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of them while sitting in a bar listening to the conversation of his fellow patrons that surrounded him like a mantel. Sometimes he would insert a sentence that he had just heard into his text. I tell André, who has just turned fifty, of these evenings. He listens, letting the story unfold. Like an experienced musician who knows how to break between songs and continue in the same rhythm, he continues on with his own story about Beirut, about when his family opened the bar in 1964. Since that time, nothing has changed in the pub.
The Sea is the Home of Sorrow. Lopez met Evore in Sao Vicente, where he travelled as a young man, as well as in Evora’s hometown of Mindelo, a port from where Portuguese ships would sail to India and Brazil, returning with spices, coffee, and tobacco.
If the story stops, he takes his chisel and makes a cut on the piece of wood in the clamp, blowing away the dust that disappears like stardust, leaving a dry smell. It has been a long time since he last visited his hometown of Praia. It is a long and expensive journey. The Portuguese word saudade and the Lebanese bukra – the He shows me souvenirs from different countries: first meaning nostalgia for something distant, banknotes, license plates, military caps. He tells the second the uncertainty of tomorrow – have me anecdotes from the civil war, such as police become one, here, at the crossroad of the two raids like the one in Casablanca when the music streets, the first one named for the Egyptian suddenly stops in the bar. Always the perfectly president and the second one for the antic god. sober captain of this bar-ship, he knows how to Here in the dawn the voice of the muezzin calls talk about big events, periods of war and peace, for the salat al-subh, and on Sunday, a church and the events in the Cabin: the names that peo- bell rings for mass. ple scratched with a key in the bar, and a chair that a jealous wife once threw at her husband she found in the bar, playing a game of bridge * with his friends. André still remembers details of that game where the husband stood to lose big, but after his wife’s assault the cards were hopelessly scattered and it was impossible to continue. He tells me about swimming on Beirut’s beaches, there where there have been for a long time restaurants, tennis courts, and swimming pools. Stories about jumping from the Pigeon Rocks, where all those who come to Beirut have their picture taken. These rocks are slowly being eaten away by the sea foam, just as the stories from the Cabin will dissipate with time.
*
I stopped looking for discrepancies in the stories of those who I meet in Beirut a long time ago, nor do I try to find mistakes in the stories of those who are imperfect narrators. I listen to their stories as images, episodes from the life of the city, its citizens, and all those who came to live here. Stories about longing, journeys, hopes for the future. Beirut exists between the mountains and the sea. In the old neighbourhoods in Naples from the Spanish period they say that they are in the cozy, warm stomach of a cow. The Captain’s Cabin in the old Beirut is the inside of a ship, floating on its own waves, while the stories acquire the aura of friendship and lose their foreign accents.
Down, through Adonis Street, there is the hotel “Versailles”, the Chatila Mosque, and the Church A bit of forgetfulness of real life and the ship floof Saint Rita, protectoress of all those who trav- ats on, and soon, everything is covered in meel. There is also the carpenter shop of the old mory. Lopez, who came to Lebanon many years ago, leaving his home in Cape Verde only several years after its independence from Portugal. The Geppetto of Beirut has his stories, too. About the years of Salazar’s autocratic rule, his cruel secret police and how people whispered even among family, and the departure of the Portuguese. And finally, more recently when life became a bit easier and more tourists came to see the archipelago and hear the morna, a fusion of fado with the local rhythms. In his atelier, we listen to Cesaria Evora’s story
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