Spies of No Country, by Matti Friedman

I highly recommend this excellent book to anyone interested in the history of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not only is this book a real page-turner, it's also extremely informative about the origins of Israel and the way it relates to its Arab neighbours. Matti Friedman is not only a great writer, but also a sensible and accurate thinker, I've reading his columns and books and wish there were more people with his acumen, intelligence and sensibility.

Crossing, by Pajtim Statovci

My Cat Yugoslavia was a remarkable debut novel, a work of genius. And Pajtim Statovci doesn't let you down with his second novel, Crossing. It's a mesmerizing read, so good you just don't want it to end. Always moving but never corny, often funny is an ironic way, Crossing puts the questions of identity and the search for one's true self in a non-judgemental way, refusing easy labels or victimizing. Pajtim Statovci comes across as one of the great contemporary writers, I cannot but highly recommend reading his books.

The Book of the New Sun - Shadow & Claw, by Gene Wolfe

I don't know how I hadn't heard about this book before, there was a time when I read a lot of science fiction. This is a very good book of sci-fi / fantasy - actually two books, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, of a series of four, and I hope to read the other two soon. I'm always fascinated when an author can convey a whole believable alternative world, and this one is on a par with Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea and much better than JRR Martin's Game of Thrones. It's an engaging and page turning read, and still intelligent and interesting, for its clever plot and its original depiction of a world thousands of years from now, when the Sun is cooling.

Looking forward to read the next two books!

Yourcenar Biographie - "Qu'il eût été fade d'être heureux", by Michèle Goslar

Marguerite Yourcenar has always been one of my favourite writers, ever since I read the fabulous Mémoires d'Hadrien at 18 (I still consider it one of the most perfect books ever written). I read most of her books - novels, essays, memoirs, correspondence - and my admiration never decreased, just the opposite. Books like L'Oeuvre au Noir, Alexis, Le Temps ce Grand Sculpteur or Sous Bénéfice d'Inventaire have marked me deeply, and I've read them and reread them several times, always with the same pleasure and sense of discovery and wonder. Not only because the writing is exquisite, whether in French or in translation, but because the characters, the ideas, the feelings and reflections speak to me deeply.

Being such an admirer of her work, it was only natural that I wanted to know about her life. There is a lot of information about it in her writings - especially the essays, memoirs and letters - and I read her biography by Josyanne Savigneau years ago. Now I read this other biography, by Michèle Goslar, which comes near to a hagiography. And the impressions I get from all this reading cause me some ambivalent feelings - as much as I admire and love her work, I don't think I would have liked Marguerite Yourcenar as a person had I ever met her. I guess we are all prone to one particular mortal sin, and in her case what comes across is Pride - it looks like she was endowed with such arrogance that would make her unbearable. I had that impression from some of her essays and memoirs and especially from her letters, and it has been only strengthened by her biographies. So much self-righteousness, so much intellectual arrogance, such pride in her origins and upbringing, such a punctilious attitude in her dealings with her publishers, fans and even with her friends. An example, among many others, is her pride in her father, that she obviously idolised, but if one looks at his life and character as depicted in Archives du Nord and the biographies objectively, was no more than a cultivated fainéant that transmitted his own pride and conceit to his daughter. And this sense of arrogance is just reinforced by her pose as a modest and humble human being, which she certainly was not.

Yet her life was certainly interesting, and I cannot help but sympathise somewhat with her intellectual arrogance, suffering from the same ailment myself - thence the ambivalence. She was a keen observer of human nature, an admirer of the natural world and understood uncommonly well the great picture in history - and those are all admirable features. And I also sympathise with her hopeless passions for André Fraigneau and Jerry Wilson, not so much withe the way she treated her devoted companion of 40 years, Grace Frick. So what bothers me is not her life or personality, but her pretence of modesty, that verges on hypocrisy, which is a characteristic I loathe.

As for the biography - Michèle Goslar takes a too much hagiographic approach for my taste. She even tries to write in the Yourcenar style, which of course she isn't able to equal, and giving much information about a lot of her life events, she doesn't really capture or is able to depict some of the phases I would be most interested in, like her life in the 1930s and her relations to the French and Greek bohemia at the time - many hints, but not much enlightenment. And she seems to assume the same pose of her subject that displeases me - starting with the title of the book, the quote from Feux "qu'il eût été fade d'être heureux". As if she didn't care to be happy! When she obviously did, and the failure to be so haunted all her life, as her strong attachment to keep on living and her late passion for Jerry show. And that's one of the most obvious clues to the distance between her pose and her true self - the inability to resign herself to death, her strong and desperate will to live until the end.

