Amália Aloud

by

Humberto da Silva

This is a work of creative non-fiction based on an incident that occurred in the early 1960s, shortly after my parents moved from downtown rooming houses (on Oxford Street market and Baldwin Street, respectively) to a flat on Oak Park Avenue in East York. The story is oft told by my mother, Maria do Ceu Henriques da Silva. All of the details she can remember, including some dialogue and her impressions of the two police officers, have been incorporated into the story. Any additional backstory is of my own extrapolation.

EXTOLLING THE SUBURBS OF TORONTO as places where you could truly breathe free, Paulino Santana, newly-minted homeowner, successfully solicited a number of Portuguese compatriots to fill his house in East York. There weren’t many Portuguese there yet, but he swore there would soon be an eastward exodus. Downtown, the air was foul, there wasn’t a patch of green anywhere, and the miniscule yards barely grew a few stunted tomatoes. The coal-grimed, narrow downtown houses, with drafty Victorian rooms no bigger than closets, were positively squalid compared to Paulino’s detached, bright two-storey. A hop on the streetcar got you to St. Mary’s for mass, or downtown for cheap vegetables or fresh killed chicken. Paulino also promised that every Saturday night he’d drive everybody downtown to the First Portuguese Club dance in his VW Beetle!

Flush with a full house on Dominion Day long-weekend, Paulino decided to host festivities to forestall any tenant nostalgia for the nascent Portuguese community in the Jewish market on Augusta Street. Paulino sprang for three cases of two-fours and two cubic foot icebox blocks, now chipped and chilling statutory holiday beers in a Thermos cooler. Paulino cracked cold stubbies of Labatt’s 50 and Old Vienna for his compatriots, who now paid his mortgage. Almost the entire household festively loitered on the Oak Park Avenue front veranda that holiday Monday in the muggiest of Toronto summers.

The men of the house played Sueca or waited a turn at the checkerboard. The women, however, toiled inside taking only an occasional break when one of their sweltering domestic chores took them outside. Although the men earned cash cleaning the factories and the adjoining offices where they worked, on this public holiday they made no contribution to domestic cleanliness. There was a clear hierarchy for doing domestic work in the home. Upstairs, Matilde, who kept house for a Brazilian diplomat’s family all week, availed herself of a day free from paid work to clean the stifling second floor flat she and her husband Rogério shared with his cousin Sebastião. The midday heat was making Matilde uncharacteristically dizzy and nauseous, and she was starting to suspect she might be pregnant. Paulino’s wife Dona Teresinha, the lady of the house, alternated between the sweaty travails of wringing her steaming sheets through washing machine rollers, and stirring two stewing rabbits so they wouldn’t stick to the pot.

While Matilde was beating the dust and stink of feet from a rug in the backyard, she encountered Teresinha who had come to hang her bedsheets on the clothesline.

“Who knew Canada was so hot?” Matilde commiserated, the faintest of breezes momentarily cooling her perspiration as she tried to blink rug dust from her eyes.

Teresinha, flicking away sweat accumulated in her eyebrows, replied: “They told me the snow was higher than a man in winter, but nobody knew in the summer it’s hotter inside the house than outside. At least in Portugal our houses were a refuge in the heat of the day.”

“But we suffered with the cold inside in the winter,” Matilde said. In Portugal she’d always spent the heat of the day hoeing or weeding one of her father’s fields. But Teresinha never worked a field, and her father, a civil servant, had a nice house in Loulé with a central hearth and a cast iron stove in the kitchen. She had ‘married down’ for love of Paulino, then emigrated in defiance of her father. Teresinha didn’t even have a job in Canada, yet still complained about housework.

Matilde changed the subject: “Maybe Rogério will take me to the cinema later. The Cleopatra movie is playing and they have air conditioning.”

“Not today querida,” Teresinha replied haughtily. “Everything’s closed. And those sacanas[1] aren’t going anywhere from that veranda other than to bed to sweat and snore. Besides, air conditioning after heat like this will give you pneumonia. Best just adapt to the misery.”

