A Year in the World

by Frances Mayes

  The next morning Carlos calls early. We will meet for dinner, he announces, then go out to hear fado in the Alfama. Fah-do, he says, like hairdo, not fah-dough. We fill the time until then visiting the Ribiera market. Used to Tuscan prices, we’re surprised to see good-looking olive oils for four to seven euros a liter. We find goat cheeses wrapped in gauze, and almonds suspended in honey. We take home massa de pimiento, the canned spread of puréed pimientos and salt. Since my home state of Georgia is a major producer of the pimiento, I grew up on toasted pimiento-cheese sandwiches, one of the world’s great treats. It will be even better with a smear of Portuguese mustard. The stalls, arranged under a vaulted ceiling, display all the vegetables we do not see in restaurants, and sacks of tiny snails and mussels. At the horse butcher’s, the meat is oh, so dark—the color of port. In other stands hang sausages in every shade of blood. Most startling are the flowers. Several vendors feature funeral sprays, elaborate horseshoes and fans of chrysanthemums and gladiolus with pastel ribbons and condolences in sequins. En route to mourning, you can pick up an impressive wreath and your carrots at the same time. As Carlos told us, few lettuces but mounds of cabbages. Ed points out the many kinds of oranges. When we have as much as we can carry, we go home.

  We meet Carlos at his restaurant in the Alfama and start walking through the maze. After six or so turns, I don’t know which direction we face. “Don’t walk here alone at night,” he tells us.

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Well, you would be lost, and sometimes boys snatch bags.”

  “That’s true anywhere on the globe.”

  “Yes, but you would also be lost.”

  “That makes sense.”

  He stops at a closed door with no sign and knocks. We are admitted into a small room with five tables. We are the only guests at this hidden restaurant, which, yes, does have a name: Os Corvos. We’re seated at a table next to a wall of wine racks. Without a word, the waiter brings us a Lavradores de Feitoria, from north in the Duoro region, a nice big wine with a plummy almond perfume. Carlos confers, and soon we are eating coriander soup, a variety of pork sausages from the north, some with rice inside, some made from black pig’s blood, and some with piquant garlic—true Portuguese tastes, indigenous to this place. Who could expect how the copious use of coriander could add such a fresh dimension? The waiter then brings a salad of dried fava beans, plumped again with oil, garlic, and coriander, then strips of savory roast pork, a mound of ricotta seasoned with oregano, and a bowl of tempura-style green beans. Even though we have feasted long and well, I’m moved to try a butterscotch flan, one of my favorite flavors, and a bite of Ed’s frothy soufflé of ground almonds and eggwhites, and just a taste of Carlos’s gelato with confit of lemon rind. I’m in love.

  After midnight we weave through the Alfama streets again and duck into a low door just as fado is about to begin. We have luck: one table is free in the small room, which feels charged with anticipation. Two guitarists step into a clearing, then the fadista, who looks as if she knows something about fate herself. She wears the requisite black shawl, and though she is only middle-aged, she looks like an old soul, black eyes reflecting the saudade of the world. She does not begin, she erupts. Her voice turns my spine into a live electric wire. I have no idea what the words mean, but her music is preverbal anyway, a direct communication among all of the nerve endings. During intermission Carlos orders Bagaço, much like grappa.

  The next singer knocks us off our chairs. He looks so unlikely. The fadista fit the role, but Luis Tomar, rigid in his suit, could be selling insurance. Just to prove you can never judge anyone by appearance, his voice, so rife with restrained emotion, sunders the room’s atoms. Passion threatens to overwhelm the song at any minute but remains contained, remains pitched to a timbre that corresponds exactly with the synapses of your own private longings and dreams. I wish he would sing forever.

