Beyond the Seas at the end of the world
Review written by Zara Ferreira and published on Umbigo Magazine, on September 14th 2020
I believe that all seafarers have a porpoise that only appears once in a lifetime and that, when it goes away for good, leaves a void in our hearts. And it really makes you want, when the sun dies in the sea, to cry for this porpoise that has algae for hair. She is looking for an island, we have to let her follow her path, even if we stay on the beach and lose her, dying for the rest of our lives.
Pepetela, O Cão e os Caluandas, 1985
In my 8th year, in a Portuguese test, teacher Otília asked us to respond to the motto “have you ever had a porpoise that left a void in your heart?”. I spoke about everything I hadn't yet experienced, about the lands I hadn't known, about smells, colors and flavors I hadn't tasted, about a fairer and simpler society, about missing the great-grandfather I never knew and about the stories I told about an enchanted Moor named Zara.
Perhaps Augusto Boffa Molinar (1922-1985) was a more or less anonymous name. Perhaps the name António Martinho do Rosário (1920-1980) doesn't sound familiar either, if it weren't hiding behind Bernardo Santareno. Perhaps the two crossed paths at the University of Coimbra, in the late 1940s, or perhaps they met later, aboard the hospital ship Gil Eanes, where, as doctors, they followed cod fishing in the North Seas.
On the occasion of the centenary celebrations of his birth that Fernanda Lapa had begun to organize at her Escola de Mulheres, Bernardo Santareno is honored in the title of this performance – Nos Mares do Fim do Mundo was published in 1959. Augusto Boffa-Molinar is represented in the slides of the photographs he took on board, projected onto the scene. But the imagined words are from his grandson, Afonso Molinar, artistic director of teatroàfaca, and creator of this company's third production.
Beyond the Seas at the End of the World is the naive dream of a child who decided to go through the photographs, letters and stories of a grandfather he never knew, transforming his travels into his own memories: whales, sea lions, seals, icebergs, the song of mermaids, hoisted candles, the sound of conch shells placed in the ear – “the one that puts newborn babies to sleep and causes storms”, sometimes fog, the sound of seagulls and the wind, the midnight sun. An innocence that is missed as much in theater as in life, balanced by the desire to tell the story to so many men who experience the love and difficulties of life at sea. As Dorival Caymmi once said, eternally divided between two worlds – “the good of the earth and the good of the sea” – Beyond the Seas at the End of the World also reveals the rawness of the lives of these men on the high seas: storms, cold-blooded operations, deaths, the absence of families left at the port – “The good thing on earth is the one who cries / But it makes her not cry when we leave” –, the uncertainty of one day returning, the attraction to the cold that both makes them feel alive and can kill them, the seduction by the sirens' song which is not always a fable, the madness to which they indulge in order to remain sane, among a multitude of souls that Mário Coelho so well represents, the inability to sleep without the lull of the waves when, for Finally, we reach land. The eternal inability to belong to two places that will never be together; porpoise forever left on land or at sea.
Beyond the Seas at the End of the World was on stage at Escola de Mulheres, from the 2nd to the 13th of September, accompanied by the beautiful soundtrack by HERA, a band formed by Beatriz Almeida, Miguel Galamba and Pedro Moldão. In 2021, he will be on board the ship Santo-André, at the Ílhavo Maritime Museum.