The Lisbon Hours

By ten the Baixa is full. Not crowded — full, which is a different thing. Crowded suggests pressure. Full suggests that every space is being used at its intended pace. The Rua Augusta at ten in the morning is a demonstration of this. The wide pedestrian boulevard has tourists, yes, but it also has women with shopping bags, men in suits walking briskly toward the Praça do Comércio, a postman on a bicycle, a delivery truck inching along the cross-street, and a cluster of boys in school uniforms eating something out of paper bags on the steps of the Arco. None of them are in each other's way. None of them are hurrying. It is possible to spend twenty minutes walking from the Rossio to the arch and not be aware that you have been walking slowly, because everyone else has been walking slowly too.

I had a list of errands, because I had rented the apartment for ten days and the apartment was unequipped in the specific way that apartments are unequipped in Portugal, which is to say that it had beautiful plates and no olive oil. I went to the Mercado da Ribeira for olive oil and found, instead, an argument between a fishmonger and an elderly customer about whether a particular fish had been caught that morning or the previous evening. The fish in question was a carapau, the Portuguese horse mackerel, and the argument turned on a detail I could not follow but which both parties seemed to enjoy. The fishmonger won, or the customer let him win, and the fish was wrapped in three separate pieces of paper and handed over with a care that suggested it was not, in fact, a commodity.

I bought olive oil in the end from a small shop on the Rua da Madalena. The shopkeeper had a very specific set of feelings about which olive oil I should buy. He held up three bottles and explained, in the kind of English that improves as the conversation goes on, why the first was too grassy for what I wanted (which I had not yet told him I wanted), why the second was too neutral, and why the third, from a co-operative near Elvas, was the one that was correct. I took the third. It cost fourteen euros. It was the best olive oil I had used in a year. I thought about this later — about the fact that he had known what I wanted before I had told him, and had sold it to me without pressure, and had given me, in addition to the bottle, five minutes of context. This is an economy that does not appear in the numbers. Lisbon runs on it.

Walking home through the Chiado, I passed a shoe-shiner working a pair of brown brogues belonging to a man in a grey suit who was reading a newspaper. The shoe-shiner was perhaps seventy. He worked the shoes without looking at them. The man in the suit did not look at the shoe-shiner. There was no unfriendliness in this — they were simply both inside a transaction that had been enacted so many times that the gestures had worn smooth. I stood at the corner and watched for perhaps ninety seconds, and in that time the shoe-shiner finished one shoe and started the other, and the man in the suit turned one page of his newspaper, and neither of them spoke.

There is a theory about Lisbon which holds that the city survived the twentieth century by refusing to participate in it. The dictatorship, which lasted from 1933 to 1974, was in most respects a catastrophe, but it had the incidental effect of preventing the wholesale modernisation of the city centre. The Baixa that the Marquês de Pombal rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake is mostly still there, because for forty-one years nothing was allowed to happen to it. When the revolution came in 1974, the city that emerged was architecturally intact and economically stunned, and for thirty years afterwards there was no capital for large-scale redevelopment even if anyone had wanted it. By the time the money arrived, in the form of European structural funds and, later, golden visas, the shape of the city was already a heritage object. You cannot redevelop a heritage object. You can only restore it, slowly, one façade at a time.

The result is a city centre that is unusual in Europe for being more or less the same size and shape it was in 1800. This has consequences for how ten in the morning feels. It feels like a nineteenth-century commercial district trying to accommodate twenty-first-century commerce. It partly succeeds and partly does not, and in the gap between those two states there is a particular quality of slowness that Lisboners, in my experience, neither celebrate nor apologise for. It is simply the pace at which the machinery runs.

I came back up the hill to the apartment with my oil and my bread and a pastel I had bought at a different bakery for comparative purposes. The stairwell of the building was cool and smelled faintly of wax. On the second-floor landing an old woman was watering a plant that sat outside her neighbour's door. I said good morning. She said good morning. Neither of us stopped. This was, I am now certain, the correct response.

