Yesterday was a long day of working online. My job normally requires about 20 hours a week - that’s what I get paid for. But the past two weeks have been 60+ hours a week; all day (and night) long my phone sounds like a pinball machine with all the notifications going off.
When you deal with customers of any stripe, you learn a lot about human nature, which is partly why I moved to Portugal to a big property where I can disappear from the public for long stretches. People tire me out. It helps a lot to be patient. If you’re not patient (as I am not), meditation and yoga and garden work will make you more so. Barring that, hang out with chickens. They have a way of making you forget about everything.
I fell asleep around 3a with my phone in my hand. It clunked down on my forehead, leaving a red mark. I woke with it next to me on my pillow, like a lover. Only I worry about having electronics close to my face, so it was more like waking to find a giant cockroach next to you on the pillow. I pushed it off with an audible cry that made Jake at the foot of the mattress raise his head briefly, look at me, then snuggle back into the covers with a heavy sigh that made me feel judged. I patted him and his tail thumped but it wasn’t for me - after a second I heard what he heard, the h coming up the steps.
There are thirteen of them. Recently a visitor staying downstairs in what is now the guest room but later will be one of a pair of rooms that form a double sitting room said she heard footsteps on the steps late at night. She said she heard it on a few different nights. I know what she means - I have thought I heard them too. But I’ve always chalked it up to the fact that I did, in fact, hear footsteps very early in our tenure here, when late one night - about 1a - a man climbed through the broken windows of our front door, easily pushing the shutters open to gain access.
Th windows of this place are loose in their frames; when the wind blows they rattle like teeth. The roosters make a racket at all hours, but most predictably at midnight, 3a and 4:45a. Otherwise, the house at night is dark and silent as graves - unless there is a rato in the walls. When they are here, which isn’t often, there is no doubt - you can always hear them gnawing.
People ask me all the time if I am scared to stay here in this big dark Brokedown Palace of a house. I always say no. But after a conversation with my Portuguese instructor Pedro about why I write horror - something that used to embarrass me a bit but when I say it in Portuguese with the proper accent, sounds kinda cool, livros de terror - I found myself lying awake, my imagination running away with me. I did not hear anyone on the steps - that wouldn’t scare me too much, I don’t think. If you hear something, you can go investigate, and because whatever it is is leaving a physical signature you don’t doubt yourself.
What scares me is waking to see a shadowy someone or something bending low to look into the flap of the tent at me, and then waking up and wondering, was that real?
The thumping of Jake’s tale picked up speed as the h entered the room and bent low to peer into the tent, just like in my imaginings except there was a sound of music and something in his hand. It took a second to recognize the tune - Squeeze, Black Coffee in Bed. The h was holding out a mug of coffee only not black but latte-style, with a lovely froth of oat milk and sprinkles of nutmeg. I laughed and took it.
Coffee in Tent is not quite the same as Coffee in Bed - there’s no leaning back, there’s no handy dandy little side table piled high with books that you can balance the coffee on. But I am not complaining - sitting up (a nice workout for the abdominals) and sipping while I do 20-40 minutes of language lessons on one of my many apps is a nice way to start the day before I have to attend to morning chores - filling buckets of water, feeding all the animals, charging all the lights that keep the night at bay.
I use five or six language apps - mixing up the accents and approaches to language learning is a lot like cross training for a sport, you get more out of it if you don’t just stress the muscle but ‘confuse’ it, ie stop it from falling into a predictable neurological rut. I read much better than I speak, and I speak much better than I hear - a lesson for me in there, I think. Spoken Portuguese is extraordinarily difficult to understand - native speakers 1) speak very fast and 2) often drop the first and last syllable of most of the words, and just for funsies heavily salt their speech with the “sh” sound EVEN WHEN THERE IS NO S PRESENT IN THE WORDS THEMSELVES.
I do keep a notebook at the side of the mattress, but I would never let a coffee cup leave a stain on it. I love my notebooks better than I love some people, and the only stains on/in them or ones I leave with my thoughts.
Already I can hear the Peep Peep, as we call Princess Leia, the chick we found abandoned in our courtyard one day, calling downstairs. The h always lets her out of her box first thing - she gets very indignant when she hears us moving around and is stuck in her box with the warmer.
She wanders about the house, pecking at dead insects and fallen crumbs and generally being a cute, noisy pain in the butt. She has many sounds - there is the chirpy sound of contentment she makes when pecking in the flower pots (we put chick food in them so she feels like she is ‘finding’ her food, chicken style, scratching at the dirt) or huddling beneath our hair. There is the skirling cry she makes when she is wanting to be picked up and warmed. There is the loud cheeping she makes when she is startled - like when Jake walks past her like a friendly behemoth. And there is the excited sound she makes when the h clicks to her - the sound she knows means that he has killed a fly. The speed at which she runs to his feet, her neck craning up expectantly, is both startling and hilarious
She has no fear of Jake - she’s just wary of being stepped on. The other day Jake was lying near me, waiting to go for his walk when Leia nonchalantly hopped onto his back and began her double-footed scratch, searching for tidbits. She went up and down his broad brown back scritch-scratching. Jake lowered his head with a groan that clearly said Sheesh, I guess we have to wait for her to get off of me before we can go for a walk. Sigh. It’s a dog’s life.
The h returns to the tent. The water is off, he reports. The leak we noticed in the driveway has gotten progressively worse, and Tiago and Paulo decided to dig down to see if they could find the pipe, and the problem.
I knew the h was thinking about the water leak he repaired at our cabin in Tahoe a few years back - a months-long affair that involved lifting the deck high into the sky onto its side, something the h accomplished by attaching it to his Toyota 4Runner and yanking it upright. With the deck upended and a huge pile of dirt next to a deep hole, the h casually informed me This is how my grandpa died, a hole he dug collapsing in on him. Then he disappeared under the house, leaving me to contemplate the possibilities.
