33

For some reason women carrying water jars or baskets or basins of laundry on their heads seemed to meet on the road just above our front door and stand there, barefoot, carrying on long conversations in loud, high-pitched voices as though they were calling to each other from a distance, while turning slowly in place, around and back, under their burdens. In the days after the old woman’s death they stood there longer than usual. I could not understand much of what I overheard through the door, but I knew they were talking about her.

Many afternoons Dorothy and I walked along the road, or the cart tracks into the mountains, or the footpaths, or simply went up the steep slopes under the stands of tall pitch pine trees that had been planted where the mixed forests had stood earlier in the century. Each of the pines had a blaze cut deep into the bark at waist level or lower, and a tapered terra cotta bowl hanging under it to catch the pitch. The bowls were collected periodically and taken away to make turpentine. Arbutus bushes and wild flowers that may have been indigenous had survived the destruction of the original growth here and there. When we walked under the pines we took string bags and picked up big dried pinecones to burn in the fireplace, for the scent they gave the house.

The unpaved road by the front door of the farmhouse led on past walled fields between the road and the river. The fields were a few steps down from the road and were entered by stone gateways, carefully made, the steps worn with use. Beyond the fields, by the river, the tall, groaning wooden water wheel, built by hand, was turned by the current in a channel that had been cut in from the river. It lifted the water from the Ceira into a narrow wooden flume at the edge of the field. The wooden cogs of the wheel reached out from the rim like paddles, turning it with its buckets, which filled one by one, and rose, spilling all the way, to empty at the top into the wooden flume made of hewn planks and held up on rows of stilts. The flume ran, leaking along its whole length, to the upper edge of the fields, where it poured out into an irrigation ditch. The whole system, powered by the river from which the water was drawn, played its complaining tune day and night.

The road climbed from the fields onto low bluffs, then to the edge of a small gorge through which the river came rushing over big rocks. At the top of the gorge, set back from the road along the cliff’s edge, another chapel stood—one more local habitation of feminine divinity. The front door was always locked when we passed, but occasionally on Mondays there were trampled flowers and signs that the chapel had been frequented the day before. We looked through broken panes in the door into a small nave filled with sunlight, to the altar, and the small window in the apse above it. Some silent trust that had made the place was still living there.

Some days I took notebooks and books out onto a terrace under fruit trees, beside the house, and tried to write out there. A turkey from the barnyard below regarded my presence as an intrusion upon his domain, and he campaigned repeatedly to dislodge me. He strutted along the bottom terrace, three or four terraces below me, and delivered himself of lengthy, elaborate, inflated threats aimed in my direction. When I seemed to pay no attention to those, he stumped to the far end of the low terrace, out behind me, and flew up to the next one, a little nearer to me, and drummed along the whole length of it, back and forth several times, repeating his performance and imprecations. Still no result, so he made his way, behind me, up one more terrace, and then another, until he was on the same one where I was sitting, in an armchair, with a board and a book on my knees. From the end of the terrace in back of me he heaved himself forward squawking untranslatable battle cries. The first time it happened, I got up at that point and waved my arms in a little dance at him, and he unpeeled a woeful shout and flung himself off the edge of the terrace to flap and flail all the way to the bottom, and start over again, in dudgeon. After that, rather than have to get up every time, I took an umbrella out with me, and when he began his final charge toward me along the terrace I raised it and opened it toward him, which sent him into his fit of consternation and flight. We played the game for days, apparently without change, but then he seemed to grow absent-minded or acquiescent—I could not tell which—and days would pass without him coming to stalk me, until I began to miss him, and hope that he had not been undone once and for all. But as long as the warm days lasted, sooner or later he might turn up, catch sight of me from below, and unpack his exasperation, and we would go through our game, which had become a ritual for us both, something that he did not have to carry out more than once a day, to make his point, and assert his indignity.

I got to know the men who worked in the barns and storage sheds and orange grove and mill, and I tried hard to keep up conversations with them, to use the Portuguese words and phrases that I was memorizing from books and learning by listening. I was beginning to acquire a labored, floundering stick-drawing of the language. I was unreasonably impatient with it for not being Spanish—my first love—and impatient with myself because of that. But limited as it was, my grasp of textbook Portuguese permitted simple exchanges, which seemed like calling across a canyon, with the men on the farm. I could not tell how they were organized, how they were related, but they showed me the olive mill, opened the hatch door in the loud roaring lower room to reveal the ladder down into the mill race and the water wheel turning, pointed out the gears carved on the heavy axle beams, slapped the piled round sacks for the olives, offered me their own harsh black wine, and laughed when nothing I said or asked made sense to them. Maria Antonia consoled me slightly by explaining that their Portuguese was not even the language I had been trying to learn, but a local, peasant variant of it—what is regularly referred to, in a distant, patronizing way, as a dialect—which she too found hard to understand some of the time.

There were still minstrels in the mountains, men who wandered, with musical instruments, a sack, and a shepherd’s blanket. The quinta courtyard had been one of their stopping places, since some period in the past of which I knew nothing, a time that I hoped the schoolmaster or somebody might be able to tell me about. A singer, or several musicians, would appear in the barnyard, shouting an announcement, and then walk into the courtyard and stand by the well, knowing the place. The one who came most often was a tall, old, blind man with a beard, who put his hand on the rim of the well and stood looking upward. He had a large, beautiful zither, which he played with great delicacy, and sang songs of longing and mourning. Sometimes I did not see him arrive. At the sound of his playing I would rush to the window over the courtyard and look down to see his open mouth singing, and the song, the notes, the words were as impossible to grasp or retain as filaments of mist. Someone from the farm would bring him, or whatever musicians came and performed there, a jug of wine, slices of corn broa and white cheese, a tin plate piled with boiled potatoes and salt cod, bacalao, which the visitors would cut off in strips with pocketknives and manage to chew somehow, though there were not many teeth left among them. Quitas knew them all. She was not sure, at first, how we felt about them, and seemed a little embarrassed by them because we were there, but she stopped whatever she was doing to stand listening to them. She watched without expression as I took them money—my only way of thanking them and encouraging them to go on playing and singing and to return.

