Weeks in Naviras

by Wimpress, Chris

  ‘Maybe he’s waiting for Carolina,’ I say. ‘But from the moment I stepped out of the ocean I’ve not wanted Sadie or Bobby to be here. I want them to have wonderful lives.’

  ‘That’s how I felt about Luis, darling, and you. Like I say, I’m surprised to see you so soon. But delighted.’ She lowers her voice. ‘You’re the first, you know, personable person to come in here.’ She looks briefly at the other people dotted around the restaurant.

  My eyes follow hers. ‘These people were here before you.’

  ‘All of them, I’ve never seen them before, and they don’t know me.’ She acknowledges the people at table with a smile. ‘They came to Naviras long before I bought Casa Amanhã, it seems.’ She leans forward to me and whispers. ‘This house is theirs as much as mine, it doesn’t belong to anybody and really, it never did. I was just its custodian, if you like.’

  ‘I missed you so much, Lottie. What happened was…’ I want to say devastating, but the word won’t come out. It doesn’t want to, not here.

  Lottie puts her hand back on mine. ‘That’s the curse of living, darling. I think I got out when the going was good. And that’s a blessing.’ I get the impression she doesn’t want to describe her own death. What would be the point, since I know all about it anyway?

  ‘I was talking to a couple in La Roda,’ I say, instead. ‘They’ve been here a long time, but they said most people just come and go.’

  Lottie puts her palms together, places the tips of her fingers under her chin. ‘Yes, there’s always that,’ she sounds indifferent. ‘There’s the decision, I think. Would you stay forever, if you knew that once you left, that’d be it?’ She looked briefly across the restaurant then back at me. ‘This lot show no sign of leaving. I keep thinking I’ll have to close, soon! How silly.’

  ‘And you’ve decided to stay?’

  ‘Of course, at least for now. I’m having the time of my life!’ She looks at me. It’s meant to be a joke, I think. ‘I get all the pleasure of this place without any of the nuisance of running it. I take it you’ve learnt about how things just appear when you want them?’

  ‘Yes, Luis showed me.’

  Lottie shrugs slightly. ‘I must say, that takes some of the fun out of it, to my mind. The joy of eating after the cooking. But never mind, at least there’s food to taste, and I can still pour the drinks. Now, would you like anything else, some Amarguinha, maybe?’

  ‘Lottie, I need to go up to Room Seven.’

  She straightens herself on her stool. ‘James isn’t here, darling, honestly.’

  Should pretend to feel sad, perhaps? ‘Would you mind if I went up there, anyway? Just to look around, take in the view of the village, you know.’

  She just looks at me for a moment, her face frozen. Then it relaxes into a smile. ‘Of course, darling. You can go wherever you like, do whatever you need to do.’

  ‘Thanks, Lottie. Is there anyone staying up there at the moment?’

  She chuckles to herself. ‘Of course not, silly. Why would there be? There’s no sleeping here. Now, once you’ve finished up there, come back down and talk to me some more. It’s so nice to see another familiar face up here.’

  ‘Up here?’

  ‘In the house, darling.’

  ‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ I say, getting up from the stool and walking up to the vestibule, which is surprisingly altered. The children’s beach toys are in their place, but the bookshelf’s empty, the paperback towers absent. I will the books to return but they don’t. That’s disappointing, I think, as I start to climb the main staircase. This place seems to have strange rules about what’s permissible.

  I seem to glide past the first floor, where James and the stag party had stayed in the large dorm room. The doors all shut. Past the second floor, with the two rooms Gail and I used on our first visit. Doors open, rooms empty.

  At the top of the house there’s just a small landing with a side-table. The door to Room Seven is wide open and I walk in. There’s the large four-poster bed, the red velvet duvet cover and the gigantic white pillows sticking out the top. The familiar watercolour painting of Naviras beach on the wall, Lottie painted that. So art’s allowed, I think, but not printed material. The double French windows leading to the balcony are open, revealing the sunny and silent village beneath me.

  For the second time it occurs to me that the hotel’s missing. Then I notice something, a smallish building on the top of the western cliffs on the right. I can’t make out much detail as it’s in silhouette, but it’s definitely new. I’ve stared at the view from that balcony so many times, it’s impossible I haven’t noticed the building before.

