José Saramago - Small Memories

I haven't yet spoken about my paternal grandparents. As the poet Murilo Mendes used to say of hell, they existed, but were not in good working order. He was João de Sousa and she was Carolina da Conceição, and they were not in the least affectionate, although it's true that they and I had few opportunities to find out how disposed we might be to displays of mutual affection. I saw them only rarely and found their apparent coldness toward me intimidating. This was a set of circumstances that I could clearly do nothing to make either better or worse, and so it seemed only natural that my safe haven in Azinhaga should have been the house of my maternal grandparents, as well as that of Aunt Maria Elvira in Mouchão de Baixo. Besides, Grandmother Carolina was never a particularly warm person. For example, I can't remember her ever giving me a kiss, or if she did, it was only a peck on the cheek (the difference is obvious), and I reckon that if she wasn't going to kiss me properly, it would have been better not to have bothered at all. The person who definitely disapproved of my evident preference for my maternal grandparents was my father, who curtly corrected me one day when I spoke of "my grandparents," meaning my mother's parents, and he made no attempt to conceal his resentment, saying: "You do have other grandparents." What was I supposed to do? Pretend a love I didn't feel? Feelings can't be controlled, you can't just put them on or take them off when convenient, still less if the heart in question is a young heart and therefore guileless and pure. Grandmother Carolina died when I was ten. My mother turned up one morning at the school in Largo do Leão to bring the unfortunate news. She had come to fetch me, perhaps following some social convention of which I knew nothing, but which, apparently, on the death of a grandparent, required the grandchildren to be brought home at once. I remember glancing up at the clock on the wall in the entrance hall above the door, and thinking, like someone making a conscious effort to collect information that might prove useful to him in future, that I should make a note of the time. I seem to recall that it was a few minutes past ten. It appears that my pure and guileless heart had, in the end, decided to play the part of the cool observer subordinating emotion to the objective recording of the facts. The proof of this came with a second and still less pure and guileless thought, namely, that it would be a good idea to shed a few tears so as not to seem like a heartless grandchild in the eyes of my mother and the headmaster, Senhor Vairinho. I do remember that Grandmother Carolina had been very ill and had stayed at our house for some weeks. The bed she occupied was my parents' bed, and I have no idea where they slept during all that time. As for me, I slept in another room in the part of the house we were living in, on the floor with the cockroaches (I'm not inventing this, they used to scamper across me during the night). I remember hearing my parents using a word I thought must be the name of the illness my grandmother was suffering from: albumin (I realize now that she must have been suffering from albuminuria, but I wasn't that far out, since without albumin you can't have albuminuria). My mother used to treat her with warm vinegar poultices, although I don't know why. For a long time, the smell of warm vinegar remained associated in my memory with Grandmother Carolina.

Sometimes I wonder if certain memories are really mine or if they're just someone else's memories of episodes in which I was merely an unwitting actor and which I found out about later when they were told to me by others who had been there, unless, of course, they, too, had only heard the story from someone else. This is not the case with the little private school on the fourth or fifth floor of a building in Rua Morais Soares, where, before we went to live in Rua dos Cavaleiros, I started learning my alphabet. Seated on a low chair, I would trace the letters slowly and carefully on my slate, which I called pedra -"stone"-because the proper term ardósia was too pretentious a word to emerge naturally from the mouth of a child, indeed, I may not even have known it at the time. This is a real, personal memory, picture perfect, complete with the satchel made from brown sacking with a piece of string attached so that I could wear it over my shoulder. I used to write on the slate with a slate pencil that you could buy in a stationer's and of which there were two types: one, the cheapest, was as hard as the slate you wrote on, while the other, more expensive, was smooth and soft, and we called it a "milk pencil" because of its color, a light, milky gray. Only when I entered the official school system, and even then not during the first few months, did my fingers finally touch the small marvel of more up-to-date writing implements.

I don't know how children perceive time now, but as a child in those far-off days, time seemed to be made up of a particular kind of hour, each one of which was slow, dragging, interminable. A few more years had to pass before we began to understand, as we had to, that each hour had only sixty minutes and, later still, we would learn that every minute, without exception, ended after sixty seconds.

A photograph (now, alas, lost) was taken of me and my mother during the time when we lived in Rua Sabino de Sousa, in the Lisbon district of Alto do Pina. It showed my mother sitting on a bench outside a grocer's shop and me standing up, leaning back against her knees, with, beside us, a sack of potatoes bearing a hand-painted sign, as was the custom then in local shops and for many years afterward as a way of telling customers how much something cost before they went into the shop: fifty escudos or five tostões a kilo. I must have been about three then and that would have been the oldest photo taken of me. I still have a baby photo of Francisco, the brother who died of bronchial pneumonia at four years old, in December 1924. I have occasionally thought that I could claim it as a photo of myself and thus enrich my personal iconography, but I never have. And it would be the easiest thing in the world given that, with my parents dead, there would no one to gainsay me, but stealing the image of someone who had already lost his life always seemed to me to show an unforgivable lack of respect, to be an inexcusable indignity. Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and to Francisco what could only belong to Francisco.

But to return to my village family, it was said that when he was born, Grandfather Jerónimo was placed on the foundling wheel of the poorhouse in Santarém, and there can be no doubt that he was, for Grandmother Josefa herself sometimes spoke of it, although without going into any detail, either because that was all she knew or because she preferred not to say too much. I knew even less about the circumstances surrounding the birth and life of his sister, my hated great-aunt Beatriz. Mentioning her was like mentioning rope in the house of a hanged man. The most intriguing question of all appears on my mother's birth certificate, which states that she was the granddaughter of an unknown grandfather and of Beatriz Maria. Who was she? I haven't the faintest idea, but the coincidence of the name would, at the very least, be another element indicating that Jerónimo's mother must also have been the mother of Beatriz who lived next door. Great-aunt Beatriz's birth certificate, if it existed, would clear the matter up once and for all. But there's another strange aspect to this whole story. How could someone be recorded as unknown when he lived in a village where he couldn't help but be known? It's clear that Grandfather Jerónimo's mother either didn't want to or couldn't keep the child, which is why she placed him on the foundling wheel, but that still doesn't tell me what happened to the daughter Beatriz. Would she have been placed as a foundling too? It would seem that my famous Berber (or rather Moorish) great-grandfather-whose reputation as a breaker of hearts and feller of men reached my ears thanks to confidences vouchsafed to me by Grandmother Josefa-must have made great-grandmother Beatriz Maria pregnant twice, unless-and this would simplify everything-the brother and sister were twins, despite their obvious differences, he being tall and she short. One thing that never deceived anyone were the similarities (dark skin, sharp features, small, narrow eyes) that made Grandfather Jerónimo and his sister, my mother and all her siblings-Maria Elvira, Carlos, Manuel, Maria da Luz-easily identifiable as members of the same tribe. The male line that produced them clearly wasn't from the Ribatejo region. Contrary to what you might think, the Moorish great-grandfather, of whose sojourn in Azinhaga there appears to be not a scrap of written evidence, was not a romantic invention on my part in order to adorn my very modest family tree, but a clear genetic reality. He lived outside the village, in a hut among the willows, and he had two enormous dogs that used to frighten away any visitors by staring at them in silence and continuing to do so until they left. My Grandmother Josefa told me that one such visitor died and was buried right there. He had gone there to demand satisfaction from the Moor after the latter had seduced his wife (that was the polite way of putting it) and received in his chest the full blast of the Moor's hunting gun. No record has been found of the murderer having been tried for his crime. Who was he?