Music lends joy to the attic of memory

 

Some memories are retained in us. Not always for good reasons. These become edifying, from this building called we. Others are glorious, because they crystallize and, because they are not repeated and made us happy, from dancing so much inside, they make us feel that they were a dream, nothing more than that. And we come back to them. An irredeemable number of times. This Still Corners Trip associated with the video directed by Wemerson Ferreira, takes me to various eras of life, from gaiata to adulthood, always in the same places, trying to feel and perhaps maintain, feeding the impossibility of feeling the smells and sensations of warm heat in the body, on the same beach, in the same returns to that past that is unrepeatable by all circumstances. 

I remember my father happy and humming, always fleeing to Marreco beach, in his Simca 1100, GH-25-50, beige and, in the upper part of the black body, with his musical cartridges, the only dad, with his will to live and to smile at life, which infected all souls, with his two childs,  behind, always singing, always inventing pagoda until we got to that sea breeze, to that smell of sargassum and the sight of the waves crashing against the rock light in the middle of the beach, where he never dared to swim, due to his heart limitations, but was the dynamo of many who rejoiced in his joy, and encouraged even a dead man to thirst for life. That's how I continue to see my dad, always in a good mood, always full of ideas to make the day memorable. 

Francisco, as my father is called, had a camera and carried it everywhere he took his children and, after inventing a thousand activities from which he got tired very quickly and leaned over smiling and filming, he was the main protagonist of my films, but not of his. So, I remember many evenings, where a white sheet was placed on a wall, other times a black velvet cloth, the lights were turned off and those images that passed by, with black pixels intruding on people's faces between one image and another, leading us to what came to be the photographic record of a repeatable time, only in the flashes of memory. The wave that drags me between different times, from the time when happiness was left to us and today, after all, was his audacity and ours, so hard to maintain.  The life of the world took his life, but it did not bury these memories. The mother doesn't get into these memories much. Except when watching the movies or between a picnic and a trip to Coimbra, for example. She was a slave to schedules at the hospital, working crazy shifts. My father grabbed her by the neck and gave her a kiss or two through her hair and neck and laughed: come here Evinha, come here because your children want to see you smile!

The mother, between smiles and grunts, tried to escape his love, the embrace, escape the center of attention and receive pampering, today I know, at the time, she thought she was a strange and dangerous being for the family element, because she either cut off the joy or tried to avoid the happiness offered. I wasn't used to pampering, to being happy. He never got used to it. Perhaps she had a premonition that she would not be entitled to more than half a dozen years in his company. Today I can understand her lack of joy when listening to Grândola Vila Morena or Green Windows, while we, small kids, Francisco included, tried, without even knowing what the weather was going to do to us, to enjoy carpe diem, until the end that we didn't know and didn't even want to know, the day, the smiles and the music. Dad loved mussels and all the food and cold beer. My father was in his early twenties. He ran with me to the Estádio do Dragão, never forgetting my blue and white tube that he meticulously filled with water, other times with water from lupins, filled at the Conde café, next to his shop, next to the hospital where my mother worked, and at the café of my father's billiards marathons, there he filled the tubes, to which they all laughed and instructed me: Daughter, you only wet your opponents, all those who have scarves, blue hats, nothing! Only the others! I already knew by heart what I had to do, at the age of three, four, five, leaning on my father's back I watched the goals from above, my father was very tall and perched on his back, I was much bigger than everyone else and my task of wetting the "enemies" of Futebol Clube do Porto was made easier. At the end, we went to Velasquez Square, where we gathered, the women of the popcorn and cotton candy, for me it was always cotton candy and my father, stopped here and there, there were always a lot of people who stopped us: Oh Guedes, great goal that one! And they laughed and I always looked at my father in the same way: Great, thirsty for life, the happiest of all, the most beautiful. My dear hero! The only one that still parades unscathed in all my memories, safe from less good perceptions that I had of all the others who stayed, but were never really part of my collection of happy memories. Grandfather Rodrigo trusted my father a lot and today, I know well that his family, his father's, seeing their son manage to reach the age of thirty, denied by so many doctors, had also added to them the will to live, motivated by his strength, by the joy that was contagious. My father was a cheerful boy. Memories are where our dear ghosts live and that's why I, in my discontent with the living, i was captivated and learned how to communicate with them. 

In my memories of Sundays, of Christmas, of football, of eternal summers, he is preserved, intact and more alive than the ones I see passing before me, with closed countenances, all of them, until I too am part of a piece of memory of others, and can leave to be with them forever. Many are already paraded in these memories of whom I have an eternal longing for life. Some Sundays are the raw wound, which the hours remove the scab, an exposed pain unable to gain health again. And even the sheets hanging from the drying rope, like yesterday, renew my longing to be able to see again the images of past films, where the voice was not recorded, except inside, where they echo, except in the father's cartridges and satirized by us, in loud screams while the father, with steering wheel in his hands, whistled and asked:  - Daughter, sing there again at the age of twenty! And there we returned to the register of music and joy that was a place within us where no harm could reach, interrupt, damage and, much less, erase. That's where I live!