How Did You Get This Number Read online

  LIKE EVERY TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD WITH A DATE of birth and a driver’s license, I had spent the past year being asked if I was “freaking out” about turning thirty. I took pride in my blase response. What was there to freak out about? One day I’d be fifty and both shamed by and envious of my dread of thirty. Besides, a new decade is a chance to find oneself at the beginning of things. Oh, life. What a sweet little Etch A Sketch of time you are! Only now, in Lisbon’s central square, watching a one-eyed man play the accordion while surrounded by stray Chihuahuas, did it occur to me that just maybe this was the freak-out. I swore that if I had to do it over again, I’d exorcise my panic attack like a normal person—by getting sloppy drunk. And I wouldn’t do it in euros. I swore that I wasn’t too cool to grip the ankles of the next nice couple I saw and beg them to take me with them, wherever they were going.

  Instead of doing that, I decided to make the best of it and hunt down an eighteenth-century opera house. This took me half a day.

  On top of the language barrier, I had the labyrinth of Bairro Alto with which to contend. Perhaps the oldest part of the city was not the wisest destination for someone with no sense of direction. It is impossible to overstate the percentage of time I spent lost in Lisbon. There are large swaths of the city for which there are no maps. You can’t buy them, they don’t exist, stop asking. Some streets simply don’t have names. At one point I found myself spat out onto a relatively trafficked road and played the classic game of mime-slash-baseball-catcher with a well-meaning Portuguese woman. She studied my foldout map. I studied her studying the map. Her eyes bounced from squiggle to squiggle in curious panic. Wanting to pitch in, I attempted to speak Portuguese by severely mumbling Spanish. Which I also don’t speak.

  When people regale one another with embarrassing foibles, one person will often claim that another looked at them “as if they were retarded.” This woman’s face is what they are referring to.

  After some time she discerned where I wanted to go, and I discerned that she used to live in this very neighborhood. What luck! We parted ways. Half an hour later, when I finally located the street, it was just lying there—exactly one block parallel from where I first received my directions. What would I do if I had a Portuguese pen pal? I imagined trying to address the envelope. Wedged between the person’s name and the city I might put: Two lefts and a right but more of an uphill right, then make another left and go up the stairs until you hit a nine-pronged fork in the road. Take the street that’s the second from your right and look for the house with the light blue shutters. Not the baby blue shutters. If you’ve hit the men hot-wiring a Vespa, you’ve gone too far.

  Thus I found myself meandering down a pedestrian-less street I had just been down ten minutes prior, tipped off by the specific network of clotheslines and the mismatched garments that hung from them. When I turned around again, I saw a figure of a man approaching. He wore a silver wind-breaker that glimmered cheesily in the daylight. Since I placed no stock in one direction over the other, I decided to continue walking away from the man. But each time I turned an Escheresque corner, he turned the same corner. I was torn between behaving like the paranoid Brits on the tram and imitating the street sense of a native Lisboan. I could hear him getting closer. The guidebooks and hotel staff alike had warned me about pickpockets (the former in complete sentences, the latter via an unsolicited staging of the crime using a sucking candy and my personal space). But would a pickpocket really chase me down an alley? Is that not like a cat burglar with Tourette’s? Or a eunuch rapist? With what? The question is begged. Some people don’t have the physical skill set for a life of crime.

  This not-so-private detective began cooing to me as if I were an underloved house pet—he had no real passion for catching me but felt obliged to go through the motions. Still, the distance between us was closing. Somewhere above, a kitchen window was open. I heard lunch being prepared and a sporting match on the radio. I could hear the plays of the game, so absent was any foot traffic on the street. I got the distinct feeling that people were attacked on this little bend of cobblestone all the time. Probably they were victims of petty crime or sexual harassment or found their faces on the business end of a broken bottle. And this probably wasn’t a good thing. But it probably wasn’t that big a deal, either.

