Small Memories Part 1

Small Memories.

Jose Saramago.

For Pilar, who had not yet been born and who took so long to arrive.

Let yourself be led by the child you were.

-From The Book of Exhortations.

THE VILLAGE IS CALLED Azinhaga and has, so to speak, been where it is since the dawn of nationhood (it had a charter as early as the thirteenth century), but nothing remains of that glorious ancient history except the river that pa.s.ses right by it (and has done, I imagine, since the world was created) and which, as far as I know, has never changed direction, although it has overflowed its banks on innumerable occasions. Less than half a mile from the last houses, to the south, the Almonda, for that is the name of my village's river, meets the Tejo, which (or, if you'll allow me, whom) it used to help, in times past and as far as its limited volume would allow, to flood the fields when the clouds unleashed the torrential winter rains, and the dams upstream, brimful and bursting, were obliged to discharge the excess of acc.u.mulated water. The land around there is flat, as smooth as the palm of your hand, with no orographic irregularities tospeak of, and any dikes that were built served not so much to contain the powerful rush of the river when it floods as to guide it along a course where it would cause least damage. From those distant days onward, the people born and bred in my village learned how to deal with the two rivers that shaped its character, the Almonda, which slips past its feet, and the more distant Tejo, half-hidden behind the wall of poplars, ash trees and willows that accompany it, and, for good reasons and bad, both rivers are omnipresent in the memories and conversations of every family. It was here that I came into the world and it was from here, when I was not yet two years old, that my parents, migrants driven by necessity, carried me off to Lisbon and to other ways of feeling, thinking and living, as if my having been born in the village were merely the result of some mistake made by chance, some momentary lapse on the part of destiny, a lapse for which destiny still had the power to make amends. This proved not to be the case. The child, unnoticed, had already put out tendrils and sent down roots, and there had been time for that fragile child-seed to place his tiny, unsteady feet on the muddy ground and to receive from it the indelible mark of the earth, that s.h.i.+fting backdrop to the vast ocean of air, of that clay, now dry, now wet, composed of vegetable and animal remains, of detritus left behind by everything and everyone, crushed and pulverized rocks, multiple, kaleidoscopic substances that pa.s.sed through life and to life returned, just like the suns and the moons, times of flood and drought, cold weather and hot, wind and no wind, sorrows and joys, the living and the not. Only I knew, without knowing I did, that on the illegible pages of destiny and in the blind meanderings of chance it had been written that I would one day return to Azinhaga to finish being born. Throughout my childhood and my early adolescence, that poor, rustic village, with its murmuring frontier of green trees and water, with its low houses surrounded by the silver-gray of olive trees, sometimes scorched by the burning summer sun, sometimes gripped by the murderous winter frosts or drowned by the floodwaters that came in through the front door, was the cradle in which my gestation was completed, the pouch into which the small marsupial withdrew to make what he alone could make, for good or possibly ill, of his silent, secret, solitary self.

The experts say that the village was born and grew up along a path, an azinhaga, which comes from the Arabic word as-zinaik meaning "narrow street," but, taken literally, that couldn't have been true in those early days, because a street, be it wide or narrow, is still a street, whereas a path can never be more than a shortcut, a way of reaching your destination more quickly, a route which, generally speaking, has no future and no great ambition to be any longer than it is. I don't know at what point the widespread cultivation of olive trees was introduced into the region, but I'm sure, because the older villagers told me so, that some of the most ancient of those trees would have seen two or possibly three centuries pa.s.s them by. They will see no more though. A few years ago, acres and acres of land planted with olive trees were ruthlessly cleared, hundreds of thousands of trees were cut down, ripped from the deep soil, or else the old roots of trees that had given light to lamps and flavor to stews were left to rot. The landowners, most of them owners of vast estates, were paid by the European Union per tree uprooted, and now, in place of the mysterious and vaguely troubling olive groves of my childhood and adolescence, in place of the gnarled trunks covered in moss and lichen and full of holes in which the lizards could hide, in place of the canopies of branches laden with black olives and with birds, what we see is one enormous, monotonous, unending field of hybrid corn, all grown to the same height, possibly with the same number of leaves per stem, and tomorrow perhaps with the exact same arrangement and number of ears and the same number of kernels on each ear. I'm not complaining, I'm not bemoaning the loss of something that didn't even belong to me, I'm simply trying to explain that this present-day landscape isn't mine, it isn't the place where I was born, I didn't grow up there. As we all know, corn is a vital crop, more important for many people than olive oil, and I myself, when I was a boy, in the years of my early adolescence, would walk the cornfields after the workers had finished harvesting, with a cloth bag slung around my neck, picking the ears they had missed. I must confess, however, that I now take a somewhat wicked pleasure-a revenge I neither sought nor wanted, but which came to meet me of its own accord-when I hear the people in the village say that it was a mistake, a huge blunder, to have got rid of the old olive groves. No point now, I think, crying over spilt oil. And they tell me that new olive trees are now being planted, but of a kind which, however long they live, will never reach any great height. This variety grows more quickly, and its lack of height makes it easier to pick the olives. What I don't know is where the lizards will go.

