São Vicente - looking for remains of the past

This being a kind of down-the-memory-lane trip, I was of course anxious to see the places I remembered from my childhood – and I was somewhat fearful that, since I was not yet 9 when I left, I wouldn’t recognize any of them. I was actually surprised how accurate my memories were. My old school was no more, a new building is in its place. But the Pracinha with its bandstand, the palace with its spiral staircase and the terrace, the eagle by the harbor, the Leão’s drugstore, were exactly as I remembered them (curiously, I had no memory whatsoever of the Belém tower replica).

I felt especially thrilled when I found the places where we used to live. The old army officers’ mess is now a university, our old apartments became classrooms, and the dining room – where I spent so many hours looking at a reproduction of Brueghel’s Peasant Wedding – and the living room now auditoriums. But the building is the same, even if now surrounded by villas of doubtful taste, where once were bare hills where we used to play. And the old three cannons were still there, one of them turned sideways to make room for a sculpture representing Baltasar Lopes’ books.
And our old house was still standing! Recently renovated, it was much uglier than it used to be, but they kept the inside plan, the cleaning woman was there and let us in, and how strange it was to see again the old verandah/living room, our bedrooms, the back yard and the front garden, I could picture our dear German Shepard there, the bed where I used to read, the kitchen where once lobsters jumped out of boiling water, the place where once a cockroach crawled inside my sandal scaring the living daylights out of me…

My mother and sister were lavishly received at the high school where they had been teacher and student. The teachers were extremely nice and deferential towards my mother, and the students were lively and funny. The name changed, but the building is the same.

We rented a car to go to Baía das Gatas, the beach where we used to go on weekends. The road is new and fairly good; leaving Mindelo was not that easy, due to a lack of road signs, and we were somewhat shocked by the poverty of the city outskirts, contrasting with the relative prosperity of the centre. We stopped at Salamansa – the beach still wild and beautiful, the village still very poor, although we didn’t see goats with a tin can on their necks as there used to be.

Baía das Gatas was a huge disappointment. What used to be a vibrant beach is now a deserted and forlorn place, not only it seems much smaller but also mostly abandoned and neglected – I guess that’s because there is now the beautiful Lajinha beach in Mindelo, so people don’t have to go to Baía das Gatas as they used to when it was the nearest white sand and protected beach.

On the other hand, the drive to the São Pedro fishing village was lovely. The place is beautiful, the lighthouse we had seen from the plane upon landing is on a fantastic setting. Fishermen had just come from the sea, big tunas were unloaded, old women were repairing fishing nets, stray dogs were roaming the beach, teenagers were talking and cooling in the shade, cats dozed, a couple of children were helping their elders. And the sun was setting and the whole place was just beautiful.