  I’d taken Lottie at her word and hadn’t expected James to be here, but really I’m not looking for him. I open the door to the en-suite bathroom. Inside the familiar rectangular window, at the top of the wall above the bath.

  The old painting’s there, hanging above the sink, this one painted not by Lottie but by someone else, long before any of us came to Naviras. Its name etched into a little panel at the bottom of the frame, O Pescador. A fishing boat, pulled up on the slipway by Naviras beach. White-capped waves and feathery clouds. An old man with a large grey moustache sitting on the rim of his boat, smoking a pipe, looking calm and satisfied with the catch at his side, a large dorada fish laid out to dry on the slipway. The fisherman’s wearing his blue cap as usual, the same brown waistcoat and white trousers. Light brown sandals. Traditional. Authentic.

  Morgan Cross would’ve called it quaint. That’s how she would’ve found everything in Naviras. I lift the painting off its hook. There’s nothing behind it, just the whitewashed wall. Now, seeing it, I begin to feel there must be something fundamentally wrong. There should be a small alcove in the wall, covered by the painting. Actually just a brick missing from the wall, the alcove had been central to so much that had happened in Naviras over several years. How can it be missing? I have a sense of wanting to run, and to keep running. To where, I don’t know. I feel like I’m expanding, or perhaps that the room’s compacting. For a moment longer I stare at the wall before putting the painting down, resting it on top of the sink. I take a step back, willing the alcove to appear. It doesn’t, it can’t.

  I know I have to come clean to Lottie, ask her whether she knows about the alcove. Surely she must and maybe she’ll explain the hole’s absence. I leave the bathroom and am about to walk out of Room Seven when I catch something out of the window. This time something that shouldn’t be there, but is. In disbelief I walk over to the French windows and step onto the balcony.

  It’s snowing; only lightly but in large flakes, meandering down vertically from the sky. I watch as one lands on my hand, it’s fluffy but not cold. It doesn’t melt, just sits there on my skin like a fleck of ash from a bonfire.

  The sky remains blue and entirely cloudless. It’s not clear where the snow’s coming from, but it’s falling harder now, every flake traveling at the same speed, in unison, settling on the roofs of the fisherman’s cottages down in the village, gathering on the branches of the poplars in Lottie’s garden. I’m pretty confident it’s never before snowed in this part of the world. But then, this isn’t really Portugal, I think.

  It’s definitely time to speak to Lottie. I walk quickly out of the bedroom and make my way down the stairs. They’re steep but I don’t feel the need to hold the handrail, somehow I know I won’t trip or fall. On the way downstairs a thought occurs to me; if secrets exist after death, if Luis still holds the same feelings for me he’d had in life, then I’d know one way or the other by checking the wine cellar. It’d been the only other hiding place for us, not just in Casa Amanhã but the whole of Naviras.

  When I reach the ground floor I stop, listening to the sounds of people chatting and laughing. I walk back into the restaurant to find everyone seated in their place, except young Lottie. She’s standing at the main wooden door, looking out at the weather. It’s still unsettling to see her rejuvenated, she seems too thin and tall. Snowfl
akes are sticking to her dark hair, like they’re trying to restore it to the white strands I’m familiar with.

  ‘Tell me you’ve never seen it snow in Naviras before, Lottie,’ I say as I draw near her.

  She shakes her hair. ‘Not so much as a flake, darling.’ She doesn’t look at me, her eyes are incredulously staring at the snow landing on the gravel driveway. She was calm before, now she’s agitated; she looks like how I feel. It’s getting thicker, the snow. ‘It’s simply incongruous,’ Lottie goes on. ‘The weather patterns above the Alantejo, they simply prohibit this. What’s even more odd,’ Lottie draws close to me, speaks quietly. ‘Is that I pointed the snow out to this lot and they all ignored it.’ She gestures with her eyes back into the restaurant, where the diners remain oblivious to what is fast approaching the whiteout above the village. ‘They didn’t even look.’

