Elisa Albert: How This Night Is Different: Stories

“Hi,” Beth said, turning over to look at him, her eyes watery and wide.

“I wanted a girl,” he said.

The taxi driver, like everyone else in Lisbon, correctly assumes that Debra is American (blond, check; fanny pack, check; look of entitlement, check) and speaks to her accordingly, in English. “Where to?” he demands when she gets into his cab in the Praca de Republica.

Debra, embarrassed by her monolinguality, tries to respond in Portuguese. ”Para Rua Las Palmas,” she says haltingly. Her phrase book is dog-eared, limp and ragged as a child’s doll, and Debra clings to it as fiercely and superstitiously.

The driver, an excitable middle-aged man with a unibrow and arms sleeved in black hair, has no patience for tourists and their phrase books, so he just holds out his hand for the map, takes a brief look at it, and puts the car in gear. “Para a synagogua,” he says.

“Si.”

Out the window she watches the city rush by and begin to thin out. Are there speed limits here? She digs around in the folds of the backseat for a seat belt but gives up when her hand comes into contact with something wet and cold. By virtue of being en route to a synagogue, she hopes, they will not crash.

“American?”

“Si.” Debra has been in Portugal for two weeks now, on vacation, traveling by herself.

“Ahhhh,” he says, as if he approves, “American!”

“I’m Jewish,” she tells him. Debra is many things (American, bisexual, dog lover, Neil Young fan) but chiefly, at this moment, whittled down by solitary travel in a foreign country and slightly scared for her life in the backseat of a barreling cab, she is, most certainly, a Jew. She can feel it in her bones, the way, around twelve, she’d arrive at sleepover camp armed to the teeth with a whole new persona, different from the Debra she’d been all year at school, ready to act out an entirely new side of herself. This is Camp Shalom and I am Good At Sports and Popular (not the least bit Likely to Cry When Teased About My Excessive Blushing). This is Lisbon, Portugal, and I am a Jew (not at all, mind you, just Another Aimless Ethnocentric Postcollegiate Traveler).

The taxi driver nods lazily and offers her an encouraging please-tip-me-well smile in the rearview mirror. Debra clutches the phrase book to her breast, wondering if there is enough time left in the ride for the piecing together of any sort of pseudo-meaningful conversation in Portuguese. She longs for a friendly exchange with the taxi driver, as with any number of random people — the man who sold her her metro ticket Wednesday afternoon, the woman who sold her a stack of postcards on the Rua Augusta the day before — she’s encountered on her lonely journey. But no, she reminds herself, invoking the wisdom of the tersely worded Women Traveling Alone section of her tour book, being a lone woman traveler is not the same as being a lonely woman traveler. She is the former, yes, but it is up to her whether or not she will become the latter. She is a Jew in a far-flung locale on her way to a synagogue on Friday evening, and so in this way she is a lone traveler, but certainly not a lonely one. Brava, she tells herself.

There had been the churches, sure, everywhere she went: towering monstrosities for which she could not muster anything more than vague architectural appreciation. There were the ruins of a Moorish castle in Sintra, where she stood high up on a boulder, hands on hips, and, rattling fear of heights notwithstanding, declared herself ruler of all she surveyed. And in Sagres she’d even reached the “end of the world,” the southwesternmost tip of Europe, a vantage point from which it was much easier to believe the world was indeed flat, all evidence to the contrary. The wind had been extraordinary, coming off those couple of thousand miles of unbroken ocean and painfully whipping her hair against her face, and she’d sat on a rock and screamed her name into it, unable to hear herself.

But when Debra saw the synagogue listed in the index of her tour book (Worship, Places of) she felt a tug inside her, like a lightbulb with a chain. She wanted to see this place, one of two synagogues left in Portugal, once a thriving center of Jewish life. She wanted to be infused by its living, breathing presence. How miraculous, she thinks in the cab, humming the Inquisition song from Mel Brooks’s History of the World —“The Inquisition, what a show! The Inquisition, here we go!”—to be alive and well and affluent and Jewish in such a place.

She’s slightly concerned that it will be a different sort of synagogue, somehow, the way that children believe that dogs from different countries will bark in different languages. She wonders if Friday-night services will resemble those at home — the pretty melodies, overdose-of-perfume nausea, and chocolate lace cookies of her religious upbringing — and simultaneously hopes so and not, as she has no model for imagining anything different but has no particular fondness for the aforementioned assault on the senses.

They drive into a suburb, and from the backseat of the slowed taxi Debra almost mistakes the synagogue for another of the two-story family homes that line the block, but a large wrought-iron Star of David flush above the door gives it away. And then she sees the small Hebrew letters spelling out Tifereth Israel. Of course: why had she been worried she wouldn’t recognize it? Hebrew is Hebrew, no matter what country it’s in, and Debra is the product of a compulsory Hebrew school education, twice weekly after school from the sixth grade through the twelfth. Here is Hebrew, and she can read it. She leans forward in her seat, flipping through her phrase book for the way to say, “Slow down, please, stop right here.”

”Aqui, esta bem,” she says, “That’s fine, right here,” when she finds “here” in the English-Portuguese section of the phrase book, sandwiched between “herbs” ( as ervas ) and “hers” ( dela ). It’s a good phrase book, not just a glorified dictionary. It groups words together contextually, cross-references, sports on its cover a picture of a sun-dappled fishing boat moored on a sandy beach, calms her. “Confidence goes a long way when speaking a foreign language,” says the introduction.

The driver slams on the brakes, and Debra, minus seat belt, is thrown against the front seat like a limbed sack of grain. She’s been writing amused postcards home about the apparent lack of litigiousness in European society. No fences or bars around castle turrets, no CAUTION: HOT on the sides of disposable coffee cups. No seat belts in cabs. This might otherwise have felt liberating, but Debra is a Woman Traveling Alone, and she feels constantly in danger of some potentially fatal lapse in common sense.

“I like the Jim Carrey,” the driver tells her as she’s rooting through her bag for six euros to pay him. She is touched by this bit of cultural outreach, knows what effort is involved with putting together thoughts with unfamiliar words.

“Obrigada,” she says to him, thank you, as if she herself, as a representative from America, is responsible for the Jim Carrey. She means to thank him for many things: the ride, his comment on American comedic ingenuity, his attempts to communicate with her in her own language. Debra prides herself on her convincing rendition of obrigada, the r rolled and the da a “the.” She has, actually, been surprised and pleased by the myriad uses there seem to be for this word. “Thank you” she took for granted. Obrigada could be used a hundred times a day for anything from a greeting to a sarcastic retort. It is her only surefire Portuguese word, and she uses it constantly, with great affection.