quinta-feira, 28 de junho de 2007

É experimentar viver 10 anos seguidos em Lisboa

(...) Sempre que afirmo preferir Lisboa a Nova Iorque, toda a gente acredita, excepto os lisboetas. O problema dos lisboetas é nunca terem vivido fora de Lisboa. Não me refiro a 10 dias de férias em Nova Iorque ou em Paris, essa outra mítica metrópole. Passem 10 anos fora e depois conversamos. (...)

Vasco vou ali de férias até Dezembro acabar um romance olha ups estou de volta Barreto

P.S: Aqui há génio: Friday evening: weather forecast is good and it will only rain on Monday. I assign a summer student an insane amount of work to be accomplished during the weekend. In the evening I go to Central Park and I run the big loop; I see fireflies in courtship rituals, extenuated runners doing essentially the same and other fine specimens. Finishing in less than 42 minutes—a personal best—I’m still in time to come home, change and catch a performance of Bach’s Brandenburg concertos at Lincoln Center, my favorite concert hall here. Then I meet some friends for drinks in the East Village; the taxi driver that takes me there is from Senegal and we discuss music and French politics on our way downtown. None of my friends gets excessively drunk and I meet an old one from elementary school who made it here and now owns a two star restaurant; he tells me I have to try his tasting menu for free and gives me his phone number. Saturday: I wake up at sunrise and I go sailing on a friend’s boat with a bunch of people. No one gets seasick and I even manage to save one of the girls from drowning; she is a heiress of a great fortune and gives me an open invitation to spend the summer in her Hamptons’ house, but I politely decline because that would interfere with my future humanitarian work in Africa—I get the feeling she is impressed. A huge brunch follows, in Brooklyn. Later we go to the theater, it’s a Off Off Broadway show but none of the actors is fully naked, they don’t throw water at us, and the plot follows the laws of logic; we leave slightly disappointed and decide to go for dinner in Greenwich Village. Sunday: there is an important soccer match in Europe, which I follow while having breakfast in a pub on the Upper East Side. The New York Film Festival is still going on so and I get to see the latest Almodovar and in the Q&A session that follows I ask Pedro if “dinero,” a lizard from one of his early movies, was molested during the shooting; I can feel the tension in the room while he answers, I had clearly touched a nerve of our collective consciousness that not even a New Yorker journalist had come upon. In the evening I go to one of the shows from the Flamenco festival and I get home broke and exhausted, but before falling asleep the phone rings. It is my student. He speaks broken English and the connection isn’t good, but I get the impression we’ve done something remarkable. I go to sleep thinking that a cure for cancer is just a few cloning steps ahead. My student had actually destroyed some important stocks and that’s why he was so agitated, but I would only find out this in the morning and by then the weekend would be over.