A Van of One's Own

by Biddy Wells

  Part Two

  6I drive out of Spain and into Portugal, passing the derelict border control office. I am strangely moved. I have made it through Wales, England, France and Spain, and at last I am here in this place I have yearned to visit. I know so little about this country but I immediately see that it is beautiful. The houses are whitewashed, red-roofed and quaint, sitting on gentle slopes of green. In the distance I see an impressive hilltop castle, much like the Cathar castles of southwest France.

  Before long I am climbing steeply up the winding road and the castle disappears behind trees. I continue twisting skywards at a snail’s pace, then suddenly find I have arrived at the aire. I look out over the Alentejo plain, now stretched below me in the late afternoon sun: a patchwork of meadows in vivid russets and yellows, with gently pointed hills in the distance. I turn around and see that just above me is the spectacular castle. The village of Marvao is sheltered inside its ancient, hefty walls. I walk through a huge stone doorway and enter a higgledy-piggledy network of cobbled streets, with sweet white houses and terraces festooned with flowering plants. At first I get lost weaving through the confusion of narrow alleys, but I am able to retrace my own footsteps, gradually becoming familiar with this labyrinth of a place. I discover the main street, which looks just like all the other streets but has a shop and a post office. I find a bar and drink a much needed cold beer.

  ‘Rain is coming,’ the barman tells me, and minutes later, as I say goodbye and step onto the cobbles, a thick mist descends. Within seconds visibility is down to a few feet. I guess we are quite high up here. The rain starts, as promised, and slowly drenches my inadequate clothing, which was appropriate for the climate only an hour ago. I know how easily walkers get disorientated in the fog on Welsh mountains, so I am glad that I am surrounded by castle walls. The scope for getting dangerously lost is actually quite limited here, yet the streets feel eerie and echoey, and I have no idea where I am going. I figure that as long as I keep to streets that descend, I will find my way back out of the misty maze. As I walk downhill, away from the castle, the cloud thins and I can just make out the shapes of the fields on the plain far below.

  Back in the van I feel truly peaceful. I relax, allowing random images of the places I’ve been to so far to drift through my mind. Driving through Spain, I had such a strong urge to divert from the route I had thought I should be on: the main drag. And it did feel like a drag. Once I had given myself the freedom to follow my urge, a lot of things seemed to change – even the landscape, which suddenly became soft and beautiful. I was on smaller, friendlier roads, and as we went along I noticed myself singing heartily and talking to myself, and then laughing out loud for doing it. My decision to go west resulted in a rediscovery of joy. Finding Marvao and falling in love with it at first sight felt like a sign, confirming that I had made the right choice in following my heart. I often find myself wondering whether we create or simply follow the paths on which we travel through our lives, and whether we have a choice between creating and following. The idea that life is guiding me and showing me signs is intriguing and reassuring. It feels like a game that I can play if I dare.

  I wake to the glorious sound of the bells from the convent next to the aire and drink tea among my clothes, which are hanging out to dry in the van’s open doorway. It rained heavily during the night and the thudding on the roof woke me, but I enjoyed it. I lay there and let my mind drift about, no longer plagued by the worries of earlier in the journey, which were – what? At first it was stressful, driving a van I didn’t know on unfamiliar roads, following Tanya’s instructions and fretting about where to stay each night, but that’s all fading away now. I have cared too much for too long about a lot of things. I am not past caring, nothing so dramatic; I am just tired of worrying, bothering, minding. If minding means living life through the mind, then I have spent much of my life minding. It is only the mind that cares what happens. It always has a plan and it complains if things go awry. Driving along mostly empty roads these last few days, I find myself slipping out of my mind and into another place. Learning to trust and not worry about it all is something I have come to through practical experience, by driving right into and then beyond my fear. Really everything is just fine, flowing along, unfolding.

