Year In The World Part 3

The mosque. We've skirted it, looking at the portals that relieve the plain sandstone exterior. Each horseshoe-arch opening, with the door below, reminds me of a schematic human figure, with the radiating design around the arch like a nimbus. Since realistic images were forbidden, I wonder if this design had the hidden purpose of placing the idea of the body within the design. The portal openings are backed by geometric designs of great variety and complexity.

Our big cowboy who took over the town, Abd ar-Rahman, bought a Christian church, which had been built over a Roman temple, and began to enlarge it for a mosque. His heirs continued the work. This is the largest mosque in the world, where you can feel how the architecture guides you toward a philosophy of prayer. The immense, spreading horizontal s.p.a.ce keeps you close to the ground, with no sense of hierarchy, no sense of uplifting the spirit toward heaven. It is profoundly unlike the experience of the Gothic but does not feel totally foreign to the experience of the Romanesque. In a mosque, calligraphic inscriptions from the Koran replace the holy images in Christian churches. Wherever you prostrate yourself is holy, as long as you face Mecca; the mosque has no focal-point high altar. Any inspired supplicant can become a prayer leader in his part of the mosque. In the Cordoba mosque, the multiplied columns make it clear to the wors.h.i.+per that all the s.p.a.ce therein is equal s.p.a.ce before Allah.

The most often-used word to describe the mosque is forest. One writer compared the endless columns topped by arches to a petrified forest. I can support that conceit. There's even a lovely parallel of the inside to the courtyard of trees outside, where the faithful washed before prayer, and-this bends my mind-where scholars sat in appointed spots and discussed recent theories with anyone interested. But walking around the mosque, looking up at the layers of arches, I do not have the sensation of being in a forest. I have a more primitive instinct-that we are in the mind of Allah. The arches topped with other many-lobed arches form a great brain. The s.p.a.ce is intimate, even claustrophobic. At the same time I feel something is called for here. I've never had a similar reaction in a building before.

The columns and the sublime cream and terra-cotta colors resemble a paradise, and at the same instant the ludicrous additions later heaped upon the mosque by the Christians are hard to look at. They literally plunked down a large church right in the prayer room of the mosque, a hideous intrusion that disrupts the harmony of the structures. When Charles V finally made it to Cordoba three years after this monstrosity was built, he said, "You have destroyed something that was unique to this world and replaced it with something that can be seen anywhere." Despite his outrage, Charles did nothing to restore the mosque's integrity, so what we have today is this absurd combination, like a camel with a chicken's face. The Christians also walled in many of the arcades, reducing the light inside. Surely this is one of the major architectural atrocities of the world. Luckily, the size makes it possible to ignore the strange church and to dream awhile in the ancient Andalucian manner. In such places, the heart expands and admits the new.

Back in Madrid, we spend the last night at the Ritz in great comfort. The hotel notebook cautions guests not to appear in the lobby in sports attire. If you must wear such attire, notify the concierge and he will escort you out another door.

We dress up and have a fine dinner in the hotel restaurant, among all the Spanish families so formally dressed that we feel we've stepped back thirty years. The Gran Reserva Bodegas Muga wine smells like wet violets in spring and the antique rose called Paul Neyron at Bramasole. The cheese, garrotxa, tastes like the basket of herbs I pick there when I'm about to prepare a feast. Or maybe I'm homesick. Our neighbor Chiara has sent Ed his pa.s.saporta. He can leave Spain and enter Italy legally.

It seems like months since we landed, Ed sick, my bag lost. The little jet lifts off for Florence, its motor humming rather oddly, like a paper airplane propelling from an unwinding, twisted rubber band. Ed is sipping water and looking out the window, and I lean over to see Madrid receding into an abstraction. Goodbye to the azure and saffron sky over the vega; goodbye to the museum courtyard, where birds drench the air with their song; goodbye to the night when women named Agueda are serenaded; goodbye to the "incorrigible bohemian" now immortalized in marble; goodbye to the Arab inscriptions on the tombs of Isabella and Fernando; goodbye to the sun high over the bullring; goodbye to the turkey thrown from the church tower and the good luck of the catcher; goodbye to the goat marooned on an outcrop; goodbye to the children carrying rosemary wreaths and colored birds in the Virgin's procession; goodbye to the brain of Allah; goodbye to the cold garlic soup of Ronda; goodbye to Machado's words Beneath the blue of oblivion, the sacred water/ sings nothing-not your name, not mine; goodbye, Federico Garcia Lorca.

Astrolabe

and Cataplana

Portugal The taxi driver whistles as he leisurely parallels Avenida da Liberdade's long park just coming into leaf. A young March spring with jacaranda and fruit trees at bud break. "Europe, really, really Europe," I say. I'm already under those trees sipping coffee at an art nouveau cafe, writing new Portuguese words in my notebook. We circle an immense open plaza of fountains, wind up, up, switch-backing into increasingly narrow streets lined with sky-blue and blue-going-to-purple facades and a few of frosted pink with tiled fronts. He stops in front of a dismal funeral parlor with a window full of dead plants warning you of what's inside. Opening my door, he points down what Ed calls a mirror-sc.r.a.per street. The driver won't enter but motions us to take a right at the end, then a left. Our rented house is there, he gestures, turning over his hand three times. We drag our bags over rough cobbles. The area looks seedy but not threatening. The funeral home is tucked in among small restaurants, produce stands with mounds of cabbage, and dim bottegas.

"Looks like a real neighborhood." Ed tries to ignore a mongrel snarling from a doorway. Though the dog strains toward Ed, it does not lunge. A sudden shout from inside causes it to go limp and lie down. Mothers are retrieving toddlers from a day care center. A stooped man sets out a plate of food for stray cats just inside an abandoned house. One house looks bombed; several are long gone in decay.

"Everywhere we go will be downhill," I notice. "That means we'll have to climb back up."

"Good," Ed says. Not good, I think.

Our block-long street has taken a modest turn toward gentrification. Freshly painted, tiny row houses line both sides, each facade with a window, a door, and a stoop onto the street. And so we arrive at our "home" in Lisbon.

Our house has been well outfitted as a rental, with yellow walls and practical furnis.h.i.+ngs. There's even fruit, wine, and a friendly note to welcome us. We inspect the kitchen first, and it is the best room, well equipped for the dinners we expect to cook. We will use the twin bedroom for our baggage and clothes. The double bedroom-oh, so dark-is small but okay as long as the lights are on. We find a large bedroom downstairs, dark as an oubliette. I close the door and won't go downstairs again. The heaters taking the chill off the March afternoon burn paraffin. The oily, medicinal smell makes me woozy probably because I am wary of paraffin. My friend Susan was burned over twenty-five percent of her body when the paraffin she was melting to seal jars of apricot jam caught fire and leaped to her cotton nightgown. Since then I've hardly been able to light a candle. I turn off the heaters and pray for a clement March.

