Again I follow the better vibrations in the air at the end of a long day of wandering aimlessly in a foreign city; again I find Brazilians playing pagode. They are down by the waterfront, playing at Amarelo, a satellite cafe of a restaurant called Anfíbio.
O Pagode do Elias are excellent, and every table is occupied. Despite my aching legs I stand on the periphery listening until a table clears. I make for it, but so do a young couple. She makes a generous gesture with both hands. So do I. Without speaking, we are agreed: we will share the table.
De onde é você? I ask, in a lull in the music.
Rio de Janeiro, he says.
I’m from the US. Baltimore, she says. No shit! I exclaim; I’m from New York!
My assumptions were wrong; they’re not a couple, they’re roommates who haven’t known each other more than a month. She could as easily be Brazilian; her Portuguese sounds fluent to me, and her English has an ethereal accent I can’t place. She is stunningly beautiful, lissome and young. A singer. Her stage name is JoLy.
We talk and share appetizers: the country has good bread, and we order pica-pao de atum—tuna stewed gently, barely past rawness, in white wine, olive oil, and garlic—which is so sublime I spend the rest of the month insisting that everyone I meet go there and try it. It’s so good we get seconds and just make a meal of it. It’s not just this tuna, JoLy tells me. Even the canned tuna here is amazing.
JoLy has been out of the US for a few years. Her story comes out in pieces. She’s classically trained. She’s been kicking around Europe; previously she spent a few years in Taiwan. Taiwan? Yes—her parents signed her up to go to a school there after high school, without telling her. She had been running with a troubled crowd in Baltimore and they wanted to throw her clear of it. Shortly after she left, the boy she’d been dating was killed. I’m doing a lot of processing of all this in my music, she tells me. Therapy Thoughts.
How does she like Lisbon? Everyone is really welcoming, she tells me. She’s already cut tracks with other musicians, gets invited up to sing. She’s looking to get residency. Portugal has a large backlog of applications, so they’ve even extended forgiveness to people who have overstayed while they work through it. (I hear a Slavic language being spoken around Lisbon, and soon learn a sizeable refugee community of Ukrainian tech workers has taken up residence there as well. Later that month, my habit of listening for where the sound is good leads me to a small knot of drummers from Guinea Bissau. They generously let me sit in with them on kenkeni, as I sometimes get to do in Harlem. An Angolan woman in the crowd dances; her smile of return to familiar joys lights the dusk.)
Lisbon seems to be a felicitous place for the likes of JoLy. May she, and all the others cast loose from place by history, continue to thrive.