02 · The Malandrino Professor

The day after I arrived, I went to rent an apartment. Lisbon was fantastic but hardly affordable, so I ended up in the city’s last frontier: Amadora Bordea.

Father and son showed me my new room — a bunk bed shared with three others, in a 60-square-meter apartment with nine people, one bathroom, three refrigerators, and cockroaches as resident guests. Rent: 230 euros. That left me 70 euros a month to live on, and I understood I was taking a crash course in how the poor manage wealth — a subject nobody teaches.

One by one the guys introduced themselves — Angola, Mogadishu, São Tomé, Brazil, Portugal, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia — watching to see whether I was racist. I answered each in their own language, and that evening, at the dinner they’d arranged to welcome me, I heard myself christened: The Malandrino Professor.

They were all young men far from home, and I told them a true story to measure their character. In 2021 I’d taken a vacation in Natal, Brazil, where at dusk the girls would come down the dunes backward toward the men waiting below. I stayed forty days and never took part — only watched.

The story that struck them most was Camilla, the rector’s daughter, met by chance at a singles party. She took me home at two in the afternoon and had me leave at ten that night — proof, I understood, that a woman can defeat a thousand men, but a thousand men cannot defeat one woman. Afterward, at dinner, exhaustion made me mishear a word entirely, and by morning the whole house was repeating my mistake, laughing.

I left Amadora Bordea on November 22, 2025. Even the cockroaches seemed sorry to see me go — because it’s only when someone leaves that you understand what you’ll never have again.