Halfway to Africa

James Lawrence

4. MARIA OF THE HOLE

“There’s an eclipse of the sun today,” Fernando informed his wife.

“Well, I’m not waiting up to see it,” snorted Matilda. She was still bristling over the entire morning she had lost looking out for Mars.

“At 10am tomorrow the red planet will be the closest it has been to Earth for sixty thousand years,” the newscaster had promised. Sharp on the hour, having fed a grateful pig thirty minutes earlier than usual, Matilda was there, squinting into the sun, expecting a fiery red orb to sweep across the heavens; then – nothing.

“It’s all a lot of rubbish,” she spat with disdain. “And how do they know, anyway? God ordains these things, not the scientists.”

But Fernando is a man with an insatiable quest for learning. Promptly after supper he donned his plastic mack and stepped out into the rain-sodden street. He swivelled under the lamplight to outline his plan of action to his spouse on the doorstep. “I’ll head up the hill – bound to get a better view from up there.”

“If you’re going to knock around with whores I hope you’re at least wearing clean underpants!” Matilda yelled after him. The hard cobblestones returned her voice far into the cold night air. Matilda jealously guards the family reputation; it would be quite intolerable to her that some smirking strumpet should put it around that she is the kind of wife who sends her husband out in soiled under-garments.

In this village there are plenty of good reasons why a man should venture down the hill: there’s the bar, for one thing; then there’s the …. well, the bar will do for now. But all the womenfolk know that, solar eclipses notwithstanding, there is only one thing capable of motivating their man to make the strenuous climb to the next village up: Maria of the Hole.

I have been accustomed to hearing the expression “As hot as Maria of the Hole” for some years now. It can be used in a meteorological context (“Phew! What a scorcher! It’s as hot as Maria of the Hole this afternoon!”), or as a medical term, to express a feverish condition (“My God, I’m sweating like Maria of the Hole today!”). Until recently I had always assumed this was one of those charming, colourful little idioms which enrich a culture, but whose origins lie forgotten in the mists of time. Not so.

It was while I was myself convulsed by some rare and nasty little viral infection, when a female hand pressed against my brow and I heard the diagnosis: “Lord, he’s as hot as Maria of the Hole,” that I suddenly felt compelled to ask who is this Maria of the Hole? At that near-death moment I wasn’t really interested, truth be told, but it seemed the best hope of winning a respite from a lot of clucking and fussing around with aspirins and steaming glasses of Lemsip pushed under my raw-red nose.

Now, I know fever can do strange things to a man, temporarily robbing him of his critical faculties and tending to overwork his staid, Anglo-Saxon imagination. But I checked later, and I swear this account of the story of Maria of the Hole is accurate in every detail, at least as it was related to me on my sickbed.

Maria was the kind of unremarkable, sub-normal young girl you could find in any Portuguese rural household. Her family was desperately poor, and very, very tight-knit: her father and grandfather were one and the same man, which at least saved money on Christmas presents. One of the very few high points of an otherwise unrelentingly drab existence was grandmother’s death. She was not a large woman, and her old clothes were found to be only slightly too big for the pre-pubescent Maria. So, nothing there to distinguish her from most of her peers.

The first hint of her glittering future came when, as a fifteen-year-old out drowning some puppies, she was dragged off into a field by a young gallant and violated amongst the cabbages. Afraid of her father’s jealous rage – it seems the young stud was much better at it than papa ever was – she secretly returned to the same spot the next day to await the teenager’s passing.

If you think this was foolhardy, ask your local Grief Counsellor. He will back me to the hilt on this one: the only way to deal with trauma is to confront it. Thus if your leg is bitten off by a shark, the very best thing you can do is hop back into the sea the next day, otherwise you could go through life nursing a fear of man-eating sharks.

Maria must have instinctively known this, for she certainly confronted her trauma with gusto every day henceforth, endearing herself to just about every man in the village, and easing many a sensitive adolescent over the painful threshold into manhood. She also gained the gratitude of most of the village wives, relieving them, as she did, of a rather unsanitary duty.

Her experiences led Maria to broaden her horizons, and to travel: she would act as locum when the neighbouring village prostitutes were on holiday or visiting sick relatives. Inevitably, word spread, and soon fell on the ears of the saintly padre, Father Ronaldo.

In the eyes of the Church, Maria was a fallen woman, whose only hope of salvation was to confess. It was the Father’s sacred duty to hear that confession, and, no wonder, it must have taken it out of the poor man, for he could often be seen emerging from the confessional red-faced and panting. It’s reassuring to know that the village has a good shepherd who cares for his flock, in much the same way as the sheep-farmers do back in Norfolk, where I used to live.

But for all her popularity, Maria was tormented by self doubt. Was her behaviour in any way abnormal? Did all those men really mean it when they said they loved her? Did Jesus really want her to cleanse herself of sin on Father Ronaldo? After many a sleepless night, she resolved to see a Head Doctor. Her village having only a part-time pharmacist (one of her best clients), that meant going to Coimbra.

It was her first time in the big city, and the noise and bustle also alarmed Maria’s mother, Maria-José, who accompanied her. Of all the hundreds of people hurrying by, none seemed to have time to help them find the Head Doctor.

