Small Memories Page 8

  When I moved from second year to third, Senhor Vairinho, the headmaster, summoned my father. He told him that I was a good, hard-working student and capable, therefore, of completing the third and fourth years in one year only. I would attend the normal third-year classes, while the more complex fourth-year subjects would be taught in private lessons given by Senhor Vairinho himself, who lived above the school. Given that this arrangement would cost him nothing, my father agreed, for Senhor Vairinho was doing it out of the goodness of his heart. I wasn't the sole beneficiary of this special treatment, three more of my classmates were in the same situation, two of whom came from quite well-off families. The only thing I remember about the third was that his mother was a widow. Of the other two, I recall that one was called Jorge and the other Mauricio, but I can't even remember the name of the orphan, although I can still see his thin, rather bent figure. Jorge, I recollect, was already getting a beard. As for Mauricio, he was a real devil in short trousers, quarrelsome, impetuous, always itching for a fight: once, in a fit of rage, he hurled himself on a classmate and stuck a pen in his chest. With a temperament like that, so quick to anger, what would have become of that boy in later life? We were friends, but not close. They never came to my house (well, living as we did, in rented rooms, it wouldn't even have occurred to me to invite them) and I was never invited to theirs. Any shared experiences, friendships and games were confined to the playground. By the way (was this perhaps another example of my presumed dyslexia?), I remember that, around this time, I confused the word retardador —"delaying"—with redentor—"redeeming"—and in the most bizarre manner imaginable. The slow-motion effect, which, in Portuguese, is o efeito de retardador, had just begun to be used in films by then, or perhaps I'd only just noticed it. And during a game we were playing one day, I had to fall to the ground, but I decided to do it very slowly, saying: "É o efeito redentor." The others took no notice, perhaps because that expression, which I had only just learned, wasn't familiar to them at all.

  Out of school, I remember engaging in some terrific battles with children from the neighboring houses, battles that involved much hurling of stones, but which, fortunately, never ended in blood and tears, although there was no shortage of sweat. As shields we had saucepan lids that we found among the rubbish. Now, I've never been particularly brave, but I remember once going on the attack beneath a hail of stones and how that one heroic gesture routed the two or three enemies opposing us. Even now, I have the sense that in advancing like that, barefaced, I was disobeying one of the unspoken rules of engagement, that each army should stay where it was and take aim at the other side from that position, with no charges or countercharges. More than seventy years later, in an image shrouded in the mists of memory, I can see myself with a saucepan lid in my left hand and a stone in my right (plus two more in my pockets), while missiles from both sides flew over my head.

  What I remember most vividly about Senhor Vairinho's classes is the moment when, at the end of the lesson, with his four students lined up in front of his desk on the stage, he would write that day's marks in his beautiful hand in our black-bound exercise books, abbreviating the marks to B, A, G, E: bad, average, good, excellent. I still have that exercise book and it shows what a good student I was: there were very few "bads," not many "averages," lots of "goods" and a fair number of "excellents." My father would sign at the bottom of the page each day, signing himself Sousa, because he never liked the Saramago he had been obliged to adopt by his son. It was a source of great pride to my family, both in the city and the village, that I passed the fourth-year exam with distinction. The oral exam took place in a ground-floor room (well, it was ground-floor in relation to the back of the building, which gave onto the playground, but first-floor in relation to the street) on a morning of brilliant sunshine, with a breeze wafting in through the windows open on either side, the trees in the playground looking green and leafy (I would never play in their shade again), and with my new suit, if my memory can be trusted, pinching me under the arms. I remember hesitating over one question from the jury (perhaps I didn't know the answer, perhaps my stutter had tied my tongue, as sometimes happened), and someone, a fairly young man whom I had never before seen in the school and who was standing just three steps from me, leaning against the frame of the nearest door—one of the doors that opened out onto the playground—whispered the response to me. Why was he there and not inside the room with everyone else? A mystery. That was in June of 1933, and in October, I would go to Liceu Gil Vicente, which was based then in the former monastery of São Vicente de Fora. For some time, I thought that the two went together, the name of the school and the name of the saint. I could hardly have been expected to know who Gil Vicente was.

  I suppose (I can't be sure) that it was thanks to those "lessons" gleaned from the Portuguese-French conversation guide and to my retentive memory that I managed to shine at my new school the very first time I was called to the blackboard, where I wrote the word papier and a few others with such ease that the teacher could not conceal his satisfaction, thinking, perhaps, that he had before him an expert in the language of Molière. When he told me to sit down again, such was my pleasure at having cut a good figure that, as I left the platform, I couldn't resist pulling a face to amuse my classmates. It was done purely out of nervousness, but the teacher must have interpreted it as an indication of future behavior and he warned me at once that he was going to mark me down. This was a shame, because I hadn't done anything so very wrong. Later, however, he realized that he did not, in fact, have a professional agitator in his class and amended his earlier suspicions. As new recruits into the first year, we didn't know the teachers' names and so were disconcerted when the mathematics teacher, without introducing himself, merely informed us that he was the author of the book we would be studying from. Of course, no one dared to ask: "But what's your name, sir?" It was a porter who came to our rescue. The teacher's name was Germano. I can't remember his surname.

