Raised from the Ground (37 page)

António Mau-Tempo had no rifle at the time, which was just as well. If he’d had one, he would have been just another ordinary hunter with a ready-made weapon, rather than the inventor of Saint Hubert’s pepper, but this doesn’t mean that he scorned the art of marksmanship, the proof is the muzzle-loading rifle he bought one day for twenty escudos from a spendthrift tenant farmer and with which he performed miracles. City dwellers are brought up to be suspicious of miracles, they always want proofs and oaths, which is quite wrong, for example, there was the time when António Mau-Tempo, by then the proud owner of said muzzle-loading rifle, found himself with plenty of gunpowder but no lead shot. We should perhaps mention that it was rabbit-hunting season, in case someone should come along and ask why he didn’t use the same stone-newspaper-pepper method as he did with hares. Only someone ignorant of the art of hunting could fail to be aware that rabbits have no curiosity at all, seeing a newspaper lying on the ground or a cloud in the sky is all the same to them, except that rain falls from clouds and not from newspapers, which is why the rabbit hunter still needs a rifle, trap or stick, but in this case we’re talking rifles.

There is no greater misfortune for a hunter than to be in possession of a good weapon, even if it’s only a flintlock, plenty of gunpowder but no lead shot, Why didn’t you buy some, No money, that was the problem, So what did you do, At first I didn’t do anything, I just thought, And did you come up with an idea, Of course, that’s what thinking is for, So tell me how you solved the problem, because I still don’t see how you did it, Well, I had a box of tacks for my boots and I loaded them into the rifle, What, you loaded your rifle with tacks, You may not believe me, but I did, Oh, I believe you, it’s just that I’ve never heard of such a thing, At some point, you’ll have to start believing in things you’ve never heard of, Tell me the rest of the story, then, All right, I was heading out into the countryside when I had a thought that almost made me turn back, What was that, It occurred to me that any rabbit I hit would be reduced to a pulp, torn to shreds, inedible, So, So I started thinking again, And you came up with an idea, Of course, like I said, that’s what thinking is for, anyway, I positioned myself opposite a big old tree with a really thick trunk and I waited, Did you wait long, As long as I had to, one never waits too long or too little, So you waited until the rabbit appeared, Yes, when he spotted me, he ran away from me and toward the tree, I had studied the lay of the land, you see, and as soon as he passed close by, I shot him, And he wasn’t shot to pieces, No, why else did I do all that thinking, the tacks pierced his ears and nailed him to the tree, which was a holm oak, by the way, Amazing, Yes, it was, and all I had to do was give him a quick blow to the back of the head with my stick, and once I’d eaten the rabbit, I still had the tacks to mend my boots with.

Men are made in such a way that even when they’re lying, they tell a kind of truth, and if, on the contrary, it’s the truth they want to blurt out, it’s always accompanied by a kind of lie, however unintentional. That’s why if we started debating what was true and what was false in António Mau-Tempo’s hunting tales, we would never reach a conclusion, we should simply be man enough to recognize that everything he described could be touched with one’s fingers, be it the hare or the rabbit, the muzzle-loading rifle, of a kind that still exists, gunpowder, which is cheap, the tack with which we shoe the poverty of the ill shod, the boot, which is witness to that, the miraculous pile of pepper all the way from India, the stone of course, the newspaper that hares can read better than humans, and António Mau-Tempo, who is right here, the teller of tales, because if there was no one to tell them, there would be no tales.

