Lisbon occupies three distinct places in the book’s account of wartime displacement: it is where the narrator secures passage to Angola, where he imagines meeting Maria after independence, and where he later sees the largest section of Luanda’s wooden city arrive in crates. The city becomes both a point of departure and a destination for people and possessions scattered by the war.

Departure for Angola

In summer 1975, while working as a correspondent for a press agency, the narrator went to Lisbon and persuaded the crew of one of the last Portuguese military aircraft flying to Angola to take him aboard. He describes the request as a matter of begging. The war among Angola’s armed political parties was already under way, and many expected the country to become isolated and engulfed in violence; while others were fleeing, he was determined to go.

Lisbon thus appears first as a threshold into danger, not as a secure home already reached. The narrator’s journey begins there at the moment when people are trying to leave Angola, reversing the direction of the mass exodus that would soon reshape Luanda.

A Promised Reunion

Lisbon also becomes the setting for a future meeting the narrator and Maria arrange while still in Luanda. He tells her he will stay until Angola’s independence on 11 November, despite her fear that the city will be destroyed. They wager a bottle of wine on his survival and plan to meet at the Altis Hotel in Lisbon at five in the afternoon on 15 November.

The meeting does not take place as planned. The narrator is late, and a note left at the hotel desk says that Maria had waited but would leave for Brazil with Arturo the following day. Lisbon is therefore a promised return that briefly seems possible, then becomes a record of separation: Maria’s note confirms that she was there, but the two do not meet.

The Wooden City Arrives

After leaving Luanda, the narrator stops in Lisbon. A friend drives him along a broad street near the mouth of the Tagus and the port, where he sees immense heaps of crates stacked precariously and left unattended. He identifies them as the largest section of the wooden city that had been shipped from Luanda to the coast of Europe. Maria, writing from Brazil, had told him that her own crates from the city had reached her there; reports in newspapers described another section arriving in Cape Town.

The crates give physical form to the Portuguese exodus from Angola. As former residents scatter across Europe and the Americas, the contents of Luanda’s shops and warehouses travel with them, while the city’s buildings and abandoned cars remain behind. In Lisbon, the narrator sees not a recovered version of Luanda but a fragment of its emptied commercial life, piled at the port and detached from the city that had contained it.