The following weeks blurred into routine. School in the morning, helping his father carry buckets of paint in the afternoon, and playing guitar on Rua da Palma whenever he could steal the time. Alex's classmates laughed at him sometimes.
"Still playing that broken toy?" one boy sneered, kicking dust toward his shoes.
Alex said nothing. He had learned long ago that words wasted energy. Besides, when he strummed his guitar later that day and the little girl clapped for him again, her smile drowned out every insult.
The coins in his tin can begin to add up not much, just a few escudos here and there. Enough to buy bread, sometimes milk. Every time he placed food on the family table, his mother's tired eyes softened, even if his father grumbled that "music won't fill a pot."
One evening, as Alex tuned his guitar under the dim light of a streetlamp, a man in his thirties stopped to listen. He wasn't like the usual passersby. He wore a black leather jacket, his hair slicked back, and he had the posture of someone who belonged to the music world.
"You've got rhythm, kid," the man said after Alex finished a shaky rendition of an old fado tune.
Alex blinked. "You think so?"
The man nodded. "Rough around the edges, sure, but you've got heart and heart matters."
Alex felt his face warm and no one had ever spoken about his music that way.
The man handed him a small card. "Name is Duarte. I play bass with a local band. We rehearse at a bar not far from here. If you're serious about music, drop by sometime. Watch, listen, learn."
Alex stared at the card long after the man had walked away. His heart thudded against his ribs. A real musician. An invitation. A chance, but almost as quickly, doubt crept in.
He turned the card over in his hands, reading and rereading the name as if it might disappear. What if Duarte had just been being polite? What if the band didn't want a street kid who didn't even own a tuner? What if he showed up and they laughed at him like the boys at school?
He tucked the card into his pocket and looked down at his guitar. One of the strings had snapped earlier that week, and he had tied it back together with a fraying shoelace. The neck was still warped. The buzz of the strings came not just from age, but from something broken deep inside the instrument. Could someone like him, with a guitar like this, really walk into a place where real music was made?
His fingers ran along the worn frets as he considered it. Then he remembered the old man's coin. The little girl clapping and the smile from the baker, They hadn't asked for perfection they'd listened anyway.
He closed his eyes and breathed in the Lisbon night the salt, the smoke, the city's heartbeat. He didn't have answers, but he had a choice.