A short note about animals and humans

Recently, reading the book We Are All Completely beside ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler, I was once more reminded of the question of animal treatment by humans. I always felt somewhat uncomfortable about the notion of animal rights; rights are a human creation and they are applied and thought of in human terms, and I never thought anthropomorphizing other animals is the right way to go. I was never against eating animals; animals do it all the time and we are also animals, even if more successful in the evolutionary scale. 

But I do care about human ethics, which implies I care about cruelty. Inflicting unnecessary suffering is wrong and demeaning to us humans. And we do that far too much. Lots of animal experimentation is utterly unnecessary – like for cosmetics and such. And the food industry is just appalling, it makes the blood boil every time I read about factory farms, slaughterhouses and such, especially because they’re so unneeded – humans could do perfectly with much less meat, and a lot of it just goes to waste. Every time I think about it, I consider the ethical thing to do would be to become vegetarian, but I never did. Partly out of self-indulgence (I like meat), partly because I know my attitude wouldn’t make much of a difference, partly because I don’t think eating animals it’s wrong in itself, it’s the suffering inflicted by the food industry I object. 

I tend nevertheless to eat much less meat than I used to, and to choose whenever possible products I think were more humanely treated. I know that’s probably not too coherent and maybe insufficient. 

And of course I’m opposed to hunting for pleasure, bullfights, cock fights and other such barbarities. Inflicting suffering is wrong, and we know other animals suffer just like us. 

Am I a snob?

 

Am I a snob? The short answer is yes. But since I am a snob, I will take advantage of my snobbish status and digress a little about my snobbishness, as snobs are supposed – or expected - to do.

Virginia Woolf’s definition in her excellent essay Am I a snob? Is:

The essence of snobbery is that you want to impress other people. The snob is a flutter-brained, hare-brained creature so little satisfied with his or her own standing that in order to consolidate it he or she is always flourishing a title or an honour in other people's faces so that they may believe, and help him to believe what he does not really believe - that he or she is somehow a person of importance.

As for myself, my snobbish has been mostly an intellectual snobbishness, not a social one – but I guess it could be considered also social, in the way everything we do is intended to affect our relation to others, so it has a social meaning, even if not related to class. Maybe it started because my parents were so intellectually brilliant so I, as their child, felt I had to prove my own intelligence to keep up to their standards. Also, being a skinny kid awful at sports and feeling awkward in an ugly and unattractive body, my intelligence and wit were my biggest assets. Anyway, my snobbishness helped me to cope.

One of the ways my snobbishness is shown is in my literary snobbishness. I’ve always been a voracious reader, and of course I always loved to appreciate the right books, the classics and the cool contemporary books, and fortunately I have been able to get a great pleasure from reading them. But I also enjoyed reading cheap comics and corny books like my grandmother’s favorite The Redbreast of the Mill. They became a kind of guilty pleasures, like enjoying the musical Cats or a few soaps on television. But then, aren’t intelligent people allowed these harmless dalliances in popular culture? One feels comforted to read the Bruce Chatwin’s account when he visited Nadezhda Mandeltsam and brought some thrillers, and he said something like “I hope they’re not literary works, I want real trash!”

I’m writing about this on account of a recent clash with my literary snobbishness. A few years ago, a dear friend gave me a book by Maria Teresa Horta, a fictionalized biography of the Marquesa de Alorna, an 18^th century Portuguese poetess. Well, Maria Teresa Horta is someone I’ve always laughed off as the kind of feminist that would burn bras in the 60s, and whose writing was, as a friend of mine described it, “very feminine, very open-legged”.  So I shelved the book, and didn’t think about it until recently, bored and having nothing better to read, I took it from the shelf and started reading it.

And then, I’m actually enjoying it! Yes, the writing is often corny, using the same images again and again, too many descriptions of dresses and jewelry. But the subject is quite interesting, and the book seems reasonably well researched. So I’m enjoying reading a Maria Teresa Horta book; how is that for a snob?

The importance of touch

 

Sometimes, a momentary ordinary experience makes one wonder, sets one thinking about things. 

Yesterday, as I was leaving the clinic, I ran across this old lady, who used to be a patient of mine a few years ago and I had not met in a long time. Even with the mandatory face masks, we recognized each other, and I said something like "Mrs C! How are you?" And she grabbed my arm saying something like "Doctor, how are you? I missed you!" 

I felt literally a shock - being touched, after all these months of not touching! I was surprised, it felt so awkward, but it was so spontaneous, and it felt so right. I haven't touched people in the last months on account of the pandemic, especially patients; I have just hugged my mother and my children, and just a few times. So somehow this set me wondering about the importance and meaning of touch.

Since the pandemic began, we avoid touching people. So when we touch, something that was so normal before, it feels awkward. It happened to me before, in March I met an old friend at his hospital where I went to do exam jury duty. We met at the elevator, and we happily shook hands, instinctively, before we could think of the pandemic restrictions. It felt a little awkward, but we didn't even think much about it, not touching hadn't yet become entrenched in our habits.

Sixth months later, I spent a short holiday in Italy, staying at my niece's boyfriend's house. By then, not touching had become the norm, both in Portugal and Italy, so, even if we had a wonderful time talking, sightseeing and socializing, we never touched each other. Then when we left, saying farewell, my niece's boyfriend reached out his hands and we shook them warmly and friendly - such a common gesture before, but now it felt like a special sign of trust and of a truly coined friendship. 

