The Light Here Is Different

There is a moment, somewhere around five in the afternoon, when the light over the Tagus river, and the ocean over Cascais, turns a color that for me is magical. Although they call it "the golden hour", it's not gold exactly. It is something older than gold — amber cut with something almost pink, the kind of light that makes the white facades of the buildings across the water look like they are lit from within rather than from above. My apartment windows face the western sun, so I have had time to think this through. I have lived in a number of cities across the world. I have never seen light behave this way here.

I moved to Lisbon about three years ago. I say "moved" as though it were a simple logistical event — boxes, a lease, a change of address. It was not simple. I even wrote a book on how to do it, and I know it's even more challenging. When you spend thirty years moving through places for professional reasons, crossing time zones and switching languages and learning the particular rhythms of cities that were never quite yours, you develop a kind of useful detachment. You get very good at arriving. A breath out. Well, let's do this! You are less practiced at the other thing — at choosing somewhere, planting yourself deliberately, and deciding that this is the place where you will let things slow down enough to be seen.

I had been through Lisbon before. Transit, mostly. A conference once. Then I came with my wife to check it out. Had sardines and mackerel at a beach restaurant for the first time, not from a can. That particular experience of a city glimpsed from a taxi window and a meeting room tells you almost nothing about the actual texture of a place. What I knew about Lisbon was its reputation — the tiles, the hills, the growth of an extra muscle on each leg from walking up the hills, the fado, the melancholy the Portuguese call saudade, and which every travel writer reaches for immediately. I was prepared to find a beautiful city and feel nothing in particular about it.

That is not what happened.

What happened is harder to explain, which is probably why I am still trying. There was a recognition I was not expecting. Not the recognition of having been somewhere before. I had barely been here, but something closer to the recognition of a sensibility. The way people move through the streets in Lisbon has a quality I want to call unhurried, but that word is too passive. It is more deliberate than that. There is an awareness in it, as though the city has already processed its own losses and arrived on the other side, not exactly cheerful, but clear-eyed. I got the message when I panicked about my residency card. Security guard: "Go relax. Have a coffee or a beer!" I found myself adjusting my pace within a few weeks, not because I decided to, but because the city asked it of me. To be fair, the Portuguese still laugh at me for arriving at parties early! Old habits!

I am Antiguan-born and bred. I should understand the "Leave Island Any Time" mentality. I hold fast to my identity, even preserving my Garrot accent. But I also spent part of my life in New York, Miami, Santo Domingo, Geneva, and Atlanta. Each of those cities has a relationship with speed that it considers a virtue. Lisbon does not. I walk more slowly. I did not know how much I needed that until I was inside it.

This is not a travel essay. I am not going to tell you where to eat or which neighborhoods to walk through at golden hour, though I have opinions about both, a few coffee shops, and even an ocean-front public bench or two to just gaze while the sun sets. I guess I am being more philosophical. What I am more interested in is what it means. What it actually means, practically and emotionally, to choose a place as an adult, deliberately, after a life built on motion. To decide, in your fifties, that you would like to be somewhere rather than always passing through.

Some relocations are decisions. Others feel more like reckonings. Lisbon, for me, is the second kind. I am still working out what it is a reckoning with. Stay tuned!