Halfway to Africa

James Lawrence

5. NUTFEST

It is well documented that the first word uttered by most babies in these parts is ‘batatas’. A local doctor confided to me that this is also most routinely the last word ever spoken – an emotional deathbed valediction. So it comes as a surprise to learn that the ubiquitous potato does not occupy the loftiest plinth in the pantheon of garden produce; no, it must bow its head and shuffle to its place beneath the undisputed heavyweight champion of the vegetable plot, the most regal of all the legumes – the cabbage.

As my illustrious colleague Jayne Ribeiro has already discussed, we are not talking here of the humble affair commonly found squatting in the commons and gardens of northern Europe. Any reader who has had one thud at his feet like a cannonball launched over the fence by a thoughtful neighbour will know: in Portugal the cabbage soars majestically on its stalk, like a tree, towering over its meaner rivals, even well above the head of its proud keeper. And much pride there is. Men like to boast and swagger about the size of their stems, and are extraordinarily sensitive to the charge that theirs is smaller than average. That is why it is commonplace to cultivate these behemoths in the front garden rather than alongside the rusting fridge and oil drums at the back – so that passers-by may stop to marvel and revere. It is impossible to overstate the significance of the tree cabbage to the rural folk of this country. As potent symbols go, it comes a close second only to the Crucifix itself. Indeed, I think it likely that some of them believe that Our Lord and Redeemer was actually crucified on a cabbage. (And if you study very closely da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’, can you make out what Christ and His disciples are tucking into?)

In this village stands a house along whose wall has been painted a horizontal line, of the like which marks a flood level in Britain. In fact I did at first wonder if this was its purpose – alarming, as we are some three hundred metres above sea level. But an informative neighbour put me at my ease: the house had belonged to Afonso, now sadly deceased, who, in his time, was the Mohammed Ali of the world of the cabbage. This line, not far short of the upper windows (it would have been so easy to just reach out and pluck a leaf), was testimony to his greatest triumph: the only cabbage in this area ever to have surpassed the magic three-metre psychological barrier. It was the talk of every café within a ten-kilometre radius, and threw down the gauntlet to his competitors – a gauntlet which, to this date, has never been picked up.

But the festa about which I want to tell you was not dedicated to the cabbage, potato, nor, indeed to any other vegetable; no, a tiny nut lies at the heart of this tale. Lacking the solemnity and gravitas of the cabbage, the amiable walnut occasions the Portuguese villager to let down his hair, cast care to the wind and kick a leg in the air. It’s time to party.

Yet there’s no getting away from The King: proceedings begin with the charming custom of throwing the cabbage. A gaggle of women wanders about the village throwing a modest-sized specimen from one to the other. If they should drop it, ill fortune will surely ensue, which is why they keep very close to each other; not close enough: as I took out my wallet, one looked up and missed her catch.

Everybody seemed to have brought a sack full of nuts, with the intention to sell to everybody else. Business was not brisk. Matilda was not having much more success with her unique homemade hair tonic.

“It does work!” she assured me. “That’s why Fernando still has more hair than you, even though he’s much older.”

With this line of sales patter, how could I say no? “What’s it made of?” I asked as I handed over a five-euro note.

“It’s made by boiling flies in a pan on the cooker. Sorry, Senhor Jaime: I don’t seem to have any change.”

Trying hard not to think about the lunch I’d eaten yesterday chez Matilda, I piped up: “And where is Senhor Fernando today? I don’t see him here.”

She shook her head sadly. “He’s not very well – turned the tractor over twice yesterday. I don’t know how he does it – the land is completely flat.” She lowered her voice in the manner to share a confidence. “He has problems here.” She stabbed a finger at her brow.

I quickly arranged my features into an expression of stunned incredulity. “No! I’m very sorry to hear that.” She made me promise this revelation would go no further.

I next came upon Arsenio, who, as usual, pretended he hadn’t noticed me until I caught his eye, whereupon he affected joyous kinship and warmth. Both of us try to pretend we never fell out over the stream he diverted to his terrace with a single walnut tree on it from its natural course through my land leaving me without water for three days and turning his land into a swamp to the extent that the supporting wall collapsed taking the tree with it. “If God had meant us to cultivate flowers, He’d have made them edible,” was his raison de guerre. He is not unique, nor even unusual, in his deeply held conviction that God gave us streams a) to water our potatoes; b) to throw our rubbish in. He relented only when Matilda pointed out I did cultivate vegetables and fruit trees, as well as flowers. He commissioned his wife to make peace with a jar of homemade honey.

“Fine nuts you’ve got there,” I greeted him. “I guess it pays to water well.” I can be as droll as hell, sometimes.

