46th Edition: The Exile of Ivette Corte Real — Part 2

When the suitcase stopped waiting for the return.

Welcome to the 46th Edition of **I Have Something to Tell You, started in June 2024 in tribute to the 80th birthday of Evo João Camões Fernandes. If you would prefer to read this piece in Portuguese, you can find it here: [46ª Edição: O Exílio de Ivette Corte Real — Parte 2.](https://open.substack.com/pub/professorantniofrancisco/p/46-edicao-o-exilio-de-ivette-corte-28c?r=1khqf2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true)**

PART II

In the first part, Ivette left Beira convinced she would return within a few months. She arrived in Lisbon, was reunited with her father, and began settling in Cascais, still not recognizing that the temporary trip had turned into exile. In this second part, everyday life in Portugal slowly begins to challenge that certainty.

ACT 5

A Home to Start Over

After returning from Barcelos to Grandfather Pacheco’s house, Álvaro no longer wanted to put off finding a home.

The next morning, he told his daughter:

— Let’s go to Cascais. We need to find a house to rent. That’s where I want to settle our family, in surroundings closest to what you grew up with in Mozambique.

— You know best, dad. I’ve no idea about any of this.

Before leaving, Álvaro told Grandfather Pacheco of the decision.

He looked at him, surprised:

— Is that really where you want to go? Are you sure?

The question wasn’t just about geography.

Pacheco was a self-employed locksmith, used to living close to his customers and measuring his decisions by how near they kept him to work. He made springs for doors, vehicles and various equipment.

Cascais seemed to him distant, expensive and impractical for someone who still needed to rebuild his life.

But Álvaro answered without hesitation:

— I want to give my daughters, as much as I can, a place where they feel at home, similar to the surroundings where they were born and grew up. From what I know of Portugal, the Cascais line seems to me the best place.

He paused, then added:

— I’m not rich, and I don’t believe I’ll ever become one of the wealthy people who live there. Nor do I want to go to Cascais because it’s an old or elegant town. What I do know is that a family’s well-being isn’t made of material wealth alone.

Ivette listened without even knowing where Cascais was.

She couldn’t even judge whether the decision was wise.

But her father’s confidence gave her the sense that he’d already thought long and hard about where he wanted to rebuild the family.

They caught the train at Cais do Sodré, heading for Cascais.

Ivette recalls that day as if it had happened only a few years ago:

— Funny how fate works. We got off at the station and walked along Rua Direita toward the centre of town.

Shortly after, Álvaro asked a passer-by where they might find a real estate agency.

The man pointed to a nearby square.

That’s where the Agência Vitória was.

They went in.

The clerk told them there was a furnished two-bedroom apartment available, on a second floor, fairly close to the station.

She offered at once to go show them the place.

Figure 09. Founded in 1956, Agência Vitória was Cascais’s first real estate agency. It was there that Álvaro Ruy Corte Real and Ivette found, on their very first visit, the flat on Rua da Bela Vista where the family settled at the start of October 1975. Half a century later, Mariazinha and Cuxa still live in the same house (Cascalenses — Agência Vitória).

They walked up Rua da Bela Vista, also known as Rua do Tribunal.

It was the first house they were shown.

It would also be the last.

The flat had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, a bathroom, an enclosed balcony and a small terrace at the front. It was furnished. It had a telephone.

— And it had a television! — Ivette exclaimed, recalling the excitement she felt when she saw it. It was still black and white, but in Mozambique they hadn’t even had that.

Ivette walked through the rooms with growing enthusiasm. Stepping inside, she had an unexpected feeling. The apartment felt like a dollhouse to her — one of those houses where, as a child, she’d imagined whole families living.

She turned to her father:

— Dad, this is the one! No need to look any further. It has everything we need.

Then she began to justify the decision, with the conviction of someone who had already done the sums:

— We’re not going to find another one this size, furnished, with all this, any time soon. It’s ten or fifteen minutes from the train station. And we don’t have money for a car either. So, dad, it’s settled. Don’t you think?

Álvaro looked at his daughter and smiled. And before he could answer, Ivette pressed on:

— And look… it even has a TV and a phone… isn’t that great?

Her father seemed to be doing sums in his head.

The rent was four thousand five hundred escudos a month. To move in they’d have to pay in advance, that is, two months’ rent up front.

He hesitated and suggested it might be wise to check with Mariazinha first.

But his daughter’s enthusiasm proved contagious.

They went back to the Agência Vitória and signed the lease on the spot, starting 1 October 1975.

That night, Mariazinha called from Beira to find out how the house search had gone.

Ivette was near the phone when it rang and answered the call.

When her mother asked how the day had gone, Ivette couldn’t help blurting out at once that they’d already found a lovely little house and her father had signed the lease and paid the first two months’ rent.

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line.