Three in the afternoon in Lisbon is the most misunderstood hour in the city's day. Tourist guides treat it as a dead zone, a lull between lunch and whatever the evening is going to be. Restaurants start closing their kitchens. Museums report their lowest attendance of the day. The light is flat. The heat, in summer, is at its least forgiving. Everything sensible has either already happened or is waiting to happen later. The guidebooks tell you to nap, or to go to the beach, or to take a long lunch somewhere air-conditioned and pretend you are Italian.

This is wrong. Three in the afternoon is when Lisbon is most itself.

I spent the Tuesday of my week on a bench in the Jardim da Estrela, which is a small park on the hill above the Assembleia da República, and I did nothing from two-thirty until four-fifteen except watch the park empty and re-fill. The emptying happened first. The lunch crowds left. The mothers with strollers left. The office workers who had been eating sandwiches from paper bags returned to their offices. By three the park had perhaps a dozen people in it, distributed across a space that could hold three hundred.

Then, slowly, it began to re-fill. An elderly couple arrived and sat on the bench across from mine and did not speak for forty minutes. A man in a maintenance uniform swept the path, stopping once to re-tie his shoe. A cat appeared from under a shrub, crossed the path, and disappeared under another shrub. A woman in her sixties sat down on the next bench with a paperback and read for twenty minutes, then stood up, refolded her coat over her arm, and left. By four-fifteen the park had the same number of people in it as at two-thirty, but it was a completely different cast, and they were doing completely different things, and none of them were doing anything in particular.

The lesson of three in the afternoon in Lisbon is that the city contains a parallel economy of people who are not working, or who are working at a pace that looks, to a foreigner on a deadline, indistinguishable from not working. This economy is not small. It includes retirees, of course, of whom Lisbon has many. But it also includes delivery men on their second break, women who clean apartments and have finished for the day, students between classes, civil servants on the long tail of the Portuguese lunch hour, and an entire category of people I came to think of as os senhores dos cafés — gentlemen of the cafés — who sit at the same table at the same café at the same hour every afternoon and have done so for decades.

I met one of them by accident at the Confeitaria Nacional. His name was Joaquim. He was eighty-one. He had been coming to the Confeitaria at three in the afternoon, he told me, since 1968, when he started his first job at a bank around the corner. He retired from the bank in 2002. He had continued to come. His wife, he said, did not mind. His wife, I eventually understood, had died in 2011. He did not say this with any particular sadness; he simply corrected himself mid-sentence, from "my wife does not mind" to "my wife did not mind", and carried on. He drank a galão — a tall glass of coffee with milk — and ate one mil-folhas, and he talked to the waiter, whom he had known for thirty-one years, about the prospects of Sporting Clube de Portugal in the upcoming season. The waiter disagreed with him on a point of midfield tactics. Joaquim conceded the point with a small shrug and ate his mil-folhas. This took an hour.

It is easy to romanticise this. It is easy, in particular, for a foreign writer to romanticise it, because the gentle ritual of Joaquim's afternoon is, to a person working against email, a visible rebuke. I am aware of this risk. I will say only that Joaquim did not strike me as a man performing slowness, or resisting modernity, or making any kind of point. He struck me as a man doing the thing he had always done, at the hour he had always done it, and that the hour belonged to him and he to it in a way that was not a decision but a fact. When I left the Confeitaria at four-fifteen he was still there. When I came back two days later, at three, he was there again. He nodded at me. I nodded back. I sat at a different table. We did not speak. This too was correct.

The afternoon is not a dead zone. It is a position. The city goes on running underneath it, quietly, and if you sit still and watch, you see the shape of the running.

Seven is when Lisbon begins to perform. The word I want is not "perform" — performance implies an audience separate from the act. What I mean is that at seven the city shifts into a mode of deliberate self-presentation that persists, with variations, until about midnight. The shifts are physical. Bars that were closed are open. Restaurants that were empty are filling. The miradouros — the viewpoints for which Lisbon is rightly famous — acquire a particular density of people leaning on railings with plastic cups of white wine bought from the kiosk beside them. The light, which was flat at three, is now the light of northern travel magazines — honey, raking, capable of making anything photograph well.