  It’s true. Everyone’s carrying on with their meals and drinks, talking to each other animatedly. Not one of them is looking at the snow falling outside the door. I find their behaviour curious, but still it’s not top of my list of incongruities. ‘There’s something I need to ask you, Lottie. There was an alcove in the bathroom of Room Seven. A small one in the wall.’

  ‘Behind the painting? Yes I know, darling, it’s always been there, rather unsightly. I just covered it with that old painting when I first moved into this place.’

  I feel relieved that I’m not going mad. ‘The alcove’s not there, Lottie. It’s missing.’

  She turns to me now. ‘What’s it to you, darling?’ Being younger seems to have made her more pointed.

  ‘I thought you might have known,’ I say eventually. ‘It was how I fell in love with Luis.’

  Brandy Mel

  The wind got up the first afternoon Gail and I spent in Naviras, quite a powerful blast from the Atlantic which whipped our hair around our faces. We’d been aware of it earlier in the afternoon, shortly after we’d met James and Rav on the driveway outside Casa Amanhã. After we’d left them and walked out of the grounds we’d turned left, heading down the narrow travessa into the village.

  The first blast of wind sent my sarong flying upwards and Gail cackled at me. She was wearing incredibly skimpy shorts – she always had better legs than me. ‘Let’s get out of the wind, Ellie.’

  At a little grocery shop halfway down the road we bought a small punnet of cherries, which seemed to ease our hangovers somewhat as we strolled into the travessa. In later years I became familiar with the lady who worked in that shop. She never truly took to me, but I suppose over time she acknowledged me as a recurrent. Most of the locals in Naviras treated me like that, someone on the boundary. That shop was also where I bought the postcard the following day, picking it out from a rotating rack blowing around in the wind outside. Then I never got round to sending it, which is just as well since it later become a postcard to myself; sent not through space but time.

  ‘You liked Rav,’ I said to Gail as we continued down the empty street. It was late afternoon, always a void period in Naviras when the shops were closing but the restaurants hadn’t opened.

  ‘Quite cute, yeah,’ Gail then suggested that James had been checking me out and I dismissed it. Although I didn’t say so I considered him out of my league, the kind of guy who’d prefer his women coiffured and composed. Yet Gail was insistent that James had given me the look, and that we should track them down that evening.

  We made it all the way down to the beach, passing through the quiet square in front of La Roda. The street down to the beach was steep – we had to take quite small steps as we went down to the slipway before stepping down onto the beach. We took off our sandals and outer layers of clothes and left them on the sand before running into the ocean in our two-piece bikinis. It was freezing, neither of us lasted more than twenty seconds but we managed to submerge ourselves briefly, agreed it had done wonders for our hangovers. We went to lean against the side of the slipway, waiting for the sun to dry us off.

  I squinted across the bay at the cliffs and the beach bar, just twenty metres away from us. I was only moderately impressed; a nice fishing village with a few things to do, but nothing special. Beautiful? Kind of. Unique? Arguably not. Addictive, definitely. Yes, Naviras was an addiction, probably similar to nicotine. I didn’t feel its hold on me until it was too late.

  ‘Well I think I’m ready for a drink, now!’ Gail’s method of dealing with hangovers was to just drink through them. I was admiring her legs, which were longer than mine. She had better knees. ‘I might be able to manage a vinho verde, actually,’ I said, far from convinced at myself as we walked up to the beach bar for the first time.

  I don’t remember who served us that afternoon. It was a Portuguese guy, that I remember. People who’d grown up in the village tended to leave once they reached adulthood. Very few of them lived in Naviras for long periods, Luis being the notable exception. Often backpackers worked the bar, sometimes it would be people who’d run away from Britain, escaping debts or the bad weather. Normally those interlopers wouldn’t arrive until later in the spring; we’d come just on the cusp of its annual transformation.

  We ordered and picked up a bottle of wine at the bar, taking two chilled glasses with us outside, sitting at a table towards the end of the terrace. Gail quickly poured and although the first sip was quite a shock it soon began slipping down wonderfully, as it always did. Another Portuguese thing I became psychologically addicted to, but in a different way to Naviras. Vinho verde doesn’t really work outside Portugal. Drunk on a warm afternoon by the sea it takes on elixir-like properties, take it out of its natural environment and it becomes what it is; a young, slightly fizzy wine that gives you indigestion. Drinking it in London always felt wrong, somehow.

