The Tale of A Strange House in Portugal

One year my work took me to Lisbon, Portugal, where a group of us were sent to cover Expo 1998 Lisboa, a sort of in-between-and-almost-but not-quite a full-blown World’s Fair. The real World’s Fair would take place at Expo 2000 in Hannover and the Lisboa event was a sort of prelude to that.

A gaggle of us were going—perhaps as many as thirty or more during the month of September—and, as it often happens, no one had thought to make hotel bookings early enough. There was not a room to be had anywhere within a day’s drive of Lisbon during the time we needed all those rooms.

So my boss, who was a very creative person, reached into his desk for a big tome titled Grand Estates of the World for Rent (I’m not sure of the real title but it was something like this.) He thumbed through the Portugal section and found a house in Sintra, a hillside village of estates about thirty miles outside Lisbon. The one he liked was called Quinta (Portuguese for farmhouse) do Biester. It had eight bedrooms, four bathrooms and a full staff and the whole thing rented for $10,000 for the month. What with all the people coming and going during the thirty days we would be at the Expo, we figured that price was no more expensive than a bunch of hotel rooms, so booked it we did.

I was sent first to get the key and open the place up. I was in Sweden at the time on another assignment, so I arrived early of an evening in the lingering dusk of later summer Lisbon. Lisbon was at that time, an odd city. Recently moving out of the dark ages of its communist/socialist years, hidden from the economic growth of Europe by its politics and the mountains that isolate it from Spain, it was the Land That Time Forgot. Men all wore suits and ties everywhere and chain-smoked cigarettes. Beautiful and slightly seedy buildings with magnificent facades of Moorish tiles sat adjacent to sidewalks full of rubble and trash. Drinking a cola as you window shopped caused a sensation, since this was just not done in Portugal. People sat down to drink and eat and that was that. And they took their time at everything. No matter when you started dinner, it went on for hours and never ended until after midnight.

A driver took me up into the nearby hills to find the Quinta do Biester. The dampness from the nearby ocean wrapped around the particulates in the evening air (Portugal was still using leaded gas) to create a Londonish-Sherlock-Holmsian fog as we drove the hairpin turns up to the Quinta. Above us rose the ruins of a Moorish castle. When we arrived at the gates of the Quinta I could only hope no other cars were coming in either direction because we had to stop and get out to open the gate and there was no shoulder of the road at that point and there was only room for one car.

We got the gate open and entered the grounds as the darkness fell. This was the strangest house I had ever seen. Gothic doesn’t begin to describe it. The front door was made of iron and leaded glass, but one of the glass panes was broken and had been replaced with cardboard. The front yard was beautifully landscaped and had a gravel drive, but the central fountain wasn’t working and was filled with brackish water. On the balcony above the door the pillars were held up by the wings of concrete bats.

It was gorgeous, though, when you entered. Paneled pine everywhere, gargoyles on the banisters, real art on the walls, a huge living room that overlooked the valley below. It was stunning and it was strange. There was a chapel upstairs and I figured, if you lived in a place like this, what with the bats and the gargoyles, you probably would need that chapel indeed.

The place looked as if it had been furnished by a gay decorator from San Francisco. Lots of Victorian pieces and ruffles and interspersed with that were some really good antiques. The bedrooms looked comfortable and mine had its own fireplace. The housekeeper was nice. Her husband was the gardener and their son waited table (if you wanted to eat supper there). But as in the movie the Haunting, they didn’t live in. So there was nobody to hear you if you screamed in the night.

It turned out to be a delightful stay in spite of the strangeness of the house. We were all busy shuttling back and forth to the Expo where we exhausted ourselves walking on Portuguese cobbles and breathing in all that lead in the air. There was a maid who washed and ironed my blouses (I liked that part especially), and when we dragged home in the evenings we ogled the gargoyles, the bats and the chapel but saw no ghostly apparitions. I did wonder why nobody cleaned the fountain in the front or put a new piece of glass in the front door, but I realized after a time that this was just kind of a Portuguese thing. They didn’t seem to notice stuff like that. On the other hand, there were always great bouquets of fresh flowers in the entry hall. Rich strong coffee with real cream and fresh homemade bread in the morning. In the elegant living room, with its Victorian aspect, there was a plastic 1970s radio, which, when switched on seemed to play only tunes by Neil Diamond.

On the last morning, several of the guys were working on their laptops in the cavernous dining room. I was sitting on the front steps with my luggage dreaming of taking a nice hot bath back home, waiting for our driver. I wandered back into the house at one point, and the housekeeper, Senora Gomes said to me in her almost incomprehensible English: “Doo joo meet zees deeerectoore Roman Polanski?”

“Have I met Roman Polanski? No, I never have. I believe he is in exile from the U.S. after an unfortunate incident involving an underage girl.”

“He ees coming jeer.”

“He’s coming here. To the Quinta Biester?”

“Jees.”

I pondered that for a minute and she continued.

“He ees making zeee mooovy at zeez Quinta with Johnny Depp.”

Oh right. I nodded my head and rolled my eyes and went back out front to wait for our driver, who, in Portuguese fashion was always about forty minutes late for everything. The house was so weird and the staff somewhat unusual so I figured Senora Gomes was just out of her mind like the rest of the country.

As I pondered how I would rehabilitate the front garden, had it been mine, a little white van drove up. Out of the car came a driver and a group of other men who looked, as it were, somewhat European.

One of them was a very small man, with shaggy gray hair, and round frameless glasses. He looked an awful lot to me like Roman Polanski.

“Hello,” he said with his European accented English. “I am Roman Polanski. I so apologize for coming now. But you see we are scouting locations for a movie with Johnny Depp, and I so wanted to see this house.”

“Uh, yes, yes, of course,” I said. “Please make yourself at home. We’re just getting set to leave so Senora Gomes will show you around.” I hoped my head wasn’t spinning around the way Linda Blair’s did in the Exorcist.

Later, after the little white van departed carrying inside it the man who had once been married to Sharon Tate, and he was now smiling and waving goodbye to me--the guys working at their laptops in the dining room came out with dropped jaws to talk to me on the front steps. “That was Roman Polanski!!!” they said. “He just walked around saying hello to us, apologizing for intruding into this lovely Rosemary’s Baby-type house. What the heck was he doing here????”

I just smiled. I still wasn’t sure I had seen what I thought I had seen. It must have been the house.

About a year later I learned, somewhat to my relief, we had not all seen a ghost. Mr. Polanski’s movie with Johnny Depp actually appeared in theaters and you can see the Quinto do Biester plain as day in it. The movie is called The Ninth Gate, and as Depp approaches the front of the Quinta, you can see that they still have that piece of cardboard in place of the broken leaded glass in the door. Inside, the filmmaker removed all the furniture, which is a shame, because I was especially hoping to see that plastic radio again. I wish you could have seen it. But you still get the creepy aspect. I would tell you that I wouldn’t want to spend a night in that house.

But I already have.