The Sea Never Forgets What We Owe It My grandfather spent…
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The Sea Never Forgets What We Owe It
My grandfather spent his entire life avoiding the sea as if some deep fear lay hidden in his soul, it was something I could never understand. My family is from a traditional fishing village on the coast of Portugal, where, for generations, men fished those waters in long, high-prowed wooden boats that look like they’re cutting the waves as they were pushed into the sea. Everyone in the village knew my grandfather as a quiet man, one of those trained by the oppressive \**Estado Novo* dictatorship to swallow his words and close the curtains whenever the military police passed by in the street. He died last week. In the middle of his old things, inside one of those old metal biscuit tins, I found a black cover notebook. It was his diary from 1965. The year hunger nearly wiped out the Portuguese coast and when the sea, suddenly, fell silent.
According to the entries from January 1965, the fish, all of the sudden, vanished from the coast without warning. The boats would leave at dawn and return at the end of the day with empty, clean nets, not a single sardine on them. After three weeks, hunger began to bring about desperation. My grandfather wrote that the children in the village cried with empty bellies, and the women spent their days in church praying. But on the beach, the atmosphere was cutting, like a knife. The local mayor, terrified that the misery would spawn a revolt and that news of it would reach the government’s ears in the Capital, sent the military police and the dreaded \*PIDE secret state agents to the beach. They controlled the landing. When the fishermen brought the high-prowed boats with empty nets onto the sand, the men in dark raincoats would approach and accuse them of conducting a hidden strike or of concealing the fish to sabotage the regime. The order was clear, they had to go further, into the high seas, where the sea was dangerous and the small boats had no safety.
It was on a Tuesday of thick fog that my grandfather and three other men decided to risk everything. They ventured kilometers from the coast, far beyond the limit where the water changed tone and became a dark abyss. The fog was so thick they could barely see the prow of their own boat. They released the oars to cast the net, and that’s when the silence became too heavy. First, they heard the sound. It wasn’t the normal lapping of waves. It was the sound of water being cut abruptly, as if something huge had broken the surface right beside them and submersed again without making a splash. My grandfather clung to the wooden gunwale. He looked down and, through the gray water, saw the shapes. They looked like sharks in size, but moved with a speed no real fish could possess. They passed under the hull, leaving a trail of phosphorescent foam, and worst of all, they seemed to be circling the boat, violently scaring off the few schools of fish that remained down there.
They returned to land without a single fish in the net, with frozen hands and stomachs that screamed with hunger. On the sand, the PIDE men looked at them with that silent disdain, noting names in a little black notebook, but my grandfather and the others didn't even have the strength to care. That night, hidden in the corner of a dark tavern, far from windows and the eyes of any regime informant, the fishermen finally began to open up. The fear of hunger was being overtaken by a much worse fear. That’s when Old Manuel, an old man who had already lost two sons to the sea years before, told what had happened to him the night before. He had gone out alone, by the light of a kerosene lamp, one of those they used for fishing at night. He said the sea was too calm, like a smoky mirror, when he looked over the side of his boat. Down there, in the darkness of the water where the lamp’s light died, he saw a reflection. It looked like the shimmering, yellowish glint of a cat’s eye reflecting a fireplace's flame, focused directly at him. Old Manuel blinked, thinking it was exhaustion, but when he looked again, the pair of eyes had multiplied. There were dozens of them, motionless, floating just below the waterline, staring at him in the dark. Fish? Not a sight of them. Just those eyes watching, staring him down to his core.
The routine became a dragged out nightmare. Every new attempt to go to sea brought similar reports, and despair spread through the village like fire. That’s when the older women took to the beach. They were the widows, those women the sea had already punished in the past, always dressed in a heavy black that seemed to swallow the daylight. They didn’t care about the police or the mayor’s warnings. They gathered at the water’s edge, on their knees in the wet sand, wooden rosaries in their hands, praying and crying for the lost sons and husbands who died at sea. My grandfather wrote that their wails mixed with the sound of the waves in a terrifying way. They said the air no longer smelled of sea spray, it smelled like a cemetery, and they swore that the water was asking for something the village could not give.
