That’s what this part of the country is like. The king said to Lamberto Horques, Cultivate and populate it, watch over my interests without forgetting your own, I give you this counsel because it suits me too, and if we follow this advice to the letter, we will all live in peace. And to his pastured sheep, Father Agamedes said, Your kingdom is not of this world, I suffered so that you might enter heaven, the more tears you shed in this vale of tears, the closer to the Lord you will be when you cast off the world, which is nothing but perdition, the devil and the flesh, and you can be sure that I’ll be keeping my eye on you, for you are greatly deceived if you think that the Lord Our God has left you free to do both good and evil, everything will be placed in the balance come the day of judgment, better to pay in this world than be in debt in the next. These are excellent doctrines and are probably the reason why the four from Monte Lavre had to accept that the wages they had earned but not been paid, nine escudos a day, for three and a quarter days during the week in which they committed their crime, would go to the old folks’ home, although Felisberto Lampas did mutter on the journey home, They’ll probably spend our money on beer. We must forgive the young, who so often think ill of their elders. Far from being spent on beer, those one hundred and seventeen escudos given into the hand of the administrator meant that the old people enjoyed better food, a positive orgy, you can’t imagine, all these years later they still talk of that feast, and one very ancient resident was heard to say, Now I can die.
They’re strange creatures, men, and boys are perhaps stranger, for they are quite a different species. We have said enough about Felisberto Lampas, who is in a bad mood, and for whom the matter of the stolen wages is just a pretext. However, they all returned to Monte Lavre feeling sad, as if something more valuable had been stolen from them, perhaps their sense of pride, which