  I drive south to Monsaraz, another small fortified city, whose walls are vast and brown. The place feels a little heavy and foreboding, not charming and inviting, as Marvao had appeared. Gazing out from this vantage point I can see the enormous barragens, or reservoirs, of Alentejo. It’s a spectacular view, but I need to be somewhere less panoramic. I continue on to the next aire, twenty minutes south.

  Luz is not panoramic or elevated or touristy. It’s a new village, built to accommodate the people who once lived in a community which is now under dam water. The houses are single storey, all the same shade of white and with blue borders around the windows. The church is modern and compensates for its lack of maturity and grandeur by playing a hymn-like tune every half hour. It’s a sweet sound, but wouldn’t it drive you bananas after a few days? I need quiet and that is what I get, despite the church jingle – a place simply to rest my bones.

  I have left all the secure things in my life to be here, in a car park next to a bull ring, overlooking a distant barragem on a cloudy day, far away from people I can talk to. I am known for talking a lot but I don’t want to talk these days. I don’t want to ask and answer questions. I am loving not having to interact – not having to do anything. I am following an invisible path, one that doesn’t yet exist. I am here, present in the present. It occurs to me that I was often alone before, in my old life, but I was rarely still.

  *

  Myfanwy drives well and I have come to love her, despite minor failings. The cupboard doors are meant to slide, but they don’t. I tug and shove and they come off in my hands. Sometimes they just jam stubbornly and I want to destroy them. Today, the crockery clatters ominously as I teeter along roads with crumbling edges and unforeseen potholes. It was Tanya’s idea to take me on roads that are straight and direct but alarmingly narrow. I suspect they are Roman roads that have not been repaired much since Roman times. All of a sudden, she tells me to take the next turning, and we climb another mountain pass featuring endless bends and very few passing places. Thankfully, there’s hardly any traffic. I sometimes wonder what would happen if I broke down out in the wilds, but then I stop wondering and focus on the fact that this is a game in which the challenge for me is to keep believing that everything is fine, and that if something goes wrong it will all work out in the end. Myfanwy seems to thrive on this adventure, and so do I. All this stretching is making us more flexible.

  ‘Stay on this road for twenty-six miles,’ Tanya commands. But, honestly, this is barely a road at all! Most of the time now I trust Tanya, although only yesterday we had a misunderstanding and I got furious with her. I shouted and swore at her, ending with the threat that I could turn her into an Irishman – which is quite easy to do, actually. I just select him from the menu and click. It’s a strange world.

  I drive through beautiful undulating countryside, drinking in the view. There are countless trees in neat rows that look like hi-vis baubles on sticks, the colour so iridescent that the whole scene is like a cartoon. Clouds gather and suddenly I am driving through a rainstorm. After a while I decide to stop battling through this poor visibility and pull in for a coffee break somewhere. As soon as I have this thought, a service station comes into view. I slow down, but the place is deserted except for a huge dog that stares at me sadly. I ask silently for a better option, and round the next bend a village appears with a cafe right by the road. The rain stops. A beautiful woman is standing in the canopied doorway. She must be seventy-something, I guess. Her dark brown face is crisscrossed with lines and she is tiny, very peaceful and still. She smiles, holding the door open for me. Her husband serves me coffee, which is very cheap and not bad.

  As I am about to leave, the beautiful woman – who is not as tall as my s
houlder – points to the sky and wags her crooked finger at me. It’s bucketing down again. We stand under the awning outside the door, saying nothing for a good five minutes, listening to the deluge thudding onto the tarpaulin. Her comfortableness with silence is infectious. The rain passes and I smile and make to go, but she points to the oncoming weather: another big black cloud. Sure enough, there’s another cloudburst and another lesson in stillness. The thudding gets even louder and we both start to laugh. We are two women, standing there, laughing at the rain, me feeling conspicuously tall and foreign. Finally I can leave. We look each other in the eye, and there’s such a warmth in the silence. ‘Obrigada,’ I say several times, as it is all the Portuguese I know – perhaps it’s the only word I need right now. I am grateful. I love this place, its coffee, its people, the weather. Everything is so verdant and juicy and alive.

