Small Memories Page 7

  As I've mentioned before, my grandparents' house was called Casalinho, and the name of the district was Divisões, perhaps because the rather sparse olive grove opposite (it became a football field later on and more recently still was turned into a park) had various owners, and each tree, as if they were cattle not trees, bore carved on the trunk its owner's initials. The house was of the very roughest construction, one story high, although it was raised about three feet above the ground in case of flood, with no window on the blank frontage, just the traditional door with the hatch in it. There were two spacious rooms, the casa-de-fora —the "outside room," so called because it gave onto the street—which was furnished with two beds and a few chests, three if my memory serves me right, and the kitchen, both rooms having only roof tiles above and a dirt floor beneath. At night, once the oil lamp had been turned out, you could see the occasional vagabond star twinkling through the chinks in the roof. At irregular intervals, perhaps every two or three months, my grandmother would resurface the floor of the casa-de-fora. She would dissolve the requisite amount of mud in a bucket of water and then, on her knees, using a cloth soaked in the mixture, she would shuffle backward, making sweeping movements with her arm and gradually covering the floor with a new layer. We were not allowed in until the mud had dried completely. I still have the smell of that damp mud in my nose and, in my eyes, the red of the floor growing gradually paler as the water evaporated. As I recall, the kitchen floor didn't receive the same treatment, it was swept, of course, although not much, but it never received that coating of mud. Apart from the beds and the chests, there was in the casa-de-fora a tall, unvarnished wooden table with an old mirror, tarnished and flawed, a mantel clock and a few other worthless knick-knacks. (Much later, long after I was forty, I bought in a Lisbon antique shop a similar clock, which I still have today, like something borrowed from my childhood.) The mirror was part of a small, rather inelegant dressing table, also unvarnished, with a central drawer and two small side drawers full of useless bits and pieces, and these contents remained unchanged, it seemed, from one year to the next. Photos of the family were gathered together on the table like a galaxy of faces; it never occurred to anyone to arrange them, like a decoration, on the whitewashed walls of the casa-de-fora. They were placed there like saints on an altar, like the disparate parts of a collective reliquary, fixed and immutable. The kitchen was the world. There were two beds, a table that wobbled on the uneven floor and so always had to have something jammed under one leg to keep it level, two blue-painted chairs, and the fireplace with, at the back, the "fireplace doll," a blurred, vaguely anthropomorphic figure, which disappeared, along with everything else, when Uncle Manuel, the youngest of my maternal uncles and a policeman like my father, inherited the house after my grandmother died, only to build in its place a house that anyone with even average taste would have found hideous, but which he must have thought extraordinary. I never asked him if he was pleased with his work, because, in keeping with deep-seated family tradition, we were no longer on speaking terms. I imagine that the "doll" was a rough representation of some pagan domestic genius, for example, one of the Roman penates (a common Portuguese expression of the day was regressar a penates which meant simply "to go home"). As far as one could tell from the shape, it must have been made out of square bricks, two of which were stuck in the wall, side by side, to form the upper part of the trunk, with another placed on top of them in the center as the neck and a third placed end on to represent the head. It was my grandmother who called it the "fireplace doll," and that satisfied me until, years later, thanks to the cognitive virtues of reading, I thought I had discovered its true identity. Had I really? The fireplace was a small one, only large enough for two to sit around, usually my grandfather and myself. In winter, when the water froze in the jugs overnight and, in the morning, we had to break the ice with a stick, we would be burned to a crisp in front and shivering behind. When the cold gripped, there was very little difference between being inside or out. The kitchen door, which gave onto the yard, was extremely old and more like a gate than a door, with cracks in it big enough to put your hand through and, even more extraordinary, it had been like that for years and years. It seemed as if it must have been old already when it was hung on its hinges. Only later, once my grandfather Jerónimo had died (he departed this life in 1948), did it benefit from a few repairs or, rather, a little patching up. I don't think it was ever replaced though. It was to this most humble of homes that my grandparents came to live after they were married, she—or so people said at the time—the prettiest girl in Azinhaga and he, the foundling from the poorhouse in Santarém, whom people called pau-preto —"blackwood"—because of his dark skin. And there they would live for ever. My grandmother told me that on their wedding night, Grandfather Jerónimo had sat outside the front door, armed with a big stick, waiting for the jealous rivals who had sworn to come and throw stones at the roof. No one came, though, and all night (if you'll allow me to give free rein to my imagination) the moon traveled across the sky, while my grandmother, lying in bed, eyes open, waited for her husband. And it was daylight before they could embrace.

