We have said our farewells, from down here you can see the castle, who could recount all its stories, those from the past and those to come, it would be quite wrong to think that just because wars are no longer fought outside castles, such military actions, however petty, however inglorious, are a thing of the past, as the Marquis de Marialva put it, Have you noticed, your majesty, how poorly Manuel Ruiz Adibe, governor of Montemor, runs the barracks there, because quite apart from his general incompetence, if the workers give him enough money, he excuses them from having to help build the fortifications, which is why so little work has been done, as anyone can see, and so I am asking your majesty if I might suggest someone more suited to the post, notably the lieutenant general of artillery, Manuel da Rocha Pereira, who possesses all the necessary qualities, efficiency, energy, zeal, as well as a desire to occupy said post, so if your majesty would be so kind as to write the requisite letter of appointment, giving him the title of field marshal, then Manuel Ruiz Adibe can still enjoy his salary, as do the other cavalry captains whom your majesty has retired, he’s not so needy nor does he have so many responsibilities that he need live uncomfortably, even if his salary isn’t always paid promptly. Devil take Adibe, who took such poor care of your majesty’s service and such good care of his own, the times have changed, now there are zealous functionaries willing to kill a man in the Montemor barracks, then go outside to smoke a cigarette, wave goodbye to the sentry courageously gazing out at the horizon to make sure no Spaniards are approaching, and set off down the road with a firm step, chatting serenely and totting up their day’s work, so many punches, so many kicks, so many blows with a stick, and they feel proud of themselves, neither of them is called Adibe, their names are Escarro and Escarrilho, they’re like twins, they pause outside the cinema, where the film being shown tomorrow, on Sunday, is advertised, the summer season is getting off to a good start with an interesting comedy called The Magnificent Dope. Bring your wives, they’ll enjoy it, poor ladies, when things calm down a bit, it’s sure to be worth seeing, but if you want a really good film, don’t miss the Thursday showing, with Estrellita Castro, the goddess of song and dance, starring alongside Antonio Vico, Ricardo Merino and Rafaela Satorrés in that marvelous musical Mariquilla Terremoto, olé.
THESE MEN ESCAPED from among the dead and the wounded. We will not name them one by one, it’s enough to know that some went to Lisbon to languish in prisons and dungeons, and others returned to the threshing machine, being paid the new wage for as long as the harvest lasted. Father Agamedes issues a paternal admonishment to these madmen, reminds them directly or indirectly how much they owe him and how they, therefore, have still more of an obligation to fulfill their Christian duties, for did not the Holy Mother clearly demonstrate her power and influence by touching the bolts on the prison doors and making them fall away and by prying open the bars on the windows, hallelujah. He makes these grand statements to a church almost empty apart from old ladies, because the other parishioners are still brooding over how much that gratitude has cost them and are not consoled. In Monte Lavre, they know little of the arrests, it’s all very vague, however often Sigismundo Canastro tells them how many there were, and only tomorrow will it become known how many deaths there were, as worker talks to worker, but the weariness of the living seems to hang heavier than a death about which they can do nothing, My father is ill and I don’t know what to do with him, these are private concerns particular to each household, not to mention that the harvest is coming to an end, and then what will happen. It will be no different from other years, but now Norberto, Alberto and Dagoberto are saying, through the mouths of the overseers, that this rabble will regret ever going on strike, and the extra money they earned will cost them dearly. Adalberto has already sent written instructions from Lisbon to the effect that, once the harvest and the threshing are over, he will keep on only the swineherds and shepherds and the watchman, because he doesn’t want his land trampled by strikers and idlers, later we’ll see, it depends on the olives, how are the olives doing, by the way. The overseer will reply, but this is the kind of correspondence no one bothers to keep, you receive the letter, do what it tells you to do or send an answer to the question asked, and then it’s, Now where did I put that letter, it would be amusing to base a whole history on such letters, it would be another way of doing it, our problem is that we think only the big things are important, and so we talk about them, but then when we want to know how things really were, who was there and what they said, we’re in trouble.
