Our tenant (I always called him The Lodger) in our cottage at the back of our house left just before Christmas. He departed before dawn in a taxi, leaving us with problems regarding keys. I think he is back in Brazil by now. He had been with us for a couple of years, and I cannot say we had built any kind of rapport with him during that time.
The Lodger’s moods ranged from the morose to the passive/aggressive to the downright miserable; if anything untoward happened to him, he always made us feel as if it was our fault. He only made an effort to be nice when he wanted us to do him a favour. Smiles were very occasional.
He was quite the opposite of the happy, cool stereotypical Brazilian. In fact, I learned some choice Brazilian curse words - these regularly emanated from the cottage when he had forgotten to pay the electricity bill and got cut off, for example. At first I found it amusing - after a while, not so much.
Now the cottage is empty, and has a sour smell. We have organised a cleaning lady.
The sour smell comes, I think, from things The Lodger left behind: some twenty or so cardboard boxes, filled with empty bottles (about 80 percent beer, 20 percent rum). We didn’t expect to inherit all of this. But we are not surprised. At first he used to walk round to the bar in the community at the back of our home. At some point, though, I think he became less sociable, and mostly drank at home with the television rattling endlessly into the night.
The other item which disturbed me, much more (we already knew about the drinking) was a framed photo, hanging on the wall: a boy perhaps in his early teens, staring, without expression. It was The Lodger’s son; this we knew.
He left it behind, on the wall. Why? Did he forget it (I would prefer to think so)? Does he still love his son? Is he returning to see his family? Has he started a new life somewhere?
Well, who knows. Lodgers can be a complete enigma. We have had a few of those.