This old woman shall greet you if you enter Provincetown, Massachusetts from the sea and haunt you when you leave through the same narrow channel, round the breakwater and head for open waters.
There are several more images of old women on the other wall of this structure which parallels the dock where the ferry departs and arrives.
I asked my cousin’s wife about these women and she said, “They are photos of widows of Portuguese fisherman.”
Oh. I gulped literally. I had thought she and the others might have been famous artists since Provincetown has a celebrated artistic community. But I forgot. Many tourists do. Before the artists came, the fisherman were here. In fact, when the first settlers came to this precious curve in the melting glacier that became Cape Cod, they came with fishing line and wooden boats and made their living from the sea.
It is a natural harbor and several fishing vessels departed through the same channel as I waited for my ferry. It was a fishing community and still is.
As the ferry pulled out on this sunlit day when storms cannot even be imagined, I followed her face like a loved one on the dock, waving soundlessly and growing smaller and smaller as we slowly made our way past the buoys, the lighthouse and lost sight of land.
She now inhabits me despite being hundreds of miles away. A fisherman’s widow perched on the edge of the dock that her husband’s boat departed from one day–years, perhaps even a century ago–a day perhaps as glorious as this one. He departed with a wave and simply did not return to her, to his family. Gone. Lost. There was no book. There was no movie of “The Perfect Storm”. He simply didn’t come back.
Unanswered prayers.
Please read this article from The International Herald Tribune. No, really. Don’t blow it off. You’ll thank me (I think) or else never return. It is the modern day tale of the complications of even answered prayers. I think I need to memorize this, as I did this old woman’s face. Line by line.
©2008 Pat Coakley
PHOTOGRAPHS CANNOT BE USED WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION
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PARIS: Ingrid Betancourt fears the collapse she knows is coming.
A week after her sudden rescue from nearly seven years of captivity in the Colombian jungle, Betancourt looks healthy, even elegant in a black pants suit and white linen blouse, a gold Cartier watch on her wrist, setting off the crude rosary she made herself out of buttons, using the plastic lanyard the guerrillas used to make straps for their rifles.
But she spoke of her fragility in an interview Thursday, as well as of her deep Roman Catholic faith. And she knows how quickly her adrenaline is dropping.
A collapse is coming, she said.
“It’s like the roaring of the waves, I know it’s coming, and it’s getting closer,” she said softly. “So I know it’s time for me just to stop. I don’t want to be submerged by depression.”
Betancourt, a Colombian who took dual French citizenship through her first marriage, has been holding court in one of Paris’s nicest hotels, Le Meurice, trying to use her moment of fame to thank those who have helped her and to press for the release of the other, perhaps 700, hostages of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
But she also is trying to avoid describing the details of her ordeal as an attractive woman in captivity in the jungle, a time when she was often chained, physically tortured and humiliated by armed and angry men, whose behavior, she said earlier, was “so monstrous I think they themselves were disgusted.”
She wants to bear witness, “but it has to come at the right moment,” she said, her eyes tearing.
Only a week after liberation, “I need time,” she said, speaking English. “It’s not easy to talk about things that are still hurting. And probably it will hurt all my life, I don’t know. The only thing I’ve settled in my mind is that I want to forgive, and forgiving comes with forgetting.
“So I have to do two things. I have to forget in order to find peace in my soul and forgive. But once I’ve forgiven and forgotten, I will have to bring back memories. Probably they will be filtered by time, so they won’t come with all the pain I feel now.”
Probably, too, she said, she would do so with professional help.
She recognizes the cruelty within the human animal. “I think we have that animal inside of us, all of us, that’s the reality of how we are made,” she said. “We can be so horrible to the others.”
She said first that it was impossible to judge others, and then said: “For me it was like understanding what I couldn’t understand before, how for example, the Nazis, how this could happen.”
She always tried to keep her dignity, she said, finding solace and sanity in regular daily activities, some private, like meditation and prayer, and some collective – “to give yourself stability in a world with no stability.” And she did find some nobility among the hostages and the degradation.
“That’s the magic of all things,” she said. “You can have the dark side of man but you can also plug yourself to light and be an enormous light to others. And I think that’s what being spiritual means.”
Even her rosary, she said, was “an error.” She remembered her late father saying the rosary, but could not remember whether she was supposed to pray 10 times to the Virgin Mary.
“So I thought, maybe 15 times,” she said, fingering the 15 buttons that make up her rosary, taken from a jacket the guerrillas had provided her. “So I did 15 buttons.”
