It is an event for which the village spent much of the week preparing. (The statue normally stands in the shrine at Fatima where Mary is believed by the faithful to have appeared several times to three young Portuguese shepherd children in 1917.) In anticipation of the visit the school exterior was repainted before being decked in flowers and palm fronds. Houses along the route were similarly decorated. So were public taps, culverts and even road-side rubbish bins. Gates were hung with flowers.
Several pigeons were crammed into a small cage, to be released at the appropriate moment. Jones indignantly asked the man bearing the cage whether the birds had been fed and watered. He wasn’t sure. Whatever the case, I don't doubt that they survived the experience.
We asked ourselves for whose benefit this was all being done. Clearly, it wasn’t for the sake of the statue. Possibly it was what the statue represented, or maybe that’s how people always prepare for a festival. Whatever the case, we all had the sense that a special honour was being bestowed on the village.Dozens of estrangeiros, including all our neighbours, turned out for the procession among the hundreds of Portuguese. For many of us, belief didn’t come into it.
Our motives, I think, were somewhere between respectful curiosity and the wish to be part of a fascinating local event. The gathering point was the pavement outside the twin cafes at Alto Fica, two kms from the village. Having left the protesting dogs howling at the front door, I drove down with Jones, giving a lift to our Dutch neighbours (who later supplied some of the pictures) en route. They planned to join the procession while I drove back to Espargal to meet them.
We arrived ahead of the crowds, and refreshed ourselves, as night fell, at the Star of the Morning café. Old Chico and Mad Dina were already seated in the café; she made the sign of the cross several times to indicate her sense of the occasion. The parish priest introduced himself to us, a charming young fellow, who said he had five congregations to look after and had told his bishop that he needed a helicopter.
Candles for the procession were on sale from a car boot for those who hadn’t obtained them in advance from the parish office. Each candle had a plastic cup fixed to it to protect the flame from the wind – not that this protection was really needed for there was hardly a breeze. More candles twinkled inside hundreds of 5-litre plastic bottles that lined the route, and yet more flickered on patios and small shrines.The crowd gathered in two long lines ahead of the statue and moved off towards the village, reciting the rosary and singing hymns.“She” was borne aloft on the shoulders of the litter bearers.
The walk took about 45 minutes. When the procession reached the old school, the faithful gathered in the grounds for a brief service. We looked on from a neighbouring house that belonged to one of the expats. Then “she” was placed on the back of a pickup, to travel back to the church. We returned home to reflect on the occasion and offer consoling treats to our outraged dogs – they hate being left behind.
During supper at the Hamburgo a couple a nights later, we were astonished to see what appeared to be the statue standing on the icecream refrigerator. For a moment I thought that it had been placed there for safekeeping while its guardians took supper. But Graca, the cook (and wife of the proprietor), confessed that the statue was hers and that she was merely taking the opportunity to display it.Saturday: I had intended to get this off on Friday morning but events intervened. As we returned home from our morning walk via the running field just below the house, we bumped into a Portuguese couple who were pruning their trees. A forest of branches lay about. We fell into conversation, during the course of which we were offered the wood cuttings which, they said, would otherwise be burned. The stuff was too good to waste. The upshot was that a neighbour, Olly, and I spent the better part of the day chain-sawing the branches into handy sizes. We got two large tractor loads. Jones worked beside us with the big shears, preparing piles of kindling.
Like most folk around here, we light a fire in the house each evening to take the chill out of the air. The cast-iron salamandra in the centre of the lounge, with its long chimney pipe, is wonderfully efficient and brings the whole house to a comfortable temperature within a few minutes. Our days continue picture perfect, gentle sunshine under cloudless blue skies. It’s ideal weather for tourists but not for farmers. Our beans and peas will soon be shrivelling up in the fields. We have started watering the garden again. Each day we look anxiously at the ten-day forecast for signs of rain and each day we’re disappointed.This morning we walked 45 minutes down the gravel road (being widened and soon to be tarred) to the Algibre river bed at the bottom of the valley. It was as dry as a bone.
There wasn’t a drop of water in the wide gravel bed. We walked up to the low dam wall that the farmers of old erected to hold their irrigation water. That too was completely dry. We are fortunate that the boreholes in the valley still give us an adequate supply. For drinking water, some villagers still turn to the old hand-pump beside the well.
Midweek we made a visit to the Griffin bookshop in Almancil to get some new reading matter. While there was masses of popular fiction on display – clearly the preferred reading of the retired expat class – their non-fiction shelves were thinly populated. Even so, I returned with half a dozen volumes that should take me the next several months to wade through. I have been reduced for the past month to John Ayto’s splendid “Word Origins” which, while fascinating in parts – try “blimp” or “bonfire” – is thicker than potato soup. I generally manage a page a night and am barely halfway through the “b”s.
Our big puppy, Raymond, is having an affair with Braveheart, one of the black cats. Braveheart deliberately takes up station beside the dog in the evening and endures several minutes of intimate nuzzling before calling a halt to proceedings. The cat often settles himself in the dog’s basket, leaving Raymond with just his rear in the basket and the rest of him sprawled across the floor. It’s quite touching. The other cats remain distrustful of the dog and continue to give him a wide berth.
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