The city resisted his memories of it. Wheeling sea-gulls, their gullets full of fish, swung in from the estuary to feed their squalling chicks on warehouse roofs around the docks. Morgan stood near the water’s edge in Praça do Comércio looking out across the Tagus, watching the commuter ferries pushing back and forth across the river from the suburbs and dormitory towns on the other side – Caçilhas and Barreiro and Montijo, the bright water chopping in the breeze. Down river a white cruise-ship, improbably vast, disrupting the laws of perspective, was moored at Alcántara, at docks where the troop-transports had carried away a generation of young men to futile wars in Angola and Moçambique.
Walking down through Baixa from the hotel, Morgan crossed Rua do Arsenal, the street where Capitão Salgueiro Maia had confronted units of a tank-brigade loyal to the Caetano regime – main-battle tanks, as big as dinosaurs in a museum, gunning their engines in plumes of blue exhaust – climbing down from his armoured car, his arms raised high above his head, walking under the muzzles of the guns and calling on the tank-crews to join the revolution: the exact intersection of history and the individual.
Morgan waited for a gap in the traffic, hurrying across the street between tour buses. In the vivid sunlight, through tunnels of deep shade, swifts and house-martins flashed through the arcades on the north side of the square. Everywhere, in the surging traffic, in the shops and cafés, in the ceaseless intensity of the murmuring crowds, the glittering, elaborate surfaces of the morning lay like an impenetrable lacquer over the past. Deep below, unreachable at the bottom of a well of time, Morgan and Matty’s ghosts ran through the city like drowned children.
© chris keil 2012