  The time has come to speak of the celebrated novel Maria, the Fairy of the Forest, which brought tears to the eyes of so many families in working-class areas of Lisbon in the 1920s. It was published, I believe, by Edições Romano Torres and distributed in weekly installments or sixteen-page pamphlets, which were delivered on the same day each week to subscribers' homes. We, too, received it in our top-floor apartment in 57 Rua dos Cavaleiros, but, at that point, apart from a dim memory of tracing the letters of the alphabet on a slate, which was not that helpful, my initiation into the delicate art of deciphering hieroglyphics had not yet begun. The person charged with reading to us out loud, for my mother's and my edification, for we were both of us illiterate—as I would continue to be for some time and as my mother would remain for the rest of her life—was Félix's mother, whose name, however hard I try, I cannot recall. The three of us, reader and listeners, would sit on the inevitable low benches and allow ourselves to be carried on the wings of the word to that world so different from ours. I remember that among the many misfortunes which, over the weeks, rained down upon the head of poor Maria, a victim of the hatred and envy of a wicked and very powerful female rival, there was one episode that would remain forever engraved on my memory. During one of her many adventures, which I have long since forgotten and which it would, besides, be of no interest to detail here, Maria had been imprisoned in the gloomy depths of her mortal enemy's castle, and her enemy—as if to confirm what we, the esteemed readers, already knew from previous episodes, namely, that she had been a nasty piece of work from the cradle up—was taking advantage of the fact that poor Maria was highly gifted in the arts of embroidery and other such feminine crafts and forcing her, under threat of the worst punishments known and unknown, to embroider and sew. She was, as you see, not only evil, but exploitative too. Now, among the many beautiful pieces that Maria had produced during the time of her imprisonment was a magnificent negligee, which the chatelaine had decided to reserve for her own use. Then, in one of those extraordinary coincidences that only occur in novels and without whose aid no novelist would ever bother to write one, the elegant gentleman who loved Maria and whose feelings were tenderly reciprocated came to visit that very castle, never imagining that his beloved was imprisoned there in a dungeon where she was ruining her white fingers by embroidering day and night. The chatelaine, who had long had her eye on him—he being the reason for the bitter rivalry between her and Maria—resolved to seduce him that very night. No sooner said than done. At dead of night, she slipped surreptitiously into her guest's bedroom, having donned said negligee and made herself provocative and perfumed enough to turn the heads of all the saints in the heavenly court, let alone an energetic gentleman in the prime of life, however in love he might be with the pure and long-suffering Maria. Indeed, as he lay in the arms of the immoral creature who had entered his bed, a
s he bent over the round, intoxicating breasts clearly evident beneath the lace, just as he was about to surrender and fall into the seductive abyss, just when the perfidious creature was about to cry victory, the gentleman recoiled as if he had been bitten by the asp hidden between Cleopatra's breasts, and, grasping the embroidery, cried out: "Maria! Maria!" What could have happened? I know this will be hard to believe, but this is what the author wrote. In her prison, much as a shipwreck victim throws a bottle into the water in the hope that his message will be picked up by some saving hand, Maria had embroidered a cry for help on the negligee, complete with her name and the place where she was imprisoned. Saved from ignominy at the very last moment, the gentleman violently repelled the lubricious lady and raced off to rescue from captivity his virginal and adored Maria. It must have been around then that we moved to RuaFernão Lopes, which is why The Fairy of the Forest had to finish there, because the subscription had been paid for by Félix's mother. We benefited from that weekly free reading, which was no small thing, especially as far as I was concerned, for even though I was very young at the time, I never forgot that dramatic and troubling episode.