The child I was did not see the landscape as the adult he became would be tempted to see it from the lofty height of manhood. The child, while he was a child, was simply in the landscape, formed part of it and never questioned it, never said or thought, in these or other words: "What a beautiful landscape, what a magnificent panorama, what a fabulous view!" Naturally, when he climbed the stairs to the church belfry or scrambled to the top of a sixty-foot ash tree, his young eyes were capable of appreciating and noticing the wide open s.p.a.ces before him, but it must be said that he was always more drawn to singling out and focusing on things and beings that were close, on what he could touch with his hands, on what offered itself to him as something which, without him being aware of it, demanded to be understood and absorbed into his spirit (the latter being a jewel which, needless to say, the child had no idea he carried within him): a snake slithering away, an ant carrying on high a crumb of wheat, a pig eating from the trough, a toad lolloping along on bent legs, or a stone, a spider's web, the soil turned up by the blade of the plough, an abandoned bird's nest, the drop of resin running like a tear down the trunk of a peach tree, the frost glittering on the undergrowth. Or the river. Many years later, using the words of the adult he then was, the adolescent would write a poem about that river-a humble stream of water that is now polluted and fetid-where he had bathed and which he had navigated. He called it "Protopoem" and here it is: "Out of the tangled skein of memory, out of the darkness of its inextricable knots, I tug at what appears to be a loose end./ Slowly I pull it free, afraid it might fall to pieces in my fingers./ It's a long thread, green and blue, and smells of slime, warm and soft as living mud./ It's a river./ It drenches my now wet hands./ The water flows over my outspread palms, and suddenly I'm not sure if the water is flowing out of me or was.h.i.+ng over me./ I continue to tug at the thread, which is not just a memory now, but the actual body of the river itself./ Boats sail over my skin, and I am the boats and the sky above them, and the tall poplars that slide serenely across the luminous film of my eyes./ Fish swim in my blood and hesitate between staying too near the surface and plumbing the depths, just like the vague summonses issued by memory./ I feel the strength of my arms and the pole that prolongs them./ It pushes down into the river and into me like a slow, steady heartbeat./ Now the sky is nearer and has changed color./ It's all green and full of singing because the songs of birds are springing awake on every branch./ And when the boat stops in a large clearing, my naked body gleams in the sun, among the still brighter light igniting the surface of the waters./ There, memory's confused recollections and the suddenly revealed face of the future fuse into one truth./ A nameless bird appears out of nowhere and perches silently on the stiff prow of the boat./ I wait motionless for the whole river to be bathed in blue and for the birds on the branches to explain to me why the poplars are so tall and their leaves so full of murmurings./ Then, with the body of the boat and the river safely back in the human dimension, I continue on toward the golden pool surrounded by the raised swords of the bulrushes./ There I will bury my pole two feet down in the living rock./ A great primordial silence will fall when hands join with hands./ And then I will know everything." No one can know everything or ever will, but there are moments when we're capable of believing that we will, perhaps because at that moment, soul, consciousness, mind, or whatever you care to call the thing that makes us more or less human, was filled to overflowing. I gaze down from the bank at the barely moving current, the almost stagnant water and, absurdly, I imagine that everything would go back to being as it was if only I could once again plunge my childhood nakedness into the river, if I could grasp in today's hands the long, damp pole or the sonorous oars of yesteryear, and propel across the water's smooth skin the rustic boat that used to carry, to the very frontiers of dreams, the being I was then and whom I left stranded somewhere in time.

The house where I was born no longer exists, not that it matters, because I have no memory of having lived in it. The other house, the impoverished dwelling of my maternal grandparents, Josefa and Jeronimo, has also disappeared beneath a mound of rubble, the house which, for ten or twelve years, was my true home, in the most intimate and profound sense of the word, the magical coc.o.o.n in which the metamorphoses vital to both the child and the adolescent took place. That loss, however, has long since ceased to cause me any suffering because, thanks to the memory's reconstructive powers, I can, at any moment, rebuild its white walls, replant the olive tree that shaded the entrance, open and close the low front door and the gate to the vegetable garden where I once saw a small snake coiled and waiting, or I can go into the pigsties and watch the piglets suckling, enter the kitchen and pour from the jug into the chipped mug the water which, for the thousandth time, will quench that summer's thirst. Then I say to my grandmother: "Grandma, I'm going for a walk." And she says: "Off you go, then," but she doesn't warn me to be careful, no, in those days, grown-ups had more confidence in the children they brought up. I put a slice of cornbread and a handful of olives and dried figs in my bag, grab a stick just in case I have to fend off some canine attack, and set off into the countryside. I don't have many routes to choose from: it's either the river and the almost inextricable vegetation that clothes and protects its banks or the olive groves and the hard stubble of the recently harvested wheat, or the dense thicket of tamarisks, beeches, ash trees and poplars that flank the Tejo downstream, beyond the point where it meets the Almonda, or else, to the north, about three or four miles from the village, the Paul do Boquilobo, a lake, pond or pool that the creator of these landscapes neglected to carry off to paradise. There wasn't much choice, it's true, but for the melancholy child, for the contemplative and often sad adolescent, these were the four quarters into which the universe was divided-indeed, each was a universe in itself. The adventure could last hours, but never finished until I had achieved my goal. To cross alone the burning expanses of the olive groves, to cut a difficult path through the bushes, treetrunks, brambles and climbers that raised thick walls along the banks of the two rivers, to sit and listen in a shady clearing to the silence of the woods broken only by the piping of the birds and the creaking of the branches in the wind, to travel across the pond by scrambling from branch to branch of the weeping willows that grew in the water; these, you will say, are not feats deserving of special mention in an age like ours, in which, by the age of five or six, any child, however sedentary and indolent, who is born in the civilized world, has already traveled to Mars to crush however many little green men he may encounter, has decimated the terrible army of mechanical dragons guarding the gold in Fort Knox, has blown Tyrannosaurus rex to smithereens, has plumbed the deepest of submarine trenches without benefit of diving suit or bathyscape, and has saved humankind from the monstrous meteorite that was heading straight for earth. Beside such superior exploits, the little boy from Azinhaga could only offer his ascent to the topmost branch of the sixty-foot ash tree or, more modestly, but affording far greater pleasure to the palate, climbing the fig tree in the yard, early in the morning, to pick the fruit while it was still wet with dew and to sip, like a greedy bird, the drop of honey that oozed from within. Small beer perhaps, but then that heroic conqueror of tyrannosauruses would doubtless be incapable of catching a lizard in his bare hands.

Many people solemnly state, supporting their words with some authoritative quotation from the cla.s.sics, that landscape is a state of mind, which, put into ordinary words, must mean that the impression made on us by contemplating any landscape is always dependent on our temperamental ups and downs and on whatever mood, cheerful or irascible, we happen to be in at the precise moment when that landscape lies before us. Now far be it from me to disagree, but this a.s.sumes that states of mind are the exclusive property of the mature adult, of grown-ups, of those people who are already capable of using, more or less correctly, the kind of grave concepts necessary to a.n.a.lyze, define and tease out such subtleties, the property of adults, who think they know everything. For example, no one ever asked that adolescent what kind of mood he was in or what intriguing tremors were being recorded on the seismograph of his soul when, one unforgettable morning, while it was still dark, he emerged from the stable, where he had slept among the horses, and his forehead, face and body, and something beyond the body, were touched by the white light of the most brilliant moon that human eyes had ever seen. Nor what he felt when, with the sun already up, while he was herding the pigs across hill and vale on his way back from the market where he had managed to sell most of them, he realized that he was walking across a stretch of rough paving made from apparently ill-fitting slabs of stone, a strange discovery in the middle of an area that seemed to have lain deserted and empty since the beginning of time. Only much later, many years afterward, would he realize that he had been walking along what must have been the remains of a Roman road.