  During my first year, I was a good student in all subjects, with the exception of Choral Singing, which I only ever scraped through. My reputation reached such heights that, occasionally, older students would come into our classroom and ask which one was Saramago, I presume because they'd heard their teachers mention me. (This was the happy time when my father would always carry a piece of paper in his pocket to show his friends, a scrap of paper with my marks typewritten on it, beneath the heading "My champ's marks." In capitals.) My reputation reached such extravagant proportions that, at the beginning of the second year, when there were elections to the Academic Association, I was elected, if you please, to the post of treasurer. At the age of twelve. I remember being handed a pile of papers (subscriptions and balance sheets) which I barely understood and which, in fact, served no purpose whatsoever. My second year went badly. I don't know what was going on inside my head, maybe I'd begun to suspect that my feet were not intended for that road or perhaps I'd exhausted the store of energy I'd brought with me from primary school. Also, my father had started to work out the cost of it all, of a complete secondary school education, and to what end? My marks that year were generally low. In mathematics, for example, I didn't get a single pass in the first term or the second, and if I got quite a high mark in the third term, that leap—which would allow me to take the exam—was not, I can assure you, due to some final, desperate flurry of activity on my part. Not at all. On the day when he announced the marks he intended to give us, the mathematics teacher had the very nice idea of asking the class as a whole if they thought I knew more about the science of numbers than my low marks would seem to indicate, and my classmates, in a display of solidarity and unanimity, replied: "Yes, sir, he does." Although the fact is, I didn't.

  The entrance to the Liceu Gil Vicente was via a ramp that ran parallel with the narrow road that connects Largo de São Vicente to Campo de Santa Clara. The main door opened immediately onto a large walled area which was where we gathered at break time. I remember it as an enormous space (I
don't know what it's like today, or if, indeed, it still exists) and have the idea that all the students, from first year to seventh, would have fitted in with room to spare. Once, as I mentioned earlier, I took such a tumble in the yard that I cut open my knee and bore the scar for many years. I was taken to the doctor's, and the male nurse (there was always a nurse on duty) applied a kind of clamp, known as a gato, to the wound. I described this gato earlier and I'll just give a few more details here. It was a small, narrow, rectangular piece of metal, which at first sight resembled an ordinary piece of tin, with the ends bent at right angles, and these would be pressed down on the edges of the wound and then gently squeezed until the edges met, thus helping the torn tissues to heal more quickly. I vividly remember the impression it made on me to see (and feel, although it wasn't that painful) the metal pressing into the skin. Afterward, I had to walk around with a bandaged knee and a stiff leg until I went back to the doctor's for the gato to be removed. Another very vivid memory is of the pincers delicately extracting the piece of metal and the two marks it left behind, raw but not bleeding. I was ready for my next fall.

  I remember with almost photographic clarity the school's long, broad corridors and the dark floor made of red tiles that appeared to have been waxed, although they may not have been, because it would have been a hard and thankless task to keep those floors clean when there were boots and shoes tramping along them all day, but if they weren't waxed, I can't explain how they were kept so shiny. There were never any marks on the wall, no litter, no cigarette ends, none of the commonplace abuses or youthful indifference you see now, as if time, since then, had judged these things to be vital elements in any really excellent education. Perhaps we learned discipline in the classes on Moral and Civic Instruction, although, to be honest, I can't remember a single one of the precepts we were given. Who was the teacher? I can't remember, I only know that he wasn't a priest and that religion wasn't taught at the Liceu Gil Vicente. Unfortunately, these classes, however secular and republican, did not prevent me, during those two years, but especially in my second year there, from becoming the biggest liar I've had the misfortune to meet. I would lie for no reason, I lied right, left and center, I lied about anything and nothing. Compulsive behavior they would call it today. My father, for example, had never been a man to get mixed up in politics—although, as a representative of the authorities, he naturally had to obey his masters' voice and carry out their orders, not that he minded—but once, when I was walking along with a classmate (a skinny fellow with buck teeth, who had the same thing for lunch every day—an omelet sandwich) on the upper floor of the cloister that led to the corridor where the classrooms were, I told him that my father had bought a copy of Antonio Ferro's book Salazar (a collection of interviews with Portugal's then dictator) at the Book Fair. I can't remember my classmate's name. What I do remember is his silence and the look he gave me: his family probably belonged on the other side of the political divide. Rather more forgivable was my tendency to invent the plots of films I had never seen. Between Penha de Franca, where we were living, and school, on what is now Avenida General Roçadas leading into Rua da Graça, there were two cinemas, the Salão Oriente and the Royal Cine, and I and my other classmates who lived in that area would stand studying the posters that could be found outside all cinemas at the time and which were illustrated with stills from the various films. From those eight or ten images I would concoct a complete story, with beginning, middle and end, and was doubtless aided in this mystifying art by the knowledge I had acquired early on during the golden age of the Fleapit in the Mouraria. Slightly envious, my companions would listen attentively, asking the occasional question to clarify anything that didn't quite make sense, and I would heap lie upon lie, almost believing that I really had seen what I was merely inventing...

