I dreamt of spending two weeks in Lisbon composing Lisbon Interlude, after Maria Negroni’s Berlin Interlude. It would share Negroni’s quick wit, sharp eye, her handheld mirror. I collected my sources: surrealists, hysterical women, voyagers. I knew I was fail-bound, but still I plotted, like a looting, compulsive and mistaken. I read Berlin Interlude; I hardly wrote.

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I read Vernon Subutex 1. “He listened to her talk about her book project. She had the energy and verve of a writer who never manages to get their project off the ground. Vernon had spent a lot of time listening to people tell him about the book they planned to write propped up on the counter in the record shop—he was all too familiar with this feverish logorrhea that was a substitute for getting anything done. She aspired to write something good. This is always a problem.” I aspired.

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I read the Dora the Explorer poem aloud to Anna early on. Towards the end of the trip, Anna saw a kid and said she was like a cartoon—like Dora the Explorer. I hummed the theme song. These are the ways words work themselves into our bodies.

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We saw a few prisons-turned-museums. In Porto, an 18th century prison is now the Portuguese Center of Photography. In Lisbon, the Moorish Cadeia do Aljube (meaning “dry well”) is now Museum Aljube Resistência e Liberdade. At Museo do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade I couldn’t understand a thing, but I understood everything. All the same machinations the world over.

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Add to the list a prison-turned-museum that was never actually a prison but now seems to be. Museu Coleção Berardo: a massive concrete box stuffed with women’s bodies fashioned by men. I could count the number of artworks by women on my hands. Eileen Agar’s brilliant bird in a glass box was inside another bigger glass box. I wanted to stroke the smooth wooden wings of her birds.

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Agnes Martin’s ‘Untitled #8’ hung on the wall like a giant piece of sheet music. I tried to steady my trumpet, but my hands kept shaking. I could never draft a line like this.

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I could not sleep. Night after night, I lay awake with an intense pressure in my chest. A swollen red maggot kept looking for any scrap of flesh around my sternum. It had all turned to stone. I listened to the door. I listened to the dishwasher. I listened to the dog. I listened to the street.

 

The total city exists without me like a capable child drafting her own calendar. “Dear Daddy,” she says, “In two weeks time I will be a young woman. I’ve gone to the market to buy a gift for your sister-in-law. The party is never fun but always necessary. Everything that happens is utterly expectable. I go looking like a blissful child. Goodnight.”