Small Memories Read online

  Sometimes I wonder if certain memories are really mine or if they're just someone else's memories of episodes in which I was merely an unwitting actor and which I found out about later when they were told to me by others who had been there, unless, of course, they, too, had only heard the story from someone else. This is not the case with the little private school on the fourth or fifth floor of a building in Rua Morais Soares, where, before we went to live in Rua dos Cavaleiros, I started learning my alphabet. Seated on a low chair, I would trace the letters slowly and carefully on my slate, which I called pedra —"stone"—because the proper term ardósia was too pretentious a word to emerge naturally from the mouth of a child, indeed, I may not even have known it at the time. This is a real, personal memory, picture perfect, complete with the satchel made from brown sacking with a piece of string attached so that I could wear it over my shoulder. I used to write on the slate with a slate pencil that you could buy in a stationer's and of which there were two types: one, the cheapest, was as hard as the slate you wrote on, while the other, more expensive, was smooth and soft, and we called it a "milk pencil" because of its color, a light, milky gray. Only when I entered the official school system, and even then not during the first few months, did my fingers finally touch the small marvel of more up-to-date writing implements.

  I don't know how children perceive time now, but as a child in those far-off days, time seemed to be made up of a particular kind of hour, each one of which was slow, dragging, interminable. A few more years had to pass before we began to understand, as we had to, that each hour had only sixty minutes and, later still, we would learn that every minute, without exception, ended after sixty seconds.

  A photograph (now, alas, lost) was taken of me and my mother during the time when we lived in Rua Sabino de Sousa, in the Lisbon district of Alto do Pina. It showed my mother sitting on a bench outside a grocer's shop and me standing up, leaning back against her knees, with, beside us, a sack of potatoes bearing a hand-painted sign, as was the custom then in local shops and for many years afterward as a way of telling customers how much something cost before they went into the shop: fifty escudos or five tostões a kilo. I must have been about three then and that would have been the oldest photo taken of me. I still have a baby photo of Francisco, the brother who died of bronchial pneumonia at four years old, in December 1924. I have occasionally thought that I could claim it as a photo of myself and thus enrich my personal iconography, but I never have. And it would be the easiest thing in the world given that, with my parents dead, there would no one to gainsay me, but stealing the image of someone who had already lost his life always seemed to me to show an unforgivable lack of respect, to be an inexcusable indignity. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to Francisco what could only belong to Francisco.

  But to return to my village family, it was said that when he was born, Grandfather Jerónimo was placed on the foundling wheel of the poorhouse in Santarém, and there can be no doubt that he was, for Grandmother Josefa herself sometimes spoke of it, although without going into any detail, either because that was all she knew or because she preferred not to say too much. I knew even less about the circumstances surrounding the birth and life of his sister, my hated great-aunt Beatriz. Mentioning her was like mentioning rope in the house of a hanged man. The most intriguing question of all appears on my mother's birth certificate, which states that she was the granddaughter of an unknown grandfather and of Beatriz Maria. Who was she? I haven't the faintest idea, but the coincidence of the name would, at the very least, be another element indicating that Jerónimo's mother must also have been the mother of Beatriz who lived next door. Great-aunt Beatriz's birth certificate, if it existed, would clear the matter up once and for all. But there's another strange aspect to this whole story. How could someone be recorded as unknown when he lived in a village where he couldn't help but be known? It's clear that Grandfather Jerónimo's mother either didn't want to or couldn't keep the child, which is why she placed him on the foundling wheel, but that still doesn't tell me what happened to the daughter Beatriz. Would she have been placed as a foundling too? It would seem that my famous Berber (or rather Moorish) great-grandfather—whose reputation as a breaker of hearts and feller of men reached my ears thanks to confidences vouchsafed to me by Grandmother Josefa—must have made great-grandmother Beatriz Maria pregnant twice, unless—and this would simplify everything—the brother and sister were twins, despite their obvious differences, he being tall and she short. One thing that never deceived anyone were the similarities (dark skin, sharp features, small, narrow eyes) that made Grandfather Jerónimo and his sister, my mother and all her siblings—Maria Elvira, Carlos, Manuel, Maria da Luz—easily identifiable as members of the same tribe. The male line that produced them clearly wasn't from the Ribatejo region. Contrary to what you might think, the Moorish great-grandfather, of whose sojourn in Azinhaga there appears to be not a scrap of written evidence, was not a romantic invention on my part in order to adorn my very modest family tree, but a clear genetic reality. He lived outside the village, in a hut among the willows, and he had two enormous dogs that used to frighten away any visitors by staring at them in silence and continuing to do so until they left. My Grandmother Josefa told me that one such visitor died and was buried right there. He had gone there to demand satisfaction from the Moor after the latter had seduced his wife (that was the polite way of putting it) and received in his chest the full blast of the Moor's hunting gun. No record has been found of the murderer having been tried for his crime. Who was he?

