Um saco de Dollars
By Carmelinda Scian
Pai didn’t leave his beloved home for political reasons. Yes, in 1957 the government of the iron-fist dictator, Antonio Oliveira Salazar, continued to be the source of nightmares for those who misbehaved, those who spoke out of turn, who didn’t bother to pay attention to who was listening, but most of us learned from an early age not to discuss politics, poverty, or the wretched state of general living conditions with anyone. Who could be trusted? I watched Pai walk away from us one morning, tears in his eyes, unusual hugs–he wasn’t a hugging man–but a scant smile promising hope. He carried a brown suitcase bought second-hand and a pocketful of escudos borrowed on a handshake from Senhor Povoas, the one wealthy man in town. My mother, seven-year old brother, Manelito, and me were left behind for, what was to be, two or three years. I’ll make um saco de dollars, he said,come back, and we’ll never have to worry about a thing. Good intentions, surely, a dream as old as humanity, but life, feelings, circumstances, often dole out decisions contrary to plans.
He was thirty-one years old. The cork factory in Montijo, where he’d worked for eleven years, had been reducing the workweek to three days for over a year. Strikes and protests only resulted in men being brutally beaten and jailed. Once, a foreman was shot. We weren’t as desperate as many others. We had a house, small, but it was our own and, since there were no real-estate or personal taxes, no electricity or running water in the house, there were no major bills to pay. Moreover, the ample garden produced enough tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, beans, kale, potatoes and carrots to keep us well fed, chickens provided eggs and a canja de galinha, if someone got sick, rabbits were meat, and the pig, once fattened and sold at the Feira do Pinhal Novo on Sundays brought in cash for medicines and other necessities.
There’s Got to be a Better Way
But, sometime in 1954, Pai woke one morning and said to my mother, There’s got to be a better way. He contacted a man in Montijo with a questionable reputation, who promised him a safe passage to Brazil. Money was borrowed from my grandfather next door to pay the man, bald head, long black moustache framing thick lips, uttering, Brazil! Brazil!
Pai waited; Brazil’s fortunes dwindled. Next was Venezuela. More money borrowed from my grandfather for the man with the black moustache. Meanwhile, a large poster inviting workers to emigrate to Canada appeared on the doors of the City Hall in Montijo.
Pai applied. After all, he wasn’t a stranger to leaving his home behind and settling in an unfamiliar place. Our family was from Algarve, generations of tilling the same small plots of land, on both my mother’s and father’s side (they were neighbours), foraging a living from that infertile, rocky, red soil growing mostly almond, olive, fig, and carob trees. Feeding a family was difficult. When word piggybacked on a breeze made its way to Algarve that Montijo offered plenty of work in its many cork factories, my parents and maternal grandparents packed their belongings and moved to Afonsoeiro, the inchoate bairro at Montijo’s hedge offering affordable land. My grandfather had learnt brick laying and built our homes.
A Chicken Farm in Nova Scotia
The Canadian Immigration sent my father to a chicken farm in Nova Scotia just outside Halifax. What did he know? It was early March, still cold, the farmer gave Pai a snow-jacket, earmuffs, and gloves. After two months of feeding chickens and placing eggs in cartons he wrote that he couldn’t eat the food cooked by the farmer’s wife. Just the smell of the hotdogs, hamburgers, meatloaf, canned beans and canned peas made his stomach turn, reminding him of the foodstuff he used to get from the Municipal dump in Montijo and cook for the pigs. He managed to eat the mashed potatoes and for protein he stole eggs, pricked a little hole at each end, and swallowed the whole raw egg.
One day the farmer took Pai to Halifax to check out the new Sobeys supermarket. There, he ran into another Algarvio, the man sporting a cap with the coat-of-arms symbol of our flag.
É Pá, the man said, you don’t make money working on an egg farm. No, no, you need to go to Montreal or Toronto and work in construction. There you make money. Toronto is better, they speak English, better for your children, more opportunity for them. In Montreal they speak French. Not so good. I’m leaving soon.
Pai did leave soon, not realizing that he was breaking his immigration contract but the farmer didn’t stop him and paid him for the days worked. Perhaps he’d found out about the missing eggs.
Sousa’s Bar
In Toronto, Pai found the house on Major Street, the address scribbled in pencil on a torn piece of a cigarette box given to him by the Algarvio he’d met in Halifax.
The rooming house was owned by a Portuguese couple from Caldas da Rainha and Pai shared a small attic room with another Portuguese man but the landlady did his laundry and cooked his meals. Pai gained back his weight eating bacalhau with batatas cozidas, sardinas assadas, soupas de feijão, and guizados.
He’d arrived on a Friday afternoon. On Saturday the owner, Carlos, who later became a good friend, took him to the Jewish Market, a few blocks in old Toronto, running north and south from College to Dundas streets, and east and west from Spadina Avenue to Bathurst Street where Jews immigrating from Europe before WWII had settled and opened businesses.
