(Cesaria Evora and her band)
I set the afternoon on the music of the legendary Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Evora. Sodade which in English translates to Longing. I am listening from the kitchen balcony which gives a view of the wide empty roads, the Roman aqueduct, blocks of apartment housing, bell-towers, pine trees, poplars, grey hills, and the cloudless blue sky. Cesaria Evora in her elegant concert gown, her warm mother eyes scanning the faceless audience in the dark, a burning cigarette stuck in a glass ashtray on a shining grand piano, her small measured swinging is as tender as the waves of the Atlantic in the moonlight, her sleepy face chocolate glowing. Her elegance has the appearance not of a glamorous queen but that of an independent woman who has an intimate kinship with toil, loneliness, political frustration, economic hardship, the love of people, the cool shade of palm trees, the wings of music… She was called the barefoot diva.
Who showed you
This distant way?
Who showed you
This distant way?
This way
To São Tomé
As her dusky voice breaks into the tropical atmosphere of acoustic guitars, percussions, saxophone, piano and the violin the languid afternoon transforms into an active rumor exchanged between village women gathered at the rumor-infested square. A rumor that browns the skin and leaves a warm, perverse smile on the face. Cesaria’s music smells of sun, volcanic winds, sugarcanes, salt, palm trees, goats, cigarettes, lobsters, coffee, half-naked children playing football in the sand.
Listening is distancing. Music is a boat. I am transported on board a ship voyaging towards memories I have half lived or unlived in some faraway island in which I have never set my foot. Probably my name is Tomàs. And most probably I was born in São Nicolau.
Longing, longing
Longing
For this land of mine São Nicolau
The afternoon is proceeding to a siesta-like drowsiness. My armpits and eyebrows are salty with sweat. At the port among sunburnt men, cattle-dealers, dock workers, market folk, smoking, playing cards, settling scores, complaining about the late arrival of cargos, looking forward to better days of above-reasonable commission. Given the news of the sea we are not nostalgic men. We are sweating with longing!
I long for the woman who, the song says, lives or lived in São Tomé. The woman whom I have never met and probably never will but have made love with once, twice, as many as the nights our fingers could hold. She is a robust fisherwoman who in flipflops walks to the other side of the mountain to sell her basket of mackerel and needlefish at the market.
If you write me a letter
I will write you back
If you forget me
I will forget you
Until the day
You come back
Perhaps in the languishing epochs of the afternoon we’ve forgotten each other, or simply our letter to each other neither arrived nor have been written. Maybe a thousand miles away in a sultry afternoon inside a cozy bungalow she is brushing her son’s soft hair while she tells the story of a man who, listening to Cesaria Evora begins to inhabit his dreams, journeys to distant islands without moving from the balcony where he sits on his grandmother’s chair.