In October, a dear friend from Sweden visited Lisbon, we met foe diner and spent a good time together, but we didn't touch - now Swedes have this lovely habit of hugging (kram is the Swedish word), and I missed it. But covid-19 times oblige. 

So, how sad is it that I can count with the fingers of one hand the times I touched people in the last 9 months? Ours is a social species, that's how we evolved, and touching is an important part of it. So, on top of the economic losses, the disturbed health care, the interruption of socializing between friends and family, the loss of touching is another of the big losses we're enduring. Is it worthy? Should we really, on the excuse of sparing lives, give up on most things that make life worth living? And are we really sparing lives this way? 

Sad times indeed. 

Soalheira

I've been lately immersed in the 19th century church registries of Soalheira, a village in Beira Baixa from where some of my ancestors are from - my greatgrandmother and her mother-in-law. The registries don't differ much from those of Alcains, my other ancestral village - an appalling number of children's deaths, about 80% of the burial registries, and the usual amount of weddings and baptisms, of a few dozen families (there were about 800 to 900 inhabitants at the time).

I've been to Soalheira a few weeks ago; it's another village in the interior, with its 18th century church and lots of houses on sale. The sad reality of Portugal's country, away from the tourist spots. The cemetery is fro the middle 20th century, so couldn't find any of my ancestors there - but the surnames were mostly the same.

How were these people's lives, what were like the owner's of these names from the parish registers? Probably not that different fro our own, even if they didn't leave any records.

The namesake's notebook

While searching for what we should keep from my late grandmother’s house, I came upon a most lucky find – my greatgrandfather’s notebook, which my grandmother had mentioned to me several times but I thought was lost for decades.

And what a wonderful find it was! Even in a bad shape, missing a number of pages, it’s still a remarkable document, spanning 50 years, from 1887 to 1937, of my greatgrandfather’s life, still easably readable in his elegant handwriting and old-fashioned ortography.
I don’t understand why the order of the entries is so haphazard, the first from 1899, the last from 1888, and jumping back and forth all the time – I wonder how did he fill it? Anyway, he took notes about a number of different things – like family events (births, deaths, marriages), community events (floods, fires, new priests), and accounts (money loans, he did quite a number of those). And also lots of recipes for several different ailments.



The money lending records take a lot of space – as my uncle cunningly observed, he was not only a barber / surgeon / doctor but also a kind of banker, sometimes charging quite high interest rates.
Anyway, the notebook confirms what a remarkable character he was, My greatgrandfasther, my namesake, who was such an important influence in my family, and on his village too – he was still remembered in my youth by many folk, by fixing a broken bone, draining an abscess, lending money.
I’m so happy to have found his notebook, I always kind of thought of myself as his heir… I never met him, but still I keep his portrait, and most of all his memory as handed over to me by his daughter, my grandmother, who was herself such a pivotal influence in my life.

Euthanasia

My country is presently discussing the passing of a law allowing euthanasia, and as always with touchy issues, al demagogy and self-righteousness is running amok. The media are as usually in these cases stoking the flames of intolerance and radicalism, which makes me sick. But of course euthanasia is a serious issue, and I feel like I should as well give my opinion.
I’ve been a physician for 30 years, and treating very sick patients, with a great deal of suffering. And what I have watched is that the overwhelming majority don’t want to die. They don’t want to suffer. And often, when they’re in great suffering at the end of their lives, they ask to be left alone, to just die in peace.
And that’s what I think is the main problem – the insistence on futile care when people are dying, driven by our culture of “doing everything possible” and the families and caretakers’ sense of guilt. That’s really the big problem with terminally ill patients.
That said, I think euthanasia should be approved and regulated for the few people that request it. But most of all, I think we should question futile care, and let people die from their illnesses when we cannot make them better.

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.

Back to São Vicente, Cape Vert, after 45 years

For a long time, I had doubts about returning to Cape Vert, where I spent 2 years of my childhood. I had so many good memories about that tie, I feared they could be spoilt by seeing it again, so any years later; wouldn’t it be too different, wouldn’t my childhood memories be somewhat shattered? But then my sister talked me into going, and off we went, a family trip down the memory lane – my mother, sister and niece.

I’ glad we did it. We landed in S. Vicente airport (now named after Cesárea Évora), and the landscape of barren hills immediately felt familiar. As the sight of Mindelo harbor, and the Pracinha, where we stayed in a very nice hotel.
My first impressions of the city were how small it looked! The centre was so much tidier than before, and everything I remembered was in a short walking distance – my old school, the beach where Matiota used to be, the palace where I played as a child.

The centre of Mindelo is very well preserved, very clean - the bright colours of the houses and the old colonial architecture wonderfully kept. Everything we remembered – shops, cafés, the eagle statue, the palace, the Pracinha – was in walking distance, and I mean like a 5 minute walk.

There was a great exhibition of African art at the Palace, and there were a lot of tourist shops, but also genuine nice cafés. And the Leão drugstore was exactly the same as I remembered it. As was the Monte Cara, the same beautiful sight as always. The weather was unusually humid, so there was a mist stopping us from having a clear view of the Santo Antão mountains.

The food was, as expected, a wonderful experience. The first restaurant we went to was the Cocktail, where we had a buffet of hearty and tasty food, and later we tried several different restaurants, the Nautilus being the best, in my opinion. Tuna cooked in different ways, cachupa, cheese goat from Sto. Antão, cheese pudding – all delicious, as the white wine from Fogo.