Portugold

I am in Faro and the moon has been full for days. Everywhere we walk he carries my bag. It is heavy with notebooks and sketchpads and he carries it without complaint. The old town is shaped like an egg. Or a zero. What was the most important thing the Arabs brought to us? asks the jingoistic guide, who has been jousting with my companion about who has the better football players. ‘That’s right! The zero!’

Well and that’s important, I say, deadpan: for the football results. He smiles into the stony ground. Our feet ache from days of walking. It is wonderful at night. We have found our way past the startlingly chic frameless glass cafes to smaller, darker, local places filled with families, trying bread porridge stuffed with shellfish and a raw egg stirred in at the table, fig and almond flatcake, pears in wine. ‘It is two pears,’ the friendly girl explains, with difficulty. ‘On his plate with sauce.’ I watch her ladling out the ruby syrup and she starts towards our papered table and then stops. She goes back to the big glass bowl in the cabinet with lavender octopi and anguished looking mackerels and carefully spoons out a third half of the fruit. Proudly she sets it before us. ‘Beers in wine!’

We love the shabby side-street bar broadcasting either football or fado where the hosts spend the afternoon getting drunk and then the entire evening singing. We explore for days before it is time for the tour, a looping walk tour conducted by a tiny local man. He guides us round the blue hour as the steep treasure roofs grow first golden then dark, under the bougainvillea, under the arch. Christopher Columbus is also called Christopher Colon. Christopher Scent-of-Spices, Christopher Arse. Standing squarely on the cobbles he declares, we are the first, we were the greatest, we are the best. ‘Portugal gave them Brazil and in exchange Spain gave us Cape Verde,’ or was it Indonesia and Madeira, Sri Lanka and Japan. Bravely my companion speaks up. As an African man it doesn’t feel good to hear this. You should find a more sensitive way to talk about it. ‘Oh, I’m not proud of it,’ says the proud guide who has described as an innovation Portugal’s decision ‘not to work the slaves, only to sell them.’ ‘You are proud,’ I say. ‘And you should be ashamed. Shame is the only way we can tell this story honestly.’

When a black man tries to speak, white people eagerly talk over him. I point this out. ‘You didn’t let him finish one sentence.’ ‘Ernesto is telling this story in his second language,’ the Canadian guest says, excusing the bristling little guide, and I say, indicating my companion, ‘It’s his sixth.’

Africans often have more courtesy. Racism relies on that gap between our entitlement and their courtesy. But later he tells me in private, I could have punched him. After the tour I say to the guide very quietly, Ernesto we like you. Your tour was great. I have a little suggestion. Next time you describe how Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas, you can put air quotes. There were plenty of people already living there with rich and complex civilizations. ‘But it’s just history.’ cries Ernesto, ‘it’s fact! We didn’t have America in our maps! We didn’t know!’ We didn’t know, I say — but they did. Put it in air quotes and that way you get to keep the same text, but it’s more accurate. My companion has picked up a feather from the ground and he tucks it in my hair. Above our heads two storks in their stork nest are making more storks, she will lay an egg shaped like a zero, like the old town. The nun at the Franciscan chapel shows us a donation box marked Pao, bread, for every Tuesday they make a soup and serve it to ‘the drug people.’ A restaurant tout promises a garden ‘in the backside’ and then thanks me over and over after I explain why he could consider saying merely, ‘in the back.’ We are laughing with joy. He’s not an arse. Our guide Ernesto has pointed out how the church and the government built their roofs next to each other and it seems to me if churches had been better governed in the first place, if governments had been more pious, there would not exist so many Drug People and so many displaced and struggling people who work three jobs and can’t afford health care, who always need feeding.