Para venir a que no eres
Has de ir por donde no eres
Sor Juan de la Cruz
To become what you are not
You must travel to where you are not
Sor Juan de la Cruz
Has de ir por donde no eres
Sor Juan de la Cruz
To become what you are not
You must travel to where you are not
Sor Juan de la Cruz
How long will you stay in Portugal? This is the question grandparents collecting grandchildren in your school yard ask. They want to know if we would be tempted to settle, especially you, Koah. ‘He must love it here,’ they say, half-guessing, half-hoping to tip the scale of country affections in their favour. ‘His grandparents would be so happy,’ they assure us. ‘To be severed from the wee ones is our hardest life cross.’ Their voices lowered to a whisper. A poorly kept secret.
These elders know better than most how distance tears a heart. Portugal is a land of emigrants. Perhaps more than half the people have left this valley, and the surrounding hills, to seek a better life in Ontario, Venezuela, Newark, South Africa, Paris and Germany, most in the nineteen sixties, others earlier in the twentieth century, to Brazil. In this decade, fifty years later, a renewed wave of departures has crested. Your own kindergarten teacher Skypes nightly with her twenty-something engineer son in the UK. These recent emigrants are no longer cleaners, construction labourers, domestic helpers and factory workers. The present exodus includes nurses and teachers, computer and trades people, university graduates. Unlike the previous emigration wave, this is a brain drain of highly skilled workers. The national repercussions will be vaster and longer lasting, bringing continued impoverishment to the public coffers. In addition to three years of free daycare, Portugal schooled and trained its future professionals during sixteen years of nearly free education, only for other nations to harvest the benefits of such citizen investment.
On your grandparents’ lane, six of the children who shared my childhood of hopscotch, futebol, skipping rope and hide-and-seek, have left the country, never to return. Australia and Switzerland, France, Brussels and Canada offered them a ladder of hope. Their grandchildren will not speak their mother tongue. There is hardly a family in 147 square kilometers of Vale de Cambra that did not have one who left their summer closet collecting dust and their toys rusting in nostalgia.
At your school gate, a man, picking up his grandchild, stops me. He says, ‘Do you recognize me?’
It takes me a second to erase the wrinkles and to paint over the white hairs not in my memory. ‘I do.’
He is the father of a childhood friend with whom I played futebol on the roads, patios, and in the woods. His family of five lived in a garage on my street. Lowering his eyes, he confided with a sigh that he had not seen his son in nine years. Before that visit, he had not seen Carlitos in another nine years. He has seen his now teenage granddaughters only twice in their lives. This forced clan separation caused by economic imperatives, brings a festering grief to a culture whose extended family ties are the foundation of community existence. This is the silence they must leave behind to find a daily meal.
Technological tricks pretend to erase the distance by placing images and voices at our fingertips, yet those visions on a screen will never warm the missing body with their fictitious embrace. Ironically, your aunt Marina and grandmother Micas, living two hundred metres apart, already interact through cell phones more often than face to face. Near and far, families have already departed into screens and computer chips. It is a newly invented static emigration facilitated by technology. The machines are a band-aid that will patch, yet not fill the gap growing larger inside the heart.
My physical emigration makes emptiness more visible and obvious, and therefore a blessing: our sadness and distance cannot be fooled by a screen anymore than fast-food fries and pop can satiate our hunger and thirst. Your computer-illiterate grandparents cannot see you on a weekly Skype screen bringing movement and voice that much closer for a more thorough fooling of the senses, yet not the wiser spirit. So, your cascading laugh and sparkling eyes will disappear for your grandparents after our return to Canada. The photos by their bedside will remain imprints to aid their memory but insufficient to replace you, and this is as it should be. The heart and the spirit see through the fog of screens.
I did not need to leave this valley for economic imperatives. I am a cultural refugee from undernourishment and stagnation, born to a community whose priorities include free meals at election times, a vanity church tower and a misplaced memorial gymnasium project to stick a name to, but no money to fix your leaky kindergarten roof or sufficient funds to staff schools. Therefore two neighbourhood schools as well as yours are slated to close next year.
