And the chickens

Jun 27, 2025

She was a star all over the world and, yet, she remains a well-kept secret. Amália. Amália Rodrigues, known by everyone as Amália. Not because of some strained familiarity, some marketing strategy, some algorithmic trick, but simply because that’s how we know our gods — they need one name only.

I don’t know why I think of her under this Lisbon summer. I pass many times on the street where the great fado singer lived — the street that, on the day she died, was unofficially renamed as “Rua Amália” (the graffiti writing this in uppercase letters on the ancient walls was, itself, a symbol for this woman’s contradictory genius) — and I always remember her. I pass many times by the door of what used to be her house — and is now a museum of sorts, between a pilates studio and a supermarket — and I always remember her. But today, I don’t know why, this memory prolongs itself, overflowing its limits and falling, pensive, on this page. Maybe it has something to do with Disquiet: the yearly literary program that brings American writers to Lisbon for workshops, readings and talks and invites Portuguese writers to be part of it. Perhaps hanging out with my American friends makes me look with different eyes at some of the obvious-yet-not-really-known, hidden-in-plain-sight Portuguese secrets. Amália is arguably the greatest of them all.

I remember that evening I visited her, in her house. André Jorge, who was about to publish Amália’s “Versos” in Cotovia, had asked me if I’d like to go with him and meet this singer, poet, this greater-than-life figure, the goddess of “fado” (which is the traditional Portuguese song, but also the word for “fate”), this mythological woman, and suddenly — there we were, in her living room, breathing the air she breathed.

A small group of five, six people, we sat on these sofas facing the chair, the royal throne, where Amália was sitting. She told us a lot of stories from her life, people she had met, places she had known, stages where she had performed — and, when she began speaking about some song, a woman would go as discreetly as possible to the sound system behind Amália and put that song playing. For two, three minutes, Amália would stay there looking at us, while her younger voice rose from behind her. When the song was almost done, she would resume talking to us, as if nothing had happened, and the woman she called “Costureira” (seamstress) would turn the volume down. It was beyond amazing. We left at 4am, and to this day I treasure that very simple and almost religious moment in Amália’s living room.

About Billy the Kid, Borges says that “he never fully resembled his legend, but he got closer and closer” (pardon my English, I translate from a Portuguese translation). Well, Amália always resembled her legend, it was the world that never got any close.

They say “saudade”, the word at the heart of fado, is untranslatable. I don’t know about that, maybe it’s just a beautiful open word. As a little don’t-take-me-too-seriously provocation, I tried to translate one of my favorite poems by Amália: