Small Memories

by José Saramago

  One of my school friends was a plump, sad-looking boy with large round glasses, who always seemed to have a whiff of medicine about him. He often missed classes, but these absences were put down to ill health. We never knew if he would be there in the morning or if he would stay for the whole day. Even so, he was intelligent and hard-working, and always got the highest marks. He was excused from gym and could never take part in our rather rough games, and I never saw him in the playground at break time. He was brought to school by car and the same car came to pick him up. Since there was no refectory, the boys ate wherever they happened to be, in the corridors, in the playground, or in the gallery of the cloister on the floor occupied by the school. He, however, had a special dispensation from the headmaster, and his lunch was brought to him, still hot, by a maid and was served to him—complete with tablecloth and napkin—in a room on the ground floor, in peace, far from the noise and bustle. I felt rather sorry for him. And perhaps he noticed this because one day he asked if I would like to join him, not for lunch, of course, but to keep him company. I said that I would. We arranged that I would go and sit with him once I had eaten—upstairs—my usual bread roll filled with chouriço sausage, cheese or omelet, and then, once he, too, had finished his lunch, we would go up to the classroom together. With his round, sad face, he would sit chewing slowly, listlessly, deaf to the maid's pleas: "Just a little bit more, menino, just a little bit more." I immediately grasped the situation and, to cheer him up, started clowning around, pretending to trip over my own feet and so on, and my very elementary comic skills brought results. I made him laugh and then he would eat almost without realizing, and the maid was delighted. He must have spoken about me to his parents because one day, he invited me to his house, which turned out to be a real mansion (well, to me it looked like a palace) in Calçada da Cruz da Pedra, above a terraced garden with views over the Tejo. I was welcomed by him and his youngest sister, although his mother only stayed with us for a few minutes and then left. It was teatime. We ate in a small room furnished in a style that reminded me of the Formigal household, albeit less solemn and with no damask. They tried to alarm me by placing under my cup and under the tablecloth a kind of balloon that could be inflated by my friend on the other side of the table squeezing a small rubber bulb. I saw the cup and saucer start to jig about, but I wasn't afraid. It was merely an effect for which I had to find the cause. I lifted the tablecloth and we all burst out laughing. Then we went into the garden to play burro (the name given to a game played on a sloping board marked out with numbered squares into which you had to throw a counter, the winner being the player with the largest number of points) and I lost. When I began studying at technical college, I went to his house for the last time. I showed him my student card with a display of pride I knew to be false (at the Liceu we didn't have such cards), but he merely gave it a bored, cursory glance. I never saw him again. The mansion was on my way to college, but I never made a point of going a few yards out of my way in order to knock on his door. I think I must have sensed that I had ceased to be useful to him.

  One day, during a mechanics class, I broke a pointer. The teacher had not yet arrived and we were making the most of the opportunity to have a good time, some were telling jokes, others were throwing paper planes or balls of paper, still others were playing at "palms" (a magnificent exercise for honing the reflexes, because the player holding his open palms out for the other player to strike has to move very fast to avoid the next blow), and I, intending to exemplify the use of the lance—why I don't know, perhaps because of some film I'd seen—grabbed the pointer and raced toward the blackboard, to which I'd given the role of the enemy to be unhorsed. I misjudged the distance and hit the board so hard that the pointer broke into three pieces in my hand. The incident was greeted with applause by some, but others fell silent and looked at me with that expression on their faces which means the same in every language in the world: "You're in for it now," while I, as if I believed a miracle were possible, tried to fit the broken pieces of wood together again. When the miracle didn't happen, I was just depositing the remains on the teacher's dais when the teacher came in. "What happened?" he asked. I came up with a hasty explanation ("The pointer was on the floor and I inadvertently stepped on it, sir") which he pretended to believe. "Well, you'll have to buy another one," he said. So it was and had to be. It didn't occur to anyone at home to go to a shop selling school equipment and ask how much a new one would cost. It was assumed that it would be far too expensive and that the best solution would be to go to a sawmill and buy a piece of wood of about the same size that I could then work on to produce something as similar as possible to the real pointer. And that's what happened. For good or ill, neither my father nor my mother got involved. Over a period of perhaps two weeks, including Saturday afternoons and Sundays, I slaved away with my knife like a condemned man, planing and sanding and filing and waxing the wretched piece of wood. My experience of working with tools at Azinhaga paid off. The final result was not what you might call perfection, but worthy enough to take the place of the broken original, and it won the necessary administrative approval and an understanding smile from my teacher. Bear in mind that my specialty was mechanics not carpentry.

