One day, at the time of the Terceira Island Carnaval, Gil Vicente’s boatman arrived, bringing with him the mission of taking two people to a hellish hell. A gaunt character experienced in the affairs of class society, far beyond the original status of Devil or Angel. He leaned against Mr. Vasco da Gama in the Alfândega courtyard, admiring the statue and questioning its nature. The last time he had visited Terceira Island, it wasn’t there yet. And what was Vasco da Gama doing there when he had little to do with the history of that city?

An old lady who was cleaning the steps of the Misericórdia church saw the scrawny man standing there, watching Vasquinho, and approached him to explain that, in fact, he was nothing more than a symbol of a broken promise between Angra and its bay. People had long since turned their backs on the sea. All that remained was Vasco da Gama, eternally stuck on land, mirroring a city with no Atlantic vocation.

But there was still hope, thought Gil Vicente’s boatman. Where there are people, there is always power and resistance. All was certainly not lost. He had come there with the order to take two sticks to the fire on the other side. Walking up Rua Direita, the boatman spotted a middle-aged man in a dark, tasteless suit leaning against a wall of a local grocery store where seeds and agricultural products were sold. It was Mr. Agriculture, one of the people he had come to for the car. They stared at each other for a few seconds while the certainty hung in the air that this would be the day of judgment. But Agriculture immediately revolted with shouts and distractions. A subsidy is promised there. A handout is offered there. Not everything that had gone wrong was his fault, he said repeatedly, while shaking water out of his even though it wasn’t a rainy day.

The boatman wanted to know about his candidacy for the mayor’s office through amnesty and redemption. The gentleman from Agriculture was annoyed with the system. He tried to help the population and be a candidate for salvation. Still, he thought it was a great shame that he couldn’t keep his management position because he wanted to be sure that he would have a roof over his head to shelter him from a hurricane in the event of defeat. He considered it indecent that our small Atlantic kingdom couldn’t understand that.

And speaking of small sizes, the boatman asked him about the small community on the island of Flores, abandoned to its fate, with no cooperatives or people able to help defend their interests. The agricultural minister kept quiet. He was always unable to come up with a solution to such matters.

Then, from across the street, the other man the boatman had come for appeared. He was age and a T-shirt advertising a local company selling non-pharmaceutical products. The gentleman from Ambiente was there to help his companion. He defended Flores, giving a long speech lasting fifteen hours, sixteen minutes, and seventeen seconds, where he said everything and its opposite, ending with a solution that existed long before he began his work and did nothing to help those people.

“I’ve come to save your ass again,” said Mr. Environment to Mr. Agriculture. The boatman was watching this dull little dance, deciding which of the two deserved an auto from the depths of Hell. Gil Vicente’s old and experienced wielder then discerned the trick being played out before his eyes. The Environment was defending Agriculture, and Agriculture was protecting the Environment. But the purpose was not to help the people. It was to defend the economic groups. There were no scientists in that street defending the made-up phrases and sticks of those gentlemen.

There was no desire to drink poisons or shoot rats. The only thing they had left was the truth. The boatman proclaimed them guilty, ready to continue their journey to their car. He offered them glasses of glyphosate from the catalog of a local company. He dedicated to them long Vincentian poems and speeches that we don’t want to repeat here. The boatman concluded about those string subjects that in the Environment and Agriculture, there were no obvious archipelagos.

Only a faint hope in his unshakeable faith in the people’s will. After Gil Vicente released him into the world, the boatman became friends with Zeca Afonso and never stopped believing in the lyrics of the old but ever-lasting Grândola. It was the words of those two gentlemen that he no longer believed.

The flowers and animals were burned, and the strategies for recovering from old pains were burned. All that remained was Hell and popular judgment.

Alexandra Manes is from Flores Island but lives in Terceira Island, Azores. She is a regular contributing writer for several Azorean newspapers, a political and cultural activist, and has served in the Azorean Parliament.

NOVIDADES will feature occasional opinion pieces from various leading thinkers and writers from the Azores to give the diaspora and those interested in the current Azores a sense of the significant opinions on some of the archipelago’s issues.

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL).