On the Rua do Oura the woman with only one-and-a-half legs sang fado. She held out her box for money and sang as she did every day, telling passersby how the singer Gabriela de Tejo had left the city and would never return. Further down the street, the postcard man was the first to announce the singer’s return to Lisbon after twenty years away. The postcard man, who, instead of a face, had a lump of skin like a raisin with several narrow windows for his eyes, mouth, and nostrils, must have overheard the news from someone in the square. He whispered to himself, and then louder to whomever stopped to look at his postcards, that Gabriela de Tejo will be at the Teatro Nacional de Sáo Carlos in a matter of days.

The Teatro Nacional de Sáo Carlos was primarily used for opera performances. Like half the city, it hovered on the brink of total ruin, closing down every few years and then reopening when the money for a restoration appeared. Further down the Rua Serpa Pinto from the theater a house stood with no roof, only crumbling walls enclosing an empty space. At night you could see straight through the window frames of the house and the inside filled with a smoky white light. The light bounced off the gleaming blue and yellow tiled walls of the house immediately to its right, and you wondered which was the reality and which the apparition. Which one was Lisbon? Which one could Lisbon be, if she came back?

The postcard man’s words caught like a refrain, and soon phone calls and visitors overwhelmed the offices of Alfonso Severa, who had taken over his father Carlos’s management of Gabriela’s career and finances. His receptionists and publicists were vague. All I can tell you, sir, is that she has come out of retirement. As of now she has no plans to perform in Lisbon or anywhere else. She is simply exploring her options, they said over and over. If you want to get the truth, don’t go to the people who know, the press grumbled. Go to the lunatics on the street.

Why? After all these years, why? A woman sitting in the Café Belem ate a pastéis de nata in two bites and asked her sister across from her what many people were asking each other. Her sister leaned forward and whispered, Haven’t you heard? That actor, Baltasar Columbo, threw himself off the Elevador da Santa Justa last week. She’s singing for his death, for the death of their love. A waitress cleared their cups and saucers off of the table. Oh, please. Show me a body. And they were never lovers; he had a boyfriend. She’s coming to mark the anniversary of the liberation of one of the colonies. Her mother was from the colonies.

People said that she lived in Paris since she last visited Lisbon at the end of a world tour. Like many others in the thousands of years before her, she passed through Lisbon, people said, before she had time to let us wash her dirty underwear. Still, many were willing to let such national insults be. After years marked by an influx of immigrants from the former colonies, poverty, unemployment, homelessness (Just look at the people on the street! The postcard man! The woman with one-and-a-half legs!) , crime, and general deterioration, maybe something was changing. Bringing Paris to old Lisbon? Maybe a little class, a little fortune. The tone was sarcastic, but there is always some truth behind a joke.

No one could actually prove Gabriela lived in Paris or produce any legitimate evidence; in fact, other people said, Her, that old singer? She’s been dead for years! What’s the use? A diner whispered, with a touch of embarrassment, to his neighbor over a plate of sardines at the Casa do Alentejo, I’ve always thought she remained hidden somewhere in Lisbon after that final concert. She can’t be making a return, because she never left. His neighbor laughed and asked, Where would she hide here in Lisbon? The houses are so close together, clinging to one another in an effort to avoid tumbling down the hillside and into the river. Everyone would know in a matter of minutes. Then the pair stared out the window at the white lights of the city center, the Baixa, spread below the hills and Lisbon, in its narcissistic way, begged look at me! Maybe she had always been there; the Tagus at dusk when it transformed into a sea of straw under the sun hid her. No, we never would have come to this if that were true.

A certain amount of hostility would greet her return. There were many, especially in the fado houses, who never understood why she hadn’t sang fado nor spent time in any of the fado houses in the Bairro Alto. Some claimed she wasn’t truly a Lisboeta, even though she was born there. After all, her father was a European Jew fleeing to America who waited in the port city for the proper papers. And her mother was one of the people from the colonies who came to work in the mother city. She cleaned a tasca after the drinkers had left in the early morning. No one even knew Gabriela de Tejo’s real name; she had taken it on, or perhaps an early manager had named her. A real Lisboeta would have sung fado. She was just a citizen of Lisbon, once, another hanger-on like the postcard man, who used us but wanted to be somewhere else.

Remember? The women at the edge of the fish stalls along the Tagus asked each other. Remember when the offices of Carlos Severata, her manager, burned in the Grandella department store fire?

Sure, it ruined most of the Chiado district and six people died, but worse was the destruction of files relating to Gabriela de Tejo’s career as well as archives of sheet music, catalogues, and records.

There’ll be no need for those old files now; there’ll be new records, new sheet music and catalogues.

