Raised from the Ground

perhaps murmur, Wretched bloody place, but he says it with great sadness, with the grief of having been born, because he has no particular reason to hate this place, or perhaps all places are wretched and all are cursed, condemned and condemning. He goes down a grassy slope, crosses a fast-flowing stream via three steppingstones and climbs up the bank. There is a hill opposite Monte Lavre, each man has his mount of olives and his reason for going there. Domingos Mau-Tempo lies down in the sparse shade and looks up at the sky without knowing that he’s looking at it. His eyes are dark, as deep as mines. He isn’t thinking, unless thought is this slow parade of images, back and forth, and the occasional indecipherable word dropping like a stone that suddenly rolls for no reason down a hillside. He sits up and leans on his elbows, Monte Lavre is there before him like a nativity scene, at its highest point, above the tower, a very tall man is hammering at the sole of a shoe, raising his hammer and bringing it crashing down. Fancy seeing such things, and he’s not even drunk. He is merely sleeping and dreaming. Now it’s a cart passing by, piled with furniture and with Sara da Conceição perched precariously on top, and he is the one who’s going to have to be the mule, fancy hauling all that weight, Father Agamedes, and around his neck is a bell without a clapper, he shakes it hard to make it ring, it must ring, but it’s made of cork, oh, to hell with mass. And coming toward him is cousin Picanço, who removes the bell and replaces it with a millstone, you’re a hopeless case, a lost cause.

He felt as if he had spent the whole afternoon daydreaming like this and yet it took only a few minutes. The sun has barely moved, the shadows haven’t changed. Monte Lavre has neither grown nor shrunk. Domingos Mau-Tempo got up, ran his right hand over his beard and, when he did so, a piece of straw got caught in his fingers. He rubbed it between his fingertips, broke it in two and threw it away. Then he put his hand into his bag, produced a length of rope and walked in among the olive trees, out of sight now of Monte Lavre. He walked, looking about him as he went, like a landowner sizing up the harvest, he calculated heights and resistance, and finally decided where he would die. He slung the rope over a branch, secured it well, then climbed onto the branch, put the noose about his neck and jumped. No hanged man ever died so quickly.

JOÃO MAU-TEMPO IS now the man of the house, the oldest son. The firstborn with no firstborn’s legacy, the owner of nothing at all, he casts a very brief shadow. He clomps around in the clogs his mother bought for him, but they’re so heavy that they fall off his feet, and so he invents some rough-and-ready suspenders, which he loops under the soles of the clogs and through the holes he has made in his trouser bottoms. He cuts a grotesque figure, with his mattock, much larger than him, over his shoulder, as he rises from his thin mattress at dawn, in the cold, oily light of the lamp, so confused, so heavy with sleep, so clumsy in his gestures, that he probably leaves his bed with the mattock already on his shoulder and his clogs on his feet, a small, primitive machine capable of only one movement, raising the mattock and letting it fall, heaven knows where he gets the strength. Sara da Conceição said, Son, they’ve given me work for you so that you can earn a little money, because life is hard and we have no one to help us. And João Mau-Tempo, who already knows about life, asked, Shall I go and dig, Mama. If she could, Sara da Conceição would have said, No, my son, you’re only ten years old, digging is no work for a child, but what is she to do when there are so few ways of earning a living on the latifundio and when his dead father’s trade proved so ill fated. It is still pitch-black when João Mau-Tempo gets up, but luckily for him, his path to the farm of Pedra Grande passes through Ponte Cava, a fortunate place for him despite all, the place where they, poor things, were saved from the wrath of Domingos Mau-Tempo, indeed, a doubly fortunate place because, even though his father killed himself in that cruel fashion, and despite his many sins, if that shoemaker is not at God’s right hand, then there is no such thing as mercy. Domingos Mau-Tempo was a sad, unfortunate wretch, so let not good souls condemn him. His son, then, is setting off in the dim light of a still distant sun when Picanço’s wife comes out to meet him and says, So, João, where are you off to. The blue-eyed lad answers, I’m off to Pedra Grande to clear the fields. And Picanço’s wife says, You’re far too small to use a mattock and the weeds are far too tall. One can see at once that this is a conversation between poor people, between a grown woman and a man still growing, and they speak of these lowly and insubstantial matters because, as you have seen, they are rough-and-ready types, with no education to enlighten them, or if they have, any light once shed is rapidly burning out. João Mau-Tempo knows what answer he will give, no one taught it to him, but any other reply would be out of time and place, That may be so, but I have to help my poor mother, well, you know what our life is like, and my brother Anselmo is going out begging for alms so that he can bring me