I’ve told you one story, I’ve told you two, and I’ll give you a third, because three is the number God made, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost of the ear by which the rabbit was caught in the excellent tale I’m about to tell you, You’ve spoiled it for us now that we know how the story ends, So what, we all die, what matters is the life we’ve led or will lead, not the end, All right, tell me about the rabbit, Well, I still had the same rifle, in fact, I’d got so used to it that the sight of those double-barreled ones used to make me laugh, let alone the ones with four barrels, like cannons they are, they should be banned, Why, Think how much nicer it is for a man to slowly and quietly prepare his rifle, loading the gunpowder, tamping it down, measuring out the lead shot, when you have it that is, and watching one of the animals you’re hoping to hunt pass you by, saying to itself, phew, that was a close shave, and you feel full of friendly feelings for the feathered or furry creature moving off, it’s all a question of believing in fate, for their hour had clearly not yet come, That’s one way of looking at it, anyway, what happened next, Next, you mean before, well, on that occasion, too, I had no money to buy lead shot, You never seem to have any money, To listen to you, anyone would think you had never lacked for it yourself, Don’t change the subject, my finances are my affair, carry on with the story, All right, so I had no money to buy some shot, but I had a steel ball, one of those ball-bearing things, I found it among the rubbish in a workshop, and I used the same method, but without the tree this time, the tree worked only with the tacks, What do you mean, It seemed to me that if I could somehow sharpen the ball bearing, it would be like a bullet, and wouldn’t destroy the animal’s flesh or skin, it was all a matter of marksmanship, and, if I do say so myself, I’m a pretty good shot, And then, Then I went into the countryside, to a place I knew, a sandy area where I’d seen a rabbit as big as a baby goat, he was obviously the father rabbit, because no one has ever seen the mother rabbit, she never leaves the burrow, which is as deep as the pool at Ponte Cava, she goes underground and no one knows where she is, Fine, but that’s another story, That’s where you’re wrong, it’s exactly the same story, but I don’t have time to tell it now, So what happened next, This rabbit had given me the slip on other occasions, and had a way of scooting out of sight as soon as I raised my rifle, but that had been when my rifle was loaded with shot, Ah, so you weren’t bothered about spoiling its skin, With a rabbit that big, it wouldn’t matter, But you just said, Look, if you’re going to keep interrupting, All right, carry on, So I waited and waited, one hour passed, then another, and finally it hopped into view, well, leapt really, because, as I said, it was the size of a small goat, and when it was airborne, I pretended to myself that it was a partridge and shot it, Did you kill it, No, it just shook its ears, gave another hop and then another, and of course I had no more ammunition left, anyway, it ran off into some bushes, gave another leap, one of those really long ones, from here to over there, say, and what did I see, What, The rabbit was caught, squirming and wriggling, as if someone were holding it up by one ear, and then I went over and saw what had happened, Don’t keep me in suspense, I’m dying of curiosity, Just like the hares, Stop playing around and tell me the rest of the story, Well, it so happened that someone had been cutting back the bushes, and a few twigs the size of a finger had been left sticking up, and, can you believe it, the rabbit had got caught on a twig through the hole the ball bearing had made in its ear, So presumably you freed him and hit him hard on the back of the neck, No, I freed him and let him go, You don’t say, I do, catching him in the ear like that had nothing to do with marksmanship, it was chance, sheer luck, and the father rabbit couldn’t be allowed to die by chance, It’s a great story, And it’s all true, just as it’s true that on that same night, the rabbits came out to dance into the small hours, by the light of the full moon, Why, Because they were so pleased that the father rabbit had escaped, You saw them, did you, No, but I dreamed it.

That’s how it is. The fish dies by its mouth unless, because it looks too small on the hook or will cut a sad figure in the frying pan, the man throws it back in the water, an act of compassion for its youth, perhaps, or mere self-interest on his part, hoping that it will grow larger and reappear later on, but the father rabbit, who would certainly not grow anymore, was saved partly by the honesty of António Mau-Tempo, who, although he was perfectly capable of inventing good stories, did not need to invent a better one, given that it was far harder to hit a rabbit in the ear than in the body, and in the silence of the latifundio, once the sound of firing had died away in the undergrowth, he knew that he could not have lived with the memory of the rabbit’s wide, angry eye as it watched him approach the bush.

The latifundio is a whole field of twigs, and from each one hangs a squirming rabbit with a hole in one ear, not because it has been shot, but because it has been like that since birth, they stay there all their lives, scrabbling at the earth with their claws, fertilizing it with their excrement, and if there’s any grass, they eat as much of it as they can, nose pressed to the ground, while all around they hear the footsteps of hunters, I could die at any moment. One day, António Mau-Tempo freed himself from the bush and crossed the frontier, he did so for five years running, going to France once a year, to northern France, to Normandy, but he was being led by the ear, caught by the bullet hole of necessity, it’s true he had never married nor had children who needed bread to eat, but his father wasn’t at all well, a consequence of his time in prison, they might not have killed him, but they broke him, and there was an employment crisis in Monte Lavre, whereas in France work was guaranteed and well paid, compared with the norm on the latifundio, in a month and a half he could earn fifteen or sixteen thousand escudos, a fortune. Possibly, but as soon as he arrived home in Monte Lavre, most of that disappeared in back payments, and the little that remained was set aside for the future.