So, I'm left with loving Yourcenar's work, and ambivalently relating to her personality, with her flaws that somehow make her more human and relatable. Maybe she was not a very nice person, but her books are wonderful and will endure and keep on giving us a sense of wonder.

Infidèles, by Abdellah Taïa

This is my favurite Taïa book so far, and I only don't accord him 5 stars because of the ending. The writing is beautiful and moving, as are the characters of Jallal, Slima and Saiâda. The feelings of the outcasts are wonderfully depicted. But then, why the religious dénouement? I really couldn't feel it as an adequate development. Anyway, it's a very beautiful book.

The Evenings, by Gerard Reve

I had never heard of Gerard Reve, I picked this book at the Paagman bookshop in The Hague from the shelf of Dutch authors, because it looked interesting. And it really is, actually it's a masterpiece. A kind of existential novel, that kept reminding me of The Catcher in the Rye and La Nausée - the protagonist is more like Holden Caulfield than Roquentin, but the dread existential feelings evoked in me much the same feelings of when I read La Nausée, ages ago.

It is set in 1946 in Amsterdam, shortly after WWII, the war is hardly mentioned, but yet its shadow looms large over all the narrative, whether in the austerity of the living conditions of the characters or in the constant nightmares of the protagonist. The said protagonist is a 23 year-old man, likeable and relatable to all of us that have faced the meaninglessness of life when we lack a purpose. Frits is a keen if apparently detached observer, he tells somewhat tasteless jokes, plays mindgames with his friends, feels mad at his father's eating manners and his mother's clumsiness and vulgarity, and yet one feels he's not that aloof - in several scenes one sees that he actually loves his clueless parents and his somewhat condescending friends.

But basically he doesn't know what to do with his life, so the filling of time becomes a terrible chore, and that's mostly apparent in the evenings of the title, when he has to endure the time passing. He watches his parents, he visits his friends, he muses over his body. It feels painful, even if the writing is always slightly ironic and amusing, as when one eschews suffering by not taking oneself too seriously. The main question is - how to live life without a purpose? There is no inherent or objective meaning in life, we must find and build one to ourselves, and sometimes we just don't, and how much I relate to that.

I Burn Paris, by Bruno Jasiensky

This is an extraordinary book. I discovered it in a bookshop in Krakow, it looked interesting, so later I ordered it. It was a surprise, it's not that often that an old bookworm like me finds such an original and excellent work. I guess it could only have been written in the first quarter of the 20th century, when modernism turned the novel writing upside down.

The book is so original in so many ways. One can classify it as a dystopian book, or as a socialist book, but the good thing is that it defies classification - it deals with how society and civilized mores crash during a catastrophe, but also how humanity endures. His characters are all extremely humane and believable, ordinary human beings caught in extraordinary circumstances and questioning their moral standards. They're all real and endearing, and it's painful to watch their inexorable demise.

It's a wonderful read, and I highly recommend it.

Namesake - a shadow portrait

I have written small vignettes about my grandparents, and someone I never knew kept coming up on the narrative – I’m thinking about my greatgrandfather, my grandmother’s father. I remember hearing about him ever since I was a small child, and seeing his portrait hanging on the wall of my grandparents’ living room, and wondering about him. And as I get older, I keep thinking about this man, with whom I share not only an eighth of my DNA, but also my name, a strong-willed mother, a trade in health care, a wife dead at 34 years old, and a penchant for drinking.
He was a short blue eyed man, born in 1869 in a family of surgeon barbers, the youngest child. According to my grandmother (my main source to his life story), his mother was an extremely strong and intractable woman, whose character drove his older brothers away – one to Lisbon, another enlisted as a ship barber and died at sea.

