XXX - Bairro Alto

When they finally left the restaurant, they had a tally of five beers each, which nevertheless didn’t discourage Romeu from driving. Luckily enough, he had a robust physique, which meant that even after having drunk a great deal he was still able to drive (almost) as well as if he was sober.

            The boys set their course towards Bairro Alto, the honorary home of all self-respecting bohemians in Lisbon. After parking the car in the Largo do Chiado, one of the city’s most famous squares, they walked up the steep streets that gave access to Lisbon’s dying liver.

            Leonardo, who was not as used to the place as his friends, due to his long periods spent abroad, paid more attention to the local fauna than his friends.

In the Bairro Alto (High Neighborhood), the citizens of the night gathered under the shimmering stars and the silver moon. There is no place in Lisbon where you can see such a wild diversity of people, and yet all of them are united in their will to escape the boredom and the difficulties of everyday-life through alcohol and music. Together, they give birth every night to one single creature, at the same time beautiful and monstrous, intense, violent and insatiable. It is the beast of the night, prey only to its inner instincts and avid devourer of the monotony of daily life.

There were a great deal of foreigners, probably more than you would find in any other place in Lisbon at night.  Many were Erasmus students, hailing from every corner of the European continent and starting to get the city which would be the their home for the next six or nine months. Others are tourists, most often than not British or North-American, eager to hop from one bar to the next, screaming, drinking, dancing, enjoying Lisbon’s mild climate, allowing themselves to forget decency and good manners and give free reigns to their hedonistic tendencies.

Most of the locals are also young, especially on a Friday, although some people are in their thirties or their forties, or even their fifties at times.

The oldest are usually more prudent and less gaudy, more interested in enjoying the moonlight, the music, the drinks and talking with their friends, than in surrendering to their most animalistic instincts.

The young, on the other hand, are more willing to let themselves go, but amongst them it’s easy to distinguish between several sub-groups. The chavs are more interested in smoking weed and provoke fights with anyone that crosses their way than in doing anything else. The punks drink more and consume more drugs than most and, obviously, relish in listening to punk and alternative music. The gays and lesbians also hang out with their own kind, and have their own bars. The posh kids, like everywhere else in the world, think they’re better than anyone else when in fact they’re the most ridiculous of the bunch. Finally, there are those people who failed to fit into a pre-defined group, who are just normal, that don’t follow a ready-recognizable pattern of behavior or dress-code. Leonardo and his mates made sure to be amongst them, and to avoid the zones dominated by any of the other groups.

In Lisbon, there aren’t any better places to have a beer at night with friends, which meant that every time Leonardo was in town, he would go there with his friends.  Sometimes you get your occasional low-life, small-time drug dealer, passing around near you and whispering something like ‘Do you wanna buy Haxixe bro?’ or something stupid like that. And sure, every time you have to listen to drunk people screaming stupid stuff as they pass you by. And as said before, there’s a bunch of chavs roaming around the place. Yet, usually, those things are rather minor hindrances and don’t detract too much from the experience.

So in that night, like in many previous nights, the four horsemen chose the Bairro as the setting of their soirée. They walked around until they found a nice place to settle in and then they gave sequence to their bohemian ritual. They drank of course, as they talked about the past, the present and the future.  As they did so, sometimes Leonardo would look around, carefully observing th animals of the night walking past them. Maybe I’m the strangest of them all.

There they stood, the four childhood friends: David, an engineering student, Romeu, a member of a rich, traditional Portuguese family; Leonardo, a young-man without a country and Alex, a frustrated worker. They had shared many nights like that one in the past, talking about trivial things, discussing philosophical issues, enjoying the warmth of friendship.  Old friends, they stood together, throughout time, mutually witnessing the physical and psychological changes that slowly shaped each one of them into the men they were to become.