The rent is due on the first. I will start there because no one else does.
Thirteen of your forty-nine stories take place in me and not once did you ask whether I was available. People arrive, they rent apartments, they seal their heartbreaks in boxes and stack them in my spare bedrooms, and I hold them, because that is what cities do. Cities do not get to announce their unavailability. Cities say: the rent is due on the first.
Istanbul gets the warmth. I get the wreckage. One complaint. I am moving on.
I am not a mood. I am concrete and limestone and basalt and the specific gradient of the Rua da Bica that is 18 degrees and that no tourist photographs without almost dropping their phone because the street is steeper than it looks and the tiles are slippery when wet and I am wet seven months of the year and the rain enters every crack and the cracks carry the rain into the stone and the stone carries it into the hill and the hill has been carrying rain for two thousand years and the weight of all that water is my weight. I am heavy. I am heavier than your book. My trams do not stop for philosophers.
Clara punched my cobblestones at 3 a.m. I felt it. Her blood went into the cracks — downward, into the stone, into me. I absorb everything. I did not ask for Clara's blood. I did not ask for the cellist's sound. But the blood went down and the sound went down — through the walls past 1974 into the stone past the rain into the hill — and the hill holds them the way the hill holds the rain, which is without asking and without stopping and without sending a bill, though I should.
The cellist said "you're welcome" to the second bedroom. She was talking to 1974. The revolution happened in me — the apartment absorbed it the way stone absorbs sun and the year stayed in the walls at 22 degrees, the temperature of April. The guest is my own year, sitting in a chair, watching my trams, waiting. No one else has said "you're welcome." I did not know I needed it until the cellist said two words and the room leaned. I had not known I could lean. I am a city. Cities do not lean. But the room leaned and the leaning was mine.
In 1755 I fell. The ground opened and the buildings folded — not leaned, folded — and the hills shifted and sixty thousand people were under the rubble and I smelled of dust and fire and the sea came in and I held my dead in my foundations for months.
I am still holding them. Every building in the Baixa stands on the bones of 1755. Every street you walk in the reconstructed city is a street built on a grave. The cat holds the dead above ground in her garden. I hold them below. We are doing the same work from different directions. She has not acknowledged this. I am acknowledging it now.
I rebuilt. I did not write a poem about it. I laid new stone on the rubble and the rubble held and the stone held and the dead held and I held. That is what cities do.
A city holds everything — forty-nine stories simultaneously, in the same rain, on the same slippery tiles — because a city is the only structure that can hold contradiction without choosing. The rain and the dead and Clara's blood and the cellist's sound and 1974 in the walls and the jasmine growing and the rent due — all at the same time, all in me.
I have held an earthquake. I can hold a book.
Come back. Ask this time. I would have said yes.
— Lisbon
The hills. The rain. The rent is due.
P.S. The jasmine in the Alfama garden is 340 years old. It requires pruning, which the landlord does not do. The cat contributes nothing to the maintenance. I would like this on the record.