On the 25th of August 1988, as I entered Lisbon, crossing the bridge over the Tagus in my old Volkswagen, I saw a column of smoke rising from the downtown area. A devastating scene, firefighters everywhere, wreckage of buildings still falling through the water-soaked streets, a Dantesque thing. A friend journalist gave me an expired press card so I was able to get closer to the area where the firefighters were fighting the fire.
It looked like a war scene. I walked from one side to another, from one street to another, I went around the blocks, there were fire engines on every street that pumped water to fight the flames. The firefighters were shouting at each other, talking to each other with portable radios, running from one place to another, a huge mess. A bunch of reporters from TFS, at the time a young radio station, reported live into the microphones everything they saw, every detail, repeated themselves, sometimes almost screaming, ran over each other, visibly excited, a new era of radio.
Over time, I managed to evade the firefighters and the police and managed to penetrate closer to the fire center, on Rua do Carmo, Rua Garrett, Rua Nova do Almada, as the fire, although not extinguished, was more controlled, flares were rarer.
When I approached the edge of the deep holes where the Grandela warehouses used to be, the warehouses of Chiado, I felt an infernal heat that rose, unbearable, my skin burned, like open boilers of smouldering volcanoes. What was left of the department stores, the shops, the few inhabited apartments, twisted beams that looked more like spaghetti, the floors had collapsed, the materials of the structures mixed a few meters below, in an igneous and formless grey magma, with woods, fabrics, unrecognizable.
I would take pictures and when the films were over I would go to Amoreiras by taxi, where the owner of Instanta, of which I was an occasional customer, asked me how his shop on Rua Garrett was doing. In the afternoon I went to see the Aliens movie from James Cameron to the Condes, from the front row of the counter, the huge screen in front of me, with my shoes soaked from the hot water that ran through the streets, exhausted and half dazed, coming from one apocalyptic scenario to another .
The dream of the Grands Magazins at the beginning of the century to imitate Paris had been undone in the snap of a finger.