Matilde didn’t like hearing her husband and cousin disparaged, but Teresinha was her landlady, so she had to let it go. As Teresinha finished hanging her sheets she noticed the old lady in the house with the kitty-corner backyard peek disapprovingly through lace blinds. Last week, a day after a smoky sardine barbecue for Paulino’s birthday, Teresinha had found massive dog turds in her yard. The old lady had a German Shepherd.

“The shit from the crone’s dog smells like it’s fermenting today. I don’t know how these people stand it.”

“English people aren’t clean like us . . .” Matilde said thoughtlessly before taking her rug back upstairs to her flat.

On the front veranda the men lounged, like gangsters lamming in a Cagney movie, in old suit pants, singlets, and slide-on sandals. Testing each other at the checker table were Rogério, who worked in a paint factory, and Sebastião who laboured on the Danforth, digging the ditch for Toronto’s second subway line. Julio and Chico, brothers from Aveiro, played aside at the Sueca table. Julio worked construction on Scarborough subdivisions, squirrelling every cent away for his wife and toddling son to join him in Canada. Chico, five years younger than his brother and unmarried, had decided mid-February of his first Canadian winter that he was going to move to California. On Paulino’s side at the Sueca table was Joaquim, in Canada solo from the Alentejo and unloading trucks at the Food Terminal. Joaquim, like Julio, was sponsoring his ‘wife’ to emigrate too, but unlike Julio, Joaquim never spoke about her, because he didn’t actually know her. He had a picture of Graciette and had exchanged only two letters with her, before she married him by proxy, his brother standing in for him in Baleizão.

Upon losing at checkers, and uninterested in a humiliating rematch, Sebastião trudged upstairs and carted down his big Grundig shortwave radio. What this party needed to make things happen were homeland tunes. He tried tuning into Portugal on multiple shortwave frequencies but all he heard was atmospheric noise like science fiction movie sound effects, and snippets of alien languages. No familiar music or voices – not even Brazilian transmissions. Chico, who lost a checker game to Rogério in record time, said: “Just put on a Canadian station before that noise gives me a headache!” then reached back and pushed the bakelite AM button. Canadian AM static instantly replaced international shortwave whine. Chico gave the tuning knob an expert twist landing on 1050 CHUM, where Elvis, in full rockabilly glory, belted out “A Big Hunk O’love.”

Paulino’s knuckles slammed the Sueca table extra hard with a trump, angrily declaring: “Shut that shit off before my head explodes!”

“That’s . . . Elvis!” Chico exclaimed to Paulino like the older man wasn’t his landlord but some guy fresh off the boat, clueless about the local scene.

Paulino rose from the Sueca game and stomped into the house, pausing only to spin the Grundig’s volume knob a full turn, snapping the radio off. Nobody turned it back on. It was Paulino’s house and everybody knew his temper sharpened after half a dozen beers, or a bottle of wine. Last New Year’s Eve, at the First Portuguese Club, Paulino nearly started a rumble when he got into it with a sharply dressed Madeirense. Paulino, drunk, became irrationally angry and mouthy at the sight of the island dandy doing the twist with the teenagers when Chubby Checker was played for the kids between band sets. Then, when the band struck up a vira, Paulino swung Teresinha around and kept bumping the guy and his wife on the dancefloor. When the Madeirense complained, Paulino accused him of always bumping into Teresinha! So, when the Madeirense and Paulino were in line at the bar, Paulino called the Madeirense an ambiguous name that could be interpreted as either ‘fop’ or another three-letter English epithet. This nearly escalated to a continental versus islander conflagration when Azoreans backed up the Madeirense and Paulino’s tenants had to stand with him. Fortunately, the club directors intervened before it got ugly. But they all had to leave before midnight in a terrifying drunken dash to East York in Paulino’s Beetle. What a way to start 1963!