  Now we know how to eat. On our long walks to look at the rhythmic patterned sidewalks and tile-faced buildings—we love coming upon the occasional 1950s tile facade—we stop for lunch at an appealing tasca. At night we ignore all the rated restaurants in our guidebooks and follow our noses toward home cooking in our neighborhood. Tascas are lively and fun. You are not isolated from others but are in such proximity that an exchange of bites seems normal. Not many tourists, we notice, are among our fellow diners. The plainness of the decor probably puts off the foreign traveller. We go back several times to the Floresta and to the blue-and-white-tiled Minho Verde on our nearby Sant’Ana street for the loud atmosphere, the grilled hunks of pork and big shrimp, duck with rice, green bean soup, and plates of sliced, peeled oranges that are plonked onto the table. Locals are ordering the grilled pork liver and slabs of grilled fish with lemons. The Portuguese breads are simply the best. I could live on bread alone—and the bowls of olives that always appear on the table. At others we try the famous cataplana dishes, the lusty stews of pork and clams or of onions, peppers, octopus, and clams. The son shouts orders to Mama in the kitchen. A taffy and white cat slinks around my legs. Ed loves those twelve-euro bills.

  “Where do you eat, other than secret places in the Alfama?” Ed asks Carlos. We want to see how new chefs are developing the cuisine. What comes after 365 recipes for dried cod? He gives us names of a few restaurants whose chefs embrace the traditional food but also have fresh ideas of their own, ideas that ultimately enlarge a cuisine. He sends us to Mezzaluna to see what happened to Portuguese food when the Italian Michele Guerrieri came to town.

  After all the down-home tascas, the cool sophistication of Mezzaluna transports us to Milan or New York. Intimate but not close, the room’s mirrors, prints, and gorgeous flowers feel welcoming. We’re seated among fashionably dressed Lisboans, women with black upswept hair, big gold jewelry, and fine silk blouses. The men wear dark, important suits. Somehow well-dressed businessmen in Europe look sexy and grand. The couple finishing lunch at the table next to us receives a plate of goat cheeses the size of kumquats. One is wrapped in leaves, another coated with ashes; others are creamy white. Soon we are eating fried and breaded radicchio stuffed with prosciutto. The spinach salad (ah, salad!) is dressed with lemon vinaigrette made with those cunning little local goat cheeses. Michele comes over to the table, and we tell him Carlos sent us. He’s a slight, young Italian raised in Naples and in New York, someone who has grown up at home in the world. His smile is wide, and those Neapolitan eyes laugh, too. He brings over a Quinta da Murta, Bucelas, and tells us how much he loves cooking with Portuguese ingredients, especially the seafood, and about his pleasure in bringing those ingredients in contact with Italian pasta. Of course, the whole world has taken to serving pasta with their own ingredients, and his use of local shrimp in a cream sauce with fresh tagliatelle provides easy proof why this is so. He combines pastas with goat, much loved locally and rarely seen on Italian pasta. His localized version of macaroni turns light with the inclusion of arugula, shrimp, and lemon. He has the immigrant zeal. He’s opened another restaurant down the street and has started a food magazine, Gula. Like an Italian, he visits with his customers, making his way around the room. Star Portuguese products—pimientos, eggs, eggplant, garlic, shellfish, and oranges—appear in new guises. The platter of oranges comes with a lemon and cider vinaigrette and shredded fennel. I can barely share my rolled eggplant stuffed with tomatoes and goat cheese. And oh yes, this is a fine restaurant: Carlos’s chocolate cake wheels by on the dessert cart.

  Our time in Lisbon is over. Carlos will come to visit us in Cortona this summer. We are taking off to see some of the interior and north of the country. He has given us names of tascas along the way, towns we must detour to see, and wines to try. We will drive inland to Estremoz, then go north to several characteristic towns—Évora, Coimbra, Guimarães, Óbidos—zigzagging where we want, then back south to Sintra, our last stop. We’ve made reservations at pousadas, the inns in historic buildings, and at two villas that have become hotels.

  From the car
rental office, two turns and we’re on the bridge and out of the city. Soon we’re in the Alentejo, the pastoral countryside of whitewashed farms with glistening blue doors and waist-high borders painted around the base. Traditional now, the blue border once was believed to ward off the evil eye. Closer to Estremoz, for our first night out, chamomile flowers completely cover the ground under the mutable pewter and silver olive trees. A clump of sheep moves like a huge amoeba among stone walls, where wild pink dog roses clamber.

