Raised from the Ground (24 page)

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 barracks 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,
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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 children 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.

When Gracinda Mau-Tempo grew up, she did not go to school. Nor did Amélia. Nor had António. A long time before, when their father was a child, the propagandists for the republic urged the people, Send your children to school, they were like apostles sporting goatees, mustaches and trilby hats and proclaiming the good news, the light of education, a crusade they called it, with the signal difference that it wasn’t a matter of driving the Turk out of Jerusalem and from the tomb of our Lord, it wasn’t a question of absent bones, but of present lives, the children who would later set off with their bag of books slung over one shoulder with a piece of twine, and inside it, the primer issued to them by the same republic that ordered the national guard to charge if these same children’s progenitors demanded higher wages. That is how João Mau-Tempo learned to read and write, enough to have misspelled his name in that exercise book in Montemor as João Mau-Tenpo, although, unsure which was the correct version, he sometimes wrote João Mautempo, which is better but still not quite right, Mau-Tempo, of course, being clear evidence of grammatical presumption. The world progresses, but within certain limits. In Monte Lavre it didn’t advance enough for him to be able to send his own three children to school, and now how will Gracinda Mau-Tempo write to her fiancé when he’s far away, a good question, and how will António Mau-Tempo send news if the poor thing never learned how to write and has apparently joined forces with a gang of ne’er-do-wells, I just hope he’s leading a respectable life, says Faustina to her husband, You always set such a good example.

João Mau-Tempo nods, but in his heart of hearts he’s not sure. It wounds him not to have his son by his side, and to see only women around him. Faustina is so different from what she was as a young woman, and she was never pretty, and his daughters, whose freshness and youth still survive despite a life of hard labor in the fields, it’s just a shame that Amélia has such dreadful teeth. But João Mau-Tempo isn’t so sure about having set a good example. He has spent his whole life simply earning his daily bread, and some days he doesn’t even manage that, and this thought immediately forms a kind of knot inside his head, that a man should come into a world he never asked to be born into, only to experience a greater than normal degree of cold and hunger as a child, if there is such a thing as normal, and grow up to find that same hunger redoubled as a punishment for having a body capable of withstanding such hardship, to be mistreated by bosses and overseers, by guards both local and national, to reach the age of forty and finally speak your mind, only to be herded like cattle to the market or the slaughterhouse, to be further humiliated in prison, and to find that even freedom is a slap in the face, a crust of bread flung to the ground to see if you’ll pick it up. That’s what we do when a piece of bread falls to the ground, we pick it up, blow on it as if to restore its spirit, then kiss it, but we won’t eat it there and then, no, I’ll divide it into four, two large pieces and two small, here you are Amélia, here you are Gracinda, this is for you and this is for me, and if anyone asks who the two larger pieces are for, he is lower than the animals, because I’m sure even an animal would know.