This piece was first
published by the Sunday Times Lifestyle Magazine.
It was republished by pif magazine
This is the story of a
journey and of a grail that was found and emptied and filled again by magic.
Every word of it is true. The journey
was undertaken by the photographer and myself and liquor ran through it like
water like gurgling down a Madeiran mountainside.
It was clear from the start
that Photographer and I were a recipe for an exiting new cocktail. Poured
together into a small Avis car on the wrong side of a road consisting entirely of
sharp bends and vertiginous overhangs, a road used by drivers of veiculo
longos to practise for the Paris Dakar, we tended to arrive at our
destinations both shaken and stirred: a Madeiran Martini.
Up in the dreamland of first
class the photographer and I savoured Portugese wines and Scottish malts. By
the time we landed in Funchal, lack of sleep had added an edgy zest to the
experience. The captain threw the
engines dramatically into reverse. Fear dropped in like an olive. We stepped
gingerly onto God’s island.
Madeira is a gnomic garden
that is always in blossom, a volcanic extravaganza rising lush and sheer from
the green Atlantic. It is a place to make you understand that the Hispanic tradition of magical realism is no more than
a mirror held to the world. It should come as no surprise to you that three
hundred years ago the Virgin appeared on a hilltop to the villagers of Egreija.
Madeira is also an
interesting place to switch to the other side of the road. The veiculo
longos, keen to qualify for the rally, accelerate into the corners. And
Madeira is all corners. Steep corners. There is really nothing you can do about
the veiculo longos bar turning sharply into the gutter and stalling. The
photographer was very helpful. I took charge of the centimetres between me and
the speeding veiculo longos and he worried about the right-hand bumper.
He veered between optimism and despair.
“You’ve got plenty of room,”
he would say. “Fine this side.” And then:
“Fuck!!!!”
The photographer and I were
really excited when we got the Avis car to Funchal. Even more so when we
spotted our hotel, the Savoy. Then it
disappeared. We’d see it’s enormous shuttered Spanish visage and try to
approach from a different angle. At the last minute we’d be distracted by some
small crisis, like a traffic circle, and Mr Berardo’s hotel would vanish into
thin air. Its elusiveness was as magical as father Antonio’s bottle of Johnny
Walker Black Label. The hotel was as
ephemeral as its owner, Joe Berardo.
Joe Berardo left Madeira as a
youth and travelled to South Africa to make money. He started off selling
vegetables to the mines. He lives now,
when he is in Funchal, at the very top of the town in the small and stately
palace that lies at the centre of the Monte Palace Tropical Gardens which are
owned and run by the Joe Berardo foundation.
Because, for a South African,
Madeira is a mixture between extreme foreignness and astonishing familiarity,
because it is an island on which the extraordinary will occur, Joe
Berardo once bought a painting from my friend, the painter, Carl Becker. Carl’s
work contains certain surreal juxtapositions.
“Why you put the car on the
pole?” Asked Mr Berardo. Carl sweated. How would he explain his ironic view of
Johanneburg mine dump and Southern African society to his potential patron?
“You don’t know, do you,”
said Joe Berardo.
Carl sweated.
“It doesn’t matter.” Said Joe
Berardo. “Is interesting. I take it.”
Mr Berardo’s hotel is all old
marble and chandeliers. Early on the morning of our arrival a small bandy
uniformed man was polishing leather banisters.
Our chambers unready, we were ushered to the Bellevue Buffet on the 7th
floor. It is as big as a rugby field, owns a view of the wide Atlantic, and is
inhabited by 137 couples, all aged
sixty-five. Baring the smallest variation in pastel, they dress identically. The men carry floppy white hats
for the sun. They all wear glasses. They speak seven languages between them and
they come for the flowers.
We understood why that
afternoon when we drove into the flower parade.
“You cannot go to the Savoy,”
said the astonished policeman, “there is a festa.”
Car abandoned in a parking
lot, we watched as Funchal’s sons danced past wearing uncomfortable life-sized papier mache dolphins on their heads.
Funchal’s mothers had painted their shoes blue to match the dolphins. The
floats were all made of genuine flora and one was crowned by an island girl
with golden stars jingling on her nipples. I absconded and walked down to swim in the Savoy’s warmed sea-water pool on the rocky shore. I was a lone character
in a movie in eastern Europe until one of Mr Berardo’s men came and offered me
a towel.
In the morning the
Photographer and I hit the roads and got lost. Within hours we had cemented our
relationship by saving each other from certain death beneath the wheels of veiculo
longos which approached at great speed from the unexpected direction. We
turned north and drove over the central spine of the island and down to the
coast at Sao Vicente. Sao Vicente is a hardware shop and a cafe and a couple of
houses in a garden landscaped by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in an opium dream.
