To leave for milk and to never return...
This is my father’s story.
He keeps it in his head, behind firmly shut lips, a stare that extends backwards, knowing things that can’t be said or implied.
It’s this silence that separates us. The child and his silent father.
Whatever distance he has travelled is the distance that is still left for me. A long way in miles, as well as years, before my father can ever take me seriously.
He spent his days from birth to adolescence on a tiny Atlantic Island called Madeira, an island that is 55km long and 22km wide.
You can traverse this island in little less than an hour travelling at 20km/h.
This is my father’s incubator, the place he “became”. The place that he sprouted from earth and simple food, a stranger in a household of 18 children, a wonderer of mountains that find it in their means to circumscribe your existence, hemmed in from coast to coast. You can only jump into metallic blue water to forget that you live in a province of a provincial country.
You imagine that you are a fish because fish are free.
Then you remember your dinner last night.
Portugal and Madeira are lands of fishermen that detest land. They still remember Fernão de Magalhães, or Ferdinand Magellan to you, and his honourable death.
To die a death in high farce is considered heroic in some parts of Europe. Many would rather that Don Quixote had remained mad to the end.
Portugal looks on from her coast and history, like a mother looks on her child while hanging out the washing, too tired or to bored to really pay attention, to notice that that the British have come and bought all the real estate on the good side of the island (an island so small has a good side, the line is drawn in diamond dust with the fine quill of the imagination), they have turned it into a blue dream for ex-pats, for people who no longer need to be tethered by reality to turn a dollar, machinery turning for them.
My father walked past this bare footed, on his way to the yachts moored in Funchal. He would dive of the tall masts of these ships for coins that would waver and undulate in the deep but transparent water. The tourists would trow these coins in and watch young, snake limbed and tanned boys dive after them gracefully. They would then cheer when they came up, white smile on brown cheeks, with their small treasure in hand. People find the smell of salt intoxicating. It makes them smile at small things. The way the sun strikes a single grain of sand.
It makes my father smile still - a man who has never forgotten the sea. It was the womb he was born into. This is the gene he passed onto me. A gene that allows salt to feel like a second skin.
It was thought that nothing could touch a place like this. A family that sometimes forgot how many children were in their care had too much to worry about without concerning themselves with the affairs of a world that knew not their name or their gentle concerns. The squabbling left them aching, left them disconcerted. How could so much life cram itself into such a tiny space? A family so large consumes itself or explodes. Its boundaries much too indeterminate to hold so much life within the membrane of loyalty and blood.
Pressing issue find even the tiniest islands drifting on the largest oceans. Continents emanate influence like waves.
From the south a wind started to blow. A tempest in Southwest Africa that moved itself upwards along the Prime Meridian, past the equator and westward – towards Portugal, towards cloud crowned mountains and boys who wished they were fish.
All waves have to do is find land to break upon.
It was certain. There would be war and revolution…