Work and more work. Now they travel far from Monte Lavre, some take their families with them, to work as charcoal burners in the area around Infantado, those men without wives bed down in this big hut, and those who brought their wives set up house in another, using mats or cotton curtains or improvised panels to separate the couples, with the children, if they have them, sleeping with their parents. The midges bite furiously, but it’s worse during the day, when the mosquitoes come in clouds, so many you can barely see, and they fall upon us, whining, like a rain of ground glass, our grandmothers, who knew so much about life, were quite right when they said, I’ll never see my grandchildren again, they’ll die far from home. They know, these are not things one forgets, that the children’s little bodies will become a running sore, a torment to them, little lepers who will lie down among rags at night, their stomachs crying out for food, it’s never enough, they’re growing up without any consolation from their parents, who very slowly touch each other, move and sigh, as if this were something they had to do in order to keep their senses more or less placated, while beside them another couple echoes that touching, moving and sighing, either because they want to or by suggestion, and all the children in the great hut lie listening, eyes open, experiencing their own gestures and disappointments.
From the tops of these hills, on a clear day, you can see Lisbon, who would have thought it was so close, we imagined that we lived at the end of the world, the mistaken ideas of those who know nothing and have had no one to teach them. The serpent of temptation slithered up the branch from which João Mau-Tempo can see Lisbon and promised him all the marvels and riches of the capital in exchange for the very modest price of a ferry ticket, well, not that modest for someone with nothing, but, in for a penny, in for a pound, he’d be a fool to refuse. We will disembark in Cais do Sodré and declare, wide-eyed, So this is Lisbon, the big city, and the sea, look at the sea, all that water, and then we walk through an archway into Rua Augusta, so many people, so much traffic, and we’re not used to walking on pavements, we keep slipping and sliding in our hobnail boots, and we cling to each other in our fear of the trams, and you two fall over, which makes the Lisbonites laugh, What bumpkins, they cry, And look, there’s Avenida da Liberdade, and what’s that thing sticking up in the middle, that’s Restauradores, oh, really, and I think to myself, Well, frankly, I’m none the wiser, but ignorance is always the hardest and most embarrassing thing to own up to, anyway, let’s walk up Avenida da Liberdade and find our sister, who’s working as a maid, this is the street, she’s at number ninety-six, isn’t that what you said, after all, you’re the one who can read, No, there must be some mistake, it goes from ninety-five to ninety-seven, there is no ninety-six, but he who seeks always finds, here it is, they laughed at us because we didn’t know that ninety-six was on the other side, the people in Lisbon laugh a lot. Here’s the building where our sister works, it’s really tall, the owner and resident of the first-floor apartment is Senhor Alberto, our sometime boss, everything belongs to the same family, Well, look who’s here, Maria da Conceição will say, what a surprise, and how plump she’s got, there’s nothing like being a maid. We’ll all go out together afterward, because the lady of the house is very generous and gives her time off, although it will be discounted from her next bit of leave, because normally she gets an afternoon off once a fortnight, between lunch and supper. We’ll visit some cousins who live in the area, in streets and back streets, and there’ll be the same joyful greeting, Well, look who’s here, and we’ll arrange to go to the show tonight, but first, you mustn’t miss the zoo, the monkeys are so funny, and that’s a lion over there, and look at the elephant, if you
