I had spotted him in the check-in line; his hair was long and blond like mine, only more ragged, and he wore purple bellbottoms frayed at the hem, a white Indian shirt, and mirror aviator shades. The more dandyish style of the London hippie, with a whiff of old money too, perhaps. I was wearing a rose-coloured shirt from Biba’s and a patchwork vest I had made out of scraps of my old clothes, including the bad turquoise prom dress and the lining from my mother’s fur coat.
I contrived to sit beside him on the plane. It turned out that he had worked as a journalist in London, although he was already disenchanted with the scene.
“A seedy lot,when you get down to it,” he said. I didn’t mention that I earned my living, such as it was, writing book reviews for a newspaper.
When we landed in Lisbon, there was an awkward stretch as we left the plane and I didn’t know whether to walk beside him. Passengers rushing to make their connections jostled around us. As we came to a Y in the corridors he turned to me.
“You’re staying a while in Lisbon, then?”
“Yeah, at the hostel. I’ll check out the city for a few days, then probably hitchhike south to Sagres.”
He gestured up the other arm of the hall. “I’ve got to catch my flight, but if you end up in the area, come find me. I’m staying in the hills north of Faro, near São Brás de Alportel. Ask after the inglês in the village; anyone will tell you the way.”
I tried to memorize the name of the village, but the slurry Portuguese syllables were new to me.
He started walking down the corridor then turned.
“Alportel, not Albufeira,” he called back. “You don’t want to go there.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t!” I sang out. Then he was gone.
Chris was his name. Chris who?
Now the roads have turned into glossy cobblestones, and Brenda and I must drive slowly. The village of Santa Margarita turns out to be nothing more than a cluster of whitewashed houses and one church, perched on the saddle between a pair of mountains. We find the Rua Dos Corralloes (where there actually is a corral, with two grey horses). The lane narrows between high white walls until it is barely wider than my car mirrors, and we arrive at my casita for one.
Not bad, I think, for an Internet stab in the dark: a pretty white house like the others in the village,with dark green shutters and a scalloped, orange-tiled roof. The familiar rooster-shaped weather vane. Brenda hands over the keys and drives off—rather quickly, I notice, as if I might change my mind and race back to the airport. I suppose it is odd, a middle-aged woman on her own holed up here in March, before the blossoms are out. The place has the sequestered aspect I remember from my first time in the Algarve, with the houses facing inward to walled courtyards. As if winds and hot sun are bad spirits.
I stand in the driveway and look south over a gentle green slope of orchards, still tight-budded, across broad scrubby plains to a thin, silver line flashing on the horizon—the sea. The owners,who live in the apartment across the courtyard, don’t seem to be home. An invisible donkey brays, but otherwise it’s silent.
I jerk my suitcase wheels over the cobblestones and roll it into the bedroom, where the bed is high and puffy. A sizable brown spider scuttles out of the corner, and I accidentally roll over it. Oh dear, bad juju. I bounce on the bed. Here I am, apparently the only tourist on this mountain in southern Portugal, at the end of a cobbled road in off-season. It’s much cooler than I expected.
Car wheels crunch in the driveway, and I hurry out to meet the owners, a short, energetic East Indian woman and her partner, a shy New Zealander with a snaggle-toothed smile. Bob and Kathy. I like them immediately. They open the shutters and doors of my apartment to let the sun in. What about phones and computers, I quiz them. They do have a computer, but it is dial-up and unreliable. The nearest hotel, a half hour’s drive away, might have an Internet connection for guests, but they aren’t sure. As for telephones, there’s a kiosk in Alte, another half hour beyond the hotel.
“This is why people come here,”Kathy says, smiling, “to be out of touch.”
Interestingly, I have travelled to a corner of the developed world where communication with my family will be more problematic than from the smallest village of Mexico.
Now it’s my son’s turn to find me.
The next morning, I consider an exploratory tramp around the valley. Little birds are singing in the courtyard. Instead, I drive directly to the neo-Grecian, deserted-looking hotel on the road to Alte. A computer the size of a convection oven sits idle in a spare office, and for a Euro they let me use it. After many pings and gurgles the thing dredges up the Internet, like a squid in a fishing net. I log in and find a fresh email from Casey.
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2003 17:11:24 -0500
Subject: Hello from Chiapas
Yesterday, I played soccer with a bunch of Jehovah’s Witnesses, who referred to me as Canada. “Hey Canada, aqui, aqui!” And not one word about Jesus.
I am considering buying this Brooklyn dude’s bike and touring gear to bike around Guatemala and Chiapas, but we’ll see. I am in the mountain city of San Cristobal de las Casas now, which is full of tourists, but also is still great and old.
I have been asked to “Say hi to Comandante Marcos” from a guy in Salina Cruz, but I don’t plan on taking up arms. In any case, people love the revolution here. Next stop is either Guatemala or back up the Caribbean coast.
Great! Comandante Casey. What could be more appealing to a boy fed up with middle-class Toronto? I review the available options: either he will join the Zapatistas or he will bicycle alone through Guatemala, where the Canadian Embassy is now posting daily warnings for tourists.
His email goes on to say that he plans to meet up with the cycle dude after a few weeks, in Guatemala, near Lake Atitlan. They’ll rendezvous in a town called Panajachel.
Panajachel! This time I know exactly what is in store for him, and at last I have a legitimate reason to worry. As it happens—I don’t think Casey even knows or remembers this about his mother— I rode a bicycle through Guatemala when I was in my twenties. And it was the road leading up from Panajachel that almost did me in. You climb 2,000 vertical feet on a grade that would cause a donkey to tip over. It’s stupid. But it’s just a vague plan, I thought, and maybe it will fall through. He doesn’t like to plan.
I leave the hotel and head back to my casita, where I pour a giant glass of Vinho Verde and ponder the ironies of my situation. Now I know—exactly—how my parents must have felt when I told them that I was going to bike my way down into South America with Tom (“The one with the motorcycle?” my father asked). I remember the day I took the commuter train home to Burlington to break the news.
It was late November. The first flakes of snow were whirling around in a dither, as if to say, “Where the hell are we—isn’t there some place nicer we can land?”The air had that stony cold that arrives just in time for the Santa Claus parade.
I stepped off the train to my father’s waiting car. The front seat of the big Buick was covered in a woolly sheepskin, and so was the steering wheel; the circulation in his fingers was poor, and his hands got cold. We drove home,where my mother was still in her blue bathrobe, sitting in the den. This was unheard of in the middle of the afternoon. She didn’t get up to greet me, she just swivelled in my direction, looking filmy-eyed and distant—the Valium look. She was sitting in her usual spot, an upholstered chair (everything in our house was upholstered, including the placemats) that rocked and pivoted. She liked to sit there and watch the kids walk home from my old school, a few blocks away.
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