The house was built for servants' quarters adjacent to a looming pink palacio, which blocks all light in back. "These row houses must have preceded the palacio," I speculate. "If not, why did they bother to build windows that just face walls?"

"Maybe. Or maybe they just wanted the illusion of light, as though you might pull open the curtains in the morning and receive a benison of sunlight."

A later owner cut a skylight in the hall. Other than that, light comes in the front window. I lift the lace curtain and look out into the sunny street, packed with cars. "If it were not for cars, the street could be a patio for all the people who've renovated these places."

"Yes, in summer they might catch a breeze."

"They could set tables at the end and dine with the marvelous view of the city. There could be pots of flowers and small trees." Instead, the cars are so closely jammed in that you have to edge through them sideways to reach your door. To exit, they back up. Cars, our boon and freedom, are also the disaster of our time. "Look, the house across the street is for sale."

Ed comes to the window. "Awaiting your cosmetic touch." But I don't think so. I would not be attracted to a one-window house.

Twilight. We make our way down to the enormous plaza we pa.s.sed earlier, Praca dos Restauradores. At one end throngs of very black-skinned people congregate. Several of the women, dressed in the brightly patterned cottons of Africa, have tall turban arrangements swaddled around their heads. Ed remembers Portugal's colonies, Cape Verde, Angola, and Mozambique. "Didn't they have Goa, too?" Ed asks. "And Macao? Where is that? They were all over the place."

"All I remember is Brazil. Macao is in the Philippines, no, near Hong Kong." They visit and talk on cell phones, flas.h.i.+ng white-white smiles. Others catch the last rays at sidewalk cafes or a stand-up sidewalk bar, taking a nip of ginjinha, a favorite drink made from distilled cherries. Everyone is out, as in Tuscany at this hour, picking up bread for dinner, meeting a friend, or stopping for a bunch of flowers at one of the vendors. Lisboans must have the best-kept shoes in Europe-shoe-s.h.i.+ne stands are everywhere. In a doorway, a man with elephant man's disease holds out his hat for change. Plum-colored tumors balloon all over his face. He's all tumor, except for one wild eye trained on the world that does not want to see him. Everyone looks instead at a Gypsy boy playing an accordion, while his little dog, who looks uncannily intelligent, pa.s.ses a cup for donations. The scene feels oddly out of time and at the same time familiar, as though we've stepped into an archetypal scene that will always be played this way.

Our guidebook mentions a street lined with restaurants jutting off the plaza. The Michelin tasters approve of these restaurants, and we walk down the street hoping instinct will guide us. They look tired. Some have barkers to lure customers. We pick the highest-rated one and have a perfectly nice, if uninspired, dinner of grilled prawns and fried calamari. We don't know what to expect from Portuguese food. We do have wine suggestions from Riccardo, a wine merchant friend in Cortona, so right away we try a Morgada de Santa Catherina, white, silky with a touch of peach.

The climb back somehow doesn't seem as steep as it looks. So much to see along the way-a woman ironing on her balcony, caged birds in open windows, the streets full of boys playing soccer, shop owners sweeping and taking out the trash, a young girl reading at a cash register with overhead neon casting a nimbus around her black hair. From the end of our street, we look out, over the domes and lights and rooftops of the city. How thrilling-an unknown country to explore.

Lusitania, early Portugal, may have been settled by Celts who intermarried with indigenous people. But those first migrants instead may have been from Lusoni, in central Spain, or maybe they were Carthaginian mercenary soldiers. And where were the indigenous people from? We always fall back on Indo-European, a nice catch-all answer. Whoever they were, the first-millennium Lusitani became fiercely bellic when threatened by the Romans. They battled through defeat after defeat before they were once and for all conquered by Augustus. At the Mosteiro dos Jeronimos (Monastery of San Jerome), built to honor Vasco da Gama's pa.s.sage to India, we have started in the archaeology wing, where we find an exhibit of religious artifacts of the Lusitani people. This is lucky because it starts us at the beginnings of Portuguese history.

We are alone in the cavernous room of recently excavated carved stone and marble altars, gravestones, and sculptures. A young girl's pure face stares back at me from a time when this land was rife with G.o.ds, spirits, and protective forces. Labeled a nymph, she may have been a village girl who owned the displayed gold circle earring formed into a tiny hand at its tip. Her first love may have slipped onto her finger the ring engraved with private symbols. Many monuments are dedicated to the strictly local G.o.d who protected the region, Endovellicus. I love the G.o.ds of the crossroads. Throughout the world people always have recognized the metaphorical significance of the path chosen, the path forsaken. These pagan people wors.h.i.+ped all the usual G.o.ds of war, nature, and agriculture, but their religion included much more specialized G.o.ds of thermal baths, horses, darts, and the house. Pantheism appeals to me: G.o.d in everything. I don't mind if G.o.d/G.o.ds take many forms. Catholicism channels this deep human need differently; you may pray to the particular saint of parachutists, telecommunications, fertility in mares, hemorrhoids, lost objects, and housework.

Ed leads me to the sculpture of a Ja.n.u.s head on one nape, looking as always toward two different possibilities, but this one looks with male and female faces. The sentiments of the artist spiral outward from one glance at the beautifully modeled faces-the reconciliation of opposites or, it occurs to me, maybe the inevitability of opposite points of view. Imagine excavating marble fragments-fingers, whole hands, unidentifiable bits-then coming upon this head in a heap of rubble. Here's our friend the bull, ever a powerful symbol, this time as a miniature votive statue, then as a larger figure sacrificed to Jupiter, G.o.d of divine light and its accompaniment of thunder and lightning. The collection of amulets brings me close to the human hand that held these small jugs, acorns, and fruits, and the inscriptions on funeral markers startle me with poignant voices from such distance in time. One bids farewell to a son who lived only a year and twenty-three days: Salve, so it is. Another says: Italic land begot me, Hispania buried me, I lived five l.u.s.tra, the sixth winter killed me. In this territory I remained ignored by all and as a guest. Many bear the inscription: May the earth be light on you. The last is an inspiring wish. When I next light a votive candle in a church in memory of my friend Josephine, I will say this for her. The whole exhibit inspires-we see how the land was alive with secret forces.

