Let me tell you about my village.
It is located inland in Portugal but not quite entirely coastal or fully rural. Neither quite south nor fully north, nor does it fit squarely in the center. There’s no distinct identity here, and it’s this strange lack of definition that perhaps best characterizes the people who inhabit it.
It’s a continental village surrounded by mountains, giving it an insular character. These mountains not only flank and define the physical boundaries but also limit the horizons of those who see them.
Here, there’s a strange feeling that the world is just this. Even though the valleys are indeed beautiful, green, and teeming with water, no one lives here fully aware of their existence.
In winter, when we’re lucky enough to see snow on the mountaintops, no one feels the slightest curiosity to touch that white ice or see the yellow turina cows trying to find shelter by wandering the zigzag roads of our valleys. No one cares to see the end of the mountaintop, to observe those small granite rocks touching the sky, surrounded by a cloud that fills them with a whitened gray and the pine trees stretching their small arms, dropping the snow that attempts to cover them. It saddens me that they don’t even know the winding path to get there. But it saddens me even more that they don’t even want to know it. It’s a common saying around here that “the biggest blind is the one who doesn’t want to see”.
This winter, filled with youthful joy, I ventured there as soon as the first snow fell. I could truly experience nature in all its splendor.
Innocently thinking that I wouldn’t be alone in the joy of this beautiful phenomenon, I promptly sent a message to my Brazilian sister-in-law. I thought that coming from a tropical country and never having seen snow in her life, a normal curiosity would rise in her like an uncontrollable frenzy. What dismay was her response: “goodness, I just want sun, I’m almost freezing to death.” And with nothing more to add, that was it. Obviously, her lack of curiosity surprised me. It’s difficult for me to conceive such an incomplete existence; one where a person doesn’t want to experience anything is definitely an incomplete existence.
But this is repeated every season.
In summer, when the heat becomes truly unbearable, you don’t see a single soul running towards the immense rivers, lakes, lagoons, or cold streams that we have in abundance here. Nor do they seek the shade of a tree or the small grass surrounding any spring to lie down and feel its freshness.
Instead, they confine themselves in their sad concrete houses, suffering and sweltering from the summer heat. Sometimes, they come to the balconies to watch tourists or foreigners who, not understanding our ways so disconnected from nature, throw themselves into the passing waters without much thought. They must think the strangest things about us, people who only live halfway…
The land is beautiful, but in the human world, the people are also the ones who make it. And the people who inhabit this land and proudly claim to belong to it, ironically, don’t really know it.
They’ve long stopped knowing each other, too. Life, which was once rural and meant knowing the face of every neighbor, has changed. People don’t walk anymore; they don’t endure the sun or the rain, either for fear of sunburn or catching a cold.
As the twentieth century didn’t really pass through Portugal, and the twenty-first century entered quickly without warning, there are things happening here that simultaneously could make you laugh or cry because of how incongruent they seem.
Walking is seen by many as an act of madness. And this is understood when so many worked from dawn to dusk in the fields, with their backs bent, their hips high, and their arms sometimes stretched towards the earth and sometimes towards the sky. Only a fool would say walking at the end of a long day’s work in the fields was a pleasure.
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