Her name is Gracinda Mau-Tempo and she is seventeen. She will marry Manuel Espada, but not just yet. She’s young, she can’t simply get married from one day to the next, with no trousseau, they will have to be patient. Quite apart from these obvious social obligations, they have nowhere to live, It would mean having to move somewhere else, You don’t want to be like your brother, always having to live so far away, I know it’s not the same thing, because you’re a girl, but it’s bad enough never seeing one child, ah me, that boy of mine. These are Faustina’s words, and João Mau-Tempo nods, he always feels a pang in his heart whenever they talk about his son, the little devil, who was only eighteen when it became clear that he had inherited his late grandfather’s wanderlust. Gracinda Mau-Tempo will tell Manuel Espada the substance of these conversations later, and he will say, I want to marry you and I don’t mind waiting, and he says this gravely, as is his custom on all occasions, a manner that makes him seem older than his years, and there was already quite an age difference, as Faustina had pointed out to Gracinda when Gracinda told her that Manuel Espada had asked her to be his girl, But he’s much older than you, What’s that got to do with it, Gracinda had replied, offended, and quite right, too, because that wasn’t what mattered, what mattered was that she had liked Manuel Espada ever since that June day in Montemor, what did age have to do with anything, although Manuel Espada, when he spoke to her, had also pointed this out, I’m seven years older than you, and she, smiling, not sure quite what she was saying, had replied, The husband should be older than the wife, and then she had blushed because she realized that she had said yes without actually saying yes, as Manuel Espada realized, and he passed on to the next question, So that’s a yes, is it, and she said, Yes, and from then on they spent time with each other as the rules of courtship demanded, at the front door of her house, because it was too soon for him to be allowed into the house, but where Manuel Espada did not follow the rules was in speaking to her parents right away, rather than waiting until both he and she were sure of their feelings and of their ill-kept secret. It was then that João Mau-Tempo and Faustina explained, and this was hardly news, that marriage was an economic impossibility just then, and that they would have to wait, I’ll wait as long as I have to, said Manuel Espada, and then he left, determined to work and save, although he also had to help his own parents, with whom he still lived. These are the problems of ordinary life, which change little or so little in two generations that one hardly notices, and Gracinda Mau-Tempo knows that in future she will have to agree, by negotiation with her mother, how much of her wage she can put aside for her trousseau, as is her duty.
We have spoken a great deal about men and a little about women, but only in passing, as fleeting shadows or occasionally essential interlocutors, as a female chorus, albeit usually silent because weighed down either by some burden or by the weight in their bellies, or else, for various reasons, in the role of mater dolorosa, a dead son or a prodigal son, or a daughter dishonored, there’s never any shortage of them. We will continue to talk about men, but also more and more about women, and not because of this particular courtship and future marriage, because we have already witnessed the respective courtships and marriages of Sara da Conceição and Faustina, Gracinda’s grandmother now long gone and her mother happily still alive, and we said little about them, there are other reasons, as yet somewhat vague, and that’s because the times are changing. Declaring their feelings at the door of a prison, or, rather, in a barra
cks and a place of death, which comes to the same thing, goes against all the traditions and conventions, and at a time of such suffering too, doubtless compensated by the joys of an as yet timorous freedom, fancy a young man saying to a young woman, Will you be my girl, ah, it’s all very different from when I was their age.
Gracinda was born two years before her sister Amélia, who, because she had filled out early, looked, to the ill informed, about the same age. There was little physical resemblance, perhaps because the family blood was so mixed and so prone to produce singularities. We have only to think of that ancestor who came from the cold north and raped a girl at the fountain, a crime that went unpunished by his lord and master, Lamberto Horques, who was more concerned with origins of another kind and with horses. However, so as to confirm how small and modest a world this is, here we have Manuel Espada asking Gracinda Mau-Tempo to marry him next to that very same fountain, next to a field of bracken, which will not this time be trampled and broken until the body of the rape victim gives in, defeated. If only we could tie up all the loose ends, the world would be a stronger and better place. And if the fountain could speak, for example, which it would be perfectly justified in doing, given that it’s been a constant source of pure, bubbling water for over five hundred years, or longer if it was a Moorish fountain, anyway, if it could speak, we think it would say, This girl has been here before, an understandable mistake, over time even fountains get confused, not to mention the vast difference in how Manuel Espada behaves toward Gracinda, merely taking her hand and saying, So that’s a yes, is it, and then the two of them walking back, leaving the bracken for another occasion.
These three children know a lot about many different things. There are only four years between António Mau-Tempo, the oldest, and Amélia Mau-Tempo, the youngest. Once, they were just three bundles of ill-nourished, ill-dressed flesh and bone, as they continue to be today as adolescents, if that word isn’t too refined for these lands and these latifundios. They were carried on the backs of father and mother or in baskets on their parents’ heads, when they could still not walk or their little legs got tired quickly, or on their father’s shoulders or in their mother’s arms, or on their own two feet, they traveled more, given their age, than the wandering Jew. They battled with mosquitoes in the ricefields, poor, defenseless innocents who didn’t even know to brush from their faces the squadrons of flying lancers that whined with pure, intense pleasure. However, since mosquitoes have very short lives and since none of the children died, it is of them that we speak, not of some others who died of malaria, so if there were any winners in the war, they were those who practiced passive resistance. It doesn’t often happen, but in this case it did.
Look at these children, it doesn’t matter which one, the oldest boy, or the middle child, or the youngest, lying in a box in the shade of the holm oak while her mother, let’s say the child is a girl, works nearby, not so near that she can see her, and like all children, especially when they can’t yet talk, she gets a pain in her belly, or not even that, just the usual outpouring of poo, at least she hasn’t got dysentery this time, and by the time Faustina comes back, it’s lunchtime, and Gracinda is covered in excrement and flies like the dung heap she has, alas, become. By the time her mother has washed, and washed not just Gracinda’s little body, which is smeared all over, but also the rags covering her and which she hopes will dry draped over this pile of firewood, lunchtime has passed and so has her appetite. At this point, we don’t know who to take care of first, Gracinda, who, though clean and fresh, is all alone, or Faustina, who returns to work, gnawing on a bit of dry bread. Let’s stay here, beneath this holm oak, fanning the child’s face with this branch as she tries to sleep, because the flies are back again, but also to save the parents any grief, because you never know, a cortege of kings and knights might pass by, and the barren queen’s nursemaid might spot this little angel and carry her off to the palace, and how awful it would be if, later, she didn’t recognize her real parents, because in the palace she wears only velvets and brocades and plays the lute in her room in a tower, with its view of the latifundio. Later on, Sara da Conceição used to tell such stories to her grandchildren, and Gracinda wouldn’t believe us if we told her what danger she would have been in if we weren’t here, sitting on this stone, fanning her with this branch.
But children, if they get the chance, grow up. Until they are of an age to work, they are left in the care of their grandmother or their mother, if there’s no work for the mother, or with their mother and father, if there’s no work for the father either, and if, when they’re older, there are no children and all are workers, if there’s no work for fathers, mothers, children or grandmothers, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the ideal Portuguese family gathered around the same hunger, depending on the season. If it’s acorn time, then the father goes to gather them, as long as Norberto, Adalberto or Sigisberto doesn’t send the guards to patrol at night, which is why, as soon as it came into being, the dear republic set up the national republican guard. That’s all a very long story. But nature is prodigal, a generous teat that spills forth its milk in every ditch. Let’s go gathering thistles, dockweed, watercress, what better diet could there be. Dockweed is just the same as spinach, it looks the same, although it tastes quite different, but once cooked, fried with a little of the onions we have left, it’s enough to make your mouth water. And as for thistles. Strip those thistles, add a few grains of rice, and you have a banquet, please, Father Agamedes, help yourself, he who ate the meat can gnaw the bones. Every Christian, and even a non-Christian, needs his three meals a day, breakfast, lunch and supper, or whatever you choose to call them, what matters is having a full plate or bowl, or, if it’s only bread and scrape, then it should be rather more than just a nice smell. It’s a rule as golden as any other noble rule, a human right for both parents and children, which means that I don’t have to eat only once in order for them to eat three times, although those three meals serve more to keep hunger at bay than to fill the stomach. People talk and talk, but they don’t know what real need is, it means going to the bread bin knowing that the last crust of bread was eaten yesterday, and yet still opening the lid, just in case there’s been another miracle of the roses,* which would, in any case, be quite impossible, because neither you nor I can remember putting roses in the bread bin, to do that we would have had to pick them, and have you ever seen roses growing on a cork oak, if only they did, hunger, as you see, can bring on delirium. Today is Wednesday, Gracinda, take your sister Amélia and go up to the big house, hold her hand, Gracinda, António won’t go this time. Encouraging children to beg, that’s the kind of education the parents give their children, I don’t know why my tongue doesn’t form a knot in my mouth or fall to the floor and leap about like a lizard’s tail, that would teach me to be more careful what I say and not speak about hunger on a full stomach, because it’s not polite.
Wednesday and Saturday are the days when Our Lord God comes down to earth consubstantiated into bacon and beans. If Father Agamedes were here, he would cry heresy, call for the holy inquisition, and all because we said that the Lord was a bean and a slice of bacon, but the trouble with Father Agamedes is that he has little imagination, he has grown used to seeing God in a wafer and was never able to think of him in any other way, except, of course, as the Father with the full beard and dark eyes and the Son with the short beard and pale eyes, was there perhaps some incident involving a fountain and bracken at some point in the sacred story, do you think. Dona Clemência knows more about such transfigurations, having been the wife and fount of virtue from Lamberto down to the last Berto, because on Wednesdays and Saturdays she presides over how much food should be given to whom, advising on and checking the thickness of the slice of bacon, the piece with the least meat, of course, because if it’s pure fat, all the better, so much more nourishing, she also levels off the measure of beans with the strickle, purely in the interests of fairness and charity, you understand, we don’t want the child
ren to quarrel, You’ve got more than me, I’ve got less than you. It’s a lovely ceremony, it quite makes one’s heart melt with saintly compassion, not a dry eye in the house, or a dry nose, well, it’s winter now, especially outside, where the children of Monte Lavre are leaning against the wall, waiting to receive alms, how they suffer, barefoot, in pain, see how the girls lift first one foot and then the other to escape the icy ground, they would lift both at once if they ever grew the wings it’s said they will have once they’re dead, if they have the sense to die early, and see how they keep tugging at their dresses, not out of injured modesty, because the boys are too young to notice such things, but because they’re terribly cold. They form a queue, each holding a small tin, all of them snotty and snuffling, waiting for the window above finally to open and for the basket to descend on a rope from the skies, very slowly, magnanimity is never in a hurry, oh no, haste is plebeian and greedy, just don’t eat the beans as they are, because they’re raw. The first child in the queue places his tin in the basket, and then the basket ascends, off you go and don’t be long, the wind cuts along the wall like a barbed razor, who can possibly bear it, well, they all do in the name of what is to come, and then the maid sticks her head out of the window, and down comes the basket with the can full or half full, just to show any smarty-pants or novices that the size of the tin has no influence over the donor of this cathedral of beneficence. Anyone seeing this would think he had seen just about everything. But that’s not true. No one leaves until the last one has received his ration and the basket has been taken in until Saturday. They have to wait until Dona Clemência comes to the window, warmly wrapped up, to make her gesture of farewell and blessing, while the dear little children chorus their thanks in various ways, apart from those who merely move their lips, Oh, Father Agamedes, it does my soul so much good, and if someone were to assert that Dona Clemência was nothing but a hypocrite, they would be much mistaken, because only she can know how different her soul feels on Wednesdays and Saturdays, in comparison with other days. And now let us recognize and praise Dona Clemência’s Christian act of mortification, for although she has both the time and the money to hand out bacon and beans every day of the week, as well as the permanent, assured comfort of her immortal soul, she doesn’t do it, and that, dear readers, is her personal penance. Besides, Dona Clemência, these children mustn’t be allowed to acquire bad habits, imagine what demanding creatures they would grow into.
Raised from the Ground Page 18
