TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

when the ladies came to pick us up at the bus station in ayamonte, the weekend, which we'd started early with a friday departure but which had only begun a handful of hours before with a leisurely coffee and then a mad dash to the bus station, was already boding very well for itself. it had been drizzling on the homestretch of that mad dash, but by the time our bus had stopped in huelva we'd broken out of the clouds, and at ayamonte the sun was hanging, unhurried, just above the facade of the station, remarkably warm for the second of december and strangely somnolent for only half past noon. we were still on the spain side of the border in ayamonte, but it boded very well, and it was at once a matter of course and a welcome forewarning that our hostess announced that portugal was a country of calm as she drove us across the bridge (by calatrava) away from spain.

it was a matter of course, because we couldn't have failed in already having sensed it, and we'd have found out soon enough anyway when we stopped in monte gordo altura, that spot on the algarve that the arabs are said to have conquered just for its beauty. they also say that the french now own most of the waterfront property there (and we joked about the british owning the most of malaga). and the french have built houses where they arabs left the land to its beauty and they leave their boats to be grounded when the waters of the lagoon recede away from the cliff and back over the beach. there is poetry, both official and more extemporaneous, written on the whitewashed walls of the little stand of buildings at the lookout point. there are a church and a cemetery. and a printed sign in a window in english advertising one of the buildings as available to rent.

there is a two-thousand year old olive tree in the side yard of one of the houses in the development through which we passed to park nearer our next destination, a beach whose name i don't recall being told. although we opted for it on our way back to the car, we chose to walk to the beach instead of taking the little shuttle train, and maybe that made our catching sight of the ocean the more exciting, or maybe just the opposite and it got us better acclimated to the calm. portgual may be a country of calm, but our hostess told us that the atlantic was a different story and that the waters weren't usually so still in the winter. they were, however, still, and the only sign of their movement beyond the lapping of the surf were the long horizontal lines of shells left in the sand by the tide. braver visitors swam (they were on the shuttle train with us later still in their swimsuits), but we relaxed with a snack at a beachfront restaurant. a snack and beers, which were remarkably better than anything available in spain, as was the bread, which the portuguese seem to take as seriously as the calm, and which we savored with our salted tuna while bewailing the poor excuse that we dealt with daily in sevilla.

and we had another beer on the seawall at olhão before heading to the store to buy what we needed for a dinner to go with the wine that the friends of our hostess would be bringing with them later to her home. carlos deals in wine, and he brought at least a case of it to rosie's; but as i rationalized to him a bit shamefully (but only a bit shamefully) later when he inquired after my apparent aversion for it, maybe a confident sensibility for drinking bad beer was better than wasting something good of something else. maybe. but like what we'd had at the ocean, whatever it was that the ladies brought the two of us who waited at the seawall while the business in olhão was finished was much better than the family of cruzcampos available in spain (even if i can't remember the name of whatever it was or whatever were the others i had that day or the next), although that beer at the seawall was probably given an edge by the sunset. and there won't ever be a shortage of renderings, tritely artistic, of sunsets over the ocean, how the light and the colors change gradually but perceptibly, in the sky and in the water, and reflected until the sunlight is gone and the water is an almost black shade of purple, imperceptible to anyone who didn't watch the entire transition. but our sunset, which had given an edge to our beers, had a special edge of its own, for the beer and the rest, yes, but more so for the lighthouse, which rosie had pointed out earlier (and i'd mistaken the name of the object for the name of the island where it was located), but which hadn't been lighted (or anyway it seemed) until exactly the moment when the two of us waiting at the seawall had noticed the light and the colors changing.

and then we were at the seawall in olhão again. the market had closed at one, but even a two-thirty breakfast didn't make it too late for meeting the group for coffee nearby. the place where we'd sat the previous evening as the sun set wasn't far. in fact, that place was only a short walk both from where we had our coffees and where we caught the water taxi to farol island. it wasn't exactly clear where they'd met rosie, but the friends of hers who had joined us for dinner the previous night had originally met on the island. and the island was where we were going to meet he rest of them, except for carlos, who came with us and our bag of jackets on the water taxi (with his two giant bottles of wine).

the walk from the docking area for the water taxis to the lighthouse on farol island takes about as long as the ride from the seawall to the island. in other words, they're both over too quickly. but there's more to walk to the end of the jetty after the island path passes the lighthouse. and that walk -- and the one back -- we passed much more deliberately. or it seemed that we passed them much more deliberately because we were suddenly caught again in the sunset. up and back the jetty, which was increasingly haunted by fishermen as it got darker, twice past the spot where a ten foot slab of concrete had been torn out of the pathway and deposited half in the water on the other side. the atlantic, however, was still weirdly calm. one of the portuguese joked that one of the would be spaniards must have brought the stillness of the mediterranean. the peacefulness of the water seemed to unsettle the native calmness of the land. but that concrete slab thrown over onto the one side of the jetty was a sign from the sea that it had once moved there, just like the arabs had once been at monte gordo, even if the latter hadn't left so much trace.

