Small Memories (3 page)

I remember that this same uncle would turn up now and then carrying a rabbit or a hare, shot during his patrols of the estate. As a keeper, there was no closed season as far as he was concerned. One day, he returned home as triumphant as a crusader who has just vanquished an army of infidels. He had a large bird slung over the saddletree, a gray heron, a creature new to me and which I believe was a protected species. Its meat was rather dark and tasted faintly of fish, unless, after all these years, I am imagining tastes that never tickled my palate or passed my gullet.

***

Another edifying story from Mouchão de Baixo involved Pezuda, a woman whose real name I've long forgotten, if, indeed, I ever knew it, and who was called Pezuda—Big Foot—because she had truly enormous feet, a misfortune she could not conceal because, like all of us (young children and women, that is), she went everywhere barefoot. Pezuda lived right next door to my uncle and aunt, and she and her husband had a house exactly like theirs (I can't remember now if they had any children), and as so often happened in that place—where for good or ill, I was, in the most exact sense of the expression, brought up body and soul—the two families were at daggers drawn, they didn't get on, they didn't speak, not even to say good morning. (My grandmother Josefa's neighbor, in theDivisões, or "Divisions," district of the village—so-called because the olive trees that grew there were owned by someone else—was one of my grandfather Jerónimo's sisters, Beatriz by name, and yet, even though they were of the same blood, they had entirely broken off relations and had hated each other for more years than my childhood memory could comprehend. I never found out the reason for the quarrel that had separated them.) Pezuda's real name, of course, appeared in the baptismal records in the church and in the register of births, marriages and deaths, but to us she was simply Pezuda, and that ugly nickname said it all. So much so that on one famous occasion (when I was about twelve), I was sitting at the
door of the house, at the top of the steps, when she, the hated neighbor, passed by (I hated her only out of a mistaken sense of familial solidarity, because the woman had never done me any wrong), and I commented to my aunt, who was inside sewing: "There's old Pezuda going by." I said this more loudly than I'd intended, and Pezuda heard me. From down below, full of righteous indignation, she proceeded to give me a piece of her mind, saying I was a badly brought-up Lisbon brat (and I was anything but a Lisbon brat), who, it would seem, had not been taught to respect his elders, a moral quality essential to the smooth functioning of society. She rounded off her rebuke by saying that she would tell her husband about me when he returned from work at sunset. And I must confess that I spent the rest of the day with heart pounding and stomach churning, fearing the worst, because her husband had a reputation as a real bruiser. I decided privately that I would make myself scarce until after dark, but Aunt Maria Elvira was on to me at once, and just as I was about to disappear, she said very calmly: "When it's time for him to come home from work, you sit at the door and you wait. If he tries to beat you up, I'll be here, but don't move from that spot." That is the nature of all really useful lessons, the sort that last a lifetime, that place a hand on your shoulder just when you're about to give in. I remember that it was a gorgeous sunset (and it
really was, this isn't a mere literary afterthought), and I sat there at the door, watching the red clouds and the violet sky, with no idea what might happen, but convinced that the day would end badly for me. Eventually, when the sun had set, Pezuda's husband arrived home, went up the stairs to his house, and I thought: "This is it." But he didn't come out again. I still don't know what went on inside. Was it that when his wife told him what had happened, he decided that it wasn't worth taking seriously anything a mere lad had said? Had she been generous enough not to say a word to her husband about the unfortunate episode and decided to swallow the insult hurled at a pair of feet that were hardly her fault anyway? Had she thought of all the scornful names she could call me, "stammerer," for example, but had chosen instead, out of charity, to keep silent? The truth is that when my aunt summoned me to supper, I wasn't filled only with a sense of satisfaction. Oh, I was glad that I'd managed to pretend a courage that was, in fact, merely borrowed, but I also had the uncomfortable feeling that I'd missed out on something. Would I really have preferred to have had my ears boxed or been given a good spanking, which I was still of an age to receive? Well, no, my thirst for martyrdom didn't go that far. I'm sure, though, that something that night was left hanging in the air. Or, rather, as I write about it now, perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the attitude of those hated neighbors in Mouchão dos Coelhos was simply the second lesson I needed to learn.