Nevertheless, these marvels, both mine and those of the precocious manipulators of virtual universes, are as nothing compared with the time when, just as the sun was setting, I left Azinhaga and my grandparents' house (I would have been about fifteen then) to go to a distant village, on the other side of the Tejo, in order to meet a girl with whom I thought I was in love. An old boatman called Gabriel (the villagers called him Graviel) took me across the river; he was red from the sun and from the brandy he drank, a kind of white-haired giant, as st.u.r.dily built as St. Christopher. I had sat down to wait for him on this side of the river, on the bare boards of the jetty, which we called the port, while I listened to the rhythmic sound of the oars on the surface of the water as it was touched by the last light of day. He was approaching slowly, and I realized (or was it just my state of mind?) that this was a moment I would never forget. A little way along from the jetty on the other side was an enormous plane tree, beneath which the estate's herd of oxen used to sleep out the siesta hours. I set off to the right, cutting across fallow fields, low walls, ditches, through puddles and past cornfields, like a stealthy hunter on the trail of some rare beast. Night had fallen, and the only sound in the silence of the countryside was that of my footsteps. As to whether the encounter with the girl proved a happy one or not, I will tell you later. There was dancing and fireworks, and I think I left the village close on midnight. A full moon, although less splendid than that earlier one, lit everything around. Before I reached the point where I would have to leave the road and set off across country, the narrow path I was following seemed suddenly to end and disappear behind a large hedge, and there before me, as if blocking my way, stood a single, tall tree, very dark at first against the transparently clear night sky. Out of nowhere, a breeze got up. It set the tender stems of the gra.s.ses s.h.i.+vering, made the green blades of the reeds shudder and sent a ripple across the brown waters of a puddle. Like a wave, it lifted up the spreading branches of the tree and, murmuring, climbed the trunk, and then, suddenly, the leaves turned their undersides to the moon and the whole beech tree (because it was a beech) was covered in white as far as the topmost branch. It was only a moment, no more than that, but the memory of it will last as long as my life lasts. There were no tyrannosauruses, Martians or mechanical dragons, but a meteor did cross the sky (which is not so hard to believe), although, as became clear afterward, mankind was never at risk. After walking for a long time, and with dawn still far off, I found myself in the middle of the countryside, standing outside a roughly built shack. There, to stave off hunger, I ate a piece of moldy cornbread someone else had left behind, and there I slept. When I woke in the first light of morning and emerged, rubbing my eyes, to find a luminous mist obscuring the fields all around, I felt-if I remember rightly, and always a.s.suming I'm not just making it up-that I had finally been born. High time.

Where does my fear of dogs come from? And my fascination with horses?

The fear-which even today, and despite recent happy experiences, I can barely control when face to face with an unfamiliar representative of the canine species-comes, I am sure, from the utter panic I felt as a seven-year-old, when, one night as darkness was falling and the streetlamps were already lit and just as I was about to go into the house on Rua Ferno Lopes, in the Saldanha district of Lisbon, where we lived along with two other families, the street door burst open and through it, like the very fiercest of Malayan or African beasts, came the neighbors' Alsatian dog, which immediately began to pursue me, filling the air with its furious, thunderous barking, while I, poor thing, desperately dodged behind trees to avoid him as best I could, meanwhile calling for help. The aforementioned neighbors-and I use the word only because they lived in the same building as us, not because they were the equals of n.o.bodies like us who lived in the attic room on the sixth floor-took longer to restrain their dog than even the most elementary charity demanded. Meanwhile-if my memory is not deceiving me, and I'm not being misled by my humiliation and my fear-the owners of the dog, young, refined, elegant (they must have been the teenage children of the family, a boy and a girl) were, as people used to say then, laughing fit to burst. Fortunately, I was quick on my feet, and the animal never caught me, still less bit me, or perhaps that wasn't its intention; it had probably been startled to find me standing outside the door. We were both afraid of each other, that's what it was. The intriguing thing about this otherwise ba.n.a.l episode is that I knew, when I was standing outside the front door, that the dog, that particular dog, was waiting there to go for my throat. Don't ask me how, but I knew.

And the horses? My problem with horses is a more painful one, of the kind that leaves a permanent wound in a person's soul. One of my mother's sisters, Maria Elvira by name, was married to a certain Francisco Dinis, who worked as a keeper on the Moucho de Baixo estate, part of Moucho dos Coelhos, the name given to the whole of a particularly large estate on the left bank of the Tejo, more or less in a direct line with a village called Vale de Cavalos, or "Valley of Horses." Anyway, to return to myUncle Francisco. Working as a keeper on such a large and powerful estate meant that he belonged to the aristocracy of the countryside: double-barreled shotgun, green beret, white s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.toned up to the neck regardless of whether it was blazing hot or freezing cold, red belt, knee-high leather boots, short jacket and, naturally, a horse. Now, in all those years-and from eight until fifteen is a lot of years-it never once occurred to my uncle to lift me up into that saddle and I, presumably out of a kind of childish pride of which I couldn't even have been aware, never asked him to do so, however much I wanted him to. I can't remember by what circuitous route (possibly because she knew another of my mother's sisters, Maria da Luz, or one of my father's sisters, Natalia, who had worked as a maid for the Formigal family in Lisbon's Estrela district, in Rua dos Ferreiros, a street in which, an eternity later, I, too, would live), but one day, a lady, still fairly young, moved into Casalinho, as my maternal grandparents' house had always been known; she was, as people used to say then, the "lady friend" of a gentleman who owned a shop in Lisbon. She was unwell and in need of rest, which is why she had come to spend a little time in Azinhaga, to breathe in the good country air and, in so doing, improve by her presence and her money the food that we ate. With this same woman, whose name I can't quite remember (perhaps it was Isaura, or perhaps Irene, no, it was Isaura), I enjoyed several enjoyable bouts of hand-to-hand combat and a few arm-wrestling matches, which always ended with me (I must have been about fourteen at the time) throwing her down onto one of the beds in the house, chest to chest, pubis to pubis, while my grandmother Josefa, whether knowingly or innocently I'm not sure, would laugh out loud and say how strong I was. The woman would sit up, excited and flushed, smoothing her disheveled hair and swearing that if we had been fighting for real, she wouldn't have allowed herself to be beaten. Fool or utter innocent that I was, I could have taken her at her word, but never dared. Her relations.h.i.+p with the shopkeeper was a well-established one, proof of which was their pale, wan seven-year-old daughter, who had come with her mother to enjoy the fresh air. Now, my uncle was a small, very upright man, a bit of a bully at home, but docility personified when it came to dealing with bosses, superiors or city-dwellers. It was no surprise, then, that he should bow and sc.r.a.pe to our visitor, behavior that might have been taken as evidence of the natural politeness of country folk if it hadn't smacked more of servility than simple respect. One day, my uncle, may he rest in peace, obviously wanted to show how fond he was of our two female visitors and so he picked up the little girl, placed her in the saddle and, playing groom to her little princess, paraded her up and down in front of my grandparents' house, while I watched in silent anger and humiliation. Some time after this, on an end-of-term trip with the technical school from which, a year later, I would emerge as a qualified general mechanic, I rode one of the sad old horses you can hire in Sameiro, hoping that by doing so I might perhaps make up in adolescence for the treasure denied me in childhood: the joy of an adventure that had come so close I could have touched it, but that had remained forever out of reach. Too late. The scrawny nag took me wherever it fancied, stopped whenever it cared to and didn't even turn its head to say goodbye when I slid down from the saddle, feeling just as sad as I had on that other occasion. The house where I live now is full of images of horses. Guests visiting for the first time almost always ask if I'm a keen rider, when the truth is that I'm still suffering from the effects of a fall from a horse I never rode. There are no outward signs, but my soul has been limping for the last seventy years.