When Paulino went into the house, the assembly on the veranda assumed he just needed a piss, or an upgrade to wine. Then an acoustic crackle and pop signalled a phonograph needle was alighting on vinyl, and the house itself suddenly reverberated with soulful Portuguese guitars. Paulino had recently patronized the furniture place on Augusta Street where Portuguese purchased first furnishings. The next day, a truck pulled up disgorging new sofas nobody would sit on for years, a coffee and two end tables, and something truly exceptional – a combination cocktail bar/Hi-Fi console with a stereo phonograph!

With the first notes of “Perseguicão,”[2] it was like time itself stopped. The wood framed Canadian house transformed into a huge Hi-Fi speaker resonating with Amália Rodrigues’s voice emanating through flyscreened windows to the front veranda, the street, the backyard, and beyond. As Amália chaunted the metaphors of melancholy universal truth, mid-afternoon Dominion Day in a humid Toronto household assumed the solemnity of a dark fado joint in the university quarter of Coimbra, or a smoky cellar in Alfama. Conversation ceased completely as the minds of all present receded into deep reflections:

When might I, if ever, see the fatherland, or my mother, again?

What did my brother mean in that cryptic letter that father caught a cough last winter that persists into the spring?

Will the money we gave that travel agent on Dundas Street make it to my sister in time to cover the shortfall in last year’s sharecrop?

What kind of person, truly, is the woman my brother exhorted me to marry? Is she really the woman in the photograph, and writing the letters? The handwriting is beautiful, and her Portuguese almost too proper. She has four years in school. Will she regret the choice she has made when first I touch her . . . ?

The draughts froze on the checkerboard. Knuckles that, moments before, bounced trump on the table in violent triumph, held each card gently like a precious memory. Cleaning and cooking paused as thoughts turned to beloved ones three thousand miles distant. To see them again required a ticket costing three months of a man’s salary (or five months of a woman’s), and supplication for leave from work. If the expense and the leave were surmounted, it was still fourteen hours aboard a throbbing Lockheed Constellation, with refuelling stops in Gander and/or Santa Maria, and another day’s hard travel by train and taxi to their village.

Anyone walking by in the street might be forgiven for thinking the Dominion Day celebrants visible on the veranda were transfixed by a siren’s call. The less imaginative might think they were stupefied with concern at some event drowned out by strange loud music. The human stillness persevered throughout “Perseguicão,” then, with the first upbeat notes of “Tudo Isto E Fado”[3] animation returned.

Paulino, who’d stood by the Hi-Fi in contemplative attention throughout “Perseguicão,” detoured through the kitchen to ensure Teresinha, paused in melancholic reverie before the stove, had spiced the rabbits as his mother had shown her. After a quick taste from the wooden spoon she held, Paulino patted her backside gently in tacit approval of her seasoning of the rabbits he’d shot at the Scarborough city limits. Then he returned to male society at the front of the house.

“Now isn’t that better than the loathsome noise of that Elvis!” Paulino posited righteously to the once again festive assembly. Nobody disagreed, although Chico was growing fonder of ‘English music’ in general, and Elvis in particular.

“The furniture store owner gave me the choice between a painting of the Last Supper or an Amália record to seal the deal. Teresinha wanted the painting but I had to say no – this Jew is trying to gull us with our own religion! What right-minded person would choose a likeness of Christ over an actual Amália long play record? Why, only an idiot! We see Jesus every Sunday in church. Now we can listen to Amália at home every day of the week!”

Every man, even Chico, nodded agreement. Who could question that an artifact of significance, such as a vinyl disc from which the very voice of Amália could be extracted, held more value than a representation of Christ, of questionable provenance? You could get Last Supper pictures – and even 3D pictures where Mary’s Immaculate Heart miraculously appeared when viewed from a different angle – at Honest Ed’s, where normally you just bought cheap housewares. But there were, maybe, two places in the whole city where a Portuguese LP record might be acquired. The painting, over your dining table, reminded visitors of the depth of your faith, but Amália took all comers on a multitrack soul trip to a place you might see, ouxa là[4] maybe once again this decade.

