Thank you, Alfredo
When lockdown was lifted and we could travel slowly again my sogro (my father-in-law) came to Atelier Retiro. My sogro and I had a great understanding of one another.
My Sogro and I shared a love of food and a nice glass of wine. We shared dyslexia and the shame of it. We both had the superpowers that comes with having a unique brain: we think in 3D, our creative problem solving, our fierce independence, our ability to work hard. He was a carpenter and a builder. Due to the laws of his era he had been afforded a 4th grate education which he left early to go work because, “His teachers hit him too much for not being able to read.” He trained making furniture, distressing and passing off new for antique. He loved football and as a child got chased often by the police for staying out past curfew watching games through the café window. His mother was a baker. His father was a miner that died in a terrible mining collapse. He grew up in a house his family built under the stadium seating of the local bull fighting ring. He was baptized twice so he could have cake. His eldest brother died young of a tooth that went septic. He went to the war in Angola and built roads and bridges. He only fired his gun once, by accident in his sleep. He wasn’t kind and often unfair, but his youngest son became an engineer and his eldest son became a doctor and went to American and came home with a hardworking, hard drinking, potter for a wife (me). Someone always knee deep in clay, always building something with enough tools to make the Forman on the construction site envious. A former baker. A worker with callused hands and a pension for swearing. Someone just like him.
He gave me the whole month of August 2022. I had plans. I had been without a potter studio for 10 years and before that I had worked in some of the best ceramics studios in the United States. And I dreamed big. I had a make list and a build schedule for every second of the working day.
And unless you’re Portuguese you may have missed the significance of the month: August. It was hot and supplies were scares and it was hot. The pandemic had turned my modest budget into crumbs. Wood was in short supply and what was available kiln dried warped and twisted. But we tucked in and got to work. Hand plaining wood, hand cutting pipe for modular shelving. Making what we couldn’t find at the big box supply stores because all the local building suppliers were closed in August. No one works in August! We did.
Every working day we were on the clock. 9am-13pm then lunch. Lunch was when I finally cracked the code to my sogro. We had been fighting about food since we met. I was always trying to get him to try something new, something different and he was always refusing to compromise. But I knew with our workload and no budge for help there was no way I could attempt to serve him a quiche and a side salad. I ordered food from the best Portuguese bakery (and take-away) in town, Trinas. Walked in every Monday morning and ordered for the whole week. Set up a table outside the atelier and we ate in silence exhausted and ravenous from our daily task. Then I would let my sogro have a coffee and a whisky alone before we went back to work: building-out the atelier until 18h when we woddled, both of us arthritic and exhausted, home to be hugged by adoring children, have a soup before falling asleep.
My sogro loved watching me work and I him. He often called Atelier Retiro “our family business.” While we worked he whisteled this tune I believe of his own making from early morning to days end. Just as he had done in 2011 when we renovated our family house in Alentejo. Lifting the cane and newspaper insulated tile roof off the adobe structure to reveal the almost too blue sky above. After spending August with me in Atelier Retiro he made me promise
that one of everything I ever made had to come to the house in Alentejo and I dutifully complied. A small sacrifice for the investment he gave to my pottery studio. No-one else could have done that work. No one else could have untwisted those boards and planed them level and true. No one else could have cut the pipe and assembled the modular shelving. No one else could have helped me learn how to hand cut dove tails to make the wheel support boxes. I mean others could have, but it wouldn’t have been the same.
