Riding the 28 until the driver knew my name
Three weeks of morning commutes on a yellow tram that goes nowhere in particular, very slowly, past everything that matters.
Tomás Okafor
Lisbon, Portugal
The 28 is a tourist tram, everyone will tell you that, and everyone is right. At ten in the morning the queue at Martim Moniz is forty people deep and somebody is always eating a custard tart standing up. But at quarter to seven the tram is a different animal. It belongs to a man with a cloth bag of oranges, two nurses coming off a shift, and a woman who does the crossword in pen and has never, as far as I can tell, been wrong.
I did not mean to ride it every day. I meant to take it once, for the story, and then find something more original to write about. But the tram goes through Graça, and Graça at dawn is a hillside of laundry and church bells and small dogs barking at other small dogs, and the tram takes the corners so tightly that the wheels scream, and by the third morning I realised I had stopped bringing a notebook and started bringing a coffee.
The driver's name is Rui. He has driven the 28 for nineteen years and he considers it a matter of professional honour to stop for anyone who runs. On day nine he nodded at me. On day twelve he said bom dia. On day sixteen, when I got on at Estrela instead of my usual stop, he said, without turning round, that I was late, and the woman with the crossword laughed so hard she had to put down her pen.
You learn a city by repetition, not by coverage.
You learn a city by repetition, not by coverage. I could not tell you the names of half the streets the 28 takes, but I can tell you which house in Alfama has a canary that sings exactly when the tram passes, and which bakery gets its bread delivery at 7:10, and where the old men set up their dominoes table when the sun reaches the bench. These are not sights. They are the city's pulse, and you can only take it by standing still for long enough.
He rang the bell twice and we went on. That is how I knew I had been accepted.
On the last morning, Rui stopped the tram at the top of the hill by the Miradouro da Graça, which is not a stop, and pointed out the window at the river, which was doing its silver thing under a sky the colour of a peeled peach. He did not say anything. Then he rang the bell twice and we went on. The nurses did not even look up. That is how I knew I had been accepted.
