A cool twilight, with a blustery wind and dark clouds coming. I feel more settled, now that it’s almost time to go home. I have my pictures of Casey and Brian, both looking so handsome, propped up in front of me, against my bowl of oranges—the market man gave them to me for free. They’re all over the ground here, like rubbish. My gas-fire heater splutters and flutters behind me.
I read a few more of Chris’s letters. They’re very tender, both toward me and toward our Portuguese neighbours on the hill, Snr. Mario and Sra. Vitoria. An older couple who befriended us. He and Snr. Mario became partners in a hog-raising venture sometime after I left. In one of his letters Chris tells the story of an afternoon he spent drinking with Snr.Mario and a few other men down at the taverna. How, after several copinhos, the men would improvise little rhyming songs about the wine, or that particular day. One was about how time ran backwards there. O tempo volta para tras.
I know I’ve constructed a romance about it all since then, but why not? There was a man in a white house on a hill, in a peaceful world, where time ran backward. I could have stayed to see what would happen, but I moved on instead. As we tended to in those days.
I spoke to Brian on the phone, who finally sounded a bit forlorn. He’s having trouble sleeping, he said. He needs that warm back and whirring early-morning brain beside him.
Last night was cold; I slept under two big duvets. My watch has lost its little turner and (tellingly) is stuck on Toronto time. I take out the latest alarming email from Casey and reread it. I didn’t quite take it in the first time through:
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2003 15:36
Subject: Hello from Puebla
Hi there
I spent a week in San Cristobal, the beautiful, tourist-filled, mountain city in Chiapas. I soon found out that ever since the Zapatistas took the city in ’94, San Cristobal has been at the centre of the uprising. My first day there, I went to see a movie on the Zapatistas and asked someone if they were here to fight the revolution. I soon learned that you shouldn’t really talk about working with Zapatistas in public places—it’s better to talk about hiking and visiting churches. So, I saw a bunch of movies on Zapatistas, La Violencia in Colombia, the massacre of students in Mexico City. I heard the bishop of Chiapas speak—he was very eloquent, and spoke a lot about peace, but I still don’t speak Spanish and missed a lot.
The revolution is certainly in the air. I met lots of people doing community development work, being peace observers in poor Zapatista villages. There is even a way too hip, revolutionary-themed bar filled with young gringos . . .
On my last day in town, I went with three Spanish folks from my hostel to visit one of the Zapatista villages northeast of San Cristobal. Part way through the ride in the collectivo, going into the mountains, we met a block in the road. A few cars were lined up, and we sat in the car for a while. Down the road, there was a crowd of people. It took me a while to get the English translation that there was a man in dark green, wearing a balaclava, shot dead in the road. We all assumed the revolution was on. I only saw his boots. There were lots of native people in traditional dress (colourful dresses for women, men in black wool cloth things, some wearing broad-brimmed hats with multicoloured ribbons hanging down). It turns out that the dead man was one of two bandits who held up a car in the night. Supposedly, they only had plastic guns, but the driver being robbed had a real one. The other bandit went to hospital and this one stayed here.
So it was not Zapatista-related. Just more life and death in the South.
Bodies on the road. Holy fuck. Now he realizes that I wasn’t crazy to talk about bandits.
I can see from my maps that Alportel is no more than 50 kilometres away over winding roads—nothing, by Canadian standards. Time is running out before I have to fly home, so I set off in the Corsa.
I drive through Benafim and Barranco do Velho, winding higher into the mountains, then down through forests of cork trees to a village that people normally speed through on their way north to Lisbon.
The place appears miraculously unchanged. A man in a brown cap squats by the side of the road with his back against a white wall, warming himself in the sun. There is the same plain white church with the same worn-out, tape-recorded bells tolling the hour. I step into the dark coolness of a store where there are open barrels of amber honey. The woman behind the counter is asleep, head on her folded arms. On the patio of Café Vitória, several old men sit as if they haven’t moved for 33 years. Which might be the case.
I park the car by the highway and right away I find the overgrown footpath that goes the back way up the “mountain”—just a big hill, really. Our place was on the crest of it. Everything feels the same, even the small white wildflowers underfoot and the clarity of the air. It has a distinctive sparkle here, like Vinho Verde. I walk past barking dogs, and clucking chickens. O tempo volta para tras.
The first time I arrived here, I had taken the bus to São Brás, left my bags in a residencia then walked the four kilometres to Alpor-tel, asking here and there after the tall inglês. They kept gesturing up the road. It was dusk by the time I left the highway and began to climb. At the top of the hill I came to a two-storey house, ochre and white, with an explosion of purple bougainvillea against one wall and grass growing up through the tiles of the patio. The dark wooden panels of the front door,with a brass knocker in the shape of a woman’s hand, were narrow as a cupboard and opened down the middle. The place was elegant but slightly derelict-looking.
I had no idea what to expect. My plane mate could have a wife and family with him, if not a cult.
I knocked, then pushed open the door and there he was, like a page out of some Graham Greene novel. He was sitting in a dark leather armchair in an otherwise empty room,with a book in his lap, a cigarette between his fingers, and a glass of red wine on the floor. He was surprised to see me, but not overly.
“Amazing,”he said. “I’ve been thinking of you the past few days, wondering if you’d come.”
That night, we walked all the way back to my residencia, where we slept badly in the single bed, facing the painting of Jesus Christ on the wall. The next morning we brought my things back to the villa, and I moved in. His father owned the place and planned to rent it out some time. But for now it was empty.
We cooked over a brazier and lived mostly outside, where the back wall of the house jutted out into a ledge. Hours were spent just sitting on the ledge, watching the mists lift off the hills to the north. Our Portuguese neighbours were remarkably accepting of these English hippies who did nothing all day long. And it was, accidentally, domestic life, a home, the thing I missed but didn’t realize. There wasn’t even the problem of being in love, at least at first. Politics, the scene in London,my family—they all felt as far away as Jupiter. We had successfully dropped out.
Several months went by.
My decision to go back to Canada was as casual and careless as my arrival; it was almost Christmas, and I thought I should show up for it.
Chris walked me to the highway,where we flagged down the big smoke-windowed bus to Lisbon. I was wearing a long, three-tiered brown woollen cloak, the kind the local shepherds wore, and had packed a big bag of unshelled almonds. Although I waved from my seat on the bus I doubt he could have seen me through the tinted glass.
My parents lived in Burlington, near a big bridge called the Skyway, not far from the American border. On the day before Christmas, at the end of 1971, I flew to London, then New York, then took a bus north. One of Buffalo’s famous snowstorms enveloped the area—the winds were strong on the arch of the Skyway. The driver agreed to drop me beside the toll booths, where my sandals sank into more than a foot of new snow: O Canada.
In my bag was a glass kerosene lamp and ceramic bowls from Portugal, presents for