‘Women who are not fattened are cursed,’ explained Glory Ita Eyo, the middle sister. ‘If you don’t do it, the gods will be angry and terrible things will happen.’
Back at the bungalow under the mango tree, Madam Eden was busy fixing bells round Arit’s ankles, elaborate brass combs in her hair, and bracelets of yellow and red pompoms on her newly plumped arms for her coming-out ceremony.
‘Any time your man is losing interest, you just come to Auntie,’ she told me, clucking sympathetically. ‘You’ll see how men like fattened women.’
* Between $3 billion–4 billion in overseas accounts was traced to General Abacha after his death.
* I was pregnant and terrified we would crash.
You Never Know When You Might Need a Wailer
Letters from Portugal 1996–1998
When I was living in Johannesburg and Paulo in Lisbon (this being in the days before email), we would keep in touch by sending each other breakfast faxes. One morning my fax machine spurted out a black and white photograph of a pretty cottage with window shutters and geraniums and an open-top car outside. Underneath it read: ‘Boy missing girl. When are you coming?’
By late 1995 I had tired of having my body on one continent and my heart on another. And after more than a year of pretending it did not bother me, I was fed up with crime in South Africa’s biggest city. Everyone talked about it at every dinner or party; no one would come downtown any more to the Market Theatre or Kippies but only to shopping centres with ‘secure parking’; and it seemed a matter of time before I too was carjacked, or raped and tied up in my own home, or murdered.
I weakened and had an alarm fitted. At night I would lock myself in my bedroom and lie in bed staring at its electronic eye blinking red. The next step would be a rape gate, a steel barrier across the bedroom door, based on the idea that intruders could make off with your belongings but not get to you. Even that wasn’t enough – the latest dinner-party horror story was of attackers breaking in by abseiling through the roof.
I felt even less safe after an unsavoury episode with a British mercenary who had been involved in fomenting black-on-black violence. The mercenary had been brought back into South Africa by one of my Sunday Times colleagues, whom he had befriended, and they set about digging up bodies of people he’d helped to murder. I was so horrified that I told the South African Police and they arrested the man, which led to threats against me from his friends in the white extremist movement.
So my heart leapt when Paulo told me he had found us a cottage in a little village called São Pedro de Sintra. It was on the estate of a condessa who had fallen on hard times and his description sounded perfect – whitewashed with yellow windows and a terrace full of flowers overhung by a lemon tree – perfect for gin and tonics.
Before I met Paulo the only time I had been to Portugal was on a cruise with my parents when I was 6. Among their old slides was one of me standing in front of a fountain wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and a pair of hot-pants of which I was clearly extremely proud. The cottage Paulo had rented was round the corner. It had to be fate.
I was planning to write a book on an incredible house I had come across in a remote part of Zambia built by an eccentric British aristocrat and this seemed an ideal place. Sintra after all had been home to Lord Byron, Hans Christian Andersen, William Beckford and the poet Roy Campbell. As a final good omen, England and Portugal were the world’s oldest alliance, dating back to 1386, and Sintra was where the treaty had been signed.
Once more I packed up my boxes of books (at the age of 30 I still did not own a stick of furniture) and for the first time moved in permanently with the man I loved. It was odd living in a village after years of noisy cities but wonderful to be somewhere so peaceful that windows and doors could be safely left unlocked. I adored exploring the mystical green Sintra hills that the Romans had known as the Mountains of the Moon. One path led to a psychedelic pink palace built by a mad German king, Ferdinand II, and another to a Moorish castle with proper fairytale turrets, one of which I adopted as my own. I would sit there looking out to the sea in the distance and reading Neruda or writing my diary, and glare at any tourist who dared to approach.
