When Don Fernando died he left eighteen horses, a dozen chickens, ten ducks, three goats and sixteen white doves. He left three beehives with an uncountable number of bees in them. Then there were two feral cats that lived in the tumbledown pigsty, the one with all the space-invader machines that Don Fernando had collected long ago and the rats the cats couldn’t catch because the rats had grown too big. There were the family of sparrows who lived under the eaves and woke us up every morning, chirping and chattering. There were the swifts who flew up the coast from Morocco in the spring and made the farm their home all summer, an aerial display of sweeping and swirling arrows squealing and shouting at each other to get out of the way as they dived and swooped, catching flies. A hoopoe scratched about the farmyard floor with its crown of feathers as if it were a king and the farmyard floor a palace, though it was hardly that, and there was the nightingale who sang forlornly, all night long for a whole year just beyond the farmyard wall hoping to attract a mate. There were countless lizards and geckos and the odd snake and once, I saw a civet cat, it sat on the terrace that ran along the back of the cottages looking out at the view with its big startled eyes. And then of course there was the mongoose and the fox and we all knew that one of them would get the blame when a chicken or a duck went missing. There were four families of humans who also lived on the farm and they had three dogs and two cats of their own, but we will have to come to them another time.
All these the late owner, Fernando, Senhor Fernando, Don Fernando to you, did not necessarily call his family, yet they were his family, his extended family, nonetheless. Without him all would not have been so welcomed or so tolerated and therefore they were his family whether anyone realised it or not. Of course he had his favourites, of which you might suppose his horses were first, and he had his favourites amongst those of course. His horses were what he seemed to live for, what he spent his money on, yet all else were his family the same, adopted in some way, even the humans who would be the first to deny his embrace. ‘No, no, we’re not family!’ they would have said, but they were, in a way. The doves he said he bought to hire out for weddings. ‘The women love them!’ he once told me with a wink. The lizards and the geckos he saw out of the corner of his eye, and the bees he put on his funny suit for, the one with the funny hat. I don’t know if he knew about the civet cat. Only I saw that, or I think it was only me. It adopted us for several evenings you see and in doing so without anyone realising it, except me, because I was the only one keeping a count of these things, it was adopted. And it was its big sad, lonely eyes that did it, the ones that could have swallowed up half the world. It turned round when it was sitting on the terrace and looked at me scared and wanted to run away, but then we both saw a dusty fox pass not fifty yards in front of us, unconcerned on its dusky way, with a big yellow moon and the shadows of the trees and the castle on the hill with its lights coming on. That’s what did it. I can see it still in my memory.
Of course Don Fernando didn’t just have this family, though when you saw him on the farm everyday you might think that this would be enough for one whose years were beginning to catch up with him. You did wonder perhaps sometimes whether he had another family somewhere, from some of the things he said and the gestures and the sighs sometimes, but that somehow they were all estranged, far away, no don’t be silly, it couldn’t be. Once, when he was beginning to talk to me in English after having said for a year he didn’t know any English, although by then I realised he had been listening to me in English for a year and understanding everything I said, he told me he had a flat in Paris or he thought he had one, but he didn’t quite know because he hadn’t been there for twenty years, and he presumed he still had it. I wondered, what sort of a person has a flat in Paris or thinks he has one, but hasn’t been there for twenty years and speaks as if twenty years were a lifetime ago, though its not that long, except that if twenty years could be a lifetime ago, a long time, another life, another set of relationships, another family, maybe. Maybe a family he had lost somewhere, somewhere along the way.
Another time we went to Montijo in the truck, the old Toyota with its faded orange cab, rust on the roof, in the doors, the sides, the frame, that struggled up the hill so much you thought it better retire right now, but when it finally got out onto the flat again it purred along as if nothing could beat it. ‘My office!’ Don Fernando declared sweeping his hand over all beside him as if to explain the discarded bits of paper, bills, receipts, plastic bags and the like strewn about the passenger seat and the foot-well, the old pens and wrappers from God knows where, God knows the world spends too much time on administration anyway. We swept them out of the way before I climbed up into the seat and sat down beside him. When we got to Pinhal Novo which everyone knows you have to go through if you go to Montijo from here, that funny town that seems very happy to have sprung up from nowhere, with the railway I suppose, Fernando slowed the truck and wound the window down and looked out across the busy street at a small sports shop and smiled. ‘That’s one of mine..,’ he said as we passed and with seemingly no intention of stopping to enquire how business was going and a wistful expression on his face as if that too was some other life better left alone. A few streets away and we slowed again, stopped to let a young woman cross in front of us on the crossing. She walked attractively she did, her arms and legs kissed by the sun, and for all the world it was like someone had put a fruit topping on Don Fernando’s ‘arroz doce’ and he lent out of the opened window again as she got to his side and he summoned from the depths of the rusty double bass that was his heart the appreciation, the felicitation, the words, are they words in Portuguese, yes I suppose they are, although they sounded more like the reverberations of an old lion, ‘Bom, Bom!’ he said, very slowly and very deeply, almost a growl, and she turned her head half in his direction and smiled a faint smile, embarrassed she was, knowing, smart and sassy, and walked on, well, what else could she do? Well now, I suppose you are beginning to get the picture.
We went to get carrots for the horses. Carrots were 50 euros a ton then, I don’t know what they are now, cheaper, Senhor Fernando said, than hay or supplement. ‘Anyway I go every week, next time, do you want to come?’ he asked. ‘Yes’ I said, ‘but there’s an exhibition in Montijo, at the Camera Municipal, can we go there on the way?’ ‘Of course,’ said Senhor Fernando.
When we got to Montijo we swung around the narrow streets, the back of the truck sticking out around the corners, and neither of us wearing any seat-belts, it felt an insult somehow, narrowly missing the parked cars and me thinking that I knew the way and Don Fernando pretending he didn’t, like he had pretended he didn’t know any English though he knew the way because he’d been coming here all his life. We parked at the far end of the main street though you might not have thought it a main street it had those one-storey houses on each side, the ones the Portuguese used to build everywhere, not shabby chic yet, though you can see that coming, and some of them are shops and businesses and then houses again in no particular order. Don Fernando eased the truck into a space between two cars like a ship into dock and we climbed out into the sunlight. We walked up the street, an Englishman with too much of a tan, and a Portuguese of naturally brown hue from the fields, from the farm, from his parents and his grandparents before him, and the Moors and the original Lusitanians a long time ago. We caught a few quizzical looks, intrigued perhaps, at this pairing not often seen in these parts, two men, from different countries, each, one side of sixty or the other. Don Fernando smiled and acknowledged a few ‘Good Afternoons’’ as we went along. I thought he might be bored coming here, a distraction from the trip for the carrots, but he seemed to be enjoying himself, and there was something else, what was it, a little nervousness, something sensitive that touched Don Fernando here as we entered the main square with its grander buildings and the Camara Muncipal and the entrance to the gallery inside. Don Fernando looked down at his shoes as we went in. They still had a little mud on them from the farm.
Well now I know what these places are like. I didn’t before, but now I do. We were greeted and shown around by a woman about sixty too, elegant, her dress made of a colourful cotton print, red and yellow and brown, her hair well kept, dark and shiny, her make up and nails just so. On her face she wore a tired expression but behind her eyes still hope and intelligence and a little fire. She sparkled as we entered, got up from her chair and introduced herself. In a thousand towns and cities in this world there are galleries like this, with matrons or patrons a little older or younger with hair and nails and expressions a little fresher or more tired. Each has been sitting in each for years hoping one day to become another centre of the cultural life of humanity, not quite the Metropolitan Museum of Art you understand but esteemed nonetheless, respected. There have been busy first nights, articles in papers, some sales to respectable and reputable ladies and gentlemen, but these have been but oasis in the many sandy and windswept days of solitary sitting and waiting. Maria had been sitting here for twenty years she said. She cast her eyes to the ceiling, to the past, as if it were last Friday, she could remember the weather when the gallery opened, the evening, the artists involved. She was coming to the end she said, she was going to retire. She showed us around the work of the current resident sculptor, coloured ceramics of creatures and plants from under the sea. They displayed themselves on plinths of varying heights, their arms and legs articulated, moving, finely balanced by their artistic creator, go on, you can touch them, Senhora Maria said, and we did, and they jangled a little, played a light chiming symphony when we set them off together, beautiful. The artist was in his seventies, Maria continued, lived locally, had exhibited here many times. I suggested to her that living here, by the river, near the sea, he might have had some first-hand experience of marine fauna and flora which had inspired him, a diver perhaps in his younger days. Maria laughed. ‘No, she said, it all comes out of his head. He’s a lovely guy, but quite mad!’ She looked at me in a gentle, knowing way as this might be a revelation to me, a revelation of a pierced conceit, that the artist is but a childlike dreamer which she the curator must indulge, now don’t go thinking the artist is some kind of genius, he is not! She smiled. Well I didn’t think that all artists were like that. I didn’t think of myself like that, then, a childlike dreamer no, though now I do wonder. She didn’t know I painted. I told her of my conceit and we sat down at her desk and I showed her my website which wasn’t very good and my paintings which were a bit better and she looked at them kindly and said I could have an exhibition there if my paintings were of Montijo which they were not, they were of Palmela. Don Fernando stood behind me and smiled and put his hand on the back of my chair in a comradely way. She showed me some paintings on her computer by the sea creature guy and I said it looked like they had been painted with house paint. ‘Tinta da Casa!’ She said yes and seemed to be impressed with my recognition of such painterly mediums! Don Fernando stood at a little distance with his arms folded and seemed tired but he was not. I wandered off and looked at the sculptures again and Donna Maria and Don Fernando stood and talked, and I thought they were indulging me but they were not and their conversation drew on and became more engrossed and before I knew it I was the one feeling I was indulging them, and then I saw that Don Fernando was genuinely interested in her, in the gallery, in the space, in art, in another life.