As side one of the LP played out, conversation limited itself to the minimum words necessary to conduct checkers or Sueca games, now both mired in the honey of memory and longing. At the end of “Coimbra” the phonograph began repetitively popping as the needle hit the end of the groove. Paulino laid down his freshly dealt Sueca hand to flip the record. A stillness persisted as the memories and sentiments begotten by the first eight songs continued to reverberate emotionally, if not acoustically.

The first lamenting notes of “Sabe Se Là”[5] deepened the shared solitudes, and saudades[6]. On the deeper laments of side two, Amália displayed her range and ability to maintain impossibly long emotionally piercing mezzo soprano notes, right up to the eponymously titled final fado track. By the last note of side two, Dominion Day was no longer a festive July Monday in their host country, but a shared day of longing for a place and the beloved left behind, to which they’d all gladly return but for grinding poverty and fascism.

Then, like a scratch across the vinyl that sends a phonograph needle skidding discordantly across a record, the squeal of braking tires on hot asphalt announced a police car, red dome light spinning, halting abruptly in front of the house.

At the unexpected manifestation of state authority, the men on the veranda immediately experienced varying levels of anxiety. They all froze in feigned disinterest at police presence. Unwarranted curiosity about police matters had never been a healthy interest in the old country. Surely this had nothing to do with them. In Portugal the Guarda Nacional Republicana patrolled the Portuguese countryside on foot with carbines slung, or astride a horse if travelling purposefully any distance. In Toronto, police drove boat-like banana-yellow American cars topped with a round cherry-red dome light. They looked more like a pastel de coco[7] than the police vehicles they saw on American TV programs. Amália had finished her final notes moments before two cops, remarkable for their stature, exited the vehicle inserting wooden batons into steel rings on their belts. The two colossi marched in a tactless hurried diagonal across the lawn, though there was a flagstone path right to the house. One cop, older and fatter with stray whisps of ginger hair spilling out of his badged black cap, eyed each man on the veranda with mindful curiosity. The younger cop, though a good half metre taller than any man on the veranda, looked nervous and mean. His dark hair was just emerging at the sides of his head from a close buzz cut, like he’d just left the army. Unlike his more seasoned partner, the young cop’s interest in the newest of Dominion Day celebrants stemmed only from an eagerness to assert his authority. Though tall as a eucalyptus, and wearing a Toronto Police uniform, his young face already bore the haughty imperiousness of any fascist Guarda.

Their Amália-induced reveries shattered, the celebrants on the veranda considered more immediate concerns. As two massive cops beelined unceremoniously across the lawn, Rogério considered Matilde’s immigration status. Was now the moment to slip inside and phone Zé Menezes, his travel agent and immigration consultant? Julio, whose landed immigrant status was secured, curiously observed that Toronto police wore their revolvers on the left side of their uniform as if to make access to the weapon deliberately inconvenient (unlike the nightsticks at easy reach on the right). Chico, who also enjoyed legal status, and was much taller than the average Portuguese, wondered where brutes like these bought their shoes. Joaquim’s perspiration changed from heat sheen to terror sweat, a rivulet running down his spine. Encounters with police in the Alentejo were always terrifying. Everybody knew about the senseless police murder of Catarina Eufémia[8] in his village.

Paulino, deepest into his cups, positioned himself at the top of the steps to his veranda, puzzled by this inexplicable visit of Toronto’s Finest. This was not his first encounter with authorities. Cops regularly rousted the pitch and toss games newly arrived Portuguese men had played with pennies against a restaurant wall on Nassau Street. The cops pulled up, then stood by smirking while local urchins pocketed the immigrants’ coins. Paulino was once taken to the station and threatened with an illegal gambling charge for mouthing off about the pennies.

