The Portuguese habit of staring

Our first house in Perão was in the suburban bit, Poços de Perão. It sat on the corner of two unimportant roads. The house was embedded in the ground, a common practice around there, the bottom half of it being half buried in the sandy earth, so that only two walls were exposed to the air and light.

The upper floor was built to be the living quarters, and the ground floor/basement was for everything else. It felt like a throwback to when Portuguese houses consisted of living quarters on the first floor and the loja on the ground floor where the animals would live.

The front door was on the first floor, accessed by a small gate for entering on foot. The big gate on the side wall was where the car went in and down a slope to the back door. This sliding gate was a big grille made of iron or some other very heavy metal which needed to be grabbed by both hands and dragged to the side to open it, then dragged back to close it. It’s been almost 20 years since I last dragged that gate, but I can still feel the grinding metal resounding through my bones.

When we moved to that house, the garden, which sat at the bottom of the ramp, was just a vast sand pit, dotted with building debris. It took a while, but eventually we got some grass put down, spiky St. Augustine grass, and the children, who were now toddlers, could play outside and I could sit and watch.

It didn’t take long for an issue to become apparent, and the issue was the old women looking through the gate into our garden.

I don’t mean that they were walking past, having a quick glimpse inside, noting what there was and wasn’t in order to determine whether it was gossip worthy or not.

This was various old women stopping, in ones and twos, putting their shopping bags on the ground, and standing in front of the gate, sometimes grabbing the uprights of the gate, to watch what was happening, for minutes at a time. Normal, day-to-day Portuguese staring was already wild enough, but to someone who comes from the south of England, where just looking a person for more than half a second can mean a death sentence, this was extraordinarily weird and uncomfortable.

This part of Perão was wide and sprawling, so not everyone knew everyone else, and I didn’t know who these women were. I couldn’t tell them, diplomatically or not, to buzz off because who knew whom I might be offending? Rub someone up the wrong way, in that village and you didn’t know what might come of it. I was already “that foreigner”. I didn’t want to become “that bloody foreigner”.

But I just couldn’t resign myself to having my kids and me stared at, so we had a word with the local builder, Sr. Amilcar, about getting a new gate, one that wasn’t see-through. Sr. Amilcar said he’d have a think about it, and would get back to us with a solution. “We’ll sort out those bloody nosey old bags!”, he said, as he had a good look around my kitchen, wobbling the cabinets to see if they were sound.

The very next afternoon, I heard something crashing about at the back of the house. It was Sr. Amilcar who, without getting back to us, was pinning corrugated sheets of aluminium to the gate. This, he explained, was the solution to the nosey old women. Then he got back into his rattly old pickup and drove off.

The gate was now twice as heavy, hundreds of kilos heavy. It now needed not just two hands but two hands and locked knees to drag and scrape it open. Annoying, but at least the feeling of being in a zoo was gone, and the kids and I could run around the garden without spectators.

A few weeks later, I drove the car inside the gate, parked, and went back up the slope to shut it. Once shut, I turned to go down towards the back door and discovered that the whole gate was held upright with a 5mm bolt that ran along the slide rail in the wall. I know because the bolt sheared in two, and the gate fell on top of me. As it slid down my back, scraping equidistant vertical stripes into my skin, I wondered if maybe I should care less about people staring at me, remove the aluminium sheets, and live with the iron grille.

The Great Big Portugal Short Story-Off

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Jun 25

Lucy Pepper and Teresa PBG are having a Short Story-Off. We both live in Portugal, and have done for a very long time (me getting on for 30 years, she for 40). Lucy lives just south of the Tejo, Teresa lives just north of the Douro, both of us thrust into Portuguese families when we arrived all that time ago.