  It did not take me long to learn to read. Thanks to the training I had begun to receive in my first school, in Rua Martens Ferrão, of which I remember only the entrance and the dark stair, I moved on, almost seamlessly, to the regular study of advanced Portuguese in the form of a newspaper, the Diário de Notícias, which my father brought home with him every day and which I presume was given to him by a friend, a particularly thriving news-vendor perhaps or a tobacconist. I very much doubt that he would have bought it, for the very pertinent reason that we didn't have enough money to spend on such luxuries. To give you a clear idea of the situation, I need say only that for years, with absolute regularity, my mother used to pawn the blankets as soon as winter was over, only to retrieve them once the cold weather began to bite again and she had saved enough to pay back the monthly interest and the amount of the loan. Obviously I couldn't read that august daily newspaper fluently, but one thing was clear to me: the articles in the paper were written using the same characters (although we called them letters, not characters) whose names, functions and mutual relationships I was learning about in school. And so I was reading even before I could spell properly, even though I couldn't necessarily understand what I was reading. Being able to identify a word I knew was like finding a signpost on the road telling me I was on the right path, heading in the right direction. And so it was, in this rather unusual way, Diário by Diário, month by month, pretending not to hear the jokey comments made by the adults in the house, who were amused by the way I would stare at the newspaper as if at a wall, that my moment to astonish them finally came, when, one day, nervous but triumphant, I read out loud, in one go, without hesitation, several consecutive lines of print. I couldn't understand everything I was reading, but that didn't matter. Apart from my father and mother, the other adults present, once so skeptical and now so impressed, were the Baratas. In that house without books, it so happened that there was one fat book, bound, I believe, in sky blue, and which was entitled The Warbler of the Windmill, whose author, if my memory serves me right, was Émile de Richebourg a name that does not feature prominently in any histories of French literature, however detailed, if, indeed, it appears at all, and yet he was a master of the art of using the word to move sensitive souls and arouse the passions. The owner of this literary gem, which appeared to have been originally published in serial form, was Conceição Barata, who kept it like a treasure in a drawer in the dresser, wrapped in tissue paper and smelling of mothballs. This novel was to be my first great experience as a reader. I was still a long way from the municipal library in Palàcio das Galveias, but my first step in that direction had been taken. And thanks to the fact that we and the Barata family lived together for a good two years, I had more than enough time to read to the end and start again. However, try how I might, I cannot, as I can with Maria, the Fairy of the Forest, remember a single passage from the book. Émile de Richebourg would be most offended by such a lack of respect, he who thought he had written his Warbler in indelible ink, but things did not stop there. Years later, I would discover, to my great surprise, that I had also read Molière in that sixth-floor apartment in Rua Fernào Lopes. One day, my father came home with a book (I can't imagine where he got it from) which was neither more nor less than a Portuguese-French guide to conversation, with the pages divided into three columns, the first, on the left, in Portuguese, the second, in the middle, in French, and the third, alongside that, indicating how to pronounce the words in the second column. Among the various situations in which a Portuguese speaker might need the guide's help to communicate in French (a railway station, a hotel reception, an office hiring out carriages, a port, a tailor's shop, buying tickets for the theater, trying on a suit at the tailor's etc.) there suddenly appeared a dialogue between two men, one of whom seemed to be a teacher of sorts and the other some kind of pupil. I read it over and over because I so enjoyed the astonishment of the man who was unable to believe what the teacher was telling him, that he had been speaking prose since he was born. I knew nothing about Molière (how could I?), but I made a grand entrance into his world when I had barely got beyond knowing my vowels. No doubt about it, I was a lucky boy.

