The harvest is done, and in the agreed time too, Gilberto came to pay these two ghosts, but he’s seen plenty of ghosts in his time, and António Mau-Tempo has now gone to work on the other side of this France, this killing field. Manuel Espada and his wife Gracinda Mau-Tempo stayed on in the hut until it was time for her to give birth. Manuel Espada took his wife home and then went back to the Carriça estate, where, fortunately, there was work. Anyone who remains unsurprised by all this needs to have the scales removed from his eyes or a hole bored in his ear, if he hasn’t got one already and sees them only in the ears of others.
GRACINDA MAU-TEMPO gave birth in pain. Her mother Faustina came to help her during labor, along with old Belisária, who had long practiced as a midwife and been responsible for a fair few deaths in childbirth, of both mothers and babies, but to make up for this, she did create the finest navels in Monte Lavre, and while this may sound like a joke, it isn’t, rather, it deserves to be the subject of obstetric research into just how Belisária managed to cut and suture umbilical cords in such a way that they resembled goblets straight out of the thousand and one nights, which, opportunity and audacity allowing, one could verify by comparing them with the bare bellybuttons of the Moorish dancers who, on certain mysterious nights, cast off their veils at the fountain in Amieiro. As for the pain suffered by Gracinda Mau-Tempo, it was neither more nor less than that suffered by all women since Eve’s fortunate sin, fortunate, we say, because of the earlier pleasure enjoyed, a view that does not sit well with Father Agamedes, who disagrees out of duty and possibly conviction, as the upholder of the most ancient punishment in human history, meted out by Jehovah himself, You will give birth in pain, and so it has been all the days of all women, even those who didn’t know Jehovah’s name. The rancor of the gods lasts much longer than that of men. Men are poor wretches, capable of terrible vengeance, but capable, too, of being moved to tears by the slightest thing, and if the time is right and the light propitious, they will fall into their enemy’s arms and weep over how strange it is to be a man, a woman, a person. God, Jehovah or whoever, never forgets anything, the sinner must be punished, which is why there is this endless line of gaping vulvas, dilated, volcanic, out of which burst new men and new women, all covered in blood and mucus, all equal in their misery, but so instantly different, depending on the arms that receive them, the breath that warms them, the clothes that cover them, while the mother draws back into her body that tide of suffering, even while the last flower of blood drips from her torn flesh, and while the flabby skin on her now empty belly slowly stirs and hangs in folds, that is when youth begins to die.
Meanwhile, up above, the balconies of heaven are deserted, the angels are taking a nap, of Jehovah and what remains of his wrath there is no news that makes any human sense, and there is no record that the celestial fireworks were summoned to conceive, create and launch some new star to shine for three days and three nights above the ramshackle hut that is home to Gracinda Mau-Tempo, Manuel Espada and their first child, Maria Adelaide, for that is the name she will bear. And we are in a land that does not lack for shepherds, some who were shepherds as children and others who continued to be and will be until the day they die. The flocks are large too, we saw one of six hundred sheep, and there’s no shortage of pigs either, although the pig is not really a suitable animal for nativity scenes, it lacks a sheep’s elegance, thick coat, soft woolly caress, pass me my ball of yarn, will you, darling, such creatures are made to bend the knee, whereas the pig rapidly loses its sweet look of a pink, newborn bonbon and becomes instead a bulbous-nosed, malodorous lover of mud, sublime only in the meat that it gives us. As for the oxen, they are busy working, nor are there so many of them on the latifundio that they can afford to attend belated scenes of adoration, and as for the donkeys, beneath their saddle cloths there are only sores, around which buzz bluebottles excited by the smell of blood, while in Manuel Espada’s house the flies swarm feverishly above Gracinda Mau-Tempo, who smells like a woman who has just given birth, Keep those flies off, will you, says old Belisária, or perhaps she doesn’t, so used is she to this accompanying halo of winged, buzzing angels, who appear as soon as summer arrives and she has to go off to help some woman in labor.
Miracles do happen,