  So many decades passed, and I did not ever see the Alentejo until today, did not enter the double-gated tunnel into Estremoz, or see the plaza and low white houses, did not ever, in all this time passed, discover this shady town with a fountain and a church with tall weeds growing on top of its pediments, white irises, plum trees in bloom, with a market full of caged rabbits, songbirds, chickens, turkeys, stands with swags of rustic sausages, handmade cheeses, bundles of herbs, and stacks of cod, with the scent of orange and lemon in the streets, with houses whose windows and doors have local marble surrounds.

  One of those flash epiphanies of travel, the realization that worlds you’d love vibrantly exist outside your ignorance of them. The vitality of many lives you know nothing about. The breeze lifting a blue curtain in a doorway billows just the same whether you are lucky enough to observe it or not. Travel gives such jolts. I could live in this town, so how is it that I’ve never been here before today?

  Partridges! Hams—fat, succulent, leathery, dangling around the tops of stalls. One man with blunt bangs and rosy cheeks sells skins. He holds up a stiff-bristled boar with the toenails still attached. I buy two goatskins because I once stayed at a hotel in Deya, Majorca, where the bedside rugs on brick floors were goatskins. I liked the combination of textures. May they not make the clothes in my suitcase smell gamy. We ask him where to eat, and he motions across the plaza.

  Great bread. The texture of pound cake and made with fine cornmeal. We have to wait in the barnlike restaurant because they have dozens of market-day customers and only two people serving. People have the same habit that we observed in Spain—throwing paper on the floor. The floor is littered. Bread and olives and a bottle of water—that’s really fine with me, don’t even bother to bring us a menu. But the server does, and then she brings around rooster stew with rice and cod with potatoes. Tasty but heavy for midday. We lurch out into the sun and thread our way through the now-deserted streets back uphill to the glorious pousada, a castle above the town. Our quarters have a sitting room, fruit with a finger bowl, tall lilies in the bathroom, and a bowl of chrysanthemums between the carved antique twin beds, hard as graves. An ice bucket with a bottle of champagne has been left to chill on a lamp table.

  My bed, immaculate in white linen, is slightly wider than a usual twin. The crisp coverlet and soft sheets feel chaste and inviting. Ed half closes the shutters for an afternoon repose. “Don’t you like these beds?” I ask. But I hear his breathing fall into the slow motion of dreams. Lying in the laddered light from the shutter, I sink into a very old feeling. I return to my bedroom in Fitzgerald and am again a girl in a white spool bed, an identical empty one beside mine. I can almost touch the scalloped edge of the pink linen bedspread and crisp sheets with my mother’s monogram, raised like veins on my grandmother’s hand. On the other side of the room stands my revolving bookcase, where I have placed The Brothers Karamazov among my Nancy Drew mysteries and only recently outgrown Bobbsey Twins books. My mother has brought home The Brothers Karamazov from a shopping trip in Macon when the department store book department (the only place you can buy books within 180 miles of us) had no more Nancy Drews. A thick book, she reasoned, and I went through the Nancys so fast. Accidently, she catapulted me into a new stage of reading, and after that Nancy was over. I always was a reader, but now I first began to be aware of the writer of the book. At the end of Dostoevsky’s novel, I felt a surge of exhilaration. I had met something great. That feeling, repeated with each transporting book, has been one of the prime pleasures of living. The blue and black Modern Library edition, heavy among the other flimsy books, became a fact of life. I had taken possession of the skirted dressing table with its silver brushes when my sister went off to college. Her perfume bottles and little tray of orange sticks, emery boards, and tiny scissors in the shape of a crane were my inheritance, too. In the narrow bed I became aware of the word solitary. Late at night I listened to Cajun music from a radio station in faraway New Orleans, with ads for hair pomade interspersing the songs. I loved the word bayou, loved to hear the phrase on blue bayou.

  So the twin bed in the Portuguese farmland takes me to the green dial glowing on the radio in the otherwise dark room of the time when I was emerging from childhood. The pousada goes completely quiet in the afternoon. The castle seems to fall into a reverie of the sad death of Queen Isabel (perhaps in this room), the royal son who rode out to defeat the Arabs, and Vasco da Gama, who climbed the azulejo-lined stairs to meet Manuel and take command of the fleet that opened the passage to India. Because the castle is crowded with so many silent memories, my own past rises, too.