From the time I remember seeking a sense of personal identity, the raft of books by my bedside offered me an escape to wider horizons where the sensitive, kinder, more thoughtful worlds of my imagination found closer affinities. I departed in my mind first, sailing with Marco Polo into his Silk Route travels; I sat in a Paris café, eavesdropping on the conversations of de Beauvoir and Sartre, while the Catholic-induced fog in my mind dissipated for the rest of eternity. Day by day, book by book, my dreams strengthened my resolve and I began to trust that my leap of faith would not land me in another existential void. I believed in my intuition, my vision, my abilities. Hitchhiking out, I stood at the edge of town, along the cobblestone road, the thumb pointing away from the hills.
You and I walk back from school along the descending, labyrinthine lanes to the irrigation channel for our daily boat race, passing many houses with sealed window shutters. The sunshine will only enter these rooms when the emigrants arrive for their summer visits or for the odd Christmas flash-appearance.
The emigrant who can afford to visit the valley does not stay long enough to become irritated at the old ways of doing and being. Our five-month stay has drawn the curiosity of those who ask if I have returned to settle back home with my Canadian family. Their eyes reveal a blend of puzzlement and hope. Did the pull of extended family roots win over an economic imperative? Were they right in having stayed? Is it true that there is nothing better than the place where we were raised, despite the history of poverty, exploitation, oppression, and a social failing to catch up to the times of more open-mindedness and new opportunities?
‘Why is that roof so huge?’ you ask, pointing at an enormous house designed with a steep, drooping roof that resembles the oversized wings of a crouching bird.
The changes emigrants bring in their swift visits leave indelible footprints in the landscape, yet little lasting roots in the minds of Cambra residents. The mark is seen in the steep roofs of their summer homes, mimicking the Swiss and French Alps, yet out of place in a valley where snow does not fall. The grandiose house designs signal financial success, an imposing presence to compensate for the emigrant’s physical absence, a perpetual howl to make up for their reluctant disappearance from the community of their birth.
I and others who left in youth will soon be forgotten, our faces no longer recognized after decades of absence. I am no longer familiar with the new generations, and my anonymity will only grow, since most of my childhood generation is now scattered around the country, and the globe.
Although I have settled far, I never doubted the depth of my roots, the harbour of our Matos’ two-hundred year old walls. Every cell in my body understood that this roof would always be here to shelter me, regardless of how far my dreams would take me. In truth, it was the strength of our roots that allowed the long reach of my flight. I understood that I could soar high, as a kite unrolling my never-ending tails, for I trusted the steady hand of family would never let me go, and that I would never be lost. I had the privilege of following the wind and my whims, knowing any fall would reel me home, into the open arms of extended family. I hope that you, Koah, and Amari will also grow up feeling and seeing those roots, and that you will never be lost.
You do not appear to notice the absence of children along our home-from-school route past deserted patios, or the quiet lanes sprinkled with the occasional elder sunning in a doorway.
As you and I approach your grandparents’ gate, we are halted by a neighbour in his fifties, who lived in Montreal, and who unwillingly returned to assist in his wife’s health recovery and be near his school-age daughter. Having experienced another world, he now feels even more trapped than before. ‘I’m paid a little over minimum wage to be a draughtsman. I see hunger all around me.’ It is no longer the speculative mirage of an improved life; he has a measure of comparison. A memory of a better life. ‘In Canada I earned enough to live comfortably.’
Of the twins in your class, whose mother was born in Montreal and arrived in the valley at the age of eight, their grandmother confided, ‘We wanted to return to Portugal before my children grew old enough not to want to leave Canada,’ she says, a smile of relief on her face. The strategy proved wise. Few teenagers wish to settle into a new place without their personal history and their day-to-day loves. The quaint Cambra valley memories belong to the parent emigrant, they are nothing but a quirky holiday movie for their visiting children; not the road to their future.
In your first month of kindergarten, the teachers took you to visit the museum, then to the library for puppet story time, and had you splashing in the indoor pool. On weekends you watch your cousin’s roller-hockey games, and then walk into the wooden rink to kick the heavy ball, simply to experience their sports territory. In my childhood I kicked a football between two stones for a goal. Your grandfather Agosto played barefoot so as not to damage his one pair of shoes. In his only family portrait, he is six years old and wears dress shoes borrowed from the photographer´s studio. I had to move to a city to finish high school and only then set foot in a gymnasium. There was no swimming pool in this valley. Now, a mobile library van arrives weekly at your school to bring books to those children whose parents do not think of taking their children near books. This may explain the town’s modern library often having more staff than patrons, and many books collecting dust. Sometimes, the books I borrow require cataloguing in the computer-based tag system for their first journey into the sun.
