Azulejos: Part 1

In part 1/3, Olinda sits in her old house in Lisbon with a plan, and most of the determination needed to execute it.

“Just do it, you old bag,” Olinda said to herself. She held the match, one of the few left in the box. It quivered in her arthritic hand. She always had matches nearby, ready to light incense to ward off the smell of mold and decay that she couldn’t seem to shake.

“Just do it,” she repeated.

Olinda was sitting in the living room of the old house, dilapidated beyond repair, especially for her to fix. At eighty, revamping a crumbling family home was the last thing on her mind, especially when there was no family left. It had once been a beautiful home, glimmering with the highest quality blue and white tiles, tickling the eyes of anyone who found themselves in this particular street. Now, the unfamiliar wallpaper peeled, the flea market furniture creaked, the floorboards underfoot threatened to give way if one stood too long on them. 

She wanted to strike the match, but remembering why she was doing it, suddenly also remembered what she hadn’t done.

The gasoline.

The match might make a flame, but it was the can of gasoline she procured from the little shed out back that would feed a fire, a raging monster that would eat this place and all of its history and pain up with it.

At least that was Olinda’s plan.

Years ago, this had been her childhood home, when Lisbon was different, under a dictatorship, and then suddenly not, a place where she and her sister had fled many years ago to a better life in Paris, and then to California. 

What a life it had been.

Well, once they left, at least.

Olinda looked around, trying to remember where the gasoline had gone, wondering if she had brought it inside at all. Her knees ached at the thought of standing up to find it.

She dropped the unlit match as her plan began to crumble, not unlike the house itself. For nearly two decades no one had lived here. Dust caked most surfaces that she hadn’t tried to clean. Streams of light like natural lasers pierced parts of the walls where the plaster had broken free, and wooden beams overhead seemed to bend into smiles never intended by architects.

When she returned to Lisbon last year, following her sister’s death, both unmarried, without children, Olinda inherited the house. A cousin owned it previously, but he followed Olinda’s sister to the grave almost immediately, and now, the only remaining member of her bloodline, and the last octogenarian standing, she held the deed.

The house, however, aged into something unfamiliar. The azulejos — the iconic tiles that made Lisbon a work of art — disappeared from the facade. They lived second lives ripped away, stolen, sold to tourists or collectors or savvy designers who employed them elsewhere. Despite looking afright, it was still safe to inhabit, albeit with some renovations, according to the local inspector. 

Or many renovations, actually.

That was bad news for Olinda. She wished it would have just died a quiet death instead, atomizing into dust, carried off towards the Rio Tejo and dispersed to the ocean to settle miles below the waves.

Her father would want her to do better, to seize the opportunity.

So Olinda decided to try and cash in on it.

She cleaned just enough of it to sleep in, hiring a plumber to fix the water system and an electrician to make sure she had light. Her meager savings grew gaunter still as she paid the bills, hoping only to sell the house and live out her life in some tiny apartment where she could spend her remaining days reading and watching the soap operas she had grown so fond of in America.

But the bills had proven too much, and the market had suddenly gone cold. For many months the sale sign hung on the second floor balcony on the little street, tucked far away from the touristy enclaves. Her phone number and the words “for sale by owner” written in big bold letters attracted no one. Olinda didn’t want to go through an agent. She didn’t trust third parties.

People turned on each other too much.

That much she knew.

She was too old for this shit.

Sitting in the creaky wooden chair, she reached for another match from the box. There were maybe three left. She struck it and watched the little red tip glow and succumb to the flame. Olinda felt powerful. In control. She waved it gently around the room, the living room where a younger version of herself once played on the wooden floor with her sister, drawing on the backs of old envelopes their father saved for them, or tying old bits of string between sticks collected in the park to create a cradle for the baby they inherited from their mother.

These were the good memories, haphazardly studded into decades of sorrow and strife brought on by the dictatorship when she was a young girl, maybe nine or ten. They had prayed for a better life, or at least that’s what her mother had always told her to do, as they said their prayers at night, underneath the watchful image of the Virgin Mary, a crucifix hanging on the wall, wooden Rosary beads woven between their fingers as they paid their dues to higher powers. Her father never joined these prayers or outings to the local church. It had all seemed so mechanical, so passionless. Olinda asked her mother about these prayers and statues, but she never had answers. None that made sense, at least. 

Her father had been a journalist.

Well, he said that stopped with the dictatorship.

His mother could hardly read.

She said God spoke through more than words.

They were often at odds. He wanted freedom for his children. She wanted education for them, which the country provided, while foregrounding the Catholicism he hated so much. They fought often. 

About that, and other things.

The match flickered and Olinda remembered later years in this room, most of it witnessed blindly through the sounds that reached her upstairs, locked in her bedroom.

It was in that very room that the meetings happened. The strange men coming and going, the hushed conversations, the wounded man stretched one night on the couch, the blood seeping permanently into the cushions. 

