Things I Never Thought I’d Hear Myself Say
...that I say all the time since moving to Portugal
No, Jake, you cannot have my pastel de nata.
Saying this has no effect on my chocolate Labrador Jake, or the tractor beam of his gaze. It’s a race to see if you can eat it before the stalactite of his drool hits the floor. It was a surprise to us to find that Portugal is a country dedicated to pastry excellence. In our little village of Belas, there are fourteen cafes (that we know of) within a 10 minute stroll, all of them serving house made pastry. Each has its own specialty - for example FoFo de Belas, or the traveissero of Padaria de Preto. But almost all of them sell pastel de nata, a delightful little custard pie that fits in the palm of your hand, with flaky pastry and a caramelized surface. Think of it as a breakfast creme brulee. Jake loves them; pretty much everyone does. Whenever I go out to get some I make sure to buy at least a dozen so I can distribute to the guys (our workers Tiago and Paulo, our neighbor Alberto); everyone accepts with alacrity. No one can say no to a pastel de nata. I bought a box yesterday but they are already gone so I have no picture to share. Luckily Tiago brought fofos.
Is there chicken poop on my shoulder?
The h and I ask one other this question a lot, ever since we rescued an orphan chick only 7 days old. She was one of two chicks belonging to a proud mama who took up residence in the front courtyard. During the day she’d scratch around the front gardens with her babies close behind imitating her, or sit on the sun-warmed calcada tiles with her babies peeping out from the curtain of her feathers. Come late afternoon she’d wedge herself between a big bushy bush and the wall of our carport and pass the night there, stock still. Hens can be so still you don’t even know they are there, even when they are right next to you. Baby chicks however are never still - they emit little peeping sounds all the time, even in their sleep, so you - and also any predator - can locate them that way.
Mornings the roosters start crowing around 4:45a; around 6:00a I could hear the high pitched cheeping of the chicks from our bedroom on the second story - sounds penetrate easily as the big double doors of the balcony overlooking the courtyard are missing some glass panels.
One morning the cheeping seemed especially urgent and unceasing. I went outside to check and found the flock milling around the courtyard waiting for me to emerge for the morning feeding and there under one of the two benches that bracket the front porch was a chick, all alone, eyes squeezed tight and screaming. I picked it up and it pushed its little head into my hand, trying frantically to get under something. The nest mama hen had made for herself was torn apart; there was no sign of the other chick, or mama. We figure a rat attacked the nest, the mama flew off, and somehow the second baby managed to escape - chicks can scurry amazingly fast for short distances.
At first we thought the chick was a boy, and named it Han Solo…but reading up on sexing chicks, it was apparent she is a girl, so the name was switched to Princess Leia. She has imprinted on us, and spends a lot of time riding around on my shoulder where she sometimes hides beneath my hair to sleep or just perches on the spot where my neck and shoulder meet, watching the world go by. Being a chicken, she poops often and without warning. I keep a dish towel on my shoulder for this purpose but it’s hard to keep it under her little feathery bottom - Leia traverses my shoulders like an alpinist in Whistler-Blackcomb. When anyone comes over or I have to run an errand I have to remember to check and make sure I am not speckled with guano. Yesterday we went to the pet store down the street to buy dog food, then on the way home passed the bakery Casa Mae. Go in and get some pastel de nata, the h said. I’ll stay out here with Jake. It wasn't until I was ordering that I realized I forgot to ask the h to check my shoulder for chicken poop. There was a mirror behind the pastry case so I turned this way and that, trying to see; the lady behind the counter gave me a strange look.
There’s a rat in the kitchen (and I’m a gonna get it).
In our first month here, we bought a loaf of bread at the little market down the street, along with some cheese and wine. The next morning, I noticed the round loaf of plastic wrapped bread now had a sizable hole excavated in the top. As well, the plastic container holding the cheese was lying on the floor, empty.
There was no doubt it wasn’t mice - it would take ten to eat that amount of bread. The h ordered a motion-activated game camera from Amazon and put it in the kitchen at night; in the morning he watched the footage. On day two he announced, Well, it’s definitely a rat. He said it was better for me not to look at the footage, and I agreed. I already knew it was big; I didn’t want to see the disgusting reality of it. Not too long ago I published a story called The Mischief Queen in a horror anthology; writing it required a lot of rat research. They are hideous creatures - intelligent, ravenous, profligate breeders and hard to get rid of. Did you know their teeth never stop growing? True fact - they have to chew all the time or their teeth will grow and grow til they penetrate their brains and kill them. They can chew through anything - walls, floors, brick, concrete, metal, tile, chickens bones, humans.
We set out a live trap and after a sleepless night or two in which I kept imagining I could hear the scrabble of little rat feet on the steps, I heard the sound of metal on metal. Wake up, I whispered to the h. It’s in the kitchen. He went downstairs and was gone a long time; I heard the back door open, then the sound of the hose in the carport. Later I learned this was the h disposing of the rat, which was still very much alive, by drowning it in the big trash can we keep outside for yard waste. It took a good little while - did you know that rats can swim for days?
I was falling back asleep when the h returned to the bedroom, his sleeves wet to the elbow, his iPhone blaring a song. I listened for a moment, then laughed. It was UB40, There’s a rat in the kitchen and I’m a gonna get it, sang to a reggae beat. You can sing it just as well in Portuguese, it translates well to the same beat: Ha um rato na cozinaha, e eu vou lo mato…. We sang the whole thing, Jake barking in excitement and waking the roosters, who all began crowing in unison. We still sing There’s a rat in the kitchen whenever we feel triumphant about something.
Do you know the name of the rooster in our hallway?