The monastery complex out in the Belem neighborhood faces the Tejo River, where the watery unknown pulled the explorers out of their safe harbor, their sense of adventure probably as strong as the capitalistic impulse to hunt for black pepper, gold, and spices. The monastery originally was close to the water, but over time the river receded, leaving an expansive s.p.a.ce for gardens. Unfortunately, a rail line and a busy highway buzz along in front, seriously disturbing the grandeur of the site. We explore the church and sublime cloister, the refectory with azulejos (hand-painted tiles) on the walls. Walking along the three-hundred-meter exterior, we examine the portals. The ornamented doors seem even more precious because they survived the epic earthquake of 1755, which shook down most of the city. The building, started by Manuel I in the heyday of the discoverers' voyages, is considered the apex of the architectural style that flourished under this ruler. Manueline is a hybrid style, Gothic on the way to Renaissance, with a touch of the Moors in its horseshoe arches and rhythmic repet.i.tions. The particularity of the style lies in the details. Doors and windows, built of local stone, are exuberantly carved with anchors, ropes, seahorses, palms, elephants, and even rhinoceroses, all recalling voyages out from the port of Lisbon. Vasco da Gama, buried inside, must rest well in this spot where his accomplishments are celebrated. The site and history intertwine, giving me the impression that each gives light to the other.

Down the street we come to another cause for celebration-this one dedicated to the famous pastry of Lisbon, pasteis de Belem. The Antiga Confeitaria de Belem, a crowded bakery-cafe, lures you from yards away with the toasty scents of the tarts that children must be given from year one. A chaos of mutable lines forms at the counter, where people order sackfuls to take home for Sat.u.r.day lunch. The delicate layered pastry sh.e.l.l is filled with voluptuous custard, a creamy, irresistible treat. Ed has two. And will, I imagine, every day for the remainder of our trip.

Thus fortified, we walk over to the tower guarding the port entry. It looks like a giant golden chess piece. Every postcard stand features images of this ante-earthquake Manueline torre, which was the last glimpse of Lisbon the navigators had as they sailed away. It has the unsettling aspect of appearing to be a mediocre watercolor painting of itself.

We return to the monastery for further wonders. Anyone who loves boats should see the Maritime Museum. Also all ten-year-olds and those who remember being ten. Was there ever another craze in the world such as the Portuguese had for sailboats? Every citizen must have had a mad pa.s.sion for making models; the endless displays attest to this. From palm size to bicycle length, the types, sails, fittings, and furnis.h.i.+ngs are meticulously worked down to the teeny knots and flemished ropes. Probably thousands more fill the storerooms. Besides the models, the museum fathers also h.o.a.rded a vast number of uniforms worn on the discovery s.h.i.+ps and their terra-cotta pots and vases for spices. Paintings and ex-votos reveal the peril of s.h.i.+pwreck, fire, and earthquake. In the remains of a "pepper wreck" recently recovered, we see spoons, coins, belt buckles, and blue and white porcelain dishes. Amid all this we come upon Vasco da Gama's portable altar with a statue of San Rafael, which traveled with him to India.

My favorite cases display the instruments of navigation. There's a travelling set of globes in little round cases. One shows the animals representing the constellations, the other the earth. Someone's pocket sundial in ivory was fitted with a compa.s.s. These instruments of beauty performed useful, sometimes life-and-death functions-the inclimator, which takes the angle of heel to port; the gimbled barometer, a gadget fitted with needles that measured azimuths, the horizontal angle between north and the point observed. Armillaries are spheres of circles within circles, usually with a sun positioned in the middle; they show the relative positions of poles, equator, meridians, and the sun. The armillary's value still symbolically reigns: you see one emblazoned on the Portuguese flag.

Most beautiful is the astrolabe. Etymologically the word means "star-taker." It looks like a big magical pocket watch. The metal face, engraved with numbers and zodiacal designs and cursive words, could be something an angel might hold aloft. For me, astrolabes have poetic a.s.sociations. Chaucer wrote "A Treatise on the Astrolabe," an early (1391) exacting work blending science and art. One of my favorite love stories is that of Heloise and Abelard. After they chose to live apart in religious orders, she wrote him to announce with "exultation" the birth of their son. She named him Astrolabe.

The instrument came to Europe with the Muslim invasion of Andalucia, though its history goes back to 150 B.C. Hipparchus of Bithynia is most frequently named as the inventor. A pilot today has the control tower; the medieval navigator had the astrolabe. The armillary performs similarly as sort of a three-dimensional astrolabe. The basic astrolabe function was taking longitude and lat.i.tude by coordinating celestial points and equatorial lines. A metal disk (the rete, "web" or "net") engraved with a star map is superimposed over a larger disk marked with the earth's circ.u.mference and markers. A movable ruler that Muslims called the alidade calculates relative positions. If you know the location of the sun or a star, your astrolabe can find time and place. The metal ring at the top allows it to be hung, as Chaucer carefully noted, in straight plumb. Though the church considered them instruments of the devil, astrolabes must have been sacred to the captains.

There's more. Actual boats in a drydock warehouse. Slick blue fis.h.i.+ng boats with the evil eye protection painted on the prow. Some designs look like Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs. A black rooster decorates a rowboat. We look at the yacht of a king, various types of war boats, and primitive rowboats. We pa.s.s on through the carriage museum, which just ill.u.s.trates that almost everything rescued from history is interesting, if only mildly.

The tram doesn't come. No taxi in sight. We begin the long walk back. Empty plazas seem to be waiting for some military parade to materialize. There's an ease here; the traffic not frenetic. So many pastry shops and cafes. Cat tongues, almond tarts, fruit tarts, citrus tarts. At the blue-and-white-tiled Canecas, the bakers, visible through gla.s.s, are flattening rounds of dough, forming a dome, then folding over the edges, leaving a cleft. We buy one of these breads in an oval shape, the opening sprinkled with seeds. We already know the Lisbon bread is especially good.

Ed has learned to order a bica, the espresso equivalent. He is thrilled with the coffee. "Better than French. Certainly better than in Spain. It's the old connection with Africa. They must have had good beans early on."

"As good as Italian?"

"Umm, different."

For the next few days we follow tourist pursuits, interspersing each stop at a museum or castle or church with a visit to a new pastry shop. I become seriously attached to almond tarts. Ed prefers the cla.s.sic custard tarts and wishes he'd been fed them in childhood. We loiter outside at Cafe Brasileira, which overlooks a statue of the unruly writer Fernando Pessoa. He might have sat in this chair when he wrote, From the terrace of this cafe I look at life with tremulous eyes. I see just a little of its vast diversity concentrated in this square that's all mine . . . perhaps my greatest ambition is really no more than to keep sitting at this table in this cafe . . . Ah, the mysteries grazed by ordinary things in our very midst! To think that right here, on the sunlit surface of our complex human life, Time smiles uncertainly on the lips of Mystery! How modern all this sounds! And yet how ancient, how hidden, how full of some other meaning besides the one we see glowing all around us.

