Raised from the Ground

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,^* 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