Stranger Things
Today while the h and I were walking back from the guest house (aka the Quinta) we stopped in the driveway to watch the newest hen with her seven babies. We had just finished checking out all the stuff the workers had hauled out of the workshop at the back of the vacant lot that sits opposite the big house, a place that is concealed from the rest of the property. The workshop contained a strange amalgamation of detritus - large construction signs, doors and window frames, car parts, glass wine jugs, a stack of panes of glass leaning against the wall like a deck of dangerous cards, a lot of old wood furniture - most of it junk in bad disrepair but a few interesting pieces we decided to salvage.
I was showing the h the plants Alberto brought by today for the built-in concrete planters that line the courtyard when the h interrupted to ask, Who is that woman?
What woman? I looked around.
A woman just walked into our garden! he said. In a red sweater, he added, making it unnecessary for me to ask Are you sure?
But..where did she come from? I asked as we mounted the steps. The staircase leads past the garden up to the abandoned cottage. Beyond the cottage is a short stone staircase leading to the top of the property, what we call the Back 40. It's mostly thistle and trees. At the far end is a site full of construction materials, fenced off and padlocked. There are walls at the boundary of the property, crumbling in places, totally fallen down in others. A path that cuts east-west across the expanse of thistles make it clear that people have been cutting across the land from the public walkway at the eastern border to the complex of apartments at the western border for quite some time. Our gardener built up one of the fallen walls to block people from parking on the land, and the h piled tree limbs where another wall had a gap in it. Still there are at least two ways to enter the property. Some locals continue to walk their dogs, leaving piles of poo as evidence. We know of at least three young boys who felt challenged by the deadfall blocking their way and boosted one another over the wall - they didn't noticed the game camera in the tree they are using for their climb, recording it all.
I suppose you can enter the property from the Back 40 and take the steps down past the cottage and not understand that the property is not still abandoned. We've power washed the front of the cottage, which faces the street from atop a hill, but if you are coming at it from the back what you see is a collapsed roof and walls stained ancient with water and moss. I mean, from that point, it looks pretty haunted - we know it, even staged a Hallowe'en photo shoot to take advantage of that.
An alert person would note that the stone steps look newly rebuilt, the earth newly scraped clean. Still, you could progress down the steep top five steps and look left and see the orchard with its spreading pear tree, fruit rotting on the ground, and maybe not notice the new walnut tree planted or the bay laurels. Similarly you could be forgiven thinking the bramble lying on the ground had been there forever and not realize it is freshly cut - bramble always looks like it's always been there.
Down a dozen more steps on the right, though, things start to look different - the garden with its raised beds of bright yellow treated wood surrounded by freshly laid stones, the bean plants climbing crossed bamboo poles, the orderly rows of potatoes and cabbage - it's all pretty new looking, even if you aren't an experienced gardener.
And maybe that's what the woman standing in the middle of it all was noticing, her hands full of the solar lights she'd pulled from the walls and the walkway as she made her way down the steps.
Who are you? I asked. I was so surprised to see her I forgot to ask in Portuguese.
What are you doing here, the h demanded. What are you doing with those? Give them to me!
That was when I noticed that what she held in her hands were the disc shaped solar lights we'd installed along the wall leading up to the cottage.
Esta e propriedade privada! (this is private property) I told her. She mumbled something I couldn't understand. She was older, but it was hard to pin down her age. If she's in her 60s, can I just say as a person approaching that decade in a matter of weeks, damn I look good. Her hair was a freshly dyed dark auburn. Her clothes were clean and pressed. Maybe she was in her early 70s, based on the cautious way she descended the steps, but that could have been her footwear - flip flops like the kind you'd wear at the beach, normal enough in summer but weird on the cusp of November, especially considering all the rain we've been getting and how chilly it is. She seemed a little off in some way that is hard to pin down.
The h took the solar lights out of her hands. She released the three lights in her left hand but did not actually give them back. There was no desculpe (sorry), no body language that said Oh, whoops, I thought this place was abandoned and took what I wanted but now see that these brand new modern looking solar lights are not ancient detritus but belong to you.
She clutched the lights in her right hand a little harder. I wondered if she was the person who had stolen our solar lights a few months ago.
GIVE ME THOSE, the h said. He pulled them from her hand.
Don't touch her, I said, mindful of the uncertain balance of some old people.
I won't, he said to me. Get out of here, he said to her. Though he spoke in English his meaning seemed pretty clear.
Propriedade privada, I repeated. Nos somos os donos! (we are the owners) I added for good measure.
She stared at us truculently.
Vai emobora! (Go away!) I said, more confidently. I knew I was saying it correctly because ironically, I learned the phrase after encountering another thief on our property. (A thief who is well known to the police, and whose name and home address I know, by the way - more on that later.)