“Yes, and they’re much easier to pick when the tree is on the ground,” he acknowledged. If he was trying to match me for irony, he didn’t show it.

“Your honey was excellent,” I congratulated him.

He blushed modestly and waved towards a cluster of medicine bottles and jam jars on the cobblestones. “Well, you can buy some more, if you like – for your English friends.”

There was no going back. “How much?” I asked.

“Two euros fifty.”

The man was being reasonable, and not trying to rip-off the foreigner, as I’ve heard the Portuguese sometimes do. I could take the honey back to England and let the folks think I’d made it, so they could see I’d fully integrated and was living a wholesome life, close to nature.

“OK, I’ll take all ten jars,” I proposed.

He nearly dropped his plastic bag in his excitement. He mumbled some figures to suggest he was performing lightning-quick mental calculations. “That’s fifty euros,” he concluded.

“Er, no, Senhor Arsenio: I think you’ll find ten at two-fifty makes twenty-five.”

He shook his head. “Não, senhor!”. He held up a stubby finger in turn. “One is two-fifty; two is five euros; three is seven-fifty; four is …. twelve-fifty.” All ten fingers sprang out. “So ten is fifty.”

I smiled in such a way as to imply: “Look, I know this is difficult, but let’s work through it together.”

“It’s very easy to multiply by ten,” I said. “You just add a zero.”

He looked at me as if I’d just read him Quantum Theory. I turned to Matilda for help, but she was jabbing a finger to her brow, talking on the mobile phone. It was Arsenio who snared a bystander.

Senhor Jorge is a kindly-faced, bespectacled man of around sixty, with a desk job in the Tax Office and, having stayed on at school until he was thirteen, one of few with a higher education. He is used to being called upon to arbitrate in such disputes. On having the conundrum explained to him, he stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Now, let’s see,” he began. “Two-fifty is five hundred scoods, more or less. Times ten makes …. five thousand. Five thousand scoods is about … yes, the Englishman is right – it’s around twenty-five euros, although not exactly, because there are slightly more than two hundred scoods to the euro. If I had a calculator I could work it out precisely, but it’s near enough.” He beamed at us benignly, his wig at a jaunty angle, as befits a festive occasion.

It was then I recklessly almost snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. “Actually, it’s exactly twenty-five. Ten times two-fifty is always twenty-five. Has been since Adam sat his Eleven-plus.” I hate that little pedant inside of me, the one that always has to win an argument.

Jorge and Arsenio looked at each other. “You still have the pound in England, is that not so?” Jorge’s question dripped implication.

“Y-e-e-s.”

Their knowing nods spoke for them. “There you have it! The foreigner doesn’t understand our currency.”

Arsenio took heart. “Something doesn’t feel right here. Twenty five just doesn’t seem enough. I’m not a wealthy man, and …..”

Suddenly I felt an urgent need for a quiet lie-down in a darkened room. But after a reassuring hand on his arm and whisper in his ear from Jorge, Arsenio yielded. With that air of weary self-sacrifice borne by people who know they have right on their side but value peace over justice, he grumbled: “Oh, all right: I’ll take twenty-five, but I’m losing money. That’s why we Portuguese are so poor and the English so rich. We do all the work and they come along and rob us …”

A rheumatic hand pounced like a starving rattlesnake on a gerbil, and my thirty euros was gone. The old man rummaged through his pockets looking for change, but signalled with a perplexed frown that he was damned if he could find any.

I then chanced upon Mario, the swimming pool man who also has a lingerie shop.

“This has saved me a call,” I said, mentally prodding his chest. “I’ve waited weeks already for the cover, and I did say it was urgent. You said it would take only a few days, and promised to call me back three times. I’ve just arranged it somewhere else, so you can forget it.”

“Just as well I never ordered it, then, isn’t it?” he sneered. There was a gleam of triumph in his eye. He’d been vindicated in doing flat nothing – exactly as he’d expected he would be.

Until that moment, the loudspeakers had been assaulting the ear, as they had been day and night for forty-eight very long hours previously, with traditional Portuguese ditties, which modestly spurn the ostentatious heights and depths of the musical scale, but at least are mostly not offensive to the ear, interspersed with the odd heart-wrenching ‘Woe is me, my donkey is dead” Fado-type misery. Suddenly we were brought bang up to date with a moving rendition of ‘Twenty-four Hours to Tulsa.”

