Saudade

Our house stood at the end of a street that climbed toward the upper part of the village. The walls were whitewashed and the roof had tiles the color of terracotta that my grandmother would scrape in the spring when moss grew on them. In front, there was a tiny courtyard where my mother hung the laundry to dry between two lines, and behind, a vegetable garden where cabbage and beans grew, and a lemon tree that never bore much fruit but which my grandfather loved anyway. I slept in the same room as my two cousins, Aldina and Lurdes. The mattress was made of wool and had to be beaten every Saturday. Aldina was two years older than me, and she was the one who decided what we did when we came home from school. We would go to the port to watch the boats come in, we would search for shells on Mira beach when someone took us there, we would play hide-and-seek in the nets drying in the sun. My father left the year I turned nine. He left for France, to Bordeaux, where a cousin had found him work on a construction site. At first, I didn't really understand what that meant. I knew he was far away and that he would come back, and that letters took a long time to arrive. Every two or three months, a money order would arrive at the village post office, and my mother would put on her headscarf to go collect it. I would go with her. The postmaster spoke loudly and everyone knew how much was in the envelope, which embarrassed me, but my mother didn't seem to notice. In the evening, my mother would write to my father. She wrote slowly, using a small dictionary that had been given to her as a wedding gift. She would tell me what she was writing, because she wanted me to get used to the idea that he existed, my father, over there, in that city whose name was all I knew. Bordeaux. I thought it sounded like a cooking word. When I think back to those years, what I see most are colors. The very pale blue of the sky above the roof, the dark red of the tomatoes my mother dried for winter, the dusty brown of the street after a week without rain. I also see the smell of wet laundry snapping in the wind, and the taste of cornbread still warm from the baker's oven. These are things that don't come back anymore, except when I close my eyes. And even with my eyes closed, sometimes, I struggle.

My mother packed my bag the night before. She put in two dresses, underwear, a bar of soap, and an envelope with my papers sewn inside the lining. She said things were often stolen on trains, and that if someone tried to take the envelope from me, they'd have to tear the bag away first. I held it tight against me for three days. My aunt Conceição had come from Coimbra to take me. She was a woman who spoke little but never let go of my hand in a crowd. Her own daughter had already been in Bordeaux for two years, and she was taking advantage of my trip to go see her. At the moment of goodbye, on the platform at Porto-Campanhã, my mother kissed me three times and told me, without crying, that I must eat well and study hard. It was she who cried, later, as the train began to pull away. I turned back to the window and saw her black scarf waving, then becoming a dot, then nothing at all. The journey took three days with the connections. At the Spanish border, we got off because the tracks weren't the same gauge and we had to change trains. Men in uniforms passed by and looked at our passports. Aunt Conceição held me firmly by the shoulder, and each time a soldier looked at her, she lowered her eyes. I did the same. In Madrid, we slept on a bench in a waiting room that smelled of hot wax. A woman brought us bread and some chorizo, and aunt Conceição spoke to her in Spanish, which I found strange because I didn't know she spoke Spanish. At Hendaye, we crossed into France. I remember the day breaking over the sky and the fields passing by, greener than anything I had known. Everything seemed vast and new to me. At Bordeaux Saint-Jean, my father was waiting for me on the platform. He had put on a little weight. He was wearing a jacket I didn't recognize. When he saw me, he took a step back, as if he wanted to be sure it was really me, then he lifted me off the ground and held me so tight that I cried without knowing why. What he said, I still remember it. He said, *minha menina, agora estamos juntos*. My little girl, now we are together. I understood that day, without being able to put it into words, that my childhood in Portugal was over. It wasn't sad exactly. It was something else. It was a beginning with, inside it, an ending that I had not chosen.