Eventually, after a little thought, Maria took us to the back of the gallery and showed us the storeroom. It was piled high from floor to ceiling with the catalogues of past exhibitions. Twenty years of this and that, paintings, sculptures, drawings, photography, group shows, individual shows, the childlike dreamers of the Sul de Tejo, the burdens of the curator. ‘Take some,’ she said to both of us, eager to lighten the load a little. I did but Don Fernando declined. ‘Take some more,’ she said. I did, but Don Fernando politely declined again. Instead he prompted Donna Maria to talk some more, and he listened. They stood together, a man and a woman of a similar age, him nearly three times the size of her, she ensconced, embraced in his attention like an elegant fox and an old bear who, after many years of separate but parallel lives have decided to become friends. Don Fernando listened while she talked on, listening to some echoes of the past maybe, to a sunny afternoon of what might have been perhaps, just listening, just enjoying the moment of being there.
We said goodbye at the door with a kiss on both cheeks for each of us from Donna Maria, and we turned and waived as we walked back across the square and Maria waived back from the doorway before she returned inside. As we walked back Don Fernando did not look down at his shoes, not once.
Then we went to get the carrots for the horses. We drove out of Montijo in the old Toyota, out on the main road going North East, into the Alto Alentejo up by the river, towards Coruche. The land flattened out and the road ran straight busy with cars and vans and lorries, carrying pallets and trays of vegetables, cattle and pigs and horses in horse boxes, signs on their sides, Barros e Filhos, Produtos Agricolas. On either side of the road now fields a little greener, tall rushes, then scrub and cork oak, then pine trees and then back again to fields. The sun shone through the tall plane trees that lined the road for a while, casting bright shadows, and then the trees disappeared leaving everything to the heat. The Toyota made good time, running along nicely, our windows open, our elbows pointing out into the oncoming breeze. We shouted to each other over the noise of the engine, the traffic, laughing, pleased to be on the road, Senhor Fernando Quixote, Toyota Rocinantes, and me an unlikely Panza, the green plains of the Alentejo passing for the dust of La Mancha.
Eventually we slowed and Don Fernando found a gap in the traffic and turned off the road into a large open, gravel yard. This was the place of the carrots. We proceeded to the far end of the yard where a large modern house stood, plonked down in the middle, and behind it, immediately behind it, like the house was being followed or something and had no room to breathe, let alone a garden, was a huge great big shed, fifty feet high and three hundred feet long made of steel girders and corrugated siding. Don Fernando slowed up in front of the house and turned to the left and joined a queue of other vehicles, vans, lorries, pickups, waiting to file round to the back of the house and into the shed behind. As all the vehicles waited for their turn Fernando idled the engine and told me about the owners of the palace of carrots, the business of carrots, how this was the modern way of these things now in the Alentejo, ‘ you’ll see in a minute.’ he said, how the owners had made it big in cleaning and processing, rich, and here is their house, all sparkling new and he had known them when they were all much younger, he was friends with them, yes, and oh, wait a minute, here they come. A couple in their early sixties came out of the front door in front of us just at that moment. They closed the door behind them and walked down the big front steps, their matching blue jeans bluer than most, their shirts brand new, the leather of her handbag and their shoes all shiny. They smiled and waved at Don Fernando, who smiled and waved back, exchanged a few words as they passed us and walked over to their car, a Mercedes, latest edition, got into it and drove away. I looked over to Fernando and caught his eye. We both laughed.
As we proceeded to the back of the shed the noise of machinery started to get louder. A couple of large lorries filled to the brim with carrots filed off to the side and we passed round them with the other customers to the queue behind. As we started to move inside the scale of the operation began to reveal itself. The shed was about the size of half a football pitch, the ceiling way up high above our heads, three sides open to the elements. We passed slowly down to the far end, waited our turn, stopped when we got to the head of the queue and got out. On the far wall an array of large processing machinery buzzed and whirred, hummed and rumbled. At one end the trucks packed with dirty carrots from the fields were unloaded, poured in their hundreds into a big hopper then via several conveyor belts, cleaned and sterilised and graded through a series of large metal tanks and cylinders, rattling along to be eventually tipped from a great height when they reached the other end into large plastic containers. A man on a tractor spun round on the polished concrete floor, picking up each container just as it filled up and stacked it on top of many others, forming a great wall of carrots to the side. When he saw Fernando he stopped for a second and exchanged a few words, difficult above the din. Fernando showed the man a piece of paper with a number on it and the man nodded and span round again, waited for a new container to fill before picking it up with the long arms of the tractor, reversed, turned deftly and tipped the carrots into the back of Fernando’s truck.
The man spun round again to pick up another container. The carrots, clean and fresh and bright orange tumbled down into it and stopped, the container half filled. The tractor man waited. There were some shouts from the other end of the line, and then some more back and forth and then everything came to a halt. The noise lessened. ‘Something wrong with the machinery,’ Fernando said. Everyone started to look at each other, the line of customers behind us in their vans and pickups, wholesalers, market traders, horse owners. Immediately behind a women got out of her van and walked up and down in her boots and riding breeches, her long grey hair and face dry from years in the sun. She looked at me a little embarrassed, carrots, after all were cheap food for horses, what was a foreigner doing here at the carrot shed, what will become of us, we all have to get by you know….!
I turned and walked a few yards out of the end of the shed. I stood in the sunlight and looked out over the green fields at the back. Some bulls stood about munching, ruminating. The nearest looked up and stared at me. I went back in.
While we waited, Fernando waved his arm over the expanse of the cathedral of carrots and suggested I paint it, ‘not now of course, but you could,’ he said. ‘Yes, I could,’ I said though such things can be difficult, to get the scale, the vastness of the machinery, the smallness of each carrot. I wondered, is it a painting, a sculpture, an installation, modern, postmodern, why are they cleaning the carrots, do they need to clean the carrots? After a few minutes the machinery whirred into action again, some more shouts and waving and the carrots started to pour out of the end of the line. The tractor man tipped another container full into the back of the truck and went back for a third, the last. As he turned fully loaded he caught my eye, lost his concentration and missed his tip, some of the carrots spilling out onto the floor. He stopped and swore, and got down from his tractor, went off and came back with a shovel and a broom. He leaned the broom against the side and began shovelling the spilled carrots back into Fernando’s truck, his professional pride dented. I took the broom and swept the remaining carrots into a neat pile to make it easier for him to scoop, but after a couple of brushes he waved me away, dismissively. Fernando leaned up against his van and didn’t move, never interfere with a man and his work, you should know that, he smiled.
Everything set straight, the tractor man signed the paper with Fernando’s number, said goodbye to Fernando, not me, and we both climbed back into the cab. Fernando put the paper on the floor with the others, revved the engine and we eased back out of the yard, much heavier than before. The old Toyota didn’t mind though, a bit slower to get up to speed, but it soon got there. We headed out on the Coruche road then turned south again, straight for a while, scraping the edge of Montijo, a few roundabouts, some modern flats, just built, just being built. Fernando said he wanted to stop and get some lottery tickets, he always did every week when he came back from the carrots, a superstition, of faith, for good luck. We went round another roundabout and stopped at a shop, a newsagent, a cafe, it hadn’t quite made up its mind which, the apartment blocks going up around it on the edge of town, like a Sims game, the people going in and out looking a bit lost. Fernando bought a fistful of tickets, the numbers chosen by the machine. People stood around drinking small bitter Portuguese coffees but she had nothing else, ‘I’m a bit thirsty,’ I said, but she had no cans, no bottles of water, the grand player of the Sims game hadn’t got to that level yet.
Back on the road, Fernando asked if I minded if we stopped somewhere else on the way back. He wanted to go and see a man about a horse, he said, a phrase that in England might mean something a bit dodgy, but no, Fernando wanted to go and see a man about a horse. ‘He’s got a horse for sale, a mare, I might be interested,’ he said We headed east of Palmela, the road ran straight through endless fields of vines right up to the edge of the road, grapes red and purple, bulging off their stems. I said, ‘Ok, I don’t mind, but I’m still thirsty though.’ The van ran on for a mile or so, and then Fernando pulled into the side of the road. No traffic passed, some houses a little way off. Fernando opened his door and got down out of the cab. ‘Hold on one minute…,’ he said and ran across the road and disappeared into the rows of vines, rustling and tugging and came back grinning, two large bunches of grapes in his hands. He opened the door. ‘Here you are, you said you were thirsty,’ he said, and handed one of the bunches to me. He got back in the cab, laughing, ‘I used to do this when I was a kid,’ he said, reminiscing. He drove on with one hand on the wheel and the other tearing three or four grapes off at a time and putting them in his mouth, this conspiracy of boys making the grapes taste sweeter.
The equestrian facility stood incongruously up against the bank of a motorway intersection, running south again to Setubal. We pulled up and parked in the yard by a line of stables. Fernando told me to wait while he went off to find the owner. Horses stood with their heads leaning out of the stable block and beyond a large oval area of sand surrounded by fencing with a couple of teenage girls on their ponies going round, an older woman looking on. I waited. The horses waited. The shafts of the sun striking lower now, through the trees and the dust. Fernando came back with the owner, a swarthy young man in breeches and boots and a loose white shirt and Fernando motioned for me to follow.
