Barnacle Love

by Anthony De Sa

  “Oh my, it’s time. Manuel, I saw a church before we came, St. Elizabeth’s, I think.”

  My father nodded.

  He stood up, reached for his wool coat and buttoned it with one hand. We were all shuffling out of the booth, still caught somewhat off guard by his quiet but agreeable nature. We heard the door swing open; curled wisps of snow streamed in as he left.

  The three of us huddled and walked headfirst into the blustering wind. The icy snow pelted our faces. I raised a forearm across my brow and caught the almost ghostly figure of my father walking against the storm. He turned left from Victoria Street onto Clifton Hill, walked in the direction of all the old horror shops and souvenir places that sold pencil sharpeners in the shape of the Maid of the Mist and little Indian dolls with fur-trimmed parkas rimming dark-skinned faces. He would disappear for a moment, then his silhouette would take shape once again through another blast of wind and snow that dragged its nets down the empty road, trawling for scattered garbage: coffee cups, newspapers, leaflets, lost gloves.

  We had dressed for the cold but not for the snow. My mother had wanted to look nice for the weekend. She had worn her black suede heels that she kept in a velour bag with a drawstring and only wore to funerals. She almost tiptoed along the sidewalk, careful of where her feet came down.

  The road descended toward the lip of the gorge and its lookout points with stand-up binoculars, twenty-five cents for five minutes. I could see my father leaning against the thick railing.

  “The church is not here, Manuel,” my mother said. But a gust of wind hit her open mouth, forced her to swallow the frigid air. She turned from him, shielded herself as she pleaded, “My toes, Manuel. They’re frozen.”

  “This is better than the church,” he said as he smiled. He swept his arm over the railing as if slowly casting grass seed. “So beautiful.”

  It was a magical sight; the thunderous roar of the Falls, the mist that crystallized wherever it settled, and the snow, huge snowflakes that now spun and twisted in a gentler wind. It was Christmas Eve and I thought of what the evening had meant two thousand years ago, how everything must have been heightened for Mary and Joseph on the eve of that birth; how, denied a place to stay for the night, the miracle was born.

  When I turned from the railing, my father had moved on, dragging his hand along the thick iron that stood between the tourists and the Falls. He turned to look at us. My sister was a bit farther behind, crouched with my mother, arm in arm, making slow headway against the wind.

  I could hear my father singing something, a fado from long ago about life and love and things lost and all that other crap my family spoke of incessantly. He was walking with purpose, confidently placing one foot in front of the other, certain of where he was heading. We were close to the park by the river where we would often picnic with our family, near the botanical gardens where the women would go with their scraps of tinfoil looking for seeds or samples to pinch and bring home.

  My father stood by a large tree, held his arm high on its thick trunk and leaned against it. I was out of breath when I got to him, only to find soft billowing puffs, slow and controlled, coming from his nostrils. He looked out across the river, to the American side. My mother and sister caught up to us finally.

  “Manuel,” my mother panted, “it’s cold. We need to go.”

  “Is this why we came, to look at a river in the dead of winter? Is this the trip you’ve wanted to give us all your life?” My sister laid into him. She was oblivious to my mother’s tug on her coat.

  My father turned and looked at us. His face appeared raw, and the snowflakes fell on his cheeks and lashes and melted. His mouth widened and his teeth broke through his parted lips.

  As he hummed, his legs began to move as though he were going to do our traditional folkdance of two-stepping and twirls followed by clapping over the shoulder. He slid his fingers into his coat and unbuttoned it in what seemed like a swoop, dropped it over his shoulders onto the film of snow at his feet.

  “Manuel?” my mother whispered.

  He used his toes to wedge the heels of his shoes and took them off. He slipped off his socks and rolled them into little balls, tucked one in each shoe. The white tops of his feet melded with the snow.

  He turned and walked to the shore.

  “Manuel! Are you crazy? Manuel! … Antonio, go get him, filho,” my mother cried.

  But I could not move, remained fixed like the thick trunks that surrounded me. The wind whipped a stray grocery bag and old newspaper against the masts of maples and oaks.

  My sister picked up my father’s shoes, rubbed their supple tongues, and draped his coat over her shoulder. My mother took two steps, reached forward at the same time my father walked onto the ice that rimmed the shore. He looked back. His forehead glowed under the moon’s light. I love him for the man that he can be, I thought.

  My hand darted out of my pocket. I lifted my arm into the air to wave, caught myself holding Mr. Wong’s baby Jesus, all swaddled in lint.

  My father turned away.

  “Every song has a fire in it,” he sang. “A fiery dream that burns.”

