The man arrived in the late afternoon. He was dressed in the simple working clothes of someone who has done this same job for a long time, and he was helpful in the unhurried way that I have come to recognise here, in this part of central Portugal where not everyone speaks English the way they do in Algarve or Lisbon or Porto. We had asked him to come. The bottle we use for cooking, the large one that lasts us roughly three months, was almost finished, and I had wanted to be sure.
The man from Condeixa-a-Nova
He brought it. One hundred and thirty-five euros. The business is family-run, based around Condeixa-a-Nova, and like a great many things here, it operates at the scale of people who know each other rather than at the scale of a company.
We tried to communicate. He spoke no English at all. I spoke the Portuguese I am still learning, slowly, the kind that gets me through some things and stalls at others. I asked him, in the best version of the words I had, how I should pay. I did not quite understand his answer. He left me a small receipt with writing on it that I could not fully read. Then he was gone.
Two weeks of silence
That was almost two weeks ago.
We have rung the supplier. They have not yet decided how we should pay. The conversation, when I had it, did not produce a clear answer, only an indication that something would be worked out, in time, when there was a reason to work it out. The 135 euros sits in our account. The bottle is in the cradle. The gas works.
Where the transaction lives
I find this difficult to describe accurately to people from the kind of life we used to live, where a transaction is closed before the engineer drives away, where there is an app, a receipt by email, a sense that everything has been completed. Here, the completion is somewhere else. The completion is in the relationship, perhaps, more than in the paperwork. The man knows where we live. The supplier knows we came to them. There is no anxiety about whether we will pay. There is just the slow understanding that the payment will happen when it is the right time for it to happen.
Here, the completion is somewhere else. It is in the relationship, perhaps, more than in the paperwork.
Not the easy story
I do not want to flatten this into the easy story, the one about how Portugal is so wonderfully relaxed. It is not that, exactly. It is something more particular. The pace is not slow because anyone is being lazy. The pace is set by what this place considers necessary, and what this place considers necessary is not what I was raised to consider necessary.
We will pay them. They know we will. Until then, the bottle is full, and the kitchen smells of dinner, and the unpaid debt sits there, quietly, waiting for someone to remember it.