Running with the bulls
New Statesman Diary, 8 August 1997
SUMMERTIME IN PORTUGAL and every day coachloads of lobster-tinted British tourists are deposited in our village. After they’ve done the castle, palace, and guesthouse where Byron once stayed, they usually end up outside the large yellow house which is home to the Duke of Bragança, the man who would be king were Portugal still a monarchy. As it is not, he whiles away his days inaugurating hospitals, consorting with other displaced European royals and opening fêtes – rather like our royal family really, only without the privy purse. The Duke, a jolly moon-faced fellow, still hopes to be king one day and reclaim the crown jewels that are gathering dust in the vaults of the Bank of Portugal (next to those mysteriously swastika-stamped gold ingots). In the meantime I often see him on the bus.
Last weekend I bumped into the Duke in Cascais, the sea resort to which most of the British tourists return after having their fill of sights. He was there to name a new ambulance, while I had gone to watch the annual ‘Running with the Bulls’. It may be a tourist trap but Cascais remains a fishing village at heart and the bull-run is the yearly chance for local fishermen to demonstrate to an admiring female population just how macho they are.
Cascais is not quite Pamplona and the bull-run takes place on the beach so as not to cause chaos in the streets, where people are busy eating fried chicken and ice cream. Even so, there was great confusion among the tourists soaking up their daily dose of UV when hundreds of tanned men in tight shorts leaving little to the imagination suddenly descended on the beach and started gesturing frantically, shouting ‘Touro, touro!’ Some of the sun worshippers got the idea and moved; others just lay there looking British and baffled. Finally a truck bearing five fairly menacing bulls drew up on the sands and they got the point and fled, the Germans even removing their towels.
The bull-runners took up position and the first bull was released amid catcalls and whistles from local women gathered on the over-looking walls. The aim of the contest is to seize the bull’s horns and risk life and limb to block its path. My money was on a muscled man whose scowl looked enough to deter most large mammals, though I was quite taken by a Gérard Depardieu lookalike tossing his long hair disdainfully. But the first to grab the horns was a John Cleese beanpole with a droopy moustache and stripy red-and-white bathing shorts, whose name was Senhor Manteiga, Portuguese for Mr Butter.
The next bull was bigger and sent men scattering into the waves as it approached. After a few charges it got bored and headed into the sea where, after some remarkably dolphin-like bobs, it was soon out of its depth. ‘It’s going to drown,’ said a woman standing behind us. ‘It happens every year.’ The old man next to her shook his head. ‘No, it won’t,’ he said knowledgeably. ‘It takes four hours for a bull to drown.’ Soon everyone around was joining in, outdoing each other with bovine expertise and elaborate tales of the time when a bull escaped the beach and ran into the front of Hotel Baía where it surprised a British tourist doing her knitting.
I suspected the RSPCA wouldn’t approve of these goings-on, but the bull was duly rescued and a third sent into the fray. Mr Butter, who had presumably been dreaming of what he’d do with the giant slab of dried codfish he stood to win, was upstaged by a passing drunk who literally seized the bull by the horns and rode around on it, a surprised grin on his face, before passing out on the sand. By the fourth bull everyone was getting braver. Even Gérard Depardieu drew nearer before flicking his hair and walking away. But the last bull was a massive 1,200-pound beast which no one dared approach, despite the taunts of the female spectators. Several people were trampled and rushed off in the ambulance that had conveniently just been named by the Duke, until finally an old man in a small yellow rowing boat managed to lasso the bull’s horns.
/> Mystified, I asked an important-looking man with a megaphone who had won the codfish. ‘The bulls,’ he replied angrily. ‘The youth of today are too busy chasing English girls to learn how to deal with bulls.’ Thus condemned, the young men in question sat around on the seafront, comparing their wounds.
In his cabriolet, Paulo drove me around a Portugal that tourists don’t normally see. We went to drive-in castles where locals were drying their laundry, cobble-stoned Alentejan villages where we had to leave the car outside as only donkey-drawn vehicles are allowed, and a fish restaurant with a tree through the roof. We picnicked among Roman ruins about to be submerged by a vast new dam. Frank Sinatra sang out of the car stereo and we filled the back seat with bunches of yellow mimosa.