One cherry brings another cherry, and just as a horse brought an uncle, an uncle will bring with him a rural version of the final scene of Verdi's Otello. As was the case with most of the older houses in Azinhaga (and I am, of course, speaking of those inhabited by the lesser folk), my aunt and uncle's house in Mouchao dos Coelhos-built, it should be said, on a stone base at least six feet high, with an external staircase, to keep the house safe from the winter floods-consisted of two rooms, one usually facing onto the road (or in this case onto fields), which we called the casa-de-fora, or "outside room," the other being the kitchen, with a door leading out into the yard at the back, again via a staircase, made of wood this time and plainer than the front stairs. My cousin Jose Dinis and I used to sleep in the kitchen, in the same bed. He was three or four years younger than me, but even though the difference in age and strength was entirely in my favor, this didn't stop him getting into fights with me whenever it seemed to him that I, his older cousin, was trying to outdo him in gaining the favor, whether explicit or implicit, of the local girls. I will never forget the torment of jealousy the poor boy went through over a girl from Alpiarca called Alice, a pretty, delicate creature who went on to marry a young tailor and, many years later, came to live in Azinhaga with her husband, who continued to work in the trade. When I was in the village on holiday once and learned that she was living there, I pa.s.sed by her door unseen and, for the briefest of moments, barely long enough to glance in, all those past years rose up before me. She was sitting with her head bent over her sewing and didn't see me, and so I never found out whether or not she would have recognized me. I should also say that even though Jose Dinis and I fought like cat and dog, I had often known him to hurl himself to the floor and weep desperate tears when the holidays were over and I was saying goodbye to the family in order to return to Lisbon. He wouldn't even look at me, and if I tried to approach, he would repel me with kicks and punches. My Aunt Maria Elvira was quite right when she said of her son: "He's a bad boy, but he has a good heart."

Jose Dinis had solved the problem of squaring the circle without once seeking advice on tackling that most difficult of operations. He was a bad boy, but he had a good heart.

Jealousy was evidently a disease that ran in the Dinis family. During harvest time, but also when the melons were beginning to ripen and the kernels of corn were hardening on the cobs, Uncle Francisco rarely spent a whole night at home. On horseback, his shotgun across his saddle, he would patrol the vast estate, on the lookout for felons, major or minor. I imagine that if he did feel the need for a woman, whether under the lyrical influence of the moon or due to the friction of saddle on crotch, he would trot home, quickly relieve that particular itch, rest a little from the effort, then return to his night patrol. One unforgettable day, in the early hours, my cousin and I were fast asleep, exhausted from the day's various fights and forays, when Uncle Francisco erupted like a fury into the kitchen, brandis.h.i.+ng his shotgun and yelling: "Who's been in here?" At first, barely conscious after being so violently wrenched from sleep, I could just make out through the open door the double bed and my aunt sitting up in her white nightdress, clutching her head and moaning: "The man's mad! The man's mad!" He was not perhaps mad, but he was certainly in the grip of jealousy, which comes pretty much to the same thing. He was saying that he would kill us all if we didn't tell him the truth about what had happened, and he kept urging his son to answer, come on, come on, but Jose Dinis' courage, amply proven in everyday life, failed him completely when confronted by his father armed with a shotgun and almost foaming at the mouth. I told my uncle that no one had come into the house, that we had, as usual, gone to bed immediately after supper. "But what about later, can you swear to me that no one else was here?" bawled the Oth.e.l.lo of Moucho de Baixo. I began to grasp what was going on, my poor Aunt Maria Elvira was begging me: "Tell him, Zezito, tell him, because he won't believe me." I think that was the first time in my life that I gave my word of honor. It was comical really, a boy of fourteen giving his word that his aunt had not taken another man into her bed, as if I, who slept like a log, would have noticed (no, I mustn't be so cynical, Aunt Maria Elvira was a thoroughly decent woman), but the fact is that the very solemnity of that word of honor had the desired effect, I suppose because it was so novel, and also because when country people spoke, oaths and curses apart, they meant what they said and didn't waste their breath on flowery rhetoric. My uncle finally calmed down, leaned his shotgun against the wall, and it became clear what had happened. They slept in one of those bra.s.s bedsteads with bra.s.s rails at the head and the foot, the ends of which were held in place by spherical bra.s.s k.n.o.bs that screwed into the side bars. Clearly, those internal screws had become worn with use and lost their grip. When my uncle came in and turned up the wick on the oil lamp, he had seen what he thought was proof of his dishonor: the rail at the head of the bed had worked loose and hung like an accusing finger over the sleeping woman's head. Aunt Maria Elvira must have raised her arm as she turned over in bed and dislodged the bra.s.s rail. I could not at the time imagine what shameful, shocking orgies Francisco Dinis must have imagined, what writhing bodies convulsed by every conceivable erotic extravagance, but the fact that the poor man lacked the intelligence to know which way the wind was blowing, or if indeed there was any wind, shows to what extent jealousy can blind someone to the obvious. Had I been of the cowardly race of Iagos (I know nothing, I saw nothing, I was asleep), then perhaps the night silence in Moucho de Baixo would have been shattered by two gunshots, and an innocent woman would have lain dead between sheets that had never known any other masculine smells or fluids than those of the wife-murderer himself.

I remember that this same uncle would turn up now and then carrying a rabbit or a hare, shot during his patrols of the estate. As a keeper, there was no closed season as far as he was concerned. One day, he returned home as triumphant as a crusader who has just vanquished an army of infidels. He had a large bird slung over the saddletree, a gray heron, a creature new to me and which I believe was a protected species. Its meat was rather dark and tasted faintly of fish, unless, after all these years, I am imagining tastes that never tickled my palate or pa.s.sed my gullet.