And when mother wasn’t home, there were the women who smelled like broken bottles of beer and lavender, smoking cigarettes that stunk up the entire house.

Olinda and her younger sister hid upstairs, sequestered there by their father, who told them to be good while he and his visitors worked. Worked at what, she never knew. Sometimes their mother would protest. They would fight. She would strike him. He would push her against the wall and plead with her to stop.

They spoke of danger.

Words traitor and revolution echoed in the house.

She could still hear her mothers deep, throaty sobs.

The match burned down to Olinda’s fingers and she dropped it instantly, waiting, hoping this was the moment it would take.

Oh, right, she thought to herself.

The gasoline was still out back.

Olinda braced herself against the wobbly chair and pushed herself up, knees cracking in kind, determined to finish this now. Her mind was made up, in no small part determined by her ailing finances and entombed family. There was nothing left.

She shuffled to the backdoor and found the gasoline can, bringing it into the living room where she would finish this story. The home had been a prison for her. Her father chased away any potential suitors that her mother brought home from church events. A presenter from the local Catholic radio station once asked her for a walk in the neighborhood. It was the only time she ever saw her father point a weapon at someone, insisting they leave the house.

The way he drew the weapon, however, indicated it was not his first time.

Olinda unscrewed the gas can and could smell the sweet, familiar perfume of gasoline wafting up, making her lightheaded and giddy. She would kick it over, sit back down, and light one more match. It had been decided. The ghosts of this place would die with her. The flames would cleanse the land as it swallowed the house, and a new generation could start anew where her family finally ended.

Again, that was the plan.

Olinda said no prayer as she prepared to finish it all. She sipped a warm glass of Port wine poured hours ago, settled and nearly forgotten on the last remaining shelf intact of the bookshelf, the one her father once filled with history books and philosophy journals long since discarded.

She reached for the box of matches and thought of her father’s smiling face when he opened the door of the bedroom each time the meetings ended, inviting her and her sister out to share a piece of cake. Olinda longed for it again.

She fiddled with one of the last matches, the smell of the gasoline growing stronger as she prepared to let it wash over the floorboards.

This was it.

The story’s final page.

Olinda was ready.

And then she heard it.

That beeping, electronic ringing that filled the house with noise, that sound that had trained Olinda and every other individual alive in 2024 to wonder the same thing.

Where is my phone?

She walked back to the kitchen, breathing heavily, where it sat vibrating and screaming into the silence on the counter. As mechanically as her mother said the Rosary, Olinda picked up the phone.

“Hello?” she asked.

“Hi, I was wondering if you were still selling your house,” a voice said. It was a man, with an accent speaking in Portuguese, an accent she almost recognized. After nearly thirty years of living in California, Olinda could clock an English speaker any hour of the day. She switched to English.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Oh, you speak English. That’s great. Really, seriously, my partner and I walked by it earlier today and we just have to see it,” the man said.

He was British. She knew it.

“That’s nice, son, but —”

“And I meant to call earlier today, and he didn’t because he doesn’t speak Portuguese. Not yet at least. But we’re around the corner and I’d love to come visit it, just quickly, if it’s not a huge inconvenience. It’s just so perfect,” he prattled on and on. 

Olinda felt the need to protest.

But protesting is what rewrote her family’s story in the first place.

“Sure, fine,” she said. “But it’s not officially on the market anymore.”

“OK, I understand, I think, but we’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Is that OK?”

“I’ll open the front door, just let yourself in,” she said.

“Thank you. Really. You have no idea how excited we are,” he said.

“Até já,” she said.

“Obrigado,” he said. She smiled and hung up.

Olinda would entertain guests one last time, she thought, as she walked up the wooden staircase, her feet leaving prints in the dust as she strained against gravity, holding tightly to the same bannister she and her sister had tried to slide down ages ago, rarely with success. In the front bedroom, the one her parents shared when they weren’t battling, Olinda shuffled to the balcony as she fought to catch her breath. She threw open the windows and stepped out onto the balcony, overlooking the curving street where cars could barely maneuver past pedestrians. It had been a dirt path when she was younger.

She hurried, as much as she could, to unfasten the “for sale” sign affixed to the iron balcony, its wooden rail splintered, its paint beyond peeled. This way no one else would call. The cool air darted through the loose knit of her sweater. She hoped to bring the sign in with her, but the wet winter afternoon left it slick and it slid through her fingers, stolen by gravity, fluttering below to the ground. 

It smacked the pavement below.

Olinda shuddered.

It was the same exact path her father had followed, his last journey before they buried him, when he was shot from atop that very balcony. He had ruffled too many feathers and they — someone — made sure he stopped.

Olinda could still remember his body, face down on the street below, the dirt dulling the crimson pool that grew slowly beneath him.

It haunted her.

This house had to go.