Booked & Boarded: Lisbon — Azulejos, Ascensores, and a Room That Isn’t Home Yet

The tram groans uphill before I’ve even decided which way I’m walking, yellow and narrow and packed tighter than seems legal, someone’s shopping bag pressed against my hip the whole climb. I let it go without me at the top and continue on foot instead, past a wall of azulejos so faded they’ve gone the colour of skimmed milk, blue on white on centuries of salt air. Lisbon does this constantly. It turns a plain wall into something that stops you mid-step, then doesn’t wait around for you to finish looking.

Rua Garrett is steeper than the map suggested, cobbles slick from last night’s rain and arranged in that particular calçada pattern that always looks decorative until you’re standing on it, at which point it becomes something closer to a small daily negotiation with gravity. I’m heading for the bookshop everyone mentions before they mention anything else about Chiado, and it announces itself with a queue, of all things, a small patient line of people waiting to photograph a certificate by the door rather than buy anything.

Livraria Bertrand doesn’t feel like it’s performing its own history, which is the first surprise. Vaulted rooms lead into other vaulted rooms, each one named for a different Portuguese writer, shelves built into stone that’s been standing since long before any of the books currently on it. I find myself in the Aquilino Ribeiro room without meaning to, a nook where the writer apparently used to sit and read undisturbed, and I understand the impulse immediately. Something about the light in there makes leaving feel rude. A member of staff offers, almost as an afterthought, to stamp anything I buy with the shop’s mark. I choose a paperback of The Return, Dulce Maria Cardoso’s, mostly because the woman ahead of me in the queue was talking about it to no one in particular, the way people do when a book has gotten under their skin. The stamp goes in without ceremony, and somehow that’s what makes it feel earned.

Outside again, the city is doing its afternoon thing of being simultaneously very steep and very beautiful, so that every uphill street rewards you with a view before it’s finished punishing your legs. I take the Elevador da Bica up out of pure curiosity, wedged into a funicular car painted the yellow of an old photograph, tracks running dead center of a street so narrow that laundry lines cross overhead from window to window like the buildings are still on speaking terms. At the top, the Tejo appears all at once, wide and silver and busy with the kind of light that makes everyone on the viewpoint go quiet for a second before they remember to take a photo of it.

I eat a pastel de nata standing up at a counter that’s clearly used to this, cinnamon dusted on afterward with a flick that looks practiced past the point of thinking about it. The custard is still warm enough to test patience, and I burn my mouth slightly anyway, which feels like a rite of passage nobody warns you about. Down in Alfama the streets narrow further still, laundry and geraniums and the occasional half-open door revealing a kitchen mid-lunch, someone’s radio playing fado that drifts out into the alley and mixes with a second radio playing something else entirely two doors down, neither one winning.

I sit with the book properly on a bench above the river, the Miradouro das Portas do Sol somewhere behind me still filling up with people arriving for sunset. Cardoso’s novel opens with a family fleeing Angola in 1975, arriving in Lisbon with almost nothing, housed for months in a resort hotel further down the coast that quietly stops being temporary without anyone deciding it should. It’s not the Lisbon on any postcard I’ve seen today, azulejos and trams and custard tarts standing in for a much longer, harder story about who gets to call this city home and on what terms. I read for longer than I mean to, the light shifting orange and then pink over the water while a man nearby tunes a guitar with the patience of someone who has never once been in a hurry.

Evening brings out the city’s other soundtrack, fado drifting from doorways as I make my way back down through Alfama’s tangle, no clear route, just downhill and toward the water whenever the streets allow it. An old man sits on a folding chair outside his doorway, radio at his feet, nodding along to a song only he seems to fully recognize. I pass the same tram line from this morning, still climbing, still packed, someone else’s shopping bag pressed against someone else’s hip now instead of mine.

The book has gone soft at the spine by the time I’m back at the guesthouse, Lisbon’s damp air working on it the way it works on everything here, azulejos and stone stairs and paper alike, everything slowly weathering into something with more history than it started the day with. I think about Rui’s family in that hotel room in Estoril, calling it home before it ever felt like one, and about how long it can take a place to stop being somewhere you’re only passing through. The stamp on the inside cover has already started to smudge slightly under my thumb. I don’t mind. It still says where I found it, even if the ink can’t quite hold the shape forever.