Another edifying story from Moucho de Baixo involved Pezuda, a woman whose real name I've long forgotten, if, indeed, I ever knew it, and who was called Pezuda-Big Foot-because she had truly enormous feet, a misfortune she could not conceal because, like all of us (young children and women, that is), she went everywhere barefoot. Pezuda lived right next door to my uncle and aunt, and she and her husband had a house exactly like theirs (I can't remember now if they had any children), and as so often happened in that place-where for good or ill, I was, in the most exact sense of the expression, brought up body and soul-the two families were at daggers drawn, they didn't get on, they didn't speak, not even to say good morning. (My grandmother Josefa's neighbor, in theDivises, or "Divisions," district of the village-so-called because the olive trees that grew there were owned by someone else-was one of my grandfather Jeronimo's sisters, Beatriz by name, and yet, even though they were of the same blood, they had entirely broken off relations and had hated each other for more years than my childhood memory could comprehend. I never found out the reason for the quarrel that had separated them.) Pezuda's real name, of course, appeared in the baptismal records in the church and in the register of births, marriages and deaths, but to us she was simply Pezuda, and that ugly nickname said it all. So much so that on one famous occasion (when I was about twelve), I was sitting at the door of the house, at the top of the steps, when she, the hated neighbor, pa.s.sed by (I hated her only out of a mistaken sense of familial solidarity, because the woman had never done me any wrong), and I commented to my aunt, who was inside sewing: "There's old Pezuda going by." I said this more loudly than I'd intended, and Pezuda heard me. From down below, full of righteous indignation, she proceeded to give me a piece of her mind, saying I was a badly brought-up Lisbon brat (and I was anything but a Lisbon brat), who, it would seem, had not been taught to respect his elders, a moral quality essential to the smooth functioning of society. She rounded off her rebuke by saying that she would tell her husband about me when he returned from work at sunset. And I must confess that I spent the rest of the day with heart pounding and stomach churning, fearing the worst, because her husband had a reputation as a real bruiser. I decided privately that I would make myself scarce until after dark, but Aunt Maria Elvira was on to me at once, and just as I was about to disappear, she said very calmly: "When it's time for him to come home from work, you sit at the door and you wait. If he tries to beat you up, I'll be here, but don't move from that spot." That is the nature of all really useful lessons, the sort that last a lifetime, that place a hand on your shoulder just when you're about to give in. I remember that it was a gorgeous sunset (and it really was, this isn't a mere literary afterthought), and I sat there at the door, watching the red clouds and the violet sky, with no idea what might happen, but convinced that the day would end badly for me. Eventually, when the sun had set, Pezuda's husband arrived home, went up the stairs to his house, and I thought: "This is it." But he didn't come out again. I still don't know what went on inside. Was it that when his wife told him what had happened, he decided that it wasn't worth taking seriously anything a mere lad had said? Had she been generous enough not to say a word to her husband about the unfortunate episode and decided to swallow the insult hurled at a pair of feet that were hardly her fault anyway? Had she thought of all the scornful names she could call me, "stammerer," for example, but had chosen instead, out of charity, to keep silent? The truth is that when my aunt summoned me to supper, I wasn't filled only with a sense of satisfaction. Oh, I was glad that I'd managed to pretend a courage that was, in fact, merely borrowed, but I also had the uncomfortable feeling that I'd missed out on something. Would I really have preferred to have had my ears boxed or been given a good spanking, which I was still of an age to receive? Well, no, my thirst for martyrdom didn't go that far. I'm sure, though, that something that night was left hanging in the air. Or, rather, as I write about it now, perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the att.i.tude of those hated neighbors in Moucho dos Coelhos was simply the second lesson I needed to learn.

It's time to explain the reasons behind the original t.i.tle I gave to this memoir- The Book of Temptations -which, at first sight, and indeed at second and third sight, seems to have nothing to do with the matters dealt with so far nor, it must be said, with those I will touch on later. My initial ambitious idea-from the days when I was working on Baltasar and Blimunda all those years ago-had been to show how sainthood, that "monstrous" manifestation of the human spirit, disturbs, confuses and disorients nature, and is capable of subverting our permanent and apparently indestructible animality. It seemed to me at the time that the crazed saint depicted by Hieronymus Bosch in his Temptation of St. Anthony had, by the mere fact of being a saint, drawn up from the depths all the forces of nature, visible and invisible, the mind's most grotesque and most sublime thoughts, l.u.s.ts and nightmares, every hidden desire and every manifest sin. Oddly enough, my attempt to transpose such a th.o.r.n.y subject (I soon realized that my literary gifts fell far short of such a grandiose project) onto a simple repository of reminiscences that clearly called for a more modest t.i.tle, didn't mean that I hadn't at some point found myself in a similar situation to that of the saint. For as a creature of the world, I must also be the seat of all desires and the object of all temptations, simply because "it goes with the territory." What difference would it make if we were to replace St. Anthony with a child, an adolescent or an adult? Just as the saint was besieged by imaginary monsters, I, as a child, was subject to the most appalling night terrors, and the naked women who continue to cavort lasciviously around all the Anthonys of the world are no different from the fat prost.i.tute who, one night, as I was on my way to the Cinema Salo Lisboa, alone as usual, asked me in a weary, indifferent voice: "Do you want to come up to my room?" That was in Rua do Bem-Formoso, next to the flight of steps there, and I must have been about twelve. And while it's true that some of Bosch's phantasmagoria make any comparison between saint and child seem ludicrous, this is perhaps only because we don't remember or don't wish to remember what went on in our heads as children. That flying fish which, in Bosch's painting, carries the saint through air and wind, is not so very different from our body flying in dreams, as mine often did through the gardens separating the buildings in Rua Carrilho Videira, grazing the tops of the lemon trees and medlar trees or rising up with a simple flap of the arms and hovering above the rooftops. And I can't believe that St. Anthony experienced worse terrors than, for example, the recurring nightmare in which I found myself locked in a triangular room with no furniture, doors or windows, but where there was "something" (I call it that because I never did find out what it was) gradually growing in size while a piece of music played, always the same music, and the thing grew and grew until I was trapped in one corner, at which point I would wake, terrified, in the grim silence of the night, struggling for breath and drenched in sweat. Nothing of great note, you might say. Maybe that's why this book changed its name and became Small Memories. Yes, the small memories of when I was small.

