José Saramago: Small Memories

A rough wattle-and-daub fence separated the two parts of the yard, with the inevitable gate to allow access to both. Immediately to the left stood the enormous stack of straw, with its typically pyramidal shape, a rectangular base narrowing toward the top, the clandestine fruit of my grandmother's dawn raids on the stubble in the wheat fields-carried out behind the keepers' backs-along with some of the other village women, all armed with a rake, a piece of cloth and some string. Next to it, so close that its branches touched the topmost part, was the big fig tree, or, quite simply, The Fig Tree, because although there was another one, it never grew very large, either because it wasn't in its nature to do so or out of respect for its veteran companion. There was also a venerable olive tree whose twisted trunk propped up the fence separating the two sections. Because of the brambles surrounding it and the hawthorn that stood menacing guard over it, that tree was the only one near my grandparents' house that I never climbed. There were a few more trees, although not that many, a couple of blackthorns that did the best they could, a rather miserly pomegranate, a few quince trees whose fruit you could smell ten paces away, a laurel and another olive tree or two. What little land remained was used for growing vegetables, especially kale, which sprouted all year round and therefore constituted the main ingredient in the local cuisine-boiled kale and haricot beans served with a little olive oil, and now and then, a plate of breadcrumbs made from cornbread fried in garlic with the main course served on top. The yard on this side was a narrow strip of land about one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy feet long, bordering an olive grove belonging to a man called Salvador and, on the other side, separating it from the street, grew a thick hedge made of reeds, brambles, the inevitable agaves and the occasional elder. From beneath that hedge I picked up, on two or three occasions, the dried skins that snakes had sloughed off when they no longer fitted them. The skins were good for some disease that afflicted pigs. Toward the end of that strip of land, it narrowed to a point, like the tail of a turtle. That was where my grandmother and I would go to do our business when we got caught short and didn't have time to go farther into the olive grove. (My grandfather had to resolve the matter wherever he happened to be with the pigs.) And the reader should not be surprised by that euphemistic turn of phrase "do our business." It was the law of nature. Even Adam and Eve had to do their business in some corner of paradise.

The chest was decorated with blue oil paint, a somewhat drab color like that of a rather grubby sky. It was in the outside room, next to the street door, on the right as you came in. It was big or, rather, enormous, it was the bean chest. My grandmother warned me not to open it because the dust from the beans caused terrible itching, covering the skin of anyone unwise enough to open the chest with brotoeja, which was the name we gave to the uncomfortable blisters that formed as a result. My grandfather, who had resolutely spartan ideas about complicated matters like character-building and fostering strength of mind, would chuckle at such warnings and concerns, and when he came home with the pigs at sunset, he would occasionally ask me if I had opened the chest yet.

I was not at the time, nor am I now, a great lover of that pruriginous legume, and so lifting the portentous lid of the chest just to peer in at some beans that were identical to other beans I could look at and handle without risk was not something that aroused my ten-year-old's curiosity, which was occupied with adventures of quite another caliber, such as exploring the banks of the Almonda and the Tejo or the labyrinthine tangle of undergrowth in Paul do Boquilobo. However, my grandfather's gentle irony, so often repeated, gradually wore away at my sensibility and provoked my young pride, so that one day, when I was alone in the house, I went over to the chest and, with a great effort, lifted the heavy lid as high as I could and then pushed it so that it fell with a thump against the whitewashed wall. There lay the beans. A little of the very fine dust veiling their beige skins had been stirred up with the sudden current of air and began to settle on my hands and forearms, where the promised skin eruption and itching would take only seconds to appear. However, as if the evolving state of my hands were not sufficient proof for my stubborn self, I plunged them in among the malignant beans, making the beans sift and rattle, and creating, this time, a veritable cloud of dust. This would be the moment to describe the ensuing itchy consequences if I did not have another tale to tell. As I moved round the chest toward one corner in order more easily to reach the upper edge of the lid and close it, I noticed that the lid itself was lined with newspaper. My grandparents' house was not a house of readers, for as I have said more than once, both were illiterate. If ever an uncle of mine came to stay, on leave from his military service for example, he would, if he could read at all, only be capable of deciphering the very largest and crudest of letters. The presence of those pages from O Século -which, quite rightly, announced on its masthead that it was the most widely read newspaper in the country, and I say "quite rightly" because it was certainly the only newspaper to reach Azinhaga-the presence of those pages could only mean that my grandmother had asked Senhor João Vieira to save them for her once they'd been read and set aside in the shop where she was a regular customer. Had my grandparents been people with fine and delicate skin, I would admit the hypothesis that those sheets of paper were merely there to cover the very real cracks in the lid of the old chest and thus prevent the dangerous brown bean dust from treacherously attacking the defenseless tribe of the Melrinhos, the Caixinhas and the Saramagos. Another hypothesis, an artistic one this time, is that those letters, words and images were as attractive to my grandmother's eyes as, years later, Chinese or Arabic characters, for example, were to her grandson's. The mystery remains unresolved.

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.