The Cambra valley has moved in time at the pace of the garden snail climbing up the collard stalks that grow as tall as me and resemble small trees. In this land of rains, the collards climb faster than the speed of the snail lagging behind. The tender leaves are never reached. I do not know whether my impetus to keep moving to the edges of new thought and exploration makes my vision of an open-minded, thriving, creative community here just as far-fetched as when I thumbed away. The occasional wind of change sweeping through other parts of Portugal misses this valley tucked in its comforts and conveniences. It is no wonder that even those born here and choosing to continue speaking their mother tongue, still migrate to Lisbon or Porto, where the cross-sweep of ideas is more likely to occur.
After talking with the neighbour, we arrive at the portico to your grandparents’ kitchen. The fish monger, stooped over from the weight of her seven decades and from the wooden crate on her head, insists that your grandmother Micas needs a sole for dinner. Dark blood drips from the limp fish in her hand, onto the clean entrance tile. This draws more attention from your grandmother than the aggressive selling pitch from the woman, who is not taking ‘no’ for an answer. It is a type of word fencing. The fishmonger hopes your grandmother acquiesces just to stop the pestering. For the arthritic elder, a sale is a sale, another day of work when her failure might mean begging on the street, since she is the last monger, on foot, hawking her fish in the weave of these lanes. Your grandmother Micas buys the sole, plus two large mackerel.
For all its faults and unsung glories, the Cambra community is a rarity. Despite its ruts and stagnations, the rovers and the seekers like me, do return to find harbour. The surrounding hills offer a steadfast retreat, a buffer from the anxious crossroads and stormy winds of choice.
I bow to the self-sacrificing family and neighbours, who tend and attend to their birth community. I bow to school friends who accepted their curtailed dreams behind the slow progress of a centipede tripping over its forty-four thousand legs. Year after year, the people who welcome or roll their eyes at me are a joy to recognize, if only for their role in the irritating script of small town drama. Here everyone lives inextricably connected and the script repeats itself with the cycle of the seasons. There is a sigh of comfort in arriving at a land that recognizes me despite the passage of time etching its tracks on my skin. To the town, I also nod in recognition for its growing asphalt and cement scars crowding its surface.
‘Are you back to visit our shit-hole of a country?’
‘Corrupt politicians run our lives.’
‘Nothing works smoothly in this land.’
The prayer wheel of complaining from family and friends becomes a love prayer, a tribute to what they believe cannot be changed, and that they cannot live without. It requires rare resilience and stillness of mind to remain where one was born. To live in this valley is to accept what is, a lay spiritual path of continuous surrender. It is to live through hair-pulling frustrations or deep delights and remain unmoved, tolerating the ground they sprang from, which later, or sooner, will collect them again into its fold.
At four years of age you have already journeyed many times between Europe and North America. From this ‘land of the leaving’ you have inherited the propensity to move about the planet at a frequency your ancestors never imagined possible, a frequency that leaves an ecological footprint larger than centuries of our ancestors’ lives combined. In order to visit her daughter, your great-grandmother Clotilde once went to Lisbon, three hundred kilometres away. That is also as far as your great-grandfather Manuel da Costa ever travelled. I, on the other hand, have lived in several countries over four continents, and crossed dozens and dozens of borders. Days before your great-grandfather Manuel da Costa died, he received my postcard from China, five months into my two-year journey circum-backpacking the world. He showed the postcard proudly to his friends at the market or in the village hub. The day he died, my postcard was found still tucked in his shirt pocket.
I wonder how many places you will leave in your life, and what will prompt you to say farewell. I wonder where you will feel at home and find your community of choice, versus a community of chance, whether your options will be vast or shrink under the political winds of protectionism. Will you move over mountains and cross hemispheres for love, as I did? I wonder if climate change, pandemics, environmental disasters or new wars will force you to move from your home against your will. I remember my heartache in leaving Luanda at your age, the warm ocean landscape receding from the plane window, the ache of leaving my beloved red chair behind, a migration against my desire. A force larger than my will had reshaped my universe.
