On Hunting In Stephanie White’s article ‘Azulejos’ (24: Migration), White brought me back to Lisbon. Not so much because of what she said, but how she said it – the way she peeled back the layers of the city, like an onion. In Azulejos, White is a hunter. People get hunters all mixed up, and think they are looking for what is rare or elusive – the thing that might give them the slip, and scurry away down some furtive alley if it were not for the hunter’s state of constant awareness. On the contrary, for the hunter, there is too much world, and all of it is clamouring for attention. Nothing rare or elusive here. White sees her quarry everywhere. If she were to make an appearance in Carlo Ginzburg’s great book, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, he would no doubt call her a detective; a job that, one would have to agree, is merely a modern incarnation of the hunter. Her language reveals her true role when she refers to “the sheaf of stencil evidence.” White is looking for evidence, clues; the broken branches on the forest-floor that lead the way to the beast. (And here I am, hunting for evidence of the hunter). What is White looking for? On the surface of it, she searches for stencilled tiles, though they are relatively numerous in Lisbon. Does she then search for something in those tiles that others can’t see, like the professional antique hunters who throng the Parisian flea markets early on a Saturday, their noses diving down amid the bric-à-brac. Perhaps she searches for a slip of a moment in the 18th century, between the hand-drawn (which occupies the attention of lesser hunters) and the silk-screened and lithographed mass- produced products of the 20th. Or else she searches for other, less visible histories: traces of the Dutch East India Company, and of the Portuguese empire, resounding out from the tiles, into contemporary Lisbon. White doesn’t fool me. All this talk of tiles is designed to put me off the scent, and deceive those who hunt the hunters. I know the real story. White is looking for time, hidden in the walls. We are all a bit dislocated, we hunters; always pressing forwards, and trying to discern, on street corners, in tiles, and in malls, a sense that is always just escaping us. * Lisbon for me exists between two faces: that of the immigrant, and that of the old man. The old man has a secret, and he remains rigid in it. Perhaps he will die there. Can you see it? It can be seen in the perfectly ironed shirt, still smelling freshly of starch, in his trousers, which finish slightly too high up the ankle for modern tastes. The space between him and where he lives: a small inch of tired flesh held together by black socks. It can be seen in the erect posture, the face that seems to bend impossibly backwards, away from you, and away from the street. Most of all, it can be seen in the eyes: the fierce pride that seems to live on despite everything. * Lisbon is a world of people waiting: kids against walls, Angolans on curbs, and old men sitting in the squares, carving out tiny circles of space. What are all these people waiting for? Hunters wait. For those waiting, just as for the hunter, no shadow is without significance. Everything may be a harbinger of the prey that we chase: every broken twig, torn leaf, street sign, newspaper, and every stranger holds within it the promise that, just maybe, our time has arrived. When we wait, we attend. Because we do so, we are not fully present; our sense of self is projected forwards to that happy imagined time in which we are united with the object that we await. We live in the future conditional. This waiting, which might seem to deprive the world of all colour, and render it monochrome, with hints of red happiness at the corners, is a condition of us being in the world at all. The kids wait to ride themselves of their youth; the fur on the lip and the wise cracks constitute part of the sheaf of evidence (and how else could you luxuriate in your youth other than by already trying to be rid of it?). The Angolans wait for an opportunity that will enable them to transform this strange life lived in abeyance – not quite at home, but not fully in Portugal. The old men, who remember
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rural community school for a period of four months, I decided to take a sketchbook and pen to draw what I saw from the passenger’s window during all that time spent in
the car. To draw was nothing new, I am in the habit of drawing daily, usually in a coffee shop where I can take my time to do my contemplative urban
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