In the Gothic abbey of Alcobaça, I traced my finger over the inscription ‘Até ao fim do mundo’ (till the end of the world) on the intricate marble tombs of Pedro and Inês, Portugal’s own Romeo and Juliet, as Paulo told me the story. Inês de Castro had been the Spanish lady-in-waiting to the wife of Prince Pedro, who was heir to the Portuguese throne, and they had fallen in love. Pedro’s wife then died in childbirth but his father King Afonso IV refused to let him marry Inês, ordering her to be confined to a convent in Coimbra. A stream flowed between the convent and a royal hunting lodge, and the couple would float little wooden boats to each other bearing messages arranging assignations. When word got back to the King, he had Inês killed – her ‘heron neck’ severed by axe – leaving the stream flowing red and his son devastated. When Dom Pedro became king two years later, he had Inês’s body exhumed and made his courtiers kiss her decomposing hand before reburying it in a tomb carved with friezes depicting scenes from their life. On top was her marble body held aloft by angels. Opposite, he had one built for himself, feet facing, so that the first thing they would see on Judgment Day would be each other.
‘Where the earth meets the sea’, wrote Portugal’s most famous poet, Camões, of this land from which explorers had set out to discover two-thirds of the world and brought back untold riches. Now it was a land turned inward and one of the poorest countries in Europe. But as the light took on the almond-pink glow of evening and the storks returned to their nests, their giant wings flapping slowly, we would find a village café in which to stop. Over coffee and bagaço (brandy), we always seemed to find a story.
You never know when you might need a wailer
Financial Times, 6 January 1996
I MET A WOMAN recently who wails for a living. At first I thought my Portuguese must have let me down and I had misunderstood. The word she had used was carpideira – something to do with carp fishing, I thought, though it seemed an unlikely specialism in one of Portugal’s most arid regions. Besides, her behind was so voluminous I found it hard to imagine how she would keep her balance on a river bank.
Then she opened her mouth to demonstrate. What came out of this small middle-aged woman with the neat bun of hair and the big backside was not a moan or a cry but truly a wail, a long shuddering wail of such epic proportions that it had the dogs howling for miles around and sent grown men and women scurrying for cover.
When I had recovered, eardrums still ringing, she presented me with a business card. ‘Maria Teixeira, Professional Wailer,’ it said in flowery italics. I have come across some strange occupations in my time but this was a new one on me. ‘Excuse my ignorance,’ I said, ‘but why would anyone need a wailer?’
‘You never know when you might need a wailer,’ she replied, reminding me of a man dressed as Elvis I had met long ago on Sunset Boulevard. He posed for a photo with me then pressed a card into my hand with ‘Eddie Powers as Elvis’ stamped on it. ‘You never know when you might need an Elvis,’ he said. I can honestly say I have been in some tough situations when a Harrison Ford or an Arnold Schwarzenegger might have come in handy. But an Elvis?
Meeting an Elvis impersonator is the sort of thing you expect to happen in Los Angeles. You would want your money back otherwise. But Portugal is a more sober place and I found it hard to imagine any circumstance in which a wailer might save the day.
‘I do weddings, funerals, graduations,’ explained Teixeira. ‘Anything where a wail or two might add some authenticity. Usually I find that after the first few wails those gathered take over.’ Seeing my continuing bafflement, she added: ‘Think of the shame of an occasion’ – she pronounced the word with special reverence – ‘with no wailing.’
It turns out that just as English towns and villages used to have town criers, in Portugal they have wailers. ‘It’s an honour to be the town wailer,’ stressed Teixeira, who comes from one of those whitewashed and cobble-street villages that the Portuguese do so well. As usual with these towns, hers has a story attached. It was given by a king to his queen after his forces successfully stormed the castle disguised as cherry trees. And I thought the British had invented Monty Python.
