Eulogy of a great woman - a portrait

It was a lovely sunny March day, but we were all feeling very sad and gloomy, because it was my grandmother’s funeral. Walking back from the graveyard, a cousin told me: “How sad is it? To think she lived over 90 years and yet is buried just a couple of hundred yards from where she was born…” I nodded in a casual agreement – she had indeed been born in a house near the church old Romanesque chapel, lived most of her life a couple of streets from there and died in the nursing home across the street, aged 91. And she spent all of her long, and mostly not happy life, there, apart from visits to her children’s homes and a few travels in the country; I’m not sure if she even went to Spain, and if she did it was no farther from Badajoz.

So yes, how sad was it? By our 21st Western middle-class standards, pretty much. But then, that was the way most people used to live their lives in Portugal (or anywhere, actually). I often think about this short and modest woman’s long and apparently uneventful life, because I loved her so much, and I cannot consider it meaningless at all; on the contrary, she shaped decisively her children’s lives (and indirectly our own lives, her grandchildren’s), and she was in so many ways a remarkable personality – in another time and place, she could have had a brilliant career in some field, she certainly had more intelligence, strength, will power and sense than most successful people I know. And she used those skills the way she was able to, to make her children successful, and in more than a way she succeeded.

Her long life can be resumed in a few sentences. Born into a rural middle-class family in a small village, she lost her mother at 5 years old to the great flu pandemic in 1918, and her two younger brothers to the rampant child mortality of the times. Left alone with an old and bereaved father that drowned his sorrows for his lost family in alcohol, she was barely schooled and had to run the household since childhood. Forced into a loveless and unhappy marriage at 16, losing her first child and bearing three more, she raised them through dire straits, as her father succumbed to alcoholic senility and her husband lost all their money through foolish ventures. Still she managed to get her children educated into professional careers, then too care of her grandchildren for long holidays periods, then she nursed her ailing husband, and lived to an advanced age with all her wits, dying peacefully one March day – she just hung her head and stopped breathing.
But what a character she was! Such a strong personality, such an incredibly remarkable woman. Ever since I was a small child, her personality and life fascinated me, and I loved to listen to her, and grow to know about her life and times. And there was so much more to it than those few sentences. I always tried to make her talk about it, which was not hard, because she loved to talk, and so I came to learn a lot about her.
Her childhood – she didn’t remember her mother (“I only remember her lying in her coffin”), and she idolized her father – a barber-surgeon, still famous decades after his death for his good deeds and great competence as a healer, he was very learned and self-taught in medical matters (I still found several of his books in the attic), widely respected and loved. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic, which was attributed to his grief for not having been able to save his young wife and two sons from death. So he married his daughter at 16 to an ambitious young man who he thought would take good care of her – with disastrous results. When I naively remarked “You married so young!”, she answered fiercely “I didn’t marry, I was married off!” (“Não casei, casaram-me!”). But in all her bitterness about her marriage, she never blamed her father, at least as far as I know.

And that marriage was a war, a 60 year war. My grandfather was not a bad man, but he was foolish and short-sighted. A pharmacist by trade, he longed to be a farmer, so he spent all the family money on his failed farming endeavours, falling deeply I debt and near poverty. It was my grandmother who struggled to get their children educated – and she succeeded, they became a schoolteacher, a pharmacist and a Math teacher (my mother).

If I had to choose a word to describe her attitude regarding life, it would be composure. She kept always a dignified pose, she was always extremely strict and disciplined. Raised in a small conservative village, educated by a conservative father and a few aunts, indoctrined by the traditional values of the Catholic Church, she soon acquired a set of strict rules to which she rigorously adhered all her life. Her favourite expressions were “unseemly” (“parece mal”) and “not to be talked about” (“não darem fé”). Those expressions were applied to practically everything, and we still repeat them often today, in a jokingly tender evocation that keeps her alive – I guess that’s the way people achieve immortality, being remembered.

She never stroke me as a particularly religious person, but of course she followed all the main church dictates, because that had been the way she was taught. She would go to Mass every Sunday – but to the first one, at 7 am, so people wouldn’t “talk about” her going to church, and never took communion without confession – but she would go to the nearby town to confess, because the local vicar didn’t have to know her sins (I wonder what she confessed with such a virtuous life!) – and she said her prayers every night and taught us all the important Catholic prayers. Raised before Vatican II, she was always extremely critical of the changes introduced – “Mass was so much more beautiful in Latin!”, “Why would they change the words to Our Father?”, or “It’s very unseemly so see an unveiled woman in Mass, it shouldn’t be allowed” – because that was the way she had learned it. When her children grew up and tried to convince her to end her unhappy marriage, she never even considered: it would be most unseemly to leave her lawfully wedded husband, she would keep to her duties till the end – and she did, nursing him when he became bedridden, probably with a never acknowledged malign satisfaction to have him finally at her mercy.