I went to the Miradouro de Santa Catarina on the Wednesday at seven because the editor of a magazine in London had once told me it was the best view in the city. It is not the best view in the city. It is the most human view in the city. The Miradouro da Senhora do Monte is higher and more sweeping; the Miradouro da Graça has the better orientation toward the castle. But Santa Catarina is low enough that you can see the people on the ferry terminal below, and wide enough that you can see the Ponte 25 de Abril in full, and small enough that the crowd has the feel of a party rather than a spectacle. On my Wednesday there were perhaps eighty people on the miradouro. Half of them were foreign; half were Portuguese; most were in their twenties and thirties; three were old and sitting on a bench in the corner watching the foreigners the way one watches a good film one has seen before.

A busker was playing a guitar. He was not playing fado. He was playing something that sounded Brazilian, or perhaps something his grandfather would have called Brazilian. A couple near the railing were arguing quietly in French about whether to have dinner at nine or nine-thirty. A group of Portuguese students were passing a single cigarette between six people with the gravity of a ritual. I bought a plastic cup of white wine for one euro fifty from the kiosk and leaned on the railing and watched the ferry pull out of Cais do Sodré and realised that the light had moved perhaps four degrees since I arrived. This was the only thing that had happened in twenty minutes. It was, I thought, enough.

Dinner in Lisbon happens late, but not as late as foreigners expect. The cliché is that nobody eats before nine. This is not quite true. The neighbourhood places — the tascas — start serving at seven and are busy by eight. What happens at nine is that the restaurants that care about being seen at become busy, and what happens at ten is that the restaurants that care about being seen at are full, and what happens at eleven is that the restaurants that care about being seen at begin to turn tables, and what happens at midnight is that everybody moves to a bar. The movement is orderly. It has the quality of an informal rotation rather than a crowd.

I had dinner on the Wednesday at a tasca in Alfama that I will also not name, because it had nine tables and did not need me. I had bacalhau à brás and a half-litre of house red and a small dish of ovos moles for dessert that the owner insisted on, because she had made them herself that morning. The bill came to nineteen euros. I over-tipped and she refused the over-tip with a firmness that was part pride and part, I suspect, accountancy. At eleven I walked down toward the river. The streets of Alfama at eleven are one of the most specific sounds I know: cobblestones, distant guitar, a television through an open window, the particular echo of a narrow street that has a sloping floor and a hard ceiling of washing lines. It is possible to walk for fifteen minutes in Alfama at eleven and meet no one.

This is the thing people mean, I think, when they say Lisbon is a city of saudade. The word is untranslatable in the usual way — it means longing, homesickness, the presence of what is absent — but what I think it means, more practically, is that Lisbon is a city built for walking alone in at eleven at night and feeling as though you are carrying something, even if you cannot say what. The city is old. It has been old for a long time. It knows how to hold a walker. You feel held.

The question of whether Lisbon sleeps is the wrong question. All cities sleep, in the sense that all cities have hours when the bulk of their population is unconscious. What varies between cities is what happens in those hours, and who stays awake to do it, and whether the wakeful and the sleeping understand themselves to belong to the same city or different ones.

Lisbon at one in the morning is populated, still, but thinly. The tascas are closing. The miradouros have emptied. Pink Street — the Rua Nova do Carvalho, in Cais do Sodré, whose surface is painted pink for aesthetic reasons I could not reconstruct — is loud, but Pink Street is a bounded phenomenon; walk two blocks and you are back in a city that is mostly asleep. The trams have stopped. The night buses run every forty minutes. Taxis circle the major squares with the air of predators who have learned that the kill is inevitable but not urgent.

I was out late twice during my week. The first time was on the Thursday, with a photographer I had known in London who had moved to Lisbon during the pandemic and never left. Her name was Inês and she had the kind of flat in Graça that had become fashionable four years after she had taken it out of love for its light. We drank wine at a bar near her flat until midnight, then walked down through the Mouraria to the river, because she wanted to show me a place that I will describe but not name.

The place was a small bar on a side street that had no sign and no fixed closing time. It was run by a man named Carlos who was, Inês explained, the son of a fadista — a fado singer — who had died some years before. Carlos did not sing. But at a certain hour, which was never the same hour twice, he would pick up a guitar and play a song his father had written, and the dozen or so people in the bar would stop talking and listen. On the Thursday he did this at ten past one. The song was about a woman who had lived on a particular street in Coimbra and who had died waiting for a letter. Carlos played it with the flat, unornamented vocal that the Coimbra fado tradition prefers. When he finished, the bar did not applaud. It said, quietly, obrigado. He nodded, put the guitar down, and went back to pouring drinks.

