There is something ceremonial about the way the managers of the most established cafes in Lisbon arrange the gladioli on Saturday mornings in early summer, for instance at A Brasileira high up above Rossio, Lisbon’s main square, at Pastelaria Suica on Rossio where the waitress will offer you a volume of different ice-cream illustrations, and at the oldest café of all, Nicola’s, also on Rossio, which dates from the eighteenth century. Manuel Maria Barbosa Du Bocage, Portugal’s wild-cat poet of the late eighteenth century, used to have his coffee there and he is depicted in a variety of murals on the walls, taking his beloved for a stroll, haranguing the clergy. Inside, waiters in formal black and white serve coffee. The atmosphere is Berlin 1930s. What’s gone from the rest of Europe – Prague is an exception – survives in these pockets of Lisbon, elegant cafés, languorous, sprucely dressed coffee drinkers, eyes that agilely take in everybody around. If you’re new to Lisbon it’s better to sit outside where you’ll be served Nicola’s special white wine by a waiter in white and where you can watch the street hawkers. Later, while you wander in the square, if you look the part you’ll be offered a choice of hash or whisky.
Like Porto to the north, Lisbon is a city of red roofs. It rises in an entranced way above the Tagus. Red roofs; leaden, terracotta, khaki fronts; dashes of verdure at the sides of houses, in street corners; gable windows open with a theatrical display of newly blanched ladies’ underwear. It is a city a very grumpy Henry Fielding confronted in a different guise, when he came here searching for a cure from various ailments before the earthquake of 1755. He died complaining about the city and as the British weren’t interested in marking his grave the French consul seized the initiative and placed a tomb in 1786 – for the honour of Fielding and the honour of France! A gentle and helpful English vicar will show you the tomb if you knock politely on the door of the presbytery alongside the English cemetery – a giant edifice, sun snatching the outlines of cypress trees behind it.
Lisbon is full of street sights. The man who gets his cat to play with – and even caress – a hamster and a pigeon on the pavements. The little blind woman with the tossed, 1960s hair-style who sings Fado songs, beating all the time on her triangle. She moves between Rossio and Rua dos Pescadores in Costa da Caparica, the seaside resort just south of Lisbon.
For lunch, for a change from the old cafés, you should go to the Calouste Gulbenkian Modern Art Centre, next to the extravagant Gulbenkian gardens, where you can have gloriously arrayed macrobiotic food among young people, many of whom will seem to have walked out of the José De Almada Negreiros, the Lino António paintings upstairs – concentrated groups, stylized posturings of the legs, often strung 1920s high heels on a girl’s feet.
After lunch you can take a train from Cais do Sodre to Estoril and Cascais, by little stations flooded by bougainvillaea, to these resorts where the sea is flanked by fin de siècle buildings, overwatched by the occasional ice-cream-like turret. But despite the loveliness of the trip you’ll meet too many tourists at the end of the journey so my advice is, for a more exhilarating afternoon, to take the ferry over the Tagus from Cais do Sodre – passing under Sul Ponte, Salazar’s dream – to Cacilhas where you can take a bus to Costa da Caparica, where the people of Lisbon go and where you’ll rarely encounter a foreign tourist.
But before you leave Cais do Sodre look at the flower vendors, ladies with poodles in cardboard boxes beside them selling red roses. Don’t be put off in Caparica by the high-rise apartment buildings rearing over the sea or by the swarms of Nivea sellers. This is where cabals of Lisbon young people sleep on the cement between surfing bouts and where the skin of Lisbon ladies ventures mango colour. For ultimate exaltation in season you can take a toy train for about eight kilometres down the coast, with a choice of nineteen beaches, the railway-side broken by straw-hut cafés, each one with its own pet palm tree beside it. On beach Number 17 you can play badminton in the nude, flitting over to the straw-hut café for refreshments of wine.
At evening try the house speciality in the Nova Perola, the market café and restaurant in Caparica – boiled bacalhau (salted cod), with boiled cauliflower, boiled potatoes, a hard-boiled egg and a clove of garlic. The market people come in for wine, for brandies and the odd dog tries to break the barricade – the six-year-old son of the proprietor whose job it is to shoo him off – and come in to beg. By now Rua dos Pescadores, which connects the beach with the market place, will be alive with night strollers; no evident rush among some of the strollers to shed surfing wear.
One Saturday night in June I watched people dance on the esplanade in Caparica as a man on a platform heartily sang ‘I want to make love with dew.’ Old ladies who looked as though they were just in from pilgrimages to Fatima danced with their near-infant sons, young women danced with young women, old men with old men; nearby boys doing acrobatics with bikes above the sea tried, with little success, to divert attention.
But you may want to go back to eat in Lisbon. The place to head for is Bairro Alto, above Rossio, where there is a flourishing amount of washing hanging out, often over café doors. The fire of autumn 1988 was associated with Bairro Alto but in fact it only burned down a commercial street – a street of shops and warehouses – leading from Rossio to Bairro Alto. It means that part of the way you will have to walk a ramp from Rossio to Bairro Alto. Old ladies, often in pale blue, with russet hair, a brooch in the shape of a cockle at their breasts, gaze at the ruins and mumble to themselves before they move on for gossip and coffee at A Brasileira with women who look like them. The ruins from the topmost point of the ramp do look staggering, the street below almost entirely gutted here, understandably eliciting exclamations under the breath from meandering, bountifully if haphazardly adorned ladies.
In Bairro Alto, further on and higher up from A Brasileira at Rua Garrett, there is a fecundity of restaurants and cafés among the crammed, hilly streets. Bars where you often have to peer through the washing to see what’s happening inside. Bota Alta, at the top of Travessa da Queimada, is a restaurant where people dine among porcelain boots, boots with patterns of flowers on them, extravagantly high laced boots, a boot with a porcelain mouse sitting in it, his legs outstretched, a boot with the message ‘I love Rio’ on it. But the queue for tables might be too long – the fabulist décor famed – and if it is you’ll have a choice of lots of other less fashionable restaurants, places where the television is often on but where you can eat bacalhau, squid or espadarte – swordfish – and receive unflustered attention.
Afterwards you can look down from Bairro Alto at a city where in June the jacaranda is a solid fog in the night, where the neon of the Scandinavian, the Nicaraguan, the Rotterdam, the Liverpool, the Texas bars – since preserved from the taint of fire – sidle into one another.
If you’re tired and don’t feel like the walk up to Bairro Alto there is a little restaurant off Rossio, Cervejaria Mariscos Restaurante, where good food will be thrust at you, where people dawdle endlessly each night, backsides slumberously thrust out, and the odd artistically ravaged drunk comes in to make a fuss, only to be thrown out in a way that half invites him to come in again.
Often in Lisbon as you’re waiting for a bus at night, especially further out, there’ll be a kiosk near by, lit by a gas lamp, cluttered with bottles, with seething packets of crisps, where you can purchase a brandy to say goodnight to this lovely, sensually ever-alive and – by and large – rock-bottom cheap city.