José Saramago - Small Memories

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.