The Collected Novels of José Saramago (206 page)

The crusaders are already on the open sea, ridding us of the pressing and awkward presence of thirteen thousand participants, however Raimundo Silva’s task was not made much easier for there are at least as many Portuguese, and, if their numbers were to be combined, they are still greatly outnumbered by the Moors inside the city, including the fugitives from Santarém who have finished up here, trying to take shelter behind these fortifications, poor wretches, wounded and humiliated. How is Raimundo Silva to cope with all these people, is the formal question. We suspect he would prefer to take each of them separately, study their lives, their precedents and consequents, their loves, quarrels, the good and bad in them, and he would pay special attention to those who are soon to die, because who could foresee that closer to our own time there would be another opportunity to leave some written record of who they were and what they did. Raimundo Silva is well aware that his limited gifts do not match up to the task, in the first place because he is not God, and even if he were, neither God nor Jesus for all his fame never achieved anything like this objective, in the second place because he is not a historian, a human category which is closer to divinity in its way of looking at things, and in the third place, an initial confession, he never had any talent for writing creative literature, a weakness that will obviously make it difficult for him to manipulate with any conviction this imaginary fable in which we all participate. On the Moorish side, the most he has achieved so far is to have a muezzin appear from time to time and who finds himself in the least favourable situation possible, because being something more than a minor figure, there is not enough to transform him into a character. On the Portuguese side, leaving aside the king, the archbishop, the bishop and a number of well-known nobles who only intervene as the bearers of aristocratic names, what is patent and indiscernible is a great confusion of faces that cannot be identified, thirteen thousand men who speak who knows how and who, presumably possessed of feelings, express them so remotely from our way of thinking that they are closer to their Moorish enemies than they are to us who are their legitimate descendants.

Raimundo Silva gets up and opens the window. From here, if the information given in
The History of the Siege of Lisbon
which he proof-read is correct, he can see the location where the English, the Aquitanians and the Bretons set up camp, yonder to the south, on the hillside of Trindade and all the way up to the ravine of the Calçada de São Fransisco, give or take a metre, there stands the church dedicated to the Holy Martyrs, which is well-named. Now, in
The New History,
it is the encampment of the Portuguese, for the moment reunited, as they wait for the king to decide whether we remain or depart, or what. Between the city and the encampment of the Lusitanians, to give them the name they themselves never used, we can see the wide estuary, so vast, winding inland, that to go around it on foot would mean passing along the eastern strait, near the Rua da Palma, and, along the western strait, near the Rua das Pretas, quite a trek across the fields which only yesterday were carefully cultivated, and now, in addition to being stripped of their crops, are trampled and scorched as if the horsemen of the Apocalypse had passed through with hooves of fire. The Moor had declared that the Portuguese encampment was moving, and so it was, but soon they came to a halt once more because Dom Afonso Henriques wished to receive with his entire army the approaching crusaders who were heading the dwindling posse of soldiers who had disembarked, thus paying them special honour, all the more so since the departure of the others had made him so angry. Familiar as we are with these encounters and assemblies between personages of lineage and influence, it is time to see who else is there, whose soldiers are these, ours, dispersed between the Carmo and the Trindade, awaiting orders, without the consolation of a cigarette, there
they are seated or at a standstill or strolling among friends, in the shade of the olive-trees, for with the recent good weather, few tents have been set up, and most of the men have been sleeping in the open air, their heads resting on their shields, absorbing the night’s warmth from the soil before warming it in return with the heat of their own bodies, until that day when they will lie side by side, one cold corpse against another, may it be slow in coming. We have good reason to take a close look at these men, poorly armed if one thinks of the modern weapons used by Bond, Rambo and Company, in our search for someone here who might serve as a character for Raimundo Silva, because the latter, timid by nature or temperament, averse to crowds, has lingered at his window in the Rua do Milagre de Santo Antonio, without plucking up the courage to go down on to the street, and his behaviour is ridiculous, if he was not capable of going out alone, he could have asked Dr Maria Sara to accompany him, a woman, as we have seen, who is capable of taking decisive action, or, perhaps as a more romantic and interesting sign of solidarity, if not of blindness, he might have taken the dog on the Escadinhas de