Words: Irina Chitas
After five days of a trip that had proved too intense — and in which the longing for a city with too many sounds was reaching an unbearable volume — crosswinds prevented me from leaving the island. I was trapped.
I hope this is not too common a practice, I don’t wish it on many of my enemies (perhaps only on a few fascists), but in the face of adversity, I usually dive inside myself. It’s a term I don’t use lightly — this diving inwards — because, along with loneliness, it has several disadvantages. On the other hand, self-inflicted isolation is not without a silver lining: thinking, as the poet said, can be uncomfortable like walking in the rain, but water also washes our eyes so that we can see the clearness of day. In that dive, I saw the island.
It began with a slight hint of despair, this impossibility of getting home imposed by miles and miles of sea. No concrete road where I could cross all these distances, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep. Madeira never seemed so small, and it looked at me from its peaks under the clouds, those places that were once so magical at sunrise, before the noisy tourists with catastrophic drones that scratch the beauty until it bleeds. And Madeira, too, had never seemed so big, and so far away, and so outlandish. How can a piece of land in the ocean be so much. At. The. Same. Time.
The vision of this island as a woman was very clear to me. Woman, me. Woman, she. Woman, hers. Alone, sometimes cradled and sometimes slapped by the waves. Alone, sometimes washed and sometimes abused by the rains. Alone, sometimes embraced, sometimes frozen by the clouds. A relationship with water that is almost toxic, codependent, were it not so consensual: Madeira surrenders to her water, she stretches out meekly on cliff beaches, as if they were not made for humans but only for the warm, passionate kiss between land and sea; she cries with happiness from all the springs that jolt from the mountains, so many that they seem to be emptying all her joys at once; she guides all her children through levada walks to serene waterfalls so cold that they can only serve to purge. Madeira creates hard children, silent children, sombre children. Crushed between the volcano and the sea, without possible escape — like me, were theirs not, by choice, perpetual. Madeira warns them that life is not for the fragile: to remain is possible only in a morose and exuberant existence, where patience is gifted by flowers. Madeira is not too thirsty, she’s not thirsty for the continent, for roads leading to houses in noisy towns; she’s not thirsty because she has water for herself, her room of her own. Madeira is not thirsty because she knows she’s enough, and from this knowledge springs the sweetness of the fruits and the calloused embroidered hands and the happy fish and the salt it preserves. It is she who crosses the winds in the sky so that we cannot leave. So that, when we stay, we know how to drink her in without an agenda. So that, by staying, we know what is enough. So that, by staying, we may be sure that Madeira chose to be an island. And that we choose to return.
