Longing and belonging

I’m not sure if I’ve told you about Porto. Porto is a time machine. It’s a city — a city in the south of Europe, in the north of Portugal — and it’s a metaphorical territory — made of dark houses and frank words — and it’s a time machine.

Fernando Pessoa wrote that Portugal was Europe’s face looking at the world. If that’s the case, Porto is this point a little above the eyes where thought and phantasy become one and the same. But I’m partial; I was born there. It’s a long story, though. I was born in Porto, but never really lived there. What’s the word? Tricky. It’s tricky, I guess. Whenever I go there, I feel a bit like a foreigner but also like I’m going back to my future. Porto remains the place where, for me, everything is marked with some kind of tomorrowness (pardon my English).

I get lost in its streets, I mix up its neighbourhoods and, still, every time I go there I feel more and more at home. It’s a hell of a city. Unique, untranslatable. (Untranslatable, yes: the city they call “Oporto” has no relation whatsoever with the actual place where people live.) Its attitude — take a look at the relaxed sophistication of some stores, at the liveliness of several art galleries or simply at the way passers-by dress — is bolder, more European one might say, than other Portuguese cities, but, at the same time, Porto also feels more connected to the ground, the land, the rock, the river. You see it on people’s faces, you hear it in their voices. I don’t know, there’s something in this city’s cold air that makes our gestures clearer.

This time I went to Porto to talk about my new novel, “Vento nos olhos” [Wind in your eyes]. It was a good session, I think, funny and serious, with a wonderfully professional host, the journalist Sérgio Almeida, great guests — the painter Albuquerque Mendes and the actor António Durães — and a generous, lively audience. But that’s not what I wanted to tell you. What I wanted to say is that this strange thing happened. I went to Porto to present my just-born novel and I got pulled into a time tunnel.

In one of the last rooms of the Soares dos Reis Museum, a small Aurélia de Souza’s painting gathers all the silence around it like some kind of magnet. It’s a self-portrait of this artist born in 1866. Her face is serious and serene; her presence has an inviting, yet somehow also intimidating, quality. Or maybe it’s only that she’s just standing there, against a dark background. She was a painter and a photographer. She embodied Saint Anthony and Mary Magdalene in her work (making me think of Francesca Woodman and Cindy Sherman). A woman artist from more than a century ago, can you imagine? She travelled, pushed boundaries, and she made her family home, the Quinta da China in Porto, her safe harbor. A woman from a century ago who seems to have just arrived from the future.

I leave the museum and the city in a kind of existential jet-lag. There’s this city I will always come back to, there’s this great artist I’m looking forward to get to know better and there’s this question: what, exactly, does it mean to belong?