So the youngest son inherited his father practice at 22, and stayed at home to take care of his mother. She had been over 40 when he was born, so probably he thought she wouldn’t live too long – life expectancy in a rural village in the 19th century was quite low. They say he decided to wait for his mother to die to marry, because she would never stand a daughter-in-law, and he apparently missed the opportunity to marry a girl from a nearby village whose grandson many years later married his granddaughter.
His mother lived until past 90, so he was over 40 when he finally married a beautiful woman 15 years younger than he was. I like to think they were happy together for the few years they had – they had three children, one of them died as a baby, and then he lost her to the flu epidemic in 1918. He was devastated by grief, and even more a few years later when his 5 year-old, who was being raised by his in-laws in a neighbouring village, died of some childhood illness. He was left with his only daughter, who he loved and doted on.
She always remembered her childhood as a most happy period, though. She left school early to take care of the household, her father trusted her and she soon learned how to run the house.

He was widely respected, loved and trusted – many years later, I still met several old people who remembered him fondly for his generosity and his healing skills. An intelligent and curious man, he studied health and medical books so he could perfect his practice as a surgeon, and he was considered better than most doctors by his fellow countrymen. They used to say they trusted him more when he was drunk than the doctor sober.
Drunk – that was the key word and the main issue. They say it was the grief due to his wife dying that drove him to drink – he would often whine about he had treated so many people but hadn’t been able to save his wife and his two sons. Whatever the reason, he took to drinking a lot, and that made him age fast, he became a depressed old man in his fifties, fearful for his daughter’s future, convinced that he would die soon.
So when this young man came along from Lisbon, to establish himself as the local pharmaceutic, a handsome and conservative man who loved the country life and seemed to follow all the right values, he was enchanted and relieved – here was the solution to his daughter’s future.
He lent him money to buy the local pharmacy, and gave him his 16 year-old daughter in marriage, thinking that he would secure her future that way. It was a bad decision. His son-in-law soon took charge of his wife and his father-in-law’s assets, and ran them according to his own will, strong and mostly misguided. So the old barber surgeon lived to see his daughter stuck in an unhappy marriage and oppressed by her husband, one can wonder how that made him sink even further more into drinking.

He was robbed while drunk, someone took his gold watch and chain, and he was tricked into selling his big house by a tenth of its value. Destitute, he had to go and live with his daughter and her husband. That was the ultimate ordeal, he would be daily humiliated by his son-in-law, who had established his business thanks to his money, and now ruled the household with an iron fist, even forbidding him to drink. My grandmother used to tell of how once, not allowed to drink his wine at lunch, he would throw his glass to the wall saying “if I can’t drink, then I don’t need a glass!”.

So he looked for solace in ore drinking; my uncle remembers fetching him from the taverns late at night. The drinking ruined his liver, and they say he once drank a whole bottle of pure alcohol, which was his end – he still lived for a few weeks, but then died the September 3rd 1944.
I grew up listening about him, and watching his portrait on the living room wall at my grandparents. I remember finding his barber’s razors in a hole in the cellar’s wall. Somehow, I always felt connected to this ancestor I never knew, as he never knew he would have this greatgrandson, born some 20 years after his death, from his favorite granddaughter, the one he used to say reminded him most of his beloved wife.

The Black Lake, by Hella S. Haasse

This is a very beautiful book, about childhood and coming of age, but mostly about colonialism amd how it affects human relationships. How poisonous it was, how it shaped people's minds and created so much unnecessary suffering.

And the writing is beautiful, I leave here just a small sample:

We continued splashing about for some time, out of habit, and likely out of a sense of awkwardness too, but without anything like our old jollity. The difference was now we saw it all – the bathing, the rocks in the river, the sparkling current – with different eyes, eyes that had lost the ability to see the real world as a world of wonder. Gone was the magical kingdom in which we were the heroes and explorers. The mysterious grottos were nothing but deep shadows beneath overhanging foliage, our old hunting ground of rocky plateaus and unbridgeable rapids only a mountain stream coursing over its bed of gravel and jutting stones. Crabs and dragonflies, a-shimmer with alluring colours, shot away under and over the surface, but they no longer took our breath away, for all that we made to chase them in the old spirit of rivalry. As we lay on our backs to dry on a slab of rock, the true significance of these changes flashed through my mind. I glanced at Oeroeg, and saw the same discovery in his eyes. A sense of finality. We were children no longer.

