Death and Taxis, Part IV

 

Tram 28, a Lisbon landmark, winds its way through the city on a 45-minute route that, it just so happens, passes many of the most famous tourist sites and neighborhoods in the city. It's the first thing Lonely Planet told us to do, and after a couple of nights of festive dancing, jumping, and staying up way past bedtime, we thought that taking it all in while remaining seated sounded like a wonderful idea. At lunch in the Bairro Alto, I asked the restaurateur where we could catch it. He pointed down the street, about a block away. But where does it begin? I wanted to know. He laughed, and asked which side of the city we wanted to see. It seemed that we were smack halfway down the 28-line, and that it really didn't matter which we walked to reach its endpoint. Either way would be a hike.

On the map, Basilica da Estrela, our goal, did not look too far away. That was because the navigator (yours truly, sorry, y'all) didn't account for the city canyons we'd be traversing along the way. The elevation changes along with several shade-chasing street-crossings made for about an hour's stroll, past minimarts where you can purchase peaches and gigantic bottles of chilled water (which we did), and past the apartment where Fernando Pessoa crashed for about a year. Coyote took pictures, in the hopes that he would receive extra credit from our evil Portuguese literature teacher. Let's just say that, if he got extra credit, I don't want to know what she would have given him if he hadn't turned in the photographs. 

 

Since the final stop of the trolley includes the word "Basilica", I declared each steeple eyed from a distance to be our destination, in the hopes of rallying the troops. It wasn't this one:

 

  

...or this one...

...and by the time we got to the tram turnaround, I was so busy trying to see whether there were seats left in the waiting car that I didn't even notice the basilica. 

I did notice, however, that it had, indeed, been necessary to walk all the way to the end of the line in order to snag a seat, because the trolley had only two vacant seats when it chugga-chooed out, and one only due to Nah's exceptional gallantry, as he chose to stand in the expectation that a little old lady would board the trolley at any moment.

And board the little old ladies did, in hordes, bevies, flocks, swarms, covens, we are talking LARGE NUMBERS of blue-hair-sporting Lisboetas. They, as senior citizens, are entitled to free transportation, and, therefore, were not required to enter at the driver's door. They could hop on from behind, either side, through the windows, and they all desired comfortable seats along with their free trip. I was, luckily, already turned perpendicular in my seat, and looked sufficiently pathetic as the love-making Spanish couple behind my smashed me into the seatback in front of me, so no one even expected me to get up to make way for the elderly. Ms. Gill, however, had no such luck. She had first been joined by a talker, a little-old-lady who patiently, persistently, repeated something mysterious to Ms. Gill in Portuguese. My dear friend Ms. Gill, bless her soul, patiently agreed with every repetition the woman made, nodding in time to the circles the woman made in the air with her arthritic knuckles and wide, watery eyes. 

We stopped next to a pretty white wall against the very-blue background of the sky, and some kids playing a radio inside a storefront provided entertainment as we waited for some sort of technical problem, perhaps just a stoplight, it was difficult to tell given that about 160 people had been crammed into the 12-foot trolley car, and I was avoiding swats from the angry French mother aiming at her complaining teenaged daughter while trying to figure out why we had stopped at precisely this spot for ten minutes.

We lurched forward again, before I could solve the mystery of our unexplained halt, and continued onward and upward, before arriving at the spot the guidebook had suggested we hop-on-snap-a-quick-pic-and-hop-back-on. No such maneuvers were even considered on the traveling sardine can, however, because even if anyone had been foolish enough to give up their seat, foothold, or handrest, they would never have hoped to get back to it again, especially if they were privileged enough to see through the elbows and shopping bags out to the crowd of frustrated tourists waiting remarkably patiently at the yellow post marked "28". I did manage to snap something of a panorama out the window without losing my seat, luckily.

Not a one of the tourists boarded, but two grisly old-timers, a she and a he, boarded the bag steps near where Coyote and I were sitting. I know that he was sitting there because I had seen him settle in at the beginning of the ride, before layer upon layer of body, umbrella, camera-bag, jacket, and yes, perfume, filled the aisle between him and me. The gristles boarded fighting, and kept up their argument as the trolley rambled on its way. At first I thought it might be the combination of aged vocal cords with a foreign language that can often trick the traveler into believing a violent argument is occurring when, in fact, the conversation is about whether one interlocutor looks beautiful or enchanting, the other just can't put his finger on which adjective is most adequate. My two weeks at the rigorous Portuguese language school, however, let me know that these two were using their shriveled voice-boxes for evil, and were, indeed, fighting.

She wanted to pass from the back platform onto the seating area of the trolley, and find herself a place to rest her bones. He blocked her way, insisting that it was impossible. She hollered, for about four more stops, and he continued to scream at her the car was full, until they both got off and went on their way, after all of five minutes of inconvience. The old women who had been wily enough to find seats around me unplugged their ears when they finally took their screaming off the tram, folding their improvised Kleenex earplugs into neat thirds and sliding them back into their plastic travel tissue packs. 

At the front of the car Ms. Gill and Nah were not faring any better. Ms. Gill had nodded for a full half-hour to Grandma Looney's musings, when a stout blue-hair boarded the tram and made it known that she would appreciate Ms. Gill's giving up her seat to her elder. Ms. Gill, of course, stood up, breaking her seatmate's groove mid-gesture, which caused an upset in her ramblings. She directed said broken ramblings, now taking on an aggressive tone, to her new seatmate, and the intruder did not appreciate the manner in which she was received on the trolley. Voices raised, then elbows, then, incredibly, the intruder's cane was raised up into the air in a threat interrupted only by Nah's voice (and grip) of reason.

"Calma, calma!" he intervened, grabbing the cane with one hand and attempting to tranquilize the spirits of the elderly with his other, using a classic simmer-down motion. Luckily we had reached the end of the line, in a seedy intersection, so seedy that I spotted  purple succulents growing out of the store awnings.  The over-60s tumbled out of the trolley in all directions, pogo-ing off the drop with their rubber-reinforced canes, elbowing children and pregnant women in their haste to exit the tourist trap they call public transit. When all was clear, the working-age population unfolded our cramped joints, and made our way out onto the plaza, unfolding maps,  finding no one who could tell us where we were.