The following Thursday began gray. My grandfather’s boat was about to be pushed into the sea when three PIDE agents appeared, their dark raincoats dragging in the damp sand. They came aggressively, shouting that this was a farce, that the fishermen were hiding the fish in clandestine warehouses to create hunger and revolt against the regime. António, one of my grandfather’s best friends, a burly man who could no longer bear to see his children starve, confronted them. He told them to their faces that if they wanted fish, they should go to sea and freeze to death themselves. The response was brutal. The agents set upon him right there, in front of everyone, pistol-whipping him and kicking his ribs. When they finished beating him, with António already semi-unconscious in the sand, they dragged him and threw him into the boat like a sack of potatoes. One of the PIDE men pointed his gun at my grandfather’s head and said that if they returned without fish, none of them would go back home alive.
The passage to the high seas was a torment. António layed on the floor of the boat, suffering greatly, groaning in pain and spitting blood mixed with vomit because of the blows he had taken to his stomach. My grandfather navigated blindly through the fog that closed over them again like a shroud. When they reached the deepest point, they stopped rowing. The silence of that desert of water was deafening, broken only by António’s weak groans. Staggering, trying to compose himself, he dragged himself to the edge of the boat and leaned over to try to wash his bloody hands and face in the cold water of the sea. The second his blood touched the water, the world seemed to stop.
A sound was heard. It didn’t come from near, but it came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, a strident, high-pitched scream that seemed to echo from the infinite of the sea and rip through the fog itself. My grandfather and the other three men covered their ears, dizzy with the vibration of that monstrous lament, trying to understand where it came from, looking in panic at the gray horizon. They took maybe thirty seconds to compose themselves. When they finally lowered their hands and looked to the boat's edge, António had disappeared. There was no splash, no cry for help, no sound of a body falling into the water. Nothing. Only absolute silence and a perfectly smooth sea.
They began to scream his name in panic, peering into the dark water, but the darkness had swallowed António. It was then that the water began to effervesce. From out of nowhere, without warning, thousands of silver reflections began to struggle around the boat. Huge, gigantic schools, of a density my grandfather had never seen in his entire life, came to the surface. The fish jumped into the boat themselves. In shock, still crying for their friend, but driven by pure survival instinct and the fear of the men waiting for them on land, the fishermen cast the net and made one of the largest hauls remembered on that coast.
The boat touched the beach at the end of the afternoon, heavy, nearly sinking with the weight of the net it was pulling. My grandfather and the other three men jumped onto the sand with ghostly faces, with empty eyes and an exhaustion that came from within their souls, but no one noticed. No one cared. The sight of that absurd quantity of fish washed away everyone's senses. The sea of silver was so great that the oxen and cows they used on the sand to pull the nets locked their legs in the sand, without strength to pull the weight. The population that was on the beach, men, women and children who hadn't had a decent meal in weeks, threw themselves onto the ropes to help pull, in a frenzy that seemed like collective madness.
Amidst that chaos of scales and screams of joy, the chief of the PIDE approached my grandfather. He looked at the brimming boat, let out a cynical smile, and gave him two slow little pats on the cheek, with that disgusting condescension of one who owns the world. He whispered in his ear that he had made the right decision, that after all, fish does appear when men listen, and turned his back while ordering the other agents to load their van with the best of the haul. For the authorities, the matter was resolved. For the people, a miracle had happened. Amidst that hungry euphoria, no one noticed António’s absence.
My grandfather and his colleagues let themselves fall onto the wet sand. They sat there, motionless, staring at nothing as the day died and the beach slowly emptied. People passed by them, patted them on the shoulder, thanked them with tears in their eyes for the feast that was going to save the village from misery, but they heard nothing. They were in another world, trapped in that infinite scream they had heard in the midst of the fog. They only returned to reality in the last light of the day, when the beach became deserted, leaving only a dark silhouette approaching them. It was Maria, António’s wife, with her black shawl pressed against her chest and her eyes red from crying. She looked at the three, sensed the silence, and asked for her husband.
In that hour of twilight, the heavy fog they had left in the high seas began to crawl across the beach, kissing the sand and bringing a salty, cold and cutting breeze. When Maria questioned my grandfather again, the silence became suffocating. My grandfather rose slowly, unable to look directly into her eyes. He took the salt stained flat cap from his head, with hands shaking from pure nervousness and panic, rolling the cloth over and over again against the calloused skin of his hands, suffocated by a dry knot in his throat. He tried to speak, stammered, opened his mouth to try to come up an excuse or give the news of his friend’s death, but the words simply refused to come out.
