A Portuguese man (or woman) always feels stronger when walking through the fog. It was passed to his (or her) head, along the generations who jumped over the centuries, the idea of the Empire (later, when it weakened, they invented another, a Fifth one) that was vast (later they said, wrongfully) from Minho to Timor. Minho, of course, was the head and the beginning of everything…

I do not understand this, but older people do have fun. There is much confusion, too many people and I’m a bit sleepy. Maybe what I need is to ask a balloon, cotton candy or a windmill to my mother. Of course she will say no, but my father, with two or three well placed tears will soon run to buy.

Responding to the roof, the awning or the immense sky that covers our head. Given the table with food and wine, of course. After, we let go out our senses, because everything is easier between family and the worries stayed there, at the foot of the hill. Now it’s whatever comes next and two impossibilities prevail: the saint can not get out of the altar without help and the pilgrim can not contain the joy.

I often saw my father going to the sea. He told me that his grandfather had also been a fisherman. Then I saw my husband going and, later, my son, on his new boat. But, for many years now, there is this morning that compensates for everything and we don’t go out to the sea. The Senhora d’Agonia goes in our turn. We just transport her and stay there, by her side…

While you go to chapel, Teresa, I’m staying here, standing on this board counter stained with red wine. I’m staying with them, laughing through my mustache, which for years you have commanded me to cut off. Go away quickly, burn the candles and walk around with he ex-votos in your white shrouded figure and do not appear here before eight. The others tell stories of chicks and freedoms of a lost youth. I look at the hills covered with lively and silky grass, like the one that grew beneath your grandfather’s vineyard, where we made love for the first time. The only thing I cannot remember, as hard as I try, is why the hell I married you in the first place.

It is by sitting down by the sea that we realize our insignificance. It is also true that astronomers tell us that, but the sea is always handier than a good scientist. Stranger still, is to be sitting with these thoughts in the burning sand, and someone shouting, is trying to sell us something. If they were Natário’s Bolas de Berlim (small round cake with egg cream and sugar top), we would buy one.

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!”

«Who went to sea, lost his place!». He didn’t understand what she was talking about, but entered the game, taken by her smile. An  incomprehensible tug trespassed his chest. He felt the sea brise more intensely, lightly dragged by the wind. The grandmother arrived, took the basket of vegetables and growled: “You look like a fool, boy.” He replied that he was just playing, but soon regretted and felt stupid for saying that. A few years later, they will tell him that one cannot love as a kid, that everything was just childish fantasies. Hopefully he will understand that this is a lie, but only he will know.

A procession sometimes drags many people, who also go by dragging themselves, as they can. Many more, however, stay with respectful faces on the roadside, on the windows, on the porches or in the higher backyards, watching. They’re no longer surprised when the women decide to take out and carry the shoes, after one or two kilometers of tarmac, because they know it’s not because of blisters on their feet that they’re  praying behind the litter of St. Benedict.

To climb the dusty and solid road to Santa Justa do Monte, can be a journey for life. Four miles of round loose stones on a background of yellow soil. On the sides, tall bushes until the sight is lost, and sometimes one or another pine appears isolated and gaunt. Cars break down and the horses go up and pass by walking in trot. And the white chapel, suspended on the roundness of the ridge, always far away. Always so far away…