Raised from the Ground

was at least the advantage that they could all be together and have access to a vegetable patch where they could break their backs toiling away on high days and holidays. Joaquim Carranca’s wage at this time consisted of lodging, firewood, sixty kilos of maize flour, three liters of olive oil, five liters of cowpeas, one hundred escudos and, at the end of the year, a modest handout. As for the younger members of the family, they earned forty kilos of maize flour, a liter and a half of olive oil, three liters of cowpeas and fifty escudos. And so it went on, month after month. They would take their sacks and bags to the granary, their jug to the cellar, where the foreman would measure out their rations of food and oil, and the administrator would pay their wages, and that was all they had to keep body and soul together and to recoup the energy expended every day. Of course, not all of them did recover, and they accepted this, time would inevitably take its toll, the skull beneath the skin becoming ever more evident, but then we are all born in order to die. Joaquim Carranca died, without having had a single day’s illness, after coming back from working in his vegetable patch on one of those Sundays when it’s easy to believe in the existence of God, even without the aid of Father Agamedes, it was just a shame that the mattock was so heavy that he had to sit down on a log at the front door, feeling unusually tired, and when Sara da Conceição came out to tell her brother that supper was ready, he had lost all appetite. There he was, eyes wide, his hands open on his lap, more peaceful than he could ever have dreamed of being when alive, and he wasn’t a bad man really, despite his sudden rages, despite his cruelty to his oldest nephew, what’s done is done. Death is like a great strickle that passes over the measuring jug of life, discarding any excess, although it is often hard to make out what exactly its criteria are, as in the case of Joaquim Carranca, who was still needed by his family.

Life, or whoever rules over life, with either a sure or an indifferent hand, expects us to acquire both our professional and our sentimental education at the same time. This conjunction is clearly a mistake, doubtless made necessary by the brevity of life, which is not long enough for things to be done in a more leisurely, timely manner, which means that one neither acquires enough nor feels enough. Since the world was not going to change its ways, João Mau-Tempo, as he acquired his working skills, also went courting in the local villages and dancing wherever the sound of an accordion was to be heard, and he was a good dancer too, and, who would have thought it, much sought after by the girls. As we know, he had inherited his blue eyes from that ancestor of four hundred years before, the same one who, not far from here, lying on the forebears of this same bracken, raped a young girl who had gone to the well for water, watched by birds whose plumage remains unchanged, and who gazed down on the pair struggling amid the greenery, a scene with which those creatures of the air had been familiar since the world began. And his blue eyes troubled the hearts of the young girls, which would melt when those eyes grew suddenly dark, though he himself was unaware of any ancient amorous rage rising up in him, such is the hidden force of past actions. Ah, youth. The fact is that João Mau-Tempo may have flirted a lot but he rarely went further than that. When he had had a few drinks, he might touch a girl rather more boldly or give her a clumsy kiss devoid of all the knowledge that the century was gradually accumulating for future general use.

In the eclogues of old, the shepherds played their lutes and the shepherdesses wove their garlands of flowers, but in this modern version, João Mau-Tempo, during a ten-week contract that took him off to Salvaterra to cut cork, ate a whole string of garlic in the hope of preserving himself from the mosquitoes, as a result, you could smell him ten paces away. He was learning the cork trade in the hope that he might one day earn the eighteen escudos paid to master cork cutters, and fortunately enough, he was far from his would-be girlfriends, who, while they might have been pretty tolerant of most smells, would perhaps have drawn the line at garlic. Happiness, as we know, depends on such small details.

And now João Mau-Tempo has received his call-up papers. He is full of daydreams, he imagines himself far from Monte Lavre, in Lisbon perhaps, having completed his military service, only a fool would miss the chance to find a job on the trams or on the police force or with the national guard, he has a smattering of education, he just has to push himself forward, he wouldn’t be the first. Call-up day is a day of celebration, with fireworks and wine, the young lads who finally deserve to be called men are all there in their freshly washed clothes, and when they’re lined up stark naked, they make macho jokes to disguise their embarrassment and stand at attention, red-faced, to answer the doctor’s questions. Then the draft board meets and makes its selections. A few men were chosen, and of the four who weren’t, only one went away downhearted. That was João Mau-Tempo, who watched his dream of wearing a uniform vanish into the realm of the impossible, his dream of standing on the platform of a tram, ringing the bell, or becoming a policeman and policing the streets of the capital, or, as a guard, guarding, ah, but on whose behalf,