Lisbon - Lisboa
During my first visit to Lisbon I had the impression of having landed in a story of Swift. This was a Western European country? Everything was strange: the buildings stacked on top of one another, the white pavement, the hills with their miradouros from where you looked down into quarters where this typical Lisbon thing had been hovering for centuries. Strange were the stocky, darkly dressed people and strangely beautiful was their language, the sounds of which they seemed to want to keep in their mouths while uttering them. With their back to the rest of Europe all these people acted like everything here was as normal as could be imagined. Unlike the Dutch they cherished something very old and peculiar, maybe without realizing it themselves. Cripples and beggars seemed to play essential roles. Old men said with their disenchanted eyes: everything is for nothing. There was an atmosphere of fado. For hours I walked through the streets, from the miradouros I looked out over the city, I enjoyed immensely the illusion Lisbon that I had created. And I wrote a substantial part of the novel Hollandse fado. |
During a second visit the magic rubbed off. I started seeing the new among the old. Around the old city were new housing estates that were as disastrous as in The Netherlands or anywhere else. The old centre with it's rickety façades and the patina of centuries was one big open-air museum. Suddenly I knew what role the decrepit old people and the beggars played: that of attendants.
But a comparison with a museum goes to far. One hopes that Lisbon will keep it's peculiar character. And if it should gradually change into a museum, it will be one of the most beautiful and authentic museums in the world.
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