It's time to explain the reasons behind the original title I gave to this memoir—
The Book of Temptations
—which, at first sight, and indeed at second and third sight, seems to have nothing to do with the matters dealt with so far nor, it must be said, with those I will touch on later. My initial ambitious idea—from the days when I was working on
Baltasar and Blimunda
all those years ago—had been to show how sainthood, that "monstrous" manifestation of the human spirit, disturbs, confuses and disorients nature, and is capable of subverting our permanent and apparently indestructible animality. It seemed to me at the time that the crazed saint depicted by Hieronymus Bosch in his
Temptation of St. Anthony
had, by the mere fact of being a saint, drawn up from the depths all the forces of nature, visible and invisible, the mind's most grotesque and most sublime thoughts, lusts and nightmares, every hidden desire and every manifest sin. Oddly enough, my attempt to transpose such a thorny subject (I soon realized that my literary gifts fell far short of such a grandiose project) onto a simple repository of reminiscences that clearly called for a more modest title, didn't mean that I hadn't at some point found myself in a similar situation to that of the saint. For as a creature of the world, I must also be the seat of all desires and the object of all
temptations, simply because "it goes with the territory." What difference would it make if we were to replace St. Anthony with a child, an adolescent or an adult? Just as the saint was besieged by imaginary monsters, I, as a child, was subject to the most appalling night terrors, and the naked women who continue to cavort lasciviously around all the Anthonys of the world are no different from the fat prostitute who, one night, as I was on my way to the Cinema Salão Lisboa, alone as usual, asked me in a weary, indifferent voice: "Do you want to come up to my room?" That was in Rua do Bem-Formoso, next to the flight of steps there, and I must have been about twelve. And while it's true that some of Bosch's phantasmagoria make any comparison between saint and child seem ludicrous, this is perhaps only because we don't remember or don't wish to remember what went on in our heads as children. That flying fish which, in Bosch's painting, carries the saint through air and wind, is not so very different from our body flying in dreams, as mine often did through the gardens separating the buildings in Rua Carrilho Videira, grazing the tops of the lemon trees and medlar trees or rising up with a simple flap of the arms and hovering above the rooftops. And I can't believe that St. Anthony experienced worse terrors than, for example, the recurring nightmare in which I found myself locked in a triangular room with no furniture, doors or windows, but where there was "something" (I call it that because I never did find out what it was) gradually growing in size while a piece of music played, always the same music, and the thing grew and grew until I was trapped in one corner, at which point I would wake, terrified, in the grim silence of the night, struggling for breath and drenched in sweat. Nothing of great note, you might say. Maybe that's why this book changed its name and became
Small Memories.
Yes, the small memories of when I was small.

Let's move on. The Barata family entered my life when we moved from 57 Rua dos Cavaleiros to Rua Fernão Lopes. In February 1927, we were, I think, still living in the Mouraria district of Lisbon, because I have a vivid memory of hearing artillery fire whistling over the roof from the Castelo de S~ao Jorge and intended for the rebels encamped in Parque Eduardo VII. A straight line drawn from the castle esplanade, and taking as an intermediate point the building in which we were living, would bring you infallibly to the traditional command post of all Lisbon's military insurrections. Hitting your target or not would simply be a question of taking careful aim and adjusting your sight. Given that my first school was in Rua Martens Ferrão and primary education began at the age of seven, we must have left the house in Rua dos Cavaleiros shortly after I began my studies. (There is another and possibly more likely hypothesis to consider, one that I set down here before continuing: that those shots came not from the uprising of February 7, 1927, but from another, the following year. Indeed, although I may have started going to the cinema early on in my life—to the aforementioned Salâo Lisboa, better known as the "Fleapit" and located in the Mouraria, next to the Arco do Marqués de Alegrete—I certainly wouldn't have done so at the tender age of barely five, my age in February 1927.) Of the people with whom we shared a house in Rua dos Cavaleiros my only clear memory is of the couple's son. His name was Félix and I experienced one of my worst nighttime horrors with him, doubtless brought on by the hair-raising films we used to watch then, and which would now seem laughable.

The Baratas were two brothers, one of whom was a policeman, like my father, although the former belonged to a different branch called Criminal Investigation. My father, who would reach the rank of sergeant a few years later, was, at the time, a simple constable in the PSP, the Public Security Police, working either on foot patrol or at the police station, depending on which shift he was on and, unlike the Barata brother, who was always in plain clothes, he bore his identification number on his collar, 567. I can remember that as clearly as if I were seeing it now, the brass numbers on the stiff collar of his dolman, as the jacket of his uniform was known, made of gray ticking in the summer and thick blue woolen cloth in the winter. The name of the Barata brother who was in the Criminal Investigation Department was Antonio, and he wore a moustache and was married to a woman called Conceição, who, years later, brought him certain problems, for my mother suspected, or may even have had proof, that my father and Conceição had enjoyed a degree of intimacy unacceptable even to the most tolerant of minds. I never discovered what really happened, I speak only of what I could deduce and imagine from the few hints dropped by my mother, when we were already living in the new house. Indeed, that might have been the real reason behind our move from Rua Padre Sena Freitas, where we were all living, to Rua Carlos Ribeiro, both of which were in the area being built on the hill that goes down from the Igreja da Penha de Franca to the beginning of Vale Escuro. And I only left Rua Carlos Ribeiro when I was twenty-two, to marry Ilda Reis.

