A good place to start.

Accounting for much of the southern half of Portugal is Alentejo, a province once vastly occupied by the Moors in the medieval period. Its rolling, grassy hills undulate with orchards and wheat fields and sometimes towns. There are no forests. No matter how deserted the road may seem, look in any direction toward the horizon and you are guaranteed to see evidence of civilization from any vantage. Houses on hilltops dot the landscape and if you’re lucky, a town snuggled into a miniature valley springs into view. Aljustrel is one such town, a collection of white plaster houses with red clay tile hats, all tightly packed together as if bounded by an invisible moat or wall. A few manmade ponds surround it and a hillside blasted wide-open, residual scar tissue from a now defunct mine.

            This appearance from a distance is consistent with the nature of the community I witnessed in 2001: unselfish, unified, wounded, proud, the town of my mother and grandparents’ birth. Pedestrians make way for motorists that honk liberally at every signal-less intersection. A car horn carries a friendlier significance in Portugal – “you can’t see me around the corner but I’m here, hello!” Narrow concrete streets lead the wanderer in diffuse directions, sloping ever steeply on the hillside of which the Ermida de Santa Maria do Castelo commands the summit, a 15^th century chapel, the town’s sacred treasure. The province, Portugal’s largest in area, has ridden the country’s modernization and surging economy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. But to get to here, it had to undergo unforgettable struggle at the hands of fascist asymmetry in the capital.

            My role here is not to align facts on a chronological continuum, nor is it to even provide verified accuracy. For that, I’m certain you can consult one of many accounts of Portugal’s political and social history. I bring to you the country of my grandparents as they remember and understand it; a sense of place at the point at which lived experience is intrinsically tied to the drawstring of memory.

           

At the time that my grandmother, Lucia—or who my brothers and I call endearingly Avó—was born in 1937, Alentejo was under feudal ownership and largely divided between only three or four people. Her father, whom we called Avô Ferreira, was a field worker (our paths only crossed once when I was a toddler). He worked mainly with the means of the day, machines, tractors, weeding and fertilizing the fields. Previously, he had been a chauffeur’s assistant, charged with sitting for long distances, keeping freight drivers awake and helping load and unload. But as far as Lucia can recall, he had always worked for the agricultural management company owned by her godmother’s parents. “That’s why we didn’t suffer too much,” she clarifies, “because we were close to that family and they helped us a lot.”

            Lucia’s mother, Avó Izaura, had six children, five daughters and one son, all quite far apart in age. Roughly 18 years separate the oldest and youngest, Lucia being the second born. Izaura had two adult daughters by the time she was nursing her youngest children, such that my mother’s aunt Mena is a mere 18 months older than she is.

“In that time we didn’t have television,” my grandfather interjects, at first, seeming to depart from the topic.

“What he means is, before, people had too many kids because they didn’t have TV,” corrects Lucia, at which we share a laugh. 

            Nobody owned their own land, but ordinary citizens like my grandmother’s family worked for the monopolists. There was plenty of manual labour for the girls in the fields, picking olives and nuts and cutting wheat. The northern tip of the province was somehow different. Many families had their proper division of land—I’m shown a recent touristic map as reference—but the rest consisted of what was probably no more than four enormous properties. Things have obviously changed since immigration to the first world began. Many people accumulated wealth and have returned to purchase a part of their homeland.

            The house in which Lucia spent her childhood was passed down from her paternal grandmother, who had two houses, one for her son and one for her daughter, her only two children. Lucia’s grandfather had died a young man and her grandmother had worked had to raise those children. She had had a piece of land where she grew grapes and olives and among other things, but it was later sold and the two houses had remained in her possession.

            Lucia speaks of her grandmother as a necessarily resilient woman whose job was to carry the mail. Aljustrel was then capital of the region, and all the smaller satellite towns belonged to Aljustrel’s council. She delivered mail from the center to another village, Montes Veilhos, each day, travelling by donkey. Lucia was delighted whenever her grandmother took ill or wasn’t feeling up to the task, for that meant she and her two cousins about ten or twelve years of age would take up the commute, to them an adventurous departure from the mundane. She recalls falling off the donkey upon his abrupt refusal to cross a stream. Often there were stone bridges at such crossings but when it had rained too much the water would rise, rendering the bridge inaccessible, forcing them to wade through the water. Once when the girls approached the donkey, he jumped and pushed the three of them into the river, Lucia’s head striking a rock and leaving a bruise to endure weeks.