It was exactly at that moment of absolute silence that a voice echoed behind their backs. It was António’s voice, clear and firm. He appeared from behind the boat, looking completely healthy, without a single bruise, without blood on his face, as if the PIDE agents had never touched him. He came rolling a thick rope, which he threw inside the boat with a dry thud. My grandfather and the other three fishermen were paralyzed, in shock, staring at him as if they were seeing a ghost, while Maria, oblivious to the horror, ran excitedly in tears into her husband’s arms.
António embraced her with a wide smile. When the two began to walk toward the village, António stopped for a second, looked back, and stared at his three colleagues, and simply said, “See you next time, lads.” At that precise instant, with the last reflection of the sun completely vanishing on the horizon, the light hit his face. António’s eyes glowed in the dark with a yellowish reflection, exactly like the cat’s eyes Old Manuel had seen at the bottom of the sea.
The diary ended with a rushed note written the next day. My grandfather wrote that he could not spend even one more night on that coast. He gathered his family, put what he could carry in an ox cart, and fled to the interior, to the countryside, vowing that never again in his life would he live near the sea. Years later, the fear of that night still pursued him so much that he ended up emigrating to France, where I ended up being born. My grandfather spent his entire life running from the sea, but now that I have read his diary, I finally understand why he always said that one sentence: “The sea never forgets what we owe it.”
Historical Context for non-Portuguese readers:
\*Estado Novo (New State): A conservative, authoritarian dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1933 to 1974. It was characterized by severe censorship, anti-communism, isolationism, and a heavily controlled, impoverished society where speaking out against the regime was dangerous.
\*PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado): The terrifying secret state police of the dictatorship. They were infamous for censorship, tracking down dissidents, using brutal torture methods and employing a massive network of local informants who turned neighbors and family members in for any sign of rebellion. Under their watch, any form of social gathering or protest, was seen as political sabotage.
#entertainment
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My grandfather spent his entire life avoiding the sea as if some deep fear lay hidden in his soul, it was something I could never understand. My family is from a traditional fishing village on the coast of Portugal, where, for generations, men fished those waters in long, high-prowed wooden boats that look like they’re cutting the waves as they were pushed into the sea. Everyone in the village knew my grandfather as a quiet man, one of those trained by the oppressive \**Estado Novo* dictatorship to swallow his words and close the curtains whenever the military police passed by in the street. He died last week. In the middle of his old things, inside one of those old metal biscuit tins, I found a black cover notebook. It was his diary from 1965. The year hunger nearly wiped out the Portuguese coast and when the sea, suddenly, fell silent.
According to the entries from January 1965, the fish, all of the sudden, vanished from the coast without warning. The boats would leave at dawn and return at the end of the day with empty, clean nets, not a single sardine on them. After three weeks, hunger began to bring about desperation. My grandfather wrote that the children in the village cried with empty bellies, and the women spent their days in church praying. But on the beach, the atmosphere was cutting, like a knife. The local mayor, terrified that the misery would spawn a revolt and that news of it would reach the government’s ears in the Capital, sent the military police and the dreaded \*PIDE secret state agents to the beach. They controlled the landing. When the fishermen brought the high-prowed boats with empty nets onto the sand, the men in dark raincoats would approach and accuse them of conducting a hidden strike or of concealing the fish to sabotage the regime. The order was clear, they had to go further, into the high seas, where the sea was dangerous and the small boats had no safety.
It was on a Tuesday of thick fog that my grandfather and three other men decided to risk everything. They ventured kilometers from the coast, far beyond the limit where the water changed tone and became a dark abyss. The fog was so thick they could barely see the prow of their own boat. They released the oars to cast the net, and that’s when the silence became too heavy. First, they heard the sound. It wasn’t the normal lapping of waves. It was the sound of water being cut abruptly, as if something huge had broken the surface right beside them and submersed again without making a splash. My grandfather clung to the wooden gunwale. He looked down and, through the gray water, saw the shapes. They looked like sharks in size, but moved with a speed no real fish could possess. They passed under the hull, leaving a trail of phosphorescent foam, and worst of all, they seemed to be circling the boat, violently scaring off the few schools of fish that remained down there.