Pessoa refused to limit himself to a single persona. His chameleon sensibility gave us many books seemingly written by different authors. The Book of Disquiet, one of my favorites, is written in the voice of an insignificant bookkeeper but feels close to autobiography. His translator, Richard Zenith, describes this monumental sc.r.a.pbook as "anti-literature, a kind of primitive, verbal CAT scan of one man's anguished soul." The book, a wonderful travel companion in Lisbon, consists of small sections, perfect for reading in sips at all the cafes he frequented around town. Pessoa rarely left Lisbon in his adult life, and the city informs, infiltrates, and grounds his writing, no matter how far afield his personas pull his ident.i.ty. The green sky over the river Tejo, "the potted plants that make each balcony unique," sunset colors turning to gray on buildings, the cry of the lottery ticket seller, the "eternal laundry" drying in the sun-the myriad sensations of the city form the lively background of his pages. I love Sundays in European cities, the sudden quiet of the streets, with the parks full of strollers and children. Pessoa writes: I'm writing on a Sunday, the morning far advanced, on a day full of soft light in which, above the rooftops of the interrupted city, the blue of the always brand-new sky closes the mysterious existence of stars into oblivion.

In me it is also Sunday . . .

My heart is also going to a church, located it doesn't know where. It wears a child's velvet suit, and its face, made rosy by first impressions, smiles without sad eyes above the collar that's too big.

A band of about twelve serious-faced musicians plays in the plaza in front of Pessoa's statue. They seem about to slip into a dirge at any moment.

The funiculars are fun, like rides at a carnival, and with the taxis so plentiful and amazingly cheap, we get all over town with ease, walking one way, riding back the other.

The Fiera da Ladra, the Thief's Fair, has no s.h.i.+p models, no baroque candlesticks, nothing to covet. The thieves must have gone into real estate. Instead I flash on everything I threw away in my whole life-Barbie with one leg, paperbacks missing their covers, sad bathrobes, and old computer keyboards. We leave and meander until we're lost in the Alfama, the labyrinthine historic Arab quarter. You'd need to drop stones to find your way back to where you started. Arm's-width streets twist, climb, double back, drop. Whitewashed houses with flowering pots and crumbling ruins with gaping courtyards open to small plazas with birds competing in the trees for best song of the morning-a soulful neighborhood for spending your days. If I lived in Lisbon, I would choose to live here. Redolent of the souk, the bazaar, the roots of Iberia, the Alfama does not seem just quaint and interesting. At heart, this area remains deeply exotic. Open this door and find the memory of a Muslim mathematician consulting his astrolabe, pa.s.s this walled garden and imagine the wives of the house gathered around the fountain under the mimosa. Easily, memory seeks a guitarist playing by moonlight at an upper window, a designer of tiles in a workshop, a child weaving on a doorstep, a sailor packing his duffel. The spirit of the Alfama feels close to the spirit of the artifacts of Lusitania that we saw on the first day. Here's where mystery lingers, where ritual and alchemy and magic take place. This is the center, naturally enough, for fado, meaning "fate," the music whose saudade rips out of the heart. Saudade. We have no equivalent English word. Does that mean we have no equivalent English feeling? A line from Yeats comes close to the meaning: "A pity beyond all telling is hid at the heart of love." But saudade connotes, too, a pervasive longing and reaching. It seems to be a lower-voltage force than the Spanish duende but springs from the same taproot: we are alone, we will die, life is hard and fleeting-easy realizations but, when experienced from within, profound.

Colors: Islamic turquoise, curry, coral, bone white, the blue layers of the sea. The scents of baking bread, wet stones, and fish frying at outdoor stands. The aromas of coriander and mint and big stews and roast pork emanating from the small neighborhood restaurants, the tascas. Menus of today's prato do dia are posted in the windows, and we choose a tasca with everyone seated together at crowded tables. As we wait, I admire a walnut cake with caramel frosting served to a man across from us. He sees this and reaches over for my fork, handing me back a large bite of his dessert. The waiter brings platters of fish fried in a gossamer, crispy batter, and a spicy eggplant the old Moors would have loved. We are astonished. Here's the real local food. For dessert, old-fas.h.i.+oned baked apples are served to Ed, and to me a flan with cinnamon, a whiff of the Arabs. The bill-twenty euros, a fourth of what the guidebook restaurants cost, and ten times better.

The Alfama slows for afternoon. Music drifts from a window, not fado, not fateful, but a whiny Bob Dylan relic inviting a lady to lay across a big bra.s.s bed. Instead, a woman hangs her laundry on a balcony, her mouth full of green plastic clothespins. Cheery old trams, red and yellow, ply the main streets. At an antique shop I find blue and white tiles from the 1700s in dusty stacks around the floor. Ed steps outside to call our friend Fulvio in Italy. I see him gesturing to the air like an Italian as I look through a hundred or so tiles and choose four to hang in my California kitchen. Souvenir-to come to the aid of memory. I always will like to be reminded of Lisbon. From the castle grounds up top, all of terra-cottatopped Lisbon spreads out for the viewing, a fortunate city on the water.

Lisbon, like San Francisco, inhabits the edge. The first or last edge? In California along the Pacific coast, I always have the sense that I'm perched on the sharp shoulder of the end of the country-nowhere else to go. On the other side of that cold ocean, waves break on far, advent.i.tious sh.o.r.es. The harsh terrain of the California coast remains a lonely and wild beauty. Geographically, Lisbon feels quite opposite. From here the old navigators ventured south to Africa, around to India, and west, reaching both Newfoundland and Brazil by 1500. Prince Henry the Navigator-I've known his name since fourth grade-charted his sea lanes outward from here, though he never set forth on the waves himself. Magellan, funded by Spain, did. And this was the pin-p.r.i.c.ked spot on Vasco da Gama's maps, the home sh.o.r.e. "Bartolomeu Dias," Ed remembers. The names float back from long lost quizzes. What was the name of Vasco da Gama's s.h.i.+p? The San Rafael, with the San Gabriel and the Berrio sailing with him. My teachers always were interested in the names of s.h.i.+ps and the horses of Confederate generals.

Although the city of Lisbon might remind me also of San Francisco-from the harbor rises a city of hills climbed by picturesque trams, where one lives with the peril of earthquake-it does not. My initial impression dissolves the natural tendency to compare the new to the familiar. This is the first edge of Europe, not the last.