You are only four years old and have already experienced a sense of two homes, a migratory bird at ease in two continents and landscapes. You carry in you the desire for movement and the joy of discovering the new. Adventure is already your favourite word.
It is too early to anticipate what role this Cambra valley and these people will bestow on your future, or your heart. What has been learned from emigration history suggests that your years of visiting Portugal will simply become a repository of our family memory until the day you establish your own family. The Cambra valley will then recede into the background of your experiences and identity. A dormant seed? Or a brief chapter of our family history to be remembered?
On your grandparents’ lane, six of the children who shared my childhood of hopscotch, futebol, skipping rope and hide-and-seek, have left the country, never to return. Australia and Switzerland, France, Brussels and Canada offered them a ladder of hope. Their grandchildren will not speak their mother tongue. There is hardly a family in 147 square kilometers of Vale de Cambra that did not have one who left their summer closet collecting dust and their toys rusting in nostalgia.
At your school gate, a man, picking up his grandchild, stops me. He says, ‘Do you recognize me?’
It takes me a second to erase the wrinkles and to paint over the white hairs not in my memory. ‘I do.’
He is the father of a childhood friend with whom I played futebol on the roads, patios, and in the woods. His family of five lived in a garage on my street. Lowering his eyes, he confided with a sigh that he had not seen his son in nine years. Before that visit, he had not seen Carlitos in another nine years. He has seen his now teenage granddaughters only twice in their lives. This forced clan separation caused by economic imperatives, brings a festering grief to a culture whose extended family ties are the foundation of community existence. This is the silence they must leave behind to find a daily meal.
Technological tricks pretend to erase the distance by placing images and voices at our fingertips, yet those visions on a screen will never warm the missing body with their fictitious embrace. Ironically, your aunt Marina and grandmother Micas, living two hundred metres apart, already interact through cell phones more often than face to face. Near and far, families have already departed into screens and computer chips. It is a newly invented static emigration facilitated by technology. The machines are a band-aid that will patch, yet not fill the gap growing larger inside the heart.
My physical emigration makes emptiness more visible and obvious, and therefore a blessing: our sadness and distance cannot be fooled by a screen anymore than fast-food fries and pop can satiate our hunger and thirst. Your computer-illiterate grandparents cannot see you on a weekly Skype screen bringing movement and voice that much closer for a more thorough fooling of the senses, yet not the wiser spirit. So, your cascading laugh and sparkling eyes will disappear for your grandparents after our return to Canada. The photos by their bedside will remain imprints to aid their memory but insufficient to replace you, and this is as it should be. The heart and the spirit see through the fog of screens.
I did not need to leave this valley for economic imperatives. I am a cultural refugee from undernourishment and stagnation, born to a community whose priorities include free meals at election times, a vanity church tower and a misplaced memorial gymnasium project to stick a name to, but no money to fix your leaky kindergarten roof or sufficient funds to staff schools. Therefore two neighbourhood schools as well as yours are slated to close next year.
From the time I remember seeking a sense of personal identity, the raft of books by my bedside offered me an escape to wider horizons where the sensitive, kinder, more thoughtful worlds of my imagination found closer affinities. I departed in my mind first, sailing with Marco Polo into his Silk Route travels; I sat in a Paris café, eavesdropping on the conversations of de Beauvoir and Sartre, while the Catholic-induced fog in my mind dissipated for the rest of eternity. Day by day, book by book, my dreams strengthened my resolve and I began to trust that my leap of faith would not land me in another existential void. I believed in my intuition, my vision, my abilities. Hitchhiking out, I stood at the edge of town, along the cobblestone road, the thumb pointing away from the hills.
You and I walk back from school along the descending, labyrinthine lanes to the irrigation channel for our daily boat race, passing many houses with sealed window shutters. The sunshine will only enter these rooms when the emigrants arrive for their summer visits or for the odd Christmas flash-appearance.
