Your editor-in-chief on the death road of the Algarve narrowly escaped from the Grim Reaper. Laetitia: Portugal Über alles and Spaniard Raúlito: We in Spain and Portugal do not have a nitrogen problem. Nor do we have a housing problem. At most, we have a vacancy problem.
Spoiler alert, dear folks: I’m still alive, as the title already indicated, but it could have ended differently. On Friday evening I went to the big city of Olhão on my bicycle to sniff some culture and crossed the N125, also known as the death road, close to where I live. In fact, the A22 toll road was built because the Estrada Nacional 125 was one of the most dangerous roads in Europe. And is, since most Portuguese are not willing to pay the toll. Just a fun fact in between to keep the excitement going: along the N125, on the first of May, thousands of scarecrows line the roadside, often provided with a little anecdote and a bottle of beer, a cigarette in the straw head and other things that the Algarvian considers important.
The dolls all have to be photographed by João and all, and so they are on the brakes every five minutes. The Portuguese are the most disastrous drivers in Europe, and the reader guesses: one big chain collision until the Spanish border.So I cross the death road, it was still dusk and the street lights were already on. I always look very carefully to the left and right and left again because that is what I learned in 1947 at the Willem van Oranje School of the Bible – also called the glass school – in Ede. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a car appeared, I flew through the air and moved up with my right arm and face over the still nice and warm asphalt. An old, nice Portuguese farmer, who just like me smelled of wine, ran towards me, worried.
In the Netherlands a “youngster” or a ‘tokkie’ would have driven on immediately. In no time at all I was surrounded by people, very kind people. My bank card and my expensive designer reading glasses had flown out of my very expensive Miami Vice shirt and were handed to me. They had long since been stolen in Holland. My head felt okay, although blood was gushing from a gore graze above my temple. I counted my limbs and hoped my expensive shirt was not damaged.
Then an ambulance came and it was from the bombeiros, from the fire department. André and Beatriz put me on a stretcher and did all kinds of first aid things. I remained a sociable speaker until my last breath and I asked André how things were with the ambulances in Portugal, because it is a complicated system with many private cars. They wanted me to go to the hospital but I thought that was excessive. In the hospital of Faro or the private clinic of Gambelas you can easily spend three hours waiting – despite my very expensive Medis insurance, which I have only had for about three years, and I shouted to Brother André: ‘Ho ho ho, I still have to compose the Portugal Post for Sunday, the columns of Laetitia and Raúl have already arrived’.
As for Médis, I was uninsured for 7 years in Portugal and 6 years in Brazil and Paraguay. My mother often said: Who then lives, who then cares, no sparrow falls from the roof without the will of the Heavenly Father, Tuurtje. The good person could have started a wholesale business in tile wisdom. Mom often called me a flutterer and an airhead, a sort of Johnny Depp in Arizona Dream, accompanied by In the Death Car by Iggy Pop. I don’t have a pension; at best, I can draw on my state pension in five years and those few pennies “pay the rent.”
The most I worry about is a TIA. Then I won’t be able to write anymore and I’ll have no income. Three years ago – I was 59 – I went to my bank to inquire about health insurance. The director himself – after all I am one of the notables in the Algarve – took out a form and said: do you smoke, Don Arturo? Nope. Do you drink? Nope, senhor, already 62 years abstainer. He then asked if there were many diseases in my family and I swallowed and said softly: no. Well, my whole family died of K, including my dog Blackie when I was about seven years old, so that was a white lie. Now I pay 180 euros a month with Médis: like shaking out a bucket. So I lay in the ambulance thinking about fate and destiny, because I could have been dead.When I was still very young and offensively beautiful, I regularly visited Willem Alfrink.
This full cousin of Cardinal Alfrink had invented and improved homosexuality and was also a clairvoyant. He counted Leen Jongewaard and Adèle Bloemendaal among his best customers. If those two lovely Mokummers weren’t chatting away at Willem’s house, they were constantly calling the sweetheart for psychic advice. On his floor opposite the Stopera the drink was always ready. While Willem’s artistic clientele gossiped falsely about the variety show in the capital, I drank my fill of gin.
Once the medium began to pant slightly – I was wearing an offensive suede knickerbocker – and he whispered: I see an old man on your shoulder. It is an angel who will always protect you. But what the hell is that? Yikes, all purple spots on your little body! The AIDS epidemic had broken out – gay cancer Willem called it – and kaposis sarcoma was rampant on the scene. His vision was probably projection and it was time to quit because I don’t believe in angel guardians, leprechauns, lavenders and rainbow horns. But maybe dear William was right after all, about the angel guardian. I like to ponder my end: devastated by Korsakov, chikungunya, lyme borreliosis and dengue fever, on a stage like Tommy Cooper or just being heroically crushed by a truck on the N125, the death road of the Algarve. But not right now.
In the Algarve, people die like flies. Since I have lived here, I have attended at least thirty funerals. There’s nothing else to do anyway and at least this way I get to be among people. Many one-sided accidents with mopeds and cars drilling into trees. Drunken farmers who get caught when they stagger home at night along an unlit road. Sometimes someone hangs themselves. Inebriated hunting parties sometimes result in deaths and sporadically someone is murdered, usually in a relational way. Many expats drink themselves to death.
For example, I knew an Englishman who lay in his wooden house for a month. In August. His dogs had half-eaten the owner when the gendarme found him. Then the Englishman, what was left of him at least, lay in a cold room in the mortuary for months. No one came to collect the cadaver. The female member of the English tennis club then made some arrangements with the parish priest. It turned out that the church had a special piggy bank for emergencies and eventually the Englishman, who was not even Catholic, went into the ground anyway. I was the only funeral attendee.
All well and good, but after half an hour I rose from my stretcher like Lazarus, and got on my bicycle, which miraculously was completely intact and not stolen, as is usual in the Netherlands. In Amsterdam-West they even steal invalid carriages and walking frames and RollerMates with a complete COPD system from poor white elderly people! I went straight home, because the big bustling pool of destruction Olhão could wait. And thanks to providence I could type this fine piece. Adeus!