São Crispim with him, what a pretty picture that would make, a rowing-boat crossing the placid estuary, over no man’s waters, and a proof-reader rowing, while the dog, sitting astern, inhales the fresh air and, now and then, bites as discreetly as possible the fleas pinching its sensitive parts. So let us leave in peace this man who is not quite ready to look, even though he spends his life revising proofs, and who only occasionally, because of some passing psychological disturbance, notices things, and let us find him someone who, not so much for his own merits, ever questionable, as for some sort of fitting predestination, may take his place in the narrative quite naturally, so that people will come to say, as one says of self-evident coincidences, that they were made for each other, However, easier said than done. It is one thing to take a man and lose him in a crowd, as witnessed elsewhere, another to search for a man in a crowd and, as soon as he is spotted, to say, That’s the one. There are very few old men in the encampment, this is an age when most people die young, besides their legs
would soon give way and their arms weaken in battle, for not everyone has the resistance of Gonçalo Mendes da Maia, the Warrior who even at the age of seventy gives the impression of being in his prime, and will only at ninety be struck down by the sword of the King of Tangiers and finally die. Let us go searching and listening, what a strange language our people speak, one more problem to add to all the others, for it as difficult for us to understand them as it is for them to understand us, even though we belong to the same Portuguese motherland, so who knows, perhaps what we nowadays refer to as a conflict of generations is nothing more than a question of differences in the language we use. Here there is a circle of men seated on the ground underneath a leafy olive-tree, which, judging from the gnarled trunk and general signs of age, must be at least twice as ancient as the Warrior, and while he wounds and massacres, the tree is content to produce olives, both of them serving the purpose for which they were born, as the saying goes, but these words were invented for olive-trees rather than for men. The ones who are here, for the moment, do nothing except listen to a tall, short-bearded youth, with black hair. Some give the impression of having heard the story a thousand times before, but listen patiently, they are soldiers who were at Santarém at the time of the famous siege, the others, judging from their rapt attention, must be new recruits who have joined the army along the way, and like the others, the sold paid three months in advance, from sold comes soldiering and from soldiering soldier, and, until the war begins, they assuage their thirst for glory with the glorious deeds of others. This man will have to be acknowledged by name, undoubtedly he possesses one like the rest of us, but the problem is that we shall have to choose between Mogueime which he assumes to be his name, and Moigema as he will later come to be known, do not think that such mistakes only occurred in ancient and uncivilised tomes, we have been told that someone in this century spent thirty years saying his name was Diogo Luciano, until the day when he needed to consult some papers only to discover that his real name was Diocletian, and he gained nothing from this exchange, even though the latter was an emperor. You must not discount this question of names, Raimundo could never be José, Maria Sara would not wish to be Carlota, and Mogueime does not deserve to be called Moigema. That said, we can now draw near, sit on the ground if you wish, and listen.

Mogueime narrates, It was at dead of night as we were waiting for dawn to break in a hidden and secluded valley so close to the town that when we heard the sentinels on the wall call out, we quietly took up the reins, making sure the horses did not neigh, and when the quarter moon appeared and our captains were sure that the guards were dozing off, we left, leaving the pages behind in the valley with the animals, taking a byway we were able to reach the fountain of Atamarma, so called because of the sweetness of its waters, and travelling on we approached the wall just as the patrol was passing so that we were forced to wait once more, silent as could be in a field of wheat, and when Mem Ramires, as commander of the soldiers who were with me, thought the moment was right, we lost no time in climbing the slope, the plan was to secure a ladder against the wall by sending it up on a spear, but ill-fortune decreed, or Satan, that we should run into difficulties, the ladder slipped and came crashing down with the most awful din on the roof of a pottery, everyone was in a panic, if the guards were to awaken the enterprise was in danger of failing, we got back down concealed by the shadow cast by the wall, and then, since the Moors were giving no sign of life, Mem Ramires summoned me as the tallest man there, and ordered me to climb on to his shoulders, and I secured the ladder on top, then he climbed up, with me behind him, and another behind me, and as we waited for the rest of the men to follow, the guards woke up and one of them asked,
Menfu,