  José Dinis died young. Once the golden years of childhood were over, we had each gone our separate ways, then, some time later, when I was in Azinhaga, I asked Aunt Maria Elvira: "What's José Dinis up to these days?" And she said quite simply: "José Dinis died." That's the way we were, we might be hurting inside, but we put up a hard front. Things are as they are, you're born, you live and you die, and there's no point making a fuss about it, José Dinis came and went, tears were shed at the time, but the fact is that people can't spend their entire lives grieving for the dead. I would like to think that no one now would remember José Dinis if these pages had not been written. I'm the only one who can remember how we used to balance rather precariously on the steps of the harvester and cross the field from end to end, watching as the machine cut down the ears of wheat and how we would get covered in dust in the process. I'm the only one who can still remember the superb watermelon with its dark green skin that we ate on the banks of the Tejo, because the melon patch was in the river itself, on one of those tongues of sandy soil, sometimes quite extensive, that were left exposed each summer when the volume of water diminished. I'm the only one who can remember the creak of the knife as it opened, the bright red slices and the black seeds, the "castle" (in other places they call it the "heart") that was left in the middle of the melon as we sliced away at the flesh (the knife wasn't long enough to reach the very center of the fruit), and the way the juice trickled down your throat onto your chest. And I'm the only one who can remember the time I betrayed José Dinis. We were walking along with Aunt Maria Elvira, searching for corn, each with our own row to follow and a bag slung round our neck, breaking off the ears of corn that the pickers had inadvertently left on the stalks, and suddenly I spotted a huge ear of corn in José Dinis' row, but I said nothing, waiting to see if he would walk past without noticing it. When he, the victim of his small stature, did precisely that, I went and picked the cob. The fury of the poor plundered boy was a sight to see, but Aunt Maria Elvira and the other adults present said I was quite right, if he had seen it, I wouldn't have picked it. They were wrong. If I had been generous, I would have given him the corncob or said simply: "Look, José Dinis, right there in front of you." I could blame this on the constant state of rivalry we lived in, but I suspect that on the Final Day of Judgment, when my good and bad actions are placed in the balance, it will be the weight of that ear of corn that sends me down to hell...

  A short distance from my grandparents' yard was a ruined farm building, what remained of some old pig pens. We used to call them Veiga's pig pens, and I would walk through them whenever I wanted to take a shortcut through the olive groves. One day, when I was about sixteen, I came across a woman in there, standing up among the weeds, pulling down her skirt, and a man buttoning up his
trousers. I turned away and went and sat on a wall by the road, near an olive tree at the foot of which, a few days before, I had seen a large green lizard. After a few minutes, I saw the woman hurrying away through the olive grove opposite, almost running. The man emerged from the ruins, came over to me (he must have been a tractor driver brought in from outside to do a particular job) and sat down beside me. "Nice woman," he said. I didn't respond. The woman kept appearing and disappearing among the trunks of the olive trees, moving further off all the time. "She said you know her and would tell her husband." I still did not respond. The man lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out twice, then he let himself slide off the wall and said goodbye. "Goodbye," I said. The woman had finally disappeared from view. I never saw the green lizard again.

  This is Francisco, the brother whose image I didn't dare to steal. He lived for such a short time, but who knows what he might have become. Sometimes I think that, by living, I have tried to give him life.

  I am six years old and standing on the balcony at the back of the house in Rua Fernão Lopes. If my memory serves me right, beside me were Antonio Barata and his wife; however, an implacable pair of scissors has separated me from them. My mother was always very clear where relationships were concerned: the end of a friendship meant the end of any photos too.

  This dates from my primary school days. It is, I think, the second photograph taken of me, if I don't count the one that disappeared and in which I was pictured with my mother outside the grocer's shop, with her dressed in heavy mourning following the death of my brother Francisco and with me looking very sad.

  They've put a tie on me in this one, and pinned the badge of Benfica football club to my lapel. My father made me a member of the club and used to take me to watch them play at the old Amoreiras stadium. This was more for his benefit than for mine. It was fun, but I wasnever that much of a fan.

  There's a triumphal air about me here; I'm wearing a confident half-smile. I assume this was taken after the fourth-year exams, when I was already looking forward to the responsibilities that awaited me at secondary school. The triumphal air didn't last.

  I should perhaps have placed this photo earlier. I look rather fragile and delicate, in complete contrast to the positive and slightly smug expression of the previous picture. One thing, though, that doesn't quite fit with my theory that this is an earlier photo is the loosely knotted tie, a fashion that came in later.

  Here I am, a full-fledged adolescent. The Benfica badge has vanished, and I seem to recall that, by then, I had stopped going to matches. I've gone back to wearing my tie tightly knotted, a style that has accompanied me all my life, right up until the present day.

  By now, I had a girlfriend.

  You can tell by the look on my face.

  In Azinhaga. Legs straddled, I gaze at the camera with a determined air. I didn't know what to do with my hands, so I stuck them in my pockets. Trouser pockets are the refuge of the shy.

  Here they are, Josefa and Jerónimo. I find that hand on my grandmother's shoulder very touching. They didn't much go in for public displays of affection, but I know they loved each other and still did then.

  My grandmother has a child in her arms, but I don't know

  who it is. He looks to me like Uncle Manuel's son.

  I'm not sure what to make of this gentleman. His face is that of my grandfather Jerónimo, but the suit isn't him at all. It was lent to him for the occasion by the husband of my Aunt Maria da Luz, who, at the time, lived in Oporto, where the photo was taken.

  My mother was a beauty.

  It's not me who says so, but the photo.

  They made a handsome couple. My mother was pregnant with my brother Francisco at the time. I came along later, but there's no photo.

  My father, when he'd already been promoted to sergeant. He was what people used to call "a fine figure of a man."

  So beautiful!

  The years passed, and this is possibly the last photo of my father. Despite his various shenanigans, he was not a bad person. One day, when I was already a grown man, he said to me: "Now you, you've always been a good son." At that moment, I forgave him everything. We had never been so close before.

  Translator's Acknowledgments

  The translator would like to thank José Saramago, Tânia Ganho and Ben Sherriff for all their help and advice.