What Else Would You Drink in a Catholic Church?
What Else Would You Drink in a Catholic Church?
Laurentina Pretas on the Ilha de Moҫambique
We looked out through an alcove window in the ancient capela (chapel) onto a cross-shaped patch of sky. Outside, the eternal crash of Indian Ocean waves; inside, sacred gloom. We’d taken off our shoes and walked into the vaulted heart of the Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte, a stoic little chapel built by the Portuguese in 1522 on the promontory of Ilha de Moҫambique, a tiny island off Africa’s east coast. Underfoot, through the cool marble, we felt the presence of ancient souls, and in the salty walls and faded inscriptions, we heard their whisperings.
“Let’s have a drink!” I whispered to Darling, perhaps a little too quickly. And I don’t know why I was whispering either. Our guide was outside talking loudly on his mobile phone. This little chapel had stirred me. Sailors for the Portuguese crown Vasco da Gama first landed here in 1498, in search of the sea route to India, and it was not long after that the Portuguese built here. I was imagining a poor shipwrecked Portuguese sailor, for some reason, desperate, on bended knee—or a sea leg, perhaps—praying hard to God. I imagine him with nothing left but his faith and the stars above him (and maybe the spirits of all the Arabs, Goans, and Swahili sultans who were here before him).
I had intended to bring a bottle of beautiful red to the Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte. What else would you take to a Catholic church? I’d imagined a wistful cab sauv—perhaps we’d even remember to chill it to capela temperature—to go with the spirit of this tiny church and its island, wrought by an exhaustion of sultans and chiefs, explorers, shipwrecks, pirates, occupations, missionaries, slavery, colonialism, and civil war.
But I was giddy with travel and love and I had forgotten the wine, never mind my own name. So here we were, Darling and I, slugging on a couple of ice cold Laurentina Pretas that we’d bought from a beachfront barracas near the fort. It’s a lovely rich, dark beer and I immediately felt better about the poor sailor and the other hopeful souls in the Chapel of Nossa Senhora de Baluarte.