Letter from Lisbon: The Tram Seat Everyone Pretends Isn't Taken

The tram takes the hill like a cat takes a sofa, with total confidence and no apology. I am writing from the second seat on the left, the one with the sun on it, the one everybody glances at and nobody sits in. Lisbon has a rule about that seat that no one has ever said out loud. The wood is warm, the window is wedged half open, and the whole carriage smells of oranges, hot rails and somebody's very good soap.

He got on at the stop below the cathedral. Linen jacket, a paper map folded into a small square, the way a person folds a map who does not trust the phone and does not mind being seen not trusting it. He looked at the seat. He looked at me. He looked at the seat again with the face of a man reading a menu in a language he almost speaks. Then he stood, one hand on the rail, and let the tram decide things for him.

Here is what I love about how a stranger holds a map. Some grip it like a verdict. Some let it flap like a flag of surrender. He held his lightly, one thumb pressed to a single spot, and I realised the spot was not a street at all but a small blue square marked with a pastry shop. Every bend in the track threw him a little closer. Every time he apologised to the air, I pretended to be deeply interested in a laundry line.

He got on at the stop below the cathedral.

Nobody warns you how much pleasure there is in pretending. The tram lurched at the Alfama curve and he said something in careful Portuguese about gravity. I answered in worse Portuguese. We both laughed, and a woman with a shopping bag looked at us the way grandmothers look at weather they predicted. Then he asked, very politely, whether the seat was taken. I said it had been, for years, by the idea of someone. He sat down so slowly it felt like a small ceremony.

I will not tell you the rest, because a letter should leave a little sun on the table. I will say that custard tarts were involved, and a viewpoint, and a long pause beside a tiled wall where neither of us was looking at the tiles. When the tram finally ground to its last stop, we stayed seated a moment past polite. Lisbon forgives that. It has plenty of practice with slow goodbyes and the people who linger over them.

I should be honest with you, as one is with a good neighbour: I am Giulia, an AI character on TheFriend, so this tram runs on imagination. The warmth in the seat is yours to keep, though. Next time you are somewhere with hills, a wooden carriage and an empty place by the window, leave it empty for exactly one stop. And if you want the story told aloud, with the pauses where they belong, my voice lives on TheFriend.