At the corner of Nassau and Bellevue Streets was the only Portuguese bar, where the handful of Portuguese immigrants in Toronto congregated.António Sousa owned the bar, a small place serving vinho, aguardente, and fiambre sandwiches in papo secosfrom Lisbon Bakery at the corner of Augusta Avenue and Nassau Street, the first and only Portuguese bakery, then, offering authentic Portuguese bread and the traditional pasteis de nata. At Sousa’s bar, one could also get olives, small sardines and carapaus in oil imported by Sousa who partnered with Correia to bring Portuguese foods across the Atlantic. The bar was a homecoming. Here, Pai found companionship and freedom to speak without fear of the PIDE, Salazar’s secret police, though there were whispers that a too friendly man hanging around the bar might be an Informer. In this home away from home, Amalia Rodrigues serenaded men’s saudades of their loved ones, a tear or two falling into copos de vinho and discreetly wiped away by calloused hands from their back-breaking work in construction. Stories of returning home, once the saco de dollars was made, lulled away Saturday and Sunday afternoons.
Hey, You Got Job For Me?
The next project for Pai was finding work. Having grown up in a country where social programs weren’t even a thought, the notion of welfare was as foreign to Pai and other immigrants he met, as the sound of English, or the sight of women smoking on the street with rollers in their hair. Back home, only men smoked, even the putas from the brothel in Afonsoeiro refrained from smoking in public.
On Sunday, Carlos taught Pai to say, Hey, you got job for me? Pai scribbled the words on a piece of paper. With that in his pocket and Carlos’ rudely drawn map on a napkin on how to get to King Street, where the big construction projects were taking place, and a chunk of bread and chouriço packed in a paper bag by Carlos’ wife, Pai walked to King and Yonge Streets early Monday morning to save on carfare.
He stoped at the first construction site, Hey, you got job for me? No. He smiled and went on to the next site, Hey, you got job for me? No. And, no. And, no. And, no…When he got to Spadina Avenue, marking the end of the construction sites on King Street, he stopped smiling and thought, I have to get a job, $50.00 to my name, a wife and two children to feed back home and the debt to pay to Senhor Povoas.
He sat on the sidewalk curb, ate his bread and chouriço, and thought. And thought…When he finished eating, he stood up quickly, as if ejected from the ground, and hurried back to Yonge Street to start all over again, Hey, you got job for me?
Paisano, the Italian foreman said at the original site,You here before, no? He pointed his index finger at his eye and then at Pai. Pai understood and smiled.
Sei Italiano? The foreman asked.
Português,Português, sou Português.
Oh, Portoghese, va bene. Then the foreman signalled to Pai to follow him and handed him a shovel and a hardhat. He pointed to his own boots, making Pai understand that he needed to buy proper construction boots.
Pai told this story for years with little alteration.
Loneliness
The pay was good, Pai had never seen so much money for a day’s work, and Pai wasn’t afraid of work. Being a farmer’s son he was familiar with his body crying for rest at the end of a hard work day when every muscle in your body screams at you.
His savings were growing in his Royal Bank account at the corner of College Street and Spadina Avenue where a cashier was Portuguese. Every Friday afternoon a line up of Portuguese labourers counted on her kind words, Boa tarde, vai tudo bem? Five words momentarily making the men feel at home.
But the money in the account wasn’t near the saco de dollars needed for Pai to return home and improve our lives, the savings not growing at the same rate as his loneliness and his tiredness of living with other men in rooming houses.
Two years or so after Pai’s departure from Afonsoeiro, my mother, Manelito and I arrived one cold night on November 12, 1960.
First Portuguese Canadian Club
Pai had rented a furnished flat on the second floor of 45 Kensington Avenue (the house is still there).My mother complained about the cold, the greyness of the sky, the dark brick houses, the foreign people speaking strange languages, and the tasteless fruit and vegetables. Only the dances at the First Portuguese Canadian Club on the second floor over a store on Augusta Avenue made my mother smile, made us all smile, as we danced away the night to familiar songs played by four or five men who found time to practice in the evenings after a hard working day. The mickey of whiskey in Pai’s suit pocket–the club having no liquor licence–was passed around.
Whenever my mother cried and complained about this cold and strange country, Pai said, It’s only for a while. He sent money to my grandfather to oversee the building of a second-storey house and a block of housing units and rental store-fronts in Pinhal Novo (near Afonsoeiro), where he could retire and make a living from the rental income.
But time passed, asking no permission and no warning, either.
The Dream Was Never Our Own
Pai rented a flat on Borden Street where we bought our own furniture, a year later, we bought a house on Euclid Avenue with tenants upstairs, then 1969 found us living in a new back-split in Mississauga. My brother and I embraced the language of this new country, its music, its culture, and obtained Canadian citizenship. You see, the dream of returning to Portugal with um saco de dollars was never ours. My parents never even visited the properties in Pinhal Novo. Everything was later sold.
The idea of returning home, as years passed, became muddled, so distant, Pai and my mother forgot they’d ever entertained it. Little remains today to remind us of the hub of Portuguese existence in the 1950’s and 60’s in was then known as the Jewish Market. Today bohemian and hipster cafes, trendy restaurants, appropriated the area, now fashionably known as The Kensington Market.
Click to listen and watch the conversation with Carmelinda Scian about her family’s immigration story