They returned to land without a single fish in the net, with frozen hands and stomachs that screamed with hunger. On the sand, the PIDE men looked at them with that silent disdain, noting names in a little black notebook, but my grandfather and the others didn't even have the strength to care. That night, hidden in the corner of a dark tavern, far from windows and the eyes of any regime informant, the fishermen finally began to open up. The fear of hunger was being overtaken by a much worse fear. That’s when Old Manuel, an old man who had already lost two sons to the sea years before, told what had happened to him the night before. He had gone out alone, by the light of a kerosene lamp, one of those they used for fishing at night. He said the sea was too calm, like a smoky mirror, when he looked over the side of his boat. Down there, in the darkness of the water where the lamp’s light died, he saw a reflection. It looked like the shimmering, yellowish glint of a cat’s eye reflecting a fireplace's flame, focused directly at him. Old Manuel blinked, thinking it was exhaustion, but when he looked again, the pair of eyes had multiplied. There were dozens of them, motionless, floating just below the waterline, staring at him in the dark. Fish? Not a sight of them. Just those eyes watching, staring him down to his core.
The routine became a dragged out nightmare. Every new attempt to go to sea brought similar reports, and despair spread through the village like fire. That’s when the older women took to the beach. They were the widows, those women the sea had already punished in the past, always dressed in a heavy black that seemed to swallow the daylight. They didn’t care about the police or the mayor’s warnings. They gathered at the water’s edge, on their knees in the wet sand, wooden rosaries in their hands, praying and crying for the lost sons and husbands who died at sea. My grandfather wrote that their wails mixed with the sound of the waves in a terrifying way. They said the air no longer smelled of sea spray, it smelled like a cemetery, and they swore that the water was asking for something the village could not give.
The following Thursday began gray. My grandfather’s boat was about to be pushed into the sea when three PIDE agents appeared, their dark raincoats dragging in the damp sand. They came aggressively, shouting that this was a farce, that the fishermen were hiding the fish in clandestine warehouses to create hunger and revolt against the regime. António, one of my grandfather’s best friends, a burly man who could no longer bear to see his children starve, confronted them. He told them to their faces that if they wanted fish, they should go to sea and freeze to death themselves. The response was brutal. The agents set upon him right there, in front of everyone, pistol-whipping him and kicking his ribs. When they finished beating him, with António already semi-unconscious in the sand, they dragged him and threw him into the boat like a sack of potatoes. One of the PIDE men pointed his gun at my grandfather’s head and said that if they returned without fish, none of them would go back home alive.
The passage to the high seas was a torment. António layed on the floor of the boat, suffering greatly, groaning in pain and spitting blood mixed with vomit because of the blows he had taken to his stomach. My grandfather navigated blindly through the fog that closed over them again like a shroud. When they reached the deepest point, they stopped rowing. The silence of that desert of water was deafening, broken only by António’s weak groans. Staggering, trying to compose himself, he dragged himself to the edge of the boat and leaned over to try to wash his bloody hands and face in the cold water of the sea. The second his blood touched the water, the world seemed to stop.
A sound was heard. It didn’t come from near, but it came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time, a strident, high-pitched scream that seemed to echo from the infinite of the sea and rip through the fog itself. My grandfather and the other three men covered their ears, dizzy with the vibration of that monstrous lament, trying to understand where it came from, looking in panic at the gray horizon. They took maybe thirty seconds to compose themselves. When they finally lowered their hands and looked to the boat's edge, António had disappeared. There was no splash, no cry for help, no sound of a body falling into the water. Nothing. Only absolute silence and a perfectly smooth sea.
They began to scream his name in panic, peering into the dark water, but the darkness had swallowed António. It was then that the water began to effervesce. From out of nowhere, without warning, thousands of silver reflections began to struggle around the boat. Huge, gigantic schools, of a density my grandfather had never seen in his entire life, came to the surface. The fish jumped into the boat themselves. In shock, still crying for their friend, but driven by pure survival instinct and the fear of the men waiting for them on land, the fishermen cast the net and made one of the largest hauls remembered on that coast.
