Immigration for food
Language for possibility
Family for circus entertainment
Genealogy for fiction
When trails turn in circles possibly you are lost. If you are hungry, danger is nearby. Perhaps the trail is your favourite, you don’t really mind being lost, or you will find a new trail. I am unsure about how this trailing started and that’s why I am here, eternally wandering home, leaving in order to return.
I remember wishing an old man had taught me his songs in Portuguese, a language as strange and exotic a thing as you can imagine when you are six years old hearing words that had washed up on shore one day and he is your grandfather. I remember wanting those sounds in my mouth, believing a song would say who I was and where I came from. You aren’t alive if you don’t wish for something you don’t have. The old man was going to die and had no idea about my wishes. I would learn his song later.
I remember we had a private club called D.E.S., and I was told it meant Don’t Ever Swear. Some people swore anyway, mostly the men when they drank. Maybe the women too, but so secretly and quietly you heard only whispers of sss and cht. Years later I learned D.E.S. was an acronym for Divino do Espirito Santo. In Portuguese, I understood that meant ‘Swear as Much as you Want,’ divinely. It was our private swearing club where after church we went for parties.
I remember a writing teacher asking me years later if English was my first language. I was embarrassed by the question and by the fact that it was my only language and somehow faulty. This too was a tiny fragment of heritage. So, silently I cursed the dead old man for not teaching me better. “Damn you, velho Maluco!”
I moved far away. I lived in Paris and learned French. Language is such a cool disguise when you are searching. When I returned home to visit I would ask a few people about our Portuguese heritage. Where did we come from? Why did we leave? Were we kicked out of Portugal because of something bad? But all the old people were busy dying, contracting diseases, forgetting, and stumbling around their houses. “Who cares?” they groaned.
I insisted. They argued about what was true and what wasn’t, which for us meant you talked louder not better. This island. Not that island. You can’t trust people from Madeira. In Portugal the church steals money from starving people and builds altars made of gold. No they don’t. Yes they do. Mister Perry used to be Pereira. That’s crazy!
I read about the Inquisition. Oh my God, were we Jews, hiding in the Azores from terrorist Christians, calling ourselves fruits and trees? Silveira, da Rosa, Pinheiro, were all our friends. What was my true faith? If the story floats, truth is secondary, but never is faith.
Fish from fact
A story held that our family’s first immigrant was kidnapped by a whaling boat when he was a young boy. On the other side of the world he jumped ship in California and swam kilometers to shore chased by sharks.
Kidnapped or given away? I learned recently it was common in the Azores for a mother to offer her child to a ship captain, wishing a better life for her son. She would signal for the vessel to stop with a campfire on the beach, row out in the cover of night, and deliver her boy to hands and faces she couldn’t see. Imagine returning to shore alone, praying for safety and that some day a few bucks might be sent from America.
Prayers were answered. The bucks arrived. Then the boy returned to the island, old enough to choose a village girl and take her with him to America.
A story is told that many years later when that boy was an old man, for a small fee he would give tourists a ride around a California bay in his dinghy named the Isabella after the famous Portuguese queen. He told his customers the story about jumping ship and swimming to shore, a different version for each day in the week: Monday-sharks biting his toes, Tuesday-knife clenched in his teeth as he swam, Wednesday-three kilometers to shore, Thursday-sailors shooting at him in the fog, Friday, twelve kilometers to shore in the midst of a huge storm… Who cares about consistency, it’s the story that counts. He packed so many tourists onto Isabella, a dollar fifty each, she threatened to sink. People risked their lives for his famous tales, not a view of the bay. Truth is that there were sharks in the ocean.
His wife stood on the pier waving out to sea, “Maluco, Maluco, come back!” The old man stood in the rear of his boat, signalling in return and singing, “Natchu, natchu worry, I cana managa!” Neither heard clearly what the other was saying because sea wind blew away their words. Disaster and acts of faith are fabulous teachers.
Did they really call him Barba de China because he had no facial hair? Did they invent these tales for entertainment on Friday nights when the work was done and they were too tired to dance?
Damn it, I don’t know. Morsels of fact leave you hungry for more.
I kept asking questions to those still alive, chanting under my breath like a Buddhist, ‘I love my family, I love my family, even if they have no idea who they are.’
“Why so many questions?” they inquired suspiciously.
Learning Portuguese is a trail. In the mysterious soft sounds and odd organisation of words, I would discover keys, treasures, and secrets. But it is more difficult than French and I am older. I was wrong to think some hidden Portuguese juices in my body would suddenly flow. Instead, dull echoes answer my call for help.
“Why in the world do you want to speak Portuguese?” asked the elder in the family, a 103 year-old uncle named Melvin. In the liquid shine of his old eyes I saw that he thought I was trying to swim back to the islands. Maluco. He speaks English with an accent, but he doesn’t know that. At 103, he is hard of hearing, stands straight as an arrow, and hides jokes in every bone in his body, the comic thread to our past.
I gave up on the living and went to the cemetery to talk to the dead. Perhaps they could tell me who I was and where I came from. They couldn’t run away when I asked irritating questions. Cemeteries in California are nicer places than strip malls even if many of the graves are decorated with plastic flowers and tiny American flags.
Frank Gaspar’s poems pulled me closer so I took his book with me, asking, “Will you help me?” I chose poems for my ancestors. How else would I reach them? If I buried words next to their bodies, perhaps I would hear them speak our tongue. As usual, lost and ill prepared, I forgot the shovel.
I went to a tiny office near the graveyard gates to borrow one, but the gravedigger only had a computer with naked angels floating on the screen. They looked like movie queens.
“Who are you searching for?” He asked with irritation. “We don’t lend shovels.” He told me where to find my family.
“Obrigado,” I said. “Tudo bem.”
I kept getting lost and had to return to consult him. The third time, he asked, “Are you playing games? What the hell language are you speaking?” He drew a map of little squares with people’s names and I found them right away. When I read poems to the dead, they shouted back, “You have the story all wrong!” I know now where I will come in the end.
The young boy is an older man learning a language, circling on a trail leading to Lisbon to interview Portuguese writers. I have a map of shiny, white stones. Calçadas. Someone here translated my words into real Portuguese. This is a miracle of good fortune and maybe a dream where I have died and gone to heaven. Someone is studying a computer screen where my name is spoken by a naked, floating angel wearing sunglasses.
There is no trail to truth, but there is a trail, and perhaps I wouldn’t know truth if it was a shiny white piece of calçada I held in both hands. Heaven could be Lisbon. Saint Peter might be Lobo Antunes and Gonçalo M. Tavares, the archangel Gabriel. The angels waiting at heaven’s gates sing mornas and play coladeiras from Cabo Verde in this eternal hip party in the Bairro Alto of Paradise-Paradise. If it is so and not a dream I will awake from, if I have circled back to the cemetery to die, I ask one thing only. Please bury your poems near me. How will the grass grow otherwise? Don’t forget a shovel. Then sing a song as you leave, in any language you like.
Richard Simas, March 2012
