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“In a country where I’m given my taxpayer number first and only months later I get the citizen card and driver’s license, how can a company shut down today and be able to open tomorrow with another tax number? How is it that factories with so much money have bosses with so little education, that they cannot see a person standing for a second without immediately calling on her to complain, as if she were a slave? Why does the State pay more in unemployment benefits than in retirement pensions? And why don’t they give a job to a persona grande – a senior? So I've been accumulating experience all my life and now they don't value it?”. Giuseppe expresses all these questions aloud when reflecting on Portugal. And then he thinks: "No-one here fears walking on the street". 

 

Giuseppe Fazio

Born in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela

61 years old

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Giuseppe's life began with a series of misunderstandings. First it was the father who forgot his real date of birth and who, a year later, in the proper civil registry, indicated it as the 19th of November, when it had been the 13th of the same month. Then it was also the clerk at the Conservatory who, instead of giving him his mother's Italian surname, Passanisi, registered him under the wrong spelling of Passanife, that stuck with him for life. Later, there were still some traumatic child embarrassments that he prefers not to remember, but that made him almost mute for most of his adolescence; there were years of dedication to the church with the expectation of becoming a priest although a superior told him that he would not be able to fulfill the vow of chastity; and there was also a failed attempt to marry an Italian woman, as his mother intended, to only end up falling in love with a Portuguese – who his mother rejected at first, before surrendering fully (“May we at least have that!”) to her Lusitanian charm.

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These mishaps of life may explain what Giuseppe now recognizes, mixing Portuguese and Spanish: “I was muy malo [very bad]. My brother and I destroyed almost everything at home, we were always having problems ... I was terrible in class and the madness was such that we had to cambiar [change] schools six times because none wanted to accept us, due to mala conduta [bad behaviour]”. Being the son of a fishing boat repairman and a housewife, and the grandson of Italians who emigrated to central Venezuela during the Depression following the Second World War, Giuseppe was the older brother among two boys and two girls, but, in Puerto Cabello, where he was born, or in Punto Fijo, where the family moved to later on, he was far from being the most responsible child and the TV shows only stimulated his boldness.

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One day, when he was 8 years old, he fully undid a broom, separated the handle from the brush, put the wooden stick on the fire and then, turning the incandescent tip to his brother, drew a Z on his chest with it, on his shoulder blade. “He was wearing a tank top and the wood burned through the cloth, burned his skin, burned everything!”, Giuseppe recalls. The howls of pain were so loud and the flesh so damaged that the boy’s mother took the handle of the broom and broke it hard on Giuseppe's own arm, after which he still took a second beating when his father arrived home. But there is no bitterness when he tells the story today and the swordsman concludes: “My brother still has the Zorro's scar. And we still laugh de eso [about it] today”.

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After three years of boarding school, always shared with his brother despite personalities "as opposed as the sun and the moon", Giuseppe took a course at college for industrial production technicians. “Then I started working, receiving plata [money], and went to the United States for three months to learn English”, he reveals. It was on his return that his mother decided to get him married: at the first party she took him to, he chose badly – he found a Venezuelan girl cute but his mother wanted an Italian; on the second attempt, it seemed he didn't get it right either because he fell in love with the Portuguese, who “was very shy, very beautiful in her natural way, without any make-up”, but after a few months his mother conceded that the boy had found in Elisabeth, from the island of Madeira, a suited wife.

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Shortly after the wedding, Giuseppe was already working as a construction entrepreneur, building, selling or renting shops and apartments in Punto Fijo. And everything went well, even when he ventured out as a supermarket owner, until “the Chávez government started to make the country increasingly worse, inflation became impossible, many people slipped into poverty and prices got so crazy that gasoline was free, but gas station employees asked for bread as payment because the most basic goods cost fortunes”. The price of corn flour, essential to baking the typical arepas, increased by 900% in 2016, for example, reaching the equivalent of 125 euros on the black market.

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Without any illusions about the direction the country was taking, first it was Giueseppe's parents who left for Italy, then his children who went to Panama and then his wife who joined them, already with the idea of ​​extending the trip to Portugal, where the family of her daughter-in-law had an apartment vacant for 25 years, in Albergaria-a-Velha. With the death of Hugo Chávez in 2013, “everything got even worse”. Giuseppe still tried to resist, out of love for the country, for his business and for the brother who stayed behind trying to keep his two hotels alive, but one day he packed his suitcase, got on the plane to Panama and, when he reached his destination, even the suitcase was gone. "It disappeared after boarding in Venezuela and I was left with nothing to call my own", he recalls. As if that wasn’t enough, he ended up being held at the airport by the police and it was inside the building that he waited for the family, until everyone embarked for Portugal, which welcomed him in the winter of 2017, “feeling so cold, with no coat or clothes for that weather".

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Here, he felt welcomed, which was not unrelated to the fact that he has a kind of “Portuguese” look, but he keeps sensing that the treatment gets colder when he reveals to be Venezuelan. "It seems they think I'm going to steal their jobs away, when the truth is that we only get the jobs that the Portuguese don't want", he argues. "Who wants to process 150,000 chickens a day in a poultry farm, in the cold, from midnight until 9, 10 or 11 a.m.?" Giuseppe was “tired to death in the first three months” of that job, then got used to it and lasted for a year and four months, until he found an opening in a cardboard factory, where he was recruited for only one trimester. He then learned about unemployment, but still doesn’t understand the Portuguese job market: “In a country where I’m given my taxpayer number first and only months later I get the citizen card and driver’s license, how can a company shut down today and be able to open tomorrow with another tax number? How is it that factories with so much money have bosses with so little education, that they cannot see a person standing for a second without immediately calling on her to complain, as if she were a slave? Why does the State pay more in unemployment benefits than in retirement pensions? And why don’t they give a job to a persona grande – a senior? So I've been accumulating experience all my life and now they don't value it?”. Without oil, but with “barbaric tourism”, “Portugal should be a Switzerland in which everything works well, in which agriculture is not abandoned and in which universities only open degrees for areas where there is employment”.

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Despite these incongruities, Giuseppe says that, in his new country by the sea, “Santa Maria da Feira is a paradise”. If in the main cities of Venezuela “you don't see anyone on the street, you can't use a cell phone or wear necklaces when walking about, you can't talk freely in public and half of the stores are closed” or being rented for a measly 20 euros a month (as with the 200 square meters that he left behind), those examples only help to highlight, by contrast, Feira’s state of grace. “The transport system is weak and, if you want to go to another city, you have to use a car – which is not difficult, ok, because in Portugal there is easy credit available to buy one – but this here is a wonder. The city is quiet, safe, clean, good for educating children... It has culture, green spaces, sports, a hospital. Nobody here is afraid to walk on the street”.

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When allowed, Giuseppe dreams of a job that will let him go back to construction or work at an airport, “between the noise of airplanes and the smell of petrol”. He is passionate about aviation and has only 24 hours to fly to obtain the pilot's brief, but he also has a chef course, so every day he cooks meals like “chicken with pepper and lemon, accompanied by banana and avocado”. He praises Portuguese bread for its variety, he is surprised by each confirmation that “everything in Portugal has eggs on” and he hopes that all “the three million Venezuelans living outside their country” may have found the same luck in their new homes as he feels he has when strolling around in Feira. Despite the imperfections and immaturities of the country where he now lives, he is grateful. “Portugal has another culture, has another education. Here they educate you to be a citizen. If you’re a driver, they teach you to stop at the crosswalk. In Venezuela, the car doesn’t stop... It will most likely accelerate”. ■

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