It started with a stupid fight about the last King of Portugal.
We’d just left the Bolsa Palace in Porto. Eric said I had literally dozed off in one of the velvet chairs while the guide was talking about Portuguese royals. He wasn’t wrong—I had drifted off. But I was furious with him because, during the tour, he’d been staring at a girl in a skin-tight white dress and shimmering gold platform shoes. That afternoon in our hotel room, our fight got louder than it should have. Eric swore he was only admiring her shoes.
“I do know who the last king of Portugal was,” I snapped. “I was a history major, remember?”
Eric was rolling a cigarette, which annoyed me. He’d only started smoking once we landed in Europe, probably because he saw French couples doing it. He’d also grown a beard, stopped showering regularly, and rotated the same green Dartmouth t-shirt every day. Back home, he dressed like someone fresh off a sailboat—red shorts, loafers, a haircut every four weeks. But he said I had changed, too. That I was rigid and needed everything planned the minute we woke up.
This trip was supposed to be the calm before announcing our engagement. But now Eric felt like a stranger. Could a different country turn someone into an alien?
“Okay then, Claire,” he said, peeling an orange and licking the juice from his fingers, “who was the last king?”
“Carlos,” I guessed.
Eric raised his eyebrows. “Close. That was his father. Half a point. What happened to him?”
“He died.”
“Assassinated,” Eric said. Then he tried to light his cigarette, but I smacked it out of his hand.
“What the hell?” he shouted.
“Who cares!” I yelled. “You clearly don’t.”
He bent down, gathering the spilled tobacco with exaggerated care. “I’m out of here.”
“Good.”
He slammed the hotel door. I collapsed on the bed, sobbing so loudly I was sure someone would call the front desk. I hated him. I loved him. I needed space.
In my wallet was eight hundred dollars my mom had given me for emergencies. This counted. I would go home. Tell the airline someone had died. Or that I was dying.
I threw my clothes, toothbrush, and Fodor’s Guide into my duffel bag. I didn’t need the guide, but I didn’t want Eric to have it either. I wiped my face on the tissue-thin hotel towels and ran down all five flights. Outside, the sun dazzled me. A taxi sat at the curb. I waved.
The driver wore a light blue shirt and dark pants. He was a tall, slender middle-aged man with thinning grey hair and a sparse moustache. He opened the trunk and shieled his eyes from the bright light.
“Just one bag,” I said.
“Yes,” he answered. His accent was unfamiliar. He placed my bag gently into the trunk, as if it were made of porcelain.
Inside, I noticed a phone strapped above the wheel. The driver caught me staring.
“Google Translate. The best, yes?”
“Airport,” I said.
He nodded and started driving. I debated closing my eyes, pretending to sleep, but he started chatting. And then I realized this would be a three-way conversation: him, me, and the translation app.
The driver spoke Portuguese into the phone. The English translation flashed across the screen. He read it out loud with his thick accent that sounded almost musical.
“I arrive Portugal six weeks ago. From Brazil. Language is different. I must learn. Also English. I study, study. Very tired.”
Terrific, I thought. A sleep-deprived driver. I wondered if Eric noticed my disappearance. I turned back to look at the hotel, but we were miles away.
“My teacher American,” the driver continued. “I like American English. Very clean.”
“Clean?” I asked, sitting up. There was no point mourning Eric. I was headed home.
“Clear, I mean. England English too… muddy?”
I laughed. My British friends would be appalled.
“Wrong word?” he asked, concerned.
“No, perfect. I agree.”
“Agree is yes?” In his mirror, I saw a smile spread across his face, softening his eyes with the kind of warmth that I could almost feel.
I nodded as the driver gave me a thumbs up. Outside, traffic thickened. Still, I wasn’t in a rush. I had no ticket. No agenda. For once.
Another car drove dangerously close, and the driver honked his horn. He was silent for a few minutes. When I looked outside, the sky was beginning to be filled with grey thick clouds. The driver lifted his eyes from his wheel and spoke into his phone again. The screen filled with text.
“I come to Portugal for my daughter. She is model. Cannot be alone. Wife stay in Brazil. Next year she come. She is housekeeper. I am mama now. I love daughter. But miss wife. A man is sad without wife. You too?”
“Excuse me?”
He translated again. “Miss your husband?”
“No husband. No boyfriend.”
