Small Memories (8 page)

One day I was fishing in the Tejo estuary, for once in peace and harmony with José Dinis (I'm not sure that it really was the estuary, because we hadn't walked that far, nor in the right direction, to have come so close to the river; it was probably just a large pool, deep enough not to dry up in the searing summer heat and inhabited by a few colonies of fish that had arrived there with the floodwaters), and we had already caught two scrawny specimens, when two boys, more or less our age, appeared, who must have been from Mouchão de Cima, which is why we didn't know them (nor would that have been advisable), even though we only lived a stone's throw away. They sat down behind us, and the usual conversation began: "Had any bites?" and we said "Oh, not too bad," reluctant to give them any information. In the end, so that they wouldn't make fun of us, we told them that we'd caught two fish and that they were in the pot. The "pot" was a cylindrical tin with a tight lid and a wire handle that you could sling over your arm. These pots, usually slung from a pole carried over the shoulder, were used by the workers to carry their food to the fields, a thick tomato soup perhaps, if it was the season, or cabbage soup with beans, or whatever was within the means of each individual. Having made it clear that we weren't as green as we looked, we turned our attention to the floats sitting utterly still on the leaden surface of the water. A great silence fell, time passed, and after a while, one of us glanced behind and saw that the boys had gone. Our hearts fell when we opened the pot. Instead of the two fish, there were two twigs floating in the water. How the thieves managed, without making a sound, to take off the lid, remove the fish and escape is something I still don't understand. When we got home and described what had happened, Aunt Maria Elvira and Uncle Francisco roared with laughter. We could hardly blame them, it was all we deserved.

It must be said that I was even less skilled as a hunter than I was as a fisherman. Only one sparrow ever fell to my catapult, but I killed it so ineptly and in such sad circumstances that one day I had to ease my conscience and express my sorrow by recounting the vile deed in a story. However, while I may have been no marksman when it came to the birds of the air, the same was not true of the frogs of the Almonda, which I felled with a slingshot that was as accurate as it was pitiless. The truth is that children's cruelty knows no limits (which is the real reason why adult cruelty knows no bounds either): what harm had those innocent batrachians done to me as they sat taking the sun in the shifting mud, enjoying the warmth from above and the cool from beneath? The stone whistled toward them, hitting them full on, and the poor frogs gave their last leap and lay there, belly up. The river—more charitable than the perpetrator of those deaths—washed away the few drops of spilled blood, while I, triumphant and unaware of my own stupidity, went upstream and downstream in search of new victims.

It's odd that I've never heard anyone anywhere else mention the "seamstress." As the precocious rationalist I had already shown myself to be at a tender age (you need only recall the heretical episode at Mass, when the bell rang and I craned my neck to see what it was they didn't want me to see), I thought, and I think I even suggested as much to my mother, that it might just be woodworm or some other similar creature, a ridiculous idea because woodworm (which aren't really worms, but larvae) couldn't live inside the thick mortar used in buildings then, which was far too hard to chew, although not as hard as modern-day cement and concrete. So what was it then? In the silent house, my mother would always say at some point, as though it were the most natural thing in the world: "There's the seamstress." And I would press my ear to the place on the wall she had indicated
and I could hear, I swear I could hear, the unmistakable sound of a sewing machine, the pedal-operated variety (there was no other kind then) and also, sometimes, another characteristic sound, slower, that of braking, when a seamstress raises her right hand to the wheel to stop the movement of the needle. I heard them in Lisbon, but also in Azinhaga, in my grandparents' house, where Grandmother Josefa or Aunt Maria Elvira would say: "There's the seamstress, there she is again." The sounds that emerged from the innocent blankness of the whitewashed wall were just the same. The explanation I was given was quite fantastical—how could it not be?—namely, that what we were hearing was the sad consequence of an irreverent seamstress who had worked on a Sunday and been condemned for that grave fault (there was no information about the identity of the judge) to work at her sewing-machine for all eternity inside the walls of houses. This mania for mercilessly punishing any Christian who needed to work on a Sunday had claimed another victim in the distant past, or so they told me, the man in the moon, the man you can see so clearly from here below, with a bundle of firewood on his back, and who was placed there, shouldering that eternal load, to serve as a lesson to anyone rash enough to be tempted to follow his bad example. But to go back to the "seamstress" in the walls, I don't know what can have happened in the world for her to have disappeared so completely, because it's over seventy years now since I last heard her and I can find no one else who has. Perhaps her sentence was commuted. If so, I hope the same mercy is shown to the man in the moon. The poor thing must be worn out. Besides, if they removed him from there, if they got rid of that shadow, the moon would give more light and we would all stand to gain.