God is personal to her, she said. “I talk to him and he responds.” People dismiss miracles, she said, and “talk of coincidences,” but for her, “I think they happen all the time to everyone.”
Betancourt, tired, still has other interviews to give. But her time of publicity is ending, she said, speaking of her children, Lorenzo and Mélanie, who were with her on Thursday.
“I know that now this is the time to retreat, to be with my family, to find a space for my life,” she said, her voice breaking. “You know, I’m landing like a parachute in the life of others. They have their own lives, their daily activities. And I don’t have anything,” she said, then stopped.
“Six days ago I was chained to a tree,” she said. “And I’m now free, and I’m trying to understand how I’m going to live from now on.”
Notes:
Hi Pat,
Thanks for posting the IHT article. It’s an interesting example of heartfelt journalism.
I only learned of the plight of Ingrid Betancourt because I saw a poster of her in France and asked Monsieur who she was. That was last spring, when she was still very much in captivity. Frankly, I was shocked that I’d heard nothing of her ordeal in the UK. How insular is that?
As you say, Ingrid’s prayers have been answered and she is now free, but we can only imagine what she’s going through inside. “It’s like the roaring of the waves, I know it’s coming, and it’s getting closer,” those words are haunting. Still, sometimes a breakdown becomes a breakthrough. Hopefully she will find a way to use her experiences in a positive way.
Poignant and so very deep reaching, all the histories we don’t know or take for granted.
Having spent time in P-town, I first became aware of a term used to describe features of the salt box cottages that hug the coast:
Widows walk.
So hard to even imagine what that last wave felt like.
And Ingrids’ story is just too boggling to even comprehend.
You take us from the frivolity of fridges’ to this deeply moving recognition of what humans are capable of doing to and for each other.
Thank you Pat for contributing so much elegant prose to your blog.
Provincetown was the first vacation I ever had when my son was 8- we flew up there from NYC together, a first plane ride for both of us! We still reminisce about the influence it had on us and it’s powerful beauty. I know you’ve taken that all back with you.
That woman’s face breaks my heart… Great post.
Welcome, Katie. I agree. Her face alone would break me, but when you see it facing out to the open water, as if she is still looking for her husband’s boat to round the channel and come home? O, my. Thanks for taking the time to visit.
BonnieL. I left you a message on your own blog about how I feel about your comments. Truly. If we bottle this, we have a wordprosac.
Epicurienne, I have so shut down from news media that I didn’t know whether this story has been covered a great deal or not. I hear this women’s voice coming through the radio. She was speaking English. She paused thoughtfully but honestly, her answers just flowed. I was
astonished, truly.
“Six days ago I was chained to a tree. And now I am free, and I’m trying to understand how I’m going to live from now on.”
Breaks my heart just as the image of the Portuguese widow.
Glad I dropped by for a read. Isn’t it odd how the pain of another can wound us and inspire us all in one breath? Thank you.
I looked at the photo for a while before I read the post.
Whenever there is text in a photo I find myself thinking about what it means. It’s interesting when one thinks about what people have selected to include in their framing.
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Slow
No
Wake
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It can mean so many things.
Which brings me to the widow in the shot.
It’s not just fishermen that don’t come back due to some tragedy.
I like to maintain a policy of never parting with my wife on angry terms because it might be the last time we ever see each other again and I wouldn’t want to have our last time together to have bad memories attached to it.
If I was able to meet Betancourt, I’d like to tell her about an epiphany that I had rockclimbing once. I was about 300ft up on a shear wall of loose rock and the strong wind gusts were nearly blowing me off. I was leading which meant that my last protection point was way below me and if I fell the rock was so loose that the protection may not have held and I would’ve died.
I can remember starting to panic when the thought occurred to me that freaking out and letting go was definitely going to kill me and it was that thought that helped me find things in myself I didn’t even know I had.
I’m sure Betancourt has dug deep into her reserves before. I know she’s tired and just wants to let go. Perhaps if she could reconnect with the strength she found to get through her ordeal it might help her weather her freedom.
Welcome, Brad. I’m so glad you stopped by and for this post. It needs comments and observations to bring out the truth of it. Hope you come again.
And, Razzman. You are probably one of the few people on the planet who would have some useful to say to Betancourt. And, if she can’t hear you, we can. We are the better for it, my friend, as is this post.
This is amazing, Pat. I too was taken in by the picture. It speaks volumes . . .