Vanya on Calvário

To better see the city, I play the foreign correspondent. In the Calvário area, I go up the street as if reading a text: I walk pass the bankrupt shopping mall “Os Lusíadas” (the title of Portugal’s national poem, written by Camões in the 16th century); a tubes-and-valves store with a window full of tridimensional punctuation marks; the figure of a mythical animal, fallen from some pre-alphabetic legend, or is it a wind-inflated motorbike cover?

When I get up there, I cross the street and walk down. (I’m killing time before my talk on Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” at Alcântara Public Library.) On this side of the street, you can read the subtext: the humming of cars over my head is the sound of the city’s blood circulation; the train that rips the air as soon as I get distracted is the startle of being alive; and the medlar tree between buildings is what, exactly? That tree leaning on the blind wall with an unimaginable modesty, a human tenderness, one might say — well, I just don’t know what that is, it has no comparison. It’s a mystery. A lonely mystery.

And, turning the corner: the bridge. Seen from this street I don’ know the name of, the immense 25 de Abril Bridge (a cousin of San Francisco’s Golden Gate) is both more imposing and more colloquial. From here, it looks like it leads to a piece of sky on the other side of the river; a bridge throwing itself into a photographable Beyond made of blue, two or three clouds and the Cristo-Rei statue (nephew of the Corcovado one, in Rio de Janeiro). I keep going down and I end up in the actual Calvário, the small square where chaos is a kind of system.

The Calvário Square. I’ve always been intrigued by this place, so different in the afternoon and in the evening, but every time restless, unkempt, lively. In this asymmetrical space, halfway between a piazza and a crossing, there’s a police station, a bank branch, a pastry, a cheap ready-to-wear store, a tram stop (where tourists line up waiting to be transported to Praça do Comércio, the big square that was once, during the first globalization in the 15th and 16th centuries, a sort of search engine) and the bus stop (where old men discuss politics in an exalted-if-not-exactly-hopeful tone that sounds quite Chekhovian). Passing by them, I realize Calvário is a comedy. A sad comedy, like, say, “Uncle Vanya”.

Then, tearing through all the noise, there’s the cry of a loud sirene, and I remember what Chekhov said of the sounds that Stanislavski engineered for the play’s opening in Moscow — that they made as much sense as adding a real nose to a face on a painting. I still have time to kill, but I won’t go anywhere. I pull my cap down, protecting myself from the sun and the stares, and I activate my invisibility superpower. An undercover writer. I’m the fictitious foreign correspondent, a sort of double agent, looking at everything with my most forgetful eyes, trying to translate the gaps, the cracks, the text between the lines.

On the two benches that someone has managed to plant in this narrow, awkward square, two women teach me how to kill time for real. One has a red beret, the other one has a cough; both flaunt the transparent calm of being at home, distracted, free from the world. Suddenly, there’s a voice singing, almost shouting, and I turn: it’s a man, with white shorts and a baby-blue jacket, carrying a phone, holding it horizontally against his ear. With his free hand, he slaps the air as if his life depends on it (isn’t that an expression?) and sings or shouts the unintelligible chorus. In the opposite direction, comes a young, silent, brunette woman. She comes sliding on her bicycle, in a liquid rhythm that has absolutely nothing to do with chaos ou shouting — she comes and goes, disappears.

After the talk at the Library, I go back there and wait for the bus. The place feels like fiction: everyone passing has the clear outline, that universal sharpness, of a character in a story. Only the bus, which I see now in the distance, getting closer, is at odds with this. It will take me away from Calvário and from these sentences and it looks like a real nose.