As I've mentioned before, my grandparents' house was called Casalinho, and the name of the district was Divisões, perhaps because the rather sparse olive grove opposite (it became a football field later on and more recently still was turned into a park) had various owners, and each tree, as if they were cattle not trees, bore carved on the trunk its owner's initials. The house was of the very roughest construction, one story high, although it was raised about three feet above the ground in case of flood, with no window on the blank frontage, just the traditional door with the hatch in it. There were two spacious rooms, the
casa-de-fora
—the "outside room," so called because it gave onto the street—which was furnished with two beds and a few chests, three if my memory serves me right, and the kitchen, both rooms having only roof tiles above and a dirt floor beneath. At night, once the oil lamp had been turned out, you could see the occasional vagabond star twinkling through the chinks in the roof. At irregular intervals, perhaps every two or three months, my grandmother would resurface the floor of the
casa-de-fora.
She would dissolve the requisite amount of mud in a bucket of water and then, on her knees, using a cloth soaked in the mixture, she would shuffle backward, making sweeping movements with her arm and gradually covering the floor with a new layer. We were not allowed in until the mud had dried completely. I still have the smell of that damp mud in my nose and, in my eyes, the red of the floor growing gradually paler as the water evaporated. As I recall, the kitchen floor didn't receive the same treatment, it was swept, of course, although not much, but it never received that coating of mud. Apart from the beds and the chests, there was in the
casa-de-fora
a tall, unvarnished wooden table with an old mirror, tarnished and flawed, a mantel clock and a few other worthless knick-knacks. (Much later, long after I was forty, I bought in a Lisbon antique shop a similar clock, which I still have today, like something borrowed from my childhood.) The mirror was part of a small, rather inelegant dressing table, also unvarnished, with a central drawer and two small side drawers full of useless bits and pieces, and these contents remained unchanged, it seemed, from one year to the next. Photos of the family were gathered together on the table like a galaxy of faces; it never occurred to anyone to arrange them, like a decoration, on the whitewashed walls of the
casa-de-fora.
They were placed there like saints on an altar, like the disparate parts of a collective reliquary, fixed and immutable. The kitchen was the world. There were two beds, a table that wobbled on the uneven floor and so always had to have something jammed under one leg to keep it level, two blue-painted chairs, and the fireplace with, at the back, the "fireplace doll," a blurred, vaguely anthropomorphic figure, which disappeared, along with everything else, when Uncle Manuel, the youngest of my maternal uncles and a policeman like my father, inherited the house after my grandmother died, only to build in its place a house that anyone with even average taste would have found hideous, but which he must have thought extraordinary. I never asked him if he was pleased with his work, because, in keeping with deep-seated family tradition, we were no longer on speaking terms. I imagine that the "doll" was a rough representation of some pagan domestic genius, for example, one of the Roman penates (a common Portuguese expression of the day was
regressar a penates
which meant simply "to go home"). As far as one could tell from the shape, it must have been made out of square bricks, two of which were stuck in the wall, side by side, to form the upper part of the trunk, with another placed on top of them in the center as the neck and a third placed end on to represent the head. It was my grandmother who called it the "fireplace doll," and that satisfied me until, years later, thanks to the cognitive virtues of reading, I thought I had discovered its true identity. Had I really? The fireplace was a small one, only large enough for two to sit around, usually my grandfather and myself. In winter, when the water froze in the jugs overnight and, in the morning, we had to break the ice with a stick, we would be burned to a crisp in front and shivering behind. When the cold gripped, there was very little difference between being inside or out. The kitchen door, which gave onto the yard, was extremely old and more like a gate than a door, with cracks in it big enough to put your hand through and, even more extraordinary, it had been like that for years and years. It seemed as if it must have been old already when it was hung on its hinges. Only later, once my grandfather Jerónimo had died (he departed this life in 1948), did it benefit from a few repairs or, rather, a little patching up. I don't think it was ever replaced though. It was to this most humble of homes that my grandparents came to live after they were married, she—or so people said at the time—the prettiest girl in Azinhaga and he, the foundling from the poorhouse in Santarém, whom people called
pau-preto
—"blackwood"—because of his dark skin. And there they would live for ever. My grandmother told me that on their wedding night, Grandfather Jerónimo had sat outside the front door, armed with a big stick, waiting for the jealous rivals who had sworn to come and throw stones at the roof. No one came, though, and all night (if you'll allow me to give free rein to my imagination) the moon traveled across the sky, while my grandmother, lying in bed, eyes open, waited for her husband. And it was daylight before they could embrace.

