|
Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Father Antonio's Black Label : Page 1, 2, 3 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 that 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, 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. 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. So we looked at the boots in the shop and had a beer. Outside, Paulo the carpenter and the shopkeeper'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. We shook hands with Paulo the carpenter and tried to hide our astonishment on feeling the stumps of the fingers that he had lost many years before in an accident. 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 to talking, the major and I. 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 that 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-meter 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. |
||||