I am glad I picked this book, along with a few others, at the Paagman Bookstore at The Hague. It's always nice to find good fiction, it's one of the pleasures I get from travelling.

A Curva do Rio, de V.S. Naipaul

This is a wonderful book. I read it i a very good Portuguese translation, that's faithful to its pared down style. From what I've heard from a few friends that have worked in Africa, this is an extremely accurate portrait - a perfect example of what my friends and the people I knew in Madagascar referred to as TIA : this is Africa. The author manages to give us an insightful portrait without being judgemental or stereotypical.

I totally recommend it.

Portrait of a marriage - or a 60 years war

My grandparents were married on the January 30th 1930. He was 26, she was 16. They had met just a few months earlier, my grandfather had arrived in the village from Lisbon, after an ad of a pharmacy for sale, which he was short of money to buy. Then he met this ageing alcoholic barber surgeon, who was worried about his only daughter’s future in case he died. Somehow, the old man liked and trusted the young pharmaceutic, so he lent him the money to buy the pharmacy and gave him his daughter in marriage. Nobody asked her opinion, women in Portugal at the time didn’t have any right to decide about their lives.

It was a disastrous marriage ever since the beginning. My grandmother always said: “I didn’t marry, I was married off!”. And my grandfather said he knew his wife was bad-tempered (torta, was the term he used) just 3 days after the wedding – they were supposed to go to their farming plot and it was raining and cold, so he and his father-in-law thought they’d better stay at home, but she said “Since you made me wake up so early, now we’re going!”.

I can’t imagine how traumatic it must have been to this girl, used to run her father’s household since childhood (her mother had died when she was just 5 years old), to suddenly being subjected to a husband’s authority, having to ask him for money to attend to everyday’s needs, and watching him dilapidate the family goods in foolish agricultural works, becoming indebted and selling her mother’s gold jewels and disregarding her elderly father, who she worshipped, as a worthless drunkard.

I also cannot imagine how their intimate life would be. I remember how my grandmother, even if she loved romantic novels, used to say, watching kisses on television: “How disgusting!”. And I also remember my grandfather telling me – “Now you’re old enough to know it” – how he stopped having intercourse with his wife after their fourth child’s birth, because the doctor said it would be dangerous for her.
He wished his children to marry local farmers, she was the one who supported them to go to college and get degrees so they could have a better life. She would steal small amounts from the household accounts so she could help her children at university. And she succeeded - their children got a college education and became quite successful in their professions.

At some time, her children tried to convince her to leave her husband and live on her own, but she never wanted to even consider that, she felt bound to her duties as a wife, however disagreeable they might be.

I remember the constant arguments between my grandparents; at the time I thought them funny, but then I understood how unhappy they were together, and felt sad about it. How sad is a decades old unhappy marriage? There were so many petty things, like the way my grandfather kept the household accounts in sheets of paper, so he could control his wife's spending. We as children didn't understand how much suffering this must have caused her, and joked behinnd their backs about their constant bickering. We actually enjoyed how he made her mad at lunch telling jokes that she would find disrespectful, after all he was funnier than she was. Later, I understood, and felt bad about it.
She would knit quilts and table cloths to make some money on the side, money she used to help their children through college and later to have some financial independence. She was only financially secure when he sold the pharmacy - he gave the money to their children, who immediately gave it back to her, without him knowing.

They lived in a big house, with an outdoors kitchen in the garden. So in their late years, they lived totally separate lives - he would cook his meals in the outdoors kitchen and they spent several days without even seeing each other. Once, my grandmother went away to visit her son for a few days. My grandfather, after not seeing her for a few days, asked their neighbours about her; when they said they didn't know where she was, he became extremely upset, saying "OMG, what shall I tell my children? How will I justify their mother's disappearance?" Of course, my grandmother was delighted when she knew about this.

Later, when heart failure kept my grandfather bedridden, he still tried to be independent from her, and asked a friend to bring him his meals to his room, but she didn't even open the door, saying that she was perfectbly able to take care of her husband. And she did take care of him, probably delighted to finally have him at her mercy.

How sad is that? There was a kind of justice there, but still it seems to me so... cruel. I guess that was the way it went with marriages before divorce became available and acceptable. Having watched this wreck of a marriage, I cannot but approve of divorce, thinking how much better their lives could have been.