The emigrant who can afford to visit the valley does not stay long enough to become irritated at the old ways of doing and being. Our five-month stay has drawn the curiosity of those who ask if I have returned to settle back home with my Canadian family. Their eyes reveal a blend of puzzlement and hope. Did the pull of extended family roots win over an economic imperative? Were they right in having stayed? Is it true that there is nothing better than the place where we were raised, despite the history of poverty, exploitation, oppression, and a social failing to catch up to the times of more open-mindedness and new opportunities?
‘Why is that roof so huge?’ you ask, pointing at an enormous house designed with a steep, drooping roof that resembles the oversized wings of a crouching bird.
The changes emigrants bring in their swift visits leave indelible footprints in the landscape, yet little lasting roots in the minds of Cambra residents. The mark is seen in the steep roofs of their summer homes, mimicking the Swiss and French Alps, yet out of place in a valley where snow does not fall. The grandiose house designs signal financial success, an imposing presence to compensate for the emigrant’s physical absence, a perpetual howl to make up for their reluctant disappearance from the community of their birth.
I and others who left in youth will soon be forgotten, our faces no longer recognized after decades of absence. I am no longer familiar with the new generations, and my anonymity will only grow, since most of my childhood generation is now scattered around the country, and the globe.
Although I have settled far, I never doubted the depth of my roots, the harbour of our Matos’ two-hundred year old walls. Every cell in my body understood that this roof would always be here to shelter me, regardless of how far my dreams would take me. In truth, it was the strength of our roots that allowed the long reach of my flight. I understood that I could soar high, as a kite unrolling my never-ending tails, for I trusted the steady hand of family would never let me go, and that I would never be lost. I had the privilege of following the wind and my whims, knowing any fall would reel me home, into the open arms of extended family. I hope that you, Koah, and Amari will also grow up feeling and seeing those roots, and that you will never be lost.
You do not appear to notice the absence of children along our home-from-school route past deserted patios, or the quiet lanes sprinkled with the occasional elder sunning in a doorway.
As you and I approach your grandparents’ gate, we are halted by a neighbour in his fifties, who lived in Montreal, and who unwillingly returned to assist in his wife’s health recovery and be near his school-age daughter. Having experienced another world, he now feels even more trapped than before. ‘I’m paid a little over minimum wage to be a draughtsman. I see hunger all around me.’ It is no longer the speculative mirage of an improved life; he has a measure of comparison. A memory of a better life. ‘In Canada I earned enough to live comfortably.’
Of the twins in your class, whose mother was born in Montreal and arrived in the valley at the age of eight, their grandmother confided, ‘We wanted to return to Portugal before my children grew old enough not to want to leave Canada,’ she says, a smile of relief on her face. The strategy proved wise. Few teenagers wish to settle into a new place without their personal history and their day-to-day loves. The quaint Cambra valley memories belong to the parent emigrant, they are nothing but a quirky holiday movie for their visiting children; not the road to their future.
In your first month of kindergarten, the teachers took you to visit the museum, then to the library for puppet story time, and had you splashing in the indoor pool. On weekends you watch your cousin’s roller-hockey games, and then walk into the wooden rink to kick the heavy ball, simply to experience their sports territory. In my childhood I kicked a football between two stones for a goal. Your grandfather Agosto played barefoot so as not to damage his one pair of shoes. In his only family portrait, he is six years old and wears dress shoes borrowed from the photographer´s studio. I had to move to a city to finish high school and only then set foot in a gymnasium. There was no swimming pool in this valley. Now, a mobile library van arrives weekly at your school to bring books to those children whose parents do not think of taking their children near books. This may explain the town’s modern library often having more staff than patrons, and many books collecting dust. Sometimes, the books I borrow require cataloguing in the computer-based tag system for their first journey into the sun.
The Cambra valley has moved in time at the pace of the garden snail climbing up the collard stalks that grow as tall as me and resemble small trees. In this land of rains, the collards climb faster than the speed of the snail lagging behind. The tender leaves are never reached. I do not know whether my impetus to keep moving to the edges of new thought and exploration makes my vision of an open-minded, thriving, creative community here just as far-fetched as when I thumbed away. The occasional wind of change sweeping through other parts of Portugal misses this valley tucked in its comforts and conveniences. It is no wonder that even those born here and choosing to continue speaking their mother tongue, still migrate to Lisbon or Porto, where the cross-sweep of ideas is more likely to occur.
