South-west

My Alentejo, and I call it mine the same way I call my right arm, was born long before I could even imagine what was to come. It began, I think, with my older brother who, sharing the same first name as me and being tall, even taller than our father, earned the nickname Nunão at my birth. I, by contrast, was born Nuninho, and no matter how tall I grew, I stayed that way. I grew up in Cascais, overlooking the sea, isolated on the slopes of the Serra de Sintra, in the house, as my father used to say, "closest to the sea." Apart from a neighbor about my age who, with his parents separated, would come over on weekends as friends and companions, I had four dogs: huge but playful German shepherds, easygoing with the kids, especially me, whom they saw as a kind of human equivalent.

Back then, my brother Nunão, the eldest son from my father's first marriage, who lived in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, would come and spend a few weeks with us every year, both in the summer and at Christmas. For me, ever since I can remember, these were the best times of the year. My brother not only always brought some kind of extra for my soccer gear—balls, goalkeeper gloves, shin guards, socks, cleats, etc.—but he also volunteered to play soccer with me, replacing the walls against which, always dressed in formal attire, I would usually pass the ball with brilliant passing. My brother's patience, my pleasure, the relief of the dogs that, otherwise, lacking company, I would feint, rage and bounce the ball over, without them, between yawns, realizing the complexity of the plots of glorious conquests in which they participated, as adversaries, even indirectly — except, of course, when the ball hit the unfortunates.

The house, large and usually partly empty, on those occasions when Nunão came to visit and occupied the "room downstairs," took on a familiar life I wasn't accustomed to, generating impressions for me, particularly at Christmas, that are still as vivid today as the hundreds of memories stored in the albums—the ones where you had to tuck the corners of the photographs into elusive plastic triangles—that I still keep here in the library, on a shelf reserved especially for that purpose. And so the world spun, in its quiet, repetitive normality, for most of my childhood.

In 1988, when I was ten years old, the world changed. Nunão, after visiting a friend exiled in the Southwest Alentejo region, near Cercal, decided it would be a good idea to buy an old neighboring farm that, incorporating a tavern, a mini-market, and some agricultural outbuildings, was for sale. The idea, original at the time, was to transform the farm into what is now called rural tourism, but which, at the time, due to its novelty, still had no name. My brother, I believe, was the pioneer in this activity, which now abounds here and is one of the region's economic drivers.

But back then, things weren't quite that way. The coastal Alentejo largely retained its inhospitable character, often abandoned, populated by small hills where the reddish, potholed rammed earth mixed with the lime and more modern bricks, often exposed, creating shacks, most of them without bathrooms, scattered across the fields and connected by dusty "old road" roads, or dirt roads. The settlements were small, "raised off the ground," with activity centered on the tavern, the mini-market, or the post office, where the telephone invariably also resided. Often, a single establishment served as a single store—in the case of Casas Novas, it was Dona Guiomar's store. Shut inside houses and taverns, with small windows or limited to the shutters of the old wooden doors burned by the sun, the refuge from the damp cold in winter or the dry heat in summer, trapped the natives in those dark, closed, claustrophobic cocoons, which, together with the glass of red wine, the medium beer and the shot of arbutus brandy sold illegally, protected them from the deserted and dusty paths.

In the larger villages and towns, things were different. Around the central squares, the meeting point where buses usually stopped, the more enterprising, without any ASAE certification, opened terraces and awnings where they served bifanas, pregos, and sandwiches, always duly accompanied by a glass of wine or cold beer. There, social life emerged from the hidden darkness into the brightness of the day, from darkness into light, revealing an entire poor but well-groomed society. Men wore caps, plaid jackets with two-button lapels, shirts, and ties; women wore aprons and colorful gowns, their hair often short, or at least tied back—the middle-aged women. The older women wore black with matching scarves, while the younger women displayed a modern air with long black hair and bolder outfits.

