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.
Then one year, António Mau-Tempo decided not to return to France, partly because his health was suffering. After that, he went back to being nothing but a latifundio rabbit, caught on a twig, scratching away with his claws, the ox returns to the furrow, the stream to its familiar course, alongside Manuel Espada and the others, cutting cork, scything, pruning, hoeing, weeding, why do they not weary of such monotony, every day the same as the last, at least as regards the scant food and the desire to earn a little money for tomorrow, which hangs over these places like a threat, tomorrow, tomorrow is just another day, like yesterday, rather than being the hope of something new, if that’s what life is.
France is everywhere. The Carriça estate is in France, that’s not what it says on the map, but it’s true, if not in Normandy, then in Provence, it really doesn’t matter, António Mau-Tempo no longer has Miguel Hernández by his side, but Manuel Espada, his brother-in-law and his friend, though they are very different in character, they are scything, doing piecework, as we shall see. Gracinda Mau-Tempo is here too, pregnant at last, when it seemed that she would never have children, and the three of them are living, for as long as the harvest lasts, in an abandoned laborer’s hut, which Manuel Espada has cleaned up to make comfortable for his wife. No one had lived there for five or six years, and it was a real ruin, full of snakes and lizards and all kinds of creepy-crawlies, and when it was ready, Manuel Espada, having first sprinkled the floor with water, went to fetch a bundle of rushes to lie down on, and it was so cool inside that he almost fell asleep, it was just an adobe wall with a covering of gorse and straw to serve as a roof, then suddenly a snake slithered over him, as thick as my wrist, which is not of the slenderest. He never told Gracinda Mau-Tempo, and who can say what she would have done had she known, perhaps it wouldn’t have bothered her, the women in these parts are made of stern stuff, and when she arrived at the hut, she found it all neat and ready, with a truckle bed for the couple, another for António Mau-Tempo and a large sack to share as a blanket, that is how intimately people live on the latifundio. Oh, don’t get all hot under the collar, Father Agamedes, where have you been, by the way, these men are not really going to sleep here, if they do lie down on the bed, they will do so simply in order not to die, and now is perhaps the moment to speak about pay and conditions, they’re paid so much a day for a week, plus five hundred escudos for the rest of the field, which must all be harvested by Saturday. This may seem complicated, but it couldn’t be simpler. For a whole week, Manuel Espada and António Mau-Tempo will scythe all day and all night, and you need to understand exactly what this means, when they are utterly exhausted after a whole day of work, they will go back to the hut for something to eat and then return to the field and spend all night scything, not picking poppies, and when the sun rises, they will again go back to
