Small Memories Page 10

  The rain is pouring down, the wind is shaking the leafless trees, and from times past comes an image, that of a tall, thin man, an old man, I realize, now that he draws nearer along the sodden track. He is carrying a crook over his shoulder and wears an ancient, muddy cape from which drip all the rains of heaven. Before him go the pigs, heads down, snouts to the ground. The man approaching, blurred amongst the teeming rain, is my grandfather. He looks weary. He bears on his back seventy years of a hard life full of privations and ignorance. And yet he is a wise man, taciturn, one who opens his mouth to speak only when necessary. Indeed, he speaks so little that we all fall silent to hear him when a kind of warning light illumines his face. He has a strange way of gazing into the distance, even if the distance is only the wall in front of him. His face, fixed but expressive, seems to have been carved out by an adze, and his small, sharp eyes shine sometimes as if something he had long been pondering had finally been understood. He is a man like many others on this earth, in this world, perhaps an Einstein crushed beneath a mountain of impossibilities, a philosopher, a great illiterate writer. Something he could never be. I remember those warm summer nights, when we slept under the big fig tree, I can hear him talking about the life he's led, about the Milky Way, or the Road to Santiago as we villagers still called it, that glowed above our heads, about the livestock he reared, about stories and legends from his remote childhood. We would fall asleep late, well wrapped up in our blankets against the dawn chill. But the image I can't shake off at this melancholy hour is of that old man advancing beneath the rain, stubborn, silent, like someone fulfilling a destiny nothing can change, except death. This old man, whom I can almost touch with my hand, doesn't know how he will die. He doesn'tyet know that a few days before his final day, he will have a presentiment that the end has come and will go from tree to tree in his garden, embracing their trunks and saying goodbye to them, to their friendly shade, to the fruits he will never eat again. Because the great shadow will have arrived, until memory brings him back to life and finds him walking along that sodden path or lying beneath the dome of the sky and the eternally questioning stars. What word will he utter then?

  There you were, Grandma, sitting on the sill outside your house, open to the vast, starry night, to the sky of which you knew nothing and through which you would never travel, to the silence of the fields and the shadowy trees, and you said, with all the serenity of your ninety years and the fire of an adolescence never lost: "The world is so beautiful, it makes me sad to think I have to die." In those exact words. I was there.

  Among the newborn piglets there would be the occasional weakling that would inevitably suffer with the night cold, especially in winter, which could prove fatal. However, as far as I know, no such piglet ever died. Every night, my grandfather and grandmother would go to the sty to find the weakest of the piglets, wash their feet and legs and lay them down in their own bed. They would sleep there together, beneath the same blankets and the same sheets, with my grandmother on one side of the bed and my grandfather on the other, and between them, three or four piglets who must have thought they were in heaven.