In the Principe Real park we order coffee at a gla.s.s cafe and drink it under an enormous magnolia. A cedar has been trained out over a circular pergola, and men sit under the branches playing cards. The houses around the park speak of the life of the city. Yellow, dark liver-red, pink, they are substantial and not at the peak of perfection but worn to a comfortable patina. A slender girl opens a door and squints up at the sun. Her life inside remains a mystery. Mystery-ah, that word. It appears throughout Pessoa's work, the mystery of the ordinary, the mystery of one life in one place.

The number of bookstores confounds us. Every street! I stop in one to look at cookbooks. We're finding the food good but feel we are missing something. The clerk becomes enthusiastic. She takes down several books, shaking her tight curls and quickly reshelving. She discards the idea of any cookbook other than Traditional Portuguese Cooking by Maria de Lourdes Modesto. The first page she shows us features lard water soup. "She does everything right. Look at this recipe for rissoles." The p.r.o.nounciation is something like ree soysh. We've seen them in the cafe display cases. "It's pastry-savory-filled with prawns. Or fish or pork. I have to have rissoles every day." She motions at her colleague. "He has to go get them for me," she laughs. "You can tell I like to eat." Her circ.u.mference suggests many rissoles.

"What are your other favorites?" I take out my notebook. What she likes, we will seek.

"Stuffed spider crab. Baked bacalhau, dried cod-oh, bacalhau every way. My mother-in-law just puts it in the oven with potatoes and onions and parsley and lemon. We eat cod a thousand ways." As soon as the Atlantic water routes opened, the Portuguese began fis.h.i.+ng the Newfoundland seas for cod, drying them like starched white s.h.i.+rts to bring home months later. At every market in Italy and all over the Mediterranean you find piles of stiff cod, but nowhere as often as in Portugal.

"Cabbage," she's saying. "You should come to my house and have my green soup with sausage. You have to slice the cabbage so very fine. The soups of my country! The green bean with mint!" She describes several bread soups with fish or vegetables. We feel more and more famished the longer she talks. I wish she'd send that colleague out for something now. She moves from various preparations of eel to an unlikely-sounding dish, a cla.s.sic of the region. "And the next time you eat, you must try the cataplana of clams and pork."

"What is cataplana? A place?"

"My dear, a cataplana is what cooks it. The pan with a lid that lifts, the lid pinned together. Like a clam. Every house has one."

"We'll look for that on the menu," Ed promises, as we exit to find one more sonho, a fried sugared pastry that lives up to its name, dream.

Of the many sights, I'm most awed by the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, housed in the former Convento da Madre de Deus. The history of Portuguese tiles hangs on the walls. The whole city is a wild museum of azulejos, but the museum establishes the five-hundred-year context. The history starts with earth-toned Moorish tiles, their colors held separate by ridges, almost like cloisonne. By 1700 Portugal had its own distinctive way with tile, the cool and fresh blue and white. It "wallpapers" churches, banks, entranceways, benches, fountains. All over town blue and white tile pictures announce the pharmacy, butcher, and house number. Art nouveau picked up the tile tradition. We look for those facades with the characteristic curving pinks, yellows, and aquas. Noticing tile patterns and sidewalks of waving stone patterns is part of the joy of walking in Lisbon.

What the fresco is to Italy, the tile panels are to Portugal-elaborate scenes record events and tell stories. Most precious at the museum is the scene of Lisbon created about twenty years before the earthquake ravaged the city. The convent chapel's lower walls depict scenes from the life of Saint Anthony, the s.h.i.+ne of the glaze cooling down the heat of the baroque and rococo decorations that cover every square inch of the rest of the chapel. I like all the Moorish geometric and floral designs, so like Persian rugs, which in turn look like gardens. But there's something eternally fresh about the blue and white. We take dozens of pictures, almost all of which turn out to have the glare of flash in the center.

We're living in a quiet part of Lisbon. At the dining-room table we spread all our books, notebooks, and maps. We play CDs of fado while I attempt to read Jose Saramago's turgid Journey to Portugal. Throughout he refers to himself as "the traveller," a stylistic choice I find arch: "Now the traveller is ready to move on from works of art." Delete "the traveller" and "he" and just be straightforward! The writing is studded, however, with bright perceptions and jewel-cut paragraphs that keep me reading. Ed watches an Italian movie with Spanish subt.i.tles, rather an odd activity in Portugal. We have cooked and served our dinner on the coffee table covered by a yellow cloth and set with a gla.s.s of freesias to ward off lingering odors of paraffin. Cooking a pan of mixed local sausages and roasted potatoes contributed a few aromas, too. We brought home a box of tarts from the Pasteleria Suica on the plaza. This night offers the pleasure of renting a house-not going out, making a simple meal, and having a few hours with each other and books.

We're getting to know our Calcada de Sant'Ana neighborhood. The crammed corner grocery, open till midnight, has most everything we need. A sweet park at the top of the hill offers green respite and the sound of a fountain. Nearby the Campo dos Martires da Patria, the Field of Martyrs, draws me on my walks because of the clutch of people around the statue of Jose Thomaz Sousa Martins, a nineteenth-century physician and pharmacist who still wields the hope of cure. Propped around the monument are stacks of marble plaques engraved with thanks, letters of supplication, and wax ex-votos. Notes describe illnesses and ask him for favors. A woman sells bracelets and necklaces with the blue stone for protection against the evil eye. She sells the wax arms, hands, feet, legs, and even eyes that you can buy and then offer at the base of the monument. I buy a few of the ex-votos to take home for my collection and also several of her candles that exorcise bad spirits from the house or promote health. They're primitive, rolled in seeds and grains and herbs. Because of the wind, candles will not stay lighted. People hold them down in a metal drum with fire in the bottom, praying with them for a while, then dropping them into the drum. Sacks of old wax are piled on the side. Sousa Martins's monument is an active spiritual spot. He has been dead 107 years, and how brightly his memory burns. I light a candle in the drum and think hard about the health of those I love. For good measure, I buy two of the evil eye bracelets and slip them on my wrist.

Then we meet Carlos Lopes. That's Carloosh Lope-shs in Portuguese. This language uses many sounds that previously I have heard only from the was.h.i.+ng machine. Italian and a smattering of Spanish help-thousands of words are similar-but mostly we are lost.

We drop into the tourist information office in our Rossio neighborhood and ask about cooking schools in town. We're told that none exist, but then the two young women confer and finally come up with an address of a cookware shop in a residential neighborhood where some cla.s.ses are taught. Also, they tell us, we have to try the owner's chocolate cake, his secret recipe, baked in his nearby shop every day. All the best restaurants serve it. We jump in a taxi immediately and go. At the cookware shop the clerk, a friend of the women at the tourist office, tells us that Carlos is out. We leave our number and ask for directions to the cake shop.