The boat touched the beach at the end of the afternoon, heavy, nearly sinking with the weight of the net it was pulling. My grandfather and the other three men jumped onto the sand with ghostly faces, with empty eyes and an exhaustion that came from within their souls, but no one noticed. No one cared. The sight of that absurd quantity of fish washed away everyone's senses. The sea of silver was so great that the oxen and cows they used on the sand to pull the nets locked their legs in the sand, without strength to pull the weight. The population that was on the beach, men, women and children who hadn't had a decent meal in weeks, threw themselves onto the ropes to help pull, in a frenzy that seemed like collective madness.
Amidst that chaos of scales and screams of joy, the chief of the PIDE approached my grandfather. He looked at the brimming boat, let out a cynical smile, and gave him two slow little pats on the cheek, with that disgusting condescension of one who owns the world. He whispered in his ear that he had made the right decision, that after all, fish does appear when men listen, and turned his back while ordering the other agents to load their van with the best of the haul. For the authorities, the matter was resolved. For the people, a miracle had happened. Amidst that hungry euphoria, no one noticed António’s absence.
My grandfather and his colleagues let themselves fall onto the wet sand. They sat there, motionless, staring at nothing as the day died and the beach slowly emptied. People passed by them, patted them on the shoulder, thanked them with tears in their eyes for the feast that was going to save the village from misery, but they heard nothing. They were in another world, trapped in that infinite scream they had heard in the midst of the fog. They only returned to reality in the last light of the day, when the beach became deserted, leaving only a dark silhouette approaching them. It was Maria, António’s wife, with her black shawl pressed against her chest and her eyes red from crying. She looked at the three, sensed the silence, and asked for her husband.
In that hour of twilight, the heavy fog they had left in the high seas began to crawl across the beach, kissing the sand and bringing a salty, cold and cutting breeze. When Maria questioned my grandfather again, the silence became suffocating. My grandfather rose slowly, unable to look directly into her eyes. He took the salt stained flat cap from his head, with hands shaking from pure nervousness and panic, rolling the cloth over and over again against the calloused skin of his hands, suffocated by a dry knot in his throat. He tried to speak, stammered, opened his mouth to try to come up an excuse or give the news of his friend’s death, but the words simply refused to come out.
It was exactly at that moment of absolute silence that a voice echoed behind their backs. It was António’s voice, clear and firm. He appeared from behind the boat, looking completely healthy, without a single bruise, without blood on his face, as if the PIDE agents had never touched him. He came rolling a thick rope, which he threw inside the boat with a dry thud. My grandfather and the other three fishermen were paralyzed, in shock, staring at him as if they were seeing a ghost, while Maria, oblivious to the horror, ran excitedly in tears into her husband’s arms.
António embraced her with a wide smile. When the two began to walk toward the village, António stopped for a second, looked back, and stared at his three colleagues, and simply said, “See you next time, lads.” At that precise instant, with the last reflection of the sun completely vanishing on the horizon, the light hit his face. António’s eyes glowed in the dark with a yellowish reflection, exactly like the cat’s eyes Old Manuel had seen at the bottom of the sea.
The diary ended with a rushed note written the next day. My grandfather wrote that he could not spend even one more night on that coast. He gathered his family, put what he could carry in an ox cart, and fled to the interior, to the countryside, vowing that never again in his life would he live near the sea. Years later, the fear of that night still pursued him so much that he ended up emigrating to France, where I ended up being born. My grandfather spent his entire life running from the sea, but now that I have read his diary, I finally understand why he always said that one sentence: “The sea never forgets what we owe it.”
Historical Context for non-Portuguese readers:
\*Estado Novo (New State): A conservative, authoritarian dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1933 to 1974. It was characterized by severe censorship, anti-communism, isolationism, and a heavily controlled, impoverished society where speaking out against the regime was dangerous.
\*PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado): The terrifying secret state police of the dictatorship. They were infamous for censorship, tracking down dissidents, using brutal torture methods and employing a massive network of local informants who turned neighbors and family members in for any sign of rebellion. Under their watch, any form of social gathering or protest, was seen as political sabotage.
#entertainment
source
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