I remember rather less about the other Barata brother, but I can still see him, small, round and rather plump. If I ever knew what he did for a living, I have long since forgotten. I think his wife's name was Emília and his, I believe, was José: having been buried for years beneath many layers of forgetting, those names, like that of the supposedly flighty Conceição, rose obediently from the depths of memory when summoned by necessity, like a cork float held fast on the riverbed, but which suddenly breaks free of the accumulated mud. They had two children, Domitília and Leandro, both slightly older than me and both with stories to tell, and in the case of Domitília, to my great good fortune, with some sweet memories to recall. Let's begin with Leandro. At the time, he didn't seem particularly intelligent, in fact, he didn't seem very intelligent at all or else made no effort to appear so. His Uncle Antonio Barata, who never wasted his breath on circumlocutions, metaphors or evasions, called him a fool straight out. In those days, we all had to learn from the
Cartilha Maternal
—the
Mother's Primer
—written by João de Deus, who, in his lifetime, enjoyed a deserved reputation as both an excellent person and a wonderful teacher, but who had, whether intentionally or not, given in to the sadistic temptation to strew his lessons with various lexical traps, or perhaps, out of sheer ingenuousness, it simply never occurred to him that they could be perceived as traps by those catechumens less well fitted by nature to deal with the mysteries of reading. We were living, at the time, in Rua Carrilho Videira, on the corner of Rua Morais Soares, and I remember the tempestuous lessons Leandro received from his uncle and which always ended in Leandro receiving several hard slaps (as with the palmer or ferrule, also known as the "girl with five eyes," the slap was considered an indispensable educational tool) each time poor Leandro encountered a particularly abstruse word, which, as I recall, he never once managed to pronounce correctly. The fateful word was
acelga
—meaning "Swiss chard"—which he pronounced "
a cega
" His uncle would roar: "
Acelga,
you fool,
acelga!
" and Leandro, already braced and ready to be cuffed round the ear, would repeat: "
A cega
" Neither his uncle's aggression nor Leandro's dreadful anxiety achieved anything, for even if they had threatened him with death, he would still have said "
a cega
" Leandro was, of course, dyslexic, but that word, while it might have appeared in the dictionaries of the day, was unknown to the primer written by our good and much-loved João de Deus.

As for Domitília, we were caught one day together in bed, playing at what brides and bridegrooms play at, active and curious about everything on the human body that exists in order to be touched, penetrated and fiddled with. When I try to pinpoint what age I was then, I think I must have been about eleven or perhaps slightly younger (I can't be certain because we lived twice in Rua Carrilho Videira, in the same house). We two bold creatures (who knows which of us had the idea, although it's likely that the initiative came from me) were spanked on the bottom, purely as a formality I think and not very hard. I'm sure the three women in the house, including my mother, would have laughed about it afterward, behind the backs of the precocious sinners who had been unable to wait until the proper time for such intimate discoveries. I remember crouching on the balcony at the back of the house (on a very high fifth story), crying, with
my face pressed between the railings, while Domitília, at the other end, accompanied me in my tears. But we didn't learn our lesson. A few years later, by which time I was living at 11 Rua Padre Sena Freitas, she went to visit Aunt Conceição, and it happened that not only were my aunt and uncle not in, my parents were out as well, and so we had plenty of time for more detailed investigations, which, although they didn't go all the way, left us both with unforgettable memories, at least in my case, for even now I can see her, naked from the waist down. Later on, when the two Barata brothers were already living in Praça do Chile, I would go and visit them, my sights set on Domitília, but since, by then, we were both grown up and fully equipped, we found it hard to find a moment alone. It was also in Rua Padre Sena Freitas that I slept (or didn't sleep) part of the night with a slightly older girl cousin (she had the same name, Maria da Piedade, as my mother, who as well as being her aunt was also her godmother) when we were put in the same bed, head to toe. A vain precaution on the part of our ingenuous mothers. While they returned to the kitchen and resumed the conversation we weren't supposed to hear and which they had interrupted in order to take us to bed, where they had covered us up and tucked us in with their own fond hands, we, after a few minutes of anxious waiting, hearts pounding, underneath the sheet and the blanket, in the dark, began a meticulous, mutual, tactile exploration of our bodies with more than justifiable urgency and eagerness, but in a way that was not just methodical, but also, in the circumstances, as instructive as we could make it from the anatomical point of view. I remember that the first move on my part, the first attack, so to speak, brought my right foot into contact with Piedade's already bushy pubis. We were pretending to sleep like angels when, later that night, Aunt Maria Mogas, who was married to a brother of my father's called Francisco, came to get her up and take her home. Ah, yes, those were innocent times.