Skip the Quinta

I went to a wedding and saw all my cousins in one place for the first time in decades. Sharing some of the same DNA, it turns out, does not mean sharing the same taste.

At the beach, one cousin recommended a Francesinha—a wet open-faced sandwich of melted cheese layered over pork slices on white bread and drowning in tomato sauce. It was rather disgusting, but I ate it anyway because I’d already paid for it. Every time he looked over, I forced a smile while chewing the soggy mess to thank him for the suggestion.

Then, overhearing that we were going to Sintra, another cousin recommended Quinta da Regaleira. “This is the garden to go to,” she said. “All the others are kitsch.”

Naturally, the tickets were sold out.

This was poor planning on my part, and my wife made sure I understood that I had dropped the ball. Our trip to Sintra was going to feel like going to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower or Rome without the Colosseum. Worse, Regaleira was the only major Sintra garden completely sold out that Friday, which seemed to confirm that everyone else had already figured out what I had failed to.

But when my back is against the wall, I somehow pull architectural tour rabbits out of the hat. On our last vacation I had pulled sold-out Van Gogh Museum tickets and a Rietveld House tour out of nowhere. I reminded the family: I always find a way.

And so began the first circle of hell.

With the official site tickets sold out, various shady tour sites offered packages whose fine print included guided tours but no admission to the sites. I refreshed the official website to see if anybody relinquished their tickets. Then refreshed it again. Then again. Eventually I was checking it with the spiritual discipline of a medieval monk waiting for a vision.

At 6 a.m. on the morning of our visit, three slots appeared. I thanked the architectural tour gods bought them immediately. I overpaid a little but did not care.

Then there was the second circle of hell - luggage logistics. 

Because our rental car SUV had no proper hidden trunk, I had become obsessed with the possibility of someone smashing the windows and running off with our luggage. The night before, I hid everything under a car mat in the trunk to avoid loading the car in front of preying thieves. At 2 a.m. I parked in the municipal lot with the rear of the car facing an Italian restaurant, apparently believing that proximity to pasta eaters constituted a security system.

My family thought I was insane.

“Who is going to steal our stuff up here in the mountains?”

I told everyone to hup hup and finish brushing their teeth. I still needed to pack their toothbrushes. A vacation activity had  somehow became a military operation.

Then came the third circle of hell. The drive.

After hiking 10 miles up and down 5 other garden sites in Sintra, we paid a guy to take us from Montserrat to Quinta da Regaleira.

Traffic in Sintra is forced into a single 10 km counter-clockwise loop, because the roads were originally built narrow for horses. If your destination lies only a mile clockwise, a bus still requires a 30-minute detour of nearly 9 km in the opposite direction. Our driver simply cut across the loop, driving short stretches the wrong way to save time and collect exorbitant fares from time-pressed travelers.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

There is a particular kind of terror that comes from realizing your risky transportation strategy has become: I assume this guy knows what he’s doing speeding down the road in the wrong direction.

And then, finally, the remaining circles of hell at Quinta Regaleira.

António Augusto Carvalho Monteiro, the Brazilian-born Portuguese millionaire known as Monteiro dos Milhões, bought the estate in 1892. He was a lawyer, butterfly collector, artisanal shampoo bottle designer, Dante obsessive, and enthusiast of Freemasonry, the Knights Templar, Rosicrucianism, and alchemy.

He did not want a country house. He wanted a physical manifestation of everything he had ever been interested in.

For this he hired Luigi Manini, an Italian set designer from La Scala. Manini understood scenery: entrances, reveals, theatrical scale, the psychological value of making someone walk around a corner and discover something they were not expecting.

Between 1904 and 1911, they turned the four-hectare estate into a permanent opera set, completed with the help of Coimbra sculptors. The palace is teeming with pinnacles, gargoyles, carvings and Manueline flourishes. The chapel mixes Catholic imagery with occult symbolism. Paths disappear into grottoes, lakes, tunnels and gardens.

And then comes the Initiation Well. It is a 27-metre inverted tower with nine spiral levels descending into the earth.

You descend with a few hundred other paying visitors, slowly spiraling downward into the darkness in a tourist conga line taking every selfie imaginable, past something that seems to be borrowing equally from Dante’s 9 circles of hell, Masonic initiation rituals, the underworld, and a very expensive Halloween attraction.

At the bottom is Monteiro’s emblem: a compass laid over a Templar cross.

Then you escape through cave tunnels to a few stepping stones beside a waterfall and toward daylight.