After talking with the neighbour, we arrive at the portico to your grandparents’ kitchen. The fish monger, stooped over from the weight of her seven decades and from the wooden crate on her head, insists that your grandmother Micas needs a sole for dinner. Dark blood drips from the limp fish in her hand, onto the clean entrance tile. This draws more attention from your grandmother than the aggressive selling pitch from the woman, who is not taking ‘no’ for an answer. It is a type of word fencing. The fishmonger hopes your grandmother acquiesces just to stop the pestering. For the arthritic elder, a sale is a sale, another day of work when her failure might mean begging on the street, since she is the last monger, on foot, hawking her fish in the weave of these lanes. Your grandmother Micas buys the sole, plus two large mackerel.
For all its faults and unsung glories, the Cambra community is a rarity. Despite its ruts and stagnations, the rovers and the seekers like me, do return to find harbour. The surrounding hills offer a steadfast retreat, a buffer from the anxious crossroads and stormy winds of choice.
I bow to the self-sacrificing family and neighbours, who tend and attend to their birth community. I bow to school friends who accepted their curtailed dreams behind the slow progress of a centipede tripping over its forty-four thousand legs. Year after year, the people who welcome or roll their eyes at me are a joy to recognize, if only for their role in the irritating script of small town drama. Here everyone lives inextricably connected and the script repeats itself with the cycle of the seasons. There is a sigh of comfort in arriving at a land that recognizes me despite the passage of time etching its tracks on my skin. To the town, I also nod in recognition for its growing asphalt and cement scars crowding its surface.
‘Are you back to visit our shit-hole of a country?’
‘Corrupt politicians run our lives.’
‘Nothing works smoothly in this land.’
The prayer wheel of complaining from family and friends becomes a love prayer, a tribute to what they believe cannot be changed, and that they cannot live without. It requires rare resilience and stillness of mind to remain where one was born. To live in this valley is to accept what is, a lay spiritual path of continuous surrender. It is to live through hair-pulling frustrations or deep delights and remain unmoved, tolerating the ground they sprang from, which later, or sooner, will collect them again into its fold.
At four years of age you have already journeyed many times between Europe and North America. From this ‘land of the leaving’ you have inherited the propensity to move about the planet at a frequency your ancestors never imagined possible, a frequency that leaves an ecological footprint larger than centuries of our ancestors’ lives combined. In order to visit her daughter, your great-grandmother Clotilde once went to Lisbon, three hundred kilometres away. That is also as far as your great-grandfather Manuel da Costa ever travelled. I, on the other hand, have lived in several countries over four continents, and crossed dozens and dozens of borders. Days before your great-grandfather Manuel da Costa died, he received my postcard from China, five months into my two-year journey circum-backpacking the world. He showed the postcard proudly to his friends at the market or in the village hub. The day he died, my postcard was found still tucked in his shirt pocket.
I wonder how many places you will leave in your life, and what will prompt you to say farewell. I wonder where you will feel at home and find your community of choice, versus a community of chance, whether your options will be vast or shrink under the political winds of protectionism. Will you move over mountains and cross hemispheres for love, as I did? I wonder if climate change, pandemics, environmental disasters or new wars will force you to move from your home against your will. I remember my heartache in leaving Luanda at your age, the warm ocean landscape receding from the plane window, the ache of leaving my beloved red chair behind, a migration against my desire. A force larger than my will had reshaped my universe.
You are only four years old and have already experienced a sense of two homes, a migratory bird at ease in two continents and landscapes. You carry in you the desire for movement and the joy of discovering the new. Adventure is already your favourite word.
It is too early to anticipate what role this Cambra valley and these people will bestow on your future, or your heart. What has been learned from emigration history suggests that your years of visiting Portugal will simply become a repository of our family memory until the day you establish your own family. The Cambra valley will then recede into the background of your experiences and identity. A dormant seed? Or a brief chapter of our family history to be remembered?
Born in Angola, and raised in Portugal, paulo da costa is a writer, editor and translator living in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. He is the recipient of the 2020 James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction, the 2003 Commonwealth First Book Prize for the Canada-Caribbean Region, the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize and the Canongate Prize for short-fiction. His poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published widely in literary magazines around the world and translated into Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese. The Midwife of Torment is his latest book of fiction.
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