THE PLACE AND THE CITY

Look at the pictures of a certain place. They don’t carry modernity as it is not necessary for the contemporary meaning issued by Baudelaire in 1864, in his “ Painter of Modern Life”, to confer to the place the powerful culture that exists in Europe, which is the continuity of a stage that is replaced much slower than places contaminated by the virus of the eagerness of a manifestation of modernity, just because.

That is why these houses and their details touch me so deeply.

Cities are places of fascination, of deals with time, living organisms, legacies, places built by those who preceded us in different pasts, respected and honored by our own experience, ingenuity and willingness to continue them.

Cities are only so when their authenticity is respected and proudly lived, enjoyed.

Otherwise, it is not a city, but an urban huddle where human vegetation replaces fruition.

This place, where I am, lulls me into sentiment, that language of feeling, and makes me proud to be here.

People say "good morning, how are you, please excuse me and thank you".

In a café run by an old black-clad widow and her two daughters, a young man, perhaps just twelve years old, stood bare-chested in front of my table with the utmost respect who, shy but dignified, asked:

“I apologize for interrupting gentlemen, but could you give me a cigarette?” And in those words, both seductive and respectful, comes down to the recognition of the Other, of someone that exists apart from himself. He showed not only respect but awareness that he was not the only person on earth. Something that appears not to happen everywhere.

Nearby is a fabulous little shop, because it embodies everything that has become anachronistic. First, because it has existed for over sixty years. Then, because he continues to flaunt caution, lotteries lining the walls, dating from decades ago to today's scratch cards, and newspapers and magazines, all exuding time, to the endless generations of students buying notebooks and ballpoint pens, and there, always there, Mr. Carvalho, slow because that's his measure, tells me "until ..."

Just around the corner, before seven in the morning, the café shop opens, the owner setting an example, the girl at the counter follows in his footsteps, and the thick-glass clerk follows, finishing the procession.

Then I come in, and a smile greets me, and soon the table comes to me, the marble top, the full 'wiping' and the mixed toast and I slowly adjusting myself to the hands of this time.

These are all working people, with a bearing that exudes a subtle dignity, equal to the stones from which they seem to come from.

An unspeakable nostalgia grips me because it reminds me of the time when, where I come from, there were people who belonged, there were tricycles and rickshaws, cicadas and the trees were not sawn, they fell of very old age. They were powerful red acacias concealing singing cicadas, alternating with the Chinese opera of a radio, and we all got along in a language-independent relationship. We were all from there, and those who arrived soon submerged in the river of the history of that place.

Perhaps few now know what a city is, where knowledge has given way to ignorance, famine, consumption, and power show off.

Some show their richness, void of anything else other their impoverished richness.

From the recurrent ignorance, from the city turned into a parish and a pigeon hole, I say I'm from here and there, I'm by my side, a side without sides, but a whole like me, a fragmented entirety.

I am, therefore, from nowhere, I am before me the skeleton, leafless leaf where glimpses are visible.

To be, to exist, is a strange simple complexity, a cosmology, a free prison, or perhaps (and I only doubt for certainty) an imprisoned freedom, a kind of shackled hurricane. I reach either side and let them believe it.

I dive into the depth of silence to see which side of the facet it is, even though I know that I will know nothing, because knowing is a transcendence that is not sympathetic to the illusions of being or being, that is, of time and place. That which overlaps us and is unnamable. This is where I am, without sides and from nowhere.