Names remembered....a few corrections....adendae... Rico, they have changed internet layout a lot. Don't know if you havr recd earlier one. AT
From: [email protected] To: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: TWO SHORT STORY WRITERS Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2013 16:48:58 +0200 VIVA WALFRIDO ANTAO...MAIS UM COPO, PA.... A very long time ago, ca 1963 "O HERALDO's" toto factum, Victor Teles, asked for a sketch on my great friend in virtue and vice. My submission was entitled: Meeting Walfrido Antao or a Collusion with Folly... Indeed, it was thus. Meeting Walfrido on a pleasant--or, otherwise-- morning one could never know when, or how -- how many mornings later-- or where the jaunt would end. One thing you could be certain though: one was ready to be hung out to dry---- The protagonists were many great cheerful souls...the greater number of them, lamentably, not among us; Aurobindo & Thelma Martins de Barros, Lucio Miranda, Suresh Mambhro usually being the core... & I. That, Walfrido instructed us was the essence of existentialism... . None doubted him, questioned him....being past the stage of doubt & so on. He was veritably a true disciple of existentialism throughout his life... drunk or sober. Jean-Paul Satre, Albert Camus and others of that gang of late forties....going into fifties he considered his true "comrades-in-life". Marx...Lenin also ran but, negligibly. It was not just illusion. He had, indeed, lived his best years with them.... treasured them in his heart... Around end sixties, when I was leaving for Europe...with no settled plan...unfocussed with nil orientation in my sozzled mind...before my blinkered eyes. "You must go to Paris," was Walfrido's undaunted stricture to me. One very wet (not to be read as rainy), sitting in a ramshackle "ghaddi" in Thana, Cortalim he decided that he should take steps to ensure it. He needed a piece of paper and a pen. Although flowing with "urraca" & verilly Goa's elite, the required implements were unimplatable at Shettye's tavern. For, although among the present were Proto Barbosa, Lima Leitao and thus many others, we had just bathed at the nearby fountain, in Kensarval, and were well nigh "au naturel". Finally, responding to Walfrido's persistent demand, Shettye emptied a packet of "Simlas" and provided him with its cover and a pencil from somewhere. On that dear Walfrido wrote me with a "Mon chere Jean-Paul" introduction. That scrap of paper remained with me and I, duly, it in my "potly" when I, eventually, reached Paris. I was, then, working at the American Library in Paris, on the Rue General Camou and showed it to M. Gpldberg, the director. He informed me, he had heard, that Satre no longer received casual visitors but directed me to Cafe Flor, his customary/legendary haunt. They gave me same information bur suggested I leave the scrap with them. I was surprised when within a few days Satre wrote me to see him at the cafe. He was very affable and ordered us cups of warm milk. However, he soon called out to the waiter and changed the order, "par le monsieur de Goa un ballon de cognac." He was, indeed, near blind. Enquired very fondly about Walfrido and asked me to inform him that "Mama"remembered them well and missed "her boys." Mama was Albert Camus legendary mother with a sort of an "ashram/auberge" in Paris. After a few years and many further perambulations I visited Goa, by then married to Eva, my Swedish wife; an incredible surprise awaited us: Walfrido had met with his "road to Damascus" syndrome. Of drink? he disdained even the smell of it. Eva and he hit it right from there. He was the high-guru of the Alcoholics Anonymous' Goa chapter....and most of our "soro" chapter along with him. Sozzled or sober, Walfrido was always the absolute personification the gentleness and absolute generosity. He lived in Fontainhas in a "comencalidade/pensao." The landlady, Dona Peregrina, ... a perenial martyr to her endless tribulations...and they wre many other than chronically unpaid rents. However, on one point of morality she put her foot down,...irrascibly: NO GIRLS IN THE ROOM. Aurobindo, Thelma and I, one Christmas day met Walfrido, unusually frolorn, in Pio's bar. Moreover, he had his "hatli potli" with him. He responded anxious queries, a palpable victim to manly emotions: "O que posso dizer pa? Aquela minha patroa nao tem coracao; ou, si tem um e certamente feito do granite. Ontem noite depois de for visado a porta do ultimo bar aberto, passeiva em Gaspar Dias, em profunda conteplacao mortal quando meu pe acertou uma coisa soave e mole...era apenas um crianca com quase nada para cobrir-se contra o frio... "Oque outro a fazer...levei-lha a casa. Na manha, quando a mulher me acordou com cha, viu a pobrezita e quis saber muito berrante: QUE E ISSO? "D. Peregrina eu Ti trouxe un Menino Jesus." "Toda furiosa....sem uma gotinha de merce ou amor Christao atirou-nos na rua." The Menino Jesus, like a badly plucked chicken, sat at a distant table, shaking although it was miday. We collected the two and spent a couple of weeks restoring the M.J. to a less ghastly pullet until Walfrido's latest crisis was somehow patched up again for the moment therough pragmatic intervention/intercession of Baba, Erasmo de Sequeira. It was the peak of hippy days; the MJ was a Dutch teen. I have met her, several times at a cafe she runs in an Amsterdam suburb. A robust Dutch meinwrow, there is nothing about her that reminds of misery...rather a proud Mother Goose wit four brats. Husband, Jan, is also a nostalgic veteran of times past in Calangute...Baga.... Alfred de Tavares, Stockholm, December 26, 2013.