We loved to make fun of all the things she deemed unseemly – though of course not to her, we respected and feared her too much. She would wake up my sisters at 5 am to wash the windows, because it would be unseemly to be seen washing the windows. She loved to watch processions, funeral and wedding corteges go by on the main street outside, but it had to be done from the windows and not from the small wrought-iron balcony, because it would be unseemly to expose her legs. Also, skirts should not be too long or too short – “the knees are there for some reason”. And my poor sisters, her only female grandchildren, were forced to learn needle work, because it was most seemly that a girl did so (to have a “little work” as she called it) – she was an indefatigable lace maker, and she was able to get some pocket money from quilts and table cloths she made. She was always most composed, a very straight little woman, who had actually been beautiful in her youth, although I think she never realized it; I remember once a friend of ours remarking: “your grandmother looks like she’s always running for president!”.

Yet this stern and serious woman also loved to laugh at small and mostly naïve jokes, and to talk and tell stories – I especially loved listening to her telling about the old times, her family and childhood. She would never laugh at my grandfather’s jokes though, usually accusing of disrespect, but even if she badmouthed him constantly, she would never allow any of us to show him the tiniest lack of respect – it would be most unseemly, him being our grandfather. Her apparent sternness and severity hardly concealed an extremely generous nature – used to running a big household with little means, her table was always open to the needed and she used to help lots of people. And there was this very romantic side of her that she didn’t like to show, but revealed to us, especially by her story-telling. She loved to read romantic novels, she had half a dozen of them from her youth that she read and reread all through her life – books like The Mill’s Warbler and The Two Mothers by Emile Richebourg, Honour’s Secrets, Slaves of Love, and a couple by Júlio Diniz. And then she would tell us the stories, speaking the dialogues, acting the scenes (and frequently adding touches of her own invention), with such a gusto and conviction that we were fascinated, even if sometimes bored because she would go on and on and we had heard it a thousand times. But how could one but marvel to watching this wonderful woman giving for once way to pleasure? She looked like a little girl, dreaming of countesses reduced to poverty and never ending troubles with a happy end. I never tired of listening to her.

So she drew from those books an endless repertoire of dramatic tirades that we still often repeat today, it’s a loveable and funny way to remember her. Very composed but always modest – she had very strict ideas about how one should dress and behave, and I think she never once wore any make-up, not even a touch of lipstick, she would still had a kind of girlish pleasure in showing us the numerous items of clothing or jewelry her children and relatives offered her – I’ll never forget a time when she unfolded for us a very expensive scarf, and then said in a slightly mischievous tone: “This was given to me by So-and-so. I never wore it”, the accent revealing a not too subtle innuendo of how she disapproved of So-and-so and her taste and ignorance of how to choose a scarf appropriated for her to wear. She was never attached to her old belongings, which she didn’t value because they were so familiar – she didn’t hesitate in having old furniture cut for firewood or in using antique crockery to feed her chickens – but as soon as she noticed someone coveting an old tureen or vase she would cling to them as if she could never let them go – it was an innocent way to feel envied and valued for something.

We were all extremely worried about her when my grandfather died, fearing that the end of that 60 odd years marital war would leave her depressed and purposeless. Well, fortunately, we were very wrong. She nursed him thoroughly through his final illness, then this apparently frail 78 year-old little woman endured a whole night of vigil at the wake in the cold Romanesque chapel across the street from the house where she had been born, as a dutiful wife should, according to her code. But then she actually blossomed. She decided to finally have the much needed renovation work in her house, something she had always stubbornly refused to do before, she moved for some months to a rented apartment while the work was being done, then enjoyed her renovated house for more than ten years, bickering with servants and visiting her children always in a cheerful mood. We had a big party and family reunion for her 90th birthday, by then she was already very frail and the loss of sight due to diabetes had forced her to move to the nursing home across the street from her house – which surprisingly she didn’t mind, she moved her bedroom there and had a very good time with her elderly inmates. I felt so proud and happy to lead her by my arm to the restaurant in that hot August day, surrounded by all her children, grandchildren and greatgrandchildren.

I saw her for the last time a few months before she died, when I visited her with my children. She was delighted to see us, she kept all her wits, she told us lots of gossip from the nursing home and her latest feud with a cousin from a nearby village, I can’t remember the reason, but still can hear her indomitable and characteristic mischievous tone: “I never spoke to him again.”

And then there we were, gathered to accompany her body to the cemetery, to join her father and husband in the plot they had bought in the 1940s. And as I absentmindedly nodded to my cousin’s remark, I couldn’t help but wonder – what is a life really worth, what makes it meaningful? My grandmother’s life may have been mostly unhappy and by current standards uneventful, but that didn’t decrease its importance to me in the least. She definitely contributed to shape my life, and all the lives of her offspring. I feel proud to be her grandson, and cherish all I learned from her; even if I disagree with most of her values and convictions, I can’t help to respect her and admire her for who she was and what she did. And to love her.

(Even if she didn’t like to be photographed, there are lots of pictures of her. But I can’t bring myself to publish them, I’m sure she would think that most unseemly.)