According to Maria, there is a parking lot behind us up the street where we can leave the car for the next couple of days without paying a parking fee. She is going to wait for us by the gate and introduce us to the guard, so he doesn’t charge us on our way out. Rita gets into the car and drives to the parking lot as if she was born on this street. I don’t even get nervous when she makes a U-turn without bothering to find out if it’s legal or not. I have complete trust in her ever since she told me about driving through Tijuana with a malfunctioning GPS and cheating death more times than she cared to count. She stops in front of the barrier where Maria is waiting for us. An elderly man sits inside a small booth, smoking a cigarette and watching something on a small television set. When he sees our sporty-looking Toyota approach, he raises the barrier arm to let us through. He steps out of the booth to greet us and offers to show us our parking spot. He probably does this with all the guests who come to this little parking lot, but it still makes me feel special. We are not just annoying tourists who drive fancy cars and behave as if we own the world. We are real people for him and are treated as such. At least in my imagination.
Maria shows us our parking spot, and after reminding us where to leave the apartment key and what time to check out of the parking lot, she bids us goodbye. She still has lots to do before the day is over and it’s getting late. No time to converse in Brazilian Portuguese about her life in Portugal or where to find normal food made from something other than egg yolks and sugar.
Rita is surprisingly low-key. Her loud chatter and over-the-top friendliness have disappeared and a persona I rarely see emerges from under the tight leggings, oversized top, and jewelry mélange. She doesn’t have to tell me that she’s exhausted. The way she picks up the bags left in the trunk tells me that she needs to hit the sack soon. She can be like a kid, going from a hundred to zero in a space of a few minutes. I’ve seen that happen when she used to come over to my apartment in Monterey between Uber trips and stretch out on the couch. One minute she would be giggling in front of her phone, scrolling down the nonsense she likes to watch on Facebook, and the next she’d be snoring.
“Do you think your mom would want to check out this coffee shop tonight?” I ask Rita on the way back to the apartment. I am sure Anna will skip a dinner outing for budgetary reasons, but with Vera, you never know. She loves to explore stuff and she might shame us into going out because “It’s not every day that we are in Portugal.”
“We can go there for breakfast tomorrow,” Rita says as she drags herself up the stairs. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Good. We can relax and recharge, and tomorrow we, or more accurately Rita, will decide how to proceed. I still don’t know when Anna is planning to depart, but I assume it will be either tomorrow or the day after. In the meantime, I will do what I can to keep the peace and not trigger her with my perceived insensitive approach to humanity and Planet Earth.
When we enter, we find Vera sitting at the dining table with the eternal cup of instant coffee in front of her, leafing through a tourist brochure. Anna is nowhere to be seen. Maybe she went downstairs to commune with her muse and wrap the seashells she collected on the beach in Nazaré with colored strings or whatever. Rita shoves the plastic bags she brought from the car into the fridge without bothering to remove anything from them. I offer to make tea. She doesn’t want any. She plops on the couch, kicks off her boots, turns on the TV, and looks for something to watch. If I know her as well as I think I do, she will be fast asleep in a few minutes. She has the attention span of a squirrel and any video longer than 75 seconds does not really interest her. Unless it is an incredibly silly Israeli comedy show, which I am sure they don’t air in Portugal. Since there are no men or children among us, I also know that no one will compete for the remote or demand to watch anything other than what she chooses to put her to sleep.
I retire to my Ikea furnished and decorated bedroom. Now it’s my turn to take off my boots and stretch on the perfectly made bed with its multi-colored pillows and matching comforter. I have my iPad charging on the nightstand and I intend to use it to learn about the places we visited and maybe even read about what’s going on in the real world since I left it to explore Portugal.
I Google “Nazaré Portugal Surfing” mainly because I remember the conversation that we had earlier in the car about the Brazilian surfer who almost died there today. A year-old article from the New York Times pops up. It’s entitled, “This Town Once Feared the 10-Story Waves. Then the Extreme Surfers Showed Up.” I settle in for the read and discover that Nazaré is the Mecca of big-wave surfers. No wonder the huge waves I saw breaking so close to shore during my beach walk made such an impression on me.
Apparently, Nazaré used to be a picturesque seaside town inhabited by fishermen and their families. In 2010, an American surfing champion named Garrett McNamara decided to come and check out the waves, following a personal invitation from a local sports teacher who understood that the mean waves could attract foreigners—and business—to the area. McNamara spent a winter there studying the waves and the deep canyon that causes these enormous waves to break so close to shore. In 2011 he surfed a 78-foot wave, becoming a world record holder and putting Nazaré on the map. The local sports teacher, Casimiro, proved to be quite a visionary because, in 2018, more than 220,000 people came to Nazaré to see extreme surfers ride the tall waves. Sadly, or not, I cannot claim that I came to Nazaré to watch the surfers.
For someone who has seen surfers ride huge waves in Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay, I feel a bit stupid discovering that Nazaré is one of the world’s most famous surfing hubs after visiting there and not before. It’s like going to Jerusalem and seeing an impressive ancient wall inside the Old City and not knowing that it’s the most sacred site for the Jewish people. To add insult to injury, because I didn’t realize it was such an important surfing spot, I didn’t think about going to watch the surfers from the fortress overlooking the giant waves. I walked on the beach looking at that fortress in the distance, admiring the waves, completely oblivious to the incredible drama that was unfolding on the other side of the mountain at the Praia do Norte (North Beach).
And to top it off, according to another report, today was a very special day in Nazaré, not only because one of Brazil’s most famous surfers nearly drowned there from a wipeout, but because it was one of the best days the big-wave surfers have seen in several years. I open YouTube to see if there are surfing videos from Nazaré when a knock on the door interrupts my search.
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