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March 13, 2009
I "inherited" a box of diaries which belonged to my grandfather. In fact I seem to be the official family archive - my uncle and aunt saying "you keep that, you're the one who always cared about trinkets and mementos" while we cleared my grandmother's place after she died and as a I salvaged valueless chinese cups and saucers, my grandparent's wedding night linens, boxes of old eyeglasses, newspaper clippings.
The diaries run from the late 30's - when he came home after being stationed in Macao - to the early 70's after he moved from the south of Portugal to Lisbon with all the family. They're impressive and scary. My grandfather obsessively noted down on each day the time he started working, times spent having lunch and at what time he stopped working. This was Portugal in the 40's and 50's, under a petty dictator that glorified poverty, and he was working from 4 am to 10 pm almost every day. On the good days he wouldn't start until 8am and he'd be home by 7pm. He was a truck driver, delivering groceries all over the country and sometimes in Spain. I remember my grandmother feeling aggrieved that he never got any overtime payed. When the revolution came and, with it, rights for workers, I think she secretly kept the illusion that if there was any justice in the world they would be able to receive what they were, at least morally, owed. I think that's why she held to this absurd registry of punch ins and outs. That day obviously never came but knowing that the situation wouldn't be that bad ever again was at least comforting.
Reading those timekeeping records really breaks my heart. For a number of reasons but foremost because I know his children loved him dearly and were thus deprived of his company. But by the end of the sixties, when he moved to Lisbon and became a private driver, his schedule was more relaxed and he started noting down mainly what he had had for lunch that day. Occasionally the stress went up and he'd note down times and addresses where he would pick up his employer, a well known lawyer.
It fascinates me how much I can read into these simple annotations, apparently giving no clue to his private thoughts.
By the time he retired, he still kept diaries. But there were no more working hours, no obligations. So he started copying meanings of words from the dictionary (an orange thick volume of which I am also the keeper still). I guess he was a pioneer of the concept of "word of the day". Eventually he moved to notebooks since his schedule-free life didn't ask for any more diaries. I also keep finding, to this day, random pieces of paper torn down from newspapers with scribbled word meanings on them inside the dictionary and inside other books. He became a compulsive Dictionary-phile.
There is one diary, however, from 1959, in which he noted down a quotation which to this day I'm not sure what was the intended meaning of. It's something in the lines of "Even if God didn't exist, religion would go on being holy and divine. God is the only creature that doesn't need to exist to rule." I never understood if this was an atheist's lament or a misguided religious excuse*. And I certainly don't know what grandfather thought of it other that he found it remarkable enough to jot it down. I wonder if he was wondering about God's existence as he drove a truck heavy with bags of refined sugar through the night?
*So, I did the obvious just now. I googled it. It's from Baudelaire's Journal Intime.
Posted by claudia