I, ISLANDER, CONFESS MYSELF, by CRISTÓVÃO DE AGUIAR

My emigration was not as complete as those of my parents, grandparents and other closer or further relatives: A part-time or permanent Islander always has someone who is his extension who represents him on the other side of the sea. The emigration I undertook always had a metaphorical nature, as suits a writer or a poet, which does not mean it was less real or painful.
Bashful, I raised anchor from my Island in a third-class cabin, heading for Coimbra, the University City. And like real emigrants, I, too, was not able to cut the umbilical cord which she, the Island, always wrapped me in. You can say I emigrated to within, and this “within”, in the course of life, came to have a physical and psychological meaning. The physical one everybody senses as soon as I open my mouth. It is immediately clear that I am a part of the diversity which came to give unity to the well-kept house that is our way of speaking.
I have three places of writing: Coimbra, the Island, and America. In America I write like this: “The hours are more spaced. An expectant silence can be felt in the atmosphere. If it is about to snow, all of Nature shrinks. Everything quietens, waiting for it, like in writing. It stars by opening an instant which is lightened by silence. Then it condenses into flaccid word flakes, and very slowly covers the sheet of the page […]. I have been going to the cemetery to water the flowers I planted at my father’s head. I then sit on the grass, scrupulously mowed, and this, though it does not appear so, makes me place some feelings, still in tears, in their places” […]. In Coimbra: “October ran trailing an autumn drunk in colours and I, who had arrived with an intense smell of sea on my body, remember having felt lost in this expanse of land and land. On the nights in which the bells of the heart tolled in tune, I would grab myself and go to the Penedo da Saudade (the rock of homesickness). I would enter that sanctuary, not to add another verse to those that were already engraved there, but merely to loosen the eyes down the hill in front, that of the Picoto (peak of a mountain). It is filled with uneven sown lights. At a certain point, in the middle, there was a row of them so symmetrical, or was it me that gave them symmetry, for a hair’s breath like the lights of the Island’s dock. On the Island, at another time, I write like this: “All seems wrong already ─ the weather, the people who no longer fit in my affection, the house humid from not being lived-in. Then the spectres start to haunt me […] I go to the cemetery and see on the family grave the portraits of my grandparents and my aunts and uncles […]. I rake my memory and see my brothers and uncles and many others, absent to the land of emigration (some of them call it the Promise Land. Thus, I only feel well when going […]. The village where I was born still shows very living steps to my Golgotha. There, I can achieve neither the peace nor the quiet which I so desire […]

Cristóvão de Aguiar

Published in the Magazine Azorean Spirit
SATA (Air Azores) ─ Summer 2006