In the shade of another stable block, two or three other horses stood in their stalls. The flies buzzed, around the horses, around the horse’s owner, around Fernando and me. The horse in question was a beautiful, middle-aged mare, tall and sinewy and white. She leaned her head out of her box and listened, patient, stoic, like most horses, as Fernando and the owner talked. I’m not sure if I would have understood what they were saying even if I could have translated it. They talked on without seeming to want to come to any sort of conclusion, let alone a deal. The flies buzzed. I sat down on a bench a little distance away and waited. I thought the flies would follow me like they always seem to, but they didn’t. The flies buzzed around the owner and Fernando, around their conversation, around the horse, who flicked her tail and mane now and again, patient, stoic. The late afternoon sun started to take on an orange hue, the heat the same. Now and again Fernando would look over at me and nod as if emphasising his point to the owner and I would purse my lips and smile back. ‘See, the silent horse expert from England thinks the same, and look, there are no flies on him!’ his look seemed to say. The owner smiled too. Eventually they stopped, we all shook hands and filed out of the stable block. We walked back over to the van and said goodbye to the owner, Fernando and myself raising ourselves back up into the cab, all saddled up and drove off.
On the way back Fernando said over the noise of the van, ‘I didn’t like the horse, I’m not going to buy.’ I asked if the horse was too old, but Fernando said no it wasn’t that. ‘I didn’t like the horse.’ he said again. It seemed strange perhaps, but then again, I suppose there are judgements of character to be made in all of this, there was a point to the standing and talking. All horse owners know that a horse has a character, a horse is a person. And then there are the others and their personalities. Who is going to get on with whom, who is going to be jealous of the newcomer’s arrival, put up a fight, give or get given the cold shoulder? Who will run off with the newcomer to the far end of the field and remain ensconced for weeks, the flicking of tails in a haughty manner, at the flies, at the others, playfully biting each other’s ears and not coming in for their carrots on time? Horses are social animals, like humans, and contrary too, like us. They can stand all day or week on their own and then come together in a huddle, rotating each in turn to the outside to give the others relief from the wind and the rain. A mother will put herself on the sunny side of her foal to give her shade, until she is ready. On the other hand, I have seen one regularly push a container of carrots away from the other’s face in the middle of eating, out of jealousy or spite. They will feud and bully each other. Fernando knew his horses, he worked for many years on a farm in Spain with one hundred of them, one became famous in a television commercial for a Spanish brandy, he said. When he had fed his horses in the evening he would sometimes spend time with them in the field, standing in the middle of the group while they gathered round, stroking their ears or necks and talking to them in a low voice. They trusted him, they had to, he fed them, but more than that he had been there at their births. Once he showed me, a day after a new foal had been born, he carefully entered the pen with the mother and her new born son. The mother looked alarmed, but stood back, rolling her eyes in consternation while Fernando crouched down next to the foal, introduced himself, his voice, his touch, his smell. ‘I have to,’ he said, ‘otherwise they would not follow me, understand me, trust me.’ The mother gradually relaxed and after half an hour Fernando retreated, the mother standing tall and proud again over her own unique creation.
We went home, under the motorway, slowly up the long hill to the junction at Aires, the castle looming up larger in our vision as we got nearer, the trees on either side of the road, the houses appearing, the supermarket on the corner. We turned right, round the hill, past the viewpoint and the bus station of Palmela and then right again, down to the farm and the valley, the beautiful, age old, Valley of the Barrels. At the bottom Fernando turned down the track, careful not to spill any carrots. He stopped and I got out and swung the big green metal gates open. Fernando drove down to the end of the yard, parked up and turned the engine off. It rattled to a halt. I followed in. Fernando got out of the van and we stood together for a moment. The silence and calm of the farm enveloped us.
After a few minutes the horses, who had heard the gate and the truck coming in and knew its meaning, started to come up from the field neighing in hungry anticipation. Fernando opened the back of the truck, carrots spilling on the ground. He brought several old plastic containers over and started to shovel carrots into each of them, then took them over to the side and stacked them ready for the next week. Did he want any help, I asked, tentatively, we were comrades now weren’t we, I don’t know..? Fernando looked unsure and then seeing my feeble attempts with the shovel let me stand back, he could do it quicker, easier himself he said. I stood back. I went away eventually to make my dinner, but he carried on, he said he didn’t mind, but he looked tired and stood there for a while the energy drawing out of him, somewhere at the back of his eyes, and then a sudden falling inside himself. I could feel it. I stood for a while at my door wondering whether he would recover, but in a few minutes he seemed to. I went to make my dinner and put my head out once or twice, but he was back at it, in the evening, ferrying carrots here and there, the sound of eighteen horses munching in unison, you could hear them into the night, long after the darkness had closed in. Eventually Fernando left to go up to his house in the village and the sound of the cicadas took over, and that is enough to make anyone feel sleepy, God rest their souls.
Several days afterwards I was with Fernando in the big hall on the farm, the one he used to store his old stuff. There was a lot of it, unwanted furniture, a pool table, boxes of old screws and nails and bolts and bits of metal, china and glass and mirrors and pictures. I’d given him a painting and there it was up on the shelf, pride of place, but starting to grow dust already. We looked at it and then I noticed another, lower down on another shelf, a portrait of a young woman done in a popular nineteen seventies style. I asked him who had done it and eventually he said he had himself. ‘You are an artist too.’ I said as we walked back out into the yard and he said, ‘No, you are the artist, not me!’ I wasn’t sure. Maybe we both were. Maybe we all are.
A few days after, he said he was going to the local fair at Quinta do Anjo and asked me if I wanted to come. He asked Antonio, a short wiry guy, the same age, who lived on the farm too. He had been growing vegetables on a plot round the back of the cottages. He would wake me up in the morning banging the metal head of his hoe onto the shaft by way of the tiled pavement outside my window and I would open it and shout at him to do that somewhere else, or preferably before he got there. He always ignored me. About lunchtime he would run round to his flat above the front gate exited to show his wife his new aubergines or peppers, or onions, he’d never grown them before. ‘Heh, look at these!’ he would say, only to be rebuffed by her bemused smile. ‘You can get them up at the shop just as fresh, for half the effort!,’ she would reply, and indeed, round here, you could. Perhaps that was beside the point though. On the day of the fair Antonio didn’t turn up and Fernando stood outside in the yard waiting for me to come out of my house and join him. I sat in my house, unaware he was out there, waiting for him to knock at my door. Understandably perhaps, regretfully, neither of us went to the fair that day, such are the fears of intimacy, sometimes, between older men.
Between the Bay of All Saints and the Southern Atlantic Ocean a piece of land sticks out, a promontory with water on three sides and the sky above. On the promontory sits the city of Salvador, caught like a precious stone or a piece of glass held up against the light, the light always bouncing and reflecting itself from sky, to sea, to land and back again, and nowhere shadow, nowhere to hide, except under the old trees that have survived from the tropical forest before, and sometimes the skyscrapers, the apartment blocks that have risen in the forest’s place and now demand the sky.
Once the colonial capital of Portuguese Brazil, the Portuguese commissioned their rich and multicoloured houses on top of the promontory and imported slaves into the port beneath. The slaves came from Benin, Angola and Mozambique, the latter two, the Portuguese African colonies the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. The slaves built Salvador, houses rich and poor, and the plantations of sugar, tobacco and coffee beyond. In the city they originally lived near the port and the docks. The port exported wood, Brazil wood, that’s how Brazil got its name, agricultural products, gold and silver and precious stones. In a period spanning the 18th and 19th centuries Salvador was the largest exporter of precious stones in the world, diamonds, emeralds, tourmaline and topaz, stones that bedazzled in the heat, stones that caught the light.
There is a road in Salvador, the ‘Avenida Sete de Setembro’, marking the date in 1822 when Brazil became independent from colonial Portugal. The road runs down the northern side of the promontory, starting at the bottom of the ‘Centro Historico’ area, on up through the modern ‘Centro’ district, curving gently around the park at the ‘Campo Grande’ and on again through the upmarket area of Vitoria, over a roundabout and then down to the point, to Barra, with its iconic lighthouse and its ever popular beaches. The road could be read as a history of modern Salvador, and in part also, as a history of Brazil itself.
In the ‘Centro Historico’ area, the brightly coloured, colonial houses, the incredible ‘new world’ baroque churches, the grand administrative buildings of the past speak of the exuberance of arrival, the arrival, five hundred years ago, of Portuguese adventurers and speculators, religious zealots and visionaries intoxicated by the light and the heat, yet all too aware of their limitations. They were few in number compared to their Tupi, (indigenous), neighbours and the African population they later imported, and needed therefore to use the skills, knowledge and labours of each. So began that particular set of contradictions that is uniquely Brazilian, as witnessed here, on the one hand, at the ‘Pelourinho’, the public whipping post, with its harsh and oppressive history, and on the other, here in the Centro Historico , that great mixture of colours and styles, of architecture, dress, food, music, language, a mixture of Portuguese, Tupi and African folk cultures.
After several centuries this area was abandoned by its original inhabitants, its families grown too large and factious, its members seeking various and other lives, the stuff of Brazilian novels and telenovelas. In the 20th century, many of the original African/Brazilian inhabitants at the bottom of the hill moved up and in, especially after the end of slavery in 1888, setting up homes and businesses, only to be evicted in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, to make a space to put the tourists and the new institutions of ‘culture’ and ‘history’. Most of the tourists are from the rest of Brazil, seeking the story of the origins of their country, as well as those from abroad, seeking inspiration for theirs. They wander or stand around taking selfies or posing with the locals, a little in awe, a little confused perhaps as to what piece of history they have wandered into, a stage set in which the play finished only yesterday, or did it? Are they the actors now, the tourists and the locals who would interact with them, exchanging food, music, crafts, money and ideas, in the bright, sparkling light?