  Acknowledgments

  The following works have been invaluable to me: I Sailed with Portugal’s Captain Courageous (National Geographic, 1952); The Lonely Doryman (National Geographic, 1968); Carlos Teixeira and Victor M. P. Da Rosa, ed., The Portuguese in Canada: From the Sea to the City (University of Toronto Press, 2000). I would also like to acknowledge the passionate words and voices of fado singers that keep the tradition alive: Dulce Pontes, Christina Branco, Mariza, Cesaria Evora, and Amalia Rodrigues—it is for you that fado is written.

  Although this book is a work of fiction, inspired by research, relationships and family histories, I have taken liberties with places and people depicted in this book to frame a story. Also, I have simplified the reproduction of a particular Portuguese dialect that was part of my childhood—of my world. If there are any inaccuracies, they are my own.

  To the many people who were instrumental at the start of my writing journey, including Ania Szado, Brad Reed, and Cynthia Holtz. To other writers who provided valuable feedback and encouragement and who helped shape these fledgling stories. Thank you. I would like to acknowledge the editors at the following publications in which portions of this book first appeared: the Dalhousie Review, Descant, Paperplates, and the Nashwaak Review.

  Thanks to David Whiteside, who quietly takes care of everything, and to Emily Shorthouse, who read Shoeshine Boy as an intern at Descant and introduced me to my literary agent, Denise Bukowski, always a tireless guardian of my work—I appreciate everything you do.

  To everyone at Doubleday Canada who has been so generous and supportive, including Martha Leonard, Susan Broadhurst, Terri Nimmo, Kristin Cochrane, Susan Burns, and Nicola Makoway. I’d like to thank Maya Mavjee for her resolute confidence, and especially Martha Kanya-Forstner for her editorial insight, passion and guidance. I am deeply indebted. I’d also like to thank Jane Rosenman, my American editor, for believing in this story and for championing Barnacle Love.

  I would like to thank my sister for our shared childhood and for her understanding, and my family for their strength and courage in a new land.

  Finally, I could not have written this book without the help of my wife, Stephanie. Her love and belief in the stories I wanted to tell inspired me. And to my three sons, Julian, Oliver and Simon, who show me every day that I am loved and blessed.

  BARNACLE LOVE

  The Burden:

  A Note from the Author

  Questions for Discussion

  THE BURDEN

  A Note from the Author

  In 1988 my mother and I traveled to São Miguel, Azores. I had been a boy when we last visited twenty years before. I was twenty-two now. My father had passed away a couple of years earlier. My mother had hoped to return to the Azores to divest herself and our family of land and property that tied us to an unrecognizable homeland. Only then could she fully re
alize a life for herself in Canada. But it was there, through the winding, dusty roads that snaked their way toward my parents’ village of Lomba da Maia that I discovered being Portuguese was in me—something that could not be forced or taught, and could not be so easily severed. I had never felt the connection before. Much of my identity was determined by my parents, who my grandparents were, and the soil that nurtured them.

  Growing up in Toronto with Portuguese parents was defined by living in secret and separate worlds. Most of the clashes, certainly all of my internal conflict, arose from an inability to bridge the great divide between the ethnic culture I inherited and the Canadian culture I felt was my birthright. I lived in two distinct cultural contexts: my Portuguese heritage shrouded behind our front door and my Canadian identity, which I felt most comfortable in the minute I closed our front gate behind me.

  As our taxi drove into the village, a plume of swirling dust in our wake, relatives and villagers lined the small road leading to my ancestral home. In their faces I could not help but see those early Portuguese immigrants. My father emigrated to provide a better future for himself and eventually his wife, children, and even parents and siblings. Leaving a family behind must have been difficult, a decision that carried a burden of guilt. For my father, the voyage did not devastate his identity like it had for so many others. He refused to become a stranger to himself and chose to embrace his new life in Canada. And as I got out of the taxi to greet a family I did not know, I was struck by their generosity and welcoming spirit. It was at that moment that I could not help but think that my father must have been haunted by some sense of loss, that his choice had in effect barred him from claiming his past, a world that no longer existed for him.

  I’m certain he felt confusion and anxiety—the result of being marginalized and alienated. Alone, he was forced to assimilate into English Canada. There was no choice for these early pioneers. He worked on Canada’s national railway and found himself drifting across a vast land with little connection to the place and people he left behind. Although my father often looked back on those days as times of hard work, I believe his wistful reminisces were his attempts at reclaiming the shattered images of what he had left, what he had lost, and what he wanted to reinvent for himself. He lived in an in-between world. Who was he? How could he identify himself?