The taxi driver waits while we run in. We buy the last pieces in the shop, one for each of us and, to his astonishment, one for the taxi driver. The three of us eat in the car. The only sound is slight moans. The light cake is rich, and the quality of the chocolate speaks of tropical earth and rainforests. This is a taste of the heaven that is someday to come to all of us.

When Carlos rings us the next day, we again make our way out to his shop. Even if nothing comes of this, we can eat another piece of his cake. Maybe a whole cake.

Confident, catching us eye to eye with a sherry-brown gaze, Carlos looks as though he could have been one of the navigators. He's a st.u.r.dy man, not young, not old. The Portuguese generally look affable, unlike the more chiseled Spanish. He's in a loose cardigan he's had for a long time. I immediately see a person comfortable with himself. Fortunately for us, his English is excellent. After five minutes his wit and irony already s.h.i.+ne. We tell him we'd like inside information about the national cuisine, that we're getting whiffs of the real thing but would like to know more. After the first tasca lunch, we began to discover the cuisine. Our tome of a cookbook reinforces our instinct that levels and levels of taste exist, beyond the good grilled fish, fried calamari, and crab salads we're ordering each night. He explains that in his cla.s.ses he teaches local people about sus.h.i.+, Thai food, Polynesian dishes. "No Portuguese cooking-we all know how to cook that."

"Any chance of a private lesson or two?"

"You come tomorrow to my restaurant in the market building in the Alfama. We will cook a lunch together."

Mercado de Santa Clara, Carlos's restaurant, is on the second floor of the market building, which could be a nineteenth-century train station. It overlooks the Thief's Fair. Lined with windows, the decor is simplicity itself-white tablecloths, little bowls of flowers, and on a serving table one of the chocolate cakes. We meet in the galley kitchen, and Carlos starts to cook. And talk. "The main herbs are coriander, parsley, and oregano. But above all coriander." He chops a large bunch and places it in a bowl beside the stove, at the ready. First he splits each side of a sea ba.s.s, filling the cut with the excellent local sea salt, then dips the whole fish in olive oil. He picked up the fish at the market this morning, he tells us as he grills it over a hot, hot flame for five minutes on each side. Done. Then he cooks pork ribs he's marinated since last night in lemon, salt, and the local ready-made pimiento sauce that is essential in every kitchen. I've never seen ribs cooked this way. He melts a dollop of lard in a frying pan, and when it is very hot, he tosses in the ribs. In another pan, he cooks some steamed and chopped rape in a little of the fat from the ribs. He stirs in a couple of handfuls of breadcrumbs.

He's fast. He washes a bowl of clams and adds them to another pan with garlic and olive oil. He squeezes lemon juice over them, then adds a lot of coriander and some white wine. Then he puts it all in a copper cataplana and cooks it briefly, shaking it as though it were popcorn. What a lunch we are going to have. "This is very simple," he says, breaking eggs into a bowl. "What you have alone at home on Sunday night. It's all in the eggs." And plain to see, the yolks are the wobbly gold of a setting sun. To the eggs he adds diced tomatoes and onion. He scrambles them in a moment. All the while he talks about ingredients, praising the Portuguese mustard, Savora; piri-piri, a white-heat sauce made from Angolan peppers; and c.u.min, which always seasons pork and beef meatb.a.l.l.s. When Ed asks if port is used in the kitchen, Carlos laughs. "The Portuguese don't drink port," he claims. He's frying some tiny sole filets, which he first dipped in lemon juice and olive oil, then floured. We ask about restaurants, and he praises the cooking in tascas, along with a few other restaurants. He drains the sole on empty egg cartons. "The Portuguese have more restaurants per capita than any other European country," he tells us. I'm sure that's accurate. Every neighborhood is full of tascas, and all of them are jammed. "Don't expect salads here. I don't know why, but we never have taken the salad to heart." He sprinkles the sole with parsley and unties his ap.r.o.n.

We eat. Portuguese food is for those who are really hungry. Carlos pours a simple "green wine," Vinho Verde Muralhas de Monco, and then a red Azeitao Periquita Fonseca. The moment for dessert arrives. He has the waiter bring a puff pastry filled with something he describes as a cross between creme brulee and egg custard, the now-familiar pasteis de nata. Which brings me to the famous chocolate cake. When I mention the recipe, he gets a little Mona Lisa smile and asks the waiter to bring over two slices, but he will divulge nothing. I tell him about an almost flourless chocolate cake with ground almonds, a recipe I learned years ago at Simone Beck's cooking school in the South of France, which I have baked at least a hundred times. He brings over tiny gla.s.ses of Amarguinha, a dessert digestivo made of almonds. As we leave, he will not allow us to pay. I am stunned at this generous man, stunned that he has given his morning to strangers and shared his knowledge and traded life stories over a long, long lunch.

The next morning Carlos calls early. We will meet for dinner, he announces, then go out to hear fado in the Alfama. Fah-do, he says, like hairdo, not fah-dough. We fill the time until then visiting the Ribiera market. Used to Tuscan prices, we're surprised to see good-looking olive oils for four to seven euros a liter. We find goat cheeses wrapped in gauze, and almonds suspended in honey. We take home ma.s.sa de pimiento, the canned spread of pureed pimientos and salt. Since my home state of Georgia is a major producer of the pimiento, I grew up on toasted pimiento-cheese sandwiches, one of the world's great treats. It will be even better with a smear of Portuguese mustard. The stalls, arranged under a vaulted ceiling, display all the vegetables we do not see in restaurants, and sacks of tiny snails and mussels. At the horse butcher's, the meat is oh, so dark-the color of port. In other stands hang sausages in every shade of blood. Most startling are the flowers. Several vendors feature funeral sprays, elaborate horseshoes and fans of chrysanthemums and gladiolus with pastel ribbons and condolences in sequins. En route to mourning, you can pick up an impressive wreath and your carrots at the same time. As Carlos told us, few lettuces but mounds of cabbages. Ed points out the many kinds of oranges. When we have as much as we can carry, we go home.

We meet Carlos at his restaurant in the Alfama and start walking through the maze. After six or so turns, I don't know which direction we face. "Don't walk here alone at night," he tells us.

"Is it dangerous?"

"Well, you would be lost, and sometimes boys s.n.a.t.c.h bags."

"That's true anywhere on the globe."

"Yes, but you would also be lost."

"That makes sense."