If you stand at the bottom of the Centro Historico area, where the Avenida Sete de Setembro begins, you may notice an office block of more modern style standing empty and derelict. Once squatted, some of its windows are broken, and in those that are not and on its outside walls, posters and graffiti protest the makeover of the Centro Historico area. Below, some military policemen stand eyeing the traffic and answering questions from tourists in danger of losing their way, while on the opposite side of the road. taxi drivers, their cars parked in a neat row, eat ice creams, waiting for their next fare.
And on up a little, past a newly restored colonial building turned into a beautiful municipal library, past another grand church, and we seem to have moved on in more ways than one. The road straightens out for five or six blocks, and here shops, shops and more shops, market stalls and pavement stalls, alleyways and side streets leading to more of the same, cafes, ‘lanchonetes’, restaurants and more. The pavements are jammed with people of all skin tones, smiling eyes, a quip or a quick call, all hoping for a bargain and not a tourist in sight. The shops are wide, some going back the full block, their entrances open to the street. Shop assistants, young and good looking, in bright, matching t-shirts and trainers beckon you inside or give a running commentary on their microphones of the shop’s particular prices and wares. Here are the many wonderful fruits and vegetables of Brazil, the food and drink, the high quality clothes and textiles not seen in Europe, the furniture and electrical goods of ‘Industria Brasileira’. Here are banks and insurance agencies, offices for lawyers, estate agents, a post office, shops for money transfer, mobile phones and services, for ‘variadades’, art and craft supplies, and travel agencies for holidays to other parts of Brazil, Peru, Columbia, Mexico and the United States, even Europe, so far away. On the pavements are stalls selling football shirts, mugs and flags, Bahia and Vitoria, the two rival teams of Salvador. Others sell cheap watches and jewellery, and behind them some shops with more expensive versions of the same. Rings and brooches and necklaces with small cut diamonds and other stones peer out through their windows, glistening and glittering in the hubbub and the heat.
At the end of several blocks the street widens out some more and curves around the park at the Largo do Campo Grande. A grand public space with avenues and pavements and pediments and seats to sit on and be calm. The palm and other tropical trees grow tall above you and shade you from the ever pressing light, a little from the heat. A single policemen stands watchful and an older woman with a stall selling bottled water is grateful for a couple of ‘reais’, ‘Obrigada amigo’.
At the centre of the park a large column rises up, like the one in Trafalgar Square in London with Admiral Nelson on its top, but here at its peak stands the figure of an indigenous warrior. He stands four metres tall, of cast iron, his weight leaning forward into action, his chest bare, his headdress of feathers, his hands pressing a spear downwards into a dragon at his feet. The statue commemorates the struggle for the independence of Bahia from Portugal, which was part of the larger struggle for the independence of Brazil from the Portuguese monarchy, some of whose main events happened here between 1821 and 1823, in Salvador. In particular the statue marks the role that Tupi Brazilians played in that struggle not just as fighters but as planners and organisers too. On the one hand the statue looks for all the world like a European caricature of an ‘Indian’, but on the other, standing in a place where generals and admirals and political leaders might claim to be remembered, a fitting statement to the real independence of Bahia and Brazil, its spiritual and cultural foundations. The present governor of Bahia is of indigenous descent too, his first name is Jeronimo, an engineer by profession, his hair is grey, his open-necked, white shirts well pressed, his smiles and handshakes and interviews with the press open and engaging. Perhaps one day there will be a statue to him too.
After the park, the road enters a straight section again as it passes through the upmarket area of Vitoria. On either side the road is lined with trees, old, and tropical, with roots pushing up through the pavement, trailing lianas from high up down to the ground. The road resembles a forest avenue, perhaps it was, once. The light presses down through the leaves in pools and puddles, bouncing off the car windscreens as they pass down the road, reflecting back off the windows and walls of the skyscrapers either side. The road is busy, a constant flow of vehicles and people back and forth, but all seems strangely calm, as if passing down the long aisle of a church, whose columns take their inspiration, architecturally, from an avenue of trees, of course.
On the pavement, under the trees, the people walk, residents, workers, travellers. Some are rich, by the standards of Salvador, or middle class, many retired, some related perhaps to the big families of old, swapping their crumbling and unmanageable houses in the Centro Historico area several decades ago for large apartments here either side of the road. They go out, in jeans and t-shirts, jogging bottoms and trainers, to the shops, to lunch, to walk the dog, speaking to the security guards at their gates, to the street vendors in their pavement kiosks. Now and then a gate slides open and a big shiny car backs carefully out for a trip to the office, to the shopping mall, or the beach. Others, guards and cleaners, maintenance and service workers, weave in and out, up and down the road, going to and from work. Into a large hole in the ground between two of the tower blocks, concrete, steel and men’s labour is being poured, wage labour, not slave labour now, the minimum wage unlikely though to be able to buy or rent one of the new apartment blocks that will rise up above. The road is blocked off for a minute or two as others in fluorescent jackets direct the traffic around the delivery of more building supplies. Day trippers pass, down to the beach, from the ‘bairros’, from the ‘favelas’ uptown, walking, not taking the bus, a free day out, grandma and the grand-kids, carrying beach towels and plastic buckets and spades. The security guards call out a friendly ‘hello’, neighbours from uptown, all neighbours here, whose town is this anyway? And ice cream sellers, water, mango and coconut sellers, pushing their trolleys down to the beach, and hopefully, a little later, empty, coming back up. Two guys go from gate to gate with buckets of fresh langoustines caught in the bay that morning. They hustle the security guards about how to access their clients in the apartments above, a chance to earn some good money, a practice that must go back and back, A few homeless men, just wearing shorts, barefoot, lie asleep on sheets of cardboard on the pavement. A few others carry large bags of empty plastic bottles to be recycled, a few ‘reais’ for a days work.
And the gateways, the fences guarded and watched over by cameras, and men and women in uniforms, in guard houses, some armed, some not. And beyond them the skyscrapers themselves, the apartment blocks like an avenue to a halfway democracy. One wonders, in this day and age, who is being kept in and who is being kept out? As if some of the ‘favelas’ uptown didn’t have their armed guards and gatekeepers too. Some of the tower blocks are fifty, sixty years old, with tropical moss or mould growing up their sides, their window frames a little rusty, their paint distressed. Others are brand new, modern, sparkling, sky-leaning dreams. On the right hand side of the road as you walk down, the apartments look out over the bay, the biggest such bay in the Americas, blue/grey and shimmering all through the afternoon. The sun passes high over the road and slowly descends to the west, bringing sunset views to the residents whose windows look out on that side of the road. The apartments here are the most desirable and most expensive, hotel rooms with similar views subject to upgrades at upgrade prices. They are the same views, though, that are witnessed down at the bottom of the hill by locals who have campaigned and resisted with some success the march of the skyscrapers, resist and cling on in the little communities at the waters edge, at Gamboa de Baixo and elsewhere. Some of the tourists seem to like these areas too, searching for something a little more down-home, where they can eat seafood prepared by local families, feel the sand beneath their feet and paddle in the water. Young men row their boats from here out around the bay for tourists and commuters alike. The light flickers off the water, silver and emerald and aquamarine, confusing the eye until you are not sure whether it is sea or sky you are looking at. Only the boys in their boats seem to know how to navigate it.
Back along the road at intervals between some of the apartment blocks, older grander houses survive of the grand merchants and speculators of the past, institutes for this or that, ambitions of an earlier century on the rise. Some stand decaying, waiting for demolition, or inspiration, one turned into an occasional restaurant, a couple of others outlying parts of Salvador University. One of the latter seems unused, at some point occupied by students, their posters sharing the eyeline through the gate with the overhanging vegetation and a sign advertising organic honey from the ‘Chapada Diamantina’ in the interior of Bahia.
The biggest such building on the road is a gallery, a museum, the ‘Museu de Arte da Bahia’. It is unclear what the building was originally used for, but clearly for something prestigious. Its huge doors, of thick tropical hardwood are carved with the heads of indigenous deities, poking their tongues out, a reminder, just to be clear, of a time before Salvador. When the doors are open two amiable security guards direct people inside and chat to the locals walking past. They stand like gatekeepers to the light, which floods past them, up a grand marble staircase into a cooler atrium inside. Another staircase with curved wooden bannisters reaches up to a second level, and on both levels rooms wide and tall run around the central space, some connected to each other, some not. At first encounter, at the top of the first flight of steps, two young attendants at a small table ask you to sign a visitors book. Most of the signatures are from the rest of Brazil, a few are ‘estrangeiros’, foreigners. A foreigner from Europe might be asked where he or she is from, and an intrigued ‘ah,’ and a ‘muito bem vindo,’ given in return.
