A Stranger at My Table. Ivo de Figueiredo
a foreigner, a stranger in his own home. “Why can’t we be like a real family?” he would say, his voice filled with bitterness and reproach. “Why won’t you answer me in English?”
And why didn’t we want to sing together, or pray together? Like a real family. Was it his memory of the family of his own childhood that Dad was harping back to? The laughing uncles and beautiful sari-clad aunts certainly weren’t like him. They were warm and gentle. Dad demanded that we speak English, demanded that we sing and sit in the park together, demanded we be a happy family. We never knew quite what to say, but defended ourselves as best we could. In Norwegian. In a childhood otherwise filled with sun-baked rocks on Steinvik beach, wild snowball fights, play-fighting on the living room floor, rambling in the forest alone with a sketchbook or with my mother, Dad became an increasing irrelevance in my life. He was against us, and we were against him. We made detours around him to get peace. Useless, of course, since he was still there with his over-sized emotions. Were we the cause of all this nastiness? Or was Mum? Eventually I realized it was something else. Something he carried within him from his own childhood. His own projection of the family we never were for him. That we didn’t want to be. Or was there something he’d lost along the way, a loss that had left him with an insatiable desire, a restless anger that could descend on him at any time or place? At home, or in the car. Yes, especially in the car; the abrupt swerving, the roar of the accelerator, the aggression that transmitted itself through his arms to the steering wheel and into the heavy bodywork, the entire car becoming a vibrating metallic membrane for all the rage inside him. While I clung tightly to the driver’s seat in front of me.
“Don’t swerve so much, Dad, please don’t swerve like that!”
The older I got, the more I questioned these things. Slowly but surely, I realized that my world was not the same as his, and that the answer to why Dad was who he was, lay somewhere far beyond my own horizon.
WHERE DOES DAD’S STORY BEGIN? Where does mine begin? The truth is that no story has an absolute beginning; all we can do is clutch randomly at the tangle of threads that lead from ourselves and back in time, generation upon generation, until they vanish into the vast darkness from which we all once issued. I scan the oldest photograph I’ve found in the family albums and open it on my Mac. The image is from the funeral card of my Dad’s grandfather, my great grandfather, Aleixo Mariano de Figueiredo. He died in 1940 aged sixty-eight, but the portrait shows him in his prime; a slim, handsome man, with a moustache and wavy hair. Pinned proudly on his lapel is the medal he’d been awarded for his lifelong service as postmaster to the Sultan of Zanzibar. Order of the Brilliant Star. Those who remember him describe him as a stern man who rarely smiled, a strong, determined character with European manners. Apparently he had Dad’s dark eyes, though it’s impossible to tell from the image of the old crumpled photograph on my screen, in which his eyes melt into a haze of zigzag pixels. I zoom in, trying to capture his gaze. But the more the image fills the screen, the more the shadow over his eyes melts into the grey background.
It is as if Great Grandfather is struggling to emerge from a darkness that refuses to release him. All I know of his origins is that he was born in Goa in 1872, in the village of Saligão, close to Calangute beach. There he built a house for himself and his mother, Maria Santana, but I know even less about her, apart from the story of how she got her nickname. It’s said that Maria had lent some money to a crook who never paid her back. Time after time she walked through the village to demand he repay her, and each time she returned empty-handed. Everyone in the village knew about it, and when her trips back and forth became a daily occurrence, they started to tease her:
“Where are you going today, Maria?” they asked.
Maria would simply answer “Zatã, Zatã”, which in Konkani means, “It will happen.” Which is how my great-great-grandmother got her name Maria Santana Zatã. To this day people in Saligão tell each other this story, laughing and slapping their thighs. Because the village never forgets anything; not Maria Zatã, nor the son who left, nor his descendants, nor even those of us who’ve never set foot in Saligão.
The house Aleixo built was on a hillside in the area of the village of Salmona. A traditional Portuguese-Goan house, whitewashed with tall, elongated windows, whose panes were made of translucent layers of oyster shell that let a soft glimmering light into the rooms. A wide set of steps led up to the front door and to a shaded porch which ran along the entire front of the house. It was a handsome house, even though many of the floors were made of stamped down cow dung. The largest room however must have had tiled floor, since the family apparently held balls and other social events there for the village’s beau monde.
Saligão was a typical Goan village, its houses clustered around a patchwork of paddy fields cut through by roads and rows of coconut palms. To the north of the paddy fields rose the neo-Gothic style church, Mãe de Deus, built in the year after Aleixo’s birth. The entire village would have been visible from its gleaming white tower, were it not for the fact that most of the houses lay hidden in the shade of banana trees, jackfruit trees and other vegetation. It must have been a vision of tranquility; life in Saligão was allowed to unfold at its own pace, interrupted only by the Angelus bells calling the villagers to prayer at dawn, noon and lastly at sunset. It was then that families gathered after a long day in the paddy fields, and in the light of their kerosene lamps knelt down on the ground, turned toward the village church and recited the Angelus prayer. At eight in the evening they got out their rosaries, ate dinner and went to bed. Night followed, coal black, apart from the occasional dim light from a coconut lantern carried by a solitary night-wanderer.
Peace reigned over Saligão. As it had for centuries. Ever since the 20th of May in 1498 when Vasco da Gama dropped anchor outside Calicut. The first day in the creation of our clan.
Vasco da Gama had discovered the sea route from Europe to India by sailing around the southern tip of Africa. Since time immemorial the Arabs, Gujarati, Ottomans, Venetians, Chinese and others had sailed the Indian Ocean assisted by the monsoon winds, their ships loaded high with merchandise. But the Portuguese wanted the lucrative spice trade to themselves, and to strengthen their monopoly they levied taxes on their competitors, or simply blasted them to bits with their superior weapons and ships. In return the Portuguese shared Christianity’s joyous message with the local heathens. The Portuguese wanted souls and sea routes, not land. But seas cannot be conquered without securing strategic ports and coastline fortifications. And it was Goa, the little enclave north of Calicut which had until then been under the sole rule of the sultan of Bijapur, which was chosen as the stronghold for the Portuguese. Which explains why Catholicism and spices would become the prime ingredients of my ancestors’ existence.
In the decade following da Gama’s discovery, Portugal’s King Manuel I sent ship after ship to conquer Goa, managing eventually in 1510 to bring the territory between the Mandovi and Zuari rivers under Portuguese rule. These districts became the heart of the Portuguese colony of Goa, known as Velhas Conquistas, the Old Conquests. Over the next centuries the Portuguese took more surrounding districts, Novas Conquistas, the New Conquests, as well as the Diu and Daman enclaves.
The town of Goa, situated some distance up the Mandovi River, became the capital of the entire Portuguese Indian Empire. In just a few decades, the town grew in population and splendor, becoming a metropolis inhabited by Muslims, Christians and Hindus, and even a Jewish minority. Magnificent late renaissance and baroque churches and elegant Portuguese villas shot up between the river and the jungle. And the streets and bazaars streamed with soldiers, traders, prostitutes, the occasional wealthy Portuguese family beneath large parasols, surrounded by servants and African slaves. This isn’t to forget the priests. After the arrival of various Catholic orders in town, you were likely to bump into an ecclesiastical habit at every other corner. The Franciscans and Jesuits christianized the town by the sword and threats, and before long Goa was transformed into the Rome of the East, the Asian center of Christianity. Not that all the natives were willing to give up their Hindu faith in favor of Catholicism, far from it, but those who did took the names of saints, and Portuguese heroes and nobles.
Many Goan families thus