  We watched the lifeguard performing handstands on the beach next to his little chair immediately below us. He was beautifully toned and wearing nothing but a skimpy pair of red trunks. ‘He’s on the list,’ said Gail.

  ‘He’s showing off for us,’ I said. He’d only started doing the handstands once we’d arrived.

  ‘So, missy, let’s get down to business. Rav, Jamie, the lifeguard?

  I thought about it for about three seconds. ‘Shag the lifeguard, snog Jamie, marry Rav?’

  ‘No, snog the lifeguard, marry Jamie, shag Rav.’ Gail took a big gulp of wine.

  ‘Really?’ I wasn’t fully engaged in the game.

  ‘Yeah, you wouldn’t want to shag the lifeguard, he’d have sand in his pants,’ Gail was matter of fact as she topped up her glass. ‘What about the guy in the hotel, what was his name, Luis?’

  ‘Oh yeah, bit too short for my liking.’ I put my hand over the top of my wine glass as Gail went to pour into it. ‘Grumpy though, I quite like grumpy.’

  ‘The lifeguard’s got a nice-looking package,’ observed Gail. From where she was sitting she couldn’t see Luis entering the beach bar, wearing an understated pair of sunglasses. He said hello to a couple of people sitting inside, before buying a bottle of beer and walking towards the exit to the sun deck.

  ‘Look, here comes the guy from the guest house,’ I said to Gail, who twisted around to look behind her.

  ‘He’s not short, he’s perfectly formed,’ she said , raising her arm to wave at him. ‘Kissing taller men, it just doesn’t work. All that looking up to them.’

  Luis walked across the sun deck towards us. ‘I don’t expect you two speak Portuguese, do you?’ I shook my head and he just shrugged. ‘It’s okay, most people here speak good English.’

  ‘You sound like you’ve spent time in England?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure, I lived in London for a couple of years, but I’m feeling a lot better now,’ he grinned. ‘You mind if I sit down with you for a bit?’

  ‘Of course, we’re just enjoying some vinho verde,’ Gail slid her chair across to make room for Luis. Its legs scraped against the wooden slats, setting my teeth on edge.

  ‘You shouldn’t drink too much of that shit,’ Luis plonked himself down. He ha
d nice, tanned legs which weren’t too hairy. ‘It’s gut rot.’

  We both laughed at him. ‘Gut rot’s a good word,’ I said.

  ‘It’s two words, actually.’ He looked at me and asked how long we were staying in Naviras. I said we weren’t sure, asked him how long he thought we’d need?

  He chuckled to himself. ‘You’ve already seen it all, if you’ve walked down the travessa from Casa Amanhã.’

  Gail was disappointed, asking Luis there was anywhere nearby which stayed open late. Luis took a large swig of beer and said that was unlikely, so early in the summer. ‘If you want to get a taxi to Sines it’s about forty Euros, there’s a nightclub there.’

  ‘Cool! Why don’t you come with us, show us around?’ said Gail.

  ‘Ah no, I don’t need to go clubbing. I have a daughter to look after. You’ve come down from Lisboa?’

  Gail explained our Iberian round-trip and the days of drunken depravity in Lisbon. I told Luis I was glad to be away from a large city and the lure of the nightlife. I was staring at the indigo sea, loving how the sky had become topaz at the horizon. I drained my glass and Gail refilled it for me.

  ‘This is the life,’ I remember saying. As if everything else wasn’t the life. Wasn’t truly living. When we say those words what we really mean is, this is how I want my life to be, always. Interesting how I was eventually held to that.

  Gail was asking Luis about where in Naviras was the best place to eat. Luis was loyal, suggesting Casa Amanhã would provide the best bang for our buck. ‘Lottie’s cheap, though you might have to wait a long time for your dinner.’

  ‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Because she’s a perfectionist, none of her staff last more than a season in there. It’s okay doing the bar and the guest-house, and I should say that I love Lottie, she’s good to me and my daughter. But when she gets into the kitchen she’s impossible.’ He grinned at me.

  ‘What sort of food?’ asked Gail, draining the dregs of the bottle.