  Equally real, and very hard, was the tumble I took on Avenida Casal Ribeiro, just round the corner from Rua Fernão Lopes, on a day that should have been a propitious one for human charity and for celestial benevolence, since the saint being celebrated was St. Anthony, the defender of just causes and protector par excellence of things lost, no matter where. Unless (another hypothesis worth considering) my violent fall was an act of petty revenge on the part of that same holy personage when he noticed that the coins I was begging from passers-by were being used to buy sweets and, therefore, to satisfy the sin of greed, rather than as a contribution to the little altar, set up at the front door, as a lure for all good souls, believers and nonbelievers. The sad facts are these: in competition with my neighborhood chums, I was intoning the usual cry: "A penny for St. Anthony, a penny for St. Anthony" when I saw, passing by on the other side of Avenida Casal Ribeiro, a gentleman of advanced years, all dressed in black, wearing a hat and carrying a walking stick—a not uncommon sight in the streets of Lisbon in those primitive times. Anyway, before you could say "Amen," I had spotted him and raced across the road, to get ahead of my competitors engaged in reaping the same harvest. The avenue was under repair, the road had been dug up (they were, I think, replacing the old, irregular basalt cobbles with tarmac), and the ground was covered in a kind of coarse gritty rubble that would have taken the skin off a crocodile. Anyway, I stumbled, fell on one knee, and when I did finally manage to get up, with blood pouring down my leg, the elderly gentleman merely gave me a glance of feigned compassion and continued on his way, thinking perhaps of his own dear grandchildren, so different from ill-bred urchins like me. Reduced to tears by the pain from my knee as well as the humiliation of having fallen at the feet of someone who had made not the slightest attempt to help me up, I dragged myself home, where my mother applied the inevitable iodine ointment and a bandage so tight that I couldn't bend my knee for several days. It's quite possible, now I think of it, that this unfortunate incident could have been the reason for me abandoning my incipient religious education. Living in the same building as us—in the second-floor apartment on the left if I'm not mistaken—was a very Catholic family (father, mother, son and daughter), and the lady of the house persuaded my mother to allow them to initiate me into the secrets of the Church in general and of the Eucharist in particular. In short, they wanted to take me to Mass. My mother said Yes, ma'am and was duly grateful that such pleasant and distinguish
ed neighbors should take an interest in her son, but, knowing her as I came to know her—a skeptic out of sheer indifference, except in the latter part of her life, when, as a widow, she started going to church with her friends in the area—I think she would have agreed just as readily to letting those or other neighbors take me to the beach. My problem now is whether this occurred before or after the fall. Whatever the sequence of events, and despite their sitting me down with them in the front pew, the two or three times I attended church proved most unpromising. When the sacristan rang the bell and the congregation obediently bowed their heads, I couldn't resist turning my head slightly to sneak a look at whatever it was we weren't supposed to see. Returning to the matter of my fall, though, if it happened before those church visits, this would mean that when they took me to Mass, I was already suspicious, disappointed with one saint and ready to believe that all the others were the same. If it happened afterward, then my tumble could be taken as a punishment for having abandoned the true path that would lead me to paradise, in which case God would have behaved disgracefully, like a bullying bigot doling out a brutal punishment for a very minor offense and taking no account of my condition as young pagan or of my very brief Christian apprenticeship. I will never know. I must not forget, however, that at least once, the celestial powers did watch over me and two of my friends who also lived in Rua Fernão Lopes. I had come across a cartridge at home, quite how I can't remember, and carried it off to show my pals, but I didn't stop at just showing it to them. Instead, trembling with excitement, like conspirators, we gathered on some nearby steps and opened it in order to extract its innards, the gunpowder and the lead pellets. Crouched on the stone steps in the hallway, we held a match to the little pile of gunpowder to see what would happen. The ensuing deflagration was a modest one, but enough to give us a real fright. The only reason we didn't get our hands and faces burned was doubtless because St. Anthony, or one of his many colleagues in the empyrean, interposed his providential, miracle-working hand between us and the explosion. A grazed knee was nothing in comparison.

  When it occurred to me to describe that fall in Avenida Casal Ribeiro, I had in mind a photograph of myself and Aunt Maria Natália, taken by a street photographer in Parque Eduardo VII, where, every Sunday without fail, the maids from all the rich houses and the soldiers from all of Lisbon's barracks would go for a stroll. In that photograph, which has been lost along with so many others, I was wearing a shirt, short trousers and black knee-high socks held up by white elastic garters. A basic rule in the art of being smartly dressed requires that you should fold over the top of your sock to hide the garter, but I had not yet, it seems, been instructed in the finer points. In the photo, you could clearly see a scab on my left knee. This, however, dated not from my fall in Avenida Casal Ribeiro, but from a few years later, when I fell over in the playground at the Liceu Gil Vicente, and the gash had to be treated at the doctor's. They applied what they used to call a gato, a small metal clamp used to hold the edges of the wound together and thus speed the healing process. The mark it left behind remained visible for years, and even now there's still a faint trace. Another scar I still have is the fine line of a razor cut, acquired one day in Mouchão do Baixo, when I was carving a boat out of a piece of cork. I was using the point of the blade to cut out lumps of cork so as to make what would be the inside of the boat, when, suddenly, due to a weak spring, the razor snapped shut and the blade cut through the first thing it found in its path, namely, the outer edge of my right index finger, by the side of my nail. It very nearly took with it a slice of my flesh. I was treated with one of the miraculous remedies of the day, alcohol and balsam. The wound didn't become infected and healed perfectly. Aunt Maria Elvira always said that I was made of good solid stuff.

