Lisbon Tilts

Lisbon tilts toward the river, and everything rolls with it. Shopping carts. Footballs. Tourists who wore the wrong shoes. The city is built on seven hills, which sounds romantic until you live on the fourth one and carry groceries. I've been carrying groceries up the Rua da Bica for twenty-three years. The street is cobblestone, steep enough that the tram uses a cable to pull itself up, and I don't have a cable. I have two plastic bags and knees that have started to comment. People move to Lisbon for the light. This is true. The light here is different — it comes off the Tagus and hits the tiles on the buildings and the whole city turns white and blue and terracotta, and in the late afternoon everything goes gold in a way that makes photographers weep and residents close the shutters because it's hot and they're trying to sleep. I didn't move here. I was born here, in Alfama, in an apartment where five of us shared two bedrooms and the bathroom was down the hall and the plumbing made sounds that my mother interpreted as the building's mood. A gurgling pipe meant rain. A rattling pipe meant the neighbor upstairs was running a bath. Silence meant something was broken. Alfama is expensive now. The apartment I grew up in is an Airbnb. I looked it up once. A hundred and twenty euros a night. The bathroom has been renovated. The plumbing is silent, which means my mother would say something is broken. I don't resent this, or I try not to. The city has always changed. The earthquake flattened it in 1755 and they rebuilt it on a grid. The revolution came in 1974 and they painted it red. The Europeans came with money and they painted it grey and called it renovation. The city survives. It tilts and it slides and it catches itself and it keeps going. The tram on the Bica still works. It's been working since 1892. The cable pulls it up and gravity brings it down and the tourists ride it and take photographs and the locals walk beside it because the tram is full and the street isn't, and I walk beside it with my groceries and my knees and the knowledge that the top of the hill has a view of the river that is worth every cobblestone. My mother is eighty-seven. She lives with me now, in Graça, on the fifth hill. She can still hear the pipes. The building is old and the plumbing speaks to her and she tells me what it means and she is usually right. Lisbon tilts. We lean into it. What else would you do.