She, Teresa
Her name is Teresa.... Teresa
Salgueiro.... Maria Teresa Salgueiro. She was born in Amadora, a
small city near Lisbon and she has become the living symbol of
Portugal, in the way we must consider it, apart from the Expo,
from the bridges and the roads.
She is the voice of Madredeus, she is its
soul, its spirit, its beauty. A lot of things have been written
about her and Madredeus, but nothing has been said. For
this reason I’m about to write nothing, but with great
passion and satisfaction.
Now that I have to try to say something,
the pen stops, paralized, while the white paper become canvas for
her portraits.
The mind explodes with words without
meaning that crowd, getting one on the other in a Tower of Babel
done in order to reach her voice. Voice, voice that arrives as
the completion of a vain thought, destroying the certainties of a
scientific mind.
Her name evokes a music; the one that her
voice will sustain.
Maria.... an ancient name open in
impudent vowels, almost child, vowels that sing an immaculate
serenity, moving in the sounds with the agility and the joy of a
swing
Teresa... ancient name, almost feared for
its bucolic solemnity, fearing to impress a trace of purity on
the one who will have to live in a dirty world. If the first name
is child, this one is adult, almost a whisper, a reflection lying
on soft e, which find a solution in an a of liberation. But, more
than a reflection, I feel it as a murmur, a rustling of
leaves, a flight of the wind which spread this name as a life
seed.
Salgueiro.... is a consequent name,
successive, necessary, right conclusion of that narration started
with two names, of that story, of those sound experiences. It is
a dark name, almost secluded, shy in the society of names, like
those old men that, even if full of gold and platinum of lived
life, roam with the eyes to the earth, guilty of a numerous age.
But, as many of this old men, the glance is dignitous, proud, and
the dresses are made with the colours of the earth, the earth
near by now, which have a color and a warmth that remind us how
much sun beated on it.
So, the entire name, Maria Teresa
Salgueiro, pour in the air and on the paper a life, the birth and
the death, the experiences, the life of a sound, of a word.
As always happen, the name reflects itself
on the person which married, becoming the only necessary and
sufficient explanation of that person.
Her voice, infact, is a contradiction of
coincident ages, a pact of alliance between warlike sounds.
It is young, child and for that, playful
and charming. She narrates the fables that her mother told her
the night before; she narrates them ignoring the tragic messages,
painting the abysses with the green of youth
But it is also mother of that child, that
narrates the fable, knowing the darknesses of it. Difficulties
stroke her like tempests on an ivory ship, white and fragile. But
she live and see in the life the hope created by that
difficulties, masking the preoccupations in order not to frighten
her, in order not to make her grow.
But she is also grandmother and mother of a
mother. And the dark voice narrates events and passions of world
distant in time, with the serenity and wisdom of the one who is
able to see the ending of a cycle, the cycle of life,
understanding the Questions that she vainly made in youth.
And when we listen to that voice we can be
sons, nephews, husbands, parents of it and in this multiplicity
we understand the inevitableness of time.
This is her magic, the magic of Maria
Teresa Salgueiro, her being woman, daughter, girl, wife, lover,
mother, grandmother.
She is all of that for me, and maybe
something more.
This is my gift for Maria Teresa Salgueiro for these crucial days of her life.
Emotional