The main exhibition is of works by the artist Carybé, Héctor Julio Páride Bernabó , an Argentinian who moved to Salvador in the middle of the 20th century, loved it so much he settled down and called it home. He was a painter, a muralist, a designer of stage sets, a writer and member inducted into the Ketu sect of the Candomblé religion, that blending of West African and Catholic spiritual practice that is particular to the coastal regions of Brazil. In 1950 he spent time down by the docks documenting with quick and prolific sketches the lives and livelihoods of the working people of the port of Salvador, before containerisation took it a little further around the bay. There are over one hundred drawings here, filling several rooms, upstairs and down, framed and grouped in themes to resonate with each other. Here are the sailors of ships and the rowers of ferries, the loaders and unloaders, the packers, carters and warehousemen, the fishermen and market stall holders, the hawkers and traders, the festival goers, to the goddess of the sea, the dancers and musicians, the spiritual and community leaders, the onlookers and stander-abouters. The sketches were conceived firstly in pencil and then later transformed in the studio into ink drawings, sixty years after slavery was abolished, and now another seventy five years later, the work still here, its people and personalities still very much alive in their modern day incarnation in the Centro area just up the road. Here are lines elegant and economical, with brush and ink running spontaneously and expressively over the pencil beneath. The lines describe exactly the character and essence of the person or persons in their moment. Here is character fused with caricature, with sentimentality, romanticism, social comment and insight, forming a description of place, its individuals and social groups. Here is West Africa transcribed to Salvador, to withstand slavery and carry on, busy, obsessed with life.
And the windows, …the windows. When walking past the building at night, or on a Monday, all the windows and their wooden shutters are closed. All that is inside seems forgotten. But come Tuesday, the windows and their shutters are thrown open, the light and the air comes flooding in, illuminating and breathing life into the grand spaces. The noises of the city drift into the gallery, an ongoing soundtrack to the pictures of Carybé. Each window is large, three metres high, two metres wide, a living picture of the street, of the lush palm trees that surround the building or of the city skyscrapers receding into the distance. It is a picture that moves as you move towards it, the breeze, if there is one, the humidity, brushing your face, leaning or putting your hand through the space as if to shape the world outside. It is unusual in a gallery, unknown in northern Europe, where rain, wind and cold keep the windows closed, the temperature and light monitored and controlled for fear of degrading the pictures inside. Here the pictures, their subject, the building, its open windows, the noise of the city, seem to have become one. Visitors walk from room to room, noting the points of each drawing, pausing to soak up the atmosphere of the building, standing at the open windows to look out at the city from whence the work of Carybé came, all part of this happy set of coincidences.
Back outside, after a roundabout one hundred metres further on the road gently descends, past more apartment blocks, several churches, some shops and older houses down to the beaches of Barra. Here on the beach there is no shade, just sun and sand and sea. All shapes of people find some space for themselves, eat ice cream, drink fresh ‘agua do coco’, a beer or a caipirinha, wade or swim in the tranquil water of the bay, or venture into the waves the other side of the point. Middle aged bellies peer over the tops of middle aged shorts, next-to-nothing bikinis reveal next-to-everything curves and love-handles, younger arms and legs and muscles flex and pose, pert in the sunshine.
And at the end, at the very end of the promontory is the lighthouse of Barra, casting its light out into the ocean at night, warning ships of the entrance to the Bay of All Saints. It is an image printed on t-shirts and postcards, mugs and car-key medallions, a symbol of Salvador and its history for every tourist to take home. Beneath the lighthouse, amongst the stalls selling hats and sunglasses there are a couple selling precious stones. Young trendy guys with bandannas and dreadlocks and cheerful smiles sell clear pieces of quartz and amethyst, or even something a little rarer. Not many ‘reais’ for each perhaps, though the money will be precious enough to the stallholders trying to make a living. Worn around the neck or the wrist to catch the light, they will be precious too to those may buy them. For it is the light that passes through them that inspires. And there is plenty of that in Salvador.
On Christmas Day I went for a walk. I got to the entrance of the Parque Municipal das Macaqueiras but it was closed. Some locals stood about chatting to each other, frustrated at not being able to get into the park too. They looked at me curiously. Suppressing a smile, one of them stepped forward and asked me whether I had the key to the gate. ‘No,’ I said, patting my pockets as if to make sure. Everyone laughed, that I understood the joke, that I might have come a long way, from another country, just to open the gate!
The gate itself didn’t seem to be much of an obstacle to anyone’s progress however. It was low and metal and painted white and stood next to a booth where two police officers usually sat, checking people in and out in a desultory sort of way, making sure everyone had left by five. They were not present, neither could I see any notice about the park being closed. I wondered why we didn’t all just jump the gate. An inviting path wound itself up the valley into the tropical forest beyond, a wide stream of clear water ran down on the left and the steep, valley sides stood rocky and tall. Jump the gate now and you could be lost in a few minutes. No one would find you.
As if in answer to my thoughts, a police car pulled up and two uniformed officers got out, one male, one female. The male officer started a conversation, patient and apologetic with the other park-goers. I looked at the pistol in his holster, firmly attached to a black belt at his hip, and at the pistol of his colleague, firmly attached at hers. I decided not to do any gate jumping just for now. I asked the female officer why the park was closed. She leaned back against the door of her car and smiled. ‘Manutenção,’ she said. ‘Oh,’ I said, and smiled too.
I stood and wondered what ‘manutenção’ might be going on in the park at that moment. Maybe some of the dead leaves that carpeted the forest floor were being cleaned and polished and put carefully back into place, a few of the boulders in the stream moved an inch or two for better aesthetic effect? On a previous visit I was pleasantly struck by the lack of litter, the locals gently enjoying a place to which their ancestors had probably come for many centuries. Perhaps the old Tegu lizard, one and a half metres long, that I had spied, and had spied me, shuffling off into the trees once he saw me, was wondering where the ‘manutenção’ had gone? Perhaps he was wondering where everyone had gone? They are supposed to get more sociable as they get older apparently, some are even kept as pets.
By way of consolation the police officer suggested that I might like to visit some of the other beauty spots in the area. I thanked her, but I had another idea. I walked back down the road, leaving the others to jump the gate once the police officers had gone off to have their Christmas lunches, whenever that might be.
The Entrance to the Park on another day with the gate open.
On a previous occasion I thought I had spotted another route that ran the other side of the hill, that might eventually allow me another entrance to the park, unnoticed by others. It was a hike though, but I had nothing better to do, so I set off, water and lunch in my backpack, sun-cream applied, a hat on my head. It was hot, 31°, that sticky heat that makes you sweat at the slightest effort, and the path I had chosen, uphill and down again, and then through some off beat streets at the edge of town, brought my temperature up to a point where I had to stop and cool down again, take a mouthful of water.
I passed quite a few other humans out and about, surprising considering the day, and a few shops open too, needs must I suppose. People walked their dogs, worked on their cars, someone spot-welding in a garage, some others standing with plans for a new house, half built. One large area was fenced off from the rest, an exclusive patch of land it seemed, with new houses on it, some finished, some not. The fence, like the gate back at the park, was not substantial enough to keep the determined out though, it seemed to stand only as a marker of social distinction, at least in the minds of the lands’ developers I suppose. I decided to go round.
At the top of the road, on the edge of town I turned right, out of intuition really, onto to an unpromising, dusty track. The houses began to peter out. On the wall of the last shop I passed was a hand-painted advertising sign. ‘Uma Boa Ideia’ the slogan read, as if in answer to my doubts that I was going in the right direction. A car passed me coming the other way, the front seat occupants peering out through their windsreen, intrigued to know who I was. They waved an amused hello, unused to foreigners in these parts. The track past the top of the exclusive development and veered left, disappearing into the side of the hill, covered in forest, the birds and the insects clicking and chirping and chattering to each other in the heat.
As I walked along, I had the curious sensation of stepping back into an older landscape and time. The road cut into the hill in places leaving a precipitous turn or two, then suddenly took a dive for a hundred yards before climbing back up again. It was a dusty, rusty track, carved out perhaps from a much older footpath. Occasionally a hand built wooden fence appeared to left or right denoting somebody’s land back up into the forest, but otherwise the trees overhung the road, manga, jaca, marmalado, mangabeira, macaqueira, babacu, their leaves shiny green on top to reflect the heat, cool, brown shadow underneath.
Half way along the road a small one room house clung to the side of the road, made of mud bricks, and a few tiles for the roof. There was a small window at the side and an unpainted wooden door with a cross on it. Surely no one was living there I thought, but as I passed, the small garden had just been dug over at the back, some peppers were ready to be picked, a hoe left on the side. ‘Deus é fiel,’ ‘God is faithful,’ one of the most popular phrases in these parts came to mind, here a living embodiment of such belief. Further on I past two or three similar houses set back a little, embraced by the trees, none connected to the power line, or to the mains water. How long all had been here was anyone’s guess, each generation searching for its own Eden, abandoning it over time for others to follow, or the forest to grow back.
On along some more and some cows blocked my path, forest cows you could call them, spilled out onto the road through an old fence. They stood sullenly and refused to move, out of indifference or perhaps a need for human contact too, no sign of their owner or farm nearby. A sudden lurch forward by me produced their cautious retreat to the fence and I passed by.
A bit further on and I turned to see a small clearing and a huge jackfruit tree commanding the space. Dull, yellow fruits hung down in profusion, their skin hard and scaley, big as footballs, impossibly suspended. Beneath them two, white calves appeared, by a kind of magic, they stood, as if in their own Eden, while I photographed them and then they skitted off, rustling the leaves as they went, so I could still hear them some time after I had lost sight of them.
