Chapter One

The bus arrives right on time: 4:10pm. 

As Clara exits, the driver directs her to the underbelly where her bags are stored. Her phone rings. It’s Francisco. She answers while attempting to fling her cumbersome bag over her shoulder without losing balance.

“I’m here,” he says, “Right behind you.”

Clara spins around, looking for someone she’s never met before.  

“No—” he gently urges, his English accent twinged with a variety of other ingredients, “Not behind you. Behind the bus.”

Sure enough, a red Peugeot van is parked on the other side of the bus. The man in the driver’s seat lowers his phone, opens his door, and waves. She walks over. 

“Bom dia,” Francisco says in a low voice while sliding her duffel bag off her shoulder and giving her a kiss on her cheek. Scruff from his unshaven, semi-gray facial hair irritates her cold, smooth skin. 

“Bom dia,” she responds, “Como você está?” her American accent infiltrating its way straight through the Portuguese.

“With me you don’t need to be so formal. We’re cousins, after all. Just ask me: tudo bem?” His inflection raises at the end and Clara does as instructed. 

“Okay…tudo bem?”

“Si. Tudo bem. ‘Brigado.” Francisco claps his hands together abruptly, startling Clara. “Ready? We go!” 

He opens the driver’s side door and gestures for Clara to hop in. She does. As she buckles her seat belt, Francisco enters in a flurry. He squeezes a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, bent from a brief existence in tight jeans, pulls one out and sticks it between his lips like a piece of candy while removing the parking brake and putting the van in reverse. As they leave the bus station, Francisco digs in the center console for his lighter. He finds it and rotates the metal wheel until click, click, a spark of fire and the end of his cigarette glows red.

“You don’t mind if I smoke?” he asks her, rolling down his window and exhaling a puff of smoke that flies right back in.

Clara shakes her head no. 

“I don’t mind,” she tells him.

“Great. Well—welcome! First time to Portugal?”

Clara shakes her head no again. “Second. I’ve been to Lisbon before,” she tells him.

”Ah, okay, but it is your first time here, to Nazaré?”

“Yes.” 

The van zooms around a round-about and climbs up a hill. So far the scenery isn’t much different than what accompanied Clara’s bus ride out of the city: old buildings, worn and dried paint, uncreative architecture but the ever-pervading sense of simplicity and quaintness. Life slows down out here. This for sure is evident. 

Rows of red-roofed homes fill the horizon as the van climbs higher up the side of a cliff to the upper part of the village. Past these homes is the Atlantic Ocean. Blue and giant and sparkling in the last light of a clear, winter day. The bleak weariness of what they drove past disappears and transforms into an enchanting, centuries-old fishing village. The scenery stops her breath halfway in her throat— it is beyond beautiful below.

“Why do you never come to visit your family’s village before?” 

Francisco’s question snaps Clara from her reverie and surprises her with its sudden interrogatory tone. 

Why has she never been to her family’s village before? Her grandfather was born here. Raised here. Fed here. Clothed here. Bathed here. Her mother’s father and his father and his father before him were all fishermen whose bones and blood and watery DNA were designed from the fabric of this place. Her grandfather one day decided to leave this village for the first time in his life and travel alone to Paris. He met a beautiful woman. They fell in love. Made babies—seven of them. They raised them in France. He built a successful restaurant business in Paris. He never returned — for over fifty years — until just a few years ago, after her grandmother died and his children moved away and he had nothing left to love in Paris.

It wasn’t until Clara’s mother, the eldest, while working for Emirates airlines in the 1980s, met Clara’s father, an American, during a long layover in Washington D.C. Several months later, Clara was born in the United States. Raised there. Fed there. Clothed there. Bathed there. And only now as a young adult, a journalist covering stories across different regions of the world, does she find herself at the beginning of the circle again: an old fishing village, once lost but not forgotten, come to put the remains of her deceased grandfather back in the soil from which he came.

“I don’t know,” Clara responds, “the opportunity never arose until now.”

At this, Francisco scoffs. 

“Waiting until family dies to find out where you come from is a hard way to learn.”