Ivette didn’t wait for her to react. She went on that it was a cute little house, small but enough for the family, fairly close to the station.

It was then that her mother broke the silence, asking:

— And the rent?

— The rent is 4,500 escudos a month.

Mariazinha, in Ivette’s own words, had always had her feet firmly on the ground.

When she understood that her husband and daughter had made the decision on the very first house they’d looked at, without even consulting her, she reacted, incredulous and irritated:

— Have you both lost your minds, taking the very first house you saw? No surprise. You’re as scatterbrained as your father. The two of you found each other, and that’s that. Put your father on the phone…

As soon as Álvaro picked up the phone, he realized his wife was still furious.

— Hello, Álvaro! I already know what you’ve done. You didn’t even try to see if there was a better option. Was it really the very first house you saw? Honestly!

Álvaro backed up the reasons Ivette had already given, but the justification only made her angrier still:

— Ivette has no idea what things cost. How are we going to keep up a rent like that? You don’t even have a job yet. I don’t even know when I’ll manage to find work over there. What foolishness, Álvaro!

Despite the scolding, Mariazinha eventually resigned herself and accepted it as done.

Once the contract had been confirmed and signed by the landlord, they received the keys from the agency and moved into the house at the start of October.

Grandfather Pacheco, with the help of his friend with a car, helped Álvaro and Ivette carry the luggage to the new rented house on Rua da Bela Vista, in the center of Cascais.

In the first half of October, Ivette tidied the house as best she could, so that she and her father would feel comfortable.

The house they’d chosen almost on impulse would go on to accompany the whole rest of the family’s story.

Álvaro Ruy lived there until his death, in 2007.

Mariazinha and Cuxa have gone on living there for more than half a century.

The first house they’d looked at in exile would end up becoming the home they never left again.

ACT 6

Two Worlds: Between Two Revolutions

Their days began at last to settle into a certain routine. It was then that Ivette truly began to discover Lisbon.

In her first weeks in Portugal, she slowly began widening her small world beyond Cascais, Lisbon, and a few days in Barcelos.

Whenever she could, she went along with her father on his errands, or took the chance to head back into the city center.

She simply loved to walk.

She would linger between Rossio and Terreiro do Paço. She watched the store windows, listened to conversations, followed the trams, and let herself be drawn into a city that seemed to live permanently out on the street.

Everything drew her curiosity.

Everything seemed in motion.

What most struck her, every time she went back into the center, was finding new crowds gathering.

In one square a speaker held forth; further along, another group handed out leaflets; on another corner, different flags were raised. The loudspeakers came one after another, and so did the slogans.

People stopped, listened, argued, and calmly went on their way.

Ivette watched that endless string of rallies with the same curiosity she gave to the cafés, the kiosks, or the city’s old façades.

She didn’t know those political parties.

She didn’t quite understand who stood for what.

But there was a difference that, even without being able to explain it, felt obvious to her.

Each square had a different voice.

Without noticing it, she still carried with her the recent memory of a very different reality.

In her last months in Beira, it had never once occurred to her that a square could hold, at the same time, voices from such different parties.

The slogans repeated, unchanged. The flags were always the same. The demonstrations all marched in the same direction.

Here, exactly the opposite happened.

Differences weren’t kept hidden.

They spoke.

They argued.

They contradicted one another.

And they kept on coexisting.

Ivette had no tools yet to make sense of that difference.

She wasn’t even aware that she was, quietly, comparing Lisbon to the city where she’d grown up.

She simply felt something new, and, as she would recognize many years later, deeply reassuring.

Without reasoning it through, she was beginning to discover that uncertainty didn’t always mean chaos.

Portugal was living through intense days.

There was enthusiasm, fear, absolute convictions and enormous uncertainty. That was exactly what was happening in the country at that moment: crowds responded better to the mobilization of feeling than to ideas, which, in most cases, few people could tell apart.

There was enthusiasm and no small amount of fervor — hope, fear, outrage, absolute convictions.

But none of those feelings managed to fully drown out the others.

Her future remained wide open.

Ivette found all of it curious, even funny, and was amused by the slogans she heard.

Her conviction that she would soon return to Beira remained intact — even as she stopped noticing the signs pointing otherwise.

Without realizing it, she was slowly beginning to breathe differently.

Not because Portugal offered her certainty. But because it gave back to her an experience that in Mozambique had grown ever rarer: the chance for different voices to share the same space without vanishing at each other’s hands.

That autumn of 1975, Ivette’s greatest journey was no longer just the crossing between Beira and Lisbon. It was the slow discovery of two profoundly different ways of imagining freedom.

Without knowing it, she was beginning to breathe an atmosphere where differences didn’t need to disappear for people to go on living in the same city.