  *

  I arrive at my next stop, Alcoutim, which has a Spanish twin, Sao Lucas, across the Rio Guadiana: two whitewashed little towns each with a hilltop castle, and a ferry to connect them. I park next to a small caravan in the aire overlooking the town. An elderly man comes out to greet me, gently taking my hands in his as though we are old friends. He is Portuguese and speaks perfect English as he has travelled to England many times, taking the route that I have just travelled. He points to his little caravan and tells me that this has been his home ever since he took up a simple, nomadic life after his wife of sixty years died. ‘Now it’s just me and God,’ he says, and sighs deeply. He smiles and directs me to a spot that he thinks I will enjoy, and he turns out to be right. At the other edge of the village is a river that has been dammed to make a swimming pool. The water is greenish but clean and warm. I have a wonderful swim in the afternoon sunshine. I wonder if the lovely caravan man is a sort of self-elected host, warmly welcoming all the travellers who come his way.

  After my swim I wander down through the village to the riverside, where there are a few bars and cafes. I choose one with a terrace and sit sipping wine, drinking in the atmosphere and the view across the wide, glassy river in the diminishing evening light. All at once the village across the river is twinkling with white street lights; moments later a string of orange street lamps comes to life along Alcoutim’s riverfront. Just behind me, the church bell chimes seven times; a second later, across the water, in Spain, I hear the eight o’clock bells.

  The next day, after a good lunch costing very little (my first meal for days), I follow the Guadiana downstream almost to its mouth and head west towards the home of my friends from Wales. I have no address, just scribbled directions and some incomplete-looking coordinates, which I put into Tanya’s brain. We come off the motorway onto a small road, continuing along even smaller roads and then tiny lanes through fields of crops. I have no idea where we are and I realise I have lost my innate sense of direction, having handed over all control to sat nav. I also notice I am getting dangerously low on fuel. According to Tanya I am very close to my destination, but this must be wrong, because I am nowhere. We have come away from civilisation across a landscape that means nothing to me, so I resort to checking my written directions. I saw no village square, no wash house; none of the landmarks I was meant to pass along the way. There’s only thirty yards to go according to the small screen, but the houses petered out a while ago.

  My friends had told me to call them if I got lost and they would come and get me. But how could I explain my position except lost? All the lanes look the same. Twenty yards, ten yards… this feels bad. I round a slight bend in the road.

  ‘You have reached your destination,’ Tanya announces. But there’s nothing here. I have no choice but to continue to the next turning place. A few moments later there’s another bend, then a wall and a rusty blue gate, half obscured with trailing jasmine. Good old Tanya! She has got me to a hidden house in a remote place via a route that felt like a wild goose chase. I assume this must be the house. There’s nobody around so I let myself in through the gate, calling, ‘Hellooooo!’ I sit in the garden and wait, and twenty minutes later we are together in the right place. There’s a lot of hugging and grinning and, on my part, relief. Mugs of tea are handed round.

  The house is typically Portuguese: single storey, whitewashed and built more for function than aesthetics, yet pretty in a simple way. The flat roof is used for al fresco sleeping in the summer. The kitchen is a lean-to across a little yard. Outside the front door is a terrace, shaded by a vine-covered pergola. There are plants everywhere: jasmine and passionflower cascade over the outdoor bread oven; rosemary and lavender scent the yard while honeysuckle and bougainvillea cover its high walls. A path leads up through the semi-wild garden, past a compost loo, to a small self-built pool. The location is very rural and quiet, yet only about half an hour from the sea.