He stops at a closed door with no sign and knocks. We are admitted into a small room with five tables. We are the only guests at this hidden restaurant, which, yes, does have a name: Os Corvos. We're seated at a table next to a wall of wine racks. Without a word, the waiter brings us a Lavradores de Feitoria, from north in the Duoro region, a nice big wine with a plummy almond perfume. Carlos confers, and soon we are eating coriander soup, a variety of pork sausages from the north, some with rice inside, some made from black pig's blood, and some with piquant garlic-true Portuguese tastes, indigenous to this place. Who could expect how the copious use of coriander could add such a fresh dimension? The waiter then brings a salad of dried fava beans, plumped again with oil, garlic, and coriander, then strips of savory roast pork, a mound of ricotta seasoned with oregano, and a bowl of tempura-style green beans. Even though we have feasted long and well, I'm moved to try a b.u.t.terscotch flan, one of my favorite flavors, and a bite of Ed's frothy souffle of ground almonds and eggwhites, and just a taste of Carlos's gelato with confit of lemon rind. I'm in love.

After midnight we weave through the Alfama streets again and duck into a low door just as fado is about to begin. We have luck: one table is free in the small room, which feels charged with antic.i.p.ation. Two guitarists step into a clearing, then the fadista, who looks as if she knows something about fate herself. She wears the requisite black shawl, and though she is only middle-aged, she looks like an old soul, black eyes reflecting the saudade of the world. She does not begin, she erupts. Her voice turns my spine into a live electric wire. I have no idea what the words mean, but her music is preverbal anyway, a direct communication among all of the nerve endings. During intermission Carlos orders Bagaco, much like grappa.

The next singer knocks us off our chairs. He looks so unlikely. The fadista fit the role, but Luis Tomar, rigid in his suit, could be selling insurance. Just to prove you can never judge anyone by appearance, his voice, so rife with restrained emotion, sunders the room's atoms. Pa.s.sion threatens to overwhelm the song at any minute but remains contained, remains pitched to a timbre that corresponds exactly with the synapses of your own private longings and dreams. I wish he would sing forever.

Now we know how to eat. On our long walks to look at the rhythmic patterned sidewalks and tile-faced buildings-we love coming upon the occasional 1950s tile facade-we stop for lunch at an appealing tasca. At night we ignore all the rated restaurants in our guidebooks and follow our noses toward home cooking in our neighborhood. Tascas are lively and fun. You are not isolated from others but are in such proximity that an exchange of bites seems normal. Not many tourists, we notice, are among our fellow diners. The plainness of the decor probably puts off the foreign traveller. We go back several times to the Floresta and to the blue-and-white-tiled Minho Verde on our nearby Sant'Ana street for the loud atmosphere, the grilled hunks of pork and big shrimp, duck with rice, green bean soup, and plates of sliced, peeled oranges that are plonked onto the table. Locals are ordering the grilled pork liver and slabs of grilled fish with lemons. The Portuguese breads are simply the best. I could live on bread alone-and the bowls of olives that always appear on the table. At others we try the famous cataplana dishes, the l.u.s.ty stews of pork and clams or of onions, peppers, octopus, and clams. The son shouts orders to Mama in the kitchen. A taffy and white cat slinks around my legs. Ed loves those twelve-euro bills.

"Where do you eat, other than secret places in the Alfama?" Ed asks Carlos. We want to see how new chefs are developing the cuisine. What comes after 365 recipes for dried cod? He gives us names of a few restaurants whose chefs embrace the traditional food but also have fresh ideas of their own, ideas that ultimately enlarge a cuisine. He sends us to Mezzaluna to see what happened to Portuguese food when the Italian Michele Guerrieri came to town.

After all the down-home tascas, the cool sophistication of Mezzaluna transports us to Milan or New York. Intimate but not close, the room's mirrors, prints, and gorgeous flowers feel welcoming. We're seated among fas.h.i.+onably dressed Lisboans, women with black upswept hair, big gold jewelry, and fine silk blouses. The men wear dark, important suits. Somehow well-dressed businessmen in Europe look s.e.xy and grand. The couple finis.h.i.+ng lunch at the table next to us receives a plate of goat cheeses the size of k.u.mquats. One is wrapped in leaves, another coated with ashes; others are creamy white. Soon we are eating fried and breaded radicchio stuffed with prosciutto. The spinach salad (ah, salad!) is dressed with lemon vinaigrette made with those cunning little local goat cheeses. Michele comes over to the table, and we tell him Carlos sent us. He's a slight, young Italian raised in Naples and in New York, someone who has grown up at home in the world. His smile is wide, and those Neapolitan eyes laugh, too. He brings over a Quinta da Murta, Bucelas, and tells us how much he loves cooking with Portuguese ingredients, especially the seafood, and about his pleasure in bringing those ingredients in contact with Italian pasta. Of course, the whole world has taken to serving pasta with their own ingredients, and his use of local shrimp in a cream sauce with fresh tagliatelle provides easy proof why this is so. He combines pastas with goat, much loved locally and rarely seen on Italian pasta. His localized version of macaroni turns light with the inclusion of arugula, shrimp, and lemon. He has the immigrant zeal. He's opened another restaurant down the street and has started a food magazine, Gula. Like an Italian, he visits with his customers, making his way around the room. Star Portuguese products-pimientos, eggs, eggplant, garlic, sh.e.l.lfish, and oranges-appear in new guises. The platter of oranges comes with a lemon and cider vinaigrette and shredded fennel. I can barely share my rolled eggplant stuffed with tomatoes and goat cheese. And oh yes, this is a fine restaurant: Carlos's chocolate cake wheels by on the dessert cart.

Our time in Lisbon is over. Carlos will come to visit us in Cortona this summer. We are taking off to see some of the interior and north of the country. He has given us names of tascas along the way, towns we must detour to see, and wines to try. We will drive inland to Estremoz, then go north to several characteristic towns-evora, Coimbra, Guimares, obidos-zigzagging where we want, then back south to Sintra, our last stop. We've made reservations at pousadas, the inns in historic buildings, and at two villas that have become hotels.

From the car rental office, two turns and we're on the bridge and out of the city. Soon we're in the Alentejo, the pastoral countryside of whitewashed farms with glistening blue doors and waist-high borders painted around the base. Traditional now, the blue border once was believed to ward off the evil eye. Closer to Estremoz, for our first night out, chamomile flowers completely cover the ground under the mutable pewter and silver olive trees. A clump of sheep moves like a huge amoeba among stone walls, where wild pink dog roses clamber.

