Mr Joachim has gone home to Portugal

Le Port is made up of three sections. The middle section is ruinous with half the first floor still rotting from when the roof was left open during rebuilding in 1976 after it was interrupted by the death of J's father.  Under the remaining sound piece of flooring is a single room. On the brown painted door is written in a swirl of red paint "P & J", a momento from when we first occupied the house and camped in this room in 1976 and which subsequently lay empty for several years until we rescued our neighbours from a spot. Mr Joachim had occupied their property on the other side of the bridge for several years. In return he carried out quite a lot of gardening and some masonary work for them. They moved him out, did up the house and let it to a doctor and in later years to another Portuguese family. Mr Joachim was too valuable to loose and anyway they had an obligation to continue to house him under French law. Our empty property was the solution so there was a bit of persuasion. First along the lines that we should not leave the house empty and vulnerable to burglars, and secondly, and more persuasive was Mr Joachim's Master work on the long front wall supporting the terrace; this had been deprived of its mortar by successive flooding of the Dordogne and looked in immenent danger of collapse. He moved in. He never paid any rent and having rolled his eyes in horror at the mention of insurance (one of the few  statutory duties incumbent upon tenants in France) we paid that too togeher with the local tax. He must have moved in about 1985 and no man worked harder, leaving to work as a mason at seven in the morning on his motor scooter and never returning until after seven at night; he would then cut grass or tend the garden until it was completely dark after which he would prepare his supper and listen to the radio. He was illiterate taking letters to our neighbour to read and we discovered he had difficulty in recognising pictures on the packets of plant seeds. Gradually a quantity of boxes, old tools and pieces of bicycle built up in the hall around his door and the middle section became infused with a particular earthy smell, he never opened the window of his room or put up curtains. He would return to Portugal in the early summer for planting on his small holding and again in the Autumn for harvest, as the years went on these absences became longer. He would leave before Christmas or earlier if the rain became too much and interefered with the masonary work. 

At one point his sixteen year old daughter turned up, a very robust young woman and very mature compared to Raph who was the same age and she was already pregnant and preparing to have the child out of wedlock. His two sons also came to stay for a spell before moving off to Switzerland to marry and set up a building transport company with a single lorry. There was tragedy too, one of his daughter's in law suffered from depression and threw herself from a bridge and drowned; his wife and daughter were often ill too. Our neighbours were full of stories of the scams he ran and how rich he really was, the sort of nonsense  typically  directed towards a hard working outsider by settled communities. He told us one of his daughters ran a chicken farm with over 3,000 chickens and that his children had persuaded him to put central heating in his Portuguese home. It was, he said, a home big enough to house all his children and grandchildren when they returned from their work around Europe. 

His work for us was sporadic, his great work was the wall he did to persuade us to allow him to move in, but in recent years he built us a giant barbecue out of rendered breeze blocks with a nice tiled roof. This, rather unkindly, became known as "the bus shelter".   His official retirement happened a couple of years ago but he still came  but for shorter periods with us until last year when he was away for five months in the summer and the onions he had planted become completely overgrown and it became clear a long relationship was soon to end. He carefully avoided helping with the walnut harvest although in residence. Whereas in earlier years we had worked togrther getting out the huge ladder from the barn and cleaning the gutters of plane tree leaves, now the two of us were not longer strong and agile enough to handle it safely and the gutters overflow when it rains. We had in some ways aged together.

For many years we had seen the light shining out onto the terrace from his uncurtained window at night or before dawn, and hear the whine of his motor scooter at dawn and dusk.  But today I went into the middle section of the house to find the key in the door of his room and it swept clean, the boxes and parts all cleared away, the cupboards of gardening tools bare,  his house key still under the same piece of tile outside on the window sill where he  left it each day for over twenty four years whilst he was out working . My last memory of  him is standing outside with a broad smile in an ancient leather jacket and a floppy hat, brown with age, upon which was written in large red letters "Portugal Glorioso".