Teixeira’s wailing career began at an early age when it was discovered she had a particularly strident cry. Her mother was the family black sheep, having come from a long line of wailers and failed to make the grade herself, being unfortunately endowed with a squeaky voice box which no amount of cod-liver oil and tobacco smoke could deepen. Condemned to a life of taking in laundry, she was overjoyed when Maria came into the world with a deep, throaty and unmistakable wail. To encourage its development she took to locking Maria in cupboards or losing her in forests, forcing her to wail for attention.
But there is more to it than just the quality of wail, Teixeira was anxious to point out. Wailers need to be able to blend in with gatherings so that it is not immediately obvious who is emitting the wail. ‘We wailers are performers, actresses, just as much as your Hollywood stars. I modify my wail according to the occasion.’ I felt honoured to be in the presence of the Emma Thompson of the wailing world. I risked my eardrums with one last demonstration and took my leave.
Because of its place in modern Europe and its holiday resorts on the Algarve with ‘real British breakfasts’ and ‘tea like mother makes’, it is easy to forget how traditional Portugal still is. But behind the medieval walls of its villages, you discover a different world where women yearn to be wailers, and donkeys are the main mode of transport. And, while many young people have left the countryside for the city, they have not forgotten the old ways.
Indeed, they are blending the modern and traditional. Teixeira’s daughter, who has moved from the village to Lisbon, is thinking of starting wailing classes for stressed executives. ‘It is a great way of letting out tension,’ she explained as I wished her luck in finding a sufficiently soundproof room. Next time I need a wailer, I know where to go.
The poet with blood on his apron
Financial Times, 17 February 1996
I STUMBLED ON José Valentim Lourenço, the rhyming butcher, by accident.
It was a wet and windy Saturday, so miserable that only the promise of a hearty Portuguese lunch of roast hog and fulsome red wine could drag me out from beneath the covers. Somehow in the tangle of narrow stone-walled streets between my village and the one famous for its hog lunches, I lost my way and found myself in Gouveia.
At the entrance of the village stood a large sign on which was painted in bold blue strokes ‘Welcome to Gouveia, Village in Verse’.
Underneath was the following poem (roughly translated):
The roads are free-moving
The air is sweetly calm
The doors are all open
To welcome everyone.
Driving on, I saw that every street wall bore a tiled plaque on which a poem was painted inside a blue and gold border. There were rhymes about the chapel, the village square, the road to the sea, the wells and even the butcher’s shop, encapsulating the history of the area.
Intrigued, I stopped a cherry-cheeked lady weaving baskets by the roadside. ‘Ah, you want José, the butcher,’ she said, waving an arm up the road. ‘Yes, it was quite a day when we all woke up to find the poems on our streets. Of course we’re pleas
ed now. They attract a lot of people to the village, taking photographs and buying souvenirs. This place was really run-down, but with all the money coming in we’ve built a children’s playground, restored the wells, the chapel and the town square.’
Sure enough, not far along the road I found José Valentim Lourenço in his glass-fronted shop, hacking away at a large piece of pork. When I explained my interest in his verses, he wiped his knife on his blood-spattered apron and extended a flabby hand in welcome.
Still in his foul-smelling apron, he closed up his shop (‘not much custom in the rain’) and led me into his house.
To my astonishment, José told me he had left school aged 10. His passion for doggerel was inspired by his grandfather. He used to accompany him into the fields every day to help tend the cows of a local farmer.
‘My grandfather couldn’t read or write but he could tell stories in verse. People would come from all around – the Peasant Poet they called him.’
Working his way up over the years to owning his own cows and eventually becoming village butcher, José, now 54, was determined to give something back to the place in which he had grown up.
He helped found a local theatre – no mean feat in a poor village of just 200 people – and started producing plays. With the proceeds, he launched a programme of public works and set about putting Gouveia on the map.
For a long time José had been making up poems as he chopped the meat into steaks or slapped it into burgers. ‘The rhythm of cutting gives me ideas,’ he grins. One day he had a brainwave. ‘The streets of Gouveia had no names,’ he recalls. ‘I decided I’d not only give them names but also verses.’ For two years he walked the eighteen streets, compiling verses.
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