No escape in Velas

Two men near a church asked Joel and I where we were from, it was the evening in Horta on Faial Island and we were searching for where the music and the sound of hundreds of voices was coming from, the UK we told them, one offered us drugs and the other asked if we wanted a woman, declining we passed by the side of the church where a band played, families chatted, kids ran in the street and locals sold food from the pavement, a young Portuguese man heard us discussing a menu in English, he said he had lived in London, we talked about the abandoned boats on the marina which had been there for years, one after over 5 tonnes of cocaine had been seized from it, could we buy one, do it up in the boatyard we wondered, he told us nobody had managed it yet, they fell apart not being enough trouble to rescue, he said the Azores were regularly used to move drugs to Europe, that the police tracked sailors like us, we mentioned the men from before and he warned us to never accept drugs from dealers in Horta, because ‘You can't get a decent line of coke here’. We bought burgers and moved nearer the band. The church had organised the party, the band sang on a stage and between them and the crowd there was space where people danced, the young wore bright branded t-shirts and made large movements with their arms and hips trying to work each other out but the middle-aged wore dresses and suits and rested in each other’s arms, their feet described slow circles as they looked at each other as if the hundreds of us were not also there, surrounding them, they could have been in their living rooms, after dinner and a drink, alone, remembering when they met, smelling of the day, one hand clasped in another, her other hand on his chest, his on her waist, moving slowly to the music coming from a record player and us jealously watching them on a cinema screen. 

We started and ended the week in Horta in Peter, a bar of over a hundred years old, in between we ate ice cream, had coffee and natas, showered and were frustrated by the owner of Genuíno Restaurante who ignored the bookings he’d enthusiastically taken over the phone and seated first it seemed his friends who shook his hand, smiling between a few words in Portuguese, each enquiry on progress was met by his mock despair and a promise to seat us next and then another local would be given a table, and so we left, some stayed as if there was some victory in eating the food of a man who did not care for them. Back at Peter we found tables and food and friends. Noberto ran a local diving and whale watching business, he stood at the bar chinking glasses with clients in his red bandana tied over his long grey hair, smiling through his heavy beard as if he had a secret we all wanted from him, a man sat at a table waving at me but we did not know each other, I waved back and he raised his glass of beer, it was late, two women walked in from the dark street into the dark bar wearing tight shorts, t-shirts and sunglasses they did not need and a young man dropped his glass, he picked up the pieces with his friend putting them into the base of the glass he'd recovered to the table, the staff told him to leave it, outside a young man from the UK told me he had moved here, bought a fishing boat with a friend and was determined to buy a bigger one someday, a woman offered a steak around from a fancy restaurant that she could not finish, he took it and with his girlfriend bit strips from it in the street, the woman had been to dinner with a man who needed help sailing his boat to the Mediterranean, she’d met him only recently and told me as if she was asking me that it would be alright and said she’d throw him overboard if it wasn’t throwing her head back laughing, a young woman had left her details on a handwritten note wanting to get back to Europe, I’d met her walking the marina the last few days asking if I knew any sailors heading east, it was an old tradition, Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail alone around the world had stopped at Horta in 1895, 23 years before Peter opened, and written in Sailing Alone Around the World, 

"I remained four days at Fayal, and that was two days more than I had intended to stay. It was the kindness of the islanders and their touching simplicity which detained me. A damsel, as innocent as an angel, came alongside one day, and said she would embark on the Spray if I would land her at Lisbon. She could cook flying-fish, she thought, but her forte was dressing bacalhao."

Two of the crew left in Horta and we made for Velas on São Jorge, the 22 nautical miles took us a bit of the morning and a slice of the afternoon. It was quieter than Faial which had around 15,000 people, here there were nearer 8000. The serenity was broken the first night in a restaurant called Flor de Jardim, where around 20 men sat drinking heavily and shouting loudly wearing colourful Hawaiian shirts on which were printed the faces of the man who sat between them wearing a tight silver dress, they would pull the dress from the back and pour beer down it which made him shriek complaining it was too cold which did not discourage them. They cleared the tables and made a dance floor and got louder, the man in the dress who was to get married came to our table and told us he was sorry for the noise and that he worked in California before dancing again slapping his flip flops off the floor with more beer being poured down his dress.

We had neighbours either side of us on the marina, a French couple from Marseille and on the other the Spanish who I saw come back one evening in their dinghy in wetsuits, they put their spearguns on the back of their boat, they also spoke French and I practiced with them asking them if they had won (gagner) any fish, the Marseillais corrected me, I should have asked if they have taken (prendre) any fish. Merci, I replied, appreciating the lesson. And like in St Lucia felt I was with people who were living the good life in the sun and on boats, pulling their food from the sea.

The Frenchman

In Velas, I met a middle-aged Frenchman in a cafe with silver rings on his fingers and bangles on his wrists, a tied grey ponytail, a wooden necklace, glasses, an arch in his back, a white vest around his thin body which sat on a stool, a gravelly laugh with a few missing teeth he quoted Voltaire and Molière and drank dark red wine, he said libraries were important for children and then broke off his manifesto to tell me that he had come out in his forties after spending the night with a man which he said had been fine, he felt monogamy was a new idea which needed to be destroyed, and told me to read The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles and Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and as much as I could from the Siècle des Lumières, insisted philosophy was better in German and poetry in French and recommended when the world got too much to stop reading newspapers for three months, listen to Rachmaninoff and go swimming, then he said he knew presidents and millionaires who sent him tickets to parties on private islands, their cars arriving to pick him up from airstrips, said he’d sold a company in France which he’d built from nothing to a thousand employees with just his hands and his brain he said this while spreading out his hands and then pointing to the side of his head, he’d sold his house in Paris but kept the one in New York, and said a young man he’d shared a night with on the island had stolen all the cash from his wallet.