He turned, his eyes blinking slowly. “You are alone in Portugal?”
“Yes. Bad boyfriend.”
“Good to get rid.”
I thought of Eric laughing at me in Madrid when I’d used the word embarazada to say I was embarrassed. It meant pregnant. The receptionist had looked at my flat stomach in confusion while Eric nearly cried laughing.
Another car honked behind us. The driver shouted something out the window, then apologized.
“My temper,” he said.
“Me too,” I replied. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Here? In taxi?”
“My boy…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I started crying. Really crying. Worse than in the hotel. I wiped my face, soaking my blouse.
“No, no,” the driver said, and suddenly pulled off the road near a gas station. He stopped the car and turned around to look at me seriously. I was too stunned to say anything.
“You are nice girl. Not good to be sad.”
“No,” I croaked, wiping my face with my sleeve. “Not good.”
“When I am sad, I go to Ipanema.”
He smiled and slid a CD into the player. A faint hiss, like wind rustling through palms, gave way to the soft rhythm of bossa nova. Then came the voices—Sinatra, smooth and smoky as dusk, and Antonio Carlos Jobim, golden and lilting, like a lullaby sung to the sea. “The Girl from Ipanema” flowed through the cab like a foreign scent, curling into corners, dissolving the air between us.
“This one, duet,” the driver said, eyes already glowing.
“If you sing too?” I asked.
He looked at me through the mirror, and his smile deepened. “A trio.”
And then he began.
His voice rose like something ancient remembering itself—imperfect, but full of longing. As he sang, the car transformed. The worn vinyl seats shimmered, becoming velvet. The dusty dashboard glowed faintly gold. For a moment, the taxi wasn’t a taxi but a floating music box, drifting not through streets but through memory, through dream.
Outside, the sky thickened with rainclouds, but inside, time slowed. The windshield blurred, not with weather but with nostalgia—faces of people we missed, cities we loved, versions of ourselves we’d almost forgotten. His hands lifted from the wheel to dance in the air, tracing the rhythm like a sorcerer casting soft, invisible spells.
I stared, spellbound. He wasn’t just a driver anymore. He was a man in communion—with music, with his old life in Brazil, with the silence between two strangers who suddenly knew each other.
When the song ended, the taxi gently returned to itself, as if exhaling a held breath. The streets came back into view. The illusion broke, but not completely.
He looked at me, eyes bright with something more than joy.
“Maybe Frank is the best,” he said.
I nodded, still caught in the spell. “You are the best,” I whispered.
Something shifted inside me. I didn’t want to leave anymore. I wanted to see Eric. Maybe I’d been unfair. The heat of the city had made me edgy. I thought of him in Lisbon, the night we got caught in the rain. My sandals broke, and he carried me barefoot through the streets, laughing like we were in some old black-and-white movie. Later, he spread every dry towel in the hotel closet across the bed like a nest. He didn’t even complain when I used his last pair of clean socks as gloves.
Suddenly, the driver gasped. “The airport! We go!”
“No. No airport. Hotel, please.”
“You forget passport?”
“Something like that. But more important.”
He turned the car around, humming “The Girl from Ipanema.” I leaned back into the seat and imagined a future in Portugal, maybe teaching English instead of my new job at an ad agency, writing copy for toilet paper.
Back at the hotel, the driver tried to refuse my money.
“Please,” I said, pouting. “I’ll cry again.”
He laughed and finally accepted. “Obrigado,” he said over and over.
Then he pulled out a photo from his wallet. “My daughter. Bianca.”
I braced myself—what if she wasn’t beautiful? But I didn’t need to worry. Bianca was stunning: dark hair, thick lashes, red lips, and her father’s bright eyes.
“Linda,” I said. Lovely in Portuguese.
A loud American family swarmed the taxi before we had the chance to say a real goodbye. The father barked about flight delays, the mother snapped at the kids, and the trunk was slammed shut before the driver could even turn around. He caught my eye through the window and gave a small wave—fleeting and full of feeling.
In the elevator, as the floor numbers ticked upward, a name floated into my mind like a memory resurfacing from a dream: Dom Manuel. The last king of Portugal.
Outside the door, I paused. I could hear Eric pacing, the soft rhythm of his footsteps moving across the floor like a heartbeat. I took out my key. But before I could use it, the door opened.
