Belem, Portugal. The summer of 2024.

Before she died, my mother always wanted to travel to Portugal.

Her grandmother immigrated over to America as a young girl, hopping on a ship from the Azores and, somehow, winding across the Atlantic and continuing west until ending up in a small town in Northern California. Along the journey, our language died off in favor of becoming all-American.

The summer before she passed away in a hospital bed, she had been coercing my dad into taking her to where her family came from. To find where the roots had been established, pull off chunks of Portuguese rolls, and savor pasteis de nata along the shoreline. For her, it may have been to connect deeper with her blood or something like that.

Just as her body slowly faded in a sterile hospital bed from sepsis, the dream succumbed as well.

Nine years later, I woke up in an apartment with a green tiled floor. Before I’d even got out of bed, my wife had made a cup of tea and stood on the small patio facing the Tagus River and the river walk of Belem. The 25th April Bridge, a doppelganger of the Golden Gate, stretched across the river toward the hills with the backdrop of a vibrant blue sky. I brewed a cup of coffee and joined her on the patio, leaning on the iron railing.

The late flight, the two-hour wait in customs, and 1am arrival still clung to us, but something else clung as well. Perhaps it was a presence I couldn’t describe. One of those peculiar emotional hauntings that distort our emotions in an indecipherable manner. Am I happy? Content? Sad? Not a particularly negative feeling, but not anything sublime.

After the faint sound of the city waking, my wife offhandedly mentions, “Your mom always wanted to go to Portugal”.

The author with his mother.

Those words sent me back to the train from Edinburgh to London, flying across the British countryside with my earbuds in and listening to a fado by Amalia Rodrigues. Those lamenting vocals soaring into my ears and through my body as she sang about Maria Lisboa who sells dreams and the smell of the sea. Those words with no meaning since I don’t speak Portuguese still impacted me. The hint of tears swelled in my throat, but I choked them down as I have conditioned myself to do and sometimes hate.

As memory sent me back to the patio, my mother’s presence, gone for nine years, met me in Belem. She spoke to me in words only my ancestors knew through Amalia Rodrigues. Throughout the remainder of our time walking the tiled streets of Lisbon, devouring the divine pasteis de Belem every day, smelling the scent of the Tagus, and trying to navigate everything with only “Buendia” and “Obrigado” to guide us, she was there. Sometimes laughing, often smiling, watching her family experience in the corporeal world what she can only experience spiritually on the shores of where her grandmother and great grandmother strolled or baked or danced or cried.

When we boarded the flight to leave Belem, a strange grief settled on me as if I were leaving her in that hospital bed once again. But, crammed on an EasyJet flight to our next location, I popped the earbuds from their charging case, slipped them into my ears, leaning my head back to listen to the story of Maria Lisboa who sells dreams and the smell of the sea.

Stereo Story #825

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N.T. McQueen is the author of The Blood of Bones, Between Lions and Lambs, The Disciple, and the children's book, Moses Jones and the Case of the Missing Sneaker. He received his MA in Creative Writing from CSU-Sacramento and his work has appeared in issues of Fiction Southeast, The Kentucky Review, The Grief Diaries, Gold Man Review, Camas: Nature of the West, Transition Magazine, West Trade Review, The Sunlight Press, and others.