Carlosh

Can I just say, for the record, that not having certain important keys -- like, oh, the ' or the - or the @ -- where I'm used to having them on the keyboard is driving me completely bazoo. On the other hand, the free government-sponsored internet access here rocks. It's always busy, of course, but you don't have to wait -- you just put your name down for an appointment and come back later. Apparently they have these things all over Portugal now. I've got a half an hour, so this will be a good writing exercise for me, since normally I take forever editing and re-editing.

So let's talk about how I met Carlos (don't forget the "ish" sound on the end). Last night I took the high-speed train from Porto to Coimbra and things were just not going my way. It was one of those days you sometimes get when you're traveling when you just want to curl up in a ball and be magically transported -- Star Trek style -- home to bed. The hotel was a dump -- I'm never taking Rick Steves' recommendations for hotels again, by the way, he said it was "delightful" -- the people there were very nice and the place was scrupulously clean but it was up a lineoleum-covered staircase above a '70s-era hair salon and the room smelled like old sweat. It was already 9 o'clock and I was exhausted (in a side note, there's something wrong with the l on this keyboard and you kind of have to whack it to get it to work, so that last bit came out "9 o'cock" on the first try -- hee, I'm nine), but when I set out for dinner I decided to look at a couple of other places first. I lucked out and found a better hotel -- the room is teeny, but it's modern and doesn't smell, but then I had the incredibly awkward task of fetching my bag from the first place and telling the very nice people I wasn't going to stay there after all. Have I mentioned it was pouring rain throughout all of this? The drizzle finally manned up and got aggressive on me. So then I went to the guidebook-recommended cafe, supposedly the best in town, only to find a sign on the door "Closed October 1 through 15", or actually the Portuguese equivalent thereof, of course, but even I can figure that much out. So then, almost at the end of my rope, I managed to find my way to a fado bar I've been looking forward to (it's in all the guidebooks), in the vain hope that they would also serve food. (Fado is the Portuguese blues -- the national art form. Beautiful music -- like jazz, but not crappy modern jazz, the good stuff. The singers all close their eyes and throw their heads back and look like every word is just ripping their hearts right out of their chests.) And there I found food, and fado, and Carlos. Carlos is a middle-aged poet who hangs out at this bar, and we struck up a conversation (well, he struck up a flirtation, I struck up a conversation). Now I know I should have been wary, and I was, but within five minutes I knew he was harmless, and within ten minutes I realized why -- Carlos is the Nick of the Diligencia Bar in Coimbra, Portugal. For those of you who never met my old friend Nick, he was one of the first people ML and I met in New York. He was an East Village fixture, a retired actor who made it his mission to hold down one end of the bar at the old St. Mark's bar, drinking white wine (which for him was permanently at the "old" price) until he got drunk enough that he and the entire bar reached a mutual decision that he should head for home. He used to come to all our Halloween parties wearing the exact same red Indian embroidered shirt, leftover from his hippie days. It was a gesture on his part, the Halloween equivalent of wearing a sign that says "Costume Here" around your neck. The St. Mark's is long gone now, of course, and thanks to the tender loving care of the VA Hospital, sadly so is Nick. I miss him whenever I happen to think about him, and Carlos reminded me of him, which made me sad and happy at the same time. One of Carlos's poems was hanging on the wall of the bar, and he took it down and translated it for me, writing it slowly and laboriously in my travel journal with my help on the occasional word. Here it is.

We have not defined spaces
Because there is no-one who can define them
But we are not defineable
We meet always everywhere a friend

Girlfriend or boyfriend
It depends on who speaks
The origin of the word is not important
What is important is what we meet of the sublime

There is a place in this town
Where nostalgia seizes intelligence
We live always an eternal youth
When we live the ambiance of the Diligencia!