Free Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser Page B

above the bar. She felt too exhausted to continue. It was senseless, this shuttling between stations and the provincial masterpieces that disgraced the walls of overheated museums. Such pleasures as she took were transient and casual: touristic, in a word. And on top of everything, she had a cold.
    But in Lisbon she racketed over the hills in tin trams. Glass caskets done up with iron were fixed to every wall: the opera boxes of the street. Laura could just see herself up there on this or that balcony, conducting a scandal on a worn velvet seat. There were grilled sardines, a mosaic promenade, tiles painted with ships and insouciant whales. And everywhere, Rome’s grandstanding Baroque transformed for lack of funds into something altogether more humanly decayed. Even the young had an old-fangled air. Boys were neat in navy blue, their girls restrained in crisp white. They held hands as they walked but didn’t caress, although now and then embracing with fervent self-control at the descent of all-forgiving dusk.
    It was a backward city, a European capital folded in a pleat of time unknown to Golden Arches. It returned Laura to childhood and to India, which is to say unmodern places. This was the effect of food cooked in the street, the care with which even modest purchases were wrapped, the dim shops with their diffident displays, the heavy spectacles on fine-boned faces. Yet ships sailing from this harbor had once shrunk and expanded the world, mapping its modern configuration. Somewhere in that rage for profit and cartography, the outline of Australia had been waiting to take shape.
    Laura’s bed and breakfast occupied the fourth floor of an apartment block. Names she had seen in Goa—da Costa, Oliveira, Gomes—converted the list of residents posted in the lobby into a genealogy of empire. Here, the Age of Europe had begun—when she realized that, her view of Australia shifted. Her birthplace had always seemed singular: solitary and distinctive. Now Laura saw it hooked into histories that ran back and forth across the globe, so that it hung in its watery corner with the stretched, starfish look of a map produced by a radical projection.
    She emerged from a cinema one evening to find herself in a road transformed by rain into gleaming black glass. Her fellow spectators ignored her as they dispersed, already starting to process the American scenes they had all received into alien words. Every light in the city was shining. What are you doing here? This was travel, marvelous and sad.
      
    She stayed three weeks. She would never come back. For the rest of her life, Lisbon would summon a season: sealed, sufficient unto itself as a fruit. Even details would return: an armoire, carved and overlarge, where linen was stored; the spectacular dandruff of the foreign-exchange teller at the bank. Smells came back, and the taste of warm codfish patties, and the metal props buttressing a tree whose branches roofed a square. Who can explain the sympathy that runs swift as a hound and as stubbornly between people and places? It involves memory, prejudice, accidents of weather. (Although in fact, Laura would later confuse certain things; the armoire, for instance, didn’t belong to Lisbon at all but to a dark, waxed corridor, inset with rectangles of light, in a convent on the Ligurian coast.)
    In her last week in Lisbon, shaken from her siesta by the rumble of a tram, Laura wondered if she had lived here long ago. For an entire afternoon, she considered staying for the rest of time. She imagined meals, routines, the room she would have, its curtains, the elderly neighbor who carried his Pomeranian up the stairs when the little dog grew frail. But then she realized that the whole continent was breathing down her neck. Where was there to go but out to sea? Along the green Tagus, where she walked in the evening, the ghosts of caravels canvassed the failing day. Laura consulted the special offers of travel agents and totted up sums on