The garden is built around this opposition. The upper landscape suggests order and consciousness; the underground suggests the unconscious and the underworld. Paths, plants, carvings, staircases, grottoes and wells have all been recruited into the symbolic machinery. 

You do not simply walk through the garden.

The garden walks you through Monteiro’s metaphysical filing cabinet.

And this is where it goes wrong for me.

The ambition is commendable and all. The craft is extraordinary. It is a rich man’s stage set frozen in stone, and Manini’s theatrical background is everywhere: every turn wants a reveal, every wall wants a secret, every tunnel wants to mean something.

Fog and moss do most of the real atmospheric work. Without them, Regaleira risks feeling less like an enchanted landscape than an extraordinarily expensive haunted-house attraction built by a man who had read too much Dante and possessed the financial means to do something about it.

Beautiful. Crowded. Ingenious at extracting tourist dollars. Exhausting.

Gothic revival pushed past conviction into pure contrivance, where every stone whispers a secret until, somewhere around the ninth circle, you just want it to quiet down.

The Prelude

This was supposed to be the day of my brother’s concert. Instead, I was trying to figure out how a fish ends up on the sidewalk. One moment I was waiting while Agong walked his second lap around the park. The next, I was in the emergency room. Later they explained: I’d rolled backward down a slope in my wheelchair, dropped over the curb, and hit the pavement. A little girl had seen it. The gash in my head was from the impact. The wheelchair was found pinned under my knees. I remembered none of it. With Alzheimer’s, you rely on other people’s memories.

My son was there, on my right. He had just driven up from New York. My daughter and Agong were sent out—policy, only one visitor per patient. I apologized, of course. I’m always apologizing. Sorry for the inconvenience. Sorry to have fallen on concert day. My son shrugged. He said we could watch the Red Sox.

It was one o’clock. Then it was three. Middle of the eighth, the Red Sox were losing 2–1. The brace hurt more and more. I kept asking the nurses to take it off. I forgot I had already asked. They repeated their line: no, not until the fracture is ruled out. A fractured neck without a brace can lead to paralysis. Fine. Meanwhile, I kept asking.

Eventually they rolled me into the CT machine. Five minutes. Then we waited an hour for the radiologist. No fractures in the spine. The brace came off. Relief. Brief relief. Then another hour for him to look at my hip X-rays. The absurd part was that I had been walking back and forth to the bathroom the whole time. Obviously my hip was functional. But common sense has no visiting rights in the emergency room.

I asked to be discharged. The nurse shook her head: potassium too high. I had just had dialysis yesterday. It never ends. If doctors knew what they were doing, I wouldn’t be here. Their prescriptions destroyed my kidneys. Now I rely on dialysis three times a week. The doctor responsible died during early in the COVID pandemic. Convenient. No scapegoat. Or maybe that’s the point—they know exactly what they’re doing. Billing, testing, covering themselves. A medieval torture chamber of jabs, braces, X-rays. The worst torture is the waiting.

Again I asked: can I leave now? Please? My brother is playing downtown. More blood drawn. My son muttered that radiologists will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence. Instant scans, no waiting. He set a deadline: six o’clock, we break from the jail. We need to go to the concert. 

In the center of the ward the doctors and nurses gathered behind their computers. They had a clear view of us, and we of them. A kind of zoo, but reversed. I thought they had forgotten my hip films and walked over. They told me to sit. Always: sit, wait, we’ll let you know. 

Eventually I did make it to the concert. I wore a hat to cover the staple that closed the gash on my head. I asked my son if this would look ridiculous and he said, no you’ll look like Georgia O’Keefe. Jordan Hall, under the balcony. The light there is dim, and you can hear the creak of the old wood when people shift in their seats. My brother walked out, bowed quickly, and sat at the piano for the encore. He played Chopin’s Prelude 13.

The sound was clear, almost severe, and yet it felt like a letter that had been sent long ago and finally arrived. A message from 1835, traveling through his fingers, through our parents’ DNA, through me. I thought: the egg my brother came from was already in my mother’s body in 1918. Now it is 2025. The time lines don’t match, but they overlap. Chopin, 1835. My mother, 1918. My brother, and me.

The Prelude itself was written during Chopin’s stay in Majorca with George Sand. The whole set of twenty-four carries different moods—storms, prayers, fragments of weather. No. 13 is not stormy. It is calm, lyrical, something like a private thought said aloud. A pause in the middle of difficulty. My brother played it that way. The sound entered me, steady and unhurried, as if nothing had happened.

