Foz -Marginal, Porto, Portugal

“Hey, wanna go for a walk?” asks my dog. I consider her question. My father is resting after a light lunch; it has stopped raining; it is Sunday; and we both miss the good old days when we went for walks in the parks around our US home (I wonder what she thinks of this drastic change in her lifestyle).

Twenty minutes later we step onto the long granite sidewalk by the river and the sea, and the area in-between where they come together. Fishing lines stand proud against the blue water and sky. The river laps lazily against the crags heaped along the wall. Everything seems to stand still. The fishermen leave the lines alone and watch out for movement from afar, sitting in long wooden benches as if hoping the fish won’t bite.

The weather warms up; the sun is high and the shadows short. Families come and go. A child peddles very fast on a tiny tricycle. Young men wheeze past in their multi-geared bikes. One hour, maybe two go by. I pace my rhythm in tandem with my Basset’s, her short legs moving like a film in fast forward, and here we go again, united by a leash and an invisible string of ions, ether and love flowing both ways.  A peaceful day, at last.

Suddenly a boat speeds by, red lights flickering, shattering the water surface into tiny specks of silver. The fishermen turn around to look  in the direction the boat is going.  In the silence, a wave more powerful than I have ever seen crashes against the newly built pier, a granite arm cutting far into the ocean. More rogue waves whip up foam that shoots up so high it seems, from where I stand, to reach the long streaks of clouds. An ambulance siren follows, then another. I walk towards the pier with everyone else: the fishermen leave their lines behind, fathers pick their toddlers up and carry them on their shoulders, cyclists turn back to where they had just come from; their head gear and glasses give them a science fiction look.

Edvard Munch. Evening on Karl Johan Street. 1892. Oil on canvas. Rasmus Meyer Collection, Norway

We’re a crowd with a silent, fixed gaze now. I think of the faces of the people in Munch’s Karl Johan street and shudder. Now we see people gathering on the still distant pier, more and more of them, and more clear with every step we take. They appear to be looking  over the side at the crags below.

“A heart attack,” says the older woman to my left, adjusting her red hat made unstable by her brisk pace. “People come here on a nice day and start jogging, running after a lifetime of desk work – and the heart fails them; it stops, just like that. I saw it happen here not so long ago. A large man, he was, about fifty.” A teenager on an old rusty bicycle comes towards us, the bearer of news: “Cyclist … hit by waves, one, two … third one got him.”

We walk faster, thoughts tangled like barbed wire. Is he, or she, young? Was she thrown against the crags, or pulled out into the ocean? My dog pulls on the leash as if she, too, needs to know, and finally we merge with those on the pier, circling around ambulances and emergency boats. One old man with an odd lumpy nose brings his face close to mine and shouts, moving his arms up and down as he speaks,

“Serves him right! F… young men, riding past at the speed of light; not a thought about us old people; they could kill us at any time. What do they care? Now he gets a taste of his own medicine.”

I look at him, uncomprehending. He smells of clothes left on his body day after day, unwashed; his teeth are dark from smoking; he looks worn, care-laden.

“Is he dead?” I ask.

“Smashed against the rocks. See where they’re searching?    He and his cronies cycled past us like lightning just a few minutes before; could have broken our bones.”  I see it now: young, soaring cyclists in lemon green or bright orange Nike suits brushing past them without a nod, an acknowledgement of their presence. “Serves him well!” he repeats.

I look away. Then someone screams, “He’s alive!” and a woman on my right, in white coat and heavy make-up, begins to cry.

All photographs by M. C. Paulino – protected by Copyscape.
All rights reserved @ Maria Clara Paulino 2010-11.