  The yard was divided into two parts that were different in shape and size. You could get to the first—the smaller one, which was more or less square—by the two stone steps outside the kitchen door or through a gate that opened directly onto the street and whose main purpose was in fact to let the pigs through, when, at the first light of dawn, my grandfather went out with them or when, almost at sunset, he brought them home again. We used it as well, of course, but for the animals it was the only way in and out. In that part of the yard, under a lean-to that always seemed to me to be on the point of collapse, were the pigsties, about four or five, where the sows lay, their teats exposed, suckling their young, and where they would sleep all night and as much of the day as the piglets would let them. All you had to do was open the doors of the pigsties for each sow to enter the appropriate one, taking her respective litter with her. I can't remember them ever once making a mistake, but it was not unknown for one or more of the piglets, blind with impatience, to go through the wrong door. They didn't stay there long. Incredible though it must seem to anyone who has never seen such things or heard tell of them, the sow knew each piglet from the way it sucked at the teat, and so she would use her snout to eject any interlopers. It would have made more of an impact had she bitten them, but I never saw that happen. The poor piglet had discovered, too late, that this was not his mother and he would squeal in distress for someone to help him. My grandfather or my grandmother would say to me: "Zezito, go and sort him out, will you?" And I, an advanced student in matters of pig-breeding, would grab the intruder by one of its back legs, supporting it under the belly with my other hand, and take it back to its home sweet home, to the peace of hearing its real mother grunt with pleasure because the prodigal had returned. And how did I know which sty the stray belonged to? Nothing could be simpler. Each piglet had had a small amount of hair shaved off its body, one stripe for the first sty, two stripes for the second and so on. (Far more complex was the system of signs used by my grandmother to work out how much money she was spending at the grocer's, and I never knew her to be so much as a centavo out. In a notebook, she would draw circles with a cross inside them, circles with no cross, crosses outside the circles, dashes that she called "sticks," and other symbols I cannot now recall. She would sometimes compare her own accounts with the list presented to her by the shopkeeper, Vieira, and often came out best. I will never forgive myself for not having asked her if I could have one of those notebooks for myself, for it would be documentary, even scientific proof that my grandmother Josefa had reinvented arithmetic, not that there's anything extraordinary or unusual about that in a family like mine, when one recalls that José Dinis solved the historic problem of squaring the circle when he was not yet ten years old.) Apart from the sties and the troughs where the pigs could enjoy their swill, sometimes enriched with a couple of handfuls of corn flour, there was also a henhouse, a rabbit hutch and a stable for the donkey. However hard you may try, there is never much to say about a henhouse, you simply hope that the chickens who live there get along well together and with the cockerel who covers them, that they produce eggs to sell, eggs that hatch to produce chicks, and eggs to eat at table on special occasions. My grandparents' henhouse was no exception, it had the same breeds any other henhouse would have, although doubtless fewer than most of them as regards the number of chickens and eggs produced. The rabbit hutch, on the other hand, does have a story. Uncle Carlos would visit it now and then, always at dead of night, in the brief intervals when he wasn't in the village lock-up in the square or hiding somewhere or other on suspicion of theft, especially of copper wire from telegraph poles, a highly prized commodity that he positively craved. He wasn't a bad man, he just drank too much and had difficulty in distinguishing what was his from what was other people's. I don't think he preferred rabbit meat to chicken, it was simply that the rabbits were, shall we say, dumb, a couple of squeals and that was that, they didn't protest when grabbed by the ears and stuffed inside a sack, whereas the chickens were capable of kicking up a row that would wake the whole neighborhood. My grandmother always got up when the still distant dawn was just a glimmer, and when she rose from her bed, she could consider herself very lucky indeed if Carlos Melrinho, as a filial souvenir of his latest nocturnal foray, had been charitable enough to leave her a rabbit or two. Unforgivable some will say, but it pays to know that not everything is as nice as pie even in the lives of the best families. Anyway, there are plenty of people out there who steal much more than copper wire and rabbits and still manage to pass themselves off as honest folk in the eyes of the world. In those times and in those places, things were what they appeared to be. Perhaps the one exception was the aforementioned stable for the donkey. The name came from a time when it was, indeed, home to a female donkey I never knew. Despite the passing years, the name stayed, and just so that there should be no doubt about its beginnin
gs, the hut still contained the old manger, as if the donkey's ghost were doomed to return each night to gorge on the memory of beans and straw. And apart from the bread oven that stood to one side of the kitchen door, the inventory of this part of the yard will be complete with the mention of the other pigsty, larger than those in which the sows and their litters would fit, although only just. This larger sty was home to the pig that had been chosen to be fattened up—although this didn't happen every year—an ungrateful beast whose bedding I, pitchfork in hand, would change at least once a week, removing the stinking straw, filthy with piss and shit, and replacing it with new straw that would take less than an hour to lose its natural freshness. One day, as I was engaged on this task, it began to rain, first a few fat, sparse drops, then hard and insistently. I thought it best to take shelter in the donkey's stable, but my grandfather's voice brought me up short: "Finish what you've started. Rain only makes you wet, it doesn't break your bones." He was right. I took up my pitchfork again and unhurriedly, patiently, like a good workman, completed the task, drenched but happy.