  I cannot recall the first name of the headmaster at the school in Largo do Leão—to which I was transferred when I'd completed my first year in Rua Martens Ferrão—but I do remember that he had a strange surname, Vairinho (I can't find a single Vairinho in the current Lisbon telephone directory), and that he was a tall, thin man, with a severe face, who disguised his baldness by combing over the hair from one side of his head and gluing it down with brilliantine, just as my father used to do, although I must confess I found my teacher's hairstyle more presentable than my progenitor's. Even at such a tender age, I found my father's appearance slightly grotesque (if you'll forgive such disrespect), especially when I saw him get out of bed with those scant locks of hair hanging down on the side that was natural to them and revealing the bare, pale cranium, because as a policeman, of course, he usually wore a cap. When I moved to the school in Largo do Leão, the second-year teacher, who had no idea how much I'd learned during my first year and had no reason to expect from my person any notable degree of knowledge (after all, why would she think any differently?),sent me to sit with the more backward children, who, given the way the room was arranged, were consigned to a kind of limbo, to the right of the teacher and facing the more advanced children, who were intended to serve as an example. A few days after classes had begun, the teacher, with the aim of finding out how familiar we were with the orthographic sciences, gave us a dictation. I had careful, round, very upright handwriting in those days, very good for a boy my age. Now it happened that I, Zezito (I'm not to blame for the diminutive, that's what my family called me, it would have been much worse if my name had been Manuel, then they would have called me Nelinho...), made just one mistake in the dictation, and even then it wasn't really a mistake, bearing in mind that all the letters of the word were there, but two had been transposed: instead of "class" I had written "calss." Perhaps I was concentrating too hard. Anyway, now I come to think of it, that was where the story of my life began. (In our classroom, and probably in every classroom in the country, the double desks at which we sat were exactly the same as those which, fifty years later, in 1980, I found in the village school of Cidadelhe, in the region of Pinhel, when I was traveling around meeting people and places for my book Journey to Portugal. I confess that I couldn't conceal my emotion when I thought that, in times gone by, I might have sat at one of those desks. They were more decrepit and stained and scratched by use and lack of care, but it was as if they had been transported direct from Largo do Leão and 1929 to that village classroom.) But let's get back to the point of the story. The best student in the class occupied a desk right by the door and performed that most honorable of duties, class doorkeeper, for he was the one responsible
for opening the door if anyone knocked. The teacher, surprised by the orthographic talent displayed by a boy who had just arrived from another school—and who was therefore assumed, by definition, to be a slacker—ordered me to go to the top of the class, where, of course, the dethroned monarch who had been sitting there until then had no alternative but to move. I can see the scene as if it were happening now, with me hastily gathering up my things, walking the length of the room before the perplexed (admiring? envious?) gaze of my classmates and, heart beating wildly, sitting down in my new place. When I won the PEN prize for my novel Levantado dochão (Raised from the Ground), I told this story to assure the audience that no moment of glory, present or future, could ever compare with that. Now, though, I can't help thinking about that other poor boy, coldly cast out by a teacher who must have known as much about teaching children as I did about subatomic particles, if such things were spoken of then. How would he explain to his parents—justifiably proud of their young son—that he had been knocked off his pedestal by a stranger who had just appeared over the horizon, like Tom Mix and Tony the Wonder Horse? I can't remember whether I went on to become friends with my unfortunate classmate, although he probably wanted nothing to do with me. Besides, if I remember rightly, shortly after that, I was transferred to another class, perhaps, who knows, to resolve the problem created by the teacher's lack of sensitivity. It isn't hard to imagine a furious father storming into the headmaster's office and protesting vehemently at the discrimination (did people use that word then?) of which his son had been the victim. Although, if truth be told, I have the impression that parents, in those primitive times, didn't worry overmuch about such details. It all came down to whether you got through the year or not, whether you passed or failed. Nothing else mattered.