None of these people went to the beach. Many of them, even though they lived 15 or 20 kilometers from the coast, had neither cars nor donkeys, always walking, and had never even seen the sea—and what a sea it was, the Alentejo coastline. Blue, from the beach to a horizon brushed with enormous, powerful, mythological crests, white foam, just as crystal clear, if not greenish, always strewn with multicolored seaweed amidst the pools of the sea rocks. On the coast, above deserted beaches and the scent of the waves, there were nothing more than a few small fishing villages, with tarmac streets, bustling in the summer, flanked by a few cafés and various summer convenience stores. Down below, at the end of each valley, each with its own river estuary, without bridges, we were forced to cross the shallow, flowing waters, by car or on foot, to finally reach the pure, practically empty sands of the many beaches that, in successive small coves, make up a large part of the Vicentina coast.

In those days, on the mostly deserted sands, where one could even camp overnight, the human fauna, separated by informal areas, consisted of a few young locals, adventurous tourists, often nudists, and a handful of Lisbonites and other Portuguese city dwellers, invariably in striped shorts and necklaces, who, usually through family connections, had second homes in the area where they would spend their summers. In the distance, near the sandless, rock-strewn ports—the Canal, the Barcas, the Azenha—invariably perched atop a cliff and watching the sun set over the sea, the gastronomic offerings consisted of one or two wooden huts with tin roofs lined with old reeds and painted cement floors. There, seated on old, worm-eaten chairs, if not benches, the most diverse delicacies were served on wooden tables, some with plastic sheets nailed to them, others covered with paper tablecloths: from the abundant barnacle that served as a starter, to the freshest fish and an infinity of different seafood, some grilled or fried, as well as, in a pot, bean stews with whelks or cuttlefish, not forgetting fish stews, all always duly accompanied by fresh wine by the jug, all paid for at modest prices, clearly advertised on slate posters scribbled in white chalk.

In the town centers, the houses, white with trim of various colors—the yellow of Milfontes, the blue of Zambujeira, for example—were arranged along narrow streets of old tarmac, permanently decorated with the then-traditional handwritten signs hung in the windows, advertising rooms for rent to anyone wishing to spend the night, or the week. Naturally, with their sights set on the foreigners who came to sprawl on the already famous sands of Vila Nova de Milfontes and Porto Côvo, signs in English and German predominated—"Room," "Zimmer," they said, free of taxes, ratings , complaints books, or even Airbnb 's guarantees of inclusive, integrated, and digital comfort. On the contrary, the best review was actually the suggestion of the owner of the central restaurant, which, as opposed to the "portinhos" (small restaurants), already had access to various luxuries, such as a flashy cloth tablecloth beneath the paper one, a handwritten menu bound in leather, an electric mosquito net with a black light lethal to mosquitoes, flies, beetles, and other insects, half-wall tiles in various colors composing geometric designs, as well as paintings or photographs of the area itself decorating the much larger rooms, usually running along stainless steel counters where old people, in the afternoon, would lean back and drink beer and medronho (arbutus) while listening, first to the radio, later to television—a plague that, always on, still infects the entire country.

But I digress. One day in 1988, Nunão took us to see the property he wanted to buy. At first glance, it didn't look very promising. The roof was old, rickety, and had missing tiles, no bathroom, the ceilings were made of old, shaky beams, and the gaps were covered with dry, splintered cane, so dry it was already more gray than yellow. Worse than that, as soon as my Father, the main guest insofar as he lent himself to the role of potential guarantor, had passed the main room of the tavern—still in operation and where several marble-topped tables and a few mismatched chairs seemed to have coexisted for decades—he went in to inspect a hidden corridor and lo and behold, in the darkness, he hadn't even been inside the house for two or three minutes and he had already banged his head on the stave of a door designed, I imagine, for people one and a half or one sixty feet tall, at best.

