Lisboa, Casa do Artista,

13.01.16, 16.00h

Maria Carolina Remartinez Quiles De Freitas França, also called NINI, is 96 years old, and has a fantastic energy and enthusiasm.

Her mother has Austro Hungarian origins, and her great-grandfather, Master Scodopole had one of the best orchestras of Europe of his time, playing every where.
Maria, his daughter, starts to learn violin with one of the orchestra musicians; they fall in love, but being discovered the lessons are interdicted…and the two lovers escape to Spain:
Maria and Toedoro Quilles get married in Madrid and have a child, Carlos.
Maria knows almost five languages, paints and has a good education, but coming from a high society family she doesn’t work, maintained by her husband who get a job in the Madrid Orchestra. On the tragic day her husband dies for a sudden heart attack, Maria remains alone with a child to grow and starts to give Italian, French, English lessons to earn her life.

Her child Carlos becomes a good cellist working with his sextet (he is also friend of the famous cellist Gulhermina Suggia), and marries a woman called Elisa having with her a girl, Felicia,
Nini’s mother.

The very curious thing is that the pianist and colleague in Carlo's sextet also has a child just 9 months earlier, called Francisco Remartinez.
The parents were imagining how nice would be if one day their two children would become lovers; the children were sleeping in the same bed when the families were visiting each other, and growing up the boy (Francisco) mentions the young Felicia as her girlfriend.

Francisco goes with 7 to Spain where he studies with big teachers becoming a good violinist, coming to Lisbon, playing with just 14 years old for the King Don Carlos.

Back in Portugal with 17 he enters the orchestra of Carlos Quilles.
During the years Felicia listens often about him (as the two mothers exchanged letters telling to each other news about their families), but she would not imagine that, one the day, the fantasy of a romance would become true and Francisco would really declare his intention of marrying her.
Orquestra Remartines is the orchestra he creates.
He wants to create a light music orchestra playing in Tivoli Theater while works in S. Carlos Theater and living in the near by Rua da Gloria, where Nini and her sister are born-.

With 16 Nini goes with a friend to the beach of Nazarè; She meets there a boy, Pae Salvaçao, composing for radio (he composed for a Milù, a young radio singer, actress and vedette in Portugal and Spain…). Back in Lisbon Salvaçao visits Ninì and listens to her and the sister singing…he likes it so much to announce their future debut in the radio program…without even being advised their artistic radio career starts…it is the year 1949.
Nini sings in a female Choir until her 50, and works for radio, starting in 1939, choosing music selections for radio programs until she is 70 years old.
She loves Mozart, Beethoven, Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Fred Astern, Maria Callas, Placido Domingues, Carreras.

I ask her what she remembers of her first house in the Elevador da Gloria: a patio going to Travessa do Falasò where her grandparents lived and from where they could greet people going up with the elevator.
About this time she remembers the sound of the sellers singing in the streets to announce their products, the beans, the figs…beautiful small poetic melodies.

When Nini is 9 her father is in Corea and, after a concert, he accepts to accompany one of the musicians to make a serenade to his girlfriends: tree cars are driving in a line. Her father's one gets smashed by a train killing him. Her first big devastating sadness.
“My father has always been my big hero, my father and my husband”
…the husband she marries is from Madeira…the island with "a special sea", where the couple hoped to go to retire together one day.
Her husband is described as a happy lively person, who liked to joke, and who was filling her life…he dies on 22 September of 1976, after 22 years of marriage.
Maria stays to live in her house in Areeiro: a nice flat, from there she can see the train passing by and in this house the couple has been very happy.

I ask her if she has been a free woman in her life...the first answer is "YES"...but then
she tells how her mother, having to grow up two daughters alone, was always controlling them as a general...just on the day of her marriage she says to have received her freedom back, as the relation with her husband was completely based on freedom and on reciprocal trust.
In 2005, on the 19th of December Nini leaves her flat to moves to Casa do Artista, as she feels a lack of strengths. Living on a third floor is not easy and she has the impression of not managing to live alone anymore.
She is a member of the House since years and she remembers the day of its inauguration...
Here she feels home, safe and well treated…
I ask Nini which are the sound of Casa do Artista…she smiles and speaks about Ricardo who organizes the cultural life of the Casa, creating the real animation of it, transforming its silence in poetry, music, theater events…the House has gained with Ricardo a new vitality!
Maria-Nini is a woman full of energy, and she loves internet!!
she says she learns with internet and she can meet there very nice people!
She uses it to distract herself.
I ask her if she has ever lived in the countryside and she tells me of the time she spent in a family house in Spain. There she become friend with a small pig “Couxinho” she adopted. Nowadays she still loves animals and plants…and she has an interesting story about of one of her plants that started to become prettier as she started to speak with her in Spanish…

Mrs. Nini still plays piano for me as last present before I leave…

This inspiring woman with humor and pleasure in telling the memories she lives for…is an inspiration of liveliness.

…with her 96…she would like to be 18 and go surfing!!!

…to listen is to imagine…

Thank you Senhora Nini, for this pleasant time and for all your energy!

Good Listening!

SPACE:

This interview recording took place in the living room of Casa do Artista, a big but warm space decorated with tables, sofas, carpets, lights, where the residents can work, make music, read and stay together.

We sit to a big round table and we listen, from the other side of the room the pleasant guitar played by another resident...