the sun had done most of its setting on our journey out, and by the time we'd nearly made our way back off the jetty (which was nearly as long as the breadth of farol island), the last light of the day was nearly gone. but the corona of the sun was still visible over the strip of fishermen's huts on the (nearly) deserted island (that's the only name they have to call it) across the water to the west. it was to the two adjacent and conjoined ones at the rightmost end of the strip that we were going for dinner, but we stopped to wait for our ride at the restaurant near the base of the lighthouse. we didn't eat much because we had plans to eat at that other island, but we did order snacks to go with our beers and ate them (quickly, our ride was coming) while we drank behind the sheets of plastic that protected the covered patio of the restaurant from the wind at night and in winter.

the sunlight had completely gone when the last of us took our turn in the smaller boat that took us from the one island to the other, an even shorter trip than the first one and even closer to the water. then, up on the jetty on the other side of the water people start making comparisons to the movies because in moments like the one they're experiencing that's the easiest unreality to reference. true, though, up ahead, lit on the outside only by two long, bald, yellowish fluorescent bulbs, the blue-green of the fisherman's huts looked especially blue-green as through a lens and from behind a filter, and the strip of huts in the foreground of the darkened and otherwise deserted island was extraordinarily scenic as if the scene had been set.

the fisherman himself was quite the character, suntanned and wrinkled like older fishermen are expected to be, but jolly -- and that jolliness was expected of someone who had spent decades living at those huts on the water and then also surprising in someone who had done the same. his inventions were everywhere and included a system for alerting him when the water had been heated in the outbuilding that housed the toilet and the shower. he had electricity from somewhere, probably the place making the generator noises in the dark about thirty yards behind the outbuilding. there was a wood plank path that led back away from the strip of huts, and it forked not far from where it started, one way leading onto a nearby beach and the other past the recess in the sand that was making the humming noises (that was probably the somewhere making the electricity) and off through the brush to the interior of the island.

the sunlight was long gone, but there were the stars. and like the type of people put stupid by the surreality of being invited to dinner at a fisherman's hut at one end of a strip of fishermen's huts on an otherwise deserted island, we remarked that it was almost more difficult to locate the constellations when they were visible because all of the rest of them were getting in the way. and that larger one near the horizon isn't a planet, it's a signal tower, although we were sure of the moon, half full, and the moonlight more than adequately lit that wood plank path, which we used at intervals to get away from the populated part of the island at the huts and ponder our ignorance of the stars.

there was fish for dinner. and rice. and a salad. and we managed, the eleven of us, to fit inside the hut that wasn't the fisherman's sleeping quarters to eat. the fisherman sat with his back to the sinks and the stove, and on the wall across from him, across the table and all ten of his guests, were hung a sampling of his press highlights. he told the story of his interview for a german television program to the one of us who asked him after dinner about the ethicality of eating those little calamari. (she wasn't happy to find out that the ones she'd been eating were in fact baby squid and not a unique species, but she was glad she asked.)

dinner was simple, and so also, it seems now, was our conversation, both at dinner and afterwards. or maybe it's just that what seemed remarkable then would only be worth remarking upon after sharing another couple of oversized bottles of wine. there was that spirit too, clear and sweet and nameless (forgotten literally in spite of itself), which we poured into each other's shot glasses from that unmarked bottle. it's made from some fruit they collect in the mountains. and it made things easily remarkable. or so i can try to excuse our taking of simple pleasures.

it isn't, however, our fault that our setting was so perfectly cliché. some things are too good to be true, and other's are too clichéd to be taken as good anymore, but we couldn't help the sunsets or the water or the impossibly idyllic scenery. who knows, maybe we'd have experienced that same feeling of a long anticipated reunion (although we'd only all just met and had all just been together less than twenty-four hours earlier) even without the fisherman and without the island that would have been completely deserted without him. but it's also possible that we wouldn't have shared the same camaraderie that we did that night (both for better and for worse) had the scene not been set so perfectly for the comedy.

but no. ours was special. that second night too we had the lighthouse to keep us sure of our bearings, and from its position across the water on farol island we could locate the seawall at olhão and then the city of faro further up the coast, which made amusing allusion to rosie's house in montenegro and our night before. and it was the lighthouse that kept us walking through the semi-darkness toward where the water taxi was waiting after we eventually left the fisherman to his inventions and his huts.

who knows if portuguese water taxis run all night, but one-thirty was late enough for those of us who had taken our dinner early at seven -- not to mention that our return load was several liters of wine lighter than what we'd taken to the fisherman's. we did, however, somehow manage to acquire a guitar.

and then we were back again at the seawall, though not entirely so quickly. none of us knows, actually, why the boat was idling for so long, adrift off the dock at the north end of farol, the opposite end of the island from where the lighthouse was shining. we were tired, but we were lucky. by the time we started up again the half moon had positioned itself low on the horizon, now larger and brighter than before, and as our taxi moved closer to our destination the moon seemed to set its pace to ours, its reflection in the water becoming less and less diffuse until both the half moon and its reflection finally disappeared into a line of boats moored in the distance in the same moment as our taxi pulled up at olhão, the lighthouse still blinking back from farol.

it was something special. maybe you wouldn't, however, suspect it from the tritely artistic renderings. still, it is true that the unhurried sun in ayamonte had boded well for our weekend in the land of calm, even if that isn't the whole truth. but as they say, something always calls you back to the algarve, and what happens on the islands...

if that lighthouse could talk.