I began the (European) summer of 2018 working in Windhoek, where I helped out in a boarding house in exchange for accommodation.
I arrived in Namibia after spending half a year in Venezuela. In Caracas I covered the disaster caused by the so-called ‘Socialism of the 21st Century’, until I quarrelled with my employers over their complacency about companies doing business with Maduro, and decided to quit.
I went to Windhoek looking for adventure and to savour that fragrance of freedom and remote civilization that I have only found in southern Africa. But I found myself under the orders of the Cuban-Namibian daughter of communist apparatchiks, and sharing a room with German youths filled with a childish fascination for Africa. I didn’t like it, and after a month I realized it was pointless to remain in Windhoek.
A comfortable life awaited me in Spain, but I wanted to stay in southern Africa, a very special part of the world that I had got to know – before moving to Venezuela – while working as the Johannesburg-based correspondent for Spanish media. It was during my time in Joburg that I met Maria Amélia Jordão.
On a cold afternoon in 2016, I was driving through the southern suburbs looking for Portuguese people to help me document the origins of Nando’s when I saw a Portuguese restaurant I didn’t know. Its name was O Cantinho da Avó. I parked nearby and rang the bell. Maria Amélia opened the door and ushered me in.
I explained what I was searching for and she wrote my number down in the small notebook in which she kept her contacts. She promised to call with the phone number of Nando’s founder, Fernando Abreu. Abreu, it turned out, had emigrated overseas long ago. In the end, she could not find his number – but I gained an excellent restaurant to lunch at, and, most importantly, a good friend and, I would know later, an incredibly generous and loving grandmother.
When, soon after leaving Venezuela, I became obsessed with returning to southern Africa, I wrote to all my friends in Johannesburg: please let me know if you hear of a job. I met a lot of people during my years in Joburg. Businessmen, academics, well-connected intellectuals. But no one tried to be as helpful as Maria Amélia. She offered to let me come to Johannesburg and live at her place. She sent my résumé around and asked everyone she knew about job openings.
Home for several months
Fast forward to my days in Windhoek, and a chilly evening spent watching a World Cup game (Russia, 2018). I wanted to leave the hostel and the city, but did not want to go back to Spain. So I wrote to Maria Amélia. Could I come to Johannesburg and stay with her? Of course, she said. A couple of days later I boarded an Air Namibia plane to OR Tambo. She and her granddaughter Micalea picked me up and took me to what was to be my home for several months.
Clean sheets and warm food awaited me in Maria Amélia’s beautiful house in Glenvista. Life with her seemed natural and easy from the very first day. We tacitly agreed on our programme together and hit the ground running in adjusting our routines. Besides personal respect and affection, we shared a certain way of doing things. Like my family and virtually everyone else in my home village in eastern Spain, Maria Amélia did not sit down to lunch without laying the table, and she did not eat without bread. She was always dependable and consistent. She never broke a promise, or changed plans without notice.
Every morning after breakfast, we’d leave for the restaurant before eight o’clock. Some days we went shopping at Spar or Rio Douro, the Portuguese shop on Kenilworth’s Main. I would drive, push the trolley in the shops, and help unload the shopping with the staff at the restaurant. When the cooking got under way, I would sit near the entrance to read or write on my laptop.
At times I borrowed her car and drove to town to conduct interviews or meet friends. On these occasions, she’d always be sure the tank was filled, and never let me pay a cent for the fuel. Her only condition was that I be back at the restaurant before three in the afternoon, when she’d pack up to go home.
I learned a few things, living with her. One of them was Jesucristo yo estoy aquí, the song in Spanish by Brazilian singer Roberto Carlos, which she always played in the car. I also learnt about her life – a life marked by the bloody political history of the 20th century, of a Portuguese of Africa. She was born in Portugal and grew up with her father in Mozambique. Years later, when she was already an adult, she and tens of thousands of fellow Portuguese were expelled by the Marxist government that took over, and ruined, the country.
Ghosts of loss
At a very young age, when Maputo was still a clean and beautiful city and was called Lourenço Marques, she got married to a man with whom she would share everything – until his tragic death in the early 2000s. On a rainy day in Johannesburg, a truck failed to brake and struck his car. She opened the restaurant after the tragedy, to escape the ghosts of loss that revisited her on every anniversary. Years later she would lose her only son. The pain of their deaths tormented her almost daily.
Every year for Christmas she baked hundreds of bolos rei, a traditional cake, for those in need in the Portuguese community. She displayed the cakes proudly in the restaurant, until someone from the Academia da Ferrugem collected them for distribution.
Along with her generosity and enthusiasm, she was also brave. She was robbed at gunpoint several times, both at home and at the restaurant, but never let fear undermine her independence. One night, the restaurant alarm triggered an alert on her cellphone. We dressed quickly, jumped into the car and set off for Turffontein. On the way, I wondered what we would find. I was scared.
She was determined to deal with the situation. And how could I, a male and much younger than she, show any sign of hesitation? It was a chilly winter night, and pitch-dark in the deserted, crime-ridden streets of Turffontein. And yet, that frail elderly woman, suffering from a severe pain in the back, jumped out of the car to speak to the security guards. After a few seconds, she sighed in relief: it was a false alarm.
On another night, a car overturned on the curve by her house. She put on a gown and rushed to help those in the vehicle. They were not injured, but she stayed out there, comforting them until a relative came.
Shrewd
Past encounters with violent crime made her distrustful of young black men entering the restaurant. Although I never told her, I judged her for it. She was shrewd and realized it. She didn’t blame me, and one day said casually: ‘Scalded cats have enough with cold water.’ I still see this as an example of the tactful intelligence she brought to bear with those who loved her.
Living with her, I also learnt to speak Portuguese, and to love and understand a community in which I always had a sense of home in South Africa. At her restaurant I met Portuguese people from Mozambique, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Swaziland, but also from Madeira, Lisbon, Porto, Setúbal and all the corners of metropolitan Portugal.
I got to know and became a reader of A Voz Portuguesa and O Século, the two rival community papers. With the telenovelas playing on Telemundo as ambient sound, I spent countless sobremesas – Spanish for after-lunch chats –with the customers. They often developed into lasting friendships.
One of these friends was the late Eugen, a retired ballet dancer who came every Wednesday for his meal and a carafe of wine – which he took forever to finish, to Maria Amélia’s despair. Ever gracious and well-meaning, Mister Gin, as she called him, liked to bring her presents and plants, some of which I let die one October (she was in Portugal on holiday, and I failed to fulfil my duty to water them).
At the Cantinho I also met Beto, a pillar of the Portuguese Forum, his colleague Américo and a jovial Mozambican man who knew Eusébio and had played for Benfica. I also have warm memories of Betty and Rose, the two Zimbabwean women who worked with her until the end. And of Dona Isabel, who has also passed away, and many other customers of English, Irish, Portuguese or Afrikaner descent who found at the Cantinho a piece of the orderly and detail-devoted southern Africa they had helped build throughout their lives.
For all this, and many other things I don’t have space to describe, I will always be grateful to Maria Amélia Jordão, who died of coronavirus in June this year. I loved and admired her greatly.
[Image: https://www.facebook.com/O-Cantinho-da-Av%C3%B3-482299082197255/]
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