LETTER FROM PORTO: 5/3/25

Beaches, A Blackout, Facebook, a Thrift Store, Yammering, “You’re a Youngster,” and Kindness

1.

My downstairs neighbors in the garden suite here at Casa p309, Andra and Sorin, left this week. They are from the Transylvania region of Romania but now live outside Stuttgart in Germany. I will miss them. She is the person who gave me the bottle of maple syrup which I wrote about in a previous column. The night before they departed she found me in the communal dining room where I had just had dinner. I was in the midst of cleaning away all the smudges I had left on the dining table’s glass top when she surprised me once more by presenting me with this lovely box above filled with gifts. One was that can of sardines, the Portuguese national delicacy, emblazoned with the year of my birth which, it informed me, was the same one in which Tom Hanks and Bjorn Borg were born. Also inside was a fancy can of tuna since I eat tuna sandwiches a lot. There was a bar of Portuguese chocolate as well as a small bottle of bespoke Portuguese olive oil because she had noticed I cook with the latter almost every night and I seem to be addicted to the former of any provenance. She also handed me an orange. I thanked her again for her kindness.

“Because our door is next to the entrance of the building I learned the sound of you,” she said.

“The sound of me?” I asked.

“Yes. When you come in your footsteps have a certain sound on the entrance hall stairs. I learned that sound of you. I liked knowing you had come back. It made me smile hearing your sound. So these gifts are for making me smile.”

“May I hug you?” I asked having learned only in the last few years to ask for permission to do such a thing since I was inculcated socially in a Mississippi family within a southern culture that put a lot of let-me-hug-your-neck store in stepping into every overly familiar embrace that led with that let which was more of an insistent cue signaling the incoming clutch than an actual acknowledgment that the other person had any agency in the matter. It was a different kind of sub-let but one that still meant you were moving into a space that really wasn’t yours.

She gave me permission.

We hugged.

I listened to her steps in the front hall leading back to her garden suite. I waited for the silence then went back to cleaning away my smudges in this place I have moved into that really isn’t mine. I smiled. Kindness gave me its permission to do so.

2.

The day of the blackout in all of Portugal and Spain and parts of France and Belgium, my Airbnb neighbors here at Casa p309 joined me out in the house’s garden where I had begun to settle in to have one of my tuna sandwiches and read the rest of Percival Everett’s novel, James. That’s Paul and Sorin and Andra and Rowena. Paul and Rowena are from Leipzig in the eastern part of Germany. “It took a blackout for us all to gather in the garden,” said Paul who has the dashing presence of another Rowena’s Ivanhoe. We spent an hour or so there in the incongruously glorious light that day - there have been long stretches of rainy cool overcast days here - and talked about our countries and politics and social mores and how much we all love Portugal and especially Porto.

The blackout fell between the national holidays celebrating the country’s Carnation Revolution in 1974 when it overthrew its fascist dictatorship and May 1st, the date set aside in lots of countries to celebrate International Workers Day and the achievements of labor movements. It’s been an interesting week to contextualize America, a country in the throes of recontextualizing itself into a lawless kleptocracy ruled by fiat and run by an unfit fascist instead of a republic based on its constitution with a respect for a lawful ordering of civil society.

So much of my life now lived as a pilgrim in other countries feels like missionary work when I sit in gardens like these and engage with citizens like this from other parts of the world who share some of the same concerns about the rise of the far right and their own histories that can better contextualize the destructive dangers that fascism foists upon societies. I always begin by apologizing for America knowing what it knew about Trump yet turning to him again and for his not only creating the chaos and unleashing the cruelty and ugliness he has back home but also throughout the world. “I grew up in Mississippi in the 1960s,” I told them the afternoon we were all sitting out here. “I was steeped in its social ways and its politics. The politesse and nice manners of the place stuck but thank God the meanness of its politics never did. Its politesse is just a way to cover up that deeper meanness.” I took a long sad breath. Sometimes it seems I’ve been taking that long sad breath ever since I left home at 19. “I’ve been fighting these people all my life,” I said

These four lovely folk - two Germans and two immigrants living in Germany - told me that they know not all Americans are guilty of supporting Trump. But I still feel guilty about it.

We talked some more about how much we love Portugal and Porto.

And later I found a place still open to buy us all some fruit - grapes and oranges and plums and apples - and arranged them in bowls for each of the couples. When I saw that the place was open during my late-day walk - all the grocery stores were closed by then - I felt a kind of elation that I was going to be able to buy all that fruit and share it with them because I have become mindful of my being a conduit of kindness and not just its receptacle. It is something my broken shoulder taught me back when I was trying to be less broken.

3.

This is my new friend Carol Greenberg. She is in the midst of moving here to Porto and giving up her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side where she has lived for decades to do so. She is 86 and changing her life. I told her the other day at lunch at our regular spot, Honest Greens on Santa Catarina, that people tell me that I have been brave to have set out to live my life as a pilgrim at this stage of it. “But like you I wanted one more big chapter in my life,” I told her. “I’ve had some pretty big ones along the way. I wanted one more before I closed the book. But brave? I don’t think bravery has had anything to do with it unless saving your own life is brave. I just think it’s sensible even though to so many people it doesn’t seem to make any sense. They can’t imagine living this way. I couldn’t either until I did.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Sixty-nine.”

She laughed. “You’re a youngster, darling,” she sensibly said.

Carol is an inspiration.

Madeline Kahn was her best friend.

4.

I have been to the beach twice since being here. Well, to two beaches. Very different experiences. One I found by taking the A metro - the blue line - toward Senhor de Matosinhos. I actually took it to the end and walked through that lovely little suburb of Porto to find its wide sandy beach. But I think it’s closer to walk to the town’s beach if you get off at the Matosinhos Sul station.

