Domingos Mau-Tempo went back to his old ways, wine, idleness, beatings, fights and insults. Mama, is Papa cursed, Don’t say such things about your father. These are words often spoken in such circumstances, and neither those intended as an accusation nor those intended to absolve should be taken seriously. Poverty was casting a dark shadow over the faces of these people, and the children who were old enough to do so went begging. However, there are still some kind, conscientious people, such as the owners of the house in which the Mau-Tempo family lived, who often gave them food, but children can be cruel, and although when bread was being baked in the owners’ house they always reserved a bread roll for João Mau-Tempo, the boys of the family, who went to the same school and were all friends, used to play a practical joke on João Mau-Tempo, tethering him with a rope to the trough with the bread roll before him and refusing to let him go until he had eaten it. And people say there’s a God.
Then, what had to happen, happened. Domingos Mau-Tempo reached the last of his misfortunes. One afternoon, he was sitting on his bench polishing the heel of a shoe when he suddenly put everything down, untied his apron, went into the house, made up a bundle of clothes, took some bread out of the bread bin, put everything in a knapsack and left. His wife was working, along with her two youngest children, João was at school, and the other one was idling about somewhere. This was the last time Domingos Mau-Tempo left home. He will still appear to say a few words and to hear others, but his story is over. He will spend the next two years as a wanderer.
NATURE DISPLAYS REMARKABLE callousness when creating her various creatures. Apart from those who die or are born crippled, some do manage to escape and thus guarantee the results of nature’s engeneration, to coin an ambivalent and therefore equivocal noun that combines generation and engendering, with just the right cozy margin of imprecision that surrounds the many mutations of what one says, does and is. Nature does not itself parcel out the land, but uses the system to its advantage. And if after harvest time the granaries of the thousand anthills of the fields are not all equally full, the profits and losses feed into the great accounting department of the planet and no ant is left without its statistical quota of food. In the settling of accounts it matters little that millions of ants have died from being flooded out, dug up or urinated on: those who lived ate, and those who died left the others behind. Nature doesn’t count its dead, it counts the living, and when there are too many of those, it organizes a new slaughter. It’s all very easy, very clear and very fair, and as far as the memory of ants and elephants can recall, no one in the animal kingdom has as yet complained.
Fortunately, man is the king of the beasts. He can therefore do his accounts with pen and paper or by other, subtler means, murmured comments, hints, glances and nods. Such mimicry and onomatopoeia come together, in cruder form, in the songs and dances of struggle, seduction and enticement that certain animals use to obtain their goals. This may help in understanding Laureano Carranca, that rigid man of principle, think only of his inflexibility, his chill disapproval of his daughter’s marriage, and the game of emotional weights and measures that he practiced daily, now that he has his grandson João at home with him, an act of reluctant charity, and another, much more favored grandson called José Nabiça. Let us explain why, although it won’t really contribute much to our understanding of the story, only enough for us to know each other better, as the gospels urge us to do. José Nabiça was the child born to one of Sara da Conceição’s sisters and a man whose anonymity consisted in everyone pretending not to know who he was, when in fact his identity was public knowledge. In such cases, there is often a general complicity, based on everyone knowing the truth but feeling curious as to how the protagonists will behave, and what’s wrong with that, given how few distractions life provides. Such love children are often abandoned, sometimes by both mother and father, and consigned to the foundling hospital or left out on the road to be devoured either by the wolves or the Brothers of Mercy. Fortunately for José Nabiça, however, despite the taint of his birth, he was blessed with a father who had a little money and with grandparents who had an eye on a future inheritance, a remote possibility but of some substance nevertheless, enough to be a promise of wealth for the Carranca family. They treated João Mau-Tempo as if he wasn’t of the same blood at all, and so he, as the son of a cobbler-turned-vagrant, would inherit neither money nor land. The other grandson, though he was the son of a sin unpurged by marriage, was treated like a prince by his grandfather, who remained deaf to what people said and blind to the evidence of his daughter’s besmirched honor, and all because he had hopes of a legacy that never materialized. Proof perhaps that divine justice does exist.
João Mau-Tempo had more than a year of schooling, and