Something in my efforts to talk with the men on the farm must have got across to them, or encouraged their own curiosity, because one day several of those of my own age met me on the bridge and asked whether I would like to go with them that evening—it was a Friday—to a dance in one of the hamlets up in the mountains. I accepted at once. Should I bring Dorothy? They seemed dubious about that, and when I told her she said that she would rather stay home anyway, as she often did. The young men knocked at the front door after sunset, carrying lanterns. I lit one from the house, took a bottle of wine, and we left.

We crossed the river and went up along the ridge above the new house into the forest. The mixed growth had not been replaced by pines there. We climbed as the light faded around us under the trees. I could hear a stream splashing in a gorge below us. We stopped to light the lanterns, and walked on with the shadows dancing and leaping around us as though we were at sea, catching on black trunks and limbs, and waving on the path. Up on the mountain the night was turning cold. We walked for an hour or so. Then the trail dipped and turned and I saw lighted windows—soft lights, from lamps—and a partly open doorway, and heard music. Mandolins, an accordion or concertina, singing, the beat of dancing. Shadows crossed the light from the doorway. We walked down toward the house and found ourselves in a cluster of buildings in a hollow of the slope. At the house, my friends pushed the door open to a single room already crowded with young people of both sexes, most of them dancing to a fast beat, a whirling, high-stepping dance akin to a jig or a reel, which I would learn had variants in the mountain villages all the way across southern Europe. This was the first time I had seen it, but to those caught up in it in that room, so close together that every movement seemed to be transmitted through all the rest of them, out to the walls and back to the spinning dancers like a ripple on a pool, it was simply what dancing meant. The room was filled with the heat of bodies, the faces were red and shining. They shouted and stamped with the beat. The floor and the walls shook. The jugs on the one sideboard shuddered and jingled, and the dance went on and on and suddenly stopped with a last stamping of feet.

Everyone was breathing hard, and there was a barny smell in the room. My friends who had brought me introduced me to another young man whose house it was, and that created a small, awkward hush around us as the others crowded closer to look at this stranger from somewhere that was only a name to them. I gave our host the bottle of wine, and he accepted it with a small formula of thanks, which I understood only in part, and then he offered me in turn a cupful of a sweet fortified wine—a variety of port. There seemed to be only a few cups, which were filled from a jug and passed around, and then someone stamped hard on the floor, a dance beat, and the instruments picked it up and the dance was off again.

Some of my companions joined in picking girls for partners, and in the next pause they began urging me to do the same. I protested that I did not know how, and they insisted that I should dance anyway. It was plain that they did not believe I did not know how to dance their dances. It was like saying that I did not know how to walk. All I had to do, they insisted, was to keep time. The beat began. One of the girls, a pretty one, was looking at me, and one of my companions gave me a little shove in her direction. I looked at her, questioning, and she nodded and we joined hands and I tried to keep time with the music, around and around the room, and managed to, more or less. The next dance was better. The step began to seem inevitable—an illusion caused simply by keeping in time with the music. As the dance after that one was announced with a stamp on the floor, my companion who had urged me to dance with my first partner tapped me on the shoulder and, with one of his friends, drew me outside the front door. There, with a remarkable awkward grace that I recognized despite the darkness and my poor grasp of the language, they explained to me that the young woman with whom I had been dancing was the noiva (the fiancée) of one of the men there, and that it was fine, and indeed an honor, for me to dance with her once. Twice was permissible. But more than that would not be right and might make for trouble. I apologized, but they said no, it was all right as it was, and we went back in and I was happy to stand watching for the rest of the time we were there.

The cups passed around between dances, and a few of the young men seemed to be showing the effects of it, but mostly it was the dancing itself that kindled the growing excitement in the room, which was in full fire when the young men I had come with suggested that perhaps it was time for us to start back. I thanked our host and we set out into the silence of the mountain path. After a bend or two we could hear the stream below us, then that sound was gone and we heard only our own footsteps. We had gone some distance when one of the men stopped suddenly, held up his hand for us to stop, put it over his mouth to signal to me to be quiet. I heard nothing, and then what sounded like quick breathing not far behind us. We stood listening. “Wolves,” the first man whispered. He reached down to pick up a stone, and signaled for us to walk on. As we went he told me in whispers that it was common for them to have wolves follow them when they were up there on the trails at night. They would not bother us. They were harmless. They were simply curious. If they got too close all he had to do was toss a stone back in their direction, and they would be gone. We kept on walking. He walked behind the rest of us. At one point he flipped the stone back over his shoulder, paused a moment, and then paid no further attention.

The dances were always on Friday nights, and not every week. They would come by the quinta door in the afternoon and ask whether I would like to go with them, and we would start in the glow after sundown to walk for an hour or two across the mountains to another huddled flock of dark roofs, and the music and dancing, and once or twice more he put up his hand and said there were wolves behind us. I have never known whether it was a game they meant to play on the foreigner, or whether there really were wolves following us on those trails at night.