Medo e Chuva Em Belas
Medo e Chuva Em Belas
Fear and Rain In Belas > Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The h is on an extended trip to the US, leaving me and Jake here to manage. I’m grateful to have so many people looking out for me while he is gone - Alberto has brought over bread twice, also some orchids to plant (for a total of six now); Tiago took me to the store today. Normally the h and I make the 15 minute hike, load the groceries into two backpacks and four shopping bags, and trek back. With the rain reliably falling every couple of hours I was glad to have a ride.
This week I have a visitor, Linda, from the east coast. She arrived in the rain looking pale and unwell. Jet lag, we thought, and celebrated with some champagne. Quickly it became clear that it was something much worse than tiredness - by the evening she was throwing up, and spent the next four days confined to bed, arising to visit the bathroom or, on bad days, merely reaching for the plastic lined trashcan I put near the bed. Somehow she survived on mini Coca-Colas and tea with ginger, lemon and honey and a single orange. On day four I made some chicken broth, and that was her only food for a couple of days. Meanwhile the weather outside matched hers for misery - cold with constant rain squalls. Just last week we had multiple days where the temp hit 70, now it’s well and truly winter again.
Her illness - possibly norovirus - cleared up with the weather. The rain is gone but we’ve been whipped by a cold spring wind that seems to wrap a large invisible hand around the house and try to shake it. The house is not airtight, so the wind can be heard whistling through the cracks and crevices between the windows and the frames, and under the doors, making a sound not unlike the “whooooooooo” we’d make as children when we were pretending to be ghosts.
I’ve begun online Portuguese lessons to supplement the apps and You Tube channels I study every day. My weekly online sessions mostly involves my instructor, Pedro, launching into a conversation in Portuguese and me frantically trying to keep up. This past week we talked a lot about what I do, which is write horror. Tu tem medo de fantasmas? he asks, and I laugh and confidently say No, I am not afraid of ghosts, though when I first moved here I was afraid - with no electricity, and only a few candles scattered on the steps and in the two or three rooms we used, plus the total light blocking effect of the locking shutters at each window, the house felt literally invaded by dark.
The h and I wore headlamps at night - in fact we still do - which somehow serves to make the place beyond the beams of our lights even darker. Darkness seems to grow from every corner and especially from the mold-blackened holes in the ceilings of rooms that collapsed decades ago. The roof leak that caused these holes is mostly addressed, but the holes are startling, broken black eyes in the ceiling. Sometimes I imagine what would I do if I looked up to see a white face peering down at me, something ready to drop down into the room on all fours - then I have to rigorously avoid that train of thought, hoping to forget it before darkness falls. Which is exactly like trying not to think about an elephant. I hate my mind sometimes.
With my friend sick downstairs, my dog Jake laying at the foot of her bed, I have found myself alone in the cold and dark in the otherwise empty second floor. There are seasonal coastal storms bringing intermittent spates of rain; the windows rattle in their loose casements with each gust of wind. I wake in the night (I am a light sleeper) and realize despite my confident daytime proclamations to Pedro that I have not outgrown my fear of the dark at all. I try - mostly unsuccessfully - to still my unquiet mind from its dank imaginings of all the things that might have happened here long ago. The roosters screaming from the trees in the backyard do not make this an easy task.
Did you think roosters crowed only at dawn? Maybe solo roosters do, but our property has more than fifteen feral roosters and they will hold a convention at midnight, or three a.m., or really any time they feel like it.
When Linda was feeling perkier we had Tiago drive us to the store and bought all kinds of yummy things - goose liver pate, mussels and oysters, bleu and brie and parmesan cheeses, Iberico ham, raspberries and strawberries, dark chocolate. Add some cashews, pickles, apples and orange slices, along with warmed up rolls from Alberto (who hung a bag of bread from his baker friend on my fence earlier this morning) and you have a perfect dinner. Even though we played Scrabble til one in the morning and I was sleepy from the late hours I’ve been keeping working my remote job (my teammates are at the biggest conference of the year held in our industry, in Colorado - their work day gets going about midnight my time), I still found myself lying wide awake in the pressing dark, listening to the roosters outside screaming about the wind. To calm myself I practiced all the horror-related words I’ve learned in Portuguese: kill (matar), werewolf (lobishomen), fear (medo) quietly (silenciosamente), with mixed results