Small town life

*The following is part of an ongoing post about how we became Montrealers, and is on my maternal grandparents in Portugal. See previous entries beginning in December 2012.
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School for children was not mandatory and their attendance was but loosely enforced. Children in the region must now go to school for at least nine years before they can choose to work. When my grandparents were young, preschools were privately established in homes and, for those who could afford it, they taught children the alphabet and kept them relatively occupied while parents worked. Other families had the option of leaving their children to wander the streets or depending on a neighbour look after them. School was free for all children as of seven years old, and at that age, everyone went.

            The schoolhouse was not the most popular place among the children of Aljustrel, as the primary use of the yardstick was to chastise, the second, to intimidate, and third, to provide measurement values of lengths and widths. With red hands, the children were only obliged to commit to school for four years. After that, to continue would bear each family an invoice. This option was not popular, especially in the interior provinces, and few went on to study their way into college. Lucia did the four years, outlasting her older sister who completed two years before being taken to work by their mother.

            The mines in the region were for copper and manganese, the green stone. This was the general line of work of the town’s men. It was the predominant industry, as there was little else at the time apart from the fields. But working above ground was generally a woman’s job and below it, a man’s.

            “Is that how the town began?” I ask.

            After a long pause for thought, my grandmother responds. “ I think it was the mine. There were 3 mines, one in the other town Santo Domingues. People from Belgium owned the mine. They were not Portuguese. This was for many years. Then they were closed, but it had to be maintained all that time. They just reopened one last year. They had slowed down and closed for more than 10 years and now they’ve opened again. But now it’s a Canadian company.”

            She looks to my grandfather for confirmation on this and repeats the question in Portuguese. She has an Alentejano accent but it is less apparent after 40 years spent amongst Canadians, away from the natural progression of vernacular, pronunciation and vocabulary localized ways of speaking can undergo in one-and-a-half generations. I don’t have the privilege of being able to speak Portuguese but having heard it my entire life and understanding it almost as well as I do French, I was able to pick up on the various dialects and accents when touring the country twelve years ago.

            He confirms with a nod, and goes on to explain that the reason the Romans and Arabs were originally attracted to the place was for its subterranean richness. There were lots of useful things beneath those grassy hills. The Romans they speak of, it suffices to qualify, are not empire Romans but rather Romanians, and the Moros (Moors) are from the times of the Kings, most notably King Alfonso in the 12^th Century, who fought to reclaim the southern provinces of Portugal from its Muslim occupants and to establish the region as a kingdom in its own right and not merely a fiefdom of Leon.

            “Your mom has a book, the story of Portugal, that explains many things.”

At this point, I embark on a lighter topic.

            “How well did you know Avô before your relationship started?”

            Lucia smiles. “We weren’t friends as kids, but we lived not too far from each other.”

            Three streets separated them, the path a zigzag. She nonetheless knew who he was. One of her childhood friends was his next-door neighbour. Their backyards were separated by low, stone half-walls and often they would play as a larger group of children. “Many times we’d play together, boys with girls, but I never thought about him. When I was 14 he started to pass through my street and he started to walk with me.”

            Miguel, accompanied by two other boys, would sing for Lucia and her friends from the street. In the summers of their teenage years, they held dances and large gatherings in the central market on Saturdays. The townspeople would clean everything and prepare for these events that would last into the evening and attract seasoned bands from other towns. When the rollerskating rink was built, it soon took over as the new location.

            “Back then,” my grandfather points out, “lots of people lived in Aljustrel. Now it’s a bigger town, but fewer people live there. The mine had 1,500 people working there. Saturday night and Sunday, everyone was in the street, walking in the middle of the street.” On their occasional summer visits to their hometown, my grandparents encounter a subdued calm on weekends in stark contrast to the period in which they grew up. Not surprisingly, he also attributes this change to the advent of television, which I assume reached that population some time later than North America, with similar consequences.