Words: Anaїs Silva (she/her)
every time I hear this story, I remember being little and walking around that village with my mum and seeing her point out the bridge, the road, and the house my great-grandparents lived in, where she would play and go to school. I remember the memories evoked in my mum as it became her turn to pass down the story in the place where it all started.
Most stories start with ‘once upon a time;’ mine starts at the dinner table as a kid, when my mum would give me glimpses of her childhood – one so different from my own, reflected in stories passed down from her mother and her grandmother, until eventually she passed them down to me. Luckily, growing up, there was no shortage of storytelling at home; my favourites had always been the stories full of mystery. One, in particular, goes back to a village in Portugal – where my great-grandparents lived – and a tiny bridge surrounded by folklore.
Legend says (and by legend I mean my mum) that when I was 8, this bridge was built by the devil, and one fateful day, a man tried to cross it to access the city. The devil requested he sell his soul in order to pass. Obviously refusing, the man turned back on his journey and found himself at a church, where he asked the priest for guidance. After forming a plan, they returned to the bridge, and again the man was approached by the devil, but he refused to give up his soul and carried on crossing the bridge. This caused the devil to start destroying the bridge, and in that moment of distraction, the priest seized the opportunity and threw an orange filled with holy water. It is said that the devil was banished, and the air trajectory of the orange formed the arched design that the bridge has now. As a kid, I was curious about the spooky supernatural nature of it all. Personally, today, I wonder about the ridiculousness of an orange, of all things. Yet, every time I hear this story, I remember being little and walking around that village with my mum and seeing her point out the bridge, the road, and the house my great-grandparents lived in, where she would play and go to school. I remember the memories evoked in my mum as it became her turn to pass down the story in the place where it all started.
Tales about this bridge don’t end here. My godmother’s favourite is one I have heard countless times. It is about pregnant women, or women, struggling with miscarriages, conceiving, or with concerns about their babies. These women, along with their husbands and families, would wait until after sunset and watch that no animal had crossed the bridge during this time. The story goes that the first person to walk by would be asked to be the godparent of the unborn child, an invitation that had never been denied, as the citizens of the village saw it to be a moral duty. In that same moment, the baby is baptised by the godparent, as they retrieve water from the river with a clay vase and pour it over the mother’s belly while saying a prayer. If the child was born healthy, the parents had to fulfill a condition. If it were a girl, she would be named ‘Senhorinha.’ Despite this tale originating long before my mum’s life, she grew up knowing a girl called Senhorinha. The belief and practice of going to the bridge was very much still alive.
These stories were more than town folklore; they were ingrained in the community, and they were widely known by everyone, having been passed down through generations. They affected the behaviour of the people, which ensured that these tales would never die, immortalised in the memory of that village and those who grew up there. Storytelling became a way to hold onto simpler, happier times. Turning the stories into souvenirs of their youth, their meaning went beyond silly folklore; they meant family time, love, curiosity – a time you can never return to. To my mum, all these stories are souvenirs of that village that used to be so full of life, of her cherished grandparents, of the good times she had when she lived with them in order to pursue her studies.
To me, hearing stories from my mum or grandparents, no matter how many times I have heard them before, has always felt like a moment of quietness. As age changes all of us, time stops in moments like this. When I see my grandmother’s eyes with a faraway twinkle while she talks, I wonder if she’s thinking of her mother and the stories she would tell; when, in my grandad’s smile, I see the cheeky little boy whose light never dimmed as he recalls the hardships of his childhood to me. These are the real souvenirs storytelling gives me, because I know one day, in the future, I will remember moments like sitting late at night at the dinner table with them – not necessarily by the stories themselves, but the memories made through them with my loved ones.