Naturally, my father wasn't impressed. Neither was I, to be honest. I didn't like the smell, either of the tavern or the mini-market. Everything seemed old and filthy, and I preferred to stay outside in the sun, or under the porch, where a huge grapevine provided shade, playing with a plastic shotgun I particularly liked because the trigger actually clicked and the fake wood stock, offering an air of great realism, reminded me of the real shotgun my father kept in the large hall closet of our house in Guincho. Truth be told, back there, in that world of mine now lost, but in which I still lived then, it didn't occur to me that, at that very moment, while the adults were working out details, values, and deadlines, and I was playing with the shotgun, aiming at imaginary enemies beyond the Casas Novas stream, something was being born that, in time, within me, as the years went by, would define much of what my life is today.

So my brother bought the farm and, apologizing for the alliteration, set up the estaminé. He washed, painted, repaired, rebuilt, restored, and in the summer of '88, things opened. It was filled for months with friends, friends of friends, and, to his good fortune, friends of friends of friends, most of them Dutch, discovering the adventure promised by a land in a distant Europe, still lost in space and time. In those primordial summers, during the day we would go to the endless Malhão Beach or, staying on the farm, we would cool off, astonished by the over-45-degree temperature, in a shower set in the middle of the garden, consisting of four beams driven into the ground, lined with three wide wooden planks and a curtain, a picturesque arrangement that today might pass for freak chic , but which left the user's legs exposed—and not only that, for anyone under one and a half meters tall, as I was. From time to time, there were also baths in a small tank next to the well, which, washed and disinfected, even without filtration, would last for a few days. In between, we would stroll through the fields where the yellow of the crops had already replaced the green that in winters and springs, at the mercy of the wind, undulated gently like an endless, desert-like, solitary sea—a Verdemar, the name my brother gave his country hotel. For the rest, the countryside. The infinite Alentejo countryside. To our ears, beyond the breeze that spreads the solitude of the hills, nothing reached us but an enchanted isolation, a curious communion with the world, a world that seemed there exactly as it is—enormous, gigantic, cosmic, yet in some mysterious way also a part of us.

In the evening, after bathing, my brother would turn on the stereo, and to the sound of rock and blues , everyone would gather on the terrace while he, a chef by profession, cooked dinner. Later that evening, outside, under the grapevine, all the guests, friends, and family would share a long wooden table lit by candles placed in empty wine bottles—the kind that's a dull, thin green that's no longer made these days and that the years have coated with melted wax. The atmosphere at the meal was one of great uproar and happy conviviality, with a cacophony of Portuguese mixed with Dutch and English, a sonic kaleidoscope of opinions and laughter, everyone drinking from the same jug of wine, always full, which added to the liveliness. My brother served typical Portuguese dishes, but always with a touch of originality—what today, in a loosely worded way, is called "fusion"—combining the traditional "esplanade" in a first edition of Pantagruel , duly signed by Berta da Rosa Limpo, which he still has at home, with everything else his years of cooking in Amsterdam had taught him. Always a three-course meal, he could completely change the menu for more than three weeks, from salads with garden produce to grilled, roasted, and stewed meat and fish paired with a variety of side dishes, always culminating in what the children inevitably applaud most—dessert. From memory, I recall as unbeatable the roast kid, which remains my reference point when it comes to cooking it, the Gratin Dauphinois , which filled my ever-gluttonous measure, and the drunken pears, a delicacy that, whenever it appeared, always made me try to squeeze the last traces of sauce onto my plate. Of all these impressions, I don't have a photographic version, of course, but I hold close to my heart the memories of those nights spent at Verdemar—and little did I imagine how much of the summers of my childhood and adolescence would be spent in that joyful, almost perpetual, routine.