I could picture it, grandma arriving with a glass of iced tea to find just a big pile of dirt where her husband had been. Maybe she’d been starting to say something before noticing the dirt pile and falling silent. Maybe a bird sang at just that moment.
Found it, the h called to me from under the house, his voice muffled. His ability to diagnose the problem, his willingness to do the dirty job solving it, saves us a lot of money, as well as gives me plenty of ideas for my livros de terror.
But the water leak in our driveway turned out to be easier and less dangerous to find, though in the end there was a sizeable pile of dirt and old calcadas - the workers found an old road beneath the current one - dug up. As I passed them on my way to the quinta I indicated the hole.
Sempre e alguma coisa, I said, wondering if I was saying in Portuguese what we mean in English when we say, It’s always something.
It’s life, Tiago replies with a Gallic shrug, confirming yes. He indicates the dish rack in my hand.
Precisa que eu abra a água?
Nao preciso agua agora, ‘brigada, I replied without even thinking about it. My first automatic Portuguese conversation, no translation required in the listening or the speaking. Something I only realized a bit later. Well look at you, I murmured to myself.
We were only without water for a day; when the pipes were repaired and the hole refilled, we were back in business, though our water was dirt-colored for a few hours. The h installed new filters and by nightfall the water ran clear again.
Today is overcast. Though there are four windows in the entryway where I have a table with my computer set up, I find I need to turn the lamp on. There is no rain in the forecast but the air itself is wet, you can feel it as a fine mist against your face. I don’t mind, it is nice to have a break from the intense heat of late. In the flat light my newly bloomed flowers - a rose in the front courtyard, a geranium over at the quinta - stand out with an otherworldly brightness. There was a time these wild-blooming flowers were the only pretty things about this property'; when we arrived, it was also a gray day, the entire place carpeted in bramble and English ivy, the stained and crumbling stone walls looking easily twice their age of 100 years.
Jake lays in the hallway, patiently waiting for our walk time. I usually let him choose the direction of the walk - left at the foot of the driveway takes us up and around the back of the property through neighborhoods stacked high with apartments. Right means we go through the center of the village, past the churrasqueira and butcher where Jake has friends to greet.
Yesterday I let go of his leash while I bagged and disposed of his business, observing his brown butt disappearing into the big mercado where his friends the butcher and his wife have a counter open several days a week.
I walked in, but espied no Jake. I called his name.
Not here, they indicated. Sim, ele aqui, I assured them, looking around. I find him behind one of the vacant counters of the market, investigating smells. He evadees me and gallops to the butcher, greeting him with wags, his barks booming off the tiles, doubling their volume. The butcher is always delighted by Jake, and the way he excuses himself after a minute to seek out the butcher’s wife and greet her too. This time, Jake slips around the meat counter for pets and then helps himself to a scrap bucket. They watch him fondly.
Jake! I say, outraged at his presumption. Nao!
Nao faz mal, they say, petting him. Jake smacks his lips and grins.
So he has played it perfectly, so jake, making friends and never minding that he is not getting treats, just staying consistent for months, never feigning his joy at saying hello to his new friends until the day he gets what his nose has always told him is there to get: fresh meat. I imagine from now on he will be gifted from this bucket on the regular.
There isn’t much doubt which direction he will choose to walk, today.
A knock at the backdoor, Alberto’s voice calling Hallooo! I go out to find him in a yellow slicker, holding a contraption with a nozzle and straps.
I bring onions, he says. And ready to spray potatoes, to stop mildew. Recently he lost a crop of potatoes to a mold that sometimes takes hold in the spring.
The h appears with his sprayer, but Alberto indicates he has one, and straps it on his back.
You look like a Ghostbuster, the h says. Alberto snorts in a way that says Whatever, we have work to do, and starts up the cottage steps. The h follows, shooting me a look that says We work for Alberto today and I turn away, not wanting my laughter to be interpreted the wrong way because there is not a day that goes by that I don’t meditate on my gratitude for having so many wonderful people as part of my daily life. Two people can only make so much progress, but with the help of two extraordinary workers and a neighbor that is a mix of Dumbledore, Bob Villa and Capability Brown, with a little Jacques Pepin thrown in, we are speeding along with renovations at a pace that would have been hard to fathom if someone told me about it a year ago.
And there’s this: if we ever had a problem we couldn’t solve on our own, I know exactly who to call. They’d be offended if we didn’t. It’s a great feeling.
Yesterday the h had a particularly long day with Alberto, planting tomatoes and passion fruit trees and another seedling avocado, plus a whole bed of onions and another of melons. He fell into bed exhausted at 11p and promptly fell asleep after a nice long back massage. We sleep in a tent and cook on an induction burner and have no sink, but we have a battery operated therapeutic massage gun with five speeds. Priorities, as the h would say.
As I write this the Peep Peep has wandered out the open door to peck around on the front porch. Alphonse has wandered in the door to peck around my feet, looking for extras. Jake too has moved out to the courtyard, where he can greet Tiago and Paulo as they pass him, still hauling branches from the Secret Garden over to the campo, and where he can see me through the open doorway, and know the exact moment when I stand and close my laptop, ready to take him for a walk.
Bom fim de semana, friends.
There is so much telling detail in your writing- I am dumb with admiration and am with you (quel horreur) as you struggle to sit up in your tent to drink the coffee gifted by the h. It's always slightly awkward levering up my body to graciously receive proffered morning drinks from the boyf and tbh there's always a hidden message , get up and keep me company!
I am in love with Jake! He's a smooth operator!