Figure 10. In the months following 25 April 1974, Lisbon lived through intense political mobilization. For Ivette, used to a public space growing ever more uniform and monolithic under Mozambique’s revolution, the coexistence of parties, movements and differing opinions was a reality as new as it was hard to grasp.( Source).

ACT 7

Freedom and Decency

Whenever she could, Ivette made a point of going along with her father.

She did it not only because her mother had asked her, warmly, to accompany him in his day-to-day dealings, feeling him still frail and, above all, unsure of himself.

She liked going out with him, for the company, and for feeling useful.

After nearly three months apart, each outing was also a quiet way of making up for lost time.

That was how she truly began to discover Lisbon.

Not the Lisbon of monuments or tourist routes.

But the city where people lived, argued, worked and filled the streets every day.

Rossio and Praça da Figueira became familiar places.

While Álvaro attended to his business, Ivette lingered watching the ceaseless motion of a city where everything seemed to be happening at once.

It was there that she lived through one of the unexpected shocks she would never forget.

Passing through Rossio, she noticed magazine covers laid out directly on the ground — erotic magazines, and in many cases, clearly pornographic ones.

She stopped instinctively.

She looked.

She looked away again at once.

She had never imagined seeing images of that kind displayed on the ground, in the middle of the street, in front of children, families and the elderly, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

She felt an embarrassment hard to put into words.

She said nothing. Her father noticed his daughter’s surprise, but he said nothing either.

Figure 11. The public display of erotic and pornographic magazines, often laid directly on the pavement in busy parts of Lisbon, was one of the first shocks Ivette experienced. Not out of prudishness, but because it unexpectedly clashed with the discreet upbringing she’d received at home and a moral climate very different from the one she’d left behind in Beira.

Without reasoning it through, she still carried marks of a very recent reality.

In her last months in Beira, everyday urban life had come to be watched over by a surprisingly rigid revolutionary morality. Certain behaviors, once ordinary, easily became grounds for censure or suspicion. Young men and women, even couples, who walked hand in hand in the street, would quickly be stopped by guerrillas with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.

Prostitution had been swept off the city’s streets, and women identified as prostitutes were sent to re-education camps. Anything that could be linked to so-called “bourgeois vices” was fought with growing severity.

Now, in front of that newsstand, she found exactly the opposite extreme.

She formed no judgment.

Nor did she try to understand.

She simply carried that image with her.

For a long time she would go on not knowing why that sight had unsettled her so much.

Perhaps because, without knowing it, she was quietly beginning to discover a way of understanding freedom very different from the one she’d known in the land she’d just left.

None of these reflections occurred to her in that moment.

She had just turned twenty.

She kept telling herself she would soon be back in Beira.

But, without realizing it, she was slowly beginning to discover an entirely new idea.

Only many years later would she find the words for what she’d felt there, without knowing it: that a free society doesn’t necessarily force all its members into the same choices.

It only lets them choose what they’d rather keep away from.

Leaving the newsstand behind, Ivette simply walked on beside her father.

The walk continued as if nothing had happened.

But that brief pause in front of a shop window would go on living in her memory for the rest of her life.

Not because of the magazines. But because, for the first time, she began quietly to understand that freedom and decency aren’t necessarily enemies.

ACT 8

The Real Exile

The weeks went by almost without Ivette noticing.

Life was slowly settling into a rhythm of its own.

In Beira, Mariazinha remained caught up in the last arrangements before her own departure, organizing everything with the same discretion and determination with which, months before, she had prepared her daughters’ trip.

It was almost always her who called.

Working at the CTT, she could do so without cost.

She used those calls to keep track, from a distance, of the family’s settling-in priorities.

Álvaro Ruy went back daily to his contacts and errands.

Cuxa had been the first to settle in, in Barcelos. She quickly adapted to life among her cousins and at school. What she found strange, and hard, was having to help with washing dishes and going shopping.

The small flat on Rua da Bela Vista, too, was quietly turning into a real home. Ivette kept things to the essentials, preferring to wait for her mother to arrive before arranging the house her own way.

Bit by bit, each family member finally found their place.

Only two things remained suspended in time.

Ivette’s suitcase stayed exactly as it had arrived from Mozambique. She never felt the need to fully unpack it.

Some pieces of clothing were taken out as needed, day to day. The essentials stayed carefully packed. The parachuting gear remained folded with the same care with which she’d prepared it on the morning of 20 September — except for one thing Ivette only noticed once in Lisbon.

Somehow, for some reason, the boots she’d jumped in on the day of departure had disappeared. She would later learn from her mother herself that they’d been left behind, without her noticing, to avoid trouble at the migration inspection. They were military-style boots, and could well have caused problems had she been searched.

In her own mind, all of it made sense.

After all, she kept telling herself, she’d return to Beira as soon as things settled down. But when?