            As she was one of the older children, it naturally fell on my grandmother’s list of responsibilities to care for her younger siblings. When her younger sister Elisabete was six-months-old, my great-grandmother became sick with liver stones and had to go under the knife in Lisbon. “We had a very difficult time, that time,” Lucia tells me, describing that at fifteen and seventeen, she and her sister stayed and watch the younger ones.  Twice a day they had to bring the baby across town to be breastfed by a cousin who was coincidentally a new mom. Nobody at the time brought their children with them to the hospital, and Lisbon, from Aljustrel, was a nine or ten hour bus ride, predating the country’s system of highways. Today, Lisbon is less than two hours from Aljustrel by car.

            Lucia remembers another hardship brought about by a progression of misfortunate events. When she was pregnant five months with her first child, her mother-in-law died at age 45. Lucia remembers her as a good person and a generous helper, who housed her upon her marriage into the family at age eighteen. My grandfather Miguel, or simply Avô as we call him, was serving his mandatory years in the military far from home. His brothers, Dionisio and Ze, were little kids, and his only sister Nellita only five years of age when their mother passed away.

“Four months later, Laura was born. That’s why we named her Laura; because she looked exactly like her Avó, exactly, exactly like her. Even now when I look at her, she reminds me of my mother-in-law.” My grandmother goes on to explain that Miguel has always taken after his mother in speech and mannerism, unlike his more soft-spoken brothers. “Your Avó Laura, she never shut up for anybody. When she had something to say, she said it, but she was a very right person. When she reasoned, nobody stopped her.”

“That sounds like my mother, all right,” I cut in.

My great grandmother Laura was benevolent to a fault. She would sacrifice what little she had for others, often neglecting her own personal security or wellbeing. During the Spanish Civil War, many Spaniards sought refuge in Portugal. She didn’t know these families, but she never let anyone stay on the streets, even if it meant they had to accept sleeping on the floor when all the beds were taken. One family, Lucia recalls, was a particular nuisance. It was expected that they stay in the house until it was safe to travel again, but eventually, the father found a job and decided to make a temporary living in Aljustrel, for a while refusing to move out and rent a home for his family. They had become too comfortable and would continuously argue when confronted by their hosts. The family finally vacated. My grandfather recently ran into one of the daughters in the Algarve, not surprised that they had remained in Portugal permanently ever since.

 In another gallop of reflexive generosity, my great grandmother took in her own uncle and his four boys, and provided shelter for many years. He made agricultural tools by trade and would sell them in the surrounding towns with a travelling fair. No one else wanted him around because he was a heavy drinker and difficult to handle. There was no space in the house, but my great grandfather made him a little house in the backyard. (On my last visit in 2001, I noted that the little house had been converted into a miniature barn occupied mostly by chickens.) He lived there, worked there and would often get drunk. Late one night, when it rained so heavily that the steep incline of the street turned into a rushing stream, he could be heard lying in the water yelling. My grandmother and great-grandmother, in her sick and depleted state, went trudging down the street in as many layers as they could throw on (my great grandfather not on hand because he worked the overnight shift in the mine), to carry the man back through the house, into the backyard, up a long flight of stairs and into his own house. Such are the tribulations of the kind hearts of this world. My mother was born four months to the day after she died.

            The women of the family were also able to contribute some paid work. “We called it ‘monda’, ‘mondar’…we had to clean the weeds from the wheat, and pick chickpeas.” This was done at night, for the day’s aridity in the summertime would cause the chickpeas to fall too easily. Chickpeas inside their casing are like beans. They need an adequate level of humidity to hold them together in order to be properly picked. Women living in rural settings were never short of an occupation. When there was no fieldwork, Lucia would learn how to sew. She explains that in Portugal of the 1950s, clothes were either made or bought from individual tailors or seamstresses. Stores sold only material, thread, and sometimes socks for convenience, but fascinatingly, these suppliers’ other role in society was to educate young girls on the basics of couture. So the women in the family made all the clothing they wore, even underwear and socks. It was different in Lisbon, as “they already started to have what we called ‘pronto a vestir’, but there was not too much of that.”

            It was more expensive, but the culture of the decade demanded perfect fit. “We had to know how to make something, take measurements and make things for our body. At that time, we recycled so much. I heard David Suzuki talking about that. It’s exactly the same thing he used to do with his grandmother and all the family. Now jeans are chic, but at that time, jeans were just for work. But when they had a hole, we kept an old pair of jeans to cut pieces off and patch it up.” That image not far removed from the current hipster drapery adorning our city centers and suburbs, it is just another spoke on the ever-rotating wheel.