After a while I began to wonder exactly where I was, and if I was anywhere near the other entrance to the park I was trying to get to. Maybe I had gone back in time so much I couldn’t return? The hill to my right appeared steeper, more rocky. How was I to get to the other side? A path appeared ascending the hill, and hope said this might be the place. My instinct wasn’t so sure. Twenty minutes of scrambling up some hard quartz gravel, produced an interesting view, and more overheating, but no way past the overhanging escarpment. A look back down at the road saw it snaking along away from the hill, now revealed, now hidden in the trees. A few more houses could be seen into the distance, tentatively connected to the power line whose poles stood at precarious angles, but nowhere I wanted to go. I was becoming tired, that kind of tired that comes from not finding what you are seeking. I decided to go just a bit further and if no path, then I would go back, the end of my quest. I scrambled back down the gravel onto the road.
Unexpectedly, a bit further on, the road took a turn to the right and down into a small sub-valley, a valley within a valley. The road was suddenly blocked by a green metal gate that looked like it had been there for decades. An old car was parked in a little parking space to the side. A sign on the gate said ‘Private Property, No Hunting or Fishing.’ Maybe I should stop and go back I thought. I was hoping that this would have been the other entrance to the Municipal Park, but clearly it was not, though it was in the direction I wanted to go. I stopped and considered. The sign declared that the land was owned by someone but seemed to suggest that entrance was tolerated as long as you didn’t hunt or fish. I looked. The pedestrian gate to the side had no lock. I tried it and it opened. I stepped inside closing the gate behind me.
On the other side the track continued. A small stream ran down a deep gully on one side and a sheer rock face sprang up on the other, dripping water, ferns growing on its face. The path went down and wound itself around the side of the sub valley. narrower and eventually redder, a change of earth with more iron in it, a characteristic of many parts of Brazil. A green verge and a small opening appeared in the trees, I stopped and thought. Here might be the path up the hill, to the peaks beyond. I reckoned so.
Before that though I thought I would continue a little way along the road I had come on. I was intrigued to know where it ended before I gave it up. It wound it’s way gently upwards and I could just make out a smaller peak, a sugar loaf hill beyond. I stopped suddenly. I could hear voices. Noises of cutting and hammering floated down to me, and I could see two or three self-build houses up ahead on both sides of the track. I listened. The respective tenants of these houses were talking to each other while working on their plots. I decided not to go any further. I was on private land after all.
Stepping through the gate had led me into a world that I wasn’t quite sure of. Coming from a country where land has for many centuries become property of one sort and another, firmly demarcated by explicit boundaries and a plethora of laws to enforce them, it was strange and interesting to encounter a country where things were not so clear. Here, the park was not as large as I had imagined it, yet the landscape was. Apart from the gate on the road the boundaries were unclear. The fences were intermittent. The forest paid no attention to these boundaries anyway, and as yet the animals too. The people busily building their own Eden above had no mains electricity or water as far as I could tell. They had a clear running stream and the light of the stars instead. Which was better? How long would it be though, before others followed these pioneers, the road paved and named, a water supply and a postal address allocated by the powers that be?
I retreated and walked back to the other path up the hill, to the summit I was originally seeking. Under some trees a narrow path sprang up the hill at a steep angle. The earth was brown under my feet peppered with the entrances to the world of the ants, the busybodies of the forest. I prepared myself for a hard climb, more sweat and lots of stops for water. The path twisted upwards, dark brown butterflies with orange wingtips flying in and out of my vision, grasshoppers and birds chirping incessantly in the background. To my surprise the path didn’t take too long. I soon realised I had done most of the hard work on the long way round I had taken. I stopped on some level ground recognising the junction I had arrived at on a previous occasion, meeting the path up from the police guarded entrance I had taken before. Pleased at my navigation skills I stopped for water and listened to the forest around me.
Some birds sat in a tree above me, chatting to each other. The sound of crickets and cicadas rose and fell in various crescendos, the barrage of noise followed by sudden unpredictable silences. The sunlight flickered off the waxy leaves. I looked for snakes, spiders or anything larger, but nothing except the eyes of the forest itself, unspoken, in the dark green shadows. When I turned round however, I saw another sign of human presence planted in the ground. At this junction of paths someone called Valmir had planted his sign, and his phone number conveniently below it. So this, it seemed, was Valmir’s land. I stood and wondered. Had he bought the land or was he just the first to be here? Did he own the forest beyond where the new-build houses were? The forest stretched up to the mountains. Did he own them too?
I could see another sign planted near Valmir’s that indicated some kind of official monument or place of interest up ahead. ‘Toca de Areia,’ the sign said, though my translation skills did not quite match up to deciphering what that meant. I decided to move on and perhaps find out. The path started to climb again and wove back and forth and got stonier, the trees began to get thinner, gaps and short glimpses of views appeared out over the surrounding ‘chapada’. The brown earth disappeared and was replaced by quartz rock and boulders covered in grey lichen, ground hugging bromeliads and small hardy bushes. Flowers appeared between the rocks and many more butterflies, about six or seven different species, and the first of the little grey rock lizards, scampering in and out of my steps. The lizards paused when I paused and looked at me sideways, nodding their heads as if in agreement with something I’d said, or was about to say, who knows? Each had a fluorescent green line from the top of its head to the tip of its tail, their grey camouflaging them against the rocks. The green line zig zagged as they moved, the only part of them focusable until they stopped still to look at me sideways again.
The path flattened out, turning a dusty grey and weaving gently from side to side. The ground suddenly fell away to my right into a deep sunken area, half hidden by the trees. Intrigued I searched for a path down, found one and some thin trees to hold onto each side for balance. A bird high above me called out as I descended, and at the bottom it widened out into a large open area. The floor was covered with a layer of deep sand, quartz sand, with larger, older trees to the side. I found myself staring at a vertical rock face in front of me, arching and curving upwards like a huge curling wave, coming down again fifty metres on the other side of the clearing. Underneath the wave, not of water, but of stone, was a cave, a very large, empty cave.
I walked over and stood on the sand at the cave’s entrance as if I was on a beach. This was the place that the sign below had indicated. I tried to look in. My eyes could not penetrate the deep shadow. I took a few steps forward and my eyes gradually adjusted. I could see up to the ceiling thirty feet above me and to the back of the cave some twenty or thirty metres away. The rock strata arched above my head, plunging into the sand at the back of the cave as if on it’s way to the centre of the earth.
The air here, inside was tepid and stale, the light dimmed, the temperature only slightly cooler than the outside. I turned and faced the way out again and stood in the great arched entrance. There was no wind, no place to sit but on the floor. A small continuous drip of water came from the rock at the side, but not enough for anyone to live on. They say that once many of us lived in caves. I tried to imagine it here, but could not. There were numerous names etched and scratched on the walls. Someone had left a large piece of chalk on the side for those who wanted to follow. I left my name and the year with the others and climbed back out of the hollow ground. The bird in the tree called out again as I left.
Later, the internet translated the words on the sign for the cave as ‘sand burrow’, which kind of made sense. A local acquaintance also told me that local history has it that the cave was once a place of execution, and that some of the original indigenous inhabitants of the area were murdered there long ago. He said that many people visiting the cave have feelings of disquiet and do not like to linger. While I was there, I had the feeling that the names on the wall were bearing witness to something though I was not sure what, and that the oldest of them probably went back a considerable time. The rocks too seemed to be saying something, and the bird calling out. Places have a way of communicating the past to the present, in a way that doesn’t seem rational, older than science, speaking to the majority of the time we have been on this planet.
Up above the cave again I continued up along my path. It divided. Which way? I went to the left and the path began to climb again. First some steep, rocky steps and then out of the trees and into the open. The breeze brushed my face, refreshing me, the sky blue, then bluer, wispy white clouds and the light you only get on the top of a hill, no shade, just plain, clear light. I climbed again, now between stones and boulders, then rocky outcrops, solid stone pavement beneath my feet or quartz sand, boulders cracked and split into impossible shapes as if two giants had had some argument long ago and had thrown them haphazardly about, crashed and splintered.
Every few yards a new, grey, green lizard accompanied me, replacing the one before, as if in relay. Small birds flew between the few low trees and bushes and the odd butterfly fought against the breeze, which, as I got higher turned to a steady wind, refreshing, cooling me. The quartz pavement I walked was etched with deep parallel scars of sun and wind, and rain. Between the rocks cacti grew, a mass of thorns, half a metre high, and thick clumps of spiny, leathery grass and various other flowers and plants, many undocumented in the northern hemisphere I’m sure, here, in the hot quartz hills of the Chapada Diamantina, 3000ft up and climbing, in their natural habitat.
In this tangled landscape there was no natural path, no large animals seemed to be living here to leave their mark, except humans. Several times my dead reckoning had me scrambling over the stones and off into a rocky dead end. At regular intervals, however, ribbon like pieces of blue plastic began to appear, tied to small trees and bushes, marking a way between the rocks. I am not usually grateful for a display of plastic, and I, at first, fought the urge to take them down, but then realised I would have difficulty finding my way back if I did. It soon became a game, to find the next blue marker to ease my navigation, prevent a twisted ankle, or worse, to stop me careering over the rocks.
And on a bit, a small sign appeared, tied to a bush amongst the rocks. Waiting for me patiently, the summit of the hill could be seen beyond for the first time. On the sign was a depiction of two peaks with someone on a mountain bike ascending one of them. The words ‘Hard Enduro Rota Do Ouro,” were written in a circle around the drawing. At first, on seeing the sign, I wanted to take it down, like the ribbons. Then feeling a little flattered, I wondered whether I had joined an exclusive club, at my age!? Then I felt a bit silly, there seemed to be no need for exclusive clubs up here, ‘Hard Enduro’ or not. There were no signs of any mountain bikers having been up here either, the terrain pretty impossible, even for them. The black vultures that glided above me, reminded me that this is still a semi wild place. Stop still for a while and they circle above you, move an arm or a leg and they fly off again, just checking!
