DAILY PENANCE No. 3: Moradia T5 at Légua, Marco de Canaveses, Porto, Portugal

From the Desk of the Damned

When the living talk about Hell, there's always something about the heat. The fire and brimstone. The tortuous flames burning the dead for eternity. Yes, those things exist, but they're not the only heat we damned have to content with. For me, the heat is not the interesting, painful, crackling kind. It is administrative.

It arrives with the morning folder, and this morning the folder contains a five-bedroom house at a place called Légua, on the road between Amarante and Marco de Canaveses in the north of Portugal, and a reminder from my supervisor, who does not sign his memoranda, that yesterday's effort ran long. I was a professor of comparative religion for three decades. I am now, for a period the paperwork (yes, we have paperwork in Hell, so much paperwork) describes as eternal, a copywriter. I have stopped asking which of these was the punishment as I fear I know the truth.

The house is large in the way that houses are large when they were built by people who expected to be visited but rarely, if ever, are. Two floors, two suites, a study on each level, and a covered structure across the full width of the plot that the description calls a telheiro and that you will call, within a week of closing, an outdoor kitchen. There is a borehole(?), in which I take a professional interest, since the rich man in Luke's parable asked for a single wet fingertip and was refused. The views, I am told, are beautiful and unobstructed with a vision toward the hills.

The listing is the work of GoldenPro, a licensed brokerage in Amarante, and I want to say plainly that it is a good piece of writing, a sentence I had not expected to type in this office. It proceeds floor by floor. It uses semicolons (but not in the "I used AI to write this" way.) It's realistic about the property as it tells you that the house is in good condition rather than that it is a dream, and it names the unglamorous things, the electric gate, the double glazing, the water, etc. The things the typically unbearable buyer only remembers to ask about at two in the morning leaving the broker to wake up to 37 increasingly aggravated and demanding texts. There is a single exclamation point. At the very end. I forgive it, because the markets demand the inclusion of at least one and the author was able to hold out for eleven lines before inevitably surrendering.

You, however, are, as usual, a different matter. You are, most likely, the couple with two remote jobs and one shared conviction that the countryside will fix something. You will read the words recuperador de calor and nod knowingly, then rush to Google or ChatGPT to discover it means a closed wood-burning insert that properly heats a room. It won't be until February you will actually learn its purpose and how you really should have read the manual the prior owners left.

You will read Vinho Verde and expect it to be green. You will ask what a légua is, and I will tell you now, since you probably won't read this far: it is an old league, roughly four kilometres, and the place is very likely named for being one league from Amarante, which you will be required to drive in order to buy groceries, fill prescriptions, or take your children to school assuming you are the type to have them.

I think it's important to note that I do not dislike you. I simply graded your type for those 31 years and know how the term ends and what you will take away from my classes. Nothing but a sense of unearned superiority over me and your fellow classmates.

The place deserves better than either of us. Marco de Canaveses is named for a marco, a boundary stone that once divided parishes, and Légua, in the parish of Várzea da Ovelha e Aliviada, still has one. I've never seen a stone marking where a municipality begins. I wonder if it's an uninteresting as it sounds?

Deuteronomy curses the man who moves his neighbour's landmark, and I note with some satisfaction that no one here has. The municipality was assembled by decree of Queen Maria II in 1852 from a handful of older councils and became a city only in 1993. Carmen Miranda was born in that same parish in 1909 and left as an infant, which is the customary way to achieve fame in our world. I think it has something to do with the need to prove ones self but either not recognize that or refuse to seek the therapy a person would need after such a tragic beginning to life.

The Romans got in earlier: at Tongobriga, in Freixo. You can walk a forum, a bathhouse and a fifth-century basilica for merely three euros. In the town proper, the Igreja de Santa Maria, finished in 1996 to Álvaro Siza's design, is a white box with one low window and almost nothing else. The most persuasive argument for the apophatic tradition I have encountered outside of Pseudo-Dionysius.

The Museu Municipal Carmen Miranda on the Alameda Dr. Miranda da Rocha is free, and this summer it was hanging Nadir Afonso. If I had something greater spotty than 90s-era dial-up access to the internet, I'd look up their works. However I do, and my nameless, faceless supervisor would likely deal out additional torment if I even tried. Have you ever had nothing to eat but uncooked turkey gizzards for weeks on end? Not something I'd recommend and for more reasons than just the texture.

At Quinta da Samoça, in Ariz, a family makes Vinho Verde from Avesso and Vinhão on their own slopes and will pour it for you by appointment. And at Cancela Velha, in an eighteenth-century granite room off the Praça Movimento das Forças Armadas, Fernanda Monteiro roasts the local lamb with oven rice, the dish this region has decided to be judged by.

A house between two cities, on a road measured in leagues, beside a stone that says here is where one thing ends and another begins. The Church Fathers would have made a homily of it. I was made to write a listing, on account of a matter involving some marginalia in a colleague's book amongst other sins, I'm sure.

Contact GoldenPro. Ask about the borehole. Tell them the Damned Professor sent you, and then, for both our sakes and to keep the conversation on track, do not attempt to explain.