My recompense for Connemara

In September 1978 my husband and I arrived in post-revolutionary Portugal on a night flight from London. We had come to take up jobs as teachers of English for the next nine months. We would stay eight years. As I stepped off the plane into the textured dark, the only thing I remember is that heat rose from the tarmac and the air smelled of jasmine.

We were met and taken to our lodgings in a black and green taxi. The trip was like a car chase from Miami Vice. We were to learn that this is the only way to drive in Lisbon if you want to stay alive. I woke up next morning in a pension on the Praca de Chile. I pulled back the muslin curtain to check on the weather. It took me years to believe in predictable heat, minutes to love it. We breakfasted on excellent rolls and awful coffee and went to explore a faded city, graced with wide avenues and intimate squares. The buildings were modern and drab or old and magnificent and as we climbed up the narrow streets, the city that spread out below us was the colour of old rose.

That was my first real taste of summer, my recompense for Connemara, for the endless winters and swims with skin blue and goose-pimpled, the misery of being never quite warm, never quite dry. It was as if my life up until then had been spent in exile from the South. That September we swam every day before work and gorged ourselves on melons. I smoked long, slender cigarettes called "Ritz". We sat at marble-topped tables in the mornings, drinking the lethal little black coffees I soon became addicted to, and marvelling as dark men laced theirs with firewater at their 11 o'clock break.

In the evenings after dinner I sat outside the elegant Suica Cafe, eating icecream from tall glasses or in the Nicola, where old men in black bow ties deigned to serve me but made it clear they disapproved of young women alone in the cafe. Nearby an old gentleman dressed formally in black and wearing soiled white gloves would often call to his vanished lover: "Maria, why have you left me?" in a voice full of longing and despair. I heard later that he had been disappointed in love as a young man and I was amazed that he could sustain such passion for so long. I thought it was very exotic carry-on - you'd wait a long time for a jilted Irish man to spend 30 years in evening dress lamenting a vanished lover.

At weekends we took a bus across the great bridge that spans the Tejo river to the Costa de Caparica, an endless beach where we dived, sunbathed and devoured picnics, then swam again. We never left until late evening, when a particular honeyed light darkened and silhouetted the last surfers on the crest of a wave. They hung there endlessly above us like statues while their enamoratas, many still chaperoned, admired but let on not to notice them. The grannies, dressed in black from head to toe, kept a sharp indulgent eye on their charges, ripe as peaches, reclining on the sand in skimpy bikinis.

Then there was music. We frequented the Hot Club, where the men were macho and the women wore strapless dresses and they danced when the saxophones and trombones played and music wailed and throbbed across the midnight square above the oldest jazz club in Lisbon. And we listened to records, the great traditional Fado singer, Amalia Rodrigues, and the sweet, unsettling music of Brazil, Caetano Veloso and Fa Fa de Belem singing in a language that was neither Spanish nor Italian but close enough for jazz.

Within weeks I was learning to speak it, hesitantly ordering dishes of olives and monkfish or inquiring about train times. Soon I even demanded the proper form of address due to me as a married woman from young men who became too familiar. Having kept my maiden name, I thought this was great fun.

That was the summer of radiance and life was as urgent as the taste of salt water on the skin. The world was ours and everything was possible because we were young and in love in a Latin country. I began to believe in a life of elegance.

We were to return to Ireland in the dark year of 1986 when the West was devastated by unemployment and despair. We came back against a tide of immigration. I would need every drop of light and the memory of small courtesies to sustain me in the coming years.

I have been back to Lisbon once, briefly in the winter. I walked the length of the great central Avenida de Liberdade. The city had lost its 1950s look of neglect and the drug dealers on the square had mobile phones. There was an investment bank on every corner and AIDS had cut a swathe through our old acquaintances.

When I got to the Rossio Square, the Cafe Nicola was closed for renovations.

Mary O'Malley's collection of poems, The Knife in the Water, was published earlier this year by Salmon Press