"I grew up without a father and my mother was a cleaning lady"

From the Red Cross Neighborhood to a celebrity tailor, have you ever dreamed this could happen?

Never [pause]. I grew up without a father, and my mother was a cleaner, so the conditions weren't good. In Spain, they paid more than double what we earned here in the 1980s, and my mother decided to take me with her to Madrid. I was there from the age of eight or nine.

Did you like it?

No [smile]. I remember telling my mother that I didn't want to, because I was always a neighborhood kid. I had my cousins; it was a family with total freedom. I said, "Mom, I love you, but I want to go live with my family. I respect that; you want to stay here so you can provide better conditions for both me and you, but I want to live with my cousins and my aunts." And that's what happened. My mother would save up all her time off to come see me. She'd come by bus, and it took forever to get here. But that's how my life was shaped until I became an adult.

What did you dream about as a kid?

[pause] I remember that conversation about how everyone wanted to be a police officer, a firefighter, an astronaut, and I just said I wanted to be happy. I was also always a very responsible kid, maybe because my mom was away. When we did our mischief, I would go, but I tried not to do it because I thought my mom would be mad at me. My neighborhood was too small for what I thought I wanted to be, I remember that clearly.

And what neighborhood was that? Because it was a neighborhood, obviously, with all the associated prejudices. But it wasn't just fame.

No, it had some benefit too [smile]. You know that sometimes, when opportunities don't arise, they lead people to opt for other means of survival...

This is a romanticized issue, also because there are some who don't want it.

Obviously, but you grow up in that environment and feel that's the standard for your future. But I thought I wanted more than just the neighborhood. One of the things that really impacted me was my enlistment. I remember going there angry, asking why I'd gone, and on top of that, he was the kid who behaved well. I spent six months in the army in Elvas, which made me detach from the neighborhood. I remember that when I returned from the army, I immediately wanted to go to work because I'd enrolled in a higher education program, but I realized it wasn't going to work and that it had to be a private college.

What course did you want to take?

Industrial design. It's funny because I was in an art class where 11 students wanted to go into fashion, and there was one guy who didn't want to, which was me.

Text: Nuno Azinheira; Photos: Nuno Moreira

Read this article in full in this week's NOVA GENTE. On newsstands now.

Follow Nova Gente on Instagram