Sunday May 19, 2019

Barcelos to Lugar do Corgo—Day 4; 29,259 steps

Proverbs 4

v. 18, 26-27  The path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter until the full light of day….  Give careful thought to the paths for your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.  Do not turn to the right or the left; keep your foot from evil.  Here are verses to bless a pilgrim!  We want to be able to see our path clearly marked, not be wandering back and forth at intersections pushing aside weeds or wondering what that faint marking used to be as we seek an elusive waymark.  The yellow arrows are like the morning sun to us, shining brightly on the path we need to take.  While we are talking we hope that one of our group is giving careful thought to the paths for our feet so that, while we may be dancing, we are not randomly turning right or left from the Way.  Thank you, Lord, for sunny yellow arrows pointing our way.  Help us not to be distracted from our path.

**************

I woke up in the middle of the night to an odd thumping.  Carpentry?  Someone’s CPAP machine?  Skulduggery in the dark?  I finally decided it was fireworks.  Whatever that soccer game was about, someone was still celebrating.

The Norwegians were gone when I woke up.  Maurice said they left at 4:30.  

Our blisters are minor and easily tended with tape and my amazing gel toe caps.  Brazil’s blister is more major.  We gave her painkillers to get through the day, as she had left her first aid bag in a previous hostel, and I blessed her on her way.  Maurice and I had breakfast in the courtyard from our supplies—bananas, strawberries, orange juice, rolls from last night’s dinner and butter from the tub I am indulgently carrying.  We were the last ones out at 8:05 and immediately set off in the wrong direction.  Ah well.  Soon rectified.

Roosters crow the sun up and continue to carry on throughout the morning.  Today across the fields I caught the occasional drift of…singing?…from church services?  It is Sunday.  Eventually louder music prevailed.  Soccer practice was in session at a local field and the loudspeaker overhead was blasting Abba across the whole town—definitely not a place I’d like to live.

We started up a 195-meter climb and I was already tired.  Fatigued.  Now I remember.  When we did the Camino Frances across Spain, after the excitement of the first couple days I was tired all the time—tired after a rest stop, tired after our lunch break, tired when I got up in the morning, tired after a city break in a decent hotel.  I may now be back in tired mode—and just a little hurting.  Other than blisters, ligaments around my hips are achey but my shoulders don’t hurt as much from the pack as I expected them to—so that’s good!  But it was a long climb today and the sun was hot.  In Aborim we turned aside from the path to a bar/cafe with one umbrella table beyond the smoky haze of the covered patio, apparently the Sunday morning men’s hangout with talk and laughter and a game of cards in the back.  A sweet barista opened the umbrella and took care of us.  With language and culinary differences it’s always a surprise exactly what we get but this time it was a winner.  Maurice ended up with a grilled ham and cheese sandwich on fat buttery bread, and I got the same fat buttery bread toasted with a heap of strawberrry jam.  With two canned drinks for Maurice and a carton of juice for me, it was a bargain too at six euros.

On and on and on we walked.  I helped myself to a package of homemade cookies offered on a ledge in roadside shade and left my euro in the cup.  We passed a little Romanesque church, locked but its inside decorative painting visible through a window grill.  Through more fields, around curves in the road, past grapevines, and finally, finally, we arrived at Casa Fernanda, a pilgrim favorite where we had managed to book a room. Brazil was there, washing her laundry.  Fernanda did not have a spot available for her but said she had a bed on a covered balcony and Brazil willingly accepted it.  “Sit down, sit down!” commanded Fernanda when she saw us.  Past the grassy backyard strung with laundry lines in the sun was a covered outdoor kitchen and patio living room with well-worn seating.  To the left a separate wooden building housed the pilgrims in a large room with single beds side by side.  From the patio a further door led to a private double room with its own bathroom—our accommodation!—though nothing fancy about it.  “How did you get this?” asked a German pilgrim…the German from two nights ago with the giggly girls.  “Did you book two months ago?”  Yes, I think that’s exactly what Maurice did.  Pilgrims were getting settled and everyone had opinions on tending to Brazil’s foot.  I asked her later how she was doing.  “Everyone did everything and it still hurts,” she said.  Her real name is Fernanda, she told me, like our hostess.

Maurice and I had our late lunch but soon Portuguese Fernanda was frying fishcakes in the outdoor kitchen.  Bacalhau—the coddies from Maurice’s childhood.  We are not lovers of fish but we sampled them anyway.  “Try one of these delicious fish cakes,” Maurice said to another pilgrim as we settled around a sunny table on the grass.  Now there are two words I never expected to hear Maurice say together:  “delicious fish.”  But the fishcakes were mild, and anything freshly deep-fried is good. 

Wine appeared, homemade red and white, and we drank it from thick low ceramic cups without handles.  Scraggly cats and dogs wandered around, and there were probably chickens because a bowl of corn sat on the ground behind the strawberries growing from old hiking boots.  Fernanda’s guests came and went from the table in the grass, and the afternoon passed sweetly with conversation around plates piled high with fishcakes and bottomless wine jugs as laundry dried overhead in the sun.

At seven we were invited inside for dinner.  A long table stretched from the kitchen into the next room and Fernanda’s husband was already ladling out that wonderful green soup (and this was the best batch yet).

Dinner was served family style:  salad, bread, rice, incredibly delicious black beans, hunks of barbecued pork and chicken and more wine, followed by two kinds of port, a potent (undrinkable!) clear liquor and chocolate.  Conversation flowed with the courses as the pilgrims got ever more acquainted with one another, and Raik, the German I had uncharitable thoughts about when I saw him in the previous albergue with the girls, kindly traded Brazilian Fernanda his inside bed for the balcony.  It feels strange to me to be on a European adventure and speaking English, but English is the Caminho Portugues’ lingua franca.  Oddly enough the only person who could not fully participate was monolingual Maria, a Brazilian psychoanalyst who at 64 (which she happily mimed in her bold, cheerful and persistent attempts to communicate) seemed older than me and whose native tongue of Portuguese did not serve her well in this gathering in Portugal of Brazilians, Americans, Dutch, Germans and one Dutch Kiwi.

The port was running low, conversation became ever more animated and one end of the table began singing Leonard Cohen’s (rather pagan) Hallelujah.  Jacinto, with a click of his remote, turned on the stereo to the same tune and soon the whole table was hallelujah-ing.  More American pop classics streamed from the boom box, all known by the world gathered at Fernanda’s table and singing along.  Can’t take my eyes off of you….So happy together….  I don’t remember what song made the dancing start, but the little space in front of the sink became a dance floor as German Sohpia jumped up from her seat and saucy Portuguese Fernanda whipped off her outer shirt and retired Bob from Seattle was urged to the floor. 

“YMCA!” we shouted from all around the room as we formed the letters.  The dance floor was too crowded for everyone at once so the dancing pilgrims shifted back and forth.  Maurice was learning the macarena.  By now Portuguese Fernanda and Brazilian Maria had put casual dresses on over their jeans, the better to fling around wildly in their moves. 

Even Jacinto, after he put out more port, joined in one of the dances.  I kept waiting for MercyMe to belt out Greater, but the final number was something hot and Brazilian, and then, it being way past pilgrim bedtime, everyone departed in peace, best of friends, though Jacinto had to kick out Maurice, me and dear German Raik (who turned out to be intelligent and thoughtful as well as kind), still discussing the ways of the world.

Now I think I might know why Casa Fernanda is so popular on the Caminho Portugues.