Fish Tale

I was asleep on the couch when my son woke me. “Mommy’s choking on a fishbone.” In the background I hear loud hacking sounds. I go to the kitchen half-conscious and see my wife eating mouthfuls of bread, then spoons of olive oil, gagging desperately to dislodge the bone. 

I pressed her tongue down with a spoon and tried to play hero doctor hoping to see bone to extract it. I couldn’t find the bone. Now she started coughing up blood but said she would wait for urgent care the next morning to avoid the emergency room wait. 

There’s a weird vow echoing in the back of my head. That classic: Do you promise to love, honor, and cherish… in sickness and in health and fish bones too? 

Yes.

I do.

Then I went back to sleep.

⸻

She woke me again around 3-ish. Maybe later. Poked me in the ribs—not lovingly—and said she thought she needed to go to the ER. This was after she’d fallen down a internet search rabbit hole and diagnosed herself with something called an esophageal perforation, which apparently has like a 20% fatality rate unless promptly treated by people wearing white coats and gloves and not an architect with no medical training  in fruit of the loom underwear. I asked if she wanted me to come, not because I didn’t want to (I did) but because our marriage has its own strange rhythm of wounded independence and deferred togetherness and I wasn’t sure if she wanted help or just wanted to be the martyr who braves triage alone. But she said yes.

On the way she reminded me—not without heat, of my shoddy medical companion track record… that I once ate a tuna fish sandwich during the birth of our first son and that I almost missed our second son’s actual crowning moment because I’d gone back to the restaurant to retrieve a missing flan that I had ordered. She did not find this amusing and warned me to behave. 

We cabbed it to Roosevelt Hospital, which I told her is a hospital with the weird claim to fame of being the place John Lennon was taken after being shot. I know this because I know things like this and absolutely no one ever needs to hear them. I did not tell her that the doctor supposedly pumped Lennon’s heart manually for 20 minutes while Yoko Ono screamed down the hallway and “All My Loving” played somewhere over the loudspeakers.

Admissions: metal detector, NYPD cops milling around, the usual ER panorama of disarray—stretchers, track-marked arms, incoherent yelling, that one guy whose bloody face looks like it lost a bet with gravity.

Miracle of miracles: we got in to the treatment area in 10 minutes. 

Now the real waiting began. Vitals, triage, fluorescent lighting that somehow makes everyone’s soul look gray. She sat stiffly on a hospital bed with a Rorschach-shaped stain on the sheet that could’ve been rust or blood or god knows what. I lay down beside her fully clothed and in my winter coat, hood up, looking either homeless or deeply disturbed… my body was contorted and my legs half dangled off the inclined hospital bed so as to avoid the stain on the sheets. I promptly fell asleep again like the world’s worst emotional support animal.

⸻

Woken by a med student. Very young. Possibly not old enough to rent a car. He asked what the pain felt like on a scale of 1 to 10. She said 7. For reference, I’m assuming childbirth is a 10. My own pain threshold, it must be said, is somewhere around 2. I can tolerate stubbing a toe on coffee table and whimpering for an hour. 

This med student peered into her mouth and saw nothing, but mentioned the possibility of a CAT scan to rule out the nightmare scenario of an esophageal rupture, which is the kind of thing that can lead to death via mediastinitis.

They wheeled her off, and I stayed behind in the bed again, now fully resigned to the idea that I might be lying in someone else’s dried trauma. And yet I slept.

They returned. They saw the bone. No perforation. A resident noted her tongue was, quote, “large,” which vindicated my failed attempt to fish out the bone.

Then at 7:30 a.m., in comes the ENT. This guy’s got a portable monitor with a long fiber optic cable, and the kind of bedside confidence that makes you trust him even though he looks 32. He tells her to gargle this anesthetic and not to swallow it, and the way she gargled—loud, comic, primal—made me laugh for the first time all night. She almost choked again just from that. The gargle broke  the whole sterile hush of the place.

Camera goes up the nose. Down the throat. Monitor shows the epiglottis, then blood, then the Bone: long, pointed, impaled vertically in the soft pink folds like a miniature medieval Excalibur sword waiting for the right knight to release it. The ENT  knight retrieves it with tweezers and drops it dramatically into a dish like a magician producing the card you picked.

“What kind of fish?” he asks.

“Dorado,” she says.

