Raised from the Ground (7 page)

This would be an appropriate moment for a Greek chorus to declare its horror and to create a suitably dramatic atmosphere for large, generous gestures. The best charity is that which one poor person gives to another, for, that way, at least it’s between equals. Picanço was working in the mill and his wife called to him, Come here, husband. He came, and she said, Just look at João here. They had the same conversation over again, and it was decided there and then that on the days when he worked at Pedra Grande, he should stay in their house, and Picanço’s wife, like the good woman she was, filled his lunch basket with food. She, too, is seated at God’s right hand, doubtless in earnest conversation with Domingos Mau-Tempo, as they try together to understand why misfortune so outweighs reward.

João Mau-Tempo earned two tostões, which would have been the wage of a grown man four years earlier, but which was now a pittance, given how expensive life had become. He benefited from the good graces of the foreman, a distant relative, who pretended not to notice the boy battling with the roots of the weeds, far too tough for a small child. He spent the whole day, hours on end, half hidden in the undergrowth, slicing away with the mattock at those recalcitrant roots, why, Lord, do you make even children suffer so. Foreman, what’s that boy doing here, you’re not going to get much work out of him, commented Lamberto one day as he was passing. And the foreman answered, We took him on out of kindness, sir, his father was that wretch Domingos Mau-Tempo. I see, said Lamberto, and went into the stables to visit his horses, of which he was very fond. It was warm in there and smelled of straw, This one is called Sultão, this one Delicado, this one Tributo and this one Camarinha, and this as yet unnamed colt will be called Bom-Tempo, Fair-Weather.

When the land had been cleared, João returned to his mother’s house. But he was in luck, because just two weeks later, he had found work again, on an estate belonging to another man, Norberto by name, and under the orders of a foreman called Gregório Lameirão. This Lameirão fellow was an utter brute. For him, the temporary workers were a mutinous rabble who would only respond to the stick and the whip. Norberto saw none of this, and yet he was said to be an excellent person getting on in years, a white-haired gentleman with a distinguished bearing and a large family, who were refined folk, albeit of the country kind, and who went sea bathing in Figueira in the summer. They owned property in Lisbon, and the younger members of the family were gradually moving away from Monte Lavre. The world lay before them like a vast landscape, although they knew this only by hearsay, of course, and the time was approaching when they would take their feet out of the mud and go in search of the paved streets of civilization. Norberto did not oppose them, and this new trend in his descendants and their collaterals even gave him a certain modest contentment. Thanks to cork trees and wheat, acorns and grubbing pigs, the latifundio rewarded the family with large surpluses, which were quickly converted into money, as long, of course, as the day laborers played their part, they and all the others. That is what the foremen were for, like rustic copies of Lieutenant Contente, with no right to a horse or a saber but invested with just as much authority. With a slender cane under his arm, which he used as a horsewhip, Gregório Lameirão would walk along the line of workers, keeping an eagle eye out for the slightest sign of slacking or sheer exhaustion. Fortunately he was a man who stuck to the rules and used his own sons as examples. They all suffered there, the younger ones, that is, because hardly a day passed without one of them getting a sound beating, or two or three if their father was in his angry vein. When Gregório Lameirão set out from his house or barracks, he left his heart hanging behind the door and thus walked with a lighter step, his only desire being to deserve the boss’s confidence in him and to earn the larger wage and better food that were his due as foreman and scourge of his troops. He was also an arrant coward. Once, the father of one of his unfortunate victims met him on the road and made it quite clear that if he unjustly punished his boy one more time, he would see, if he could still see, his own brains spattering the door of his house. The threat worked in that case, but this only meant that he increased the number of punishments he meted out to the others.

In Norberto’s household, the ladies had all the refinements of the female sex, they drank tea, knitted, and were godmothers to the daughters of the maids closest to them. Fashion magazines lay on the sofas in the living room, ah, Paris, a city the family was determined to visit once there was an end to this stupid war, which, quite apart from other inconveniences of a greater and lesser degree, was delaying their plans. It is not in our power, of course, to do anything about such problems. And when old Norberto listened to his foreman giving his mumbled report on how the work on the land was going, a report whose sole object was to make himself look good, Norberto would grow as impatient as if he were listening to communiqués from the front. His imperial tendencies, and perhaps some trace memory of the birthplace of Lamberto Horques, who might well have been his ancestor, meant that he was a natural Germanophile. And one day, in a playful spirit, he said as much to Gregório Lameirão, who simply stared at him, eyes wide, not understanding what he had heard, because he was stupid and illiterate. Just in case, he humbled himself still more and was even more rigorous with his workers. His oldest sons now refused to work for him and went in search of employment on other estates, which offered more humane foremen and more security, although more security meant only that they would not die quite so soon.

These were good times for discipline. Sara da Conceição, who, understandably enough, could not forget the bad example set by her husband nor the worm of guilt that gnawed away inside her for the unfortunate manner of his death, was always saying, João, if you don’t toe the line, I’ll give you a sound beating, we’ve got a living to make. That is what his mother told him, a sentiment reinforced by Lameirão, who used to say, According to your mother, all she wants from you are your bones to make a chair with and your skin to make a drum. When two such authorities were so clearly of one mind, what could João do but believe them. But one day, worn down by beatings and overwork, he braved the threat of being flayed and boned, and spoke frankly to his astonished mother. Poor Sara da Conceição, who knew so little of the world. Amid screams and sighs, she said, That wretched man, I never said any such thing, a mother doesn’t give birth to a child in order to be the death of him, oh, how the rich despise the poor, that monster doesn’t even love his own children. But we ourselves have said as much before.