  In all fairness, it should be said that Lisbon is hardly a shady place. Twenty years ago, fresh out of the womb of fascism, it was. And one can still witness hints of this on the outskirts of the city, in the condition of the churches built in 1980, which are often so badly battered that they’re indiscernible from those built in 1680. The past is in plain sight in the form of ashtrays on public buses and spray-painted swastikas on the sides of apartment towers. But Lisbon is also a delicate place that’s been sucked into the modern world quickly. There are major international design fairs and direct flights that come here now. My most posh English friend spent her summers here and unironically encouraged me to visit a bar called Snob. Lisbon’s biggest nightclub is owned by John Malkovich.

  I was not afraid of John Malkovich. I was not even afraid of getting mugged in Bushwick. Okay, Greenpoint. I was not even afraid of getting mugged in Greenpoint. So, what then? Was this real fear or just some manifestation of acute loneliness, the kind that afflicts people abandoned on desert islands or raised by wolves? Though even victims of first contact are probably less seized by terror than I was. Honestly, if you thought you had the only pineapple in the world and I came to your house and gave you a second pineapple, how long would it take you to get over the shock? Not very long. The real reason island dwellers and jungle orphans try to shoot you with poison darts before they meet you is that they instinctually mistrust their own kind.

  By this time I had made a few more turns. I could hear footsteps descending the worn marble staircase behind me. That’s when I came upon a set of poultry. Two portly chickens blocked my path, brains too small to focus on their feet. Behind me, the footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs. All I had to do was keep walking. A few more turns and I’d be safe—either out of the labyrinth or hidden farther within it. For reasons still not fully known to me I stopped. I searched my jacket pockets, feeling for my camera. Maybe I wanted proof that I had been here so that when my body was found in the Tejo River, my camera still on my person, the police would have clues. Maybe I wanted to tempt fate or to make some larger sharklike point that once I stopped running, he would stop chasing me. Maybe I just liked the artistic composition of land fowl. I saw a flash of silver catching up with me.

  “Shit,” I muttered.

  “Hola, gata!” He raised his voice. “Where you going?”

  I had no idea. Oh, how you cut to the core of me, random Portuguese thief! I quickly snapped a picture of the chickens.

  He was close enough for me to hear the swoosh of his pants as he approached. Jesus, I thought, is he wearing a full-body tracksuit? What is that, nylon? The chickens straightened their necks in his direction. They looked frightened and stupid. I clutched my camera in my hand and quickly speed-walked back to civilization.

  SNOB WAS A PLACE WHERE I SAT AT A FELT-TOP table illuminated by a desk lamp. I watched soccer with a few senior citizens. They were as surprised by my presence as I was unsurprised by theirs. Apparently, the whole scene becomes just that—a scene. It transforms into a chic hotspot sometime around two a.m. I could see how, when filled up a bit more, the bar might not have been the most depressing watering hole of its generation. I glanced at my watch. Eleven p.m. The foray into an advanced time zone was working in my favor, but the language barrier was not. I was caught in socialization purgatory. If I left Snob, the situation elsewhere would be just as dead, lonely, reminiscent of game night at Jean-Paul Sartre’s house, etc. But if I waited for things to heat up, I’d be equally overwhelmed. Lisbon is designed for bar crawls and multilevel discos that close after sunrise, for nights that make your top-ten lists: Top Ten Drunkest. Top Ten Wildest. Top Ten Involving Grain Alcohol, a Leotard, and a Spider Monkey
. I wish someone had told me this. But how could anyone have? How could anyone have warned me that a Saturday night in Lisbon rivals Ibiza in dry-ice expenditures? I never asked.

  One of the old men tore himself away from the game to bring me a bar menu. I ordered a basket of fried pierogi filled with shrimp and cream cheese. I took one bite and stared at the TV for two more matches. Has anyone in history been more engrossed in a televised sporting event? I drank two whiskey sodas and got into a cab. Because the roads of central Lisbon cut in and out of each other at such windy angles, the bad news is that it took me a few minutes to realize my driver was drunk. The good news is that there is such a thing as the international language of slurring. As soon as I had a bead on the neighborhood of my hotel, I asked him to let me out. Elaborate Christmas-light formations were strung above the roads. My head spun. I walked up to my hotel, grateful to have made it home. Even if I was greeted by a broken radiator and a lone bath towel that could tear the skin off a baby.

