This week we sat under a 4-billion year-old moon, in the shell of a two-thousand year old temple, listening to 200 year old music and looking at fish mosaics that were just as fresh as the day they were laid in a Roman wall. The setting (at the Milreu ruins at Estoi) was spectacular, the evening was mildly autumnal and we were at peace with the world. The only drawback was that the audience had to seat itself on the ruined walls of the surrounding Roman villa, anticipating which I’d had the foresight to take along a cushion. The rest of our party declined my offer of more cushions, a supply of which I keep in the car. [ Picture at: http://www.letterfromespargal.blogspot.com/ ]
Afterwards we retired for supper to a café where we’d parked the car and taken refreshments before the concert. There we wined and dined for the princely sum, including a generous tip, of 6 euros a head. It is for benefits like these that we live in a country with a fiendish bureaucracy, horrendous drivers and a medieval attitude towards animals.
Our week has revolved around the fortunes and misfortunes of our occasional workers, Dani and Natasha. We bumped into Dani last Saturday evening as we were setting out to dinner with friends and he was approaching Espargal on his moped to seek our assistance. After a brief exchange, we agreed to meet him in Loulé the following day, which happened to be young Alex’s first birthday. As ever, Dani’s main problem (apart from Dani himself) was the abject state of his finances. He was being threatened with eviction – yet again - for failure to pay the rent and he needed money both to recover his pawned mobile phone and to buy a third back wheel for his elderly moped, having trashed the first two.
We agreed that he should work for us the following week and that he would start at 09.00 sharp each day as a condition of employment. The fact is that Dani has a serious problem getting to work on time. It’s a failing that has cost him a number of jobs because his employers, myself included, find it exceedingly irritating.
In the event, he didn’t make it on time once. He ran out of petrol (twice, even though he gets a daily fuel allowance), he had a mechanical breakdown, he crashed his moped (covering himself in scratches), he overslept, he was stopped and fined for failure to display a licence plate, and he was chased by the police (caught and searched), possibly as part of a crackdown on burglaries in the area.
Each day he would roll up mid to late morning with another tale of woe and each day he would resolve to be prompt next time. Things could have been worse as he doesn’t have a driving licence here in Portugal. It was just his good fortune that the police didn’t demand it on either occasion that they stopped him. (They did check that he had the moped’s papers.)
Wednesday he brought Natasha on the back of the bike. She was cool and organised, as ever. I asked her why we were helping Dani to pay the rent while she was investing in expensive cameras. Surely, I suggested, her priority should be to assist Dani or they might both be on the street.
It was their agreement that Dani should pay the rent, she replied – and shrugged. That’s the way it was. We suspect that Natasha finds Dani as exasperating as we do but, unlike us, she takes no nonsense from him. She won’t even lend him money to buy cigarettes, to which he’s addicted. However, she’s paying back her camera loan as she promised and we have no grounds for complaint.
As we returned from Loulé after the Sunday meeting we encountered a hire-car with strangers at the bottom of our hill. A couple sat in the car, evidently lost. Their companions were talking to a villager but, since they didn’t have a language in common, they weren’t making much progress. So we stopped to offer our assistance.
It emerged that the group wanted to go to Alte for lunch but were seriously short of petrol. They had looked for fuel without success in nearby Benafim, which was on their route. As Benafim has a petrol station that’s open on Sundays, the problem seemed to us to be one of communication. I should add that the they all had strong South African accents and no Portuguese. Rather than describing to them how to find the petrol station, we led them there and introduced them to Gilberta, who runs it with her husband, Denis.
They were very grateful. “We cum from Sow Thefricka,” one of them told me in that unmistakable accent. “Yes, I know,” I replied in Afrikaans, to their astonishment. At this, their compliments and blessings flowed around us, to say nothing of a barrage of questions as to how we came to be in this remote part of the world. Keeping the answers to a polite minimum, we waved them farewell and returned home with all the satisfaction of people who have rescued wayfarers from a miserable fate.
On the work front, Dani has been clearing “the park”, two acres of rocky scrub that climb the hill behind the house. I’ve been assisting him and shredding tractor loads of the greenery that he’s been ripping out. I have also been assisting Jones with cleaning the boxes of grapes that we obtained from Leonhilda’s plot and sharing them out with our neighbours. Jones has been labouring away, as ever, in her garden. Her garden looks wonderful. So does the Banco’s Broadwalk right-of-way at the bottom of the garden. Neighbours wander along in the evening to seat themselves on the log seats that we have placed there.
The two inches of rain that we had last week have set our annual transformation in train. Countless millions of pinhead green dots are heaving themselves skywards and transforming into every possible variety of weed. The fields are losing their brown summer coats and cladding themselves in winter green. Thousands of small black millipedes – we used to call their big South African brothers “shangalulus” – are crawling across the roads, up the walls and down the paths. I’ve no idea where they come from or where they’re going.
This is true also for the family of wild pig that evidently wandered down a dirt road leading out of the village. We didn’t see the animals themselves. We never do. But we followed their prints, of one or two adults and a bunch of piglets, down the muddy road for hundreds of metres. We wondered whether they were watching us from just the other side of the thick green bushy fringe.
On the way back from our walks we have bumped into villagers collecting dandelions. These are apparently highly favoured by chickens. Large snails are also in evidence and will also shortly be collected for the pot. Snails are regarded here, as in France, as a delicacy.
On Friday we took an old friend of Barbara’s to lunch in Alte to mark the latter’s birthday. The dogs and I left the pair of them to chat and went to Luiz’s café for our usual coffee, baggy and fig and almond tart. There’s a cake shop in Alte that makes the best fig and almond tart in the world. The dogs always settle down under the table and glare at the cats that come along to bum a crumb from the tourists. Ono fails to see the point of having cats.
This morning we drove past Loulé and Sao Bras to the tiny village of Santa Caterina to support a fete being held on behalf of the Sao Francisco Animals’ home. We returned with a box of German knives, a stock of jams and chutneys - always useful over the Christmas period - and one or two minor garments. Such has been our week.
No comments:
Post a Comment