Raised from the Ground

like another feature of the landscape, alongside others, like the piles of straw, in this sun it’s even hard to tell them apart, nothing is still or quiet, the engine is throbbing, the thresher is vomiting out straw and grain, the slack chain is vibrating, and the air shimmers as if it were the reflection of the sun in a mirror held in the sky by the small, unsteady hands of angels with nothing better to do. A few shapes can be seen in the midst of this mist. They have been working all day, and yesterday and the day before, and before that, ever since the threshing began, there are five of them, one older man and four younger men, whose seventeen or eighteen years are not enough to cope with such strenuous work. They sleep on the threshing floor, in between the bales, but it’s already dark by the time the engine falls silent, and the sun is still far off when this beast fed on cans of sticky, black liquid first groans into life and then proceeds to batter their ears with noise all the blessed day. It’s the machine that sets the pace of work, the thresher cannot chew on nothing, as becomes immediately obvious when the foreman emerges from his hiding place and bawls at them to keep it fed. The inside of the machine’s mouth is a volcano, a giant gullet, and the older of the five men tends to be in charge of feeding the monster. The others are responsible for helping the piles of straw to grow higher and higher, they spin like mad things in that fog of chopped-up straw, they haul the rough, dry wheat, the stiff stalks, the bearded ears, the dust, where is the tender springtime green of the fields when the earth really does seem like paradise. The heat is unbearable. The older man steps down and one of the younger men takes his place, and the machine is like a bottomless pit. All it needs is for a man to fall in. The bread would then take on the correct blood-red color, rather than its usual innocent white or neutral brown.

The foreman comes over and says, Go and work down at the chaff end. The chaff is that weightless monster, that straw-cum-dust that blocks your nostrils, that creeps in through every gap in your clothing and sticks to your skin like a layer of mud, it itches like crazy and gives you the very devil of a thirst. The water they drink from the clay jug soon grows lukewarm and slimy, as if you were drinking directly from a swamp full of worms and bloodsuckers, which is what we call leeches around here. The lad goes down to the chaff end and receives it full in his face like a punch, and his body begins slowly to protest, it doesn’t have the strength to do more than that, but then, and only those who have experienced this themselves will know what I mean, the despair feeds on the body’s exhaustion, grows steadily stronger, and that strength feeds back into the body, and finally, with that redoubled energy, the lad, whose name is Manuel Espada, and who will reappear later in this story, steps away from the chaff, calls to his colleagues and says, I’m off, this isn’t work, it’s slow death. The older man is once more standing on the thresher, What about the straw bales, but he’s left with his words hanging in the air and his arms by his sides, because the four lads leave together, brushing off their clothes, they’re like clay figures ready for the kiln, grayish brown, their faces striped with sweat, they look just like clowns, except that they’re not funny at all. The older man jumps down from the thresher and turns off the engine. The silence is like a blow to the ears. The foreman comes running over, panting, What’s going on, and Manuel Espada says, I’m leaving, and the others say, We’re leaving too, the threshing floor is stunned, So you don’t want to work. Anyone looking around can see the air trembling, it’s only heat haze but it feels as if the whole estate were trembling, and yet it’s just these four young men, who are free to leave, having no wife and no children to feed, for as João Mau-Tempo says to Faustina, That’s the reason why I agreed to go to Évora. His wife answers, Don’t think about that now, get up, it’s time.

Manuel Espada and his friends go to the overseer, squint-eyed Anacleto, to ask for the money they’re owed for the days they’ve worked, and to tell him that they’re leaving because they can’t take any more. Anacleto fixes his wandering eye on the four young rascals, ah, if only he could give them a good whipping, You’re not getting any money, and be warned, I’m going to put you down as strikers. The insurrectionists are too young and innocent and ignorant to know what this word means. They walk back to Monte Lavre, which is a long way, taking the most direct route they can along old paths, feeling neither happy nor regretful, that’s how it is, a man cannot spend his whole life obeying orders, and these four men, if we can call them that, stroll along talking and saying the kind of things lads of their age always say, one of them even throws a stone at a hoopoe that fluffs up its wings as it crosses their path, the only thing they regret is leaving behind those women from the north who worked alongside them on the threshing floor, there being a great shortage of labor that season.

Anyone traveling by foot has all the time in the world, but when speed is of the essence, and especially when one is athirst for justice, when evil deeds and evildoers threaten to put the latifundio at risk, it’s understandable that