José Saramago - Small Memories

On the occasional Sunday afternoon, the women would go down to the Baixa to window-shop. They usually walked there, but sometimes took the tram, which was the worst thing that could happen to me at that age, because I soon grew queasy from the smell inside; the overheated, almost fetid atmosphere set my stomach churning and within minutes I would be throwing up. In that respect, I was a delicate child. With the passing of time that olfactory intolerance (I don't know what else to call it really) diminished, but for years afterward, I only had to board a tram for my head to start to swim. Anyway, on that particular Sunday, for whatever reason-whether because she felt sorry for me or simply wanted to stretch her legs-my mother, along with Conceição, Emília too, I think, and me, decided to walk there from Rua Fernão Lopes, along Avenida Fontes Pereira de Melo, then down Avenida da Liberdade to the Chiado, which was where Ali Baba kept his most valued treasures. I don't remember the shop windows, and that isn't what I'm here to talk about. I'm concerned with more serious matters. Next to one of the doors to the department store, Armazéns Grandella, a man was selling balloons, and whether it was because I asked (which I doubt very much because only someone who expects to be given something will run the risk of asking) or because my mother, unusually, wanted to make a public demonstration of her love for me, one of those balloons ended up in my hands. I can't remember if it was green or red, yellow or blue, or simply white. What happened afterward erased from my memory a color that should have stayed in my eyes forever, because that was neither more nor less than the first balloon I had been given in my six or seven years of life. We were walking across the Rossio, on our way home, and I was as proud as if I were dragging the whole world through the air tied to a piece of string, when, suddenly, I heard someone behind me snicker. I turned and I saw. The balloon had deflated and, without my realizing, I had been dragging it along the ground-a grubby, shriveled, shapeless thing-and two men were laughing and pointing at me. I felt, on that occasion, the most ridiculous of human beings. I didn't even cry. I simply dropped the string, grabbed my mother's arm like a drowning man a piece of wood and kept walking. That grubby, shriveled, shapeless thing was the world.

One day, at around this time, I went on a trip to Mafra. I had been born in Azinhaga and was living in Lisbon, and there I was, possibly in response to a knowing look or an indecipherable wink from the fates, being taken to the place where, more than fifty years later, my future as a writer would be decided once and for all. I don't remember now if the Baratas came with us or not. I have a vague idea that we were driven there in the car of some acquaintance of my father's, who, as far as I know, left no other trace of his passage through our lives. My most vivid memory of that brief visit (we didn't go into the monastery, only the basilica) is of a statue of St. Bartholomew which stood, as it still does, in the second chapel on the left as you go in, on the side which I believe is called, in liturgical language, the gospel side. A combination of extreme youth, a complete ignorance of the world of statues and the dim lighting in the chapel meant that I probably wouldn't even have noticed that poor St. Bartholomew had been flayed had it not been for the guide's practiced patter and his smugly eloquent gesture as he indicated the folds of flaccid skin (flaccid even though they were made of marble) that the poor martyr was holding in his hands. Dreadful. There is no mention of St. Bartholomew in Baltasar and Blimunda, but it is quite possible that the memory of that awful moment was still lurking somewhere in my mind when, in 1980 or 1981, I once again gazed upon the vast bulk of the palace and the towers of the basilica and said to the people with me: "One day, I'd like to put all this in a novel." I can't swear to it, I'm just saying that it's possible.

Between the ages of two and four or five, I must have made quite a few journeys to Azinhaga in my mother's arms. My father had gone from being a vulgar digger of fields to public servant, a policeman no less, with a basketful of news and novelties from the city to recount, and it was most unlikely that he would have remained in Lisbon during his annual leave, when he could enjoy showing off to his former work colleagues, talking fancy or at least trying hard not to sound too provincial and, in the intimacy of the tavern, after a couple of glasses of wine, regaling them with stories of women, a prostitute, say, who would pay with her body for a certain degree of police protection-not that he himself would admit to such things-or a market-trader of easy virtue in the Praça da Figueira. Many years later, my grandmother would tell me that, whenever I was left in her care, she would sit me in the next room, on a blanket spread on the floor, from where, after a while, she would hear me say: "Gramma, gramma." "What's wrong, sweetheart?" she would ask. And I would reply tearfully, sucking my right thumb (was it my right thumb?): "Want to poo." By the time she had rushed to my aid, it was always too late. "You were already all dirty," she would say, laughing. My mother, Francisco and I had left for Lisbon in the spring of 1924, when I was, at most, eighteen months old, so my communicative skills weren't really up to much. Presumably, though, such scatological episodes must have taken place later, on those holiday visits to Azinhaga, when my mother, leaving me in the hands of Grandmother Josefa, would go off to catch up on the latest gossip with her childhood friends, to whom she would report on her own experiences of civilization, including, if pride or shame did not tie her tongue, the frequent beatings she received from a husband disoriented by the erotic delights of the Lisbon metropolis. And perhaps it's because I was an astonished and frightened witness to some of those deplorable domestic scenes that I've never raised my hand to a woman. It served me as a vaccine.