What I understood, sitting in that bar at one-fifteen in the morning on a Thursday, was that Lisbon's nightlife is not, for the most part, nightlife in the way other cities conduct nightlife. It is the same daytime city, operating with the lights turned down. The people in the bar were mostly the same people who had been in the tascas at nine and at the miradouros at seven. They were not performing lateness; they were simply still there, because Lisbon is a city that permits you to still be there without having to justify it. The informal rotation continues. The bar at one is the café at ten. The café at ten is the bar at one. Carlos, I later learned, also runs a breakfast place on the Rua dos Remédios that opens at six-thirty. He sleeps, he said, from about three until seven. He has done this for eleven years.

The second late night I had was on the Saturday, alone, and I walked for an hour along the river from Cais do Sodré out past Santos, past Alcântara, to a point where the bridge's shadow falls across the water. At two in the morning the Tejo is the colour of old iron. There were fishermen. There are always fishermen on the Tejo. One of them, an old man with a styrofoam cup of coffee balanced on the railing beside him, told me that he had caught nothing in an hour and was perfectly content. His son, he said, came out at five, and between them they would usually catch enough for dinner. If they did not, there was always the market. He said this with the equanimity of a person who had correctly calibrated what he needed from the city and what the city could reasonably be asked to give. I thought about this for a long time on the walk home.

At three I passed the same café I had gone to on the first morning. It was closed. The chairs were stacked, the tram was not running, the broom was leaning in the doorway. The diagram of the street had reasserted itself. In three hours the man behind the counter would arrive, and shortly after that the silver light would come through the shutters of my apartment, and the sweeping would begin again, and a gull would cry, and the city would begin the process of assembling itself across the hours of the day. I let myself into the building. On the second-floor landing the plant outside the neighbour's door had been watered recently; the tile underneath was dark. I climbed to the third floor. I slept until the light changed.

The question my editor had asked — is Lisbon an afternoon city pretending to be a late-night one — is a good question, but it is not a question that has an answer. Lisbon is not an hour. It is a way of distributing itself across hours that is unlike the distribution of other cities I have spent time in. Paris concentrates. Rome performs. New York accelerates. London layers. Lisbon distributes. It does not have a rush hour, because it does not have a rush; it has instead a long, shallow, widely-spread current of movement that runs from six in the morning to one in the morning, with a slight thickening at ten in the morning and seven in the evening and a noticeable thinning in the middle of the afternoon. If you are willing to be in the city at each of these thicknesses and thinnesses, the city presents itself to you. If you are not — if you come only for dinner at nine and miradouros at seven — you will still have a good time, but you will have met only a portion of the thing.

I left Lisbon on a Monday morning at seven. The taxi driver had the radio on low. He was listening to the morning news, which led with a story about the drought in the Alentejo. Crossing the bridge he looked at the river and said, without turning around, that the fishermen had been complaining that the water was lower than last year. I said I had spoken to a fisherman on Saturday night. He said, yes, fishermen have always complained, it is what they do, it is their right. He drove on. The bridge was not crowded at seven. It is never crowded at seven, he said, because the people who cross the bridge at seven are the people who work on the south side, and there are not, any more, so many of them. This was information. I wrote it down.

At the airport I bought a coffee and a pastel from a kiosk run by a woman who was, I thought, from Cabo Verde. She was efficient in the way airport workers are efficient. She did not engage. The coffee was bad. The pastel was fine. I sat at a metal table and watched a cleaner move slowly around the concourse with a large mop, pushing a grey tide of water toward the drain. It was seven-forty in the morning. The light through the airport's east-facing windows was the pale gold I had been expecting at six on my first day and which had, I now understood, simply been running on Lisbon's clock.

I boarded the plane at eight-twenty. The plane pushed back at eight-forty. By nine I was over the Atlantic, and Lisbon was behind me, and I was composing, in my head, the beginning of this essay. It began at six. It could have begun at any hour. Every hour is an entrance.