How difficult can be for a woman to keep up with everything that is happening daily around her! In my opinion, most of the housewives should be truly subversive. Some of them should be so defiant as Che Guevara.
The other day I heard on TV about such kind of a woman. She was a poor Brasilian, half illiterate, doing the usual housewife routine and also keeping a small laundry business to maintain her family. She used spending her spare time watching TV soaps, yet, when she returned to her sink, her head was not playing around the love scenes she had just witnessed. She was creating scenes of her own! Sometimes she was so moved by her stories that tears would fell over the clothes she was scrubbing.
Ideas kept coming and she started to recognize the good ones. She took some coins of her precious monthly income to buy a pen and paper. When she started to write, she never stopped again. Today, one of her novels is being adapted to theatre but her dream still is to see one of her stories end up as a TV soap.
Isn’t she incredible? Isn’t it marvelous the way such simple woman can elevate herself from her humble condition and turn the tide?
Seabell has a friend who also likes to write. Her name is Lisa and she has a curious story, worth to write about: she learned to read and write very little and today she still writes, but she doesn’t want to become a writer. She just likes to express herself through writing. Most of the time, she writes and erases everything shortly after. Reading her story is to understand her motives.
She went to boarding-school with Seabell. One day, when she was eleven years old, she told her colleagues what happened to her. During holidays, she stayed at her grandmother house. She wrote a text mixing poetry and prose, about a teenage girl who slowly was becoming blind. The words talked of her despair and how she dealt with the situation. She sent her writing to a newspaper and waited.
During the next days, she waked up very early due to the expectation. The room was still pitch black when she started to read old books in the darkness, because she didn’t want to disturb her aunt sleeping in the next bed. She could read two hours in a row before there was proper light to read.
One day she went out with her family, and at a certain point she fainted. When she waked up, she couldn’t see a thing. She was blind like her character! She was rushed to the doctor for exam and diagnostic of a strange kind of blindness. The doctor also gave her good advice and medication, before she returned home.
That same afternoon, someone brought from the street the newspaper with her work printed. Everybody could read it except for her. She sat silently and cried a lot in a mix of perplexity and joy. She still remembers the pleasure of listening to her aunt reading the words she had designed in her own head.
Only days later she could read everything by herself, when her temporary blindness disappeared leaving her with a slight case of short-sightness. Even today, Lisa can recite by heart some passages of her first published work, and she recalls the size of the characters used for the title or the position occupied on the page.
After this first try, she went again on a period of disperse writing and destroying. At seventeen she moved to a new place with her parents, brothers and sisters, to start a new life. This was a major set back for her, because she was leaving behind good friends and a fiancé.
For a couple of months, she and her family lived in a small hotel, before they could move to a proper house and start school. As she had time for herself, she decided to write a book. During days she played with a couple of ideas in her mind. Suddenly, the words came with ease and she started to write feverishly. Her story was a love story, inspired by her romantic ideas of love and the fate of a very young maid Lisa had when she was a child, who disappeared from her life because her father sold her to a man.
Her female character had 13 years old and came from a very poor family working the fields from the first lights of dawn to the sunset. One day her father called her and presented her to a young man.
“Here is your future husband!”, her father said.
She soon moved to her new family house, while her father received cattle and the protection of an important farmer of the region. Her new family was composed of a forty something widower and two sons: one with 16 and the other with 19 (her husband).
Her misfortune started the day she first entered the big farmhouse and saw her father-in-law. She was in love with him, but she didn’t know it at the beginning. While she was waiting the ceremony of marriage, she only could see that she loved everything about that man: his strength, his loyalty, his love for the land and for his family.
She realized her feelings the moment the priest told the final words. She felt such sadness that the true surfaced like a deep sigh. She started then a strange period of her life: loving the father and running away from the son, her husband. However he had other ideas in mind for her. Being a strong young man, used to the roughness of country life, he waited far too long. That night he would have her, with or without her consent…
My friend Lisa was at the hotel balcony writing the painful and difficult rape scene, still undecided about the girl’s fate (should the father-in-law save her from the agony or should it happen?), when she was interrupted by a male voice.
“What are you always writing?”
“A book”, she answered.
“How interesting! Can I read it?”
“I will think about”, she answered in a relaxed tone of voice.
The man asking to read the first pages of Lisa’s book was a middle age man she knew from the hotel where she and her family provisory stayed. He was married to a beautiful woman and they formed such a nice couple that everybody loved them, including Lisa’s parents. Due to all this, she didn’t felt very surprised with his familiarity when he just took the pages and told her promptly:
“You don’t have to think about. I will read it in a couple of days and I swear that I will give you my honest opinion. It is not the first time that an author asks me to read his book.”
The next days, my friend used to enter in the dinning room and ask the man about her book or his opinion. He always answered with a subterfuge.
One day, she was having lunch with her family when he approached their table and gave her the pages she had written, explaining that he would comment later. Very happy to have her book back, my friend asked permission to put it in the room she shared with one of her sisters.
She went quickly upstairs. As it was only a matter of leaving the pages on a table, she didn’t even close the door behind her. The moment she was putting down the pages, she was violently pushed to one of the beds. Lisa could perfectly see his face, because he wasn’t hiding it. She told me that she remembered her fiancé, and she fought like hell to escape from her aggressor. I think it was the first time she fought for something so hard.
The fact that she fought saved her from being raped, not because she was strong enough but because it gave her time, and time can be sometimes the most precious thing. In her case, the fight gave time for her sister to come up after her and arrive at a crucial moment.
“What the hell is happening here?”, she asked. “I suspected of something when I saw you leaving your table so shortly after my sister went up!”
Then happened a marvelous thing: Lisa’s sister gave two big slaps on his face and he left without a word. My friend had escaped from a terrible fate, but her relieve was only partial.
“Once again”, she emphasized, “I was experiencing the same fate of a character I had created!”
It was at this moment that she turned to me and asked almost pathetically:
“In my place, would you write again?”
I don’t remember what my answer was, but even today her question still deserves a reflection. If you were on her shoes, would you write again?
Sometimes the best in a row of thirty days can be selected due to a series of simple events. There was no party and no travel in this day, but I will not forget it for sure. TD was in Mozambique, what usually makes me feel a lot better. He and girlfriend had lunch with us, and I convinced him to go out to have dinner with girlfriend and her colleague arrived from Switzerland.
Posted by seabell 
Yesterday we had our Sunday lunch at Costa do Sol. We go there at least once a month and, as far as I can see, it was a first of October. It was windy as usual, but don’t get me wrong. With temperatures up to 40ªC, wind is more like a blessing than a curse.
Posted by seabell 
Posted by seabell 
JP started yesterday a long journey that will keep him away from Africa during the next three months. First he flew from Durban to Johannesburg, after he departed to Amsterdam in the company of a different group of divers from the one that worked with him in Mozambique. JP is also familiar with this group, because they have been working together for some time. From Amsterdam he is flying to Houston, in Texas, and from Houston to his base in Lafayette-LA.
The group of divers has been in Durban and, as far as I know, they are rather happy with the work going down there. JP announced that he is going to USA at the end of the month, but before he will visit us again. Seabell will get another tender goodbye kiss and I suppose that he has other interests to come back just for two days! Who knows?