On another day I caught the old trolly down by the Douro River and road it to the end of its stops and walked toward the little village of Foz and its beach which is much rockier than the one in Matosinhos. That’s a photo above I took during my Foz afternoon: three teenagers on this promontory of rocks staring at both the horizon and their lives hovering out there before them. I didn’t long so much for them as I did to know what it was still like to long for what lies ahead of you in your life because you don’t have enough past yet to permeate such longing with what no longer passes for permanence. Part of recovery is living one day at a time and not getting too far out there toward that horizon because you’ll end up drowning, or having to be saved yet again. And yet part of this pilgrimage is learning how to long again for an unfolding life. There is a balance to be struck with the instinctive ease with which these boys struck it over and over while I watched them in the moments before I took this photo as they leapt and laughed and pushed each other about out there with the purposeful care of not making each other fall from each jagged precipice where they preened, just making it feel like they were about to do so before they settled in for whatever came after such laughter and leaping and not having fallen which fed their quieter, stiller longing. These three lads staring out at what lay there before them were themselves what were lying before me as I contemplated such a weekday afternoon in such a life now that led me to a beach in Porto after a ride on an old rickety trolley. “Thank you for my life,” I whispered staring at these boys staring out into the wider world, a life that had led me to that exact moment they didn’t even know I was sharing with them. Even rocky days aren’t so rocky anymore.

5.

I attended a couple of performance art pieces this past week. They were part of the Dance Festival taking place all around the city. There was one at my metro stop - Campo 24 de Agosto - in the midlevel of the place which encompasses the ruins found there during the excavation for the station. They are the remains of the Arca de Água de Mijavelhas, a water tank and well used to provide water to the city which date from the 14th to the 19th centuries. The piece, Ordem do O, in the first and third photos was performed by the remarkably focused Pedro Ramos. It seemed to be about the primal, animalistic instincts of man to become human as an act of creation itself. Both pieces went on a bit too long for me but the audience was attentive and patient and it did give me time to think about that: their attentive patience and how it was put into affect as well during the blackout when a goodnatured patience abounded.

The other piece took place in a black box theatre on the grounds of Central Electrica down by the river in the middle of nowhere - or so it seemed as I walked there the other night. It was a queer piece mostly performed by Be Dias about the objectification of the female body and nonbinary realties and lesbian love and the graceless bigoted truculence that transgender people have to put up with, fight back against, and at the same time navigate with that grace the bigots lack. It incorporated cabaret and referenced Diamanda Galas, Grace Jones, Nina Hagen, and bell hooks, among others. Its title was RE.SET a metaphor for my queer emancipation. So much of it was rhythmically repetitively yammered in Portuguese so I was having to put it all together like a puzzle I couldn’t quite decipher. There was also a lot of improvised dancing that could also be described as writhing and some interludes about how the mirror can be illiterate in the stubborn way it misreads us. Or something like that.

I was there in solidarity but my mind did wander back a bit to the “yammering” days of performance artist Karen Finley and her cohorts Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller who were defunded by the NEA in 1990 during an earlier repressive censorious right-wing time in America. When I was the Fanfair Editor at Vanity Fair, I assigned a story to be done on Findley, Hughes, Fleck, and Miller but Finley wasn’t able to be photographed. It was my way to fight back, to be a conduit too for activism, to stand with them in solidarity while also making a newsworthy editorial choice.

In a bit of maddening irony, I was recently attacked on Facebook by Holly Hughes when I made the mistake of commenting on a feminist writer’s post about an actress who had been in a recent series I had not liked at all. (I only post links to this column over there on Facebook mostly but every now and then I will comment on someone else's post if I’m sneaking a peek at my feed there.). The writer praised the actress so I didn’t comment on her and steered clear of that because the writer has made it clear she won’t brook disagreement regarding her posts. I just said the series was like fingernails on a chalkboard to me and I basically detested it. I could go on and quote the back and forth that resulted because I copied and pasted it in an email to myself before I deleted it all in case I might want to use it more fully someday in something else I write. But quoting the back and forth is not the point really. The point is that I felt an attempt to censor and shame me by someone who was censored and shamed, and then even created performance pieces about it as part of her art. But it did remind me that I had once celebrated her for fighting back against censorship and shame. And I’m glad I did.

Sometimes everything connects even when you wish it wouldn’t.

Now Trump and his fascist regime want to defund the NEA itself.

6.

I love thrift stores even though I’ve weaned myself from my addiction of buying clothes at them. Paris has great high-end vintage couture places that don’t fit into my budget and London has myriad charity shops where you can find a relative bargain and do good all at the same time. Porto? It has many cool keenly curated vintage stores that aren’t as precious and rarified as the Parisian ones. My favorite so far is Mao Esquerda Vintage. Here it is on Instagram. That’s Rui at his desk. He’s cool and keenly curated himself and I have a crush. I’m wearing a vintage pair of brown aviator shades I bought the other day there for only 10 euros.

When I went in today to take Rui’s photograph to run with this column, I told him a bit about my life and how I’d sold or donated almost all I owned and where all I’d been in the last few months and where I was planning to be but I wasn’t sure if he was comprehending all the English I was slinging nervously his way. “Did you even understand all that?” I asked, my nervousness turning sheepish, shy.

He shrugged but smiled. “You’re a pilgrim,” he said.

“Yep. That’s me,” I told him and then headed over to A Certain Cafe where I so often write at one of its back tables. I wrote the last of this column there today after running into Rowena and Paul there for the first time. Porto is beginning to feel a bit like one of my small-town way stations that can pass for a sense of home.

Later I headed toward a grocery store. The walk was a familiar one. I listened for the sound of myself.