Let's move on. The Barata family entered my life when we moved from 57 Rua dos Cavaleiros to Rua Ferno Lopes. In February 1927, we were, I think, still living in the Mouraria district of Lisbon, because I have a vivid memory of hearing artillery fire whistling over the roof from the Castelo de S~ao Jorge and intended for the rebels encamped in Parque Eduardo VII. A straight line drawn from the castle esplanade, and taking as an intermediate point the building in which we were living, would bring you infallibly to the traditional command post of all Lisbon's military insurrections. Hitting your target or not would simply be a question of taking careful aim and adjusting your sight. Given that my first school was in Rua Martens Ferro and primary education began at the age of seven, we must have left the house in Rua dos Cavaleiros shortly after I began my studies. (There is another and possibly more likely hypothesis to consider, one that I set down here before continuing: that those shots came not from the uprising of February 7, 1927, but from another, the following year. Indeed, although I may have started going to the cinema early on in my life-to the aforementioned Salao Lisboa, better known as the "Fleapit" and located in the Mouraria, next to the Arco do Marques de Alegrete-I certainly wouldn't have done so at the tender age of barely five, my age in February 1927.) Of the people with whom we shared a house in Rua dos Cavaleiros my only clear memory is of the couple's son. His name was Felix and I experienced one of my worst nighttime horrors with him, doubtless brought on by the hair-raising films we used to watch then, and which would now seem laughable.

The Baratas were two brothers, one of whom was a policeman, like my father, although the former belonged to a different branch called Criminal Investigation. My father, who would reach the rank of sergeant a few years later, was, at the time, a simple constable in the PSP, the Public Security Police, working either on foot patrol or at the police station, depending on which s.h.i.+ft he was on and, unlike the Barata brother, who was always in plain clothes, he bore his identification number on his collar, 567. I can remember that as clearly as if I were seeing it now, the bra.s.s numbers on the stiff collar of his dolman, as the jacket of his uniform was known, made of gray ticking in the summer and thick blue woolen cloth in the winter. The name of the Barata brother who was in the Criminal Investigation Department was Antonio, and he wore a moustache and was married to a woman called Conceico, who, years later, brought him certain problems, for my mother suspected, or may even have had proof, that my father and Conceico had enjoyed a degree of intimacy unacceptable even to the most tolerant of minds. I never discovered what really happened, I speak only of what I could deduce and imagine from the few hints dropped by my mother, when we were already living in the new house. Indeed, that might have been the real reason behind our move from Rua Padre Sena Freitas, where we were all living, to Rua Carlos Ribeiro, both of which were in the area being built on the hill that goes down from the Igreja da Penha de Franca to the beginning of Vale Escuro. And I only left Rua Carlos Ribeiro when I was twenty-two, to marry Ilda Reis.

I remember rather less about the other Barata brother, but I can still see him, small, round and rather plump. If I ever knew what he did for a living, I have long since forgotten. I think his wife's name was Emilia and his, I believe, was Jose: having been buried for years beneath many layers of forgetting, those names, like that of the supposedly flighty Conceico, rose obediently from the depths of memory when summoned by necessity, like a cork float held fast on the riverbed, but which suddenly breaks free of the acc.u.mulated mud. They had two children, Domitilia and Leandro, both slightly older than me and both with stories to tell, and in the case of Domitilia, to my great good fortune, with some sweet memories to recall. Let's begin with Leandro. At the time, he didn't seem particularly intelligent, in fact, he didn't seem very intelligent at all or else made no effort to appear so. His Uncle Antonio Barata, who never wasted his breath on circ.u.mlocutions, metaphors or evasions, called him a fool straight out. In those days, we all had to learn from the Cartilha Maternal -the Mother's Primer-written by Joo de Deus, who, in his lifetime, enjoyed a deserved reputation as both an excellent person and a wonderful teacher, but who had, whether intentionally or not, given in to the s.a.d.i.s.tic temptation to strew his lessons with various lexical traps, or perhaps, out of sheer ingenuousness, it simply never occurred to him that they could be perceived as traps by those catechumens less well fitted by nature to deal with the mysteries of reading. We were living, at the time, in Rua Carrilho Videira, on the corner of Rua Morais Soares, and I remember the tempestuous lessons Leandro received from his uncle and which always ended in Leandro receiving several hard slaps (as with the palmer or ferrule, also known as the "girl with five eyes," the slap was considered an indispensable educational tool) each time poor Leandro encountered a particularly abstruse word, which, as I recall, he never once managed to p.r.o.nounce correctly. The fateful word was acelga -meaning "Swiss chard"-which he p.r.o.nounced "a cega" His uncle would roar: "Acelga, you fool, acelga!" and Leandro, already braced and ready to be cuffed round the ear, would repeat: "A cega" Neither his uncle's aggression nor Leandro's dreadful anxiety achieved anything, for even if they had threatened him with death, he would still have said "a cega" Leandro was, of course, dyslexic, but that word, while it might have appeared in the dictionaries of the day, was unknown to the primer written by our good and much-loved Joo de Deus.

As for Domitilia, we were caught one day together in bed, playing at what brides and bridegrooms play at, active and curious about everything on the human body that exists in order to be touched, penetrated and fiddled with. When I try to pinpoint what age I was then, I think I must have been about eleven or perhaps slightly younger (I can't be certain because we lived twice in Rua Carrilho Videira, in the same house). We two bold creatures (who knows which of us had the idea, although it's likely that the initiative came from me) were spanked on the bottom, purely as a formality I think and not very hard. I'm sure the three women in the house, including my mother, would have laughed about it afterward, behind the backs of the precocious sinners who had been unable to wait until the proper time for such intimate discoveries. I remember crouching on the balcony at the back of the house (on a very high fifth story), crying, with my face pressed between the railings, while Domitilia, at the other end, accompanied me in my tears. But we didn't learn our lesson. A few years later, by which time I was living at 11 Rua Padre Sena Freitas, she went to visit Aunt Conceico, and it happened that not only were my aunt and uncle not in, my parents were out as well, and so we had plenty of time for more detailed investigations, which, although they didn't go all the way, left us both with unforgettable memories, at least in my case, for even now I can see her, naked from the waist down. Later on, when the two Barata brothers were already living in Praca do Chile, I would go and visit them, my sights set on Domitilia, but since, by then, we were both grown up and fully equipped, we found it hard to find a moment alone. It was also in Rua Padre Sena Freitas that I slept (or didn't sleep) part of the night with a slightly older girl cousin (she had the same name, Maria da Piedade, as my mother, who as well as being her aunt was also her G.o.dmother) when we were put in the same bed, head to toe. A vain precaution on the part of our ingenuous mothers. While they returned to the kitchen and resumed the conversation we weren't supposed to hear and which they had interrupted in order to take us to bed, where they had covered us up and tucked us in with their own fond hands, we, after a few minutes of anxious waiting, hearts pounding, underneath the sheet and the blanket, in the dark, began a meticulous, mutual, tactile exploration of our bodies with more than justifiable urgency and eagerness, but in a way that was not just methodical, but also, in the circ.u.mstances, as instructive as we could make it from the anatomical point of view. I remember that the first move on my part, the first attack, so to speak, brought my right foot into contact with Piedade's already bushy pubis. We were pretending to sleep like angels when, later that night, Aunt Maria Mogas, who was married to a brother of my father's called Francisco, came to get her up and take her home. Ah, yes, those were innocent times.

