The bolt was brass, or had been once. Now it was the colour of old coins left too long in a drawer. It slid across the door frame with a sound like someone clearing their throat. That was the only lock.
I’d been in Vila Nova de Milfontes for three days before I noticed. The room was on the second floor of a house that smelled of detergent and fried onions. A woman with paint on her thumbnail showed me upstairs on the first afternoon and pointed at the bed, the fan, the towel folded on the chair. Then she left.
The bolt sat about shoulder height on the inside of the door. From the outside, there was nothing. No keyhole. No latch. No handle that turned. Just a wooden door with a worn patch where the bolt had rubbed against the frame for years.
I stood there with my bag still on my shoulder. I’d come up the hill from the bus stop, sweating through my shirt, and the first thing I did was look for a way to lock the door behind me. There wasn’t one.
For two days I hadn’t noticed because I’d been leaving the door closed but not bolted. Nothing had happened. My things were always where I left them. The towel stayed on the chair. The sand near the window was the same sand.
That evening I went downstairs. The landlady was sitting on a plastic chair in the courtyard, shelling broad beans into a bowl. Her thumbnail still had that chip of white paint. I asked her about a key for the room.
She looked at me. Not unkindly. The way you might look at someone who asks what the weather is like on Saturn. Her mouth opened slightly and she turned back to the beans. She said something in Portuguese I didn’t catch. Then she held up a broad bean between her thumb and forefinger as if it were the whole answer.
There was a man on the ground floor who rode a bicycle with a basket on the handlebars. He came and went without locking anything. I heard his door close at odd hours and never once heard a key.
In Ohrid I once stayed in a guesthouse where the lock was a padlock threaded through a hasp on the outside of the door. You locked your room from the corridor and carried the key in your shoe. The mattress there was worse than the security, but at least the logic was clear. Here the logic was that the room locked when you were inside it. When you left, it was open.
I tried the bolt again that night. It held. I pulled the door from the outside and it didn’t budge. From the inside, it was solid. The fan clicked overhead. A cat cried somewhere below the window. I started taking my bag with me when I went out. The bag was small.
I keep meaning to ask someone what happens when you leave. Whether anything has gone missing. The landlady held up that bean as if it explained something, or maybe she was just showing me a bean. I didn’t push it. She was busy.
If you’re thinking about it
- Late summer is crowded but mornings are still cool enough for the river walk
- Buses from Lisbon run several times a day
- Ask about the lock before you unpack
- Bring a small padlock if it makes you feel better, though there may be nothing to attach it to
I’ll be here a while longer.