He wanted to meet that evening as there was a street party celebrating the Holy Spirit, I said fine, it was the highlight of the town and it seemed everyone was going, he was struggling to find a place to stay that night for a reason I never understood but I'd met a lone traveller from Switzerland who had found a room for around 20 Euros so offered to find out for him and we swapped numbers, this would prove to be a mistake, he inquired after my occupation, I told him I was a writer and as I left he didn’t so much shake my hand as hold it. He did not make it to the party that evening, walking back I saw him outside the same cafe throwing wine down his throat what I mean by that is he'd pushed his head back as far as it would go with his open mouth pointing at the sky, the contents of the upturned glass in his hand falling down his throat, I was with other sailors, we politely bade him a good evening and retired to our boats, he called at midnight and I turned off my phone. In the morning, I saw several texts saying hello, that he had showered and links to the music he was listening to until 03:29 in the morning.

Later that day, I saw him in another cafe where he was having pasta and wine, after finishing he came over to my table and asked if I could pay his bill since he had left his wallet in his room, it's not much he insisted, only around 20 Euros waving a hand in the air as if the waiters should not be bothering him with such a small bill, I said no, he smiled and said it would all be fine since he knew everyone on the island including the chief of police who he needed to meet with to discuss his missing money. He went back to his table and chatted to people on his mobile in French, I was sure I heard him say my name to them then thought I must have imagined it, I left. That night he texted me at 00:09, 00:19, 00:30, 00:48 and 02:26. 

It was hard to avoid him in Velas, there were three places to work and Portugal had public holidays so now there was only one unless I had the will of a pilgrim and walked for many miles so I'd see him regularly, one day he walked into the cafe, I was busy writing, he asked if he could sit with me and not at any of the other free tables, the politeness that had been drilled into me after my Punjabi parents had answered England's call for workers and moved to the UK where a queue was sacred and an apology offered for anything including the bad weather that nobody could control made me say fine and he sat, at least he would add material to this entry I reasoned, and he did, opening his notebook and writing wildly on the pages as if the lines did not matter to him and a sentence needed at least ten pages. I'm writing for The New Yorker he told me, about what I asked, he said they were impressed by the people he knew. I let him buy a drink so he was committed to sit a while and told him I needed to move the boat for which I lacked both the skill and the need, and I left.

Another public holiday followed the first and the cafe had become my prison, there he was, as if we were chained together to break the same rock, he waved and smiled and told me Marilyn Monroe had an IQ higher than Einstein's but she chose to act instead of use her brain. He had at least stopped texting me in the night. I told him I needed to work and he let out a dramatic sigh which did not convince me of any frustration he might have felt, it was a stage he was preparing for an announcement, he told me he was leaving, unfortunately he did not mean the cafe, to New York he declared, where the people are civilised unlike here in the Azores, I asked how long he had been here vaguely remembering him say he moved every three months when we had first had the misfortune to meet, eight years, he said. I hid my shock as I wanted this to be a full stop, not a comma. It had taken him nearly a decade to realise Manhattan had more to offer than an island of eight thousand people.

I went to another table and sat to write, he looked over frequently and at one point shouted 'putain' but a skill I'd learned from working in an office came to my aid, that of appearing busy, all it took was the barrier of a laptop behind which one should tap on the keyboard every so often and essentially wear a look of slight concern, my earphones were out of power but they helped the subterfuge. He spoke Portuguese well but made a point of tipping the waiter loudly in English. I felt sorry for him, I wished he had had the colourful life he threw on every canvas of conversation he was allowed into but I doubted it and more than that I did not care. I enjoyed the second-hand smoke from the Portuguese who seemed civilised enough. We were leaving the island in a few hours but I expected to see him again as if Allah could not wait until the Day of Judgement to punish me. I did not say goodbye to him, instead I went into the cafe and left through another door. I did not want to engage in the fantasy that I would stay in touch. Allah did not wait. Neither did the Frenchman. Eight 8 music videos arrived including The Nightfly by Donlad Fagen, Love Still Flows by The Lotus Eaters, along with several others I'd never heard of either and Simple Minds' Don't You (Forget About Me).

Part of me hoped to see him in Vanity Fair some day, find out that he was indeed a celebrated writer of culture for The New Yorker, that he had created jobs for hundreds of Parisians and left the busy city behind for a small sunny Portuguese town where the busiest days were Christian celebrations, that the reason he wore the same clothes each day was because he now shunned capitalism, that he was friends with kings who asked him to educate their princes, that French captains of industry would call him when they needed to keep Paris ahead but if I had to put my money down, I'd say you could find him in Velas. In one conversation and two of the messages he sent he'd said nobody cared about him. I did not know whether this was the only true thing he'd said or if it was also another thought that could be found when one sank slowly into the middle of a bottle of dark red wine.

I hope this post found you well, there may be a delay in the next one appearing as we cross more of the sea. And until the next time thank you for reading and please share this post with friends,

Adnan
Marina das Velas, Portugal, 2025

Adnan Sarwar is a philosophy student at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He won The Bodley Head/Financial Times essay prize, edited for The Economist and is an Iraq war veteran of the British Army.

References

Slocum, J. (1900) Sailing Alone Around the World, Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6317/pg6317.txt, Accessed 6 June 2025.