Halfway To Africa

James Lawrence

2. THE LUNCHEON PARTY

Call him Fernando. I’ve changed his name only to protect the innocent – me. It’s not him I’m afraid of, it’s his wife (who, for the purposes of this tale, will be known as Matilda). She juggles gas bottles and bites heads off chickens. She once took the full discharge from a neighbour’s twelve-bore when he mistook her behind for a large crow in the corn, and prized out the shot one-by-one with only a rusty penknife and a bottle of home-made aguardente in front of a shaving mirror. They are the sanest and most civilised of my neighbours in this village – decent, God-fearing people, salt of the earth. Years ago, Matilda’s father was the most respected of all the village elders, having alerted the others to the presence of a witch amongst them – he saw her, with his own eyes, change into a black chicken. You don’t get better pedigree than that.

Fernando is not from these parts, but he is the most hospitable of men. I promise you, if you happen past his home one day (you’ll easily spot it – it’s the one with the yuppy new corrugated tin roof), you will find him squatted on the front step, or, in winter, sat in his new turbo-tractor – and you will almost certainly be invited in for lunch. I know, it’s happened to me – many times.

By the way, if you do ever find yourself at a Portuguese table, here’s a useful tip: don’t just say “marvellous!” like you used to at all those dinner parties back in Esher. No, you must writhe about on your back with your legs in the air, foaming at the mouth, in a state of orgasmic ecstasy. This you must do with the first mouthful, and again at the end. Anything less is taken as a slight on their kitchen. Trust me – you won’t embarrass yourself.

“This pork is just ….” I cast around for the right word… “Marvilhoso!” You can take the man out of Esher, but can you take Esher out of the man?

“It should be – it was killed only this morning,” said Matilda with a toothsome grin. (That’s to say, she bared her single, walrus tusk.)

“It wasn’t that friendly little grunter I was speaking to ….” Matilda’s nod answered my question before I could finish it. Chewing thoughtfully, I spooned out a couple of more potatoes onto my plate. “Did you kill him yourself?” I asked. I was trying hard to be matter-of-fact.

Matilda shook her head and grimaced squeamishly. “No, it was Cousin Carlos. He’s a specialist – everybody goes to him.”

“I hope it was quick?”

“No, he made an awful mess of it. Actually, he always does. The poor animal was running around, squealing, with his throat cut. There was blood everywhere – barely enough left for the gravy.”

I heaped my plate with cabbage.

“His knife isn’t sharp enough.” Fernando shared his insight on the incident.

“Do help yourself to more pork, Senhor Jaime,” exhorted Matilda.

“I’m quite full already,” I lied, illustrating the point by allowing my normally washboard stomach to slump over my trouser belt.

I wondered if I’d caused offence, because at that moment Fernando suddenly took his leave, before we’d even got to the climactic rite of appreciation, and forsaking rice pudding.

“He likes to go for a drive at this time every day,” explained Matilda. “The strange thing is, he can’t remember where he’s been. I think it’s to do with his medication.”

“Or maybe he has a bit on the side!” I quipped. Everybody laughed – oh, that English sense of humour. Fernando is so fat he can’t squeeze into the shower and his wife has to hose him down in the yard.

About a week later I was pleased to accept an invitation to another luncheon engagement, this time from Matilda. I went along clutching a bottle of Fanta Orange, having been advised that Fernando was still being dried out after having overturned his tractor (happily, he was spared injury through being fast asleep), then backing into a neighbour’s barn by mistake, flattening two goats.

I sensed immediately a sombre tension in the air, as if I’d entered a courtroom where a man was on trial for his life.

“The mystery is revealed,” Matilda opened for the Prosecution, even as she flourished the knife over the rabbit I had cuddled the day before. “Fernando has been seeing another woman all this time. The whore has got all our money. He even sold the tractor. She was catering to the needs of the padre at the same time, and he’s eighty-three, God bless his soul!”

I looked to Fernando with new respect – so, he was getting dessert elsewhere, after all. And who was I to condemn him? At least he’d taken steps to see that his wife had company while he was only taking this woman to the café – nothing more than that, honest – and that showed sensitivity on his part. But he sat, head down, shoulders slumped, in the dock, exercising the right of the accused to remain silent.

“At least without the tractor he can’t see her any more,” I pointed out. I always like to put a gloss on things – it’s just my upbeat nature. I am the oil on troubled water, the voice of reason. I sometimes wonder if I should have been a lawyer. Or maybe, these days, a Grief Counsellor.

Matilda was too emotional to factor in such practical considerations (or perhaps it was because he’d somehow already acquired a new tractor). In a voice quivering with pent-up indignation, she wailed: “I don’t understand it – he hasn’t got it up for me for four years!”

Even in her understandably distraught state, Matilda didn’t neglect her duties as host. She handed me a paper serviette to dab my eyes.

“Sorry, wine went down wrong way,” I explained.

The worldly reader will know that in such circumstances the cuckolded wife will pour her venom over the other woman, rather than errant husband – regardless of culture, women all know that men are pathetically powerless to resist these harpies, so there’s simply no point in holding them responsible. Matilda was no exception.

“I still think it’s down to the pills he’s taking,” she relented. She threw a tender glance to her wayward spouse. “And I’m sure they’re causing his constipation as well. He hasn’t been for eight days now.”

Fernando nodded confirmation that this was indeed so. At last he was the object of the sympathy that was his due. “None of the laxatives has had any effect,” he bemoaned. “Now I’m trying this.” He held up a length of thin tubing for the gathering to inspect. “I can’t reach round, so Matilda has to insert it. But it was only a partial success. I wish we had a hot water tap.”

“Teresa, pour Senhor Jaime a glass of water,” Matilda ordered her niece.

“Sorry, I choked on that black pudding,” I apologised again. “It really is … marvellous, though.”

Fernando asked permission to get down from table to go outside for a smoke, which was granted on condition that I accompanied him to prevent his escape. He was still brandishing his tube, and it came to me this was his defence, a physical reminder of his exculpation and forgiveness. A man must have his dignity, or he is nothing.

“I’ve had a run of bad luck lately,” he confided to me, man-to-man, once outside. I cocked a disbelieving eyebrow. He continued: “I went to consult a witch yesterday, to see if she could make things better. I paid her thirty euros, and on the way home I got stopped by the police for going through a red light – fined sixty euros. You know, I’m beginning to think maybe she ripped me off.”

Through misted lenses, Fernando looked at me anew. He had long held it to be a truism that Englishmen are cold and aloof; jeering cynics who find the misfortunes of others, however tragic, hysterically funny. Yet though I was trying in vain to hide it, he could plainly see that I’d been moved by his words – my eyes were filling with tears, my upper lip trembling from the struggle to hold down my inner anguish. So, it wasn’t true, what he’d heard; underneath that ‘hard man’ veneer, the English lack not the milk of human kindness.

I’m proud to say that since then I have become Fernando’s friend and trusted confidant. He always scampers along to my house when he is let off the leash, and over Fanta laced with red wine we will sit and chat long into the summer evenings about guy things: potatoes, tractors, digital watches. And with improved technique (Matilda has learned to work the tube more rigorously, and he can now take the jet of cold water at full pressure), he has cracked his constipation problem.

James Lawrence is based in Central Portugal. He can be contacted on traduz@mail.telepac.pt

Visit James' websites at www.portugalhols.com and www.portugalpropertydirect.com