I froze: I was only metres away from a couple standing forlornly, blinking and silent, by a sack of unsold walnuts. Her hard-bitten, tight-mouthed features, with that yellow complexion which betrays decades of tobacco abuse, glared around her, defying anyone to approach. His red and peeling scalp sat atop a bespectacled face of almost bovine stupidity. Over his ample belly stretched a C & A chequered half-sleeve shirt, which almost hid a pair of shorts bordering on the indecent. From there, startlingly white, hairless legs led to a pair of black socks and Jesus sandals, thus completing the ensemble.

Call it sixth sense if you will, but I knew they were English. The Master Race was here! I felt hemmed in already, and looked for an escape route. “They won’t spot me,” I comforted myself. “I’ve learned to blend in.”

I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Excuse me, you wouldn’t be English, would you?”

I immediately regretted admitting I was.

“I was right, Fay!” The grinning, beery features of this fifty-something rotated back towards me: “Funny how we can always tell, innit? He held out a podgy hand. “Name’s Alf. ‘Ere, ‘elp yourself to this nosh they’ve laid on. It’s not bad, and it’s all on the ‘ouse. What brings you to this part of the world?”

“Just passing through.”

“And I’d keep it that way if I was you,” he counselled confidentially, dropping a vol-au-vent into a plastic bag. “Two years we’ve lived here. Worst two years of our lives.” He folded a wad of sliced ham into a paper napkin and slid it into the plastic bag.

“Oh?”

Encouraged by my evident interest, Alf continued, lowering his voice: “It’s the Portuguese – they’re so stupid. Aren’t they, doll?”

His wife’s pinched, mean features formed into a sneer. “And rude,” she added, carefully wrapping a clutch of boiled eggs.

“They couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery – scuse my French. Actually, come to think of it, that’s probably the one thing they could organise. They’re scroungers and thieves, every last one of them. Oi, Manuel!” A startled adolescent looked up. Alf pointed to an empty plate. “Volly-vonts!”

The lad shrugged his shoulders. Alf turned to me again. “See what I mean? They just cannot organise!”

“Did you put any rolls in the bag, Alf?” asked Fay.

“Not yet, doll.”

“Better grab a few now, then, before they disappear as well,” she recommended acidly.

“Consider it done, Mrs Witt!” He winked at me as if to say: “Best to humour them, isn’t it?”

“And don’t forget the butter, like you always do!”

“It’ll melt long before lunchtime!”

“Then spread it on the bread now, stupid!” She rolled her eyes to heaven. Men!

Alf resumed his man-to-man talk. “I think the mosquitos must be smarter than the Portuguese. The estate agent who sold us the house told us they’re not a big problem here, but when my son Richard came to visit last summer he got eaten alive! Ruined his holiday. All right, he left the bedroom window open and the light on all evening, but even so! Now in Britain I could have sued that bloody agent. And another thing I’d like to sue him for: he told us we’d sell our nuts at the fair, n-o-o problem. Wanna know how many we sold? Not a f------ one! Scuse my French again. And he talked us into buying eight f------ acres of walnut trees!”

His face reminded me of a baby’s – all puckered up, ready to scream. I badly wanted to punch it – hard.

“No, don’t get me wrong,” cautioned Alf, rummaging through the fruit for un-bruised apples. “England has its problems. I mean, one of the reasons we left is because of all these asylum-speakers pouring in. They don’t even bother to integrate or learn the language, but they know every damn trick in the book. They go straight to the front of the queue for everything. It can’t be right, can it? I heard of one Ukrainian who was given a new van, so he could do his work. And some Polish family got given a house, just because they had nine kids.”

“Yeah, while our own people have to wait for years,” a bitter Mrs Witt reminded him, as she harvested miniature cheeses.

“Like you did for your operation, wasn’t it, doll? Yeah, that was the final straw for me. Fay had … women’s problems, like, and had to wait nearly seven months for an operation. But the worst thing for me, as her husband – the doctors were all black.” Alf swallowed hard against rising emotions. “I had to … look, I’m in no way, shape or form a racist, but when I saw those black scum looking at my wife … my wife …” His wife tightened her mouth and assumed the mien of a woman bearing with dignity and fortitude the insults heaped upon her by an undeserving world. “Well, that’s when we knew we had to get out of there,” concluded Alf, decisively.

The thin and suffering Mrs Witt nodded and added a footnote: “My father fought in the war to keep foreigners out of the country.”

“Which side was he on?” I would have liked to have asked, but instead prompted hopefully: “So, are you going back to England?”

“No way! We’re going down the Algarve. At least they speak English there. But don’t worry: there’s a lot more Brits on the way. So if you do decide to live ‘ere, you won’t be lonely for long!”

Out of the tinny loudspeakers crooned the voice of someone who was not Frank Sinatra, imploring: “Fly me to the Moon!”

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