Ladies and gentlemen, may I humbly bow and talk to you about one of the world’s most melancholic and passionate musical genres. It is called Fado (a Portuguese word normally translated as Fate) and it miraculously emerged, under its nowadays shape, from Mouraria, one of the oldest Moorish neighbourhoods of Lisboa. Its mysterious birth dates from the very begining of the 19th century, although earlier, deeper roots are generally admitted. It seems to have been the astonishing, heartbreaking result of a powerful multicultural combination: the black rhythms of African slaves, the traditional music of old Portugal, the Moorish vocal inflexions and the Brazilian modihna.

Fado talks of loss and longing, talks of people’s lives and talks of people’s soul. It has in it the sea and its tenderness. It is mostly made of desires and their stories, desires that are not meant for fulfillment, but for singing and sublime renouncement. It is the ultimate strength of the human soul: to escape and overcome reality. It is poetry and poetry only. And so is the love it describes. Defined mostly by the untranslatable word “saudade” – which counts for infinite longing for someone or something, a form of nostalgia that is bigger than life and more profound than the Atlantic ocean – love in fado’s short stories is built out of poetry and tragic passion, it forever breaks the tide of ordinary to melt itself into its own flame.

This beautiful world of sounds and feeling is my gift for today. Hope you’ll enjoy it. The gorgeous lady in the above movie is Amalia Rodrigues, Portugal’s greatest modern days fadistas and one of Europe’s “grand dames”.

Truth is fifteen minutes of poetry won’t make up for 15 hours of prose. And we always come back to our daily life and those overused contemporary myths: The Strong Woman, The Self Made Man, The Success. It seems like The Princess, The Hero, The Accomplishment have transformed overnight in their Business-World-Equivalents. That’s the model for today, nothing else we’ve got in stock, so take it or leave it.

I was not aware of my own, personal need for fairytales until some years ago. Back then, I was in the middle of some love-affair and way too preoccupied with being cool about it. Being cool was cool, right? So I was being so cool that one day I realised it wasn’t fun anymore. I was looking on the window, smoking in silence, my dreams were blocked somewhere on the way, there was no thrill, no thrill at all. I was feeling strong, the night was warm, there was no wind blowing and no sense of adventure. Nothing could have been more boring. My lover was a nice, calm, almost passionless person and I wasn’t looking for commitment. Everything was awfully clear and there was nothing to fantasize about. Suddenly, I realised I was living an uninteresting solitude, as my experiences were losing their meaning, and I got extremely sad. And out of that, of course, because that boredom thing wasn’t making feel like a novel heroine at all.

What I came back to was not idle dreaming, but a world full of sense. An interesting solitude, where you could plant fairytales and let them grow. And then I actually realised the value of being able to wait, hope or fight for something. It’s not the adventure that makes our hearts beat faster, but the possibility of it.

So, the prose? It will always be there, but when you do have something to wait for, something to believe in, well, it just turns to poetry a lot easier. And then we can just get rid of all those models and write some true fairytales. True fairytales rule.