Colonial delights and pains
A square with another white church outlined in blue. Spaced out houses, with many trees in between. It looks like a quiet, rural little village, with nothing particular. Maybe we were mistaken, maybe there’s another town with a similar name and the bus driver misunderstood what I asked him. In a little shop they point us the way. We find a long manor house with blackened tiles and two rows with many windows. The windows are all closed, the white facade and the iron balconies already meriting a new paint job. We pass through an archway under the house and up a staircase to a landing. No one answers the bell, we call from the stairwell. Nothing. We’re already on our way down when a door opens, showing a gray-haired lady in a brown dress with a tight skirt.
“I wasn’t expecting visitors today. You want to visit the house?” She gives us passage into an opulent hall, and with little sympathy asks the usual question. “Where are you from?”
“Portugal.”
“Ah, Portuguese, so we can speak Portuguese.” In an instant, her demeanor changes subtly. She speaks Portuguese with a characteristic accent, perfectly articulate and correct, even too correct, a sign of other times. “No one speaks Portuguese anymore,” she says, with an underlining sorrow and satisfaction at being able to do it again for a moment.
The house was built in the 17th century, with later extensions. To the lady, Sara doesn’t have the courage to ask her age. She is certainly over eighty, with tanned brown skin and a cloud of white hair that you feel like stroking. Her facial expression, frozen by age, brightens as she leads us through the house and unravels its story and that of her family. She carefully lays down each word, as if plucking them out of the depths of time where they had long been stored away. As for the memories, they seem very vivid, she evokes them with ease as we move from one room to another. My impression is that we would just need to point to any of the objects on the bookshelves, desks, cabinets, showcases, any table or chair, any of the many black and white portraits that populate the walls, for her to tell us its story. We can’t focus on everything, there is too much to look at.
In the ballroom a large mirror reflects the chandelier and the arches of the windows. In place of honor is one of the glories of the house, two armchairs covered with golden flourishes, that were offered by the king of Portugal to the family for services rendered to the crown. After being converted to Christianity by the Portuguese, the family became very influential, their ancestors holding high positions in the colonial government. The lady is the last representative of the 14th generation of her lineage, she proudly preserves her pompous and aristocratic Portuguese name. With a nostalgia that is sensed, more than physically expressed, she tells us about the opulence of other times, of lavish parties, the house full of guests and servants, when all the fashionable society spoke Portuguese and they could order anything from anywhere in the world.
The second glory is an altar in honor of St. Francis Xavier that takes up an entire wall. It would make the envy of a small church, it even holds an authentic relic, a fingernail preserved in a reliquary of gilded wood and glass, under an image of the saint. Besides these riches, the lady directs our attention to mundane curiosities: the wooden latrine, very elegant, with a removable drawer to empty the waste and a lid that allows it to be closed and look like a drawer; the massive chests that carried the treasures of commerce; the refrigerator that ran on coal before there was electricity. We marvel at the archaic treasures and utensils stored throughout the house in displays, dressers, and showcases, the ceramics, the Chinese porcelains, the African ivory carvings, the lace tablecloths, the dark furniture in exotic woods, the chandeliers and candelabra, the Italian marble, the Belgian stained glass windows, the wooden ceilings, the colorful tiles on the floor, the canopy beds, the litters, the draperies, the engravings of landscapes on the walls, the piano with its darkened and uneven keys that used to enliven the dances…
As times changed, it became increasingly difficult to keep the house in its former splendor, and after independence, impossible. The family decided to open it to tourists, proud that they have never had to resort to government aid. To the Indians, says the lady with spite. In a separate wing that is not part of the tour, the matriarch lives with more than a dozen descendants, among children and grandchildren, who help maintain the house. She is confident that they will never sell it. And maybe not, but what will be left when only those who have always lived in the house as a museum survive?
