The slow Saturday massage
A small letter from a Saturday morning at a particular small studio above a particular small bakery — and on what an unhurried massage actually feels like.
Dear reader,
It is Saturday morning, the eighteenth of May. I am writing this in the small kitchen of our apartment in Lisbon, with a small cup of coffee and the window open to the slow Saturday sounds of the building waking up. I have, this morning, just returned from the small studio above the bakery on Rua das Janelas Verdes where I go most months for a long unhurried massage with the woman who has been working out of that single room for, by my count, about nineteen years.
The massage today was two hours. The cost was a hundred and ten euros. The room was, as it always is, a small clean space with one window, one table, one small ceramic dish of warm almond oil, and almost nothing else. The practitioner was, as she always is, mostly silent. She asked, at the start, how I was sleeping, and then said almost nothing for the next two hours except a quiet 'turn over' at the halfway point.
What unhurried work actually does
The massage was slow in a way I am still learning to write about. The hands moved at the speed of a sentence read aloud, and the pauses between strokes were long enough that I could feel my own breath in them. There was no rush to cover the body. The right side of the back, where I have been carrying tension for some months now, received perhaps thirty minutes of slow attention by itself — slow circles, slow pressure that sank in over the course of minutes rather than seconds, the kind of work that the muscle has time to actually receive.
By the end of the two hours, I had been worked over completely without ever feeling rushed, and the body that got off the table was, by some measure, lighter than the one that had got onto it. I walked home through the warming Saturday morning, stopping at the bakery underneath the studio for a small custard tart, and the rest of the day has, since, proceeded at the slightly slower pace that the morning set.
There is no large lesson here. The lesson, as always, is small. A two-hour massage that costs a hundred and ten euros is not the cheapest thing one can do for the body. It is, however, in my own private accounting, the most efficient single intervention that exists for me, and the small monthly appointment has earned its permanent place in the calendar.
Until next time,
M.