Theme Tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW9hgMUsVUw (ignore cheesy video. This song is EVERYWHERE -- especially in one car that always parks up outside my window in Alfama. And then I see that Senna has it!)
I have just come back from a day at Senna’s.( Senna is the guy that worked on the farm with me in the summer: a very strong, charismatic Cabo Verdian who is studying Philosophy and Politics here in Lisbon). He lives in Cacem, out in the suburbs of Lisbon. I took the train out onto the line towards Sintra. The train was filled with white, black, old, young people, with hundreds of children running around the place. The woman and her children twins running in the slanted light of the station to catch the train. The train pushed its way out of Lisbon under the hot grey sky. The concrete sides of the track were patterned with fat tropical graffitis. Groups of skyscrapers, like clumps of weeds, grew up either side and up the hill-sides, with a thousand windows looking out over each other. Skyscrapper after skyscraper. Calm eyes of the man opposite of me, the fiddling of the fat African lady with her shopping bag. Arriving at Cacem, Senna found me. I sat on a cafe step and watched a gypsy couple, old and wrinkled, with skin like leather bags, ask a lady to help them buy a ticket from the machine. Perhaps they could not read. The way I could see the back of the gypsy lady’s patterned headscarf, turning towards her husband’s face as if to ask if they were going to get the ticket. His beige trousers, ironed down the middle and his hunched back. They seemed so helpless.
Me and Senna wondered up and up through the area, past the tall building and the bustling shops. Every so often there is a low house with a African-like veranda where, perhaps, an old lady is watering the plants. There is space here, some fountains and some modern community constructions to clamber on, etc. Up and up we go to Senna’s flat. He shares it with an old man, and his half-CaboVerdian son (11) and another young man who is an Electrician, Edgar. The old man was so welcoming. Slight and with a cigarette hanging in his mouth, he chattered away in (relatively good) English. He used to work on the ships. He had been all over the world. His shy son, PJ, enters and is reluctant to talk. The little kitchen overlooks a community centre, a basket ball court and more flats opposite. The TV in the sitting room is on: Senna’s room is simple with the bed diagonally on the floor and full of bits and bobs, including a collection of lamps on the floor covered over with coloured cloths. Kizomba is playing here. Edgar the electrician enters and departs, with or without the dog he has. Edgar’s parents live in London now. He is 19. PJ came here when he was 7, his mother is still in Cabo Verde. Senna says that his father gives him a lot of love here. “Pae?”.
I started making two lemon cakes with Senna in the kitchen (because he loves that cake). We were all involved in getting tins and scales and the old man said he wanted to have tea with his cake at 5 o’clock because that was “the time of tea”. After Senna taught me some Kizomba dancing and PJ kept passing to watch and laugh nervously at my attempt. “Listen to da music with your hear-rt”, said the old man, cigarette bobbing up and down on his lip. The white tiles on the floor and the walls, the sounds of the TV, the cooling day and the people outside wondering around the streets. The €1.50 tag on the packet of tea, neatly rolled and pegged up. Me and Senna ate Senna’s beans and rice that he had cooked and sliced into the cake, washing it down with Spumante, that is a champagne-like drink.
We watched his photos of Cabo Verde with the Kizomba playing. His friends, all so muscular and smiling. The animals wondering around the streets, the low varandered houses, the electricity wires collected up to one pole on the side of a street full of old jeeps. Bays with huts and palms and dark sand. His friends collecting the fish, his sister pounding the corn with a stick as big as herself, the old concentration camp from Salzaar’s time. Senna was a leader of a community centre there that started juntos maos, an idea to form a co-operative group and all help each other in the community – to all work on one farm and then move onto the next together, not each at their own. He was “peopleSenna”. Senna of the people. I felt sucked into the photos, into that life, for a while. Into the heat and the dry dry earth that is so hard to work, into the way they were all smiling in the pictures, the way the group of little nephews had filled a white sack with plastic bottles to float it in the sea... that kind of life, I felt sucked into.
Time to go home: we wondered down to the train station again back onto a bustling train of various races and ages and sizes. Back it went through the suburbs, plonking me right in the middle of Lisbon. I rather missed the house when I got back. The way that everyone had come from some other place, the way they all had family other sides of the world, and the way they came together in a little Cacem flat on a Saturday night to eat lemon cake and the affection of it, especially between the father and the son. The son’s starry pyjama bottoms I saw when he was peering quietly out over the street. I feel pressured to go out now but love to think that they are sitting there now in their flat, in silence, perhaps watching the TV together, the blue flickering light reflecting on their faces, as the rest of Cacem goes on, all in their own little space, yellow boxes for windows, in the Portuguese night.
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