It’s hard to get a full count of the roosters on the property, but I’m pretty sure there are twenty two. They are Leghorns, what used to be called Italians. I call mine Italians because I associate Leghorns with Foghorn Leghorn, who is white, and these guys are very colorful, presenting in two major color schemes: brown with emerald tail feathers - some with spotted chests - and blonde. I haven't named all of them yet; there are eight that look almost identical and run in a pack I call The Gang of Eight. There are three with spotted chests (Jackson Pollack, Jack Tripper, Jack Black), four blondes (Shaun Cassidy, Justin Bieber, Leif Garrett and Sette), and one blonde mix (Alphonse).
I’ve named some of the brown ones with strong personalities or unusual markings - Potsy (because he hangs with Alphonse aka Fonzie), Ralph Malph (because he hangs with Potsy), Preto (black chest), Mr. T sports a mohawk, Al Capone has a crooked comb, Golden Graham has a chest the color of honey. Two of them - Alphonse and Potsy - regularly enter the house looking for handouts. They allow us to pick them up and will hang about for awhile. Sometimes we forget they are around and then one will crow and scare the bejeesus out of us. Once I had a guest who was laying down, recovering from an illness and I heard her calling Help, there’s some kind of animal in here. I came in to check, a bit worried - in addition to the rat, we’ve had both a cat and a bat sneak into the place - but it was neither, just Posty looking for peanuts.
My ears are slow.
I have become quite good at telling people, Desculpe estou a aprender Portuguese. Nine times out of ten, I get the same response: E dificil/ nao e facil! The unintended consequence of saying “Sorry I'm still learning Portuguese” so fluently is that the other person will nod and speak rapidly - after all, I sound pretty good saying that one sentence. My next sentence used to be Por favor, podes repetir? but that makes the conversation seem too much like work, so instead I say, Desculpe, os meus ouvidos são lentos. This always gets a laugh. I imagine them going home to say, I met an American woman with slow ears and chicken poop on her shoulders, but otherwise she seemed nice.
Princess Leia needs a fly.
We have an electric fly zapper that looks like a yellow tennis racket. It electrocutes insects on contact. Princess Leia cheeps excitedly when we pick it up; she knows what is coming next.
The h has trained her to come with a click of his tongue; she races over to get her roasted fly with a speed that has to be seen to be believed. It was that speed that probably saved her from the rato.
There’s some chickens at the back door asking for you…
Every morning when I step outside there is a mob of chickens hanging around by the back door, clucking amongst themselves like people at a cocktail party talking in low voices: Have you seen her? She’s usually up by now. I saw a light on late last night, maybe she’s sleeping in. For some reason the hens are always in the front of the crowd. Hens sound very much like women murmuring. Opening the door to see them milling around waiting for me reminds me of summers in the midwest, Jan and Lisa and LaDonna knocking on the back screen door to see if I could come out and play. No one told me life would just be a progression of me getting older, hens coming to my back door to see what I am doing.
It’s time to vacuum the tent again.
Our property has four residences; the palaceta, a split level quinta with separate entrance units on top and bottom, and a cottage. The palaceta was in the least bad shape when we moved here, so that is where we decided we’d sleep. We scrubbed down one room that had no water damage to floor or ceiling, bought a mattress and pitched a tent to protect us from the mosquitos, which have about a billion ways to get into the house given the rotting window and door frames and broke/missing window glass (there were also a billion mosquitos until we drained the pool and the koi pond of their decades’ worth of accumulated nastiness, the gross evidence of which I’ll share in a before-and-after post someday.)
We could buy a bed, but soon enough we’ll be shipping our worldly goods from the US in containers - that couldn’t happen til we secured our residence cards which has taken longer than expected. I thought a mattress on the floor in a tent would be a temporary solution; now, a year in, it’s just how we sleep. Once a month or so we plug the vacuum cleaner into a long extension cord that stretches two hundred yards or so from the quinta (which is the sole place electrified) to the palaceta and give it a good once over.
We do actually have a bed for guests, located in one half of the double living room downstairs. It’s a nice room but we have guests so often we rarely have the chance to sleep there.
It’s never more better.
Our workers speak French and Italian and Portuguese. Sometimes I default to Italian, but mostly I try to converse in Portuguese, and not rely too much on the translator app that Tiago puts to constant use. I’d rather get it wrong and be corrected - I remember it better that way. Tiago is always nice about my mistakes, furrowing his brow and not laughing. But he couldn’t help it when I commented that the area at the foot of the driveway is looking so much better. I couldn’t decide if I should use mais or melhora so I said both. It’s never ‘more better’, he said with a laugh. Okay, I said Except it really is more better, in every way. The h and I say it all the time now - how’s the avocado tree doing? Never more better!
Come see us in Portugal.
We are not the Christmas letter type, if we were, I suppose it would have occurred to us to send out a global message telling everyone we moved to Portugal. Actually we moved from California to Alaska, then to Portugal - it was a complicated and fraught time, requiring a lot of arranging and packing and visa getting …we leaped from crisis to crisis like stones across…well, an ocean, one thing inexorably leading to another. Then there was the ten week period we were couch surfing…and the drive from San Francisco to New York to ship the dog. We arrived and then the *real* work began, and through it all we just never got the word out that we are now residents of the EU. I get a lot of texts from friends, Hey how are you, we’ll be in San Francisco, would love to see you! Then I have to say, We don’t live there anymore….We moved, come see us in Portugal. Since last August we have had nineteen visitors, with nine more coming before the end of July. I guess Portugal is a place people just like the sound of.
I'm stealing os meus ouvidos são lentos. Love it!