José Saramago: Small Memories

One day, a neighbor of ours-well, I call him neighbor not because we knew him, but because he lived in the same street (which, at the time, was still Rua Padre Sena Freitas)-went mad. He was a young man in his twenties who was said to have lost his wits by reading and studying too much. Just like Don Quixote. I remember one attack he had, the only one we actually witnessed, for afterward we heard nothing more of him and presumed that he had been interned in Rilhafoles, the local insane asylum. Anyway, on that day, we-my mother, Conceição and I-heard terrible, heartrending cries coming from outside and ran to the window to find out what was going on. He lived on the top floor of a much taller building than ours, on the other side of the road and slightly to the right of the house we lived in, on the corner of Rua Cesário Verde. We saw him appear at the window again and again, as if he were intending to throw himself out, the proof of which was that two hands immediately appeared behind him, tugging at him, while he struggled and cried out over and over, in the most pitiful way: "Ay, Santo Hilário! Ay, Santo Hilário!" Why he was calling on Santo Hilário we never found out. Shortly afterward, an ambulance arrived, he was bundled inside and never came back, not at least during the time we lived there.

By then, I was already studying at technical college, the Escola Industrial de Afonso Domingues, in Xabregas, after two short years at secondary school, the Liceu Gil Vicente, which in those days was part of the São Vicente de Fora monastery. Here follows a chronology of my brief career as a student: I entered secondary school in 1933, when I was still only ten (classes started in October and my birthday falls in November), I was there during the school terms of 1933ߝ1934 and 1934ߝ1935, and I left to go to the technical college when I was comingup to thirteen. Of course, since technical subjects like Trade Skills, Mechanics and Mechanical Design form no part of the normal secondary school curriculum, I was in the first year for those subjects and the second year for everything else. So the sequence of my career there was as follows: '35ߝ'36, second and first year; '36ߝ'37, third and second; '37ߝ'38, fourth and third, '38ߝ'39, fifth and fourth, '39ߝ'40, fifth. The excursion to Sameiro-the one where I rode the horse that ignored me when I got off-took place at the end of '38ߝ'39 school year, just before the exams, and during that trip, I had the misfortune to twist my left foot jumping over something, cracking my heel bone in the process. As a result, I had to spend more than a month with a plaster cast up to my knee. There was a curved metal bar on the bottom of the cast, the ends of which were embedded in the plaster, and this was called a stirrup. That plaster boot was elaborately decorated with signatures, drawings and doodles by my fellow students. One of them suggested using it as a crib in the math exam: "Just pull up your trouser leg and Bob's your uncle." I managed to pass the exam without following his advice.

I think the time has come for me to tell you about another episode related to my arrival in the world. As if the delicate identity problem provoked by my surname wasn't enough, there was a further problem with the date of my birth. I was born on November 16, 1922, at two o'clock in the afternoon, and not on November 18 th as the register of births, marriages and deaths would have it. My father was working away from home at the time and so not only was he unable to be present at his son's birth, the earliest he could get back was shortly after December 16th, probably the 17th, which was a Sunday. Then, and I imagine now as well, a child's birth had to be registered within thirty days or you had to pay a fine. In those patriarchal times, and given that it was a legitimate birth, it would never have occurred to anyone that my mother or some other relative could go to the registry office, and given that the father of a child was officially considered to be the newborn's sole progenitor (on my enrollment card for secondary school, only my father's name appears, not my mother's), we waited for his return, and so as not to have to cough up for the fine (any amount, however small, would have been too much for the family's pocket), two days were added to my actual date of birth, and the problem was solved. Life in Azinhaga being what it was, painful and difficult, men would often go away to work for weeks on end, which is why I couldn't have been the first or the last example of such minor deceits. When I die, I will be two days older than the birth date on my identity card, but I hope no one will notice.

Living to our right on the same floor (we had not yet left Rua Padre Sena Freitas) was a family comprising a couple and their young son. The husband worked as a painter at the Viúva Lamego ceramics factory in Largo do Intendente. The wife was Spanish, although I don't know from which part of Spain, and her name was Carmen, and their son, a fair-haired little boy, would have been about three (that's how I still remember him, as if he had never grown during all the time we lived there). We were good friends, the husband and I, which must seem surprising, given that he was an adult, practicing a profession unusual in my tiny world, and I was just an awkward adolescent, full of doubts and certainties, although unaware of either. His surname was Chaves, I can't remember his first name or perhaps I never knew it, and so for me he was always and only Senhor Chaves. To keep ahead of his work or possibly to earn extra money, he would often work late at home, and that was when I used to visit him. I would knock on the door, his wife would open it-she was always very brusque and barely took any notice of me-and I would go through to the little dining room where there stood, in one corner, lit by a reading lamp, the potter's wheel at which he worked. The high stool on which I always sat was there waiting for me. I used to enjoy watching him painting the already glazed ceramics with an almost gray paint which, after firing, would become the familiar blue of that particular type of pottery. And as the flowers, volutes, arabesques and scrolls flowed from his brushes we would talk. I may have been young and with, as you can imagine, limited experience of life, but I sensed that this sensitive, refined man was lonely. Today, I'm sure of this. I continued to visit him even when my family moved to Rua Carlos Ribeiro, and one day, I took him a few lines of popular verse I had written and which he then transferred onto a little heart-shaped dish whose intended recipient was Ilda Reis, with whom I had just started going out. If my memory serves me right, that must have been my first "poetic composition," rather belated, it must be said, when you consider that I was almost eighteen or had already turned eighteen. Chaves was lavish with his praise and thought I should enter it in the jogos florais, as the delightful poetry contests much in vogue at the time were known and whose very innocence saved them from seeming ridiculous. The fruit of my poetic inspiration read thus: "Careful, now, lest someone hear/ The secret I unfold:/ I give to you a china heart/ for my heart you already hold." You must admit that I would have deserved, at the very least, second prize…

The couple did not appear to get on very well, and his unpleasant Spanish wife found everything about Portugal detestable. While he was patient and refined, discreet and measured in his speech, she was the guardia civil type, tall and surly and rather broad in the beam, with a way with words that pitilessly garbled the language of Camóes. That wouldn't have mattered so much if she hadn't been so aggressive. It was in their house that I first started listening to Radio Sevilla after the Spanish Civil War had begun. Oddly enough, given that she was Spanish, I never found out for certain which side they supported. I suspect, however, that Doña Carmen had sided with Franco from the start. Listening to Radio Sevilla, I got into a terrible mental twist from which it took me a long time to free myself. The Nationalist General Queipo de Llano used the station to make his propaganda broadcasts, of which, needless to say, I remember not a word. What did stick in my memory was the jingle that always followed and which went: "If lovely colors make you sing, Revi paints are just the thing." There would be nothing very special about this if it weren't for the fact that I had become convinced that it was General Queipo de Llano himself who recited this cheery advertisement as soon as his broadcast was over. A necessary addendum to the "minor matter" of the Spanish Civil War. Forgive my frivolity. More serious was my throwing out with the rubbish, a few months later, the map of Spain in which I had been sticking pins to mark the advances and retreats of the armies of both sides. It goes without saying that my sole source of information was the censored Portuguese press, which, like Radio Seville, never reported a Republican victory.