#22 Bokito and Dostoevsky …

The force with which Heidi throws herself between me and the counter rattles me for a moment. One hand against my chest and one hand on the counter, she shouts at the two waiters, hunched over their phones next to the espresso machine: “Caballeros, darle su café como lo quiere es una opción real giving him his coffee the way he wants it is a real option y antes de que llega la Guardia Civil este café es una ruina and before the Guardia Civil arrives this café will be a ruin!”

Then she looks at me and says: “You calm down, okay?”

“I am calm and eh… it’s llegue and será.”

“What!”

“It’s uncertain whether the Guardia Civil will come, so you use the subjuntivo: llegue la Guardia Civil, not llega. And as for the ruin, you use the futuro: será una ruina, not es una ruina.”

“Wonderful. But what is this all about?”

“Nothing. I ordered café con leche caliente for you and for myself café solo medio largo, a café solo with a drop more water, which …” “I know what a café solo medio largo is,” Heidi interrupts me, “but …” screaming behind us. Boris the tiny terrier takes advantage of our inattention. One by one, he greets other guests of the café, and he has come upon a woman who seems terrified, face to face with two kilos of tail-wagging dog. Heidi picks Boris up from the floor, takes the three steps back to me, and says: “It’s half past nine in the morning. Commotion over coffee. That bodes well.”

I point at an oversized teacup on the counter and say: “That’s my café solo medio largo.”

Heidi picks up the cup, looks at what amounts to half a centimeter of coffee at the bottom, and says: “Strange way to serve coffee.”

“And I was given that teapot with hot water to dilute the coffee.”

“Hm… but I think you still don’t realize what happens when you get angry. You look like Bokito. Half the café is filming us now. Take Boris from me and sit down.”

I eh… I happen to know that Bokito is a gorilla in a Dutch zoo, famous for losing his temper at times, so I lift an eyebrow, open my mouth to tell Heidi I hadn’t even gotten into any King Kong Fu, think wiser of it, and with Boris on my lap, I sit down at the table Heidi just got up from and see a waiter pour the coffee from the teacup into a cup for café solo. I see Heidi shake her head, see the waiter make a gesture I don’t like, get up, see the waiter rapidly turn toward the espresso machine, and sit back down again. Man, what a hassle. Just before we ended up here, a waiter in a venta—an old tavern, usually cozier than today’s average café—snapped at us that dogs are not allowed where food is served. After I explained that he was talking nonsense, he whined something about allergic people, and before things escalated, Heidi grabbed me by a sleeve. She pulled me out of that venta, and we drove on until we found this café. And all that hassle is my fault.

When we are traveling, Heidi and I prefer to brew our own tea and coffee somewhere quiet along the road rather than visit ventas or cafés. Last week, though, I stashed our coffee filter so awkwardly in my backpack that it came out broken. Nowhere can I find a new stainless-steel coffee filter, and … “Café solo medio largo,” Heidi interrupts my thoughts as she puts a café solo medio largo on the table and, next to it, a café con leche for herself.

Grumpily, I drink my coffee and think of the building Heidi and I had set our sights on in Montelobado, a Spanish village at the Portuguese border, west of Salamanca, where we settled about two months ago and where our journey started this morning. Two floors, a café on the ground floor. In my mind, I had already rebuilt that café into a 1950s venta, but the building slipped through our fingers, and a friend who called me yesterday remarked that that was probably a good thing because otherwise I would once again fill my days throwing guests out the door, referring, I realized, to the hotel-restaurant Heidi and I once bought in Germany.

Back then—being Dutch and running a hotel-restaurant in Germany—I hadn’t taken the possibility of a clash of cultures into account, let alone how German culture equates the social status of an innkeeper with that of garbage. Integration-wise, I eh… I wasn’t on my A game those days, and my thoughts drift to Herr Salzman, our first guest who tried to make me jump through a few cultural hoops.

Having checked in at five o’clock, Herr Salzman took a chair at a table in our restaurant at six. Visibly annoyed, he looked up from the menu when I politely asked Frau Salzman and him whether they had sich entschieden. Both Frau and Herr Salzman had sich entschieden for salmon, but only having a choice between french fries or baked potatoes, alongside the salad we served with every dish, was so absurd, according to Herr Salzman, that he threatened to contact a television program exposing malpractices in the hospitality industry. Smiling at Frau Salzman, convinced that I would find a package of rice in Heidi’s kitchen, I politely remarked: “Vielleicht wäre Reis eine Idee maybe rice would do.”