The time has come to speak of the celebrated novel
Maria, the Fairy of the Forest,
which brought tears to the eyes of so many families in working-class areas of Lisbon in the 1920s. It was published, I believe, by Edições Romano Torres and distributed in weekly installments or sixteen-page pamphlets, which were delivered on the same day each week to subscribers' homes. We, too, received it in our top-floor apartment in 57 Rua dos Cavaleiros, but, at that point, apart from a dim memory of tracing the letters of the alphabet on a slate, which was not that helpful, my initiation into the delicate art of deciphering hieroglyphics had not yet begun. The person charged with reading to us out loud, for my mother's and my edification, for we were both of us illiterate—as I would continue to be for some time and as my mother would remain for the rest of her life—was Félix's mother, whose name, however hard I try, I cannot recall. The three of us, reader and listeners, would sit on the inevitable low benches and allow ourselves to be carried on the wings of the word to that world so different from ours. I remember that among the many misfortunes which, over the weeks, rained down upon the head of poor Maria, a victim of the hatred and envy of a wicked and very powerful female
rival, there was one episode that would remain forever engraved on my memory. During one of her many adventures, which I have long since forgotten and which it would, besides, be of no interest to detail here, Maria had been imprisoned in the gloomy depths of her mortal enemy's castle, and her enemy—as if to confirm what we, the esteemed readers, already knew from previous episodes, namely, that she had been a nasty piece of work from the cradle up—was taking advantage of the fact that poor Maria was highly gifted in the arts of embroidery and other such feminine crafts and forcing her, under threat of the worst punishments known and unknown, to embroider and sew. She was, as you see, not only evil, but exploitative too. Now, among the many beautiful pieces that Maria had produced during the time of her imprisonment was a magnificent negligee, which the chatelaine had decided to reserve for her own use. Then, in one of those extraordinary coincidences that only occur in novels and without whose aid no novelist would ever bother to write one, the elegant gentleman who loved Maria and whose feelings were tenderly reciprocated came to visit that very castle, never imagining that his beloved was imprisoned there in a dungeon where she was ruining her white fingers by embroidering day and night. The chatelaine, who had long had her eye on him—he being the reason for the bitter rivalry between her and Maria—resolved to seduce him that very night. No sooner said than done. At dead of night, she slipped surreptitiously into her guest's bedroom, having donned said negligee and made herself provocative and perfumed enough to turn the heads of all the saints in the heavenly court, let alone an energetic gentleman in the prime of life, however in love he might be with the pure and long-suffering Maria. Indeed, as he lay in the arms of the immoral creature who had entered his bed, as he bent over the round, intoxicating breasts clearly evident beneath the lace, just as he was about to surrender and fall into the seductive abyss, just when the perfidious creature was about to cry victory, the gentleman recoiled as if he had been bitten by the asp hidden between Cleopatra's breasts, and, grasping the embroidery, cried out: "Maria! Maria!" What could have happened? I know this will be hard to believe, but this is what the author wrote. In her prison, much as a shipwreck victim throws a bottle into the water in the hope that his message will be picked up by some saving hand, Maria had embroidered a cry for help on the negligee, complete with her name and the place where she was imprisoned. Saved from ignominy at the very last moment, the gentleman violently repelled the lubricious lady and raced off to rescue from captivity his virginal and adored Maria. It must have been around then that we moved to RuaFernão Lopes, which is why
The Fairy of the Forest
had to finish there, because the subscription had been paid for by Félix's mother. We benefited from that weekly free reading, which was no small thing, especially as far as I was concerned, for even though I was very young at the time, I never forgot that dramatic and troubling episode.