And what exactly is France. France is an endless field of sugarbeet in which you work a double shift of sixteen or seventeen hours a day, that is, all the hours of daylight and quite a few of the night. France is a family of Norman French, who see three Iberian creatures come through their door, two Portuguese men and one Spaniard from Andalusia, António Mau-Tempo and Carolino da Avó from Monte Lavre and, from Fuente Palmera, Miguel Hernández,
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who knows a few words of French, picked up as an emigrant worker, and with those words he explains that they have been hired to work there. France is a cheerless barn where one sleeps little and dines on a dish of potatoes, it’s a land where, mysteriously, there are no Sundays and no public holidays. France is a bent and aching back, like two knives pressing in here and here, an affliction and a martyrdom, a crucifixion on a piece of land. France is to be viewed with one’s eyes a few inches from a sugarbeet stem, the forests and the horizons in France are all made of sugarbeet, that’s all there is. France is this scornful, mocking way of speaking and looking. France is the gendarme who comes to check our papers, line by line, comparing and interrogating, keeping three paces away because of the smell we give off. France is an ever-watchful distrust, a tireless vigilance, it’s a Norman Frenchman inspecting the work we’ve done and placing his foot as if he were stepping on our hands and enjoying it. France is being meanly treated as regards food and cleanliness, certainly compared with the horses on the farm, who are fat, large-footed and proud. France is a bush bristling with twigs, each with a rabbit dangling by the ear like a fish on the end of a rod, slowly suffocating, and Carolino da Avó is the least able to take it, bent double and limp as a penknife in which the spring has suddenly snapped, his blade is blunt and his point broken, he will not return next year. France is long train journeys, an immense sadness, a bundle of notes tied up with string and the stupid envy of those who stayed behind and now say of someone who left, He’s rich, you know, these are the petty jealousies and selfish malice of the poor.

António Mau-Tempo and Miguel Hernández know about such things, they write to each other in the meantime, Mau-Tempo from Monte Lavre, Hernández from Fuente Palmera, they are simple letters with spelling mistakes in nearly every word, and so what Hernández reads is not quite Portuguese and what Mau-Tempo reads is not quite Spanish, but a language common to them both, the language of little learning and much feeling, and they understand each other, it’s as if they were signaling to each other across the frontier, for example, opening and closing their arms, the unmistakable sign for an embrace, or placing one hand on the heart, signifying affection, or merely looking, which indicates a readiness to reveal one’s thoughts, and both sign their letters with the same difficulty, the same grotesque way of holding the pen as if it were a hoe, which is why it looks as if a physical effort were needed to form each letter, Miguel Hernández, uh, António Mau-Tempo, uh. One day, Miguel Hernández will stop writing, two of António Mau-Tempo’s letters will go unanswered, and however hard you try to explain these things, they still hurt, it’s not exactly a great misfortune, I’m not going to lose my appetite over it, but this is merely what one says to console oneself, perhaps Miguel Hernández has died or been arrested, as happened with António Mau-Tempo’s father, if only he could go to Fuente Palmera to find out. António Mau-Tempo will remember Miguel Hernández for many years to come, whenever he speaks of his time in France, he will say, My friend Miguel, and his eyes will fill with tears, he’ll laugh them off and tell a story about rabbits or partridges, just to amuse people, none of it invented, you understand, until the wave of memory calms and ebbs away. Only then does he feel any nostalgia for France, for the nights spent talking in the barn, the stories told by Andalusians and those who came from the other side of the Tagus river, from Jaén and Évora, stories about José Gato and Pablo de la Carretera, and those other crazy nights when their work contract had ended, and they went whoring, stealing hasty pleasures, allez, allez, their unslaked blood protesting, and the more exhausted they were, the more they wanted. They were driven out into the street by a rapid-fire language they couldn’t understand, allez, nègres, that’s how it is with dark-skinned races, everyone’s a black for those born in Normandy, where even the whores think they’re pure-bloods.