I am due to a geographical error

I started with the intention of telling the storyteller’s story, but Sofia had other plans.

It was almost as if letters, words and ideas flowed out of that very same persons who so captivates youth and adults.

In the terrace, on that windy Saturday morning, the wind would occasionally play with the blond hair of the granddaughter of Gunther Maul, the first to arrive in Madeira with that surname.

The woman who told me her story – her story – is no longer the different young girl, with chameleon green eyes freckles and very light hair who went to school in Madeira and who was keenly observed by children with dark eyes and brown eyes.

Her grandfather (his father’s father) didn’t like the cold, and started sending cvs to warm places, receiving an answer from New Zealand (in six months time) and another from Madeira (effective immediately).

With a Jewish background, and in the aftermath of world war one, the option was to leave Hamburg as soon as possible.

He quickly became part of the foreign community residing in the island, and was known as Gerry – the term used for Germans during the war. Then, says Sofia with her blue eyes almost closed due to midday glare, he stopped using his native tongue, and didn’t speak of his family. Deliberately.

One day he was at the then Country Club – now Quinta Magnolia – when he saw a young British girl playing tennis. She didn’t talk about her father, but her mother was financially independent, and they used to spend holidays in warm places. As with all love stories, this one also has letters and promises of eternal love. And with the help of her nanny, they wrote for many years. And on the day she turned 21 he went to fetch her, with the money he had saved.

They married four days later, in a London chapel. A disgrace for her mother, for besides being German, he was also poor and without a family. She was disinherited.

Two children were born of this marriage. By this time I am already hooked on the story, and I can feel we are close to the closing. Sofia drinks a bit of tea, as if to turn a page.

On her mother’s side the story is almost as interesting. There was a Californian grandfather, with a Swedish ancestry, who became auctioneer when he went back home. He would ransack barns and trunks, finding antiques which he would then restore and sell.

One day a doctor told him to go somewhere warm for a vacation, and someone told him of a wonderful holiday in Maiorca. He went to the travel agency, and didn’t go past the first syllable. When he got to “Ma…ma…ma”, the travel agent helped him say “Madeira”.

Smiling, the woman with two different earrings stresses: “I only exist due to a geographical error by the travel agent”. He came here, he bought a house here, he brought his family, and eventually a granddaughter got to know Sofia’s father. Her mother, Swedish, married the son of a German, and they now have four Muslim grandchildren. But we’ll get there…

Let’s get back to Sofia. The kid who wanted to be a biologist, and discover more than the Natural History Museum where her grandfather received so many thousands of kids through the years. The years went by, and the story teller, protestant and student in a catholic school, lived her own life, creating her own memories. She and her brother followed their family’s footsteps, and got their own families, with “different” people. As was tradition, after all. She, with a Senegalese, the brother with a Malay. So much so that her father laughs, saying that if one had told him that all his four grandchildren would be muslim he would have laughed. The brother converted in the catacumbs of a London bookshop, and the three kids are cousins of her daughter, and enchanting mix of two races that couldn’t have had better results. Bali is gorgeous, sweet, and very, but very, extrovert, after the first twenty seconds. It isn’t hard to find where her genes come from…

She went to Coimbra to train as an interpreter. The plan was to work for four months per year, and be a marine biologist in the other, and she knew she’d have to complete a degree in both areas. But she had what it takes. She was asked to complete jobs that got her physically sick. “Words left my mouth with which I didn’t agree, while I translated the ideas, and I quit”. Her parents separated, to help all these emotions and, to top it all, she was afraid to fall asleep, because she was part of a Red Cross ambulance and frequently has nightmares about the cases she transported.

She came back to Madeira. She even looked at driving industrial machines, so big was the despair of finding something. She tripped on speech therapy. One more “marriage”, this time between linguistics and the brain, which fascinated her so much that she didn’t hesitate to take the course. The deal with her father was that he would finance the course if she kept her grades above 16. And her stubbornness paid off, because when she finished her degree she started working in a school, with two basic languages: the first was gestural language, and the second was Portuguese, written and spoken. She was the first to do this in Portugal, along with a colleague who is still doing it.

She naturally received plenty of different work propositions, and for a number of years taught in bilingual schools in the Estoril area. She did well. She met the father of her daughter, she got pregnant, and she didn’t look back. Sofia had the habit of telling a story, at the end of her sessions with her students, and one day she was invited to hear stories being told in the Oeiras library. She didn’t hesitate. She was smitten by a course in storytelling, and her life changed. Again. She joined a storytellers’ group that had been created, and that we know as “Contabandistas”.

The group grew. They started promoting storytelling events. She returned to Madeira, permanently, in February 2015, over two years after having told a story as a thank you for the group who went to plant dragon trees in the mountains, after the 2012 fires.

Life became more complicated after she separated in 2014.

She came back to the island, and she held on to the stories as one holds onto a teddy bear, until – she recognizes – everything falls apart. Because one of the most important things in a storyteller is knowing where the audience wants to go.

There’s a specific language – her own and the group’s – that everyone follows. She does not usually see people yawn, or watch the phone, she captivates them with her blue eyes and her relaxed attitude. She only tells stories that move her. It must have to do with freedom. She likes to alternate between traditional tales, life stories and texts with author. She adapts and translates a few things. She makes them better, with her own personal touch, but she always says where the story comes from, and who wrote it. She ends up by embellishing words in the same one way one decorates a Christmas tree, tenderly and very carefully, so that those to whom the story is being told can build their own bridges.

I wanted to know when she realized that that was what she wanted to do, that that was what filled her heart with words that can’t be described. It was with adults. Kids have very lively memories, but they aren’t so demanding. That’s why they are abandoned to their own reading as soon as they learn to read. Sofia explains: “when we enter kindergarten, the teachers tell us stories, but when we get to primary school, our parents think that, just because we learned to read, we can enchant ourselves”. And she adds, in a serious tone: “for years I was unable to hear Brazilian, because I remember my parents watching Gabriela, and we waited – my brother and I –, at the top of the stairs, that the programme would finish so that we could be told the stories we really liked”.

And that why she likes stories of life, that why she keeps coming back to these. We only know where we are going to if we know where we came from. For now, we know only that her smile wanders through the city. If you want to hear a story, sit comfortably and enjoy the blue eyed story teller, the Madeiran who loves the island where she was born due to a geographical error. An error she doesn’t regret.

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