The other words on the sign, ‘Rota do Ouro,’ spoke of another story however. These hills, as their quartz strata suggests, contain many metals and minerals. This route may be of gold, spiritually, but the prospect of gold metal is what attracted the first European migrants to this area. Five miles to the south is a gold mine, one of the biggest in Brazil, owned by the pension companies of the cold, far north of this continent. It provides steady employment to many of the local inhabitants at reasonable wages with good benefits. The mine shafts run right under the hills further south, and the company has exploration rights for the hills here too, underneath my feet. A local friend of mine told me a story of when he used to work at the mine. He was present at a visit of the international directors and owners. A very expensive lunch was flown in for them. He met the general manager of the mine, who had a gold pen with a gold nugget attached to its top, displayed on his desk. A very expensive pen, my friend decided. Standing up here, it was difficult to fathom the sum of value, monetary or otherwise, lying under my feet. I moved on, trying to tread as carefully as I could between the plants and animals about me.
The higher I climbed, the more spectacular became the views. The hills or ‘chapada’ around me stretched out, a huge ‘cordilheira’ of mountains running some 60 miles to the north and another twenty miles to the south. The chain is composed of three or four parallel ranges each about one mile wide with a smaller width of valley in between, the whole five to ten miles wide depending on the location. The peaks go above 3000 ft in places, and in each valley, as I had experienced, deep tropical forest. Springs, waterfalls and mountain streams run through the valleys, sometimes with spectacular gorges. Some are remote, others not so much, each a little less or more inhabited, off grid or on, depending how near they are to the little villages and towns either side of these hills, the villages themselves pretty remote in the scale of things, here in Bahia.
It is impossible to see from one end of the cordilheira to the other, in this spot maybe five to ten miles north and south. To the east the landscape stretches back toward the coast, some two hundred miles away, beyond sight, the flatlands of the arid sertão appearing vague and blue and misty. Strange lumps can just be seen sticking up on the horizon where large hills suddenly arise in the middle of the backlands, like huge termite nests built by the termite nest god. To the west more sertão, but more hilly, stretching some ten miles to the escarpment of the Serra de Tombador, itself 50 miles long running parallel to this set of hills. Beyond that another 100 miles of the same dry country to the banks of the Sao Francisco river, the second longest in Brazil. In all of it, more remoteness, odd farms and villages, dusty un-tarmacked roads, marks in the landscape in light green and grey of tentative fields cleared in the ‘caatinga’, the odd spiral of smoke drifting up in places where more brush is being cleared.
The wind blew in my face, cooling me, the clouds above a procession of white sheets on a washing line, marching across the sky. I climbed on past some more rugged outcrops and came to a large area of level ground which seemed to be on top of the world. Here were scattered rocks and clumps of coarse grass, cacti and orange amaryllis. Here was my peak, as high as I was going to get today. I found a suitably comfortable rock and sat down for a well-earned rest. I drank some water, juice and ate my sandwiches, biscuits and fruit. It was 2.30pm and somewhere far away were villages and towns and cities, and rivers and coasts and seas and other countries and time zones, and people enjoying Christmas dinner or sleeping it off, or thinking they had better go out for a walk to get some air. Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean it wasn’t even Christmas anymore, whilst somewhere else it had only just begun, and in many places, it had never been Christmas at all and never would be. The faraway horizon stretched 360° around me. Somewhere along that line I thought I could see the curvature of the planet, though it may have been the lenses of my glasses, the astigmatism I have in one of my eyes. I sat there for a while and thought I could see the earth slowly turning, but maybe it was just the clouds passing above me, the sound of the wind.
The Tracks of the Tegu Lizard.
these days
the old men still stand beneath the castle
watching the ships go in and out
as their grandfathers did
and their grandfathers before that
the ships are bigger now
oil tankers and containers
filled with the things we did not know we wanted
filed and noted
by style and time of day
the sea when calm a mild estuary
or otherwise a temptestuous lover
and around the corner old vasco stands
in his iron stockings
his feet set wide
and his stare so far
so far away
each afternoon
his shadow moves slowly behind him
and the sea grows dark
and the sun sets orange on the water
the lights come on
twinkling on the boats waiting at anchor
twinkling in the old men’s eyes
who say boa noite to each other
and drift home
to bachalao à brás
rissoix de camarão
or peixe espada
If you go south from Lisbon, before you get to the Algarve, you go through the Alentejo, an area as wide as Wales, of undulating hills that roll on and on, gentle, vast, agricultural. It is cold in winter, full of flowers in spring, baked dry in summer, with a hint of sadness in autumn, like all autumns I suppose. A town called Melides lies in the south of the Alentejo near the coast. Alentejo by the sea.
The people of this area go back and back. In each town or village a little museum proclaims their past, neolithic, celtic, roman, gothic, moorish, medieval and the time of the dictatorship before the revolution of 1974.
The Alentejo was central to the revolution of 1974. Conservative with a small ‘c’, traditional to the point of pride, nonetheless the overthrow of the Salazarist regime brewed here. The theme tune, the signature call to the one thousand captains of the army who overthrew the dictatorship played out on national radio on the morning of the 25th of April 1974, the song, ‘Grândola!’, a hymn to that town, sung by an Alentejano male voice choir with deep pride, in a style rather like their Welsh male voice countreparts. Grândola is ten miles from Melides.
In Melides men still wear flat caps and shirts unbuttoned two down if rakish or hot. Women of a certain age wear black skirts or dresses and cover their hair. Faces are brown from the sun, from outdoors work, and eyes smoulder, deep as dark honey in a jar. Rice is grown in nearby fields that hide between the beach and the land, and beef cattle, wheat, plums and pears, oranges and lemons, grapes, olives and cork from cork oak are harvested. The sea too provides a living for some. In Melides sea bass caught at night from long lines off the beach fetch a good price at local restaurants.
The revolution was a long time in coming for the people of the Alentejo. Maybe from the days of the Romans. Maybe before that. The Romans had seized the land, enclosed it into big estates, the ‘latifúndios’, reorganised the language, turned the locals into slaves, a practise that continued more or less after the Romans left. The people worked hard, but were poor, the riches of the land were taken from them, taken away to Lisbon or exported abroad, the profits used to keep the big houses and estates, the rich in power.
After 1974, two thousand years of history witnessed a sea change. At first dreams forged from collective struggle brought the people’s occupation of the land. The state enforced some redistribution, agricultural collectives sprang up, old power vacuums imploded. Portugal found it’s feet, and after adopting a democratic constitution and joining the EU, new investment, new jobs and careers began to sit side by side with the old. But the prices for agricultural products remained stagnant, the minimum wage was set, but low, both dependent on world markets still not for equality. And still the migration, the moving away from places like Melides, to Lisbon or Porto, to France and Germany, the US and Brazil. What price a traditional farming life in the Alentejo, cooperatives and all? What price the new mechanisation and technology? Many of the young, in past centuries resigned to the land, now priced out, or disinterested, have left it.
The bell in the old church tower chimes twelve. It is too loud. The hammer needs adjusting but for some reason hasn’t been. You can hear the crack of the hammer on the bell at each chime. Everybody nearby goes inside. A dog barks discontentedly from behind a closed door, a gruff disapproval, once after each chime. After twelve strikes the dog stops, the people come out and continue as if nothing has happened.
Next door to the Pharmacy someone has delivered a pallet on top of which is balanced a set of shelves containing seed trays with tiny cabbage, lettuce, onion and cress. The pallet stands on the side of the road waiting for customers, the forklift used to deliver it parked next to it, the keys left in the ignition. People come and go, bartenders wait for customers, the older men sit together on a wall behind which is spelt out in large plastic letters, ‘MELIDES’, a sign to beat all signs, they have them in all Portuguese towns now, everywhere it seems. Just in case.
The roles between men and women shift back and forth. What passes as tradition is sometimes more complicated than one would think. The women work in shops, run shops, serve in restaurants, cook in restaurants, own restaurants, clean, run guest houses, do social work, teach, yet some of these are all quite modern occupations in the long history of the Alentejo. The men build houses, drive tractors, the local buses, cut cork, work in the many labours of the countryside, but this was not always their exclusive role either. There is a photograph, blown up large on the wall of the local museum, the photo circa 1960, a group of men and women out in the fields, together, posing, women in long dark skirts and bright white blouses embroidered with flowers and filigree, black hats, stiff and round like small fedoras tilted at a jaunty angle. These are their work clothes, so many to wear in such weather, though in winter perhaps better. The men wear shirts and trousers, more prosaic, but both are ‘camaradas dos campos’, comrades of the fields, in those times, before mechanisation, their labours shared, though whether paid equally is another story.
In the photograph one woman has a large earthenware jug balanced on her head and a big smile. They are all smiling. One man stands in a pullover with holes in the sleeves and at the shoulders. Another man, tall, earthy, has his hand at the crotch of the woman next to him, teasing, mocking the posing of everyone, uneasy perhaps at being photographed himself, the woman has her hand on his, laughs. A gesture wanted, unwanted, or just how it is, a world apart, a time before this one, caught at that moment, those times, are they gone, are they still here? Their children have gone, well some of them anyway, to Lisbon, to Porto, and Los Angeles and São Paulo. Sometimes they come back, to visit, to stay, to retire.