The Amália record repetitively popped, like a faulty heartbeat as, every second, the needle hit the end of the groove.

“Hello, hello. Having a little illegal public piss up . . . fellas?” enquired young Constable Kirkwood, each word seemingly leaving an unpleasant taste on his tongue. In Toronto the Good drinking in public was illegal.

“Okay. Hello to you, too. What you say? This my house!” Paulino replied with the incautious insolence of a property owner enduring trespass.

“What we mean to ascertain, gentleman, is whether everything is okay here?” the more seasoned Constable Boyle enquired, as if an interest in everyone’s good health made amends for his young partner’s brusque demeanour.

“Everything is very good here. What you want?” Paulino retorted from the top of his veranda steps, hands on his hips.

“Are there any women in the house with you . . . fellas?” Constable Kirkwood pointedly queried, more businesslike yet still unable to follow his partner’s lead in referring to drunken sweaty wops drinking outside as ‘gentlemen.’

“My wife is home,” Paulino said.

Rogério wasn’t sure what to do. Matilde was working illegally, but if he didn’t call her down and the police discovered her presence from Teresinha, his lack of forthrightness might provoke suspicion. Nonchalantly making the best use to date of the English he’d learned in four night school classes, Rogério said: “My wife, she is here as well too.”

“Might you call the ladies out for a moment, gentleman, so’s we could have a word with them?” Constable Boyle requested with firm courtesy from the bottom of the veranda steps.

“Why do you come to my house to see my wife?” Paulino enquired, tilting his head in an exaggerated drunken pantomime of curiosity.

Shit, Joaquim thought, Paulino’s going to get into it with the cops.

The young cop looped his thumbs into his wide leather belt as if to adjust his gun and baton into easier reach.

“Well sir,” said the older cop, casually resting his right foot on the bottom step and fulfilling his disclosure obligations under natural law: “We’ve a report alleging a domestic disturbance at this address. If we could speak to the ladies, I’m sure we could clear this right up.”

“Dom-es-teek dees-tur-bence?” Paulino repeated, as if deciphering code, but already wondering which neighbour called the cops. His first suspects were the Griggs across the street that noisily slammed shut their front window last week while he and Joaquim energetically debated Kennedy’s actions during the Cuban missile crisis in Portuguese. They would be the prime suspects had they not packed up their station wagon and left for their cottage on Friday. “Who say there is dom-es-teek dees-tur-bence here?”

“I’m afraid I can’t rightly say, sir,” replied Constable Boyle. “But if we might come in and speak to the ladies, I’m sure we could clear this all up, and be on our way. Then you gents may continue with your front porch . . . festivities.”

“You stay there! I call my wife, she come out,” Paulino said, then turned and yelled through the screen door: “Maria Teresa! Come here!”

Rogério got up slowly and called to Matilde upstairs through the screen door: “Matilde! Come down here just for a minute.”

Moments later the faces of two perspiring women appeared behind the screen door, their expressions immediately showing concern at the sight of the two police.

“Come down here now. We need to speak with you!” Young Constable Kirkwood ordered.

Matilde felt an instant nausea, bile rising in her throat. Teresinha looked suspiciously at Paulino.

“Would you be so kind as to step outside for a word, ladies,” the older cop called out, smiling.

The screen door squeaked open and Teresinha and Matilde stepped out on either side of Paulino, Teresinha holding a wooden spoon and Matilde a broom.

Matilde gave Rogério a frightened look. Though alarmed at the turn the day had taken, he nodded for her to comply. Paulino shrugged at Teresinha. The two women started tentatively down the veranda steps.

“Leave your . . . tools . . . behind,” the young cop demanded as if instructing a felon to drop revolvers. The women looked to each other for comprehension.

“The broom and the spoon,” Chico translated into Portuguese.