João Mau-Tempo is not the stuff of heroes. He’s a skinny little ten-year-old runt, a scrap of a boy who still regards trees as shelters for birds’ nests rather than as producers of cork, acorns or olives. It’s unfair to make him get up when it’s still dark and have him walk, half asleep and on an empty stomach, the short or long distance to wherever his place of work happens to be, and then slave away all day until sunset, only to return home, again in the dark, mortally tired, if something so like death can be called tiredness. But this child, a word we use only for convenience’s sake, because this is not how the latifundio categorizes its population, people are either alive or dead, and all one can do with the dead is bury them, you certainly can’t make them work, anyway, this child is just one among thousands, all the same, all suffering, all ignorant of what evil they committed to deserve such a punishment. On his father’s side, he comes from tradesmen’s stock, his father a shoemaker, his grandfather a carpenter, but see how destinies are forged, there is no bradawl here, no plane, nothing but dry earth, killing heat, deathly cold, the great droughts of summer, the bone-deep chill of winter, the hard morning frost, lace, Dona Clemência calls it, cracked, bloody, purple chilblains, and if that swollen hand rubs against a tree trunk or a stone, the soft skin opens, and who can say what misery and pain lies beneath. Is there no other life than this drudgery, an animal living on the earth alongside other animals, the domestic and the wild, the useful and the harmful, and he himself, along with his human brothers, is treated as either harmful or useful, depending on the needs of the latifundio, now I want you, now I don’t.

And sometimes there is no work, first the youngest are dismissed, then the women, and finally the men. Caravans of people set off along the roads in search of a miserable wage somewhere else. At such times, there’s not a foreman or an overseer to be found, far less a landowner, they’re all shut up in their houses, or far away in the capital or some other hiding place. The earth is either a dry crust or pure mud, it doesn’t matter. The poorest boil up some weeds and live on those, their eyes burn, their stomachs bloat, and this is followed by long, painful bouts of diarrhea, the sense that the body is letting go, detaching itself, becoming fetid, an unbearable weight. You feel like dying, and some do die.

As we said before, there is war in Europe. And war in Africa too. But these things are like shouts from a hilltop, you know you shouted, and sometimes it might be the last thing you do, but down below, that shout grows fainter and fainter until it vanishes into nothing. Monte Lavre hears about these wars from the newspapers, but they are only for those who can read. When those who can’t read see prices going up or basic foodstuffs running short, they ask why, It’s the war, say those in the know. War ate a great deal and war grew fat and rich. War is a monster who empties men’s pockets, coin by coin, before devouring the men themselves, so that nothing is lost and all is changed, which is the primary law of nature, as one learns later on. And when war has eaten its fill, when it is sated to the point of vomiting, it continues its skillful pickpocketing, always taking from the same people, the same pockets. It’s a habit acquired in peacetime.

In some places, people put on mourning clothes because a relative had died in the war. The government sent condolences, deepest sympathies, and spoke about the nation. The usual mentions were made of Afonso Anriques and Nuno Álvares Pereira,
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about how we Portuguese were the ones who discovered the sea route to India, and how Frenchwomen have a weakness for our soldiers, but nothing was said about African women apart from what we know already, the czar was deposed, the neighboring powers are concerned about the situation in Russia, there’s a big offensive on the western front, aviation is the weapon of the future, but the infantry still reigns supreme in battle, you can’t do anything without the artillery, dominion of the seas is indispensable, revolution in Russia, Bolshevism. Adalberto read his newspaper, looked anxiously out at the foggy weather, shared the indignation expressed in the newspaper and said out loud, It will pass.

It isn’t all roses for one side or the other, although, as we have explained before, the distribution of thorns is made according to the old familiar rules of disproportion and gives the lie to the dictum, which may be true in the world of navigation, The larger the ship, the bigger the storm. On land, it’s different. The Mau-Tempo family have only a tiny, flat-bottomed boat, and it’s only by chance and because of the demands of the story that they haven’t all drowned. However, their small craft was giving every sign of breaking up on the next reef or the next time the store cupboard was empty, when, unexpectedly, Sara’s brother, Joaquim Carranca, lost his wife. He wasn’t of a mind to remarry, nor did he have a list of potential brides, plus he had three children to bring up and a very bad temper, but hunger joined forces with a desire to eat, and this prompted brother and sister to unite lives and children. It balanced out nicely, the brother provided a new father, the sister a new mother, but it was all kept in the family, so let’s see how things turned out. It wasn’t any worse than what could have happened, and possibly better. The Mau-Tempo children stopped begging from door to door, and Joaquim Carranca had someone to wash his clothes, which is something every man needs, and, in addition, someone to look after his children. And since it is not the custom for brothers to beat their sisters, or at least not as often as it is for husbands to beat their wives, this was the beginning of better days for Sara da Conceição. Some may consider this to be very little. They, we would say, clearly don’t know much about life.

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VERY DAY HAS ITS
story, a single minute would take years to describe, as would the smallest gesture, the careful peeling away of each word, each syllable, each sound, not to mention thoughts, which are things of great substance, thinking about what you think or thought or are thinking, and about what kind of thought it is exactly that thinks about another thought, it’s never-ending. It would be best to say that for João Mau-Tempo, these years will provide his professional education, in the traditional country sense that a workingman has to know how to do everything, from scything to harvesting cork, from clearing ditches to sowing seeds, and he needs a good strong back for carrying loads and for digging. This knowledge is transmitted across the generations with no examinations and no discussions, and it has always been the same, this is a hoe, this is a scythe, and this is a drop of sweat. It is also the thick white saliva you get in your mouth on furnace-hot days, it’s the sun beating down on your head, and your knees going weak with hunger. Between the ages of ten and twenty you have to learn all this very fast, or no one will employ you.