  My hosts Martin and Catherine have lived in Pembrokeshire for decades, where I see them from time to time, and now spend increasing portions of the year here, in this offbeat part of the Algarve. They are older than me: a laidback, long-married couple. Martin is the owner of a wild, white mop of hair and matching beard, and he’s a fine guitarist and singer. He’s always been very sweet to me, encouraging me to sing and demanding that I learn tricky harmonies that sound beautiful against his softly sung melodies. I can’t remember exactly how I first met him but it must have been in the nineties, almost certainly at a folk club or a small festival in west Wales where we would both have been performing. It seems like another life, and I can only bring to mind fragments and vague images of those days. During my stay Martin reminded me that he used to play in a prog rock covers band with Peter, my friend and ex-partner and the father of my two children. That was back in the glorious seventies, a decade before I met Peter. Somehow I’d forgotten they even knew each other.

  In the early eighties, at sixteen tender years old, I flew the nest and made my escape from Cardiff. I moved in a small clockwise circle around England, apprenticing and working in craft potteries. I loved the work, but I began to realise I didn’t belong in any of the places where I lived – they just didn’t feel like home – and ended up staying in Oxford, near my brother who lived there. I was trying to work out what to do with my life. I became immersed in the city’s lively folk scene, and it was through music that I got to know Peter. Over a couple of years we became close friends, then got together. Neither of us were Oxford students – we just happened to be there for a while. He was planning a move back to Wales – also his homeland – and, ironically for me, settled on Cardiff as his destination. And it was now my destination, too, as I belonged with Peter, regardless of geographical preferences. Peter was my rock – true to his name.

  Somewhat reluctantly I returned to my city roots – living only a few miles from my broken family home was not what I’d had in mind – and we bought a tiny terraced house on a treeless street in Splott. Deep down my dream had been to venture much further west, shunning urban life altogether. I had to wait another fifteen years before we made that move. Meanwhile, we were a good team, and precious years flew by as we raised our two children, renovated our house and succeeded in making a very modest living in the arena of music and the arts. Finally, after a lot of discussion, we did move to the wild west of Wales, and, almost immediately, our relationship came apart. This was something we hadn’t factored into our plans, and we handled it as best we could. Over time, new partners came into our lives and we remained friends, continuing to work together as parents and on various musical projects. We still do.

  Now here I am in Portugal, looking back on a long, long journey full of twists and turns. There’s sadness in nostalgia, but there’s also comfort in continuity – it feels good to see how it is all connected.

  I didn’t meet Catherine until relatively recently. I knew of her existence, but she had always seemed slightly mysterious. She wasn’t part of the music scene and had her own interests, which included spending as much time as possible in the Algarve, often leaving Martin back home to continue with his job. Now he has retired
they both love to be here as much as possible, enjoying the climate, the culture and the people. I am so glad I’ve come to know Catherine, because I love spending time with her. She is simply a beautiful, peaceful woman and we get on really harmoniously, as though we have been friends for decades.

  Two other friends from Pembrokeshire are also here, staying for a week. Chris is a keen cook, which is a bonus. He is a good friend of David’s and mine and he has brought Alys with him, who I guess is in her early thirties, much younger than him. I’ve not met Alys before and it’s hard to tell if they are an item. If they are, it must have happened recently; last time we saw Chris, only a few weeks ago, he was definitely single.

  I tell them about my journey and they tell me about the weather, which has been unusually wet for the last week and has turned everything a fresh green and caused delicate, pretty weeds to grow up through the gravel all over the yard. They bring me up to date on all the things they’ve been up to: mostly swimming, relaxing, shopping for fresh fish in the market, and eating – it sounds wonderful.

  *

  For two days I have enjoyed companionship, bathroom facilities, great cooking and a lovely place to be. I have burst out of the bubble of my independence and I am now part of a group, weighing up how to fit in and be a helpful guest. I have changed mode and mood, talking more than I have for weeks. I relax and my appetite returns. Something is gained, but something is lost, too. I feel nostalgic thinking that the magical atmosphere, created by being only with myself, my van and my one CD, might never return. It’s strange: now that I am no longer alone, I feel incomplete. I miss David and a vague insecurity arises, as though I have lost some of the strength that manifested itself because I had no choice but to look after myself. Have I left part of me somewhere along the road, abandoned?