Minimalism

My system of bedroom meals is more than simple.  No appliances, no furniture, no drawers of implements.  Just me with a knife, a board and a bowl.

Maximalism

The bedroom system amuses me for now, but I am dying to have a proper kitchen and start cooking again.  Yesterday I saw the dining table that has to go into the sitting room with the panelled walls.  Oh, the wonderful glass top!  Oh, the gleaming wood!  Oh, the clean design with the straight legs!  Oh, the sliding section to make it bigger for my eleven guests! 

Going along the Rua dos Martires da Liberdade for the first time, it was late in the evening and I was on my way to the Flamenco concert.  I hesitated at the entrance to the dimly lit, narrow street, but went in anyway.  Here was an open café, here some children were playing with a ball, here were some teenagers chatting by a doorway, here someone walking his dog stepped off the pavement to let me pass.  I could scream if anything looked dangerous.  Then I thought:  I would be coming home, if this is where my pensione happened to be, like those children when they finish playing, and the man walking his dog.  Thinking about one thing and another, I walked without any harm all the way to the flamenco hall. 

Usually people say, about their part of the town, that the danger is somewhere else.  For Samuel, this district is fine; it's nice and quiet, but down in Ribiera, on the bank of the River Douro, well, you can go there in the daytime...   

I went there again in the daytime.  The children were still there with their ball, so were the teenagers chatting in the same doorway, the open cafés of course, and now I saw a lot of shops to help me pass the time in limbo.  I spent a long time kneeling on the floor in a kitchen goods shop, pulling out different sizes of heavy-bottomed saucepans and counting up prices.  A full set would cost only 68 euros.  It went onto my list.  

The assistant brought over someone to help translate.  He was a tall man, in a brown camel hair jacket, with grey hair and glasses, a courteous smile... like my Dutch friend Herman, I thought, scrambling to my feet. 

I supposed he was another customer.  No, he was the owner of the shop.  They laughed at my surprise.  'It's because he's tall; he doesn't look Portuguese.'  They checked through my list and said, no they don't do discounts, but they would deliver everything free to my flat if I bought the things there. 

Further along the street was a shop with unusual glass lamps.  I stepped in past a grey tabby cat which immediately rushed to the back of the shop.  The shades for the pendant lamps were box-shaped, and their glass with slightly whirling dusky colours was set in a black iron framework – like the mounting for stained glass windows.  The young woman looking after the shop with her mother told me that she makes them herself.  This is her atelier, and these lamps are a development of the Tiffany style.  I started to look through her catalogues, and...

And in no time we were talking...  About cats: did I want a cat, her friend needed to find a home for one of hers...  About what happens to your fingernails when you are working:  we compared our hands  -  my long unbroken nails since I stopped mending furniture  -  her chipped, red varnish, and two broken nails...  About working:  her mother, a retired primary school teacher, joined in here, in French. 

One glass lampshade on my list. 



Several times on my way to Samuel's office, I have stopped to gaze at a bed through the window of a furniture shop.  It had the beautiful wood and modern lines that I set my heart on in Russia.  Of course it would be too expensive for me.

Coming back there to have a look at a second hand shop which I had noticed through the bus window, I stopped at the bed shop, just to torment myself.  The person who unlocked the door and showed me round was the owner, and he also made the furniture.  Oh yes. 

    'That armchair for example, 1940s retro.  The first piece of furniture my father made as an upholsterer was exactly the same.  It is still selling - people like retro.  Of course my father doesn't work now, but he comes to the shop and talks to customers to keep them occupied when I am busy.

    My son has just qualified as an architectural... [I didn't exactly catch what my storyteller said here about his son.]   He looks at pieces of modern furniture that I like, copies the designs with his own variations, and I make them.  That's what you see here. 

    By the way, there is a thirty per cent discount on the bed that you like.  Did you notice that it is solid cherry wood?'



Rua de Cedofeita is a long street that leads across from my pensione to Boavista Avenue where the Casa da Musica is, and where I will be tonight for a jazz concert. Now part of it is closed to cars, and it's listed in the guide books under urban buzz.  When I went window shopping there, I was more interested in mattresses.

Here was a shop that sold only mattresses.  Two rooms were stacked high; I  could just manage to get inside the main room.  An old man sitting at the back looked up from his newspaper.  We began to calculate, and he frugally used the top of the newspaper to write down figures. 

I looked at his card - Business established 1921 - and looked back at the old man.  He was old, but he couldn't be that old.  We began a conversation with gestures and single words.

    'Business here?  Father's?'

Yes.  He gestured to the back of the shop and I understood that it was also the family house.  He was eighty-one years old, married fifty-four years. Children...  Grandchildren...

I will think about this old man when I go to sleep on one of his mattresses in my new flat.