I leaned over
“I leaned back in the deck chair and closed my eyes, And my destiny appeared in my soul like a precipice. My past life mingled with my future, And there was in the middle a noise from the smoking room, Where, to my ears, the game of chess had ended.”
Álvaro de Campos, in “Poems”
I found myself thinking that, at this time of year, a quarter century of twenty-six years has passed since I met Eng. António Mota.
We met, as so often happens, in the formalities that life forces us to do and, why not say so, gladly provides it to us.
Our agendas meant that, shortly after that first contact, we had, on my initiative, a morning meeting in Lisbon.
Engineer António Mota arrived, apologizing for a slight delay, and said to me: “sorry for the delay. I’m here almost without sleep because I had to pick up my daughter from the nightclub at x o’clock in the morning”.
And that’s how perhaps I started to know the Man before meeting the businessman.
When, years later, accompanied by his wife, Rosa Maria, he formally and definitively invited me to work with him, he told me exactly what he expected from my work, what that work would be and under what conditions it would be carried out.
No shadows, no opacities, no doubts, nothing that wasn’t transparent and clear.
And there, at a peaceful dinner at the Sheraton Hotel, this quarter-century relationship began to take on another dimension, a relationship that takes up half of our adult lives.
A relationship that was, whenever it had to be, a professional relationship.
A relationship that evolved into a personal and friendly relationship, without it being conditioned or harmed.
A relationship of various complicities of which I, and only I, will be the faithful custodian until my “chess game” ends.
A quarter of a century is a lot and nothing.
The marks that each person leaves in life and the memories that those who survive us keep are truly relevant.
The indelible marks that António Mota leaves on each of those he deprived of will last in each one.
We all know how, together with Teresa, Manuela and Paula, he built a huge Economic Group.
We all know how this Economic Group passed on to the next generation.
We all know how it helped Portugal to assert itself in the world.
We also know that he was supportive and attentive to those who, less fortunate, were, in the happy expression of Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, “on the other side of the path”.
Camus asked himself: “Have you ever noticed that only death awakens our feelings?”
Fortunately, it wasn’t like that with António Mota.
Lawyer and manager