by Julie Prince
The train stopped at Portimao. At least we thought it had. You know how it is sometimes when it’s dark, and you don’t speak the language.
We’d been muddling through the continent, Paul and I. Energetic youngsters that we were, we’d given up our jobs-not-worth-keeping to backpack around Europe for a few months. We had to accept our decidedly American failing of not speaking a second language, save for my few broken phrases of high school French. We did it with good humor, and without ever expecting someone to speak English to communicate with us. Though many did, or at least were able to make a better attempt than we were.
There were the French college guys on the train from Paris to Madrid who, when they learned we were visitors from the United States, wanted nothing more than to talk about Jesse Jackson’s presidential run.
There was the overnighter from Salzburg to Oostende, where Paul got into an argument with a two hundred pound Japanese girl. They’re rare, two hundred pound Japanese girls. He wanted to evict her from the bottom bunk which she had commandeered, but which was supposed to be his. “Hey! The reservation says so,” he barked, and pointed to his crumpled paper. “Bunk A! Right here!” But she didn’t speak any more English than Paul did Japanese, so her friend and I frantically tried to mediate. “Don’t yell at the man,” the friend seemed to say to the girl, who sat up in the bed and steadfastly crossed her arms and refused to budge. “Paul,” I said. “This is a big girl. She can’t climb to the upper bunk. Give her a break and go up there yourself.”
But then there was the rattling experience on a day train from Madrid to Seville. After being stopped for twenty minutes or more at a small station along the way, and having no idea what was going on–the unflappable passengers just shrugged and went back to their newspapers when we tried to ask–two burly military police entered the train car. With purpose. They each had a sniffing German Shepherd, and they worked their way up the aisle. They had dark glasses, machine guns and extra ammo strapped to their chests. Goodness.
Then my stomach fell.
I suddenly remembered. Oh my God! The little baggie of pot Paul had insisted on carrying with him on our trip. I’d warned him against it, but Paul never listened to me much in those matters. He proclaimed me a worry-wart, and I proclaimed that if he got caught, I was going to continue on as if I didn’t know him, so there. He’d stuck it in his shoe to go through airport security, and this being over ten years before 9/11, encountered no problem. But here on the train, it wasn’t in his shoe. It was in his backpack right next to him on the seat. I was in the seat across the aisle on this lightly-occupied train.
Visions of Midnight Express danced through my head as I carefully eyed Paul across the way. He chewed his baguette and his Manchego cheese slowly, trying to achieve an air of nonchalance.
And the dog lunged…
…up onto Paul’s seat, and stuck his nose straight into the bag.
I wet my pants, but just a little.
The policeman looked momentarily surprised. He yanked on the leash. The dog pulled out his head…
…with a sausage in his mouth.
The policeman tried to hide it, but clearly wasn’t happy Fido had let his baser canine instincts momentarily take over. He yanked him down, muttered something to Paul, and continued up the aisle. They left Paul gray-faced and shaking.
They stopped again, two rows up, at a well-dressed man in a business suit. The policeman asked the man to take down his briefcase. He took a quick look, and called his colleague over. The man stood up, they handcuffed him, closed the suitcase, picked it up, and the three men and the two dogs walked calmly off the train.
The other travelers barely looked up from over their papers, and Paul and I never ever did figure out exactly what had happened.
So, Portimao, in the Portuguese Algarve. We needed a stop on a beach for a few of days to “rest” from our travels. A ‘vacation within a vacation’ we called it. We had been knocking around long enough to feel like we needed it, and were young enough to do it without irony.
We jumped off that train in the fading light without knowing exactly where we were. Oh, we thought we did, indeed. “It said ‘Portimao’ on the sign, didn’t it, Paul?”
“I thought you read the sign.”
Wherever we were, it wasn’t Portimao. We’d read that Portimao was a popular holiday destination for folks from areas spanning a radius of several hundred miles. Very popular among Londoners, we’d been led to understand. This place where we’d hastily jumped off the train looked like a movie set for “ghost town.” There wasn’t a soul on the narrow streets as the sun was setting. We pulled out our pocket-worn timetable and discovered we’d gotten off a stop too early. “Damn. But not the biggest deal,” I said. “When does the next train come through?”
“At nine,” Paul said.
Nine the next morning, that is.
There was no one around to ask anything, and nothing that looked even approximately like an inn or a hostel or even a home that might have a spare room for a night for a few escudos.
I only threw a brief hissy fit. I’d been doing well with the hissy fits, being–as I was–on the cusp of young womanhood passing through to “get your act together, lady.” A tantrum, I was learning, achieved nothing other than to get others in the street to stop and gawk and/or guffaw–not that there was anyone around to do that here. I was trying to teach myself that the best response to the occasional monkey wrench thrown into my works was to try to solve it, not to stand there and rail away to the gods.
“So, do you want to walk the few miles into town, or do you want to sit here on this solitary bench in the dark for the next fourteen hours?” asked Paul. A no-brainer of a query.
It didn’t stop me from huffing and puffing and whining (just a little) as we trudged along the highway where few cars seemed to travel. The lights of the distant Portimao drew closer. After a half an hour or so, we could discern a few buildings. “It better be Portimao!” I wheezed. “Dammit all to hell!” As if it were all poor Paul’s fault.
