Ten to three

        Although São João (a public holiday in Porto) is my favorite day of the year, I haven't been able to celebrate it lately. Cambridge has a very strong connection to St. John, to whom it dedicated a College and a Chapel, but the St. John of Cambridge – the apostle – is not our São João – the Baptist. Feeling lonely and knowing São João is in such a good company, and because even Saints have their rivalries, St. John has done everything in his power to find academic reasons to prevent me, for the past two years, from celebrating my Saint.

        It was thus by agreement between the two Saints, and not of my own free will, that I stayed in Cambridge on June 23, 2024. It was perhaps the hottest summer day I remember in England. The King's College choir sang the traditional serenade with a crowd watching, young and old, and even the cows peeping in from the distance, everything in perfect harmony: the different tones of voices, the sun's rays reflecting on the gentle ripple of the river, the punts that didn't stop working and seemed to dance melodiously around the choir. In that moment of complete tranquility, I was aware that at that precise time, in Porto, balloons were already being released, and I imagined the smell of sardines, the anxious feeling of responsibility for the balloon fold we choose at the moment it threatens to escape, sucked into the hot volume, the sensation in the hand that the balloon is heating up, someone shouting that we can let it go and, around, the warmth of everyone dancing.

        I expected the memory of São João to hold me, weigh me down, take me out of the present moment, and sadly convince me that it was another place the one where I should be. This awareness, however, passed through me like a very light breeze, a neutral thought, accompanied by the sacrilege of thinking that it was actually good to have stayed, and that I would have missed a lot by not being in Cambridge for that concert. Worse still, I felt that I belonged as much there – as naturally as everyone was involved in the music and nature – as to the festival of my home town.

        The happiness and the sun lingered for a few days, just a few, until parents and grandparents began to arrive in their cars, for a brief farewell after the graduations, surprisingly brief and light for those who are not returning, the contents of the rooms packed into suitcases, and off we go. The feeling of emptiness that fills us when everyone leaves, the cafes and libraries are left without a soul, only the unwavering choir of birds remaining the same, has to serve as a lesson for me, I told myself, to never deposit here, or too much, my heart. It's not for lack of warning, I think, when I glance, bothered, at the book by Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, which I read recently and which tells us that creating roots is the most important need of the spirit, requiring that human beings draw almost all of their spiritual, moral, and intellectual life from the space to which they naturally belong. Other spaces are important only as external influences that make the roots themselves more intense, and should not replace or be confused with the original space, like when a talented painter goes to a museum to confirm their own originality.

        Simone Weil's idea is that the banks of the River Cam, flowing placidly in narrow margins, and the yellow toasted grass, should seem strange to me and confirm in my memory the distinctive and contrasting features of the Atlantic Ocean, the Douro River, and the strong green of Minho. But it's difficult, when we are there, not to belong completely to Cambridge, not to fully merge into nature, while walking in the Grantchester trail. Grantchester is a pre-Roman village that you reach from the center of Cambridge, always following the waterline of the Cam River, very famous for The Orchard, a café once frequented by Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, among others. It also has a very old church and a small series of houses with orchids and gardens, one of which was rented by Rupert Brooke to study for exams, away from the city's confusion. It was also here that Bertrand Russell wrote pages and pages of thesis, which he then had to transport by a horse-drawn carriage to the University, and where Lord Byron bathed, in the part of the river known as Byron’s Pool.

        But as I was saying, it is impossible not to draw all the spirituality from Grantchester when you are in Grantchester. Rupert Brooke used to row in a small boat the three miles from Cambridge to Grantchester. On full moon nights, he knew he was approaching home by the sound of a certain poplar that grew there, whose leaves rustled lightly even on calm nights without any noise. Sheltered from the city, he wrote a letter: “And here I work at Shakespeare and see very few people... I wander about barefoot and almost naked, surveying nature with a calm eye. I do not pretend to understand nature, but I go on very well with her in a neighborly way. I go on with my books, and she goes on with her hens and storms and things, and we’re both very tolerant. Occasionally we have tea together.” 

        Even though I am not English, like Rupert Brooke was, I do not believe that the nature of Grantchester welcomes me any less, and that barefoot, swimming in the river, on an evening among friends, I am not fully immersed and mixed with Cambridge.

        One of the most beautiful poems about Grantchester was written by Rupert Brooke from a café in Berlin, Café des Westens. I imagine him looking out the café window and thinking about how Cambridge was at that moment. The poem is a marvel:

        "Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand / still guardians of that holly land? / (…) And sunset still a golden sea / From Hastingfield to Madingley? / (...) Oh, is the water sweet and cool, / Gentle and brown, above the pool? / And laughs the immortal river still / Under the mill, under the mill? / (...) Oh! Yet stands the church at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?”

        Grantchester does not seem strange to me. Simone Weil would like me to evoke Porto when I am strolling around in Grantchester– and I do. I think of the swans in the Porto city park whenever I see a swan in Cambridge. But the opposite is also true. I will remember the River Cam when walking in the Porto city park, and it is likely that, one day, my distant gaze, seen from outside a café window, will be fixed on Cambridge, not on an external city, and therefore real – as it is – but on Cambridge as it was, in my version of “ten to three,” where I still am, where I shall be, simultaneously. How can I be a painter who looks at a painting in a museum and appreciates the one at home, when I was the one who painted both?