Where would it go?

My grandmother left a village in the north of Portugal in 1962 with one suitcase and a photograph of a church, and I went back to find the church at thirty-four with a rental car and a phone that didn't work. I should say I grew up in Toronto and my Portuguese is what my cousins call "kitchen Portuguese," meaning I can say I'm hungry, I'm sorry, and that's enough, thank you, and not much else. My grandmother died four years ago. My mother has never been back. It was, as far as I could tell from family conversations, a place people left. The village doesn't have a sign. It has a name on the map and then a road that becomes a track that becomes a dispute between the car and the landscape. I got there at four in the afternoon and parked by a fountain and got out and stood there, and an old man on a bench across the square looked at me, and I looked at him, and neither of us said anything for a good ten seconds. "Boa tarde," I managed. He said something back that I didn't understand. I said I was sorry, I didn't speak well. He said something else. I got out my phone and showed him the photograph. The church. Black and white, corners soft, my grandmother's handwriting on the back with a name and a year. He took the phone in both hands and looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at me, and he said my grandmother's surname, as a question. I said yes. What happened next took about four hours and I'm still not sure I have it in the right order. He stood up. He called to a woman in a doorway. The woman called to someone inside. Somebody was sent to get somebody. Within twenty minutes there were nine people in the square and I was sitting at a table outside a house that I was given to understand had belonged to my grandmother's cousin's family, and a woman about my mother's age called Fernanda was holding my face in both hands and saying my grandmother's first name, over and over, and crying.

I didn't understand most of it. I understood enough. There was a wedding photo brought out that had my grandmother in it at nineteen, in the corner, laughing at something off camera, and I had never seen her laugh like that, not once, in thirty years of Sunday dinners. There was a plot of land pointed out on the hill that had been "the family's" and was now olive trees. There was a lot of food, which I'll get to. There was wine from a plastic bottle that was better than anything I'd bought in Toronto. And there was the church. Fernanda walked me to it at dusk. It was smaller than the photograph, which I'd been warned about, and the bell tower had been rebuilt, and someone had painted the door a blue that wasn't in the picture. I stood where I thought my grandmother had stood and held the phone up and tried to line it up, and Fernanda watched me do it and didn't say anything, and when I'd done it she took my arm and walked me back. At the table, later, she asked me, through a young man who had some English, why my mother had never come. I thought about how to say it. My mother's version was that there was nothing there. My grandmother's version, which she only gave once, near the end, was that she'd promised herself she wouldn't look back and had kept it too well. "She was afraid," I said, finally, "that it wouldn't be there." The young man translated. Fernanda looked at me. Then she said something short, and he laughed, and then he told me what it was. "She says: where would it go?" I stayed three days. I'd planned for one. When I left, Fernanda gave me a jar of olives from the hill and a printout of the wedding photo that somebody had driven to the next town to make, and the old man from the bench shook my hand and said something that the young man translated as "next time bring your mother," and I said I would, and I might, and I'm working on it.