In Beautiful
I was born in a beautiful village, and in a beautiful village I’ll die…
I was born in a beautiful village - literally, my hometown Belleville translates from the French to beautiful village. And now I live in Portugal in a village of about the same size as my hometown, and it is called Belas which as it happens translates from the Portuguese to also mean… beautiful. Both villages have a central feature of a memorial fountain - in Belleville, memorializing veterans of WWII, in Belas, memorializing the Carnation Revolution. . Such a novelistic symmetry is rarely granted to anyone in this life, much less to a writer. No wonder it has lodged in my brain.
When we were first deciding to move here, there was a critical moment. We had the down payment for the property - a large check that put out a heat and vibration from the h’s pocket as we had some afternoon coffees at one of the cafes in Commercial Square in central Lisbon. The h had to tell me to quit staring at his pocket.
From the cafe we went to see the property for the first and only time - we’d had a video tour, the real estate agent gamely picking his way through brambles and over broken glass, iPhone held aloft, roosters casually pecking about in the background. We could see almost nothing on the inside of the structures, all of them had wooden shutters nailed close, some with metal bars in place.
So all the water damage from holes in the roof and windows that had fallen out of their rotted wood casements to let the torrential winter rains inside were hidden from our sight until we had our walkthrough. I found the amount of damage traumatizing but the h, who grew up rehabilitating hotels and motels that had run to seed, merely shrugged. All fixable, he said. No problem.
We walked the neighborhood and found the h’s name spray painted on a nearby building in three foot green letters. His name is a common slang for marijuana here - well, everywhere, but here it’s a favorite subject for graffiti, which is everywhere in Portugal.
On the house itself - the main dwelling we call the palaceta - we found not the h’s nickname but mine. The house and the nest of the little one, it reads. For years in college my teammates called me Little One instead of by my name - even Coach. At barely one hundred pounds and five foot three I was among the smallest players in NCAA Division 1 softball, and I was without question the littlest pitcher - with the biggest strikeout record to boot.
Sitting in the conference room of the real estate company, the buyer and half a dozen well-dressed professionals there to begin the closing process, I found myself so stressed I was. unable to speak. The h asked for a private room and we held hands. I remember how big the whites of his eyes looked. Are we doing this? we asked each other. I think we were both on the verge of hysteria. I could sense the people in the other room trying to control their consternation at such last minute signs of cold feet.
Were we really going to buy this house in a beautiful village, with our names emblazoned all over the house and the village? We were! Sometimes the signs demand to not be ignored.
We hit the ground running and never looked back. The amount of cleanup was tremendous. It was months before we could safely step foot in all the rooms of all the buildings on the property. We lived for many months without electricity or plumbing, sweating through hot days of 95 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and cold days of 45 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter. It rained on us inside and out until we could address some of the bigger leaks and broken windows.
For nearly a year we walked 20 minutes to the laundromat with our dirty wash in backpacks - in the winter enjoying the warmth of the dryer-heated clothes against our backs on the way home, in summer cursing it.
We’ve never regretted the decision. We have awesome neighbors who help us as needed navigating some of the thornier aspects of not speaking the language well and needing services like electricity which have not been in play on the property for many decades.
Our neighbor Alberto is a daily fixture in our lives. Although he is not actually a neighbor - he lives the next town over with his wife while his farm - a “retirement “ project - is across the street, land that he rents and has cultivated into a utopia of flowers, vegetables, chestnut and walnut and fruit trees, cabbage and potatoes - whatever you can think of, he grows a lot of it, and well. We are regularly gifted with fresh produce plus seedlings and germinating trees and bushes - by spring our property will be vibrant with pink Naked Ladies and yellow St. John’s Wort and trumpet flowers, blue Nile lilies and the elegant white faces of Calla lilies and leggy red geraniums. In spring I give you lavender, he promises.
Already our raised beds are stuffed with garlic, onions, lettuce and radishes, with mounds of potatoes and beans climbing their poles like a fairy tale I fell into sideways.
When Alberto’s car didn’t appear for a week I became worried - did his endoscopy results come back? Was it bad news? I texted him, espero que voce esta bem. A day later he texted back, my wife has been sick so I am taking care of her, I’ll be in Belas tomorrow. He wrote his message in Portuguese, of course; Apple translates messages within the app, so that what I read was “Hello, good afternoon, I haven't been in beautiful because my wife has been sick but now I'm in beautiful! Is everything okay with you?”
In beautiful, of course, is the translation of in Belas. How poetic it sounds translated. The message rattles around in my head as I walked Jake through the village. There are more people out and about during the middle of the day than usual - people are on Christmas holiday already. Jake rushed into the tiny churrasqueria to greet his new old friends Carlos and Elaina, the proprietors, then stuck his head in the door of the butcher next door, giving out a companionable woof when he spotted the butcher’s wife, who adores him. None of them speak English and my Portuguese is far from adequate but we are all Jakebrothers, fluent in the language of Jake.
When Jake stopped to do his business the sidewalk was narrow. I commanded him to stay while I bagged it up. A woman and her two little girls stepped around us easily enough, but the girls shrank away when they spotted Jake sitting placidly in their way. I didn’t blame them; he was nearly as tall as the littlest one, who was maybe six and dressed from head to toe in shades of pink. Her sister, maybe eight and in dark blue, took her hand and they continued down the walk with nervous glances behind them.
Desculpe, boa tarde, ele e amigavel, (he is friendly) I reassured the mom bringing up the rear, who smiled and repeated my message to her daughters, who looked back with doubtful faces.
We fell in behind them, the little girl snapping glances back at Jake, who wagged each time. The third time she smiled and began to skip, as if proclaiming to all, I could pet that dog if I want (though not quite daring to). As she skipped down the walk, a flock a bright green parrots flew squawking overhead to perch in the tall trees that border the Queen’s land. The sun was bright and warm and welcome after a spate of unusually cold and windy days.
Then it was past the vet where Jake darted ahead of me to get through the door before I could pull him away - he always wants to stop in and sit before the giant bin of dog biscuits, waiting for someone to notice him. Today I allowed it, having a surprise - I bought a fleecey dog bed in bright Christmas red. The vet rang us up, giving Jake a few treats plus a take home bag of biscuits. Jake pranced all the way, occasionally tugging at the bed tucked under my arm. He always knows what is his. Though he is twelve with a whitening muzzle and eyebrows he shows an undiminished joy in receiving and tearing apart stuffed toys.
As we walked up the driveway I spied Alberto delivering a basket of beans and bright orange clementines, part of his winter harvest. He waved cheerily.
The poem that has been circling my mind since reading Alberto’s text message (I am in beautiful) suddenly coalesced as these things do, as unexpected and welcome as the bright green of a parrot against a blue winter sky, high above the brave pink of a little girl:
I was born in a beautiful village
and in a beautiful village I’ll die
an ocean between them but grateful am I
that in a beautiful village I’ll lie
