Small Memories

by José Saramago

  It's time to explain the reasons behind the original title 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, lusts and nightmares, every hidden desire and every manifest sin. Oddly enough, my attempt to transpose such a thorny 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 title, 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 prostitute who, one night, as I was on my way to the Cinema Salão 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 Fernão 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 Ferrão 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 Salâo Lisboa, better known as the "Fleapit" and located in the Mouraria, next to the Arco do Marqués 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 Félix 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 shift 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 brass 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 Conceição, who, years later, brought him certain problems, for my mother suspected, or may even have had proof, that my father and Conceição 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 Emília and his, I believe, was José: having been buried for years beneath many layers of forgetting, those names, like that of the supposedly flighty Conceição, 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 accumulated mud. They had two children, Domitília and Leandro, both slightly older than me and both with stories to tell, and in the case of Domitília, 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 circumlocutions, 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 João 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 sadistic 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 pronounce correctly. The fateful word was acelga —meaning "Swiss chard"—which he pronounced "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 João de Deus.

  As for Domitília, 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 Domitília, 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 Conceição, 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 Praça do Chile, I would go and visit them, my sights set on Domitília, 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 godmother) 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 circumstances, 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 classes, 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 championships 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 circumstances 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 courtship 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 washing 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 Golegã 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 José 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 god 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 cock, bum and balls. 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 José de Sousa, the Law, ever strict and suspicious, wanted to know why it was that his son was called José 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 José 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.