The women nodded knowingly in unison. Matilde leaned the broom against the wall and Teresinha handed Paulino the spoon. Then they hesitantly took each step down to the awaiting police. The young cop started issuing further instructions until it became apparent neither woman spoke any English, so he placed a massive paw on each of the women’s elbows and marched them to the police car. Matilde, whose bladder capacity was precarious of late, now also feared she might wet herself with terror. Teresinha looked back at her husband and demanded: “What’s going on here Paulino?!” But at the physical behest of the mountainous young cop, both women remained standing where he left them beside the cruiser as he opened the rear door.

“Why you putting my wife in police car?” Paulino, starting to display characteristics of drunken agitation, demanded from his porch.

Given his experience with the volatility of domestic disputes, and displeased at his young partner’s precipitous behaviour, the old cop remained at the bottom of the veranda stairs, advocating calm: “Now let’s all remain composed gentlemen. This is going to be sorted expeditiously. We don’t want any trouble, now do we gentlemen?”

Constable Kirkwood, pointing at Chico, commanded: “You, come here.” He could handle this sort.

Chico, knowing whatever was happening had nothing to do with him, and knowing his immigration status was in order, walked casually down the steps and down the flagstone path toward the haughty young cop. The men on the veranda watched curiously the exchanges between the parties beside the cruiser, punctuated occasionally by Teresinha’s religious exclamations when Chico translated the cop’s questions. Matilde’s terror increased with each of the pressing, inappropriate questions. She could only shake her head in denial, hoping not to disgrace herself while standing in the street. She had lost control of her bladder one time before, when her fourth grade teacher hit her with a bamboo cane for being unable to do a long division problem on the blackboard. What kind of country was this? What business did Canadian police have making personal enquiries about her domestic life? Unhappy at the consistent pattern of denial, the young cop dismissed Chico in frustration, and ordered Matilde and Teresinha into the cruiser. Teresinha, though she had the least to fear, immediately broke into histrionic tears. Matilde, petrified that her Canadian Dream and her gravidity might unravel in the back of a hot police car, started praying quietly to forestall a full attack of nerves.

Chico returned to the veranda and explained: “Somebody reported a woman being thrashed here. The big one says Dona Teresa and Dona Matilde are lying because they’re scared.” On hearing that narrative, everybody fully expected Paulino to lose his mind. Paulino looked like he was about to launch himself off the stairs at the two cops, and he might have, were it not for Chico’s hand tightly gripped on his arm.

Rogério, in the highest state of anxiety of his life, tried to follow the situation. Life certainly could “turn on a dime” as went Rogério’s most recently-acquired English expression. He knew some neighbours looked askance at so many people living in one house, and at men drinking and arguing in a foreign language on the front veranda. But never did he imagine anyone harboured the malice necessary to make false accusations against neighbours. He couldn’t even imagine ever raising a hand to his Matilde, and Paulino, though an Algarvio and a hothead drunk, had never struck Teresinha either. With Matilde being in Canada on an expired tourist visa, working illegally as a domestic, this little malice could cost them their future here. When the cruiser door closed with Matilde inside, Rogerio knew he needed to call Zé Menezes, the fixer who had transformed his tourist visa into a six-month work permit and sold him Matilde’s Lisbon-Toronto plane ticket. But even Zé Menezes couldn’t always help with police complications.

As Rogério surreptitiously slipped inside to make the call, he passed the stereo in the front room where the record still spun, needle popping annoyingly at the end of the groove. Rogério stepped into the parlour to replace the turntable arm in its cradle, fearing the mechanism was damaging itself like a millwheel grinding without grain. As he lifted the needle arm off the record he was struck by a thought. He moved the needle to the outer edge of the spinning disc and dropped it gently on the first groove in the black vinyl. A loud pop, and the first guitar notes of “Tudo Isto E Fado” trilled from the speakers. Rogério’s rough finger tapped the needle gently and bumped it a quarter inch across the vinyl. After a scratch, the voice of Amália spun a soulful lament about the iniquities of existence and the unique ability of fado to capture them.

