José Saramago: Small Memories

Leandro wasn't the only one to suffer the occasional bout of dyslexia or whatever it was. For example, I insisted that the word sacerdote -"priest"-should be pronounced " saquerdote, " but since, at the same time, I suspected that I must be wrong, if ever I had to say the word (given that it was such an "erudite" word, this can't have happened very often and would happen even less today, when there are so few priests), I would always find a way of mumbling the word so that no one would have to correct me. I must have been the inventor of the so-called benefit of the doubt. After a while, I managed to resolve the difficulty by myself, and the word once again emerged as it should from my mouth. Another word I had problems with (these stories date from primary school days) was sacavenense. As well as meaning "a native of the town of Sacavem," which has now been swallowed up by the insatiable dragon that Lisbon has become, it was also the name of a football club that may or may not have survived the vicissitudes of time and the purgatories of the second and third divisions. And how did I pronounce it then? In a truly shocking way that scandalized all who heard me: " sacanavense, " which incorporated into the innocent original the word sacana with its echoes of libertinism and masturbation. I can still recall my relief when I was finally able to transpose the ill-bred syllables.

I must return once again to Rua dos Cavaleiros. The back of our house gave onto Rua da Guia, once known as Rua Suja-Grub Street-that joined another famous street, Rua do CapelÃo, which-accompanied inevitably by a guitar and several glasses of brandy-was always a fateful and unavoidable presence in fado songs and in any reminiscences about that first singer of fados, Maria Severa, and her fictional lover, the Marquis de Marialva. We had a view of the castle too, which is why I remember so vividly those shots whistling over our roof. We lived on the top floor (we almost always lived on the top floor because the rent was cheaper) in a room with use of kitchen, as the advertisements would inform us. There was no mention of a bathroom because such luxuries simply didn't exist, just a drain in one corner of the kitchen, open to the elements shall we say, which was intended for all manner of slops, both solid and liquid. At one point in my novel Manual of Paintingand Calligraphy, I write about the women who used to carry to the aforesaid drain the receptacles used for all nocturnal and diurnal deposits and which were usually covered by an immaculate white cloth and called bacios -"chamber pots"-or, more rarely, penicos -"pisspots"-perhaps because the latter was considered too plebeian by the families who used them. Bacio was more refined. I associate the house in Rua dos Cavaleiros and its steep, narrow stairs with the nightmares that afflicted me while asleep and awake, for as soon as night fell, every corner would fill up with shadows from which monsters would reach out to me with great clawed hands, terrifying me with their diabolical grimaces. I remember sleeping on the floor in my parents' room (there was, as I said, only one) and calling out to them, shaking with fear, because underneath the bed or inside an overcoat hanging from the hook or within the distorted shape of a chest of drawers or a chair, indescribable beings were stirring and threatening to leap out at me and devour me. The main source of these terrors was, I believe, that famous fleapit cinema in the Mouraria district, where, with my friend Félix, I received spiritual nourishment from the thousand faces of Lon Chaney, from wicked, cynical people of the very worst kind, from ghostly visions, supernatural magic, accursèd towers, dark underground passageways and from the whole paraphernalia, still in its infancy then, of cut-price collective and individual fear. In one such film, the leading man (that was what he was called in those days, although we denizens of the Fleapit referred to him unceremoniously as "the guy") was seated romantically on a balcony, his right arm resting on the balustrade, and, to judge by the expression on his face, he was thinking of his beloved. Then, after a moment of suspense, a sinister, hooded leper began to climb toward him with agonizing slowness, finally placing one of his disease-ridden hands on the pure white hand of the actor, who, straight away, before our very eyes, contracted Hansen's disease. Never in the history of human illness can there have been such a rapid case of contagion. The result of this horror was that, on that same night, when I was sleeping in the same bed as Félix (I don't know why, since it wasn't usual), I woke up in the dark and saw, in the middle of the room that also served as the other family's dining room, the leper from the film, exactly as he had appeared to us, all in black, with a pointed hood and a tall staff that came up to head height. I shook Félix awake and whispered in his ear: "Look over there." Félix looked and, explain it how you will, he saw exactly what I was seeing: a leper. Terrified, we pulled the blankets up over our heads and lay there for a long time, suffocating from fear and lack of air, until we dared to peer out over the edge of the sheet to find, with infinite relief, that the poor creature had vanished. At the end of the film, "the guy" was cured by the faith that led him to bathe in the grotto at Lourdes, where he entered the water unclean and emerged pristine into the arms of the ingénue, or "the girl," as we equally disrespectfully referred to her. These terrors came to an end when we moved to Rua Fernâo Lopes, where a new fear-of dogs this time-awaited me. Our home in Rua dos Cavaleiros had been an attic room as it would be in Rua Fernâo Lopes. When I looked out the back, the building seemed extraordinarily high, and later, even as an adult, I would often dream that I was falling from there, although the verb "fall" should not be taken literally, that is, in the sense of plummeting helplessly earthward, because what actually happened was that I would drift downward, slowly brushing past the balconies on the lower floors, with their washing hung out to dry and their flower pots, and alight gently and unscathed on the cobblestones of Rua da Guia. Another very vivid memory from those days is of being dispatched by my mother to buy salt from the grocer's opposite, and then, as I was coming back up the stairs, of opening the paper cone it was wrapped in and placing on my tongue just a few grains, which, as they dissolved, tasted at once strange and familiar. I also discovered the most primitive of drinks ever to pass my lips: a mixture of water, vinegar and sugar, the same mixture that I would use, albeit without the sugar, to slake Jesus' thirst in my novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. It was then, too, that I began training myself in "artistic" drawing. I learned to draw a stork and an ocean liner, always the same way, a perfection I repeated over and over which is why, perhaps, I eventually tired of it. From then on, I became incapable of drawing anything, except, out of duty, the engine parts I had to tackle years later at technical college (drawing a cross-section of a carburetor, for example, was a task more suited to the perspicacity of a Sherlock Holmes than to the limited deductive powers of a fourteen-year-old). The person who taught me how to draw the ocean liner and the stork was Félix's father, who, I've just remembered, had very particular ideas about the best methods of applied pedagogy: he used to tie his son's ankle to the table leg with sewing thread and leave him there for as long as it took him to do his schoolwork. I hadn't yet started school then, but I accompanied Félix in his shame and wondered if one day my parents would do the same to me.

It wasn't all nasty shocks at the cinemas that let in boys like me, with short trousers and close-cropped hair. There were comic cuts too, usually starring Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, but the actors I liked best were Long & Short, who seem to have been completely forgotten. No one writes about them and their films don't appear on television. I used to see them mostly at the Cinema Animatógrafo, in Rua do Arco do Bandeira, where I used to go occasionally, and I remember how I laughed at a film in which they were pretending to be millers (I can see them now). Much later, I learned that they were Danish and that the tall, thin one was called Carl Schenstrøm and the short, fat one Harald Madsen. Given their physical characteristics, it was inevitable that they would one day play Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, respectively. That day came in 1926, but I never saw the film. The person I didn't like was Harold Lloyd. And I still don't.