Travels with Virginia Woolf, edited by Jan Morris

An interesting read, but a bit disappointing. But still it's always nice to read Virginia Woolf's prose, and there were several texts I didn't know. She was not a great traveller, so this book - a collection of texts mostly from diaries and letters - is mostly a curio, a small pleasure for her admirers - one of whom I am, of course.

I think what I liked less was the editing - I wouldn't have organised the texts by place, as Jan Morris did, I think the collection would be much more interesting and expressive of her mind and feelings about the places if they were organised chronologically. Jan Morris says in the introduction:

"What one records is really the state of one's own mind." Precisely that is the fascination of these writings. They are seldom descriptions of place, they are records of the effect of place upon a particular sensibility, one of the most finely tuned imaginable. The earliest piece here was written in 1897, when the writer was fifteen, the latest in 1940, when she was fifty-eight, and there is inevitably a vast difference in the style and approach.

And precisely because of that evolution in her style and approach, I believe the book would be more coherent and enjoyable if it followed her impressions along her life, which is also a kind of travel through time that inevitably influences what one gets from travels through space.

That said, I enjoyed it very much, especially the parts about Greece, her description of Epidaurus reminded me so much of my own visit there.

...but if statues & marble are solid to the touch, so, simply, are words resonant to the ear.

A short trip to Holland

After too many months homebound, I felt the urge to travel somewhere again, so I booked a flight to Holland in an impulse. I had been in Amsterdam twice before, so this time I booked a hotel at The Hague, from where I could take the train to other cities and also see the famous tulip season.

The Hague is a beautiful city. I arrived on a Saturday, and there were lots of people celebrating in the streets, with orange hats and garlands, I later knew it was a big national holiday, the King's Day. I spent all afternoon walking around the city, enjoying its lively squares lined with cafés, its lovely architecture - the Binnenhof, the Peace Palace, the many nice shops.

The next day I headed to Amsterdam, to meet a Facebook friend - I like to know my Facebook friends live, I have met several interesting people this way who became good friends. While waiting, I strolled along the canals of this most beautiful city, and visited the Rembrandthuis and the Portuguese Synagogue, passing by the sleazy Red Light District, that I always found more depressing than exciting.

The Rembrandthuis is a wonderful museum - the epoch reconstitution is excellent, the studio is especially interesting, with the pigments used to make the colours and the several props for the paintings. The prints and paintings collection is also beautiful and most informative about the painter and his times.

The Portuguese Synagogue is most impressive, it gives one the notion of how prosperous the Jewish people expelled from Portugal were, and it's funny to read the Portuguese words on the inscriptions.

Then my friend showed up, and we had a wonderful time, talking and walking along the canals and the Vandelpark. Several streets were reeking of urine from the huge amounts of beer that had certainly been drank on the holiday, and the locals only started showing up on the streets by mid-afternoon. The Hockney exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum was sold out, so I couldn't see it - too bad, but nevermind, I don't care about these minor setbacks on holidays.

We ended the day with a great Indonesian dinner at a nice restaurant - I had never tasted Indonesian cuisine, and I loved it, a perfect blend of spicy and sweet dishes.

I visited Delft the following morning - another beautiful Dutch city, with canals, lovely façades and churches, the Vermeer centre interesting, although not nearly as much as the sight of his original paintings, as I could confirm that same afternoon at The Hague. I didn't climb the church tower due to my fear of heights, but enjoyed visiting the church anyway, and then sat at a café terrace in the square reading and writing - one of the great pleasures while travelling.

Back at The Hague, I visited the Mauritshuis - definitely the high point of the trip. It hosts a wonderful collection, not only the uberfamous Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Anatomy Lesson. So many masterpieces in such a small museum, it's really mindblowing. I finally was able to see the View of Delft by Vermeer, one of the first paintings I knew by him, and that became so associated with Proust - but still couldn't find the small yellow pane so loved by Swann.

Happily filled with great art, I walked around the city and finished the day with a drink at one of the Plein café terraces, enjoying the sunset of a beautiful sunny day.

The next day I headed to Leiden, to catch the bus to see the tulips at the Keukenhof Gardens. The sky was grey, so I decided to visit Leiden first, since the weather forecast said it would be sunnier later.

