This would be an appropriate moment for a Greek chorus to declare its horror and to create a suitably dramatic atmosphere for large, generous gestures. The best charity is that which one poor person gives to another, for, that way, at least it’s between equals. Picanço was working in the mill and his wife called to him, Come here, husband. He came, and she said, Just look at João here. They had the same conversation over again, and it was decided there and then that on the days when he worked at Pedra Grande, he should stay in their house, and Picanço’s wife, like the good woman she was, filled his lunch basket with food. She, too, is seated at God’s right hand, doubtless in earnest conversation with Domingos Mau-Tempo, as they try together to understand why misfortune so outweighs reward.
João Mau-Tempo earned two tostões, which would have been the wage of a grown man four years earlier, but which was now a pittance, given how expensive life had become. He benefited from the good graces of the foreman, a distant relative, who pretended not to notice the boy battling with the roots of the weeds, far too tough for a small child. He spent the whole day, hours on end, half hidden in the undergrowth, slicing away with the mattock at those recalcitrant roots, why, Lord, do you make even children suffer so. Foreman, what’s that boy doing here, you’re not going to get much work out of him, commented Lamberto one day as he was passing. And the foreman answered, We took him on out of kindness, sir, his father was that wretch Domingos Mau-Tempo. I see, said Lamberto, and went into the stables to visit his horses, of which he was very fond. It was warm in there and smelled of straw, This one is called Sultão, this one Delicado, this one Tributo and this one Camarinha, and this as yet unnamed colt will be called Bom-Tempo, Fair-Weather.
When the land had been cleared, João returned to his mother’s house. But he was in luck, because just two weeks later, he had found work again, on an estate belonging to another man, Norberto by name, and under the orders of a foreman called Gregório Lameirão. This Lameirão fellow was an utter brute. For him, the temporary workers were a mutinous rabble who would only respond to the stick and the whip. Norberto saw none of this, and yet he was said to be an excellent person getting on in years, a white-haired gentleman with a distinguished bearing and a large family, who were refined folk, albeit of the country kind, and who went sea bathing in Figueira in the summer. They owned property in Lisbon, and the younger members of the family were gradually moving away from Monte Lavre. The world lay before them like a vast landscape, although they knew this only by hearsay, of course, and the time was approaching when they would take their feet out of the mud and go in search of the paved streets of civilization. Norberto did not oppose them, and this new trend in his descendants and their collaterals even gave him a certain modest contentment. Thanks to cork trees and wheat, acorns and grubbing pigs, the latifundio rewarded the family with large surpluses, which were quickly converted into money, as long, of course, as the day laborers played their part, they and all the others. That is what the foremen were for, like rustic copies of Lieutenant Contente, with no right to a horse or a saber but invested with just as much authority. With a slender cane under his arm, which he used as a horsewhip, Gregório Lameirão would walk along the line of workers, keeping an eagle eye out for the slightest sign of slacking or sheer exhaustion. Fortunately he was a man who stuck to the rules and used his own sons as examples. They all suffered there, the younger ones, that is, because hardly a day passed without one of them getting a sound beating, or two or three if their father was in his angry vein. When Gregório Lameirão set out from his house or barracks, he left his heart hanging behind the door and thus walked with a lighter step, his only desire being to deserve the boss’s confidence in him and to earn the larger wage and better food that were his due as foreman and scourge of his troops. He was also an arrant coward. Once, the father of one of his unfortunate victims met him on the road and made it quite clear that if he unjustly punished his boy one more time, he would see, if he could still see, his own brains spattering the door of his house. The threat worked in that case, but this only meant that he increased the number of punishments he meted out to the others.
In Norberto’s household, the ladies had all the refinements of the female sex, they drank tea, knitted, and were godmothers to the daughters of the maids closest to them. Fashion magazines lay on the sofas in the living room, ah, Paris, a city the family was determined to visit once there was an end to this stupid war, which, quite apart from other inconveniences of a greater and lesser degree, was delaying their plans. It is not in our power, of course, to do anything about such problems. And when old Norberto listened to his foreman giving his mumbled report on how the work on the land was going, a report whose sole object was to make himself look good, Norberto would grow as impatient as if he were listening to communiqués from the front. His imperial