We must have lived in Rua Padre Sena Freitas for two or three years. That was where we were living when the Spanish Civil War broke out. The move to Rua Carlos Ribeiro must have happened in 1938, or perhaps even 1937. And unless my still, for the moment, serviceable memory allows different dates and references to surface, it's hard, not to say impossible, for me to place certain events in time, but I'm sure that the next incident I'm going to tell you about took place before the war in Spain. A very popular game at the time among the lower cla.s.ses, one that anyone could make at home (I had hardly any toys, and those I had were made of tin and had been bought in the street from itinerant sellers), consisted of a small rectangular board with twenty-two nails hammered into it, eleven on each side, distributed much as footballers used to be before the emergence of modern tactics, that is, five in front, the forwards, three behind them, the midfielders, also known as halves, two others, known as defenders or backs, and finally the goalkeeper. You could play the game using a marble or, better still, a ball bearing, which you guided in between the nails with a small spatula, then pushed it between two posts (because there were goalposts too) and thus scored a goal. People, both children and grown-ups, had enormous fun with these very meager materials, and hard-fought contests and champions.h.i.+ps were fought. Seen from this distance, it seems, and perhaps very briefly was, a golden age. Not that this was always the case, as you will see. One day, my father and I were on the rear balcony playing (I recall that families with few possessions spent most of their time at the back of the house, mainly in the kitchen), I was sitting on the ground and he on a small wooden bench of the kind that was commonplace then and considered indispensable, especially to the women of the household, who sat there to do their sewing. Standing behind me, watching the game, was Antonio Barata. My father was not a man to let his son beat him and so, implacably, and taking advantage of my limited skill, he scored goal after goal. Barata, as an officer in the Criminal Investigation Department, must have had plenty of training in different ways of putting psychological pressure on the detainees in his care, but clearly thought it a good idea to use that occasion to get in a little extra practice. He kept nudging me with his foot from behind and saying: "You're losing, you're losing." The boy I was at the time put up for as long as he could with the father who kept winning and the neighbor who kept taunting him, but eventually, in desperation, he struck Barata on the foot (well, "struck" is too strong a word to describe a blow dealt by a mere child) and at the same time vented his frustration by using the few words that could be spoken in such circ.u.mstances without offending anyone: "Stop it!" Barely were the words out of his mouth, however, than his all-conquering father slapped him twice across the face, so hard that the blow sent him rolling across the concrete floor of the balcony. After all, he had shown disrespect for an adult. Neither father nor neighbor, both of whom were policemen and honest guardians of public order, ever understood that they had shown a lack of respect for someone who would have a lot of growing up to do before he could finally tell this sad tale. His and theirs.

From that same balcony, some time later, I courted a girl called Deolinda, who was about three or four years older than me, and who lived in a building in a street that ran parallel to ours, Travessa do Calado, and the back of which looked out onto our house. I should make it clear that this was never a courts.h.i.+p proper, in the sense of my asking for her hand and making more or less lasting promises. ("Would you like to go out with me?" "Certainly, if your intentions are honorable.") We just looked and waved at each other and talked from balcony to balcony over the intervening yards and was.h.i.+ng lines, but we never made any serious commitment. I may have been shy and awkward by nature, but on the occasions when I visited her house (I seem to recall she lived with her grandparents), I went there ready for anything or everything. Both anything and everything turned out to be nothing. She was very pretty, with a small round face, but, to my dismay, had very bad teeth, and, besides, she must have thought me far too young for her to entrust her tender feelings to me. She was amusing herself a little for lack of any better suitor, although, unless I have been much mistaken all these years, I think she regretted that the age difference was so marked. In the end, I gave up the enterprise. Besides, her surname was Bacalhau-salt cod-and I, apparently already sensitive to the sounds and meanings of words, didn't want my wife to go through life burdened with a name like Deolinda Bacalhau Saramago.

I have explained elsewhere how and why I acquired the name of Saramago. How Saramago was not a family name from my father's side, but the nickname-meaning "wild radish"-by which the family was known in the village. How when my father went to the registry office in Goleg to declare the birth of his second son, the clerk (who was called Silvino) was drunk (although my father always claimed Silvino acted out of pure spite) and he, under the influence and without anyone noticing this onomastic deception, decided to add Saramago to the plain Jose de Sousa that my father intended me to be. And, as it turned out, thanks to what was clearly divine intervention, on the part, that is, of Bacchus, the G.o.d of wine and of those who drink too much of it, I later had no need to invent a pseudonym with which to sign my books. I was very lucky indeed not to have been born into one of the families in Azinhaga, which, at the time and for many years afterward, had to put up with far more scurrilous nicknames-Pichatada, Curroto and Caralhana-all of which referred to various parts of the male anatomy, namely c.o.c.k, b.u.m and b.a.l.l.s. My family was unaware that I had entered life marked by the name of Saramago until I was seven, for it was only when they had to present my birth certificate in order to enroll me in primary school that the raw truth surfaced from the bureaucratic depths, to the great indignation of my father, who, since moving to Lisbon, had grown to dislike the nickname. The worst of it was that, since-as was apparent from his papers-he was called plain Jose de Sousa, the Law, ever strict and suspicious, wanted to know why it was that his son was called Jose de Sousa Saramago. Feeling intimidated and wanting to make sure that everything was right and proper, my father had no alternative but to reregister himself under the name of Jose de Sousa Saramago. This must, I imagine, be the only case in the whole history of humanity of a son giving his name to his father. Not that it helped us or humanity very much, because my father, steadfast in his antipathies, always insisted on being called plain Sousa.