Down on the shore water oozed from the rock where the buildings were cut into
the hillside and majestic Atlantic rollers crashed on the shore. We drove through streaming rocky
tunnels to Porto Moniz. Along the way
precipitous steps led to vineyards that
clung to the mountain. Often the road was just wide enough for the car and I
offered sincere Catholic prayers to the saints at every bend.
And then, in the afternoon,
we came to Egreija. We stopped at Egreija because Father Antonio put into the mind of the photographer the
thought that he would like to buy a pair of boots. And so we looked at the boots
in the shop and had a beer. Outside, Paulo the carpenter and the shop keeper’s
husband were putting up the wooden frames for the flowers for festa to
celebrate the appearance of the Virgin on the hillside above the village three
hundred years before. It became necessary to take photographs of them. Then the
photographer became happy and charming and he directed other inhabitants of
Egreija to sit in the light in the entrance of the shop so that he could
photograph them also.
It was only in saying goodbye
that we introduced ourselves and shook hands with Paulo the carpenter and tried
to hide our astonishment at the feeling of the stumps of the fingers which he
had lost many years before in an accident and about which he was philosophical.
Paulo’s name is Paulo Lorenco Caldiera and he
worked for many years in Van der byl Park near Johannesburg. He took us
to see the church and his work shop and on the way we passed the house of Moses
Acafrao, the mayor of Egreija, who for many years owned and ran the Outspan
Cafe in Sundra in Johannesburg and the Sundra Cash Butchery. We got talking,
the major and I, and before long I had to call the photographer and tell him
that we had been invited to taste Mr Acafrao’s wine which was pure and new.
The mayor explained that when
the wine became old he took the thick residue from the bottom of the barrel and
distilled from it an Aguadente much more powerful than the wine which
owned only “eight or nine degrees of alcohol.” It became necessary then to
taste the Aguadente also and we liked it so much and were so lavish in
our praise of the mayor’s vegetable
garden and his pigs and his chickens that the major gave us a bottle.
Then Father Antonio arrived.
Father Antonio speaks no English. He is eighty-eight years old and his pale
eyes have faded to allow the light of God which shines strongly on the inside
of his head to have access to the world. We were instructed that we would visit
him in his house.
“Very clever,” said Paulo of
father Antonio, “four passports!”
“But they don’t hear,” said
the mayor, pointing to his ear, “we must look after them.”
Father Antonio’s eyes gleamed
through his spectacles and he spoke happy and excited words of which we
understood nothing but the good will from which they emanated.
“He is the biggest authority
in the village,” said the mayor, and then he paused for a long time, “on
religion.”
Father Antonio had a
preliminary errand to attend to and so we drove down the hill in the Mayor’s
old right-hand drive South African Merc to see his vineyards. We parked on an
800 metre cliff. Far below, nestling next to the sea, were the vines whose
produce we had tasted. The grapes, and sometimes the mayor, made the journey up
and down the cliff in small metal basket. On Madeira a mini cable car is the
farmer’s equivalent of a tractor. The thought of the journey was enough to give
me gibbering nightmares. Fortunately Mr
Acafrao could not demonstrate the mechanism as the cable had recently snapped.
Father Antonio’s house is a
fine square doubled storied building in the centre of Egreija. Its orange tiles
and white walls and dark green shutters are sparkling clean. They are devotedly
maintained, like the dark and gleaming interior, by the villagers of Egreija.
In the dining room, Father Antonio sat on one side of the table and the
photographer, the mayor and I sat on the other. Paulo the carpenter and the
mayor’s son remained outside. Father Antonio produced a bottle of Johnny Walker
Black Label, four tumblers and a cake. Christ
watched from the cross on the wall. Father Antonio broke the cake and
poured generous measures. We raised our glasses. The whiskey tasted like ice
cream. We spoke. The mayor translated. Father Antonio beamed at me,
interrogated me. I told him my marital status. The mayor referred to him in the
godly plural.
“They say: ‘Married with
three children - very rich people!’”
Father Antonio rose and
produced two more cakes and another bottle. These we must take with us. He
looked at me with merry eyes, indicating the cakes.
“For the wife and children!”
I guarded those cakes
carefully on our travels and brought them home. For a time I carried the
whiskey also but one night we got drunk on The Algarve and I borrowed some
money from the photographer and the next
morning I couldn’t remember how much it was. The photographer said he
also couldn’t remember.
“Look,” I said, “why don’t
you take the scotch and we’ll call it quits.”
And so it was. But when I
arrived home my wife had offered refuge to a friend and the friend had left a
present. There on the dining room table, gleaming by divine intervention among
the fruit bowls, was the grail offered
to us by Father Antonio, there, reincarnated, was Father Antonio’s bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label.