A Year in the World (17 page)

 
Sopa alentejana de espargos bravos
: wild asparagus, which is
also a Tuscan mania. There the bitter little strings are
usually cooked into a frittata.

 
Sopa da panela
: many kinds of meat, bread, and mint.

 
Sopa de alface com queijo fresco e ovos escalfados
: lettuce
with fresh sheep’s cheese and eggs, which we had at
the
pousada
one night. It had a clear broth with
floating ingredients, like a Japanese soup.

 
Sopa de feijão e batata com ossos de porco
: beans, potatoes,
and pork bones.

 
Sopa de túberas com linguiça e toucinho
: truffle soup with
sausage, fatback, and eggs.

 
Açorda à Alentejana
: bread and garlic.

We
reach Óbidos by noon. A walled and white town on a hill crowned by a castle and tower, Óbidos’s beauty has earned it a stop on every traveller’s itinerary. There are few of us at this time of the year, but all the commercial activity in town is geared toward the tourist trade. Something inevitably goes out of the life of a town when that happens. The houses are appealing, bedecked with flowers and the whitewash often trimmed with sunny yellow borders. The largest wisteria trunk in Christendom travels along the side of a village house. Many sweet churches invite one to stop awhile. After Estremoz and Évora, we’re less enchanted here. We could have been the first tourists ever in Estremoz as far as I could tell, and Évora, a UNESCO World Heritage site like Óbidos, is not at all subsumed by tourism.

Since we’re celebrating my birthday today, Ed urges me to find something special. Because Portugal is known for table linens, coverlets, and sheets, I stop at a shop on an upper street. Everything looks enticing. I select creamy white scalloped sheets with hand-embroidered flowers my mother would have wanted.

At the
pousada
, the castle at the top of town, we are given the room in the tall tower. At first, we’re thrilled.
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair
. We cross a battlement with an enormous view to reach the tower. The entrance opens into a lower room with a little place to sit, an armoire, and a bathroom. To reach the bedroom, you essentially climb an almost vertical, ankle-breaker ladder into a dungeon room with a wood-paneled, curtained canopy bed (how did they ever get it up here?) and a small desk on which waits the
pousada
’s chilled champagne. The three windows are slits through which arrows were shot from crossbows. Since hardly any light comes in, we turn on the bedside lamps, both of which have Christmas-light wattage. The room is literally stone cold. Up this high the wind screams around the corners. Do I feel the tower sway? Downstairs is even colder, and our two bags take most of the space. Although it is only late afternoon, we decide to open the champagne and toast my having a birthday in a real medieval tower. How often will that occur? Ed turns on the television, and from under the duvet in the knight-in-armor bed, we watch a hilariously terrible Elvis Presley movie in English with Portuguese subtitles. By the end, we have finished the whole bottle. To add to the surreal, the
pousada
dining room is empty except for one table of extremely large and well-dressed Portuguese who look as if they stepped out of Botero paintings. They hardly speak at all through course after course of an excellent dinner.

What dream will come to me on my birthday high in a tower? Images influenced by the wedding of Afonso V and Isabel, who wed in the peaceful church on the
parque
when the groom was ten, the bride eight. Or maybe a narrative about the famous Josefa de Óbidos, the seventeenth-century local woman artist much revered, though only two of her paintings remain in town. Nothing, I hope, about the pillory outside Santa Maria. But after the champagne, after the red wine with dinner, I sink into the dark, dark bed and sleep with no dreams at all. Ed is dreaming something because he laughs aloud in his sleep. “What’s funny?” I ask in the dark.

“You.”

We leave early, after a walk around the town walls and castle. Some distance restores the original enchantment of Óbidos. Moorish porches, stone steps up and down passageways, and the moon-white houses in the early morning certainly cast their spell. And anywhere the scent of orange blossom drifts, I’m happy.

The
roads bear much more traffic in the north than in the Alentejo. Portuguese drivers seem rather reckless. We’re used to Italian roads, where people drive fast but with their minds on their business. They usually have considerable skill at the wheel. We trail a truck loaded with cork for miles as it weaves down the road. At each bump the cork flies in the air. A man sits on top of a hay wagon pulled by a donkey, driving others on the road to rash acts. Two lanes become three—the middle of the road seems totally what the boys in my hometown used to call “guts go.” You keep to your far side and venture into the middle to pass, straddling the yellow line. Two wagons full of Gypsies, pulled by horses with other horses attached behind, trot down the highway. Women ride up top, wearing flowered scarves and nursing their babies. Everyone swerves around them. This is crazy. And dangerous. I try to control Ed’s urge to pass by frequent screams.

We’re looking for our country-villa-turned-hotel near Coimbra. When we find it, finally, we come upon a teensy oasis, a dreamy, dreamy house ringed by industry and apartment blocks: what they don’t show you on a Web site. The place itself, Quinta das Lágrimas, is glorious, a sprawling yellow villa with converging stone staircases on the second level. It’s a microcosm of the city of Coimbra, a fabulous small city on the Mondego River, with ugliness all around. We walk in from the hotel, past a fantastic park for children. All the architectural styles of Portugal are reproduced in a miniature village. Once again we say to each other what a perfect vacation Portugal offers for a family with children. The interior of the town drops us into the Old World. A woman with a basket of bread balanced on her head makes her way up a flight of stone steps from one street to the other. Another two carry on their heads big baskets of laundry. The university, oldest and most venerable in Portugal, centers on a square surrounded by buildings where students and professors for centuries have studied and learned. The bell tower dates from 1728. One of the bells, known as the
cabra
, the nanny goat bell, keeps the official time of the city. This is a walking city. The café next to the Santa Cruz church has stoked generations of intellectual coffee sippers both inside, in part of the former church, and at tables outside on the
praça
. The church itself, once elaborately carved in the Manueline style, looks as if a big wave came over a drip castle. Inside, the calming blue and white tile. Outside, a playful fountain with some of the worst street musicians in the world perched around it. We follow the patterned sidewalks for a four-hour walk, absorbing the vibrant life of the town.

Carlos has given us the name of a
tasca
. Fortunately, because it’s
so
local we might never have ventured inside if we’d simply peered in the door. Half the size of a one-car garage, the
tasca
is lined floor to ceiling with notes and drawings from patrons, on napkins, notebook paper, matchbooks—anything. One flick of a match, and we’d be torched. We’re squeezed into chairs at a tiny corner table, and three regional cheeses are quickly brought, along with a basket of bread that could bring tears to your eyes. Then we are served bowls of cabbage soup. The Portuguese man at the next table offers us some of his wild boar. This never has happened to me in any other country in the world. Then the waiter appears with a pewter platter of grilled pork with chunks of garlic, coriander, and olive oil, followed by a terra-cotta oven dish of rice and beans in broth. A table of men gnaw at what looks like a heap of bones, then move on to pork stew and a bowl of spinach steaming with garlic. We don’t even know the name of the place. Is it Manuel ze Dos Ossos? Carlos’s address, scrawled in Ed’s notepad, says Beco do Forno, 12, behind the Astoria hotel. We couldn’t find it and asked several people for the
tasca
. All of them, including a policeman, pointed us here. Every bite is de-lish, and we relish the atmosphere of workers and businesspeople all chowing down on hearty food.