Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Susana Moreira Marques

Author:Susana Moreira Marques
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, travel notes, vignettes, portraits, oral history, journalism, Translation, Portuguese, Agora e na Hora da Nossa Morte, Portugal, village, Trás-os-Montes, Angola, Lubango, Old age, palliative care, illness, cancer, dementia, death, family, travel, migration, colonialism, Tinta da China, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
Publisher: And Other Stories Publishing
Published: 2016-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

HIM: When I went to Angola, there was lots of folks here and almost nowhere to harvest grain. Before that, I even tried getting to France. I gave a doctor from Bragança one and a half contos (speaking in contos, which is what we used back then). The doctor said he got people across the border and he had this middleman in Vimioso. The plan was that after he got me papers, I’d give him another one and a half contos. But time passed, and then some more… He must’ve conned ’bout six hundred people. There was lots of us waiting to go to France. And then in the end not one of us did. Those days, there wasn’t any tv, but I heard this broadcaster say on the radio: come to Angola, my brothers, hardworking men of Trás-os-Montes. I had a cousin of mine in Angola and he was a sergeant in the army, and I wrote him a letter and then he wrote me back saying: cousin, you’re not going to believe it! They harvest twice a year out here! First, two guys from over here went there, then me, then three more. Then it was like a flood: more than thirty folk from here went over.

I was already sick back then. I’d say to her, I got an ulcer and she’d go, there ain’t nothing wrong with you. I’d say, yeah there is, and I need surgery. Those days, you need an operation, you gotta pay, and we didn’t have no money for that, we would’ve had to sell all we had, and that’s why I left here so fast. But there in Luanda, with that food and that weather, I hurt even more. I was lucky enough, though, ’cause I knew someone there, a lady who was the daughter of a teacher from over here, the one who’d taught me my letters, and she was a teacher, too, and married to an engineer who was in charge of the railways, and he told me to go see his friend, who worked at a clinic. He wrote a little something on a piece of paper for me to show him and they saw me right then and there. They operated and then after the operation they told me: you gotta go on a diet now. But I was never much a nagger, I never asked for nothing. I was staying in this shelter and there was six hundred and some more of us there – there was family men, sick folk, some missing a hand, others who was blind. That was where all us outcasts went. All the poor folk were there and we lived crammed into this barrack made of zinc, it went from over here to about there, to that cherry tree. The outhouse was over a cesspit, there was just a lone plank of wood and no water. There was loads of old folk, some from here, some from Angola, folk who should’ve been in a home, and they were almost always fighting like dogs.

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