Clara wonders what he means by this, but isn’t in enough of a talking mood to inquire further. Besides, she’s hasn’t come for that. She is here for three days—no more, no less—an uninvited stop on her long journey back to Los Angeles from a week spent in Greece working on a story about Syrian migrants making the dangerous crossing by boat. There is rumor that international flights will stop soon on account of a viral infection brewing in China, so her mother thought it best she go as a representative for the family to identify her grandfather’s body and take care of his remains while there was still a chance. In her 23 years, she had never been assigned a duty like this. Clara decided not to overthink it. She loved her grandfather but hadn’t seen him for years. This wasn’t close enough to sting. It was just the way life went, she told herself: death is inevitably woven in-between. Besides, she had just spent a brief but unforgettable week being hardened by the gruesome realities of war. The cruel injustice of where we find ourselves born on the globe. She felt detached to the idea of death. An indifference to it. Though it was her own family member, her grandfather whom she had once loved very much as a little girl, memories of summers spent on his lap learning words in French, it didn’t feel so personal.

Francisco stops the van in front of an old church building. The bell at the top of the tower chimes. The time is 4:30pm. 

“He is inside. You must come with me.”

Obliging, Clara disembarks the vehicle and follows Francisco inside a building off the side of the church. It’s a hospital camouflaged in stone. How long it’s been here she can only guess. The material is withered on its exterior but fundamentally strong from the ground up. She likes walking into a place and feeling through her feet the reliability of the ground beneath her and the sturdiness of the walls around her. That is Europe, after all—old yet timeless.

“It is a very small village,” Francisco explains, “our — how do you say? mortuário is behind the hospital. That is where your grandfather is.”

“Mortuary,” Clara corrects.

“Si.”

Francisco opens the doors at the end of a hallway and at the center of the cold, stone room sits a metal table with the outline of a frail body under a white sheet. An elderly man in glasses is writing something down behind a desk on the left side of the room. He looks up once they enter, coughs to clear his throat, grabs a clipboard with papers, and rises to greet Francisco and Clara with a firm handshake. Francisco and the man volley back in forth in Portuguese, too fast for Clara to comprehend. The man looks at Clara up and down as if he were searching her clothes and face for information about her she kept pinned like buttons on the outside of her denim jacket. 

He gestures to the table, signifying for her to move closer. As she does, the man removes a white sheet from the head of the body. A shiver runs down Clara’s spine. She suddenly remembers all the dead people she’s seen in her life: a motorcyclist struck by a truck in the middle of the 110 freeway in Los Angeles; a body on a toboggan rushed down the ski slopes in Northern Arizona; a dead newborn baby being carried off the boat in Greece; and now, even more recently, her grandfather. His skinny, shriveled, naked body lying motionless against the cold metal of a mortuary table. His eyes closed. Her memories of him, far and few and scattered across the tapestry of her childhood, rush back all at once. Behind those close lids are warm, brown eyes, full of love and devotion. Underneath this thin sheet is a thin man who didn’t eat more than a meal a day, whose bones stuck out like tree limbs and had callouses on his knees and knots in his back from a lifetime spent bent over in prayer. His hands too, those rugged, rough hands that used to pinch her cheeks and spank her butt when she squirmed and screamed to get out of trouble. Hands that spent eighty years touching, feeling, and holding the world around them. Hands that are now lifeless. Attached to a body that is the same. 

It is her grandfather. What was left of him, that is.

Clara looks up at the man with the glasses. She nods to confirm. 

The man lifts a paper from his clipboard and quickly reads the name, “Hugo Martim da Silva?”

Clara is surprised to hear her grandfather’s Portuguese name which she had never known until now. He was never “Hugo Martim da Silva”, he was either “Jean LeMarc” or papi — a French word for grandfather. She had never heard her grandfather’s name spoken in such robust Portuguese either. With papi words flowed always in French. Never Portuguese. This part of him faded with each year that passed in Paris. What did he leave behind when he left this village she wondered? Why did he come back?

Francisco and the man with the glasses rattle off again in Portuguese while Clara unwinds her thoughts and looks down again at her grandfather’s body. The man in the glasses quickly draws the sheet over his face — out of respect — he tells her in rough English, and Clara distances herself from the table, accepting her final look at him. 

“Clara— Mr. Flores will see that the body is cremated tonight. Tomorrow you will come here and pick up the box of his ashes and remaining belongings. You stay very close to here. I will show you now.”

Clara nods. These decisions have been made. Saying anything else would be of no use.  

—