of sea and stone
It is said in Pico one can experience all four seasons in a single day. Once I had passed the outskirts of town, the fog that was once ahead of me crept closer and closer until it entered the car and overtook my mind. We sailed over the hills and down into the valleys until they could no longer be described as such: The dense greenery now stood so closely together that no light seeped through. I slowed the vehicle as the heavy boughs of evergreens draped themselves into the road. What was in front of me was hardly visible, what was behind me was closing in. I had taken myself deep into the forest and seemingly into an alternate plane.
Absentmindedly, I found myself pulled over and stepping out of the car into the trees. The forest floor held me but in the softest way, as if I could sink below the surface if that was what I wanted. It was seasons and seasons of fallen pine needles, leaves, twigs and plant matter covering every square inch of space. It was cold and wet, and the sounds of the singing birds haunted — greeting, warning, mating — and covered any thoughts of my own.
Fallen trees and branches obscured a clear path and after only a few steps I realized I’d crossed into a vortex. The light, minimal at best, evaded my camera and it is certain that no man made object could capture the energy of the place. I gave up and sat at the base of a wide pine, letting the air fill my senses.
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Overgrown yet in control, the forest operated in its own rhythm. Time passed though I don’t know how much. I figured it was nearing dusk but I was in a place of perpetual dusk — a space where the light promised it would be less in the next moment.
It was then that I noticed the mushrooms climbing the bark of a tree, their shapes voluminous and their colony bountiful. As my eyes adjusted I saw them everywhere: Popping up from the earth’s floor, growing sideways out of branches, wedged between boulders.
When we were a young family without a car we would leave the house every Sunday more than two hours before church began. It was a ritual with many steps and milestones. First, the walk to the train station 15 minutes away. The walk would head west before it turned downhill toward the ocean, the quiet Santo Amaro station looking out over the beach. The train we’d take to Cais do Sodre, Lisbon’s main terminal, which is a strong word to use in the early 90s for a fairly limited train hub covered in graffiti. From Cais do Sodre, we’d exit the octagonal yellow building and cross the square, walking uphill from the Tejo and into the city. At the top of the hill we’d wait for the bus — and here was when we’d find out our luck — did we time it perfectly for the 85 bus, or would we have to catch the 97 to the 26? Either one bus or two, I’d sit with my body crammed against the glass, likely sharing two seats with three people. We’d sail past tiled buildings and I’d try to peer through windows as we’d pass — streets in Lisbon aren’t very wide. After 20 minutes the bus would spit us out at the subway station where we would ride several stops until we reached Jardim Zoológico. There, it was a right, a left, and a right up a long hill to an apartment building whose basement held the church my father worked with.
If we could afford it, my mom might give me 100 escudos to buy a folhado at the cafe adjacent to the church, but that was a rare occasion. Mostly, we rushed into the unventilated basement and searched for seats before the three hour meeting began. When it was finally over, the same journey must be completed only in reverse, from the subway to the bus to the train to walk, and up six flights of stairs into our apartment.
This is all to say that it is strange to me now that one can walk through a place dozens of times and not notice it. It is strange to me now that I did not know what I now know.
In 1506, the Lisbon Massacre occurred against the Jews who lived in the Alfama, then known as the judiaria. Over the course of three days, 1,900 children, women, and men were brutally murdered in Rossio Square. Many others were tortured, mutilated, and beaten. Though the Portuguese Inquisition wouldn’t “officially” begin for another 30 years, Jews were already experiencing discrimination and abuse in the predominantly Catholic state.
In 1497, upon pressure from the King and Queen of Spain and in hopes of marrying his daughter to the wealthier nation, King Manuel I of Portugal issued a decree expelling all Jews from the continent’s oldest nation. Only, the Jews in 15th century Portugal were highly esteemed subjects. Their proficiency as merchants, their nobility, and their money was not something Manuel I wanted to lose. In an attempt to keep the Jewish community within the small country, the king issued another decree — Jews would be forcibly converted to Christianity, and dubbed “New Christians”. While some baptisms went smoothly, others were coerced and even some had the mark of the cross branded onto their foreheads.
I knew none of this as I passed through Rossio Square every week. I knew none of this as we took our friends to the Alfama, as we sat in cafés and ordered bicas and pregos. I didn’t even know that my own name — one I was so fiercely proud of — was that of a Jewish family in northern Portugal.
It was not until I traveled to the Açores that I learned of my ancestor Jorge Peixoto de Carvalho, a Jew who fled Portugal in 1500. He sailed to the island of Faial, having been baptized a New Christian but assumedly — and wisely — wanting to leave a place where fervor for Jewish blood was rising.
There is no way to know. The only thing to know is that I am the actualization of so many. And so the island revealed another side of myself to me. The forest had invited me in, and I was one of its living beings.