Memories that the locals keep

 

I saw the pigeons flocking toward the Crystal Palace, but my mother, reminding me, repeated: "No, Cristina, it's the Rosa Mota Pavilion!"

"Mom, at that time, Rosa Mota must have been a two-year-old girl; it wasn't the Rosa Mota Pavilion. That name is recent!" But she insisted, and I let her insist. "You know the building wasn't like that. It was a different pavilion (a palace, for fuck's sake), it didn't even have those buildings around it. It already had the lake, which I think was cleaner than it is now!" Where had I heard the story before, that back in the day, during the fifteen-a-month rice festivities, everything was much better, or even better, good? The air had become permeated with fascism. In truth, not everything was like that. Perhaps it should be said that the avenues were wider, perhaps cleaner, that the buildings were newer, that they now have the ease of disguising themselves as new utilities and modernities, that they are less Gothic, less Baroque, less Dona Maria, less Dom Manuelino, less Pombaline—okay, but that's what we have today, between the matchbox and the pretense of lasting longer than they're worth. And today they're worth millions in investments, and tomorrow they're sold at a prudish, non-public auction, for well under half the investment. That everything burns like a match, in the speed of consumption. Yesterday it was green, tomorrow it's ripe, what can we do? These are perspectives that arise and hang in the present and in the subjects of today. There was no need to romanticize anything. For me, it was good, not to resort to the best, because it went beyond my considerations, to speak of these new buildings that emerged, perpendicular to the gardens of the Crystal Palace, which was where epic films and thematic cycles were shown, where history was discussed, poetry was recited, and where one could see films in 4D and perhaps 5D, one day. And musical concerts, even classical ones, oh yes! I looked at the sky and then at my mother's serene face. That bench had invited us, on one of our walks, after times of our own captivity, to the exercise of reflecting on the city of yesterday and looking at it through the lenses of today, both operated on for their respective glaucomas and with an iris interested in the differences and similarities of the city's history, laden with significant nuances that spoke of other peoples before us and, certainly, would come to reflect the present, to which we had been assigned to belong and to express our opinions, today, on that bench.

"Not even the peacocks are the same, Mom. I believe I remember them as a child being less aggressive; now they squawk loudly and bite. Everything changes, depending on the people who inhabit the spaces. The energy that fuels geographies has become contagious, chaotic, and versatilely juggling." I wasn't quite sure what I meant by that, but I said it anyway, and it sounded hollow to me. The void was a current, contemporary, whimsical, and useful space, where being empty or being empty was the essential quality to make way for the new. The approaching times closed cycles and opened new alignments, fantastical discoveries, and unfathomable promises.

"Mom, what if we walked to that bakery, over there next to Pedro Cem?" She sighed and added, "You know, I still remember coming around here and going to a pastry shop with a beautiful terrace, and there were several people enjoying the warmth and the fashions, and we were drinking wine from teacups. It was called iced tea."

Of course, orange juice wouldn't have been on the radar of a beautiful summer afternoon for a woman who had recently turned eighty and who had vowed to stay alive and wanting to go to a dinner dance somewhere in Leça. One of these days, but when? Soon. The woman beside me, with a tired air and a serene face, was different from the one who had spoken to me last year about living longer and better, to keep up with progress, just like Manoel de Oliveira, plotting what he would do with time, after the word searches had become too predictable, the Arraiolos rugs had become dull and boring, the godés and paintings had exhausted their depressive pains and pushed them into the blind arc of difficulty breathing, lack of appetite, the inability to move without the help of that damn cane, which was a dreadful thing, reaching a good age and no longer knowing what to do with the boredom and lack of prospects. And those rooftops all around, the stubble of pigeons' wings in the air, the noise of cars in the background had served as background music to his shrug, to his acceptance of not going to drink a glass of rosé from the cups of yesteryear, nor of the disappearance, one might say sudden, of the Pedro Cem cinema, the Petúlia and the breweries that had cemented life in those places in the area, long ago. Those who remembered this were half a dozen who were still breathing, between nostalgic memories and sighs interrupted by the search for a comfort zone, by the city's rush hour and the successive continuation of routines, that it was already late afternoon, that night would come to bring light and fantasy to the younger ones and that the cycles contained, within themselves, stories that told of the changes and events that would come to be remembered, in order to do justice to those who left and who continued to inhabit the spaces, anchored in the memories of those who still preserved them, like Mr. Gervásio, like Oliveira from the Newspapers, or the Mozambican Graçolino who trod the lupins, taking off their capes, for his wife on that terrace, when summer afternoons fell, in the past, and the sky, today, was the same as those days, when the afternoon fell and painted purples and oranges in a clear sky, charging with lights and music, promising eternity to all who believed that the future was made of these beautiful moments. There weren't those buildings where period films were shown yet, but there was always something futuristic emerging in the eyes of those who gazed slowly into time, in a contemplation filled with gratitude for the present and faith in a distant childhood dream.