Letter from Espargal: 9 of 2009

If this week has been anything, it’s been windy. Algarvian winds are not like your common-or-garden winds. They blow with a certain malicious intent. As I write, my hat is somewhere in the garden below, having been whipped off my head as I stepped on to the upstairs patio. I could have sworn that I heard a windy chuckle as it vanished. That’s typical of an Algarvian wind. What’s more, this wind comes armed with a lot of wet stuff. It chooses its moments, permitting us to walk down to the river in brilliant sunshine before soaking us on the return journey. That’s the kind of thing we’ve had to put up with.

Most days we drive around to Zeferino’s house to fetch Bobby before we begin our walk. I find it hard to stay up with Jones on these outings because she’s a fast walker and I’m still burdened with a lazy leg, courtesy of my last bout of sciatica. I'm frustrated to find myself the tail-end Charlie, not a role I’m accustomed to.

Jones finds it as difficult to slow down as I do to speed up. Fortunately, she’s always on the lookout for glittering pieces of quartzite, to adorn the crystal path that she's building in the garden, and frequently stoops to dig one out of the verge. Talk about Atalanta and the golden apples.

A large truck arrived one morning at the edge of the village with lengths of safety railing. These railings the workers set about installing along the verge of the newly-tarred road to the river. The team filled in a large hole that the recent rains had exposed in the verges and they erected a sign informing drivers that the speed limit on the new road was 40kph. We’ll be lucky. The only speed limit acknowledged by most local drivers is the speed at which their vehicles will travel with the accelerator flat against the floor.

During a break in the showers, Joao turned up with his picapau digger, as promised, to widen and level the tractor entrance to the property, just above Casa Nada. It took him an hour to demolish a couple of boulders and level the bedrock at the point where I want to erect gates. My neighbour, Fintan, has already given me two fine wrought-iron gates, which he no longer requires. Joao’s skills were impressive. I pointed out to him several of Jones’s flowers that were planted among the rocks, and asked him to do his best to avoid them. And he harmed not a single one – although Jones did complain that the rocks he shoved to one side had landed on a desirable weed.

In spite of these trying conditions, we have kept ourselves industriously occupied. One of our occupations has been to press on with our efforts to register the Casa Nada.
CASA NADA

When we bought the property nearly a decade ago, Casa Nada was a roofless old house whose floor was thick with the weeds of ages. The people who built the house and lived in it had never registered it, presumably to avoid paying taxes on it.
So as far as the Portuguese authorities were concerned, it didn’t exist. That’s as much as I can state with authority.

WAITING AT THE FINANCAS

The rest I write with caution because I now venture into the murky world of Portuguese bureaucracy. To exist in Portugal a building must have a triple presence – at the Financas (which tax it), at the council (which approves construction and supplies services to it) and at the Registry of Titles (which keeps track of the owners). The building doesn’t actually to have exist in fact because the bureaucratic world invests a parallel paper (now cyber) universe.

The easy part in registering a former ruin, such as ours, is with the Financas, who are delighted to be able to tax it. (The Financas are pleased to tax anything!) The hard part is getting it recognised by the council and accepted by the registry. Last summer, after much form-filling, oath-swearing and document-submitting, we thought we had it cracked. With the help of a local agent, we updated all the relevant documents, submitted them for approval and awaited confirmation that all was in order.

This approval never came. We are led to understand that the documents vanished into a bureaucratic black hole. Matters came to a head on Wednesday morning when I met the agent to sign a new sheaf of papers that she undertook to complete and resubmit. Stay tuned.

After signing the papers, I dropped around at Natasha’s flat to give her our old vacuum cleaner. Natasha, who’s not backward in coming forward, had seen that we were making little use of it and wondered if she might have it. Afterwards, she returned with me to upload several hundred pictures, mostly of herself and her son, Alex, from my computer to the internet, so that her family and friends could enjoy them. Natasha normally makes use of the computers at the public library but she had no way of transferring her pictures to them – so I made an exception and allowed her to use mine for the purpose.


I’d suggested to her that she should use the free picture facility (PicasaWeb) provided by Google. As I wasn’t familiar with the site, I fiddled around sufficiently to able to show Natasha the basics. She instantly discovered a faster way of doing things (this in English, her 3^rd language) and had all 430 pictures in place by the time we set out a couple of hours later for the bus-stop on the main road, five minutes away at Alto Fica.

As often happens, we stopped at the Madrugada (Daybreak) Café, beside the bus-stop for a coffee and baggy, as well as a chat with Natilia, the owner. Natilia’s a widow in her sixties. She spent a decade or more in Canada, where much of her family still live. She’s says she’s forgotten most of her English but she understands it well enough when she needs to. We speak to her in Portuguese. Seven days a week, Natilia opens Madraguda’s doors at 7.30 and closes them when the last patrons leave. As usual during the winter months, we found her seated with the locals in a semi-circle around the wood fire at the far end of the room.

The café occupies the site of an old dance-hall and, like many such establishments, doubles as an informal social centre where people go to converse, play cards and pass the time.
NATILIA

Natilia, like her sister, Fernanda, was clad in black. It’s a garb some older widows adopt permanently after the death of their husbands. In her case, Natilia said, it was to mark the recent death of her mother, aged 93. There was no rule about how long one should wear mourning dress, she told us. She would continue for some months until she felt comfortable about resuming normal dress.

THE FORD

There was great excitement one morning when Jones returned home with the dogs after a short outing while I was putting the finishing touches to my English lesson. The dogs nosed their way in through the front door to find an intruder in the kitchen, the Squaller - one of the numerous black cats that bum a living around the village. The Squaller looks to me very much like two of our official felines,

DOG WITH OFFICIAL CAT

with which the canines get on fine. But the dogs knew him instantly for an impostor.

From upstairs I heard a shriek from Jones, an outburst of barks and a skidding of paws on the tiles. With Jones’s assistance, the Squaller made it to safety, leaving a very bad smell and three outraged dogs in his wake. While Jones tried to mop up the smell, I gave the hounds a finger-wagging talking-to, followed by a discreet biscuit. I’ve nothing against the Squaller but we’ve enough inside cats already – plus he never fails to spray during his thieving visits to the patio.

Before retiring inside the house and lighting a fire this evening, we went looking in the garden for my wind-swept hat. There was no sign of it there, nor in the park beyond, nor the adjacent field. Jones eventually spotted it clasped in the branches of a wild olive tree. I was glad to get it back. It’s my working Tilley and I’m very fond of it.