  A rough wattle-and-daub fence separated the two parts of the yard, with the inevitable gate to allow access to both. Immediately to the left stood the enormous stack of straw, with its typically pyramidal shape, a rectangular base narrowing toward the top, the clandestine fruit of my grandmother's dawn raids on the stubble in the wheat fields—carried out behind the keepers' backs—along with some of the other village women, all armed with a rake, a piece of cloth and some string. Next to it, so close that its branches touched the topmost part, was the big fig tree, or, quite simply, The Fig Tree, because although there was another one, it never grew very large, either because it wasn't in its nature to do so or out of respect for its veteran companion. There was also a venerable olive tree whose twisted trunk propped up the fence separating the two sections. Because of the brambles surrounding it and the hawthorn that stood menacing guard over it, that tree was the only one near my grandparents' house that I never climbed. There were a few more trees, although not that many, a couple of blackthorns that did the best they could, a rather miserly pomegranate, a few quince trees whose fruit you could smell ten paces away, a laurel and another olive tree or two. What little land remained was used for growing vegetables, especially kale, which sprouted all year round and therefore constituted the main ingredient in the local cuisine—boiled kale and haricot beans served with a little olive oil, and now and then, a plate of breadcrumbs made from cornbread fried in garlic with the main course served on top. The yard on this side was a narrow strip of land about one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy feet long, bordering an olive grove belonging to a man called Salvador and, on the other side, separating it from the street, grew a thick hedge made of reeds, brambles, the inevitable agaves and the occasional elder. From beneath that hedge I picked up, on two or three occasions, the dried skins that snakes had sloughed off when they no longer fitted them. The skins were good for some disease that afflicted pigs. Toward the end of that strip of land, it narrowed to a point, like the tail of a turtle. That was where my grandmother and I would go to do our business when we got caught short and didn't have time to go farther into the olive grove. (My grandfather had to resolve the matter wherever he happened to be with the pigs.) And the reader should not be surprised by that euphemistic turn of phrase "do our business." It was the law of nature. Even Adam and Eve had to do their business in some corner of paradise.

  The chest was decorated with blue oil paint, a somewhat drab color like that of a rather grubby sky. It was in the outside room, next to the street door, on the right as you came in. It was big or, rather, enormous, it was the bean chest. My grandmother warned me not to open it because the dust from the beans caused terrible itching, covering the skin of anyone unwise enough to open the chest with brotoeja, which was the name we gave to the uncomfortable blisters that formed as a result. My grandfather, who had resolutely spartan ideas about complicated matters like character-building and fostering strength of mind, would chuckle at such warnings and concerns, and when he came home with the pigs at sunset, he would occasionally ask me if I had opened the chest yet.

  I was not at the time, nor am I now, a great lover of that pruriginous legume, and so lifting the portentous lid of the chest just to peer in at some beans that were identical to other beans I could look at and handle without risk was not something that aroused my ten-year-old's curiosity, which was occupied with adventures of quite another caliber, such as exploring the banks of the Almonda and the Tejo or the labyrinthine tangle of undergrowth in Paul do Boquilobo. However, my grandfather's gentle irony, so often repeated, gradually wore away at my sensibility and provoked my young pride, so that one day, when I was alone in the house, I went over to the chest and, with a great effort, lifted the heavy lid as high as I could and then pushed it so that it fell with a thump against the whitewashed wall. There lay the beans. A little of the very fine dust veiling their beige skins had been stirred up with the sudden current of air and began to settle on my hands and forearms, where the promised skin eruption and itching would take only seconds to appear. However, as if the evolving state of my hands were not sufficient proof for my stubborn self, I plunged them in among the malignant beans, making the beans sift and rattle, and creating, this time, a veritable cloud of dust. This would be the moment to describe the ensuing itchy consequences if I did not have another tale to tell. As I moved round the chest toward one corner in order more easily to reach the upper edge of the lid and close it, I noticed that the lid itself was lined with newspaper. My grandparents' house was not a house of readers, for as I have said more than once, both were illiterate. If ever an uncle of mine came to stay, on leave from his military service for example, he would, if he could read at all, only be capable of deciphering the very largest and crudest of letters. The presence of those pages from O Século —which, quite rightly, announced on its masthead that it was the most widely read newspaper in the country, and I say "quite rightly" because it was certainly the only newspaper to reach Azinhaga—the presence of those pages could only mean that my grandmother had asked Senhor João Vieira to save them for her once they'd been read and set aside in the shop where she was a regular customer. Had my grandparents been people with fine and delicate skin, I would admit the hypothesis that those sheets of paper were merely there to cover the very real cracks in the lid of the old chest and thus prevent the dangerous brown bean dust from treacherously attacking the defenseless tribe of the Melrinhos, the Caixinhas and the Saramagos. Another hypothesis, an artistic one this time, is that those letters, words and images were as attractive to my grandmother's eyes as, years later, Chinese or Arabic characters, for example, were to her grandson's. The mystery remains unresolved.