Who has come in their place? Fifty years ago a German man came. On his holidays or just travelling. Was he the first? Who knows? Maybe in time the historians will tell us? He had been in Latin America, Columbia, Argentina, Brazil. In the 1970’s that was a time of dictatorship in those countries. In Argentina the military chucked him out. Why? Because his hair was too long, or something else, it doesn’t matter. He came to Portugal, found Melides, and stayed, and Melides found him. He speaks a mixture of Portuguese, German, Spanish, English and French in every sentence. His hair is thick and white, slicked down at the back, a memory of flowing youth. Today he runs a guest house with his wife. She goes off to Germany every month or so and comes back. He rents rooms, all idiosyncratic in style and perfectly formed. The garden is full of nooks and crannies, paths lead to different spaces, made of recycled tiles and stone, pebbles from the beach, and trees and flowers, and little huts and chairs and benches and tables to sit at and talk, and meet. At the back is a yoga stage, a stage for yoga. His website invites you to take part if you want.
The trip to the beach is ten minutes by foot, the road gets sandier as you get nearer, past a modern restaurant, some other guest houses, Portuguese, French, German, no English, they haven’t discovered it yet. The road becomes a boardwalk and then past another restaurant and some public conveniences and showers, ‘A Praia de Melides’, Melides Beach, opens up. A wide expance of fine, light sand, sloping gently down to a big, blue, sparkling sea. The sun shines 250 days a year. Temperatures can reach 400 in the summer. To the north the beach runs uninterrupted for thirty miles to Tróia and Setúbal . To the south it runs another fifteen to Sines, forty five miles of uninterrupted beach, in many places, with not a soul on it, except sometimes a lonely beachcomber of his or her own thoughts and an audience of seagulls and dunlin standing together, silently watching the waves.
Amongst the other newer inhabitants is a local artist, British even, a YBA of thirty years ago, famous, he has a house and a studio here and in London, sells his work for €70,000 a time. That building there is a new hotel, and here is another, and another going up, though it looks like it’ll take some time. Prices start from €300 a night, and go up above €2000. The rich have come, the rich Portuguese of today, from the city, with their international jobs and portfolios, and the French and the Germans to follow. There are superstars and popstars, czars and their cars. All shabby chic or pretending to be so. In town a tractor is parked next to a shiney Range Rover, a farmers van next to a new Mercedes. Others park in beaten up Volkswagens and Citroëns just to blend in, the odd surfboard atop the roof of a few.
If you look on the Internet, on the sites selling property for the area of Melides, you will not find a house for sale for less than €300,000. A quick search reveals 64 ‘moradias isoladas’, detached houses for sale, of which forty are above €1,000,000 and twenty €2,000,000 and above. Each has land, five, ten, twenty hectares, the houses stand large and proud in this timeless landscape. What price a house for those younger, of the older families, who would not move away? There are many properties that are kept out of the reach of strangers by those families, it is true. But of the rich newcomers? Are they the new ‘latifundiários’?
In the local museum there is an exhibition of the local tradition of earthenware ceramics. In reality the tradition just hangs on, the local masters of the craft all older or passed on, each has a plaque to his name on the wall. The museum manager passes me a tablet, (digital), which when I point it at the QR code on display shows an animation of past techniques. Two older residents sit together watching a film. talking fondly of a man working at a wheel whom they know, now in retirement. The large group photo with intimate gesture is here also. What price a connection to your past?
In an adjoining street, there is an art gallery, the ‘Art Gallery of Melides’, a commercial concern in which are displayed paintings and sculptures about that same connection. The artist has travelled and had exhibitions in different parts of the world. The gallery owner with expectant smile hands me a brochure. It reads … ‘This exhibition weaves a narrative about an unexplored island and its first inhabitants, proposing a return to the natural state of humanity through an ancestral and intuitive aesthetic, akin to the purity of children’s creations… Far from being an exercise in excessive nostalgia, this exhibition is a living record of our history and a reminder of the intrinsic beauty of nature in it’s most rudimentary form…’
The ceramics and paintings in the gallery are in the same earthenware colours as the ceramics in the museum. On the one hand the words from the gallery speak of the past as something ancient, that cannot be remembered, a tradition interrupted, the connection to it lost. The words contain a hope that we can reclaim that connection through the work of the artist and a return to our ‘childhood creativity’. On the other hand the exhibition in the museum speaks of the past as a tradition remembered by those still living, of families who retain those memories and skills too. Their ceramics were made for daily life, the stuff of cooking, pouring, and storage. They sold in ordinary shops, for ordinary prices. The paintings and ceramics in the gallery go for €1600 each, for walls, for decoration, for reassurance.
The older indigenous population of Melides eye their newer incoming neighbours with a wary eye, but not an unkind one. When neighbours become neighbours there is always a getting to know you, a transitional time of discovery, of negotiation, of edging around. A tourist sits on the wall below the ‘MELIDES’ sign for a few minutes. An old timer, his spot taken, stands a few yards away not knowing what to do. Another joins him. They look on, incredulous. The tourist moves on unaware of his indiscretion and disappears into the art gallery. The old timers reclaim their spot.
What price a connection to your past? What price a connection to your ancestors? Each ancestor moves in your memory, in your tradition, in your dreams at night, in your knowing. It seems that those who have gone away have come back, but in a different form. They bring new cars and new wives and husbands. They bring new art and stories of travels from far away. Modern paintings and pop songs sit next to the stirring themes of ‘Grândola’. Incongruous? Perhaps. Why did they come back? Was it the sun, the sea, the surf, to bask in the relative glories of their fortunes? Maybe it was their parents or grandparents they came back for but in a different form. Perhaps it was that bridge to that generation, to those times, to those faces brown from a lifetime of outside work, those with a direct connection to the land, to the landscape, that made them return? Maybe they came back to find that connection that was lost in their wanderings? Reassurance sought from intimate gestures. Ask the German man who runs a guest house in Melides, who speaks words from five different languages in the same sentence. He moved away and wandered, and came here fifty years ago. He has stayed in all these years of transition.
Piece on socialdocumentary.net documenting the area around Palmela, Portugal, one year after the wildfire. Press link here Portugal | Palmela – One Year After The Fire | Oliver Sidaway | SocialDocumentary.net
an unusual painting this
a crowd approaches from far away in a grand space and assembles before it looking at the figures in the painting assembled looking back each group gazes at the other down the centuries reaching back to sixteen fifty six reaching forward to now the clothes and customs have changed but not too much as to preclude recognition perhaps each group might smile if they met what fashion is this out of place out of time a curious conversation might ensue a conversation of curiosity in spanish of course
an unusual painting this
was velasquez thinking about this when he painted it
the painting is about time a moment in time the infanta has come to see the king and queen being painted there they are in the reflection in the mirror at the back and there she is herself turned into a painting it is intimate a moment in royal domesticity this is what we do we royals this is what they do the patient dog is kicked playfully from behind the infanta is offered some chocolate the officials look on and discuss the rival painter stands framed on the stair the painter himself stands back and considers
the infanta looks intently at us at her parents at the painter painting her or at something else
one figure is placed in front of the other and reaching back again to the door to the reflection in the mirror a sense of depth a sense of space that old trick the painters trick depth equals space equals time the time it takes to walk to the doorway in the background to travel there by eye
there is a line on the wall at the back just above velasquez’s head running horizontally to the right below the two large pictures above and the one below and the top of the mirror and the doorway it marks exactly half way on the picture plane an unusual picture this half the painting is full of people and the other half filled with nothing wall and ceiling space vague shadowy undefined again a sense of depth one minute you’re here the next minute you’re gone the painter seems to say you may be royal the centre of attention but soon you will be shadows in a painting at the back of another painting at best or just ghosts drifting up to the ceiling into thin air
a crowd approaches from far away in a grand sala in a grand museum exited a little forbidden from taking pictures of this picture I myself was told off for taking these a little exited to be meeting the ancestors who come every day in their best dresses and stockings to meet us
the crowd approaches and we say hello
the infanta and others look out intently do we look as intently back the infanta seems to be the centre of attention will she survive and prosper this heir to the royal dynasties of europe so young so fair is this what velazquez was thinking when one day she came to see her parents being painted and he caught the light on the top of her head out of the corner of his eye in the moment of that painting we do not know but now centuries later we do she did more of less nothing spectacular she survived and now as a few of those dynasties still linger we can say we are all her heirs standing here in front of her in front of us in our own democracy more or less
is this what velasquez was thinking
they say that velasquez used a mirror to paint this painting he certainly must have done to paint himself but the rest of it perhaps perhaps not the figures stare out so intently they might be considered to be looking at themselves in a mirror that gaze that meeting of our eyes with our eyes that is like no other is this what velasquez was thinking the mirror on the wall in the background the mirror into which the infanta gazes at herself the painting as a mirror up to nature of us looking a them looking at us we laugh or we admire their sense of dress their sense of style but we recognise the relationship between ceremony and banality between theatre and time
an unusual picture this
was velasquez thinking of all of this when he painted it
perhaps
perhaps not
maybe one day when the king and queen were being painted in that grand musty sala feeling bored and summoning their daughter to come and cheer them up one of them noticed the novelty of the scene and said to velasquez hey diego that would make a good painting what we can see from here the infanta and las meninas and you painting us and us reflected in that mirror on the wall at the back
and diego went about working out how it could be done
Las Meninas by Diego Velasquez can be seen in the Prado Museum, Madrid. A fuller discussion can be read by pressing the link here. Source of image of painting: wikipedia.commons
Exhibit on www.socialdocumentary.net documenting the landscape two days after the wildfire in Palmela, Portugal. July. 2022. Press here for link.