Her eyes widened a bit - clearly she had understood me. I extended my arm and pointed toward the street. She started down the steps. Jake walked over to her and she shrank away from him.
Ai cao, she said, visibly afraid.
Tough beans, I said, not bothering to try to translate. I was not anxious to make her more comfortable. I wanted her uncomfortable. Plus I knew Jake was no danger to her - he was merely curious, his protective instinct not aroused. She was no danger to us, clearly, but I was starting to feel a little PO'd with the lack of apology.
Vai embora, I repeated. AGORA! (Go away NOW).
Nao volte nunca (don't come back) I added for good measure, hoping I was saying it right. Later I checked and was so happy at coming up with a Portuguese phrase under pressure, without assistance, I fist pumped and muttered Yesss! It's important to take the little victories where you can.
I ran off to find the workers while the h followed her closely until she was off the property. By the time I retrieved Tiago and returned to the driveway, she was already a hundred feet down the street.
Aquela mulher! (that woman) I babbled to Tiago, pointing. I used my Google translator app to say We found her in the garden, she had our solar lights in her hands.
At that point I wasn't really sure what we should do, but Tiago galloped after her. After ten minutes he was back.
She says she saw a path and took it, he reported. He explained he'd told her it was private property, which she disagreed with. He shrugged. It's been empty for a long time, he said. Most people don't know this land was bought, that new owners are here. You need signs that say private.
We do in fact have signs - some say privada, one shows a man with his hand up in a clear STOP gesture. We glued them to the wall and nailed them to a tree but they did not stop people from taking their accustomed short cut - we know, because one of the trespassers stole our posted No Pedestrians sign for good measure (and if you're wondering if I'm getting tired of thieves, the answer is sim).
We put No Parking signs in front of our gate which people ignored at first. The gardeners came every day throughout September and the first two weeks of October and, finding tall traffic-style cones among the detritus in our workshop, put two in front of the gate to reinforce the message of the signs, but people simply moved them and parked anyway, often leaving barely enough room for the gardener's truck to squeeze through. Someone stole one of the cones, but we have plenty more where that came from - they must have realized it, because no more were stolen.
One day, a neighbor who had parked almost-but-not-quite in front of the gate returned to his car in the evening and, seeing the h at the top of the driveway, beckoned to him. The h went down to see what he wanted. We were aggravated by the parking situation but trying to channel the Portuguese way and not get all insisty and "get off my lawn-y", and for a wonder it paid off.
The man introduced himself and then sheepishly noted that, with another car parked almost-but-not-quite in front of the other side of the gate, he had contributed to leaving very little room for a car of any size to go in and out.
I'm sorry, he said. Parking is really difficult around here. I'll make sure to leave enough room from now on. They exchanged phone numbers and I was really glad we had not left an angry note on his windshield, which had happened to me once in San Francisco, when, new to the whole street parking situation, I had accidentally blocked a driveway, thinking it unused. Hey asshole park your car here again and I'll smash the windshield and flatten your tires, said the note on the driver side window, with some dog feces smeared on the side for good measure. This was deeply upsetting - it was an honest mistake, no malice intended. It took me a few weeks of struggling to find parking to see things from the note writer's point of view - possibly my blocking his spot caused him to spend an hour in the dark and rain trolling the streets for a spot, missing his kid's birthday; maybe he came home exhausted and ill from his fifth session of chemo and then found my bright yellow car sitting smugly in his spot, the one thing he thought he could depend on in an uncertain world. Still I think the dog poo was over-reacting.
After awhile, the regulars who had become accustomed to thinking of the space in front of our driveway as their personal parking spot simply stopped parking there, no doubt noticing all of the activity on the property, the gardener's truck arriving and departing multiple times a day, they realized the signs were there for a good reason, and decided to give us our space.
When I was first learning the language a friend pointed out the difference between foreigner, and stranger. Don't get them confused, he said. Don't say Eu sou uma estranha, people will look at you oddly. An estrangeiera is me, a new resident in a country that is not my patria -my homeland. An estrahna is a strange person - a weirdo, an oddball, a person to avoid. I am an estrangeira, the woman on our property was estrahna.
Of course I am no doubt considered uma estrahana too, with my skull hoody and my silver hair made witchy-frizzy by the humidity. That's okay too.
It is tempting to say we are strangers in a strange land but that is not precisely true. We are foreigners, yes, but what is unfamiliar is not necessarily strange. Nos somos estrangeiros em uma terra desconhecida (we are foreigners in an unfamiliar land) lacks the poetic appeal of Heinlein's book title, but it's more accurate. And with practice and patience and meeting people where they are instead of where we're from, it will get less and less accurate.