Leiden is another beautiful city, and I would have liked to have the time to visit more of its museums - I just visited the Pieterskerk and the Antiquities Museum. The church is grandiose and has several most interesting tombs; the museum has an outstanding Egyptian collection and many beautiful Greek vases and Minoan artifacts.

I had a Dutch lunch of meat croquettes, a little heavy for my taste, before I took the bus to Keukenhof. The garden is really beautiful, there were lots of tourists but the place was big enough to allow one to enjoy it. There were tulips galore, of all colours and shapes, and many beautiful daffodils as well. The pavilions were a little tacky, with its decorations themed on "peace and love" 1960s style, but still with many remarkably beautiful orchids and lilies. Unfortunately, the bulb fields were already stripped of flowers, it was one of the sights I longed to see - too bad, another minor setback.

I spent the last morning at The Hague visiting a few great bookstores, and buying Dutch books - seven, and there were so many more I felt like having, but I had to restrain myself. I highly recommend Paagman, the American Book Centre and Stanza to any book lover.

And so ended my short Holland trip, I was glad I took it, and it made me wish to travel again, as soon as possible.

Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li

A beautiful and moving book about loss and mourning. Written in a sad tone, but never cheesy, one can feel the sorrow but also the resentment of the narrator facing something she cannot understand and accept - and we never understand either, because the son's act is never explained, and his voice is not really his, but his mother's perception of him, incomplete as it must be. This is one of the great strengths of the book, in my opinion, the way we can never really know what goes on in other people's minds, even the ones closest to us, and how we try to fill in the gaps with whatever we feel we know of them, to try to make sense of their actions that hurt us most, or at least to build a plausible story that can help us to deal with the pain.

The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch has been a familiar name for a long time, but somehow I never felt like reading anything by her. Then recently, a few posts about her work by Garth Greenwell, whose opinion I value immensely, made me wish to do so, and I chose The Sea, the Sea, a little by chance. At first, I didn't think much of it - yes, the writing was very elegant and she knew how to build the narrator-character's voice and to subtly create some momentum of ominous things to come (like the sight of the monster, or the difficulty of getting out of the sea), but it took me a few chapters to get into the book, inside it, like a dear fellow reader used to say when talking about the magic of reading. Maybe because the narrator is not a likeable character, and the plot is sometimes somewhat far-fetched.

But then he's such a believable character, with his delusional blindness about what's happening and how selfishly he is acting, that I felt more and more drawn into the book. The writing is really extremely good, and I was often reminded of Dostoievsky, with all those dramatic and passionate characters going in and out of scene, all so extreme and strongly depicted. So I enjoyed the reading immensely, and by the end I was totally into it. So I guess it was a good introduction to Iris Murdoch's work, that makes me want to read more of her books.

I could put here several beautiful quotes from this book, but I'll leave just this one, that I particularly liked, because it expresses so perfectly something I've always felt about how a story is never finished, because one is always left with the nagging question of what would happen next:

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summing up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

Another eulogy - my grandfather

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?

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.)

A Guerra das Gálias, de Júlio César

As many people from my generation, the first time I heard about the Gallic Wars was through the Astérix comic books - Vercingétorix laying his arms at Caesar's feet, the Roman garrisons in the occupied Gaul, etc. Of course the genius work of Goscinny and Uderzo was mostly a satire about the modern world, but still it planted a seed of interest for Roman times. And now, many years and many readings about Roman history later, I finally read the famous Caesar's comments on the Gallic Wars.

It's a fascinating read. The tone is so vivid and real one can follow the events as a mixture of an adventure story and a journalistic tale. It's an extremely lively depiction of war in those times - and of strategy, politics and cunning. One cannot be but overwhelmed by the Roman's war machine, the way they accomplished astonishing engineering feats with their limited technology, their tactics and speed. No wonder so many of their works are still around, be it bridges, roads, temples or amphitheatres. Rome shaped the Western world as we know it. Reading the history of the Gallic Wars, one is reminded of the multiplicity of the celtic tribes, whose names one can hardly remember today, that became Romans; and the same applies to the Iberian peninsula. The Romans were such a powerful changing force. And Julius Caesar was really a remarkable character, one of the few people one can say it changed History.