  Aunt Maria NatÁlia worked as a maid in the Formigal household (the master and mistress were usually referred to in the plural as the Senhores Formigais), along with an outside maid, who was the one who did the shopping and ran other errands. I remember one morning (I'd perhaps gone there to collect my aunt for our fortnightly Sunday walk) standing in the kitchen (I'd never seen anything like it and so was fascinated by the black oven, the little doors of varying sizes with their gleaming copper frames, and the boiler always full of hot water) when old Senhor Formigal came in, accompanied by his wife, Dona Albertina, who was equally advanced in years, but still a fine-looking woman. The cook and the two maids, inside and outside, curtsied and lined up, awaiting their orders, but Senhor Formigal, who wore a goatee and a moustache as white as the hair on his head, had come only to inspect (out of politeness, not because he was a doctor or a nurse) the knee I had split open in Avenida Casal Ribeiro. He regarded me with an understanding, protective air and asked: "So you hurt your patella, did you?" I will never forget that word. I had hurt my knee, not my patella, but he must have felt that "knee" was too vulgar a term, unworthy of his person. I looked down at my battered joint, and all I could say was: "Yes, sir." He patted my cheek and left, followed by Dona Albertina. Aunt Maria Nat´lia glowed with pride, while the cook and the outside maid looked at me as if a heavenly halo were encircling my head, as if hitherto unsuspected qualities had bloomed in the inside maid's otherwise insignificant nephew, qualities that the white, manicured hand of Senhor Formigal, when he lightly touched my cheek and my close-cropped hair, had finally caused to spring into life. The Senhores Formigais were about to go out, probably to Mass, but Dona Albertina returned to the kitchen in order to give me a little bag of chocolates: "Here, these are for you, to help your knee get better faster," she said and was gone, leaving behind her a whiff of face powder and having put that word "patella" firmly in its place. I don't know if it was then that my aunt took me to see their bedroom—I think not—but it was a magnificent, solemn, almost ecclesiastical room, all adorned with scarlet draperies, the canopy, the coverlet, the plump pillows, the bed curtains, the upholstery on the chairs: "It's all done in the very best, the very finest damask," my aunt told me, and when I asked her why they had that S-shaped sofa at the end of the bed, she replied: "That's a love seat, he sits on one side and she on the other, so that they can talk without having to turn their heads, it's very practical." Since we were there, I would have liked to try it out, but my aunt wouldn't even let me across the threshold. The chocolates and I met with far worse luck later on. I ate a few before leaving the Formigais' house, and they left in my mouth a foretaste of paradise, but my aunt was categorical on the matter: "Don't eat any more, they'll make you sick," and I, being a good little boy, obeyed. Since I have no memory of strolling through Parque Eduardo VII with a bag of chocolates in my hand, especially since I was forbidden to eat them, we must have gone straight from there to Rua Fernão Lopes, where my aunt deposited me, having first described, in, I imagine, lavish detail, the episode in the kitchen, the kindness her employers had shown to me, Senhor Formigal patting my cheek and the chocolates given to me by the lady of the house, so very kind. Darkness fell, and, since at the time we had no radio on which we could listen to songs from the latest shows, we kept the same hours as the chickens, and so my mother soon packed me off to bed. My parents and I slept in the same room, they in the double bed and I on a small divan, almost a camp bed really, underneath the sloping roof. On the other side of the room, on a chair standing against the wall, stood the longed-for bag of chocolates. When my mother and father came to bed, first, my father, as usual, then my mother, because there were always dishes to wash or socks to darn, I had my eyes closed, pretending to sleep. They turned out the light and fell asleep, but I couldn't settle. Later, with the room in darkness, I slowly got up, tiptoed over to get the bag of chocolates and, in three furtive steps, crept back into bed where I snuggled happily down between the sheets to gorge myself until I slipped into unconsciousness. When I woke the next day, I found, squashed beneath me, what remained of my night feast, a sticky, soft, brown chocolate paste, the dirtiest, most repellent thing my eyes had ever seen. I wept bitter tears of vexation, and tears of embar
rassment and frustration too, which was perhaps why my parents didn't punish or scold me. I was unhappy enough as it was. I had given in to the sin of greed, and greed was punishing me with no need for sticks or stones.