In another anachronic mansion, we were welcomed by a young man who struggled to speak in an almost indecipherable Portuguese. He could have been the grandson of the old lady, and if listening to her in the halls was like falling into a black hole and being dragged to an island frozen in time, with him the stories seemed to have been taken from a book, not experienced.
On the beaches there was nothing left of that past but a few forgotten words lending a nebulously exotic name to a bungalow or a restaurant. On the way by bus we pointed out to each other a little whitewashed church, a villa devoured by the weeds and cracked by the weather… It is mainly in Panaji, formerly Panjim, that Goa’s Portuguese history still imposes itself. We discover the colonial buildings, the houses painted in faded tones of green, blue, yellow, arched windows and doors with stone frames, iron or wood-worked balconies, hidden tile panels, the names of the streets and businesses in Portuguese, coats of arms, and other half-effaced symbols. As good devotees, the colonists left churches everywhere, they are the most enduring fossils. In Old Goa they erected the most grandiose, they wanted to build the Rome of the East, and divine providence repaid them with a great epidemic that led to the abandonment of the city.
The ancient presence of our ancestors is a vague and increasingly less tangible aura, and what that means to me, I cannot say for sure. An Israeli staying in Vasques guesthouse, next to us, wanted to know where we were coming from:
“From Portugal? Don’t you feel bad about being in Goa?”
“Why?”
“Because you colonized Goa!”
“What about the colonization in Palestine that is happening right NOW?”
That’s what I wished to answer him. It pains me to admit that I have my prejudices too. In my case, history hardly interferes, it’s the current affairs of a state that, for a moment, can be conflated with its citizens. I have noticed that this is the case with the Israelis and the Russians, two of the most predominant groups in Goa. I try to quash those feelings as soon as I notice them, that they don’t condition me, and they almost always fades after meeting them properly, but on first contact I can’t help but expect them to be belligerent and chauvinistic. The Israeli neighbor had offended me by identifying me with something that means nothing to me, only because of my nationality, and I was ready to strike back in the same way. All I knew about him was that he was from Israel, but he might even be a pacifist, he might be there precisely to escape from the military service, I don’t know. I managed to keep quiet and dismissed him with a cynical smile.
If Sara had been with me at the time, instead of being angry she would have felt guilty, in Mozambique she suffered terribly from the weight of colonial history. For me, the heroic narrative of the Age of ‘Discoveries’ provokes a response that oscillates between indifference, irony, and revulsion, but I’m not affected by hereditary shame or guilt. What embarrasses me is an intimate delight that I feel when I recognize Portuguese traces in the streets, a faint, elusive, impression. It’s neither an outburst of pride, nor the flatness of indifference, it’s the pleasure of finding the familiar amid the unknown. And nothing better than shared words can make us feel close to home.
Of the fair and civilized Portuguese language, old faded signs and names remain, like the Vasques guesthouse. Just like the Israeli, inevitably many people want to know where we are from, it’s always one of the first questions when we meet someone on a trip, and in India not even the glory of football makes it easier to place us, cricket is king. Only in Goa we never have to explain. The three words in Portuguese that the innkeeper Vasques addressed to us were not surprising, they are a parrot skill that anyone could have learned to please the tourists. Much more unexpected is to hear people approaching us on the street talking knowingly about Vasco da Gama and Afonso de Albuquerque, instead of an insecure “ah, Potiugal…”, or a more honest “What?!”. And not even when talking about viceroys and conquistadores do we feel any animosity, it’s as if our shared history unites us, a distant great-great-grandfather that bind us together. Not because of a lack of memory, on the contrary, it’s because for better or for worse memory is very old in India, the European presence was but one phase among many in the eternal cycle of days, and its brutality was not enough to erase what came before it. The signs are digested, incorporated without the deep trauma of other rapes that, beyond the coveted riches, continue to devastate dreams and identities long after the perpetrators have withdrawn.
Perpetual Motion is a serial novel. Go to the Table of Contents to read previous posts.
Next: To move or to stand still