  We entered a small, whitewashed house that day, located at the end of a road and perched above a cliff that looks out onto an expanse of blue. We stood around a small table in a stifling kitchen, were greeted with hearty hugs and tears. My mother stood out in her floral dress and heels. There was discomfort in her face—an uncertainty in her step. My mother had straddled both worlds: the Old World, with its traditions and customs, and her new world in Canada, which she had forged through marriage with my father. At times, my mother had voiced regret for not achieving “more,” for not seizing the opportunity to go to school in Canada. Like many immigrant parents, my mother was forced to live a necessary illusion. Her life in Canada was defined by a marriage to a man she barely knew. She had simply become my father’s link to a place he had allowed to slip from his fingers. She coped by focusing her energies on her children and “suffered secretly.” Sadly, it became our reluctant inheritance—to carry out unfulfilled dreams as the first generation of immigrants grieved their lost hopes, dashed dreams.

  Barnacle Love is an exploration of both the intended promise and the disappointment inherent in the choices made by a father and the expectations he places on his son. Manuel is any immigrant, every immigrant, always reaching for a dream he cannot have. Intimate and personal, the story of the Rebelo family is the story of the forces that tear many immigrant families apart. At its heart is a story of a boy unwilling to carry the burden of his father’s unfulfilled dreams.

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. How does the author’s writing demonstrate what Manuel is going through, what the world looks and feels like to him? How does the tone and style in the first half, “Terra Nova,” differ from that in the section that follows, “Caged Birds Sing”? Discuss how the switch in narrative voice heightens the reader’s understanding of the central themes.

  2. “The Portuguese call it saudade: a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable. Love affairs, miseries of life, the way things were, people already dead, those who left and the ocean that tossed them on the shores of a different land—all things born of the soul that can only be felt” (page 4). What past feelings, experiences, places, or events now trigger Manuel’s senses and make him remember? Is the indescribable feeling of saudade evident in any other characters? Is this something you have experienced in your own life?

  3. How much responsibility do you think Manuel’s mother, Maria Theresa da Conceição Rebelo, bears for what happens to her son? How much of his behavior is genetically driven, and how much results from his mother’s influence and the circumstances of his upbringing? How does Manuel’s abuse at the hands of a priest contribute to the person he becomes?

  4. What is the significance of the title Barnacle Love? In what ways are each of the central characters bound to tradition? Discuss the difficulties encountered by immigrants trying to preserve their Old World ways in their new land.

  5. Manuel begins his journey with such hope and promise for a new life. The reader is drawn to this man who is filled with the dream of making it in America. What happens to his dream?

  6. “Caged Birds Sing” invites readers into the lives of the Rebelos and finds there both the promise and the disappointment inherent in the choices made by the father and the expectations placed on his son. How does this section develop the theme of freedom?

  7. In literature, it is the intimate unwritten world of a character that is often more intriguing than the words on the page. There is a span of time—almost ten years—between Manuel’s life in Newfoundland and his return with his family to the Azores to bear witness to his mother’s death. What has happened during this time? As readers, can we fill in the gaps in the lives of these characters? Is it even important to know, or is it fair for the author to burden the reader with creating histories based on the reader’s experiences?

  8. The roles of men and women are sharply drawn in Barnacle Love. Discuss what the role of gender is in the novel and how identity is shaped, not only by gender, but also by the settings: the isolated Azores in the middle of the Atlantic, Newfoundland, and a modern city like Toronto. Discuss the ways in which the settings function as characters in the novel and how each of the characters relate to those settings.

  9. Colm Tóibín wrote, “Anthony De Sa moves with skill and ingenuity between folk tale, myth, and narratives of contemporary displacement. The tone is spare and elegiac; the stories are filled with carefully chosen details and sharply drawn characters. They have immense emotional and powerful truths.” Discuss how the author reveals the theme of displacement through the powerful truths of Manuel, Georgina, Terezinha, and Antonio.

  10. In “Mr. Wong Presents Jesus” Antonio asks his mother “So what was his dream?” and she responds “I’m not sure anymore, filho” (page 199). The novel ends with Manuel singing “Every song has a fire in it … a fiery dream that burns” (page 214). The reader is left to contemplate their “dreams.” Is this true for all of us? Do we all dream? Do we ever really know what it is we long for? Discuss your fiery dream.

  Anthony De Sa grew up in Toronto’s Portuguese community. Barnacle Love was a finalist for both the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the 2009 Toronto Book Award. He lives in Toronto with his wife and their three sons.

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