Truth be told, I don't know how the idea came about. However, in the summer of 1990, when I was twelve, I spent the entire month of August at my brother's rural tourism establishment. The reason for the stay stemmed from a family negotiation I'd overlooked, but which ultimately resulted in my promotion from occasional guest to lowest-ranking helper at Verdemar. I say lowest-ranking because only the sheep and dogs were below me, and those, at least from my perspective, didn't count in the hierarchy, something confirmed by the fact that I sat at the table with everyone else for dinner, a privilege not granted to the irrational members of the community. In my new role, I picked vegetables from the garden, swept the terrace—an activity I hated and avoided under various pretexts—as well as helping set and clear the table and even wash the dishes, usually as a dryer. I was also primarily responsible for fetching this or that whenever necessary, becoming a sort of assistant, a little more useful than pliers and, I imagine, certainly more useful than a human TV remote. This was one of the few responsibilities I already knew, because, like the entire generation of the 70s, before electronic controls appeared, in the evenings, and in my case usually at my father's behest, I was responsible for getting up from the table and turning the knob to see what was starting on the "other channel," a time when programming changed, which was indicated by a "+" sign in the upper right corner of the TV. In any case, my usefulness at Verdemar, even if limited and sometimes recalcitrant, I imagine was proven historically and empirically by the fact that the invitation was repeated the following year.

In fact, over the years, the tradition of my stay in the Alentejo continued, and despite remaining at the bottom of the establishment's hierarchy, my responsibilities actually increased. I took on, for example, feeding the animals, a task usually carried out successfully, except for one day when I failed to lock the fence properly and the damn sheep all ran off to an unknown location, prompting hours of searching and capturing by everyone. That was not a good day. I was also incorporated into the department dedicated to renovating certain buildings on the farm. I washed old roof tiles, loaded carts and carts of cement, sand, and bricks, even learned how to make dough with a hoe, and, under the hot summer sun, sweating, it was precisely among the two neighbors who made up the group of helpers that I felt, I believe for the first time, truly useful. Few things will help a human being navigate a world that doesn't care much for them as much as helping to build a house. Now that I've done several, I know what I'm talking about. At the time, of course, I couldn't have imagined such a thing; I was simply happy to be with grown-ups, to help and learn, and, crucially, to share the moments of relaxation when they, the adults, would stop for a beer and I, not to be outdone, imitating their ways, would down bottles of Sumol , sometimes orange, sometimes pineapple. The effort and sacrifice were worth it. There still stands, I believe, a house where the original tiles were washed, scrubbed, and scraped by me—and the mortar that makes the rough plaster on the walls was also partly the result of my labor, as was the transport of the extremely heavy bags of cement that, in the scorching sun, I carried, one by one, from the farm entrance in an old wheelbarrow.

My Alentejo is therefore, as I said at the beginning, as mine as my right arm. Not because the province belongs to me, or is more mine than anyone else's, but because so many of the memories that make the person I was yesterday who I am today are intertwined with a mental concept, mine, which, for me, is the Alentejo, in my particular case, the Southwest Alentejo. It is, therefore, in this abstract space where the concepts that compose the senses and offer the meanings of our particular life stories reside, mine, and mine alone, as exclusively mine as my memories, even those that, scattered throughout time and shared by so many people, still remain my memories and no one else's.

In the end, that's exactly how my Alentejo was born: with family, in peace and childlike happiness, in successive summers spent at Verdemar, always camped outside in the garden, behind a wall so as not to obstruct the guest rooms, but with the right to an extension cord, always the same one, which allowed me, late at night, to turn on my radio and light a small lamp. That's how, at night, after everyone had retired, after reading two or three chapters of a mystery novel, I would listen to music quietly while, lying on an old foam mattress, with my head outside the tent, mingled with the chirping of the crickets, I gazed at the stars that city life prevented me from seeing and dreamed of the future that time would bring.

1. from A – This autobiographical story is a revised, modified, expanded version of a small note once published on my personal blog and which is no longer available for public reading.
2. from A (2) – After almost 40 years, Verdemar is still there in the hands of my brother, sister-in-law and nephews .