  I turned on the radio and listened to the news in Portuguese, which was delivered with such enthusiasm that it was impossible to separate from the commercials that buffered it. I sat on my rock-hard bed and, not finding a remote, got back up to turn on the TV. There are ten zillion channels in Portugal. Half of them are QVC. Almost half of them are porn. And everything in between is both. I can’t tell you how many late-night programs I stumbled upon in which a topless woman in a Santa hat bounced up and down behind a counter of state-of-the-art blenders. Or how many men with Burt Reynolds mustaches came up behind these women brandishing sex toys that, upon closer inspection, were meant to peel carrots. Have you ever seen a naked woman jerk off a paper-cup dispenser? Have you? Some things can’t be unseen.

  I clicked off the bedside lamp and went to bed, pulling the covers above my head. Streaming in through the rough lace of the bedspread were splotches of the light from the apartments and restaurants up the hill. I could hear glasses clinking, people laughing on balconies, lovers fighting in the streets. This was, hands down, the most pathetic day of my twenties.

  BUT THE NEXT MORNING, THE BEGINNING OF MY last day in Lisbon, something had changed. I woke up at a reasonable hour. I stretched and cranked open my window and stood at the far corner, where I could see the fog rolling over the river and the two perfect peaks of the bridge sticking up through it. Down the hill, the city was a mix of browns and reds and stucco. Seagulls flew over the palm trees along the shore, palm trees that I had failed to notice before. It’s going to be a good day, I thought. I turned on the TV to see one of Santa’s elf slaves, still naked and still riding a vacuum cleaner. She shook her breasts in agreement. A good day indeed.

  In the military, they have a kind of sanctioned hazing so systemic that even the recipients get on board. They break you down so they can build you back up again, a friend once told me. And perhaps that’s what Lisbon had done to me—made me feel lost and stupid and envious of those who don’t feel lost and stupid. Only so I could begin the next day feeling profoundly lucky to be there. The city and I had been in the shit together, fused into a state of understanding, despite our differences. I looked in my guidebook and memorized “good morning” in Portuguese, repeating it aloud like a phone number fresh from the operator: Bom dia. Bom dia. Bom dia, como vai?

  I walked down to the river and miraculously found my way back to the hotel without asking for directions. The winds of luck were no longer blowing straight into my face. It was as if I was reborn with a traveling superpower. The power to discern. Here is what to order for breakfast today. Here are the right buttons to press on the ticket machine. Here is the bus you want. There is a sweet teenage boy, and behind him is the sweet teenage boy who will steal all your money. I went east, to Belém, a neighborhood known for its elaborate monastery and custard tarts. I went to the monastery, where I sat down and thought generally of God. With its interior of candelabras and stained glass and exterior of endless spires dripping with concrete saints, it made American churches look like Fisher-Price models of Christ’s house. It had the chaotic façade of the Sagrada Familia and the excessive buttress count of Notre Dame. I meandered through the manicured sculpture gardens, licking custard from my thumb. If I had only one pudding-like substance to consume for the rest of my life, it would be that custard.

  When I reached the port, I discovered a monument jutting out over the water. The Tribute to Explorers, said the statue’s stone name tag. The wind blew but seemed less adamant about choking me than it had been at the top of the freestanding elevator. I was standing on the exact piece of land where Christopher Columbus docked in 1493, when he returned from the Americas. A few years later, Vasco da Gama pushed off from the same spot.

