Lisbon: A Sheepish Attempt at Lunch (cont.)
We sit and wait and watch. The man’s stress level fills the room with a nervous energy, and I repress the urge to start clearing tables for him. Dirty dishes and glasses and silver stew pots pile up. We sit. We wait. Ten, fifteen minutes pass. Through a few quickly exchanged words, we consider an escape.
“What about the bread?” I ask, picking at a piece of stale bread, sniffing a foil container of oily gray sardine paste.
“We’ll leave five euro. Let’s go.”
But manners win out, and we remain trapped.
I just want some water. I get the man’s attention and say, as clearly and politely as possible, “Agua, por favor.” He barks my words back at my face, “Agua! Agua!” There is no question mark in his tone. I am confused, but agree and copy his ways. “Agua!” I yell in return. The rules of exchange now firmly established, and we trade angry outbursts for a bottle of red wine.
We drink fast to numb our pain. I take impolite swigs. I thumb the Lonely Planet, thinking salvation may yet lie within its discredited pages. Soon I accept our fate, abandon my lunch fantasies and become a passive spectator.
The cook’s floating head, decorated with a frost white moustache and topped by a starchy white paper cap, occasionally pops out from a window into the kitchen. Identical orders of fish-rice stew raise his cartoonish ire. From his little window, his prison cell, he wails.
“How much fucking seafood-rice stew can one man cook!?” he seems to say.
“You stay in there. You cook seafood rice until you die!” the owner seems to reply, shouting over the heads of his baffled customers. We can’t understand a word, but unmistakable anger pierces the air and, I fear, embitters our simmering stew.
Meanwhile, more parties are streaming through the door. Rain soaked, they bare a desperate and familiar look. They glance about nervously, struggling to calculate the mean facts before them. They hold familiar blue paperbacks, clutching them to their rain coats. They are sheep like us, and it is actually possible to see their lunch dreams being crushed. I could have warned them; but I just sat and watched and drank, comforted that our misled flock would suffer as one.
As travelers, we had failed, but there was a lesson in it. Lisbon’s secrets would not be unlocked by a couple of roaming bohemians on the Lonely Planet payroll. I looked across at my friend. He knew it as I did. We smiled, accepting what was coming in a silver stew pot: watery, overcooked rice in a weak tomato broth with a few pieces of shattered mussels and clam shells floating about. Outside, the rain had stopped. The cobblestones would be drying. I tossed the book aside and sat with a thousand yard stare. With wide eyes, my friend looked to his left. The stew had arrived.
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