On Wandering Slowly

I arrived in Lisbon without a plan and, for the first time in a long while, without an apology for it. The Tagus was the colour of old silver that morning, and a fisherman on the quay was singing something in a key I did not recognise. I set my bag down and listened.

There is a kind of travel that behaves like acquisition — passport stamps collected, monuments crossed off, meals photographed before they cool. And there is another kind, older and quieter, that behaves like listening. You stand still and let a place say its name to you. Lisbon says hers slowly.

I took the yellow tram to nowhere in particular. An old woman crossed herself as we passed a small church at the top of Alfama. A boy in a football shirt fell asleep on his mother's shoulder. The tram creaked like a wooden ship, and I remembered that most of the world's beautiful things are not efficient.

In the evenings I walked to the same café — a small, tiled room where the espresso came in a chipped cup and the owner did not pretend to remember me. This, I decided, was a mercy. Anonymity, in the right city, is a kind of welcome.

I thought about the eighteen countries behind me and the ones ahead. I thought about how the fastest way to lose a place is to try to conquer it. I thought about my father, who once told me that a traveller and a tourist walk the same streets but come home with different souls.

On the last morning, the light on the pastel houses of Bica was so gentle it almost hurt. I did not take a photograph. I stood there until a stranger asked me the time in Portuguese, and I answered, badly, in a language that was not mine — and we both laughed, and that was enough.

You do not need to see everything. You only need to see one thing, and to let it see you back.

— Abul Bashar Arman