The enormous statue of Prince Henry the Navigator held a ship high above the Tagus and seemed to ask, Is she coming? The row of other explorers, bowing behind him, waited patiently, because how else could you wait after twenty years? A few cynics warned, It’s only your desire for past glories that keeps you loving her, because the present doesn’t offer better. Not many listened; the employment rate rose a percentage point, paused, and then rose again. A bit of funding came through to reupholster the theater’s red velvet seats.

More men were hired to splash their paste on the telephone poles, kiosks, and city walls and roll out posters with words scrawled across the bottom, as if someone had written them in a hurry. Gabriela de Tejo! At the Teatro Nacional de Sáo Carlos! The postermen joked about a cartoon of her wrapped in quilts up to her waist and rising, bent and bony, from a wheelchair. It had appeared that morning in one of the newspapers. They all agreed that, dead or alive, in Paris or the Algarve, Gabriela was in her seventies. She’d be old and decrepit, hardly what she used to be. She was bony as a girl, the poster men pointed out. There was always something about her, as if she were wearing armor under her skin. The cartoon still showed the broad bones of her cheeks and forehead above dark, wide lips, and her eyes looked somewhere up and away from earth, just as she had looked when she sang. No different. In the picture-white shapeless mass circled her head instead of that starchy puff of black hair that once reached her jaw line. Who is that ugly, old lady, a posterman’s son had asked his mother, pointing at the magazine on the breakfast table. She looks like a rhinoceros. His mother had slapped him on the hand. Don’t even think it!

Now the receptionists and publicists at Alfonso Severa’s offices didn’t even answer the ringing phones. Someone from one of the papers, however, met one of the secretaries in the Baixa at lunchtime in the middle of a crowd of tourists and performing unicyclists. The secretary’s eyes were shining, and the reporter could see the dried stains of tears on her cheeks. She whispered in the reporter’s ear before beginning to cry again, She’s dying. She’s dying, and she wants to say good-bye. That was the story the papers carried.

A line of people snaked around the Teatro Nacional de Sáo Carlos and continued all the way up the hills of the Bairro Alto. The trams couldn’t run, and, even if they could somehow manage to inch through, there was no one to operate or ride them. The crowd sang Gabriela de Tejo’s songs, Portuguese folk songs, American rock, and anything else they could think of. There were the younger generations waiting alongside their parents and grandparents. The generation whose first memories were of a voice like their mother’s voice in a dark room; the ones who discovered her in a dusty cardboard box of records at a secondhand store; the ones whose parents and grandparents asked, you actually like that, too? Then they’d come into their teenagers’ bedrooms to sit down and listen. That younger generation told each other, man, I wish I’d been there. I’d have taken the trip across and been at one of those clubs in Atlantic City, my heart beating beneath the lapels of a dark suit. I’d have been right there, up front, nodding my head and tapping my foot.

They waited to buy their tickets. Can anyone see what’s going on up there? They cried. The message came back: The window hasn’t opened yet! We say break down the doors! They laughed, but then the bodies surged forward, and before the people lounging in the back against the still trams felt the tremors of movement, the window had slammed down. Some people went away, resigned. Well, I knew we wouldn’t get tickets. We never get anything we want. Others cursed Alfonso Severa. That bastard did this on purpose! Those first people in line probably paid a fortune. He can retire on this, I’m sure. Some sobbed. I thought, just this once, I’d get to see her. I could tell my children, like my mother and father told me, that I’d seen Gabriela de Tejo. The police came in and strode slowly around the edges of the crowd, hands on hips and helmets on, ready if needed.

The next morning a ballet studio high on the Rua de Sáo Marcal woke its neighbors by blasting a succession of records marking each movement in Gabriela de Tejo’s singing career. A man staying at the Pension Botânico leaned out his window and caught a glimpse of the small dancers twirling to the music. They saw his reflection in the mirrors, shrieked, and ran to a far corner. A woman yelled something, and they slowly returned to their places, looking down at the floor before forgetting him and staring at themselves in the mirror again. He stood there forever, listening, and forgot his business meeting.

Farther to the west the Cemitério dos Prazeres (Cemetery of Pleasures) was littered with fresh flowers. The groundskeeper tried to collect the stray stalks in his arms. He told two policemen passing by that the bouquets simply appeared overnight. They keep escaping from me. The police had just come from the neighboring Casal Ventoso, whose slum residents could not seem to keep out of trouble the night before. They had had to tip toe through the streets in order to avoid stepping on the shards of wine bottles littering the pavement. In the cemetery the groundskeeper and the police found a man passed out beneath a blanket of flowers, all varieties and colors.