which means, Who goes there, and Mem Ramires, who speaks Arabic as well as any Moor, replied that we were with the patrol and had been ordered to return, and the Moor, having come down from his turret, had his head cut off and thrown down, thus reassuring our men that we had entered the stronghold, but the other guard realised who we were and began shouting at the top of his voice,
Anauchara, anauchara,
which in their language means, An assault by the Christians, at this point there were ten of us on top of the wall as the patrol came running and swords clashed on both sides, Mem Ramires called out, invoking the help of Santiago, the patron saint of Spain, and the king, Dom Afonso, who was down below, shouted back, Santiago and the Holy Virgin Mary come to our assistance, before going on to say, Kill all of them, let no man escape, in a word, the usual incitements, meanwhile elsewhere, twenty-five of our men scaled the wall and rushed to the gates which they only managed to open after smashing the locks and bolts with an iron mallet, and then the king entered with his men, and falling to his knees at the entrance, began giving thanks to God, but rose quickly to his feet when he saw the Moors rushing to defend the gates, but the hour of their death had come and, advancing pell-mell, our soldiers massacred them along with their women and children, and their numerous livestock, and there was so much blood that it flowed though the streets like a river, and this was how Santarém came to be won, a battle in which I took part, and others who are here with me. Some of those named, nodded their heads in agreement, no doubt they would have their own deeds to relate, but being men who are always at a loss for words, firstly because they do not have enough words, secondly because words never come to mind when needed, they remained as they were, seated in silence in a circle and listening to this fellow who was much more loquacious and skilful in the incipient art of speaking Portuguese, disregard this gross exaggeration, for we must have the most advanced language in the world if eight and a half centuries ago, a simple soldier could already concoct such an eloquent speech, where not even the felicities of narration are missing, the alternation of long and short sentences, the sudden break, the transition from one plane to another, the element of suspense, and even a hint of irreverent satire in making the king get to his feet in the middle of his prayers of thanksgiving, in case the scimitar might fall before he can say amen, or, having recourse for the thousandth time to the inexhaustible treasury of popular wisdom, Trust in the Virgin rather than flee, and much good may it do you. One of the recruits, whose only experience of war had been to watch the army file past, but endowed with a sharp mind and commonsense, on seeing that none of the old guard were prepared to speak up, said what everyone else must surely have been thinking, It’s fairly obvious that Lisbon is going to be a harder bone to crack, an interesting metaphor which recalls the story about the dog and the dogs, for it would take lots and lots of them to get their teeth into those tall, massive walls confronting us from afar and where weapons and white burnouses are gleaming. This warning plagued the spirits of our companions with dark omens, when it comes to wars you can never tell who is going to lose their life, and there really are fortunes that happen once and nevermore, the Moors would have to be quite mad to settle down to sleep when the fatal hour arrives, we wager that this time it will not be necessary for a sentinel to call out,
Menfu,
for they know perfectly well who is there and what they want. Fortunately this gloom was dispelled by the presence of two pages who had stayed behind to look after the horses in that hidden and secluded valley of Santarém, and they were frolicking about and laughing their heads off as they recalled what they along with others had done to a number of Moorish women who had fled the town and been guided here by destiny, a black destiny, for after being raped over and over again, they were butchered without mercy, as befitted infidels. Mogueime in the meantime disapproved, using his authority as a front-line combatant, for it may be all right, in the heat of battle, to kill women indiscriminately, but not like this, after having abused them sexually, it would have been more Christian to have let them go, a humanitarian attitude the pages contested, arguing that these women should always be put to death, raped or otherwise, so that they would conceive no more of those damn Moorish dogs. It seemed that Mogueime might have no answer to such a radical statement, but from some hidden recess of his mind he extracted a few words which left the pages speechless, Perhaps you have massacred the sons of Christians in those wombs, and they were at a loss for words, because they might well have replied that they are only Christians if the mother, too, is Christian, what must have silenced them was a sudden awareness of their importance as apostles, leaving traces of Christianity wherever they sowed their seed. A clergyman who happened to be passing, a military chaplain, would finally clarify this issue, erasing any doubts from souls and strengthening convictions and faith, but all the clergy are with the king, awaiting the foreign nobles, and now they must have arrived, judging from the cries of acclamation, each man celebrates as best he can, within limits, on this occasion so much for so little.