Cacimbo*

I grew with albums of ancient smells, black and white photos, love letters clandestinely read behind the sofa, the smell of the sea, dusty, little, yellowish boxes stored in the attic, memories of Africa, stories of voodoo spells and witchcraft, trunks, vinyl’s, sound of tangos and guitars, diaries and secrets of a story that I used to feel in every slowly aging wrinkle of my grandmother’s hands. For years, I never understood it. It was her hands crumpled like a piece of antique paper that unwrapped an unrevealed story of a woman with her soul imprisoned in Africa. 

Maria was born in Espinho, Portugal. Fifth daughter of four brothers has never learned to read or to write and never went to school. Her mother died when she was only one year having been therefore taken care by the siblings and the father. At the age of fifteen she feel head over heels in love with Alberto with whom she dated eleven years and later married. My grandmother’s dream was to become a mother, but after a miscarriage she was sadly told she couldn’t have children of her own, which took it looking for a child to adopt. 

  

Alberto had a friend who was living with Maria Emília and her small baby.  She was often a victim of physical abuse by her man until one day, in desperation, she throws herself into the sea with her daughter in her arms trying to drown herself. Alberto, strolling along the beach, it sees her, jumps into the water and brings them safe to the sand. With the baby in his arms, reaches later home and tells my grandmother: I brought your daughter. It is in your room. 

Maria has not only devoted her life to my mother since then but also to Maria Emilia, my biological grandmother, who, after what happened, fell ill with tuberculosis and was entrusted to the calm hands of my grandmother until her death. Fatima, my mother, was two months. 

For year’s life unfolded calmly in family until a sudden passion of a woman for Alberto. When she recalls it, maintains the strong words but her eyes barely dried when she says she put a spell on him. The beginning of maltreatment and discussions led her to abandon Portugal and flee with her daughter to Luanda, to the land of spells and beauty, she says.

Angola, a former Portuguese colony, boasted a country rich in faith and hope, a rough diamond lengthening his long salty blue sea arms to the thousands of Portuguese people living together in a docile harmony with Africans. Luanda was described to me as a colorful city, a golden shell, a blue bay bordered by coconut palms and baobabs tanning bodies with colored skirts and dresses copied from fashion magazines of the 60s. 

This island was retained in my childhood memory as a symbol of the will to live, the tranquility of a Sunday day at the beach, the laughter that rocked the sea breeze on the terraces and above all the opportunity to dream without fear. The years lived there with her daughter, she says, where of the purest happiness.

She worked on a guest house during the years lived there until the independence of Luanda, in 1974, shortly after the carnation revolution in Portugal. It was the beginning of a bloody civil war in Angola that abolished the tranquility of their lives. Fear took hold, especially due to the prominent attacks in the pension and the sudden entry of soldiers during the night. Qualms threaten freedom. They decreed the compulsory collection and fear gave way to peace.

Until one summer day in 1975, while dining with my mother, they were told by radio that at 19:30pm they would have to be at Luanda airport to leave the country. In a few hours they had only time to fill old trunks of clothes and some photographs and postcards. Nothing more. Everything else was abandoned.

My grandmother and her daughter were just one of millions of refugees forced to abandon not only one land, one family, the life they build there but also a piece of their identity. The data recorded about two millions dead in Angola. However, the official history does not record the loss, separation, trauma and pain of more than one million Portuguese who had to leave the island. This was the grief I felt for years. The grief of someone who never completely came back; someone who is simply waiting to hear again her name on the radio in order to refill the trunks and return home. Somehow I feel that the life they built later in Portugal was just a substitute life for an island that was left behind, only accessible within the souls that will never heal.

The requests made in Portugal to the luandan authorities to return were constantly denied. Also my mother persisted several years, eventually giving up. But she told me something that she had never confessed before: if I had known I would never had caught that plane.

When they returned my mother found a job in Santarem where they lived long years. And life went slowly adjusting to a small and conventional Portugal to sifting through the remnants of their former life. Twelve years after return, Maria became ill with a cancer in the intestines, which she survived. I do not have memories of those times and I do not remember seeing her suffer. But I do remember seeing her crying when I read her the Portuguese classics during summer holidays. This is what I best remember of her. And the endless stories that she told me of her past. 

She was a women with many losses along her life: she lost her mother, sisters, husband, one son, her stature, today hunchbacked and her nails, deformed due to a mycosis contracted during the years she worked in Africa.  But she mentions very little about the fear or panic of losing her life during the war. Moreover, her memories are only filled with episodes of my mother spreading beauty and charm on the sidewalks in Africa. She was a special woman. Everyone stooped to see her dance, she says. In her eyes you see the depths of the sea and I think this was where her soul stayed. 

For me, Luanda was a fairy-tail island where I wanted to live as too. Actually, I have always thought they would return one day, but this time, I would also be part of another chapter of this story.

 It has been 36 years and Maria, like the great majority of the repatriates, has never returned since. Today, at 94 years, I ask what reminds her  of Africa the most. She answers me: my nails. See, I’ve got tree branches instead of hands. Can we leave it at that?

(One year after finishing this story my grandmother past away. This is a tribute to this beautiful, strong woman who taught me what love is).

* Cacimbo is the name given only in Angola to the "dry season" than runs from May to august. During this period there is often an intense fog, also called Cacimbo, which gives the name to the station.