It was Portimao. And the tallest building we’d seen from the distance was a hotel. It looked like a modern and even slightly fancy, place, and as we drew closer, I announced that it was going to be the place we were going to stay. Paul agreed without an argument. He was tired, too. The exchange rate in those days was very favorable, especially in Portugal.
It was also pretty generic, the type of place we’d been doing our level best to stay away from in the interest of sucking up that local color. Think Holiday Inn or Best Western. Clean, modern, polyester. But our feet hurt, and our backs, too. And it would be nice, for just a couple of days, to escape from some of the less-than-enjoyable aspects of the down-to-earth places. Paul probably wouldn’t be bitten by a Dalmatian, as he had been in the tiny Paris walk-up hotel to the proprietress’s’ total unconcern. I probably wouldn’t half-drown, as I had when I was sitting on the john in the shared bathroom of the inn behind the Florence train station, saw a button on the wall, wondered what it was, pressed it, and discovered that it was a toilet/shower all in one. Who the heck has ever heard of that?? And they probably wouldn’t give away our passports, as the desk person in the tiny hostel in Perugia did. Their policy was the desk held your passports during your stay–presumably, so you wouldn’t slip out on the bill. When we checked out, it was discovered that they had accidentally given our passports to the couple who had checked the hour before. We knew they would come back when they discovered it–they’d have to–but we didn’t know when that might be, and we spent a painful few hours waiting.
We were ready for a couple of nights of worry-free “luxury.”
We checked in. I wanted to get down to that hotel restaurant as quickly as possible; Paul had to jump in the shower first. Soon after the hiss of the water started, the phone rang. A call from the front desk. Broken Portulinglish, something along the lines of, “Is everything all right??” Paul had pressed an unlabeled “help” button in the shower. You have to watch these European hotels and their bathroom buttons, apparently. “Paul! Don’t press anything else in there, OK?” I shouted. “Ya got all hell breaking loose downstairs!”
I don’t remember what we ate when we finally got back downstairs. All I remember is that I wanted some wine. “A whole bottle, please.” It wasn’t a fancy place; the double-doors opened up onto a TV lounge where a few folks sat.
That exchange rate was in our favor; bring it on.
Por favor, of course.
“Uhh, I don’t think I want any wine,” Paul said when I placed my order. “And?” I asked him. “Don’t you worry, Paul. I’ll manage.”
Even with Mateus Rose. We chuckled.
“Hey, hey, hey, Mateus Rose!” we shouted, recalling that seventies commercial and drawing a few glances. There was no wine list, and the waitress hadn’t asked. I’d just asked for wine, and mimicked tipping an imaginary glass. The sweet and sparkly national wine of Portugal, who knew? It would work for me just fine, at least that night. Dish water would have been fine for me that night.
It was delicious.
“So, what’s on the TV over there? Oh! The Sting!
So popular, even after fifteen or more years. An oldie-but-goodie, even halfway around the world. Newman and Redford still a well-known entity, still attracting viewers of all ages. A really good movie, by all accounts. Though I had managed never to have seen it. Paul had seen it. But somehow, I hadn’t.
It was broadcast in English, with Portuguese subtitles. “Ha ha! Fun!” I remarked to Paul–or maybe just to myself–as I poured another glass of Mateus. Action and humor and eye candy. No wonder The Sting was still a big favorite. I looked at the lines of Portuguese dialogue running beneath Redford’s blond locks and Newman’s baby blues.
It was a poker scene. They were up to something, of course. It was amusing, and we laughed frequently–always a split second before our Portuguese company who were relying on the written words.
I noticed it right away. Cool! I had never been on the other side of the subtitles before. I’d always been in the dark theater at home watching foreign films with other mono linguistic Americans, reading quickly to keep up. Sometimes trying to match the words I read with the French or the Japanese being spoken and wondering which words were which. Sometimes I would wonder if I watched enough movies like that, if I could perhaps learn the language. I always wished I knew another language, but never enough to actually do something about it. Then sometimes, if I got thinking about all of that too hard, I’d lose the entire plot of the movie.
Here, Paul and I were able to get our laughs directly, not having to wait while the words we read to filter through our parietal lobes. I wondered if the other folks in the room were just the tiniest bit jealous that we could catch the jokes a moment before they did. If they wished they spoke our language like I often wished I could speak the language of the countries we had been visiting.
Maybe. Maybe not.
In any event, we all enjoyed the movie at our own speed, and afterward Paul and I went upstairs and I fell tipsily into bed.
Portimao was a friendly town. We found a corner restaurant where we liked the proprietor so much we ate there almost every night. A handsome man with a big curly moustache. Tall, and gregarious and friendly, he spoke not a word of English. “What’s that?” We pointed to a diner’s plate the next table over one night. It looked delicious. He understood our questioning look, and answered, “Coelho.”
“Co–what??” we asked. We wanted to look it up in our little book.
“Coelho.”
We tried to look it up, but we couldn’t find it.
“No, no!” He playfully yanked the book out of my hands, slapped it down on the table, and took a couple of dramatic steps back.
“Coelho!”
He shook out his arms, stuck out his pointer fingers, and placed them on top of his head, going straight up. He threw his top teeth out over his lower lip, and started hopping.
Bunny hops.
“Ohhh, ha ha!” Paul and I cheered, and we clapped our hands.
We didn’t order the rabbit.
But there was no need for subtitles.