One day, a week or two before Christmas, she asked her father when she’d be able to go back to Beira. Álvaro Ruy was brief in his answer:

— Oh, sweetheart… wait until your mother gets here.

The answer felt so natural that Ivette felt no reason to show any concern.

Since she rarely overheard the phone calls between her parents, she also didn’t notice her mother’s irritation on realizing her father had done nothing to enroll Ivette in school. It seemed that he, too, like his daughter, was waiting for his wife to decide which way to steer things.

Mariazinha boarded a flight on 22 December 1975, bound for Lisbon, via Salisbury, where she got stuck. The TAP flight didn’t show up, and the trip was delayed without anyone quite knowing why.

After 48 hours, Álvaro grew impatient, eventually deciding it was her fault — perhaps she’d chosen to spend two or three more days with her friends, who’d decided to settle in Rhodesia, and so say her goodbyes to Africa before leaving it for good.

That mishap ended up turning Christmas Eve and Christmas Day into an event with nothing worth remembering.

Had Mariazinha made it home, she would certainly have made sure that on Christmas Eve the usual dinner menu wasn’t missing: boiled salt cod with greens, potatoes and eggs.

Her unexpected absence left those present eating whatever improvised meal Ivette simply doesn’t remember.

What she never forgot was what she saw the next day, going into her father’s room to give it a quick tidy. On the bedside table she noticed her mother’s photograph turned face down.

— Guess dad got furious mom didn’t make it and put her in the corner, turned around like that?

She never forgot that remark, which made her smile at the thought that it must have been a small, silent fury of her father’s.

They spent Christmas Day alone, father and daughter, with no wish to join anyone else.

It was Mariazinha who, without planning it, finally broke that suspended time — but only two days later.

On the very day she arrived, 27 December, as she began setting the house in order, she noticed her daughter’s suitcase was still practically untouched.

She smiled.

— Still haven’t unpacked your case?

The answer came with the ease of someone stating the obvious.

— What for, mom? Anyway, when are you booking my return trip to Beira?

Mariazinha paused for a moment in what she was doing. She looked at her daughter for a long while.

Then she answered with the firm calm that so often marked her decisions:

— You’re not going anywhere.

Ivette felt that answer like a blow to the chest. She stared at her, stunned, and after a sudden hesitation, shot back:

— Really, mom? So the promise that I’d go back for New Year’s with my friends was nothing but a lie?

Her mother stayed quiet, looking her in the eyes with tenderness and calm, and finally said:

— No, sweetheart. How would you even travel? Didn’t you notice, when you flew here, that your ticket was one-way only?

Ivette didn’t know what to say, not just from the state of shock she was in. In truth, she’d never noticed that detail about the ticket.

Her mother watched her in silence, giving no opening to carry the conversation further.

Ivette knew that, for her mother, no meant no.

She stood still a few more seconds, and, without a word, turned and went to her room to cry.

For the first time since leaving Mozambique, she began at last to understand something she’d never let herself admit until then.

The trip hadn’t simply interrupted her life. It was her own life that had changed course.

She looked at the suitcase for a long while.

It remained exactly the same.

Until then it had just been luggage ready for the return; now it stopped meaning the same thing.

Years later, recalling that moment, Ivette would find an image that captured, with striking precision, what she’d lived through then without being able to explain it.

— I felt utterly lost, and once I realized that if I walked out the door I wouldn’t know where to go, those first months in Portugal felt like being kept inside a “psychological womb”.

Everything felt provisional to her. Sheltered. Suspended.

Only on that day did she understand that time had ended.

She’d finally stopped living out of a packed suitcase.

Exile stopped being a circumstance.

It became part of her own life.

The following week passed with the simplicity of families relearning how to live together.

The end of the year drew near — the first the family would spend entirely together since June.

There were no presents. No abundance.

There was only the rare comfort of being together again.

Their relatives from Barcelos wanted to join them in Lisbon for New Year’s Eve dinner. They brought Cuxa along to stay, since her mother had by then returned for good.

Close to midnight, when Álvaro’s brother Jorge started changing plans to join other relatives and friends, Álvaro Ruy decided it was time to head home:

— Let’s go back to Cascais.

The bus to Cais do Sodré took its time.

By the time they reached the station, the train had already left — the next one wasn’t for another hour. They spent midnight there, sitting on the pavement, watching the fireworks in the distance.

They went back to Cascais by train, already well past midnight.

Ivette looked out the window at the lights slowly fading into the night.

She still believed that one day she’d go back to Beira.

She didn’t know when.

But a small certainty was finally beginning to take root inside her.

Some journeys end when the plane lands.

Others only end when a suitcase stops waiting for the return.

For months, Ivette went on keeping a life that no longer existed.

Only when she finally closed it did she realize that, to go on living, she too needed to be reborn.