  I was ten, but I could already read fluently and understand perfectly everything I read, and considering my tender age, I didn't make too many spelling mistakes either, not that this, at the time, was considered something deserving of a medal. You will understand, then, that despite the almost unbearable itching that cried out for the cool balsam of a bowl of cold water or a little vinegar, I seized the opportunity to plunge into the varied bit of reading that chance had placed in my path. It was the summer of 1933, and I was ten years old, and of all the news items published in O Século on a particular day of the previous year, I can remember only one: the photograph, with explanatory caption, that showed the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss watching a parade of soldiers in Austria. This was the summer of 1933, and Hitler had taken power in Germany only six months before, but I have no recollection of having read about this in the Di´rio de Notícias, the newspaper my father used to bring back to our Lisbon home. I'm on holiday, in the house of my maternal grandparents, and while I absentmindedly scratch my arms, I feel surprised that a chancellor (whatever a chancellor was) could be so short. Neither I nor Dollfuss know that the following year he will be assassinated by the Austrian Nazis.

  Around this time (perhaps still in 1933 or possibly
1934, if I'm not getting my dates mixed up) as I was walking down Rua da Graça, on my accustomed route between Penha de França, where I was living, and São Vicente, where I went to school, I saw, hanging on the door of a tobacconist's shop, right opposite the old Royal Cine, a newspaper whose front page bore a perfect drawing of a hand reaching out to grab something. Underneath were the words: "An iron hand in a velvet glove." The newspaper in question was the satirical weekly Sempre Fixe, the artist Francisco Valença, and the hand was supposed to be Salazar's.

  Don't ask me why, but those two images have stayed with me all my life—that of Dollfuss smiling as he watched the troops march past, when he had possibly, who knows, already been condemned to death by Hitler, and Salazar's iron hand concealed beneath a soft, velvet glove of hypocrisy. We often forget what we would like to remember, and yet certain images, words, flashes, illuminations repeatedly, obsessively return to us from the past at the slightest stimulus, and there's no explanation for that; we don't summon them up, they are simply there. And it is those memories that tell me that although, at the time, I was basing myself more on intuition than, of course, on any real knowledge of the facts, Hitler, Mussolini and Salazar were, in my view, all chips off the same block, first cousins, each with the same iron hand, the only difference being the thickness of the velvet and how tightly the hand could squeeze.

  When the Spanish Civil War broke out, I had already moved from secondary school at the Liceu Gil Vicente to technical college at the Escola Industrial de Afonso Domingues, in Xabregas, and I was doing my best to learn, as well as Portuguese, mathematics, physics, chemistry, mechanical design, mechanics and history, a little French and literature (it amazes me to think that in those days they taught French and literature at a technical school) and, finally, which was the real reason I was there, to penetrate, little by little, into the mysteries of the profession of general mechanic. I read in the press that those on one side in the Spanish Civil War were known as reds and those on the other as nationalists, and since the newspapers published regular reports of the various battles, occasionally illustrated with maps, I decided, as I mentioned earlier, to create my own map, on which, depending on the result of each battle, I would stick different colored flags, red and yellow, I believe, and thanks to which I imagined I was accompanying, to use the age-old expression, the development of operations. Then one day, quite early on, I realized that I was being mocked by the retired soldiers whose job it was to censor the press, respectfully making theirs the iron hand and the velvet glove. According to them, only Franco's victories counted. The map was thrown in the bin and the flags lost. And this was probably one reason why, when I was sent with my classmates to the Liceu de Camoes, where the green and brown uniforms of the Mocidade Portuguesa—Portuguese Youth Movement—were being given out, I managed never to get beyond the end of the line that stretched out into the street, and I was still there when a graduate (as the older boys were known) came to tell us that they had run out of uniforms. In the weeks that followed, there were more distributions of berets, shirts and shorts, but I, along with a few others, always went to parades in civvies, and showed myself to have two left feet when marching and to be as clumsy with a gun as I was inept at target shooting. That was not my destiny.