The fado reverberated through the house spilling into the street. Through the front window Rogerio saw the music having a calming effect on Paulino. The cops, however, were visibly perplexed by the insertion of Amália’s explication of fado into their investigation. Constable Boyle slowly took his right foot off the porch step, as if entranced by Amália’s voice and needing both feet on solid ground. Rogério stepped back to the porch hoping not to regret foregoing the opportunity to make his phone call.

“And what would be that . . . music?” The older cop enquired of no one in particular, perhaps of the gods of music themselves.

“Well sir, that is Amália Rodrigues!” Chico explained, relaxing his grip on Paulino’s arm. “The greatest singer of fado in the world.”

“And what is this ‘fah-doo’ of which you speak, son?”

“It is the sad happy music of Portuguese people,” Rogério postulated in newly minted, meticulously over-pronounced, English.

Constable Boyle listened as trilling Portuguese guitars and Amália’s voice delineated the human condition. Though in Portuguese, the song engendered familiar sentiments in him. He could recognize something universal, akin to musical elegies like “Molly Malone” or “Polly Vaughn” he’d heard sung in Armagh streets and pubs before embarking to a more prosperous (and less contested) land. Perhaps this song too, was about a fishmonger’s ghostly daughter hawking cockles and mussels, or some poor maiden mistaken for wildfowl by her lover hunting in twilight. Whatever it was about, it was assuredly a woman’s deep lament, almost a wail. Struck by another insight as Amália sang, Constable Boyle asked: “And would you Portugal peoples have been playing this ‘fah-doo’ earlier this afternoon?”

Paulino, indignant at the very question, said: “Of course we were playing fado this afternoon. It’s a festa day. Why else I need a record player for?”

Constable Boyle turned and strolled down the flagstone path to the cruiser. He said something to Constable Kirkwood who stood by, nightstick in hand. Whatever Constable Boyle said to his partner caused him a fleeting quizzical expression. Constable Boyle opened the cruiser door and beckoned the women to exit with exaggerated courtesy, like he was their chauffeur.

Constable Kirkwood’s expression transformed from confusion to anger as Teresinha and Matilde hurried back into the house. In fuming, frustrated silence, he installed himself in the passenger side of the cruiser and slammed the door.

Constable Boyle went around to the driver’s side and opened the door. Loud enough for all the neighbours to hear, he called out: “Turn your fah-doo down a bit, gentleman. Your neighbours aren’t much fond of your sad happy music. Otherwise, Happy Canadian Day to you all.”

With that he got into the cruiser, turned off the spinning red light, and gently pulled away from the curb.

When the police car was out of sight, Teresinha and Matilde, though still puzzled, mutually sighed their relief at the front parlour window. Canada was a strange place. The houses are warm in winter, but unbearably hot in summer. One moment you are dutifully cleaning your kitchen, next moment you are terrified in the back of a police car. Then, just as quickly, you are free and everything is normal again with no explicable reason. Thank God police here travel in mutually regulating pairs.

Paulino, fuming at the spurious intrusion of authority and unsure who merited his wrath for it, decided to benefit the whole block. He marched angrily into his living room and cranked the volume on his new Hi-Fi to its limit. Now all his neighbours would experience the glory of fado, full volume, throughout the afternoon.

There was a momentary, disturbing blast of Amália holding an impossibly high, quivering note before the speakers blew, thereafter emitting only a low static hum.

[1] bastards

[2] “Persecution”

[3] “All of This is Fado (Fate)”

[4] Portuguese expression similar to In Sh’Allah meaning hopefully or used interchangeably with Se Deus Quiser meaning God willing.

[5] “Who Knows”

[6] longing, nostalgia

[7] a yellow coconut tart with a cherry on top

[8] A 26 year old agricultural worker from Baleizão, Alentejo, shot dead by Portuguese police for participating in a work stoppage to achieve a wage increase.