“I think there’s a fancy word for it,” said the mother. “Pisciatro. That’s it! Let’s ask this man in the shop.”

In a maelstrom of moving bodies, the man was a rock, in no apparent rush to go anywhere. Unfortunately, he turned out to be very rude.

“We’re looking for the pisciatro.” Maria-José smiled alluringly.

The man didn’t even acknowledge her, but just continued to stare straight ahead, stiffly indifferent.

“Pisciatro!” she yelled. She didn’t like to be ignored, and her patience was wearing thin. Her daughter was watching, anxious, through the shop window.

Another man emerged from the rear of the shop. He wanted to know how he could help.

“Your colleague is pig-ignorant! I asked him where the pisciatro lives and he wouldn’t even look at me!”

The man’s face blanked for a few seconds, then understanding dawned. He gently led Maria-José to the door and pointed up the street. “There’s a psychiatrist about half a kilometre in that direction, opposite a café.”

Maria-José gushed a smile of thanks, and returned to the street. The shop assistant brushed spittle off the mannequin.

After two hours of tramping the hot streets, Maria had had enough. “I think we must have walked half a kilometre by now. How far is half a kilometre, anyway?”

Her mother had to confess she didn’t know. She spotted another man, standing very still on the street corner. “Pisciatro?” she implored. The man looked at her and shook his head. “Pisciatro!” For the love of God, did no-one in The City of Learning know what a pisciatro is? The man shrugged his shoulders and pointed to a card at his feet. Had they ever been on the end of an education, they would have read: “Deaf and dumb. Please give me money for food.”

“Oh, this is a waste of time,” concluded the mother. “I heard city people are not friendly. Now, back in our village, everybody would know where the pisciatro lived, if we had one.”

“Mum, I need to go to the toilet. It’s urgent.”

“We can’t go in this café – they might expect us to buy something. Look, over the other side – that block of flats is bound to have a toilet.”

It didn’t – just a bare entrance hallway with a plaque screwed in the wall. Maria couldn’t hold on a second longer. She squatted down in the dark behind the stairs; but the tenants had thoughtlessly failed to provide toilet paper.

“We can’t go see the pisciatro now, with you smelling like that!” The mother had the keener sense of propriety.

So, downcast, they made their way back to the station. But it’s an ill wind …. at least they had a seat all to themselves on the crowded train home.

The experience was not wasted on Maria of the Hole. In her trajectory across the city, she had noticed there were many more men than in her native village, which, in short, had become too small for her. She soon returned to Coimbra to ply her trade. Of course, there amongst the teeming multitude she could not rely on the personal touch to expand the business, and she faced competition from the established professionals, so she hit on a brilliant and innovative marketing ploy: she paraded the streets with a placard hung over her neck, listing the price for each of her various services, and promising that she was never knowingly undersold. Before the gendarmerie had carted her off, an enterprising young photographer snapped the scene, and there she was, grinning out from the next edition of Diário de Coimbra. A copy of the journal found its way back to her village, and Maria was an instant celebrity!

In the end, after a long and distinguished career, she tired of the bright lights and glitz, and decided to return to her ancestral home – but not before she made the trip of a lifetime to see Lisbon Zoo. Maria had always loved animals, and would play with the litters of puppies and kittens for hours on end, before tying them in a sack and throwing them in the river. It was while standing in front of the elephant enclosure that elastic suddenly yielded to flesh and her ample knickers fell about her ankles. For any other woman this would have been an insufferable indignity, but Maria took it all in her stride and simply flicked her leg. The voluminous panties, of floral design, billowed through the air, and, witnesses swear, wafted like a purple parachute, over the heads of the fascinated spectators, over the enclosure fence, straight on to the elephant’s tusk. They swung gently a couple of times before finally coming to rest.

Now, the elephant is the true Lord of the Jungle. At his approach, the lion will have sudden and unexpected business to attend to on the other side of the street; the charging rhino will saunter off, whistling tunelessly; and the hyena will assume a po-faced, respectful demeanour; but Mother Nature has simply not equipped this magnificent beast to deal with a crisis such as this.

For a few seconds there was utter silence; nothing stirred. Five tons of pachyderm stood there, stupefied. Then he began rocking his great head from side to side, then up and down, with ever more urgency. Maria’s knickers slid and bobbed along the ivory, but, stubbornly, never over that fatefully curly point. The animal went into an awesome rage. He stomped his feet, flapped his ears and threw back his head, but those knickers clung on as if to a washing line in a gale.

Finally, the exhausted animal sunk to his knees, broken and humiliated. Nobody there present could fail to be moved to pity. They say elephants are sensitive creatures who know when they’re going to die.

Nowadays, as a grand dame, Maria of the Hole entertains few gentlemen callers, but on occasion she will come out of retirement to offer relief from tension to a select few of her own generation. She refuses any remuneration. “I want to give something back to the community which gave me so much,” she says, with commendable philanthropy. “They are the best people in all the world!”

Put it down to a temperature of 39.4ºc, but I forgot to ask why Maria of the Hole? It can wait until next time I’m ill, or I might take a stroll up the hill one day to put the question to the lady herself. Fernando tells me the stars twinkle that much brighter up there.

© James Lawrence 2005

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