Raised from the Ground

and her thirty-third was not far off. And yet there was something irresistible about her. Her dark brown eyes, her dark hair. When she was tired, her face took on an almost masculine hardness, especially around the mouth and nostrils, but with just the slightest change of expression it became flattering and seductive. She was not the kind of woman who relies solely on her body to attract men; instead, she radiated sensuality from head to toe. She was skillful enough to be able to dredge up from within herself the kind of tremulous, shivering cry that could drive a lover quite mad with passion and render him incapable of defending himself against something he assumed to be perfectly natural and spontaneous, against that simulated wave into which he plunged in the belief that it was real. Yes, Lídia knew how to do that. These were the cards she had to play, her trump card being that sensual body of hers, slim as a reed and sensitive as a slender rod of steel.

She could not decide whether to go back to sleep or to get up. She was thinking about Maria Cláudia, about her fresh, adolescent beauty, and for a moment, though she knew it was foolish to compare herself to a mere child, she felt her heart contract and a frown of envy wrinkle her brow. She decided to get dressed, apply her makeup and put the greatest possible distance between Maria Cláudia’s youthfulness and her own seductive powers as an experienced woman of the world. She sat up. She had turned on the boiler earlier, and the water for her bath was ready. She removed her dressing gown in a single movement, then grasped the hem of her nightdress and pulled it up over her head. She stood there completely naked. She tested the water and allowed herself to slide into the tub. She washed herself slowly. Lídia knew the value of cleanliness for someone in her situation.

Clean and refreshed, she wrapped herself in a bathrobe and went into the kitchen. Before returning to the bedroom, she put the kettle on to boil for tea.

Back in her bedroom, she chose a simple but charming dress, which clung to her body and made her look younger, and quickly applied a little makeup, pleased with herself and the night cream she was currently using. Then she returned to the kitchen, where the kettle was already boiling. She took it off the gas. When she looked in the tea caddy, however, she found it was empty. She frowned, put down the tin and went back to her bedroom. She was about to phone the grocer’s and had even picked up the receiver when she heard someone talking out in the street. She opened the window.

The mist had lifted and the sky was blue, the watery blue of early spring. The sun seemed to come from very far away, so far away that the air was refreshingly cool.

From the window of the ground-floor apartment a woman was issuing instructions, then repeating them to a fair-haired boy who was gazing up at her, wrinkling his little nose in concentration. The woman spoke voluminously and with a strong Spanish accent. The boy had already grasped that his mother wanted him to buy ten tostões’ worth of pepper and was ready to set off, but she kept repeating what it was she wanted out of the sheer pleasure of talking to her son and hearing her own voice. When it seemed she had no further instructions to give, Lídia called out:

“Dona Carmen!”

“¿Quién me llama? Ah, buenos días, Dona Lídia!”

“Good morning. Would you mind asking Henriquinho to get me something from the grocer’s too? I need some tea . . .”

She told him what sort of tea and sent a twenty-escudo note fluttering down to him. Henriquinho set off at a run down the street as if pursued by a pack of dogs. Lídia thanked Dona Carmen, who answered in her own strange idiolect, alternating Spanish and Portuguese words and murdering the latter in the process. Lídia, who preferred not to show herself for too long at her window, said goodbye. Henriquinho returned shortly afterward, red-faced from running, to bring her the packet of tea and her change. She thanked him with a ten-tostão tip and a kiss, and the boy left.

With her cup full and a plate of biscuits beside her, Lídia returned to bed. While she ate, she continued reading the book she had taken from a small cupboard in the dining room. This is how she filled the emptiness of her idle days: reading novels, some good, some bad. At the moment she was immersed in the foolish, inconsequential world of The Maias. She sipped her tea and nibbled on the biscuits while she read the passage in which Maria Eduarda is flattering Carlos with her declaration: “Not only my heart remained asleep, but my body too, it was always cold, cold as marble.” Lídia liked that image. She looked for a pencil so that she could underline it, but, unable to find one, she got up and, still holding the book, went over to the dressing table, where she found a lipstick with which she made a mark in the margin, a red line highlighting that moment of drama or perhaps farce.

From the stairs came the sound of someone sweeping. Then she heard Dona Carmen begin a mournful song, accompanied, in the background, by the continuing clatter of the sewing machine and the sole of a shoe being hammered into place.

Taking another delicate bite of a biscuit, Lídia resumed her reading.

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About the Author

JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Footnotes

* Mau-Tempo