  When we veer off road, we’re suddenly on a track of crushed marble. Marble yards are littered with enormous Michelangelo-type blocks. We crunch down the road that ends at a cemetery. As in Italy, photographs of the departed decorate the graves. Some have a photo of the whole family. Eterna saudade carved on many slabs leaves no doubt as to exactly what saudade means. This cemetery in proximity to marble quarries is not quite like others. Laid out like a town with a central monument, the “streets” are lined with houses, like playhouses in elaborate marble, with marble bunk beds for the coffins to rest on. You could reach in beyond the lace curtains and touch the coffins, some of which are covered with silk, like bedspreads. Coffins are marble or wood. Carved saints and ministering angels and even a full-sized soldier at the door of his mausoleum populate this campo. The graves of the poor (or those with stingy relatives) are covered with chipped marble or glass. One innovative headstone is actually a cross-section of an oil drum filled with fake flowers and a photo of an old man. Grave number 524 is just a mound of dirt, where someone ended with no further ado when his long day was over.

  Down country lanes, simple white churches suddenly appear, their forms as pure as wildflowers. Bulls congregate in the cork groves. Some cousins of Ferdinand the Bull relax in the shade. They gleam like polished copper, and each wears a bell. All the sheep wear bells, too, and when we stop, little symphonies are playing all over the rolling countryside. I hold out my voice recorder so that for the rest of the trip I can listen to this madrigal of the bells. We stop at Glória, where a woman stoops, mopping the marble stones around the outside of a church no larger than my living room. Her own blue-trimmed cottage next door is surrounded by tall daisies and rosemary. She smiles and opens the nave door, welcoming us as if into her home. I smell the clean whitewash, the scrubbed marble floors. She performs her devotion right here. The church possesses a fine beauty. The altar, painted with blue and yellow flowers, and the walls display ex-voto paintings offered by those saved from goring bulls, sinking ships, and tipped-over carts. The spring grasses are luxuriant, bisected, trisected with rivulets and torrents of rushing water. This is joy, to meander on back roads, windows open to sweet-smelling air, stopping to photograph the neat houses draped with yellow Lady Banksia roses, wisteria, gardens blooming with peonies. We pull over at another white church trimmed in heavenly blue, this one surrounded by a meadow of wild blue irises, smaller than the ones at Sea Ranch in California that cover the salty hills above the Pacific. Whitewashed benches in front of the church must invite visiting after services. We rest from our walk through the meadow, listening to the bulls’ bells ringing the changes.

  The restaurants in the pousadas are committed to preserving local cooking traditions and using the best products of the area. In the baronial dining room we taste a garlic soup with sheep’s cheese and bread. Bread soups, called açordas, are basic to Portuguese cuisine, just
as the famous ribollita is to the Tuscan repertoire. I often make another “dry” Tuscan soup of bread and onions. I’m crazy about these soups you can eat with a fork. With such exquisite bread, how could açordas be anything other than sumptuous? In Lisbon we tried another with shrimp. We’re on the lookout for soups made with pumpkin or chickpeas, both staples in the Alentejo, an area known for delicious soups. Having seen partridges at the market, we are pleased to find them on the menu. Nicely served with bread and sausage stuffing, the partridge is rich and savory. They must have been served to Alfonso, Pedro, and Fernando, the three kings who lived here and to whom we must be indebted for the eventual fate of this castelo—a haven for travellers. The cheese course! All those bell-ringing sheep out there in the dark, praise unto you! Is there a saint of cheese? If so, I offer my thanks.

  In the maiden bed I dream not a dream, just an image: an iridescent gray pigeon with a blue morning glory blooming on top of its head.

  We roam the countryside around Estremoz, looking at the smallest villages’ Roman ruins, towers, prehistoric stones scattered across fields, and more of the enchanting white churches left all alone in fields where their beauty attains a sculptural purity. The towns are sometimes so small that we don’t realize we’ve passed them. The whole Alentejo invites walking or bicycling. The sweeping terrain rolls on and on, expansive and empty. In this season the green fields look as though they are underpainted with light. And they are lit also with the music of bells! Oh, for a horse. This province may be Portugal’s poorest in income, but the people live in beauty, both their houses and their land, and enjoy the bounty of their own gardens and pigs. They are everywhere welcoming, though our communication, out this far, is almost nil.