⸻

Forty-five more minutes waiting for discharge. Now I became useful. I started flagging down nurses with my trademark polite-desperate energy. I tracked down the elusive discharge RN. Got the papers. Freedom at last. If it weren’t for me we would’ve been sequestered there another 5 hours. 

We walked home in the morning light, which was golden and beautiful. She was exhausted but okay. I was still in my winter coat. The fishbone sat god knows where, possibly now a teaching specimen, or in the trash. A week ago it was swimming in the ocean minding its own business.

The Art of Fugue in Tibet (or, What Happens When the Lights Go Out in the Middle of Bach’s Last Breath)

Contrapunctus 14, the last movement  of Bach’s Art of Fugue ends abruptly. Bach literally died while writing it. In his original manuscript, the notes stop and are followed by a message in Bach’s son’s, Carl Phillip’s, handwriting  who was in charge of transcribing his father’s musical ideas onto paper as Bach battled blindness in old age:

“Über dieser Fuge, wo der Nahme B A C H im Contra-subject angebracht worden, ist der Verfasser gestorben.”

Translated into English, it means:

“At this point in the fugue, where the name B-A-C-H appears in the countersubject, the composer died.”

The rest of the score is blank. Empty hand drawn staves extend to the bottom of the page. 

Theoretically, a score is just symbols. Ink scratches on paper. Without a performer, it lies inert. But when a musician conjures Bach they’re not just reading - they’re channeling. They’re breathing life into a set of instructions written by someone who is no longer here. They align their body, their breath with someone else’s mind, often across a gulf of centuries and culture. The composer is dead; the music is not. And the performer’s job is to bring that ghost back into the room.

And when the musical seance is done well—you can feel it. The room changes. Time and space warp a little. It’s not just you hearing something—it’s you being in the presence of someone.

J.S. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge—The Art of Fugue—a kind of farewell note… the musical equivalent of a man drawing a mandala on his deathbed and then leaving the last corner blank, mid-stroke, hand arrested in air. The final movement, Contrapunctus XIV, trails off mid-line. No final cadence, no ritardando, no D minor chord to finish. Just gone.

And here’s the part that will sound like a parable even though it isn’t one.

We were in Tibet. My sister was slated to play Art of Fugue in concert and I had the role of page turner. We were told the electricity might go out. This was presented with the same matter-of-factness as “the restrooms are down the hall to the left.” Something about rotating power grids, something about rationing, something something elevation and batteries. So I brought a flashlight. 

Now imagine this: my sister onstage playing the 90-minute sequence of fugues and canons, each one built like a crystalline scaffold of pure intellect, themes folded into themselves like those snakes that swallow their own tails. There’s no tempo markings. No instrumentation instructions. Bach left it like a musical koan: interpret this how you will. Solve this labyrinth if you dare.

About halfway in, right during the triple fugue—this is the one that eventually spells out B-A-C-H (in German notation: B♭–A–C–B♮), a kind of contrapuntal signature, an audio fingerprint folded inside the fugue—the lights go out.

And not like a flicker. Total. Gone. The hall is in sudden full blackout. You could hear people, shuffle. My sister, maybe not seeing but somehow sensing, doesn’t skip a beat. She keeps playing. Unfazed. The music continues—disembodied, a sonic ghost in total darkness. And I, from her side , flick the flashlight on. Only the sheet music glows now. A small cone of light in the sea of darkness. 

I turned the pages.

And for the next 30 minutes, we are in this dimension  of negative space—black on black, notes bouncing  around  in near darkness—and the audience, who cannot see her, only hear her leading the musical odyssey. Everyone’s sense of hearing  is heightened with nearly all visual distractions removed. 

And then we reach the end.

Except—there is no end. The music stops. No resolution. No closure. It breaks off in the middle of the third subject, right as the B-A-C-H motif returns. And the story goes that Bach died while writing it. Like literally expired with the quill still raised. 

And I click off the flashlight. The hall went from dimly haunted to utter black.

No one claps. Not right away.

Because we all know something had happened. Like we’d glimpsed the ghost inside the notation. The unfinished fugue—the final fugue that loops on itself, that encodes the composer’s name inside itself and then vanishes—had been played in the dark. And the only thing illuminating it had been this tiny cone of light, aimed not at the player but at the pages. The score. The artifact. The trace.

I think that’s when I understood what a musical performance could be. Or at least, what this piece is. It’s a mirror Bach left for us with his dying breath. And because he couldn’t finish it, we have to finish it. Not musically—I mean spiritually. Interpret that however you want. Just bring a flashlight.