Occasionally I'd drop by one of my favorite Azorean places, the Museu Carlos Machado. When I was around eleven I discovered it for the first time and have been in love with it eversince. Chances are that, if today I enjoy history, I owe that enjoyment to my first accidental discovery of that museum. In fact, thanks to the Museu Carlos Machado, I managed to survive having been poor in America.
Poor in America?
Well, not really. My first job in America - at the age of fifteen, and six months after my arrival in this country - paid me thirty-five cents per hour, a great sum when compared to what many boys my age were earning in the Azores at the time, and yet a miserly discouraging wage when equated to American standards of 1946. Granted that prices were a lot lower then. On the other hand, as I looked down the future, I would easily perceive that it would take forever for me to save a sufficiently large sum to buy that "quinta". Sometimes I'd get quite gloomy just thinking about it, while making the realities I was trying to develop into no more than a never-never land. It was during one of those moments of gloom that I rediscovered my appreciation of museums.
Besides being places where I could hide from school truancy officers, the museums of my early days in America offered me one other benefit. They were pretty much within the budget of someone making thirty-five cents per hour. In fact, most charged no admission whatoever.
I was fortunate to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the time, a city of museums and several subway (underground) stations whose trains can bring anyone to Boston's finest cultural spots in minutes. My house was located within walking distance of Lechmere Station, from where I could go just about anywhere in the Americas by train. A few years after I left Cambridge, in fact, some adventurer with nothing else to do took a subway train that had started its journey at Lechmere and, before he had finished his trip months later, had gone all the way to Argentina. For those interested on how he did it, I suggest that they read a book entiled "The Great Patagonia Express".
In any case, in those days of gloom when I should have been at school, I would take the subway and head for museums where I would get lost amidst their wonders. Ironic as it may seem, I never developed a feeling of art appreciation. Even to this day, while I'm able to tell a Renoir from a Gauguin, or a Goya from a Rembrandt, I have never become an art expert - or even someone who could win a "Trivia Quiz" if the subject were art. I enjoy walking around museums loking at their presentations without pausing long enough to learn what makes one artwork different from another. Granted I do pause occasionally, and that at one time at the Museo del Prado, in Madrid, I spent more than three hours trying to decipher the character of Philip IV (Of Spain)/Philip III (of Portugal) wondering if I could find traces that the man foresaw he would be the last monarch at the apex of the Spanish Empire. To me museums remind me of my youth, when in happy days I would often start a walk somewhere along the Estrada Nova da Ribeira Grande and go as far as the day allowed me. From the road's higher vantage points I would gaze over its south-side walls towards the lower lands appreciating the scenery while always discovering from a distance something new in places that I often knew intimately up close. One summer evening, for example, while standing on the dusty side of the road where the Estrada meets with the Canada de Joao Leite, I heard the Angelus bells (Trindade) ring at St. Roch's Church. The sound echoed over the planted fields and hills and, for a time, it seemed in my young mind as if even the birds had paused long enough to pray. Today, more than forty-three years later , I can still feel the wonder of that moment. I was baptized at St. Roch's and made my First Holy Communion there. On occasion, when I should have been at catechism, I'd sneak out of class and head for the volcanic rocks adjoining the beach at the foot of the church and go swimming in the small shallow pools where the tide's height was generally meaningless. It took the sound of bells on that undated afternoon, however, to make me realize that beauty is not something decreed as such, but simply what one feels at a specific moment. Museums, somehow, seem to re-enforce that feeling in me - even if I can not dissect what they're trying to teach me. Granted that, unlike the scenery down below the intersection of Estrada Nova and Canada de João Leite, museums require a society willing to tax itself to maintain them. On the other hand, once they have been established, their offerings extend beyond anything money can buy. That's why, in my opinion, museums are one of the great refuges from poverty - particularly for those who are poor.
St. Louis, Missouri, where I presently reside has one of the best art museums in America. Although my wife and I are not amongst its patrons, we are nevertheless amongst those lesser souls known as the Friends of the Art Museum. I really don't know what our contribution is (My wife takes care of that) but I do know the contribution the museum has made to our lives. When our children were small, and my salary went no further than what it took to meet our obligations, we'd take them there and, although we don't know whether our actions rubbed off on them for their benefit, we feel nevertheless that we exposed them to the same sense of beauty that I had experienced that afternoon as I heard the Angelus bells. We now have grandchildren and, in a way, I can't wait for them to be old enough to accompany us on a trip or two within the walls of that magnificent building at Forest Park. You see, my wife and I don't intend to leave our grandchildren any money, and if we do it will be totally accidental. In a way we are still saving for that "quinta", only this time its destiny extends beyond our cultivating it for our own leisure. Instead, we hope to leave a substitute for that leisure as a legacy to those who will follow us. And, who knows? Just as I discovered the land of their birth and grew to love it, perhaps our grandchildren will someday discover through a museum history book, painting, or artifact their grandfather's birthland and, in the process, find a part of me that was close to them and which they only saw when I could no longer physically touch them.
Manuel L. Ponte
St. Louis, Missouri
August 5, 1988
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