Bicas

Is like Europe is merging into Africa. The moment we came over the border into Portugal, we came across the kind of rock formations that I have only seen before in Zimbabwe. Huge boulders lying prone along the landscape. Sitting here, you hear nothing. The land is too dry to support larger mammals and their fluid requirements. It’s mostly insects. Lots of black beetles, ants and dragonflies. I made an acquaintance yesterday: a black beetle who had lost a feeler and one of his back legs. He seemed bewildered by the experience. With my vertical perspective, I guessed he had strayed too near the teeming entrance of an ant’s nest and those bastards are vicious without scruple. I left him, still searching, as the light was fading, and he was gone this morning. Not much of a life I think but that’s probably only human arrogance. He might look at me, dashing over the surface of the planet in a metal cage and think that his fallen pine needles and sandy dryness is all he needs.

The ground all around me is carpeted with used pine needles. It is hard to imagine a material that would be more suitable for starting a fire. I would certainly collect and store it for the winter if I was going to be here. No-one is, because this is a holiday home and its owners, if not its heart-keepers, live in Miami. The sky is now streaked with high, wind-blown candy floss and, as I look up, a large bird with outstretched wings rides easily on the warmed air. He – or she – has keen eyes that scan the ground below. There must, therefore, be small mammals here that my amateur eyes and ears have failed to detect. There is no human movement in the undergrowth though, in fact no discernible movement at all. Only the wind sometimes sways the tops of the trees and occasionally, clouds pass like the shredded tatters of something once more substantial. In fact, today there are no clouds, only distant streaks down near the horizon. When we have left, I will really miss the absolute quiet that sits on the land here and somehow seems connected to the power of the sun which brooks no opposition during these bright days. The flies are busy with what flies are always busy with but, for the life of me, I have not been able to understand what the beetles’ business here is. They do fly and occasionally I hear their low-pitched thrum speeding by. Nearby is one beetle with a vast stash of collected seeds, one area of which he has clearly eaten his way through. His life is obviously busy and not guaranteed against challenges to his ownership of all that hard work. On the other hand, he pays neither rent nor bills. If he’s lucky, he will get a partner who, impressed by the size of his stash and all that it implies, will make little beetles with him. I’d say he deserves it. It’s not lost on me that the real creator of this stash may lie murdered and buried somewhere nearby but we can give him the benefit of the doubt on that.

It has not rained in all the time we have been here. I am sitting in the shade of one of the many tall trees that dot this landscape and I have to keep moving as the shade moves over the ground. Over to my right, the land drops to a wide, flat ribbon that obviously, at times, is a running river bed. At this moment, it is simply dry like everything else here. Plants do cling – more or less happily – to whatever nourishment they can find in this white, sandy soil and it is very peaceful. There are many cork trees, naturally-seeded I would say, and some of them have had the entirety of their lower bark removed. Incredibly this does not kill the tree, only makes it look as if it is standing in its underwear. Although most people would say that the predominant colour here is green, I think that, as the sun catches the tops of the trees, it is trying to be yellow. Later, in the evening, as the sun slashes its way from the lower horizon, the treetops are tending towards red.

The birds are singing now. When we first arrived, it was too hot during the day. It is cooler now. They must have been hunkered down, waiting for the sun to descend. There is a glorious breeze here but nothing is carried on it except the pleasure of its freshness. The tree near me clearly has no particular plans for today but seems content to just be. I know that he thinks I could take a lesson from that but the hindrance of conscious awareness makes it difficult for us humans to just be. There are lots of “pseudo-wasps” here – the flies that are striped like their more vicious cousins. Do they suffer from imposter syndrome? They don’t, do they? I rest my case.

I am sitting here in a place that I am not even paying for, drinking coffee that others grew, harvested, roasted and packaged. It’s true that I know that the Taliban have just paraded their victory through the streets of Afghanistan’s main towns and cities but here the sun shines peaceably and the wind is only playing. People there feel betrayed. They have been betrayed. But that has not happened to me nor to anyone that I know or ever will know. I know of them and that, unfortunately, is what seems to make the difference in this world. The last few weeks have been ones in which the world has watched the frantic and violent scramble of Western forces, to get out of Afghanistan before the Taliban return to absolute rule there. To us oldies, the parallels with Vietnam are too obvious.

We are reading Frankenstein, an erudite and cultured tale of Gothic horror. Also a vivid and frightening description of a manic-depressive episode. B just called to say that all her tests are clear. Fantastic news, of course.