One day, a neighbor of ours-well, I call him neighbor not because we knew him, but because he lived in the same street (which, at the time, was still Rua Padre Sena Freitas)-went mad. He was a young man in his twenties who was said to have lost his wits by reading and studying too much. Just like Don Quixote. I remember one attack he had, the only one we actually witnessed, for afterward we heard nothing more of him and presumed that he had been interned in Rilhafoles, the local insane asylum. Anyway, on that day, we-my mother, Conceico and I-heard terrible, heartrending cries coming from outside and ran to the window to find out what was going on. He lived on the top floor of a much taller building than ours, on the other side of the road and slightly to the right of the house we lived in, on the corner of Rua Cesario Verde. We saw him appear at the window again and again, as if he were intending to throw himself out, the proof of which was that two hands immediately appeared behind him, tugging at him, while he struggled and cried out over and over, in the most pitiful way: "Ay, Santo Hilario! Ay, Santo Hilario!" Why he was calling on Santo Hilario we never found out. Shortly afterward, an ambulance arrived, he was bundled inside and never came back, not at least during the time we lived there.

By then, I was already studying at technical college, the Escola Industrial de Afonso Domingues, in Xabregas, after two short years at secondary school, the Liceu Gil Vicente, which in those days was part of the So Vicente de Fora monastery. Here follows a chronology of my brief career as a student: I entered secondary school in 1933, when I was still only ten (cla.s.ses started in October and my birthday falls in November), I was there during the school terms of 19331934 and 19341935, and I left to go to the technical college when I was comingup to thirteen. Of course, since technical subjects like Trade Skills, Mechanics and Mechanical Design form no part of the normal secondary school curriculum, I was in the first year for those subjects and the second year for everything else. So the sequence of my career there was as follows: '35'36, second and first year; '36'37, third and second; '37'38, fourth and third, '38'39, fifth and fourth, '39'40, fifth. The excursion to Sameiro-the one where I rode the horse that ignored me when I got off-took place at the end of '38'39 school year, just before the exams, and during that trip, I had the misfortune to twist my left foot jumping over something, cracking my heel bone in the process. As a result, I had to spend more than a month with a plaster cast up to my knee. There was a curved metal bar on the bottom of the cast, the ends of which were embedded in the plaster, and this was called a stirrup. That plaster boot was elaborately decorated with signatures, drawings and doodles by my fellow students. One of them suggested using it as a crib in the math exam: "Just pull up your trouser leg and Bob's your uncle." I managed to pa.s.s the exam without following his advice.

I think the time has come for me to tell you about another episode related to my arrival in the world. As if the delicate ident.i.ty problem provoked by my surname wasn't enough, there was a further problem with the date of my birth. I was born on November 16, 1922, at two o'clock in the afternoon, and not on November 18 th as the register of births, marriages and deaths would have it. My father was working away from home at the time and so not only was he unable to be present at his son's birth, the earliest he could get back was shortly after December 16th, probably the 17th, which was a Sunday. Then, and I imagine now as well, a child's birth had to be registered within thirty days or you had to pay a fine. In those patriarchal times, and given that it was a legitimate birth, it would never have occurred to anyone that my mother or some other relative could go to the registry office, and given that the father of a child was officially considered to be the newborn's sole progenitor (on my enrollment card for secondary school, only my father's name appears, not my mother's), we waited for his return, and so as not to have to cough up for the fine (any amount, however small, would have been too much for the family's pocket), two days were added to my actual date of birth, and the problem was solved. Life in Azinhaga being what it was, painful and difficult, men would often go away to work for weeks on end, which is why I couldn't have been the first or the last example of such minor deceits. When I die, I will be two days older than the birth date on my ident.i.ty card, but I hope no one will notice.

Living to our right on the same floor (we had not yet left Rua Padre Sena Freitas) was a family comprising a couple and their young son. The husband worked as a painter at the Viuva Lamego ceramics factory in Largo do Intendente. The wife was Spanish, although I don't know from which part of Spain, and her name was Carmen, and their son, a fair-haired little boy, would have been about three (that's how I still remember him, as if he had never grown during all the time we lived there). We were good friends, the husband and I, which must seem surprising, given that he was an adult, practicing a profession unusual in my tiny world, and I was just an awkward adolescent, full of doubts and certainties, although unaware of either. His surname was Chaves, I can't remember his first name or perhaps I never knew it, and so for me he was always and only Senhor Chaves. To keep ahead of his work or possibly to earn extra money, he would often work late at home, and that was when I used to visit him. I would knock on the door, his wife would open it-she was always very brusque and barely took any notice of me-and I would go through to the little dining room where there stood, in one corner, lit by a reading lamp, the potter's wheel at which he worked. The high stool on which I always sat was there waiting for me. I used to enjoy watching him painting the already glazed ceramics with an almost gray paint which, after firing, would become the familiar blue of that particular type of pottery. And as the flowers, volutes, arabesques and scrolls flowed from his brushes we would talk. I may have been young and with, as you can imagine, limited experience of life, but I sensed that this sensitive, refined man was lonely. Today, I'm sure of this. I continued to visit him even when my family moved to Rua Carlos Ribeiro, and one day, I took him a few lines of popular verse I had written and which he then transferred onto a little heart-shaped dish whose intended recipient was Ilda Reis, with whom I had just started going out. If my memory serves me right, that must have been my first "poetic composition," rather belated, it must be said, when you consider that I was almost eighteen or had already turned eighteen. Chaves was lavish with his praise and thought I should enter it in the jogos florais, as the delightful poetry contests much in vogue at the time were known and whose very innocence saved them from seeming ridiculous. The fruit of my poetic inspiration read thus: "Careful, now, lest someone hear/ The secret I unfold:/ I give to you a china heart/ for my heart you already hold." You must admit that I would have deserved, at the very least, second prize...

The couple did not appear to get on very well, and his unpleasant Spanish wife found everything about Portugal detestable. While he was patient and refined, discreet and measured in his speech, she was the guardia civil type, tall and surly and rather broad in the beam, with a way with words that pitilessly garbled the language of Camoes. That wouldn't have mattered so much if she hadn't been so aggressive. It was in their house that I first started listening to Radio Sevilla after the Spanish Civil War had begun. Oddly enough, given that she was Spanish, I never found out for certain which side they supported. I suspect, however, that Dona Carmen had sided with Franco from the start. Listening to Radio Sevilla, I got into a terrible mental twist from which it took me a long time to free myself. The Nationalist General Queipo de Llano used the station to make his propaganda broadcasts, of which, needless to say, I remember not a word. What did stick in my memory was the jingle that always followed and which went: "If lovely colors make you sing, Revi paints are just the thing." There would be nothing very special about this if it weren't for the fact that I had become convinced that it was General Queipo de Llano himself who recited this cheery advertis.e.m.e.nt as soon as his broadcast was over. A necessary addendum to the "minor matter" of the Spanish Civil War. Forgive my frivoli