“Who wants an apple?” Vera suddenly swings into action from the front passenger seat. She is probably tired of listening to us and wants to lighten up the atmosphere, which has become somewhat less cheery than desired. Being a Holocaust survivor, she is not one to dwell on the irreparable.
Rita puts her hand out and Vera gives her a wedge. A 50-year-old baby chick accepting food from her mommy bird. I have to keep from rolling my eyes. Stay positive, I think to myself. You’re in Portugal and you don’t have to drive or even look at a map.
“Do you want me to cut you a piece?” Vera asks me.
“Sure, thank you.” I don’t want to look ungrateful and deep down I welcome the interruption. My mission to get personal information from Anna has become a sad success. I got a lot more than I bargained for and I’m not sure what to do with it. One thing I can say for sure: Anna is definitely a woman in distress and this trip is a diversion she can barely afford. I can try to be nice to her, but that’s about all I can or want to do. I know my limits. I chew the crisp apple slowly and stare out the window. The road sign says that we are on our way to Sintra.
I know nothing about Sintra except that it’s a city in Portugal. Rita read something about it in a travel blog before we left Israel and mentioned to me in passing that there was something to see there. A castle or a palace. She said we might stop there on the way to Porto, but she was not sure. I didn’t bother googling the city. I trust Rita’s assessment about its offerings. We might stop to see beautiful historical edifices.
We start climbing up a winding road. Through the thick foliage that covers the hills, I can see roofs and balconies of magnificent mansions poking through the greenery. Rita does not give any sign that she is planning to stop the car and take in the view. Should I ask her to stop? Do I want to get out of the car? I can’t decide. I expect one of my travel mates to say something but no one comments on the changing landscape.
As we climb higher and higher into the mountains, an enormous castle-like megaplex punctuated by towers and domes that look like something out of Disneyland slowly comes into view. Each structure of this fairytale fortress is painted in a different bright color: red, yellow, orange, gray. I have no idea what I am looking at. Maybe a theme park, maybe not. Rita says nothing. I decide to say nothing as well. I don’t want to start a conversation that might devolve into a debate. I can live without seeing a Disney version of a Portuguese palace, which might turn out to be an expensive and mindless tourist trap. In any case, my interest lies in living and speaking people, not in tourist attractions. I want to get to know Portugal through its people, not through its tourist offerings to outsiders who drive through the country from one end to the other and barely notice what it is like to actually live there.
After the colorful castle disappears behind us, I hear Rita’s cheerful voice from the driver’s seat. “Hi Freddy. Boker tov.”
It’s early morning in California and she is calling to check on him. He’s probably awake already, preparing to go to work, and she is eager to report to him about her new adventure. Calling Freddy several times a day is Rita’s way of not feeling alone in the world. Every time I walk with her, she calls to ask him how he’s doing even though she has nothing to say to him, or he to her. It’s a routine they perform for an invisible audience to reassure one another that they are still there, somewhere, thinking of each other. When she finishes talking to Freddy, she usually calls her son, Ari, and goes through the same routine. Sometimes she calls her son first and Freddy second. Today, she calls Freddy first. Her teenage son may still be asleep.
“Good morning, how you doin’?” Her voice sounds more nasal when she speaks on the phone. She stretches the words and emphasizes the final consonants.
“I’m OK,” I hear Freddy from the other side of the world.
“How are you?” she asks again in that nasal voice.
“Good,” he says.
“What’s going on?” she asks. It’s the same routine every time. Sometimes she asks him these questions in Hebrew. She has trained him to do this opening act of the phone call in Hebrew. It’s quite impressive to hear him responding correctly to her “ma koreh” which translates to “what’s happening?” with “hakol besder.”
“You’re on speaker phone,” she lets him know, just in case he might say something we shouldn’t hear.
“Hi Vera,” he says.
“Hi Freddy,” we all say in tandem.
Now that the preliminaries are over, she tells him about the car and whatever she has been through since the last time they spoke. She concludes the call with a shameless “I love you,” which is an overstatement although not a complete lie. She loves his money and the lifestyle it affords her. In return for that love, Freddy gets a lot of womanly attention, something he was seriously deprived of before he met her. I have nothing but admiration for her survival skills. Without him, I don’t want to speculate where she would have ended up after her divorce. At present, though, she is worried about him. He has been threatening to quit his job and, because she is not sure from where the money would keep coming, she keeps him on a short leash with phone calls, texts, and empty declarations of love. So, life is good, and on we go, to visit some place not too far from where we are now.
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