I remember the times that “we went to the festival”… The smile of my parents, the candies, the rockets blasting in the sky, the rides in the carousels… The joy of being a child in a day of pilgrimage makes us Minho’s natives. And this is what identifies us when we return there as adults, albeit with totally different eyes. Stepping on the green carpets of  the hills we learn to love the pilgrimages, even if growing up would turn us into another person and faith does’t mean nothing but something we just look at with mere curiosity.

«Ó luas negras, cujo luar é tudo, tudo
Quanto ha de branco: véus de noivas, cal
Da ermida, velas do hiate, sol de Portugal,
Linho de fiar, leite de nossas mães, mãos juntas
Que têm erguidas entre cyrios, as defuntas!»

António Nobre (1867-1900), excerpto do poema A Vida, in «Só», Paris, Léon Vanier Éd., 1892.

Another white chapel up there… Always on the top, rarely beside a flat and accessible road. Once there, it springs an eagerness to talk with everyone, explaining to them the centuries and the men, to love with ideas, with no disrespect. I just stay put and stare. I remember when my mother bought me António Nobre and I read it under an old olive tree in the churchyard of a Baroque chapel in my village, if I did not know it so well, I would swear this one is the same. Something in Portugal makes me feel that all the chapels are just copies of a primary matrix, designed in limewash on a white sheet of paper.

«Oh dark moons, who’s moonlight is all, all
There is of white: bridal veils, limewash
Of the Chapel, yacht sails, sun of Portugal,
Flax for spinning, milk from our mothers, hands worshiping
Raised among tapers by defunct ladies!»

António Nobre (1867-1900), freely translated excerpt from the poem A Vida, in «Só», Paris, Léon Vanier Éd., 1892.

Alto Minho reserves for viagra animals a special value, an ashamed tribute to thousands of years of help, gift and sacrifice. This value can never be settled and on days of pilgrimage or fair, they are paid a shy tribute, often in the form of a bath and hair scrubbing, a colorful ribbon or an old and lavishly ornated yoke who already belonged to the great-grandparents.

Those hours were secret, at that slope of Peneda, picking from the towel on the table the food, the smells, the conversation and the fun. And then, Father Loureiro entering the tent, accompanied by a concertina and in open arms, unleashes in the impromptu an eulogy on request of everyone. The simple joy springs from those there, and the birds chirping in the trees, they also accompanied, but by the beating wind on the dried herbs and the crickets. Those secret hours, nothing would remove me from there.

To get to the bottom of memory a son, who is in France, or the daughter who works in Canada and just sit down, watching distractedly what happens in the tent. His wife told him that it’s disrespectful to keep his hat beneath the awnings but, what the hell!, this is all outdoors, just go away! The fatigue was brought to him by the grilled codfish, drowned in plenty of oil, one of this cheaper ones that can be bought in supermarkets for an euro and a half. A scream wakes him from the soft torpor in which he was almost about to fall away: “Coffee? Coffee goes to that gentleman over there!”

Cows teach us much, through the passively and correct way they observe the world. I say so, that in the silence of Minho’s fields, often took them to graze the green of the grass, at the behest of my grandmother. At first they tell us nothing, but they always hear us with great care. After a few hours, they become the grand masters of silence and, over the years, they tell us how to grow and face the rest. Open your mouth only when absolutely necessary (usually in pain or hunger), absorb everything with the utmost attention and capture every detail and, every now and then, just shit on that. Not only literally, but simply turn their backs and walk away.

Not everyone has the luck to grow up surrounded by animals and breathe with them the same air that descends from the Mountain of Peneda. Share everything, feed them and walk them through the grass to the top of the valley. From there, look at the old huts of the brandas, today abandoned, like castra eaten by time, piled stones that no longer seem to make any sense. And, at the end of the day, stroking the head of the lamb born a few days ago and return home. If we could all play like this.

Soon we forget that we were children once. That someone had to put up our questions, our temper, our strange behavior. But it’s in the little moments that we devout to them that we’re able to return there – into the hidden place in the memory that we once were with five, six, seven years old… There, we countless recall our grandfather in that day, when he put his arm around our shoulder and took a picture with us at Peneda.