I recently wrote a small text about my grandmother, so it’s just fitting that I do the same about my grandfather. My grandparents were hugely important for me in my childhood – we used to spend the long summer holidays with them, and Christmas was a time I will always associate with the family reunions at their old and cold house. They both certainly helped to shape the person I am today, and if I always felt more connected to my grandmother, I also loved my grandfather and remember him fondly.
As my grandmother, my grandfather also had a long life, dying at 88. He has a slightly more eventful life, but still a quite prosaic one. Born in a Northern village from an illicit relationship between a married man and the daughter of a registrar, his illegitimacy marked indelibly his whole life. His father was a kind of country esquire, from an old family part of a sort of landed gentry, he had studied in Coimbra university in Pharmaceutics, had a proper wife and family but also several mistresses, among them my greatgrandmother, with whom he had three children that I know of. I guess that was pretty common at the time, but my grandfather always resented his illegitimacy as a deep shame and avoided talking about his parents; I often tried to make him tell me about them, but never got more than small bits and pieces. In my late teens, sometimes he would open up a bit, usually starting with the sentence “now you’re old enough to know this”, and tell me a few details, like “my mother didn’t go pure to the altar” (apparently she married, but he said he hadn’t kept in touch with his stepfather because he was abusive to his mother), or “once they asked my father how many women he had known (in the biblical sense), and he said seventeen; how sad is that?” (I was actually a little disappointed – I mean seventeen didn’t really look like such a big number, especially for someone who lived to be close to a hundred years old, but of course I didn’t tell him that).
Anyway, he suffered a lot from the stigma of illegitimacy, and I guess that was the main reason why he always loved so much the dramatic novels of Camilo Castelo-Branco, I guess he identified with those stories of troubled love affairs and suffering heroes and heroines, often set in his home province. He left home barely out of childhood, to work as a pharmacist’s assistant in several country small towns, then ended up in Lisbon, where he spent 14 years. I think those were the happiest times of his life, he love to talk about them, how he had made some lifelong friends, how he enjoyed the city life, especially going to the theatre to watch the burlesques (revistas, in Portuguese), whose songs he still knew by heart in his old age. He lived the kind of small clerk life we so often saw depicted in Portuguese movies of the 1930s – sleeping in a pension, working, eating in another pension and enjoying the simple pleasures of popular theatre.
But deep down he always remained a country man. So when he had spared some money, he went to a small village in the interior to establish himself with a pharmacy of his own. What happened then differs according to different sources. What is certain is that he met and befriended the village’s old barber surgeon, widowed, alcoholic and depressed, whose 16 year-old daughter he married – according to her, he got the dowry money to purchase the pharmacy, he always maintained he used his own savings.
Anyway, that was the start of a very long and very unhappy marriage – a veritable 60 year-old war, whose last 25 years I witnessed. A deeply conservative man, he considered the wife’s role to be subjected and obedient to her husband, he never shared his frequently disastrous decisions regarding money with her and expected as a perfectly natural thing that she would smoothly run the household on an increasingly tight budget, made progressively scarcer by the hard times in the 1930s and 40s and his foolish spending in unsuccessful farming (something he never really mastered but was his true passion) while neglecting the pharmacy business (something he was actually very good at but never really liked). His severity and thrift at home contrasted with his outwardly attitude – a generous and congenial man, he soon gained the affection of his new fellow countrymen. His door and his table were always opened to anyone who needed it, he took credit without asking questions, he was handy giving shots and always available 24/7. He loved to make jokes and innocent pranks in Carnival, he was honest and trustworthy.
Yet, regarding business and ideas, he was always naif and shortsighted and managed to get the family in financial dire straits – and even if he later claimed credit for his children successful lives, he would actually rather that they married local farmers and if they got college education it was thanks to his wife’s efforts and financial sacrifices. He was well meaning, but misguided in his priorities.
He was always a hard working and disciplined man. He would get up before 5, take a hearty cooked breakfast and walked 2 km to his small farm plot, where he tilled the land until about 8:30, so he could open the pharmacy at 9. Lunch at 12, siesta before reopening the pharmacy at 14, dinner at 19, bed by 21m where he would read and later watch television He always slept with the window wide open, whether in scorching summer nights or in the freezing winter (something I got from him).
Not devout until his old age, when the fear of death made him turn to religion, he used to take a nonchalant attitude to religion – he would attend Mass every Sunday, claiming “it isn’t that hard; if it isn’t true one won’t lose that much time, if it is, we get our little place in Heaven”, and he loved to tell bawdy jokes of priests and nuns, something my grandmother of course disapproved of – “such a lack of respect, it’s most unseemly!”.
We, his grandchildren, loved this good-humoured and generous grandfather. He would take us with him to his plot of land and taught us to pick fruit, water and dig up potatoes, and then we would stay in the fields playing cowboys and Indians. He would tell funny stories at lunch and drive our grandmother mad, and he would give us chocolates and ice-creams, then he let us help him in the pharmacy – I remember the fun it was to prepare bicarbonate packets and such. He was a great story-teller, and he clearly doted on us; it was hard to believe he had been a stern father, even if we witnessed his meanness to our grandmother.
In his old age, he finally became financially comfortable, when he rented the pharmacy to a young man who developed the business. He could then spend most of his time doing his beloved farming, visiting his old friends and his family. Then once he fell while watering his vegetables, and hurt his knee badly; it was the start of his physical decline – he then suffered a myocardial infarct, and heart failure soon severely limited his activities. It was extremely sad to watch the progression of his illness and ageing, and how he turned in his final years to religion, he was terribly afraid of dying. He still would sit in the sidewalk outside the pharmacy and chat with the passersby, until he couldn’t climb the stairs to his room, in his last months he was mostly bedridden, and eventually died from heart failure.
I was sad at his funeral, but in a way relieved that he wasn’t suffering anymore, he was such a life loving man, his last times were really not fitting to his personality. And, as I attended the funeral mass and then watched him being buried in my greatgrandfather’s tomb, I couldn’t help but wonder how one’s family affections are peculiar, because they feel so inevitable. I didn’t agree with my grandfather’s conservative values, I resented the way he had always treated my grandmother, I disapproved of his narrow-mindedness regarding his children’s education. And yet I cherished the memory of my affectionate grandfather, I still do, with all his shortcomings he was an endearing part of my childhood and upbringing. I don’t resemble him in the least, but somehow I inherited some of his traits – his honest work ethics, the habit of sleeping with open windows all year round, keeping my personal things in a chest of drawers in my bedroom. It’s funny how these small things endure. I will always remember him fondly, how I loved to listen to him reminisce about his life in Lisbon in the 1920s, and the pleasure of getting up at 5 am in the summer to go with him to his land plot to help him with the farming. He’s a part of me, and a part of him will always be alive as long as I am – isn’t that the afterlife one can aspire to?