So many decades pa.s.sed, and I did not ever see the Alentejo until today, did not enter the double-gated tunnel into Estremoz, or see the plaza and low white houses, did not ever, in all this time pa.s.sed, discover this shady town with a fountain and a church with tall weeds growing on top of its pediments, white irises, plum trees in bloom, with a market full of caged rabbits, songbirds, chickens, turkeys, stands with swags of rustic sausages, handmade cheeses, bundles of herbs, and stacks of cod, with the scent of orange and lemon in the streets, with houses whose windows and doors have local marble surrounds.

One of those flash epiphanies of travel, the realization that worlds you'd love vibrantly exist outside your ignorance of them. The vitality of many lives you know nothing about. The breeze lifting a blue curtain in a doorway billows just the same whether you are lucky enough to observe it or not. Travel gives such jolts. I could live in this town, so how is it that I've never been here before today?

Partridges! Hams-fat, succulent, leathery, dangling around the tops of stalls. One man with blunt bangs and rosy cheeks sells skins. He holds up a stiff-bristled boar with the toenails still attached. I buy two goatskins because I once stayed at a hotel in Deya, Majorca, where the bedside rugs on brick floors were goatskins. I liked the combination of textures. May they not make the clothes in my suitcase smell gamy. We ask him where to eat, and he motions across the plaza.

Great bread. The texture of pound cake and made with fine cornmeal. We have to wait in the barnlike restaurant because they have dozens of market-day customers and only two people serving. People have the same habit that we observed in Spain-throwing paper on the floor. The floor is littered. Bread and olives and a bottle of water-that's really fine with me, don't even bother to bring us a menu. But the server does, and then she brings around rooster stew with rice and cod with potatoes. Tasty but heavy for midday. We lurch out into the sun and thread our way through the now-deserted streets back uphill to the glorious pousada, a castle above the town. Our quarters have a sitting room, fruit with a finger bowl, tall lilies in the bathroom, and a bowl of chrysanthemums between the carved antique twin beds, hard as graves. An ice bucket with a bottle of champagne has been left to chill on a lamp table.

My bed, immaculate in white linen, is slightly wider than a usual twin. The crisp coverlet and soft sheets feel chaste and inviting. Ed half closes the shutters for an afternoon repose. "Don't you like these beds?" I ask. But I hear his breathing fall into the slow motion of dreams. Lying in the laddered light from the shutter, I sink into a very old feeling. I return to my bedroom in Fitzgerald and am again a girl in a white spool bed, an identical empty one beside mine. I can almost touch the scalloped edge of the pink linen bedspread and crisp sheets with my mother's monogram, raised like veins on my grandmother's hand. On the other side of the room stands my revolving bookcase, where I have placed The Brothers Karamazov among my Nancy Drew mysteries and only recently outgrown Bobbsey Twins books. My mother has brought home The Brothers Karamazov from a shopping trip in Macon when the department store book department (the only place you can buy books within 180 miles of us) had no more Nancy Drews. A thick book, she reasoned, and I went through the Nancys so fast. Accidently, she catapulted me into a new stage of reading, and after that Nancy was over. I always was a reader, but now I first began to be aware of the writer of the book. At the end of Dostoevsky's novel, I felt a surge of exhilaration. I had met something great. That feeling, repeated with each transporting book, has been one of the prime pleasures of living. The blue and black Modern Library edition, heavy among the other flimsy books, became a fact of life. I had taken possession of the skirted dressing table with its silver brushes when my sister went off to college. Her perfume bottles and little tray of orange sticks, emery boards, and tiny scissors in the shape of a crane were my inheritance, too. In the narrow bed I became aware of the word solitary. Late at night I listened to Cajun music from a radio station in faraway New Orleans, with ads for hair pomade interspersing the songs. I loved the word bayou, loved to hear the phrase on blue bayou.

So the twin bed in the Portuguese farmland takes me to the green dial glowing on the radio in the otherwise dark room of the time when I was emerging from childhood. The pousada goes completely quiet in the afternoon. The castle seems to fall into a reverie of the sad death of Queen Isabel (perhaps in this room), the royal son who rode out to defeat the Arabs, and Vasco da Gama, who climbed the azulejo-lined stairs to meet Manuel and take command of the fleet that opened the pa.s.sage to India. Because the castle is crowded with so many silent memories, my own past rises, too.

When we veer off road, we're suddenly on a track of crushed marble. Marble yards are littered with enormous Michelangelo-type blocks. We crunch down the road that ends at a cemetery. As in Italy, photographs of the departed decorate the graves. Some have a photo of the whole family. Eterna saudade carved on many slabs leaves no doubt as to exactly what saudade means. This cemetery in proximity to marble quarries is not quite like others. Laid out like a town with a central monument, the "streets" are lined with houses, like playhouses in elaborate marble, with marble bunk beds for the coffins to rest on. You could reach in beyond the lace curtains and touch the coffins, some of which are covered with silk, like bedspreads. Coffins are marble or wood. Carved saints and ministering angels and even a full-sized soldier at the door of his mausoleum populate this campo. The graves of the poor (or those with stingy relatives) are covered with chipped marble or gla.s.s. One innovative headstone is actually a cross-section of an oil drum filled with fake flowers and a photo of an old man. Grave number 524 is just a mound of dirt, where someone ended with no further ado when his long day was over.

Down country lanes, simple white churches suddenly appear, their forms as pure as wildflowers. Bulls congregate in the cork groves. Some cousins of Ferdinand the Bull relax in the shade. They gleam like polished copper, and each wears a bell. All the sheep wear bells, too, and when we stop, little symphonies are playing all over the rolling countryside. I hold out my voice recorder so that for the rest of the trip I can listen to this madrigal of the bells. We stop at Gloria, where a woman stoops, mopping the marble stones around the outside of a church no larger than my living room. Her own blue-trimmed cottage next door is surrounded by tall daisies and rosemary. She smiles and opens the nave door, welcoming us as if into her home. I smell the clean whitewash, the scrubbed marble floors. She performs her devotion right here. The church possesses a fine beauty. The altar, painted with blue and yellow flowers, and the walls display ex-voto paintings offered by those saved from goring bulls, sinking s.h.i.+ps, and tipped-over carts. The spring gra.s.ses are luxuriant, bisected, trisected with rivulets and torrents of rus.h.i.+ng water. This is joy, to meander on back roads, windows open to sweet-smelling air, stopping to photograph the neat houses draped with yellow Lady Banksia roses, wisteria, gardens blooming with peonies. We pull over at another white church trimmed in heavenly blue, this one surrounded by a meadow of wild blue irises, smaller than the ones at Sea Ranch in California that cover the salty hills above the Pacific. Whitewashed benches in front of the church must invite visiting after services. We rest from our walk through the meadow, listening to the bulls' bells ringing the changes.