A little night music

It is the fall equinox, bringing with it cooler days and especially nights. When I walk across the slate courtyard of the garden apartment there is the shush shush of fallen leaves. The other night in bed I kept hearing faraway music. Uh oh, I thought. This is a symptom of an oncoming migraine for me - phantom noises that I am so sure are there I have gotten up out of bed and taken a tour of the house in the dead of night, looking for the radio left on accidentally, or a television with the volume on low, or an ipod on the counter with music sounding tinny through the attached ear buds.

The garden apartment is small so it didn’t take long to tour it for the source of the music with a bass line so familiar my brain was trying to place the song. I opened the door and stepped out into the courtyard in the mild night air and heard, very clearly, The Human League singing about working as a waitress in a cocktail bar. Don’t you want me, baby, don’t you want me OH-oooooooh.

I walked all the way down to the gate at the foot of the driveway then all the way back up Olive Tree Road to a high point that overlooks much of the main avenue that knifes through the village, but was unable to pinpoint the source of the music. Either it was the house one level below our property, its roof on the same level as the lower quinta garden, or a house up in the hills opposite the hill that our house perches on. It was hard to tell - the night was so quiet and still, the music bouncing between houses. I walked and stood around various parts of the property trying to echolocate the source but also just enjoying the night air. And, to an extent, the music, a classic 80s playlist.

Around 2:00p I sat on the darkened palaceta front steps and listened to the sound of the wind in the palms - a sound that always makes me feel like I’m in Hawaii - then headed back to the quinta. I wrote for a while and when I went to bed at 3:30a the music was still blaring outside. Our windows are so soundproof that, once inside the house, I couldn’t really hear the music so much as feel the baseline in some subterranean way. But the roof of the laundry room is (for now) both impermanent and noise-permeable, and any loud noises outside - our resident owl hooting, the roosters crowing, an occasional midnight motorcycle drag racer, and this neighbor’s music - can be heard without much effort.

Whoever and wherever the source of the music, they were surrounded by neighbors - I was definitely NOT the only one hearing that music. Ot was I? Did everyone in the village have such good soundproof windows they weren’t disturbed by the music? Was everyone a sounder sleeper than me? Was there an unspoken pact to be tolerant of the young on a Saturday night? Isn’t such music at such an hour kind of…anti-social? Maybe the person playing the music is well known around the village, nursing a wild grief. Maybe the music is played so infrequently, by a recluse, that everyone in earshot is actually relieved, even in the dead of the night, to hear evidence the person responsible is still alive and grooving.

I’m not one to make a fuss…I’d rather just take a few deep breaths and ignore it. This was a skill I acquired through much ignoring of the example my parents set for me. Whenever I’d visit my dad at their ranch house in the middle of the midwestern cornfields, one of his first responses to my “How have you been, what’s new” was the same old story, a dog three houses down that barked in the night and therefore totally owned my father. My dad would lie there at night, tense, waiting to hear it, then when it would start, he’d explode in aggravated fury. Goddammit, his voice would yell out in the dark, waking the rest of us up. Dad spent a good part of every single day, for years, complaining about the dog and the impact on his sleep and therefore his overall quality of life.

The late night music segued to the Cranberries, then Nirvana. I wondered if the unseen music lover knew his playlist featured so many artists who took their own lives. Maybe he knew it in his bones the way the Portuguese seem to be acquainted with longing. Portugal is a good place to be when you have the sads. Every view is an elegy. The past is present, everywhere. It reminds me how ephemeral it all is, even the house we are renovating was falling back into nature when we came along and stopped the process. A family lived here once; I can’t imagine how safe it must have felt, growing up among these stone walls and gates and private gardens. It must have felt as permanent as a castle. Even the koi pond acts as a kind of moat between the street and the house. It gives a feeling of not just being safe from the world, but being the world, or anyway all of it that I need.

As a kid I always assumed our house was permanently ours - it didn’t occur to me that someday we wouldn’t live there anymore, that someday someone would paint over the hashmarks penciled on the doorsill indicating our height year over year. It was reasonable to think that because no one that I knew ever went anywhere; I reconnected with friends from grades school on Facebook and some still live in their childhood homes. I knew that mom and dad had lived in another house three blocks away, and that I was born there, but that seemed unimportant - the gray shingle house at the bottom of the hill where I grew up was our forever home, a notion that became more not less certain as I went off to college, then my first job, then my marriage. In each of these stages I still called the house where I grew up home, everything else was just a place that I lived.