This was a time when women would consult the local witch when things were going wrong at home. Even during the time we were living in Rua Fernào Lopes, I remember the prayers and smoke with which my mother would fill the room as she tossed some small, dark, round seeds onto the embers in the stove, all the while intoning a spell that began thus: " Cocas, minhas cocas " I can't remember how the rest of it went, but I can recall the smell of the seeds, so intense that even now I can feel it in my nose. They gave off a sickly smoke, simultaneously sweet and nauseating, that made you dizzy. I never found out what cocas were, but they must have been something oriental. Maybe that's why I still can't stand the stench from the joss sticks with which people often contaminate their apartments in the belief that it makes them more spiritual.

One day, on a melon patch near Mouchão de Baixo, Aunt Maria Elvira, José Dinis and I-why I can't remember, although I'm sure it can't have been mere chance-met up with Alice and her parents, and my angry cousin, seeing that the girl was paying more attention to me than to him, was, inevitably, filled with such jealousy that he flung his slice of melon at me. He aimed it at my face, but missed and hit my shirt instead. As I said earlier, we were always like cat and dog, at each other's throats over the slightest thing. But it's Alice I'm interested in now. The moment has come to speak of her in more detail than I have up to now. Some time after this incident (I think it was the following summer), the three of us went to Vale de Cavalos, where her family had moved (they had lived in Alpiarça before), and if my memory serves me right, we even visited her house. (I can't be absolutely sure that things happened exactly in this sequence, but there was one occasion, presumably this one, when I learned the shortcut from Mouchão de Baixo to Vale de Cavalos across the fields via footpaths and tracks.) Now it so happened that one or two weeks later, some festivities or other were being held in that village, and I decided that I absolutely had to see Alice. I was fifteen and this was the summer of the year in which I would turn sixteen. In the earlier pages of this book, I described certain somewhat romantic adventures, like crossing the Tejo, Graviel's boat coming in to shore, its bottom scraping over the tiny pebbles on the river bed, the crepuscular light, the long walk there and back. I won't, however, repeat them here, for now I must find the courage to turn the coin over and show you the other side. There was dancing in the village square and the local band was playing with an enthusiasm appropriate to the occasion. I talked to Alice, who seemed quite pleased to see me, although not overly so, and I danced with her (if you can call it dancing, for she took more of a lead than I did, and I have a suspicion-not to say certainty-that, at one point, she shot a look of quiet resignation at a girlfriend of hers who was dancing nearby). Finally, when it was getting late (it was that look, I realize now, that made me renounce Alice for ever), I gave up and said goodbye. Even today I wonder how I didn't get lost in the night full of noises and shadows, when only a few years before I had lived in fear and trembling of the darkness and the monsters it engenders. Toward the end of my long walk, I was so exhausted and my legs so weary that I took shelter in a rough straw-thatched, wattle-and-daub shack, which was, as I found out later, where Uncle Francisco Dinis used to rest occasionally on his night patrols of the estate. Starving hungry, I groped around inside for something to eat and found only the aforementioned piece of cornbread, a stale and moldy piece as I discovered in the morning when I ate what was left of it. There was no mattress on the truckle bed, but the layer of corn husks on which I stretched out my weary body smelled good. I slept for what little remained of the small hours and, in the morning, my uncle appeared. I heard the barking of the dog that always accompanied him-Piloto his name was-and I emerged from the hut, still dazed with sleep and dazzled by the light. When I reached Mouchào de Baixo, I recounted my adventures to Aunt Maria Elvira and José Dinis, to the great despair of the latter, because I took the precaution of omitting any hint of the humiliation I had suffered at my romantic failure. Alice had wanted me to lead her in the dance, and I hadn't known how. The tailor had more luck. It would be interesting to know, although we never will, if she was as lucky as him.