She walked in our house with the confidence of a queen, and the demeanor of an old friend. Smelled the garden, took a look at my books, borrowed few. I had not yet welcome her daughter and her husband, my actual friends. We talked some more and got to smoke a cigarette together, outside the kitchen and hidden from the rest. I showed her two or three of my preferred spices, seduced her to inhale deeply at a stinking thai shrimp paste without telling what to expect. Her burst of laughter at the stench in her nostrils was only comparable to the ample and generous smile at eating the curry that I eventually ended up cooking. I think I had expend some ten hours, perhaps twenty, in her company before. And I loved her.
Once upon a time, for few years, I participated in european green politics. Green parties in europe are members of a european federation, with a council that gathers twice a year. With few friends we tried, without success, to made that federation into a real european political party, with individual members instead of parties as members. Meanwhile we tried, we attended all those councils. So in these years I got to know delegates from different countries, some of whom are still my friends. Like V. then delegate from the portuguese greens. In one of the many occasions that after a extended meeting we were having coffee in the lobby of one or another hotel, or perhaps a beer, or a few, V. got to know that I like to dive. “So you have to come home” he said. The family of V., and the family of his wife S. were from the Azores islands. To which I arrived, a couple of years later, with my own family on holidays. Nor V. nor S. were there. We just had the address of Joana’s house, the mother of S. We hadn’t meet before, but they were delighted at receiving us. Actually they were neither there when we arrived. A key was left for us with neighbors, and for few days we had the house of an unknown couple for ourselves.
As I said before, I saw Joana some ten, or perhaps twenty hours. We stayed in her house for a few days, and we overlapped even fewer days. But I needed about ten minutes to believe that she had known me for ever. To say that Joana was a force of nature is just to use a wrong, and most correct, english expression that should not be used to describe a Portuguese to begin with, and even less, a person from the Azores. Yet the expression strangely fits. We tend to use “force of nature” to describe somebody overwhelming, unstoppable. I believe that Joana was like that, too. But that is, by far and large, not all what the real forces of nature are. Perhaps that is why the french, when talking about renewable, or more natural energies, talk about “energies douces”, which means sweet, and also soft. I don’t think there was nothing soft about Joana, and yet I also believe that was one of the softer persons that I have ever meet. How come that some people can reunite nature in themselves, the strength and the softness of all these things that are alive, that fight, and that also love?
It is already four months since I hear that Joana passed away. And somehow I can’t accept that she is gone, even if I know that I will not see her again. I suppose that I will be back, someday, to the Azores. And I will search for her in a pastel de natas, or perhaps in the fire of the oven that cooked it.