  I removed my shoes and dangled my legs over the stone cliff. I felt like a little kid at the dinner table, my feet bobbing in the air. I also felt connected to the people who inspired these statues. Subtract the scurvy, the smallpox, and the genocide infliction, and how different were we? I was comforted, thinking that not only had this trip to Lisbon been no accident, but also that these men had the same view of this river that I had now. Take away a building here and a bridge there, and how much could the curve of salt water have altered over the centuries? I looked up at the giant stone nostrils as they jutted out, permanently distracted by the scenery. The sun was setting on the horizon. The tarts were beginning to settle in my stomach. As I got up, I knocked one of my balled-up socks, which went tumbling down the stone and into the water below. Yesterday, this incident would have been tacked on to a chain of poorly executed attempts at tourism. But because this was today, I thought, At least it wasn’t the shoe.

  That night I found myself with a lower-than-usual tolerance for QVC porn. I paced in my room, making U’s along the foot of the bed. On the nightstand my camera was running low on batteries. There were piles of brochures and keepsakes, napkins and matchbooks. Who knew they would be treated so preciously when they left their respective assembly lines? This was my last night here. I grabbed my coat. As I passed the man behind the front desk, I winked at him, punching my fists into my pockets and holding them close to my body so as to indicate an awareness of potential pickpockets.

  I clomped down the uneven cobblestone hills. At the base of one staircase I could see electric lanterns framing the doorway of a café I had passed before. I hadn’t gone in because I knew the staff had seen me from the windows, looking overwhelmed and guidebook-dependent each morning. I walked into what I expected to be a closet, but it turned out to be a sprawling, multi-balconied bar. At night, the café traded cappuccino for hard liquor. The back porch overlooked the bridge, the river, the castles and cathedrals—the whole city. I took out a paperback book, lifted my glass of wine from the bar, and settled on the balcony, where it was getting cold enough to see my own breath.

  And then they sent in the clowns. A girl in her early twenties came into the bar and sat facing me a few tables away. After we exchanged the international head nod for “You’re at the same place as I am,” she got up and sat one table closer.

  “Como vai?” she said in Portuguese, followed by an “English?” in English.

  She had thin blond hair with fuchsia streaks that crept out from beneath a propellerless beanie. Her eyeliner made me question the clarity of the mirrors in her house. Her right arm was covered with what looked like kabbalah bracelets. I wanted to tell her that I was fairly certain that karma points were not doled out in proportion to the number of bracelets you wore. But since I could barely ask for the cheese plate, I just smiled wider instead. Si, English.

  She moved closer and sat next to me. I shut my book and smiled. I couldn’t stop smiling. Not because I was thrilled at the prospect of hair and makeup tips from this woman but because it was my only means of expressing myself. I am not a professionally trained mime. My companion, on the other hand, probably was. She was wearing white gloves that stopped at her wrists. With them, she gestured at her two friends, who had just arrived at the bar. When that didn’t work, she
screeched at them in high-speed Portuguese. She must do her training at remedial mime college, I thought.

  A boy and a girl, not older than twenty, came over and started debating with her. My eyes bounced back and forth between them as if I was watching my second sporting event of the week. And my presence was as irrelevant to them as it had been to the tiny football players on TV. The boy was extremely animated and matched the girls sequin for sequin. Eventually, I was folded into the conversation in the usual Lisboan fashion—with the conviction that the longer one speaks Portuguese, the more apt your foreign subject is to understand it. It’s the Portuguese version of screaming English in order to better communicate. Everyone knows that works.

  The three of them convened. They were an unusually good-looking bunch, even caked in makeup. I looked at the girls’ heart-shaped faces and the boy’s sloping nose. Each had a look of the purebred that many Americans find appealing, colony of mutts that we are. The boy flicked up his top hat as he leaned in to hear his female companions. I noticed the second girl was wearing two different types of shoes—a feather-covered high heel and a flat moccasin. I scanned up her legs, trying to compute how she was able to stand evenly.

  I shook my head from face to face like a rotating fan. They were my sideshow freaks, and I was theirs. But they were growing frustrated with my lack of fluency. I wondered : did I speak English at the same speed they spoke Portuguese ? It seemed unlikely. You know, I wanted to tell them, Portugal and Brazil may be the only hubs of your tongue in this world, but this is a language that’s out there. I mean, it’s around. The chances of there being more Portuguese to speak tomorrow are very good. No need to get it all out now.