“Wunderbar,” both Salzmans agreed. But when I cleared away two empty plates a little later and politely asked, “Hat es Ihnen gefallen did you enjoy your meal?” Herr Salzman was no longer annoyed but angry. Salmon with rice was a ridiculous combination, he yelled and Frau Salzman screamed louder than the woman who had just been terrified by Boris after Herr Salzman had landed in the flower bed in front of our terrace and I walked toward her to let her know that the hotel room had been canceled free of charge and that she had five minutes to pack her and her husband’s belongings and leave our hotel.

Most days after that incident, I uttered the words Ihr Zimmer wurde kostenlos storniert, your room has been canceled free of charge, at least once, shortly before or after at least one German landed in the flower bed in front of our terrace. And because most Germans who landed in that flower bed lacked sportsmanship—anyone confronted by an angry dwarf and getting away with nothing more than a fright should laugh about it—die Polizei visited us with such regularity that Heidi and I sold our hotel, left Germany behind, and … “I have the feeling something is bothering you,” Heidi again interrupts my thoughts.

“Huh…?”

“Nik, only fifteen minutes ago, in that venta, you grabbed a waiter by the scruff of his neck, and now …?”

“Oh, that’s great!” I snap. “After I got that teacup—while you were sitting here playing with Boris—I politely ordered another café solo medio largo and asked whether it could be served in a cup for café solo. That was when those waiters started a riot, not me. And what’s wrong with your coffee?”

“Cold milk. You said you ordered café con leche caliente.”

The two officers in the Guardia Civil 4x4 that passes us just before we reach Salamanca show no interest in us. That puts Heidi at ease, for the waiters at the café we just left—baristas, according to the embroidery on their aprons—had again screamed, “Guardia Civil, Guardia Civil,” when I refused to pay for Heidi’s coffee.

Just after ten o’clock, our TomTom guides us into a parking garage in Salamanca. Heidi walks with Boris into a park; I enter a Tráfico office—the Spanish government agency that handles everything to do with cars—with the folder of papers Heidi printed for me. A security guard helps me enter enough information about myself into a screen to prompt the enormous machine behind the screen to print me a queue number on a slip of paper. The printed confirmation of the cita previa, the appointment, I have at half past ten, carries no weight, and when, at twenty to twelve, my queue number appears on a television screen, I report to counter E, where, after my third friendly attempt to get the seemingly burned-out man in his fifties across from me to do his job, I suspect I have turned into Bokito. My new friend jolts backward on his rolling chair, and with an agility that rattles me—second time today—a seriously overweight woman jumps up from behind her desk. She steps toward us, leans one hand on her colleague’s desk, gestures for me to sit back down, gestures for the security guard to put his baton back in the ring on his belt, and politely asks how she can help me. Five minutes later, I find Heidi and Boris in the park opposite the Tráfico office, and Heidi asks: “Did you manage?”

“More or less, though more less than more. Our Kangoo was never deregistered. That’s why we got that notice about overdue road tax. We can’t prove that we faxed the certificate of destruction seven years ago, so the car has only been officially deregistered today.”

“Which means,” Heidi adds, “that we’re being charged seven years of road tax.”

“Probably. But since we still have the certificate of destruction, we can file an objection with the Tráfico department of the municipality where we lived at the time, which is Torre del Mar, in Andalusia.”

Just as I am about to tell Heidi that she has set our TomTom incorrectly—we are driving south, not west—our TomTom guides us into the parking lot of Salamanca’s MediaMarkt. Heidi jumps out of the car, and when she comes back, I stare surprised at the small stainless-steel moka pot she presses into my hands.

“No Bialetti,” she says, “but for ten euros, we can’t go without. Happy?”

“Super happy,” I answer, super happy.

Around three o’clock, we cross the border into Portugal. Making coffee is still not an option—our gas stove stayed behind in Montelobado—and so, without stopping to try out my new moka pot, just past the city of Guarda, we report an hour and a half later at the gate of Quinta da Portela, a biodynamic farm run by a Dutch couple, who rent out rooms and a cottage. On the driveway, our friend Jan Boesten walks toward us, brightly smiling.

Heidi and I agreed to make a short film about what moves a foreigner to settle in Montelobado. Our client was happy with the script we wrote, and just when we realized that, when it comes to filming, we still have some doubts, Jan—a professional filmmaker—let us know that he would be staying at Quinta da Portela for a few weeks.

After a tour along the fields and vegetable gardens of Quinta da Portela, Heidi, Jan, and I settle in front of the fire in the hearth in the main building of the farm. Jan talks about his passion—filmmaking—and we learn. We sleep well, and the next day, Jan drives us to the nearby summit of the Serra da Estrela, the highest mountain in Portugal. October 14, 2025. Beautiful weather. Jan meditates on a solitary boulder, Boris terrifies rabbits, and Heidi and I stroll through the few shops on Serra da Estrela’s summit.