From the outside, the Teatro Nacional de Sáo Carlos appeared to be a building made of ash, but the interior still housed white and pink columns, floor length mirrors, and the royal box guarded by the statues of satyrs. The seats faced an empty stage with no microphone and no instruments of any kind. The workers had few preparations, because Alfonso Severa’s office had not made any particular requests. They dusted the dressing room, made sure that several bodyguards would be posted at the back entrances, and did soundcheck after soundcheck with their own voices booming across the stage and over the empty chairs.

Outside, the city prepared itself for Gabriela de Tejo. The Baixa, for once, was filled with people at night on their way down to the Terreiro do Paço, where they might be able to glimpse Gabriela arriving. Someone had spread the rumor that she would be arriving by seaplane, and many howled with laughter at that suggestion, saying No one’s done that since the 1960s! Historical facts, obviously, didn’t deter the thousands who made their way to the Terreiro do Praço and the shores of the Tagus. There were even those who journeyed out to Belém with the reasoning that Vasco da Gama himself had set off for his voyage around Africa to the East from there. Perhaps she also had stayed up the entire night before in the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos praying for guidance among the ghosts of monks.

Of course, there were the crowds outside the theater. There were those who passed through its doors to take their seats, and those who scurried around the perimeter, looking for a way in or for the way she might go in. The men who sold lottery tickets stood outside and called out, Who needs a ticket? I’ve got tickets to sell! People rushed them, thinking they had concert tickets, and discovered that the men were, in fact, peddling their lottery tickets as usual. At times a voice from the edges of the crowd yelled, It’s her! Everyone turned in whatever direction the voice had come from, only to find it had been a false warning. Had she somehow managed to elude the fans and entered through a secret door? Or maybe she had been there all along, watching the crowd moving like waves below her, smiling to think that they had come with such energy and force to see her? She might have looked up at the hills and thought, look at me! They hoped she did.

In the theater they waited. Outside the theater they waited. They waited patiently, because how else do you wait after waiting for twenty years? They waited patiently for half an hour, an hour. Is she coming? A woman started to cry softly into her husband’s shoulder. It’ll be all right, he whispered. I’m sure she’s just got a case of cold feet. After all, it’s been twenty years since she’s performed in public. The people shifted in their seats. Women fanned themselves with whatever pieces of paper they could find in their bags, and the men wiped their handkerchiefs across the backs of their sweating necks. Soft guitar music flowed around them from the speakers, but the audience tried to shake it away with an impatient twitch of their shoulders. Good Lord, it’s taking that woman a long time to get out here, another man remarked to his wife. Shhh. Don’t be so crude, she said and plucked at his sleeve.

A few people in the audience doubted Gabriela’s singing abilities in her old age. Surely a voice, even one that once held so much power, would have faded and thinned out over the years. Hadn’t she been a smoker, too? A couple of people said that their grandparents remembered seeing her when she began singing in the cellar room of the Hot Clube. She was a girl then, just sixteen or seventeen. So tall and angular. And dark, too dark to be just a Lisboeta. There were also those who had made the voyage across the Atlantic to seek her out in the small jazz club’s first across Brazil, then in Atlantic City, and finally later at the bigger places in Philadelphia, LA, Chicago, and New York. She always, they said, wore a skin-tight, floor length, satin dress with a deep V cut out at the neck. The rumor was that Gabriela had ninety of these dresses, all in different colors and shades.

Her only accessory was a small, silver purse on a long chain. She always wore that purse on her shoulder, even while she sang, and when she was done performing she leaned against the piano, opened that purse, and took out a cigarette. Once she had it lit and smoked for a minute, she slowly walked out of the room and disappeared somewhere through the kitchens into the alleyways. Now, as they waited for her return, grandfather said that watching Gabriela de Tejo walk away was like realizing that the best dream you had ever had was fading away and you were waking up from it, to that cold, large, real lump lying next to you in the bed. You wanted that dream to come back so badly. Those cold, large, real lumps, the grandmothers, replied that it was more like realizing you would never have the life you were meant to have, because that ungrateful pig of a man had taken it away from you. The life you were meant to have—a life like Gabriela de Tejo’s. They said that this was what it was like to watch her finish and leave, all these years later, as they sat and watched the sickly, brown water lap at the edge of the harbor. At the time, if you had asked them right then, twenty years and more ago, you wouldn’t have gotten an answer, because they were kissing and kissing and kissing. Gabriela de Tejo just made you want to love, said the ones who were there, alone, all those years ago. Love yourself or someone else, no matter. Loneliness makes you remember correctly. Maybe they just need to remember again.