Our place here in Portugal was built ~115 years ago. We haven’t learned anything about the builder, though we often compliment his genius at the way the houses are arranged on the property relative to each other and the sun, the placement of the gardens and walls. The house was built the same year the monarchy fell - it seems pretty clear this house was built with monarchy-adjacent money, as it contains many of the same architectural details, inside and out, of the last King of Portugal’s residential palace in Queluz, the sister city of Belas and where our train station is located.

The house was at one time inhabited by a family that lived here in the 70s, 80s and at least part of the 90s (based on the dates I found on left-behind magazines) before losing the property to the bank, which turned out to be the real owner after all. I’m glad I didn’t know about mortgages as a kid - it would have terrified me to know a house, despite its size, was a thing that could be lost/taken. My parents never talked about money in front of us kids, but they didn’t have to take their tense whispered fights behind closed doors for us to know there was never quite enough of it. They tried to hide their worries from us, and though my heart aches for them, now, to think of it, I’m glad I didn’t know anything more about our precarity than I did.

A commenter on one of my posts accused me of wearing rose colored glasses for trying to cultivate calm in the chaos of getting a residency permit. She said it like it’s a bad thing whereas I happen to like rose colored glasses, also blue blockers - they make the world pretty to look at, always appreciated in the neverending struggle against the stasis of bureaucracy and things just not getting done here. For example today we were expecting our wifi to be installed. After having workmen out here twice but unable to complete the job, then two no shows, this time we thought it was a sure thing - they called on Friday, set the time yesterday, and then…nada. Until the end of the day when they called us to confirm that we canceled the service. What?! the h says, in that way where you sound very calm but it’s also clear you are mentally shouting. No, we did not cancel. We’ll call you back, they say. And they did, and we got a new appointment for this morning. The man showed up and said Oh this is 10G, I don’t have the right equipment. He left to get it. The h said, if he doesn’t come back I’m going to get salty with them. (addendum: he came back and finished the install! But still no wifi - something needs to be connected in Sintra. The workman says he has called it in and will call us later today to tell us when we’ll have wifi.)

The same with the oven we ordered over two months ago. It’s from Italy. Just days after placing the order the h got an email saying, Your oven is on the way. Then we got an email saying, Your oven has been delivered! But it hadn’t. Calls were made and conversations were had. The latest on the oven is that it will arrive “not before the end of September” is the best we can get out of them. So we stay calm and make sure to get twenty minutes of hen therapy each day. If you haven’t tried it, you should - just let four sixteen week old hens fall asleep on your stomach and chest. It’s remarkably soothing and lasts longer than rose-colored glasses, which only work while they are on your face.

In anticipation of three guests arriving mid-week, we ordered a bed. This will the the third time we have ordered a bed since moving here. Each time the website has said the bed was available for delivery from the Alfragide (pronounced: Ahl-frah-ZHEE-zhee) store. And each time the delivery dates were missed and then missed again and in the end did not arrive in time for our guests to use them. I hope third time’s a charm.

In other news:

• there is still no sign of my residence card! It’s been five months since the twinkly lady at the SEF told me I would have to wait a week, maybe two.

• a rooster ate all the cabbage and other new plantings. The h forgot to put the chicken wire on top of the raised beds, and Stanley said Don’t mind if I do.

• the fruit trees planted last fall are all doing well except the pomegranate tree which still looks just like a big stick in the ground.

• the h fixed the bathroom door so it actually can be closed now, and locked. As well the cracks are repaired and it’s been sanded and painted. It’s the kind of thing you don’t prioritize when it’s just the two of you but suddenly matters when five people are using the same bathroom.

• a little dog came shooting down the cottage steps and went straight for the roosters, chasing them about in the driveway. There was much indignant squawking, not the least from Alberto, who hustled down his driveway from across the street to shoo the dog off and scold the owner.

• the h and I discussed the need for a gate at the stone staircase that leads up to the four acres at the back of our property, where the owner and his dog had come from. It’s one more thing on a list that seems to grow daily - fencing the Back 40, installing posts in our driveway to prevent parkers from blocking our gate, constructing steps in the pool, replacing the koi pond water fountain motor.

• the h has made another 5 jars of fig jam for a total of 10 and the fig trees are still so full of figs it looks like none have been picked

• the yellow chair remains in the window at the store, the price still 179 euros. The h recommended I write an anonymous letter suggesting a discount to 159 euros would result in an immediate sale, but I think my foreigner’s Portuguese would give me away, and as the h carries the chair out to the car and I do a little I-got-my-chair triumphal dance, they’d be pretty sure who wrote that “anonymous” letter. I still may do it though.

• my yellow trumpet bushes were hit by snails that ate a bunch of the lower leaves but they were apparently too stuffed and fat and lazy to climb to the top of the bushes which are now experiencing a second flowering, aren’t they gorgeous?