  When I started going to the Liceu Gil Vicente, we were still living in Rua dos Heróis de Quionga. I'm sure this is so because I can remember, a few days after starting classes there, sitting on the floor reading my French book in a room that wasn't my parents' bedroom (by then, we had gone up a rung on the social ladder, and were renting a small apartment). We lived in Rua dos Heróis de Quionga along with the Baratas, who had come with us from Rua Fernão Lopes, bringing with them an elderly aunt of theirs (although where she came from I have no idea), who was called Emília, like the wife of Barata senior. Every now and then, about once or twice a month, the Baratas would receive a visit from a relative of theirs, a nephew or cousin called Júlio, who was blind and lived in some kind of institution. He wore a faded gray cotton uniform. He had a beardless face and what little hair was left on his head was cropped short, his eyes were almost white and he had the look of someone who masturbated every day (that's what I think now, not what I thought then), but what I disliked most about him was the smell he gave off, a rancid odor of cold, sad food and ill-washed clothes, a smell that would be associated for ever in my mind with blindness and which probably resurfaced later in my novel of that name. He would hug me very hard and I didn't like that either. Nevertheless, whenever I saw that he was about to write something, I would always go over and sit down next to him. He would place a sheet of thick paper, his own, between two metal trays and then, quickly, unhesitatingly, start pricking it with a kind of punch, as if he had perfect sight. I like to think that this "writing" was a way of lighting stars in the unremitting dark of his blindness.

  The gift-bearing Three Wise Men didn't exist in those days (or is it just that I don't remember them?) nor did people make crèches with a cow and a donkey and everything. At least not in our house. You would leave a shoe by the fireplace, beside the oil stoves and, in the morning, you would go and see what Baby Jesus had left for you. Yes, it was Baby Jesus who came down the chimney then, he didn't just lie in the straw, belly button on view, waiting for the shepherds to bring him some milk and cheese, because he would need those to survive, not the gold-incense-and-myrrh of the Magi, who, as we know, only brought him things bitter to the tongue. In those days, Baby Jesus was a worker, who tried to be useful to society, a proletarian like the rest of us. Nevertheless, we children had our doubts; it was hard to believe that Baby Jesus would be prepared to soil his white clothes spending all night going up and down soot-begrimed chimneys. One Christmas Eve, perhaps because we had let slip a hint of this healthy skepticism, the grown-ups tried to convince us that the supernatural not only existed, it existed right there in our house. Two of them—it must have been two, possibly my father and Antonio Barata—went out into the corridor and started pushing toy cars back and forth, from one end to the other, while the grown-ups who had stayed with us in the kitchen said: "Can you hear? It's the angels." Now I knew that corridor as well as if I had been born in it and had never noticed any angelic presence there when, for example, placing feet and hands on either wall, I would climb up until I could touch the ceiling with my head. I had never come across a single angel or seraph up there. Later on, when I was an adolescent, I tried to repeat that wall-climbing trick, but couldn't. My legs had grown longer, the joints in my ankles and knees less flexible. Ah, the weight of age...

  Another memory (which I wrote about in Manual of Painting and Calligraphy) involves the troubling case of Aunt Emília, who, as I said earlier, was an elderly lady, who wore her white hair in a bun at the back of her neck, a robust figure, very erect, with a naturally high color made still higher by too much drink, and who always seemed to me exceptionally clean and neat. When it was the season, she used to sell roast chestnuts outside the bar a little further down the street, on the corner of Rua Morais Soares and Rua dos Heróis de Quionga, as well as other tidbits—boiled sweets, honey-and-almond bars, loose almonds, and strings of pine-nuts that we called necklaces—that she set out on the tray with folding legs that she used. She would sometimes drink too much wine and get drunk. One day, the other women in the house found her lying on her back on the floor of her room, with her legs spread and her skirt up, singing some song or other while she masturbated. I
tried to see what was going on, but the women formed a barrier to block my view. I must have been at most nine years old. It was one of the first chapters in my elementary sexual education.