That afternoon, back roads only, we drive back to Spain, to Montelobado, and while we argue about how to incorporate what we learned from Jan into our film, I suddenly grow nervous. Almeida, I read on a sign at the edge of a town. Almeida, I know, is a well-preserved star fortress. Napoleon’s marshal Masséna besieged Almeida when he advanced on Lisbon in 1810. Boris notices my nervousness. He yelps softly, and I say to Heidi: “I think Boris needs to pee.”

“And I think,” Heidi replies, “you two are comedians. Monumento histórico I just read on a sign. You suddenly behave like a child on the evening before his birthday, and Boris starts yelping. We can stop here for a moment, but I want to be home by seven, and we still have an hour and a half to go.”

Passing through the two gates that lead into the fortress, it dawns on me that we need at least a day here. I want to see the castle—or what remains of it—want to wander along the fortress’s walls, want to visit the museum, and end up with Boris on a stone bench on a square instead while Heidi goes in search of a butcher’s shop. No matter how hard I try, I don’t end up in 1810, and when the Russian writer Dostoevsky whispers in my ear, “Do fortress walls protect you, or do they imprison you?” I realize that Heidi may have been right yesterday when she asked whether something was bothering me. When then Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov whispers in my other ear, “Let me take your doubt away. I give you certainty. Let me protect you from the unbearable burden of freedom,” I know what is bothering me.

From café solo medio largo to freedom, the value of many concepts erodes, and inwardly grinning, I think of Dostoevsky and how, despite his years of forced labor in Siberia, he would laugh himself to tears if he could see what we call freedom in the third millennium, a thought that doesn’t land me, musket in hand, in 1810, but lands me behind a computer in 2035, trying to plan our present trip on Google Maps. After typing Montelobado as the point of departure and Quinta da Portela, Guarda as the destination, a dialog box opens next to the map on my screen. Unfortunately, I read, you do not have sufficient travel credit for this trip. I can look for a shorter route. Would you like me to do that?

Yes, please, I type.

Unfortunately, there is no shorter route. On November 1, you will receive new travel credit. Would you like me to release your car on November 1 for the trip you want to make?

A few years ago—and I catch myself shaking my head—I was a conspiracy theorist, warning against the introduction of digital money. As early as 2027, in a number of countries, the EU will introduce that digital money as a trial, with the aim of rolling it out across Europe around 2030. No apologies from the people who called me a conspiracy theorist, and eh… they are right, of course. I am, after all, still a conspiracy theorist, now because I doubt that digital money is something wonderful that will make our lives even safer and grant us even more freedom.

And of course, only a conspiracy theorist would think that cars in 2035 will only start if a digital entity grants permission. Inwardly grinning again, I suddenly am a twenty-year-old lad in 2040, convinced that I enjoy more freedom than anyone ever did because everything I need is within fifteen minutes’ reach and because Google Maps, once every month, releases the Tesla I rent, allowing me to travel wherever I please for as long as I don’t travel more than two hundred kilometers.

“Let me protect you from the unbearable burden of freedom and …” a blinding flash, a deafening explosion, an all-destroying pressure wave. Buildings—even the centuries-old castle of Almeida—collapse. Finally, I have landed in 1810 …

The siege of Almeida did not last long. A French grenade struck the powder magazine. Hundreds of victims among the civilians and the Portuguese and English defenders in Almeida. The defenders surrendered, and Marshal Masséna marched on with his armies, only to be stopped some fifty kilometers north of Lisbon, at Torres Vedras, by the defensive lines that had hastily been put up on the orders of the English Duke of Wellington.

No matter how safe the fortress walls behind which we shelter may seem, no one is safe if too many people, as Dostoevsky in my view rightly suggests, are afraid of freedom—because it implies responsibility, moral choice, and uncertainty—and prefer to surrender to supposed safety and authority—even if it is the authority of someone who calls himself a barista—and … Boris wags his tail. I follow his gaze and see Heidi walking toward us, a cardboard cup in her hand.

“No butcher’s shop,” she says, “but for seventy cents, I found you a café solo medio largo—though it goes by a different name here in Portugal.”

“Good coffee,” I mumble after taking a sip.

“That’s a relief,” Heidi says, laughing. "Now I don't have to worry about the Guardia Civil—or Guarda, as they call it here—and we might even come back one day.”

“I’d gladly come back! As long as we don’t forget that it’s better to go wrong on our own path than right on someone else’s.”

“Huh…?”

“Dostoevsky.”

“Of course …”

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