It was a bit too early on a Saturday morning to be receiving visitors. 8:30am. Not 6:00am, thank goodness. It wasn’t that kind of meeting. But, we all like to sleep-in every now and again, so 8:30 did seem a bit strange.
I heard heavy, deliberate clomping up the stairs of my apartment building. I’m on the top floor. These old buildings in Lisbon are great, usually pretty solid, but with poor acoustics in the stairwell. If someone’s coming in, everyone knows about it.
Because it was not usual to have someone coming up so early, and because I was getting ready to go to the airport (it was my girlfriend sleeping in), I opened the door before whoever this was had a chance to knock.
“Ola. Bom dia. Hello.”
He replied in Portuguese. A man in his 60s or 70s, thin, with an old briefcase, tussled and flaking hair, and wearing what was clearly his only suit. A tie, a hat tied with cord to one of his button-holes, lugging his own body up by the bannister.
I didn’t understand a lot of what he said to me in reply.
The feelings in my body were curiosity, impatience (I missed my flight two days ago, had to rebook for this morning, and didn’t want to miss it again), compassion, and alertness. We’re still new to this neighborhood, I don’t understand the language, and am not accustomed to the social nuances. I just felt a bit on guard.
Through Google Translate and some gesturing we eventually worked out that this man had lived in our apartment when he was a small boy. He slept in the room that is now my girlfriend’s study; his family ate meals in what we now call the master bedroom. He repeated the address three or four times to make sure.
He didn’t presume that I would be ok with letting him in to see the place, but he made it clear he’d be grateful if I would. What he really wanted was to see our back patio: our small open sunroom at the back of the apartment, which looks out onto the backs of the adjacent buildings. He gestured that way, saying ‘verandah.’
We let him in. My only real hesitation came from needing to get to the airport. As we walked down the corridor, he, still verifying, would announce which room was coming up. Sala to the right, douche straight ahead, cucina to the left. He was here when he was a criança.
We got through the back door, onto the platform at the top of the outdoor stairs that attached to our verandah. It was a nice little place to hang out. Perched there, you felt as if you hovered in mid-air, over the deep drop between the buildings.
He was telling me a story about the verandah. There didn’t use to be outdoor stairs here. Only a ladder. The building across the way was important. Something fell down. He started crying and saying thank you. He mentioned the Torre de Belem, a landmark 20 minutes away by car, and the water, and something about a helicopter.
We took a photo together, and I need to find a way to get it to him. His phone only sends and receives messages and calls, nothing hi-tech. We exchanged numbers. We may have made a plan to contact each other again, I’m not so sure. He left, crying, saying thank you again and again, wishing us a good life.
If this man was casing the joint, so to speak—working out our floorpan in preparation for a robbery, or something like that—I would be extremely, extremely surprised. He felt genuine to me.
And I felt sad. Sad that I spend so much of my day scheming, trying to create relationships, trying to do better at what I have chosen to do in this world, disciplining myself, watching drama or one-eyed lectures on the internet, working my body hard. All these things, we might say, are necessary. But they don’t always feel very real.
I felt this man was real. And he got me thinking about what is important for the masculine. Not just men, but the part of us humans that strives, and organizes, and goes to work, and creates value, and fights for safety, and is rarely truly heard.
This man cried when he told me his story about the apartment. I didn’t even really know what he was saying. But I knew it was vividly real for him. Who knows how long he has wanted to re-visit this place, where he slept, and ate, and loved as a child.
Who knows how many times his experience in other places, at other times, has been shaped by whatever pain or pleasure he has experienced here. If it was pain, I wonder how many times did he not go for what he wanted, or felt pain again, because some life-loving, vibrant part of him was left here.
He could have come back to tell this story, to feel the rush of that first experience through his body again, at some earlier time. If he did, how could things have been different?
Maybe he was not ready, or the circumstances were not right, or whatever. But this meeting was so real, and I am utterly convinced that we all have parts of us yearning to feel the relief, the love, the grief, and the exileration this man—José Manuel is his name—felt on the landing at the top of our back stairs.
Tell stories that feel alive without them needing to have a purpose, or be useful to someone else. Listen to others’ stories when we feel that aliveness coming through. Share and receive them with love.
Revisit what is painful. Close the loop. Notice your power in that. And do it sooner, rather than later.
These are the lessons I am sitting with now.
There are so many other elements of this storytelling situation we can become aware of if we want our stories to be spaces of liberation and connection. He felt when to finish; I didn’t interrupt or complain that I didn’t fully understand; he was accessing a place of deep and real emotion, rather than trying to make me belief some fabricated version of reality.
But the first step, as I see it, is to acknowledge the story that is our own, then step into the courage to tell it.
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