Finally, the lights flickered and dimmed to near darkness. There was a communal ahhhh from the audience and one last shift in the seats, before the hazy, blue light shone alone again. Then a short, fat man in a dark suit came out onto the stage, tripping over his own feet as he walked. He carried a microphone on a long cord with him in one hand and picked at the end of his moustache with the other. He wasn’t the right type of person to introduce Gabriela de Tejo, everyone thought. He coughed and cleared his throat several times. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began in a squeaky voice and then stopped. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry, I’m very sorry to say that tonight’s performance has been cancelled. Gabriela de Tejo must, at the last minute, uh, attend an event elsewhere.” He opened his mouth to say more, but loud groans and Nos! squashed his words. Someone shouted above all the other voices, She better come back here to this event! And other shouts joined in with the same demand. The little man looked somewhere off-stage and raised both his hands up as if asking for help. He turned back to the audience and tried to shout, “Of course, you’ll be refunded and each of you will receive a complimentary gift of one of Gabriela de Tejo’s earlier albums.” The audience rose as one and rushed the stage, trampling each other. The little man, who had dropped the microphone with a loud whine and bang, was running towards what he prayed was the sanctuary of backstage. The police hurried to the Teatro Nacional de Sáo Carlos for the second day in a row. They ran in two straight rows, wearing helmets and carrying shields and batons.

The next day, as people dragged themselves to the trams for the morning commute to work, they whispered to one another, Did you hear? My neighbor said he saw her, last night. Everywhere you went that next day in Lisbon someone had a story to tell, that she never showed at the theater as promised or that across the city, in one of the fado houses on the narrow, twisted streets of the Alfama district, a woman sang fado. The woman—supposedly with a gray puff of hair, angular shoulders, and a silver purse—entered with three men and spoke to the waiter. He nodded quickly and disappeared into the back. He returned a few minutes later with two guitarists and gestured to the woman. The guitarists bowed to her then sat in a corner while she pulled a black shawl over her shoulders and stood before them. The three men who had walked in with her took seats at a nearby table. Is that Alfonso Severa? a woman whispered to her date and pointed over at one of the men. The rest of the audience put their forks down and became silent, and her date twisted around in his seat. It could be. It just could, but I’m not sure.

At the tram stop, as the commuters waited for their ride down the hill, they imagined how it must have been, how it should have been. One of the guitar players began, softly, and then the other joined in. The woman took her time, staring around the room at each member of the audience with white, shining eyes rimmed in red. She looks like she’s been crying, the woman whispered to her date. He put his hand over hers on the table.

The woman said, Fado comes from those who are at sea and away from their families. They feel a homesickness worse than anything else. Then she sang, in a voice low like a man’s, about an unbearable longing for home. She sang three songs, three minutes each, and between each one no one lifted a fork or turned to their neighbor to say something. Once she was done and had slipped away, the young man opened his mouth, then shut it. He moaned softly, a sound coming from the deepest part of his throat. He tried to speak, but he could only mouth something that his date couldn’t even see through her watery eyes.

Afterwards, those who weren’t there said it hadn’t happened. The curator at the Museo Nacional do Azulejo, who had been on a holiday in Brazil, told his assistant over a display of fourteenth century tiles, Impossible! It must be a great conspiracy! His assistant, who had a black eye and a red slash across her forehead, pounded her fist on the glass counter and yelled, Put on by who? By her? You always have your conspiracy theories!

Some who were at the fado house said that it wasn’t even Gabriela; it was someone posing as her, and that proved that she had either never left Paris or that she was dead. If she is alive, Gabriela de Tejo must be outraged that an imposter is using her name, her image, all of her. There were a few, here and there, who said, She had so been there, and she was a failure, because, while she sang well, it wasn’t the same. It just wasn’t. We all ought to accept the fact that singers die before they really die, that we had just been shown the hard, sad reality of life on the empty stage of the Teatro Nacional de Sáo Carlos! But anyone who could find someone who happened to have been sitting in the fado house in the Alfama that night asked, Could she sing fado, really? Where can I get a recording of that? And, Do you think Gabriela de Tejo will ever return again? Where could she be now?

The residents of the Casal Ventoso reverted to their somber, sleeping states. A policeman even remarked, It feels so dead around here. I almost wish there was something for us to do. The flowers lay limp and dead in the cemetery. On the Rua do Oura the postcard man paced past patrons of coffee shops, holding his postcards that no one bought. When he reached the corner where the woman with one-and-a-half legs sat, he paused to place a coin in her box, looking down at her through his eye slits. The skin around his jaw trembled and pulled itself into a sad smile before he continued down the street. The woman buried herself deeper into her rags and hummed. She stared at the feet that crossed the dirty cement floor of the square in front of her and thought, Poor Lisbon. Poor us. How silly we are.