Small Memories (13 page)

I was ten, but I could already read fluently and understand perfectly everything I read, and considering my tender age, I didn't make too many spelling mistakes either, not that this, at the time, was considered something deserving of a medal. You will understand, then, that despite the almost unbearable itching that cried out for the cool balsam of a bowl of cold water or a little vinegar, I seized the opportunity to plunge into the varied bit of reading that chance had placed in my path. It was the summer of 1933, and I was ten years old, and of all the news items published in
O Século
on a particular day of the previous year, I can remember only one: the photograph, with explanatory caption, that showed the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss watching a parade of soldiers in Austria. This was the summer of 1933, and Hitler had taken power in Germany only six months before, but I have no recollection of having read about this in the
Di´rio de Notícias,
the newspaper my father used to bring back to our Lisbon home. I'm on holiday, in the house of my maternal grandparents, and while I absentmindedly scratch my arms, I feel surprised that a chancellor (whatever a chancellor was) could be so short. Neither I nor Dollfuss know that the following year he will be assassinated by the Austrian Nazis.

Around this time (perhaps still in 1933 or possibly 1934, if I'm not getting my dates mixed up) as I was walking down Rua da Graça, on my accustomed route between Penha de França, where I was living, and São Vicente, where I went to school, I saw, hanging on the door of a tobacconist's shop, right opposite the old Royal Cine, a newspaper whose front page bore a perfect drawing of a hand reaching out to grab something. Underneath were the words: "An iron hand in a velvet glove." The newspaper in question was the satirical weekly
Sempre Fixe,
the artist Francisco Valença, and the hand was supposed to be Salazar's.

Don't ask me why, but those two images have stayed with me all my life—that of Dollfuss smiling as he watched the troops march past, when he had possibly, who knows, already been condemned to death by Hitler, and Salazar's iron hand concealed beneath a soft, velvet glove of hypocrisy. We often forget what we would like to remember, and yet certain images, words, flashes, illuminations repeatedly, obsessively return to us from the past at the slightest stimulus, and there's no explanation for that; we don't summon them up, they are simply there. And it is those memories that tell me that although, at the time, I was basing myself more on intuition than, of course, on any real knowledge of the facts, Hitler, Mussolini and Salazar were, in my view, all chips off the same block, first cousins, each with the same iron hand, the only difference being the thickness of the velvet and how tightly the hand could squeeze.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out, I had already moved from secondary school at the Liceu Gil Vicente to technical college at the Escola Industrial de Afonso Domingues, in Xabregas, and I was doing my best to learn, as well as Portuguese, mathematics, physics, chemistry, mechanical design, mechanics and history, a little French and literature (it amazes me to think that in those days they taught French and literature at a technical school) and, finally, which was the real reason I was there, to penetrate, little by little, into the
mysteries of the profession of general mechanic. I read in the press that those on one side in the Spanish Civil War were known as reds and those on the other as nationalists, and since the newspapers published regular reports of the various battles, occasionally illustrated with maps, I decided, as I mentioned earlier, to create my own map, on which, depending on the result of each battle, I would stick different colored flags, red and yellow, I believe, and thanks to which I imagined I was accompanying, to use the age-old expression, the development of operations. Then one day, quite early on, I realized that I was being mocked by the retired soldiers whose job it was to censor the press, respectfully making theirs the iron hand and the velvet glove. According to them, only Franco's victories counted. The map was thrown in the bin and the flags lost. And this was probably one reason why, when I was sent with my classmates to the Liceu de Camoes, where the green and brown uniforms of the Mocidade Portuguesa—Portuguese Youth Movement—were being given out, I managed never to get beyond the end of the line that stretched out into the street, and I was still there when a graduate (as the older boys were known) came to tell us that they had run out of uniforms. In the weeks that followed, there were more distributions of berets, shirts and shorts, but I, along with a few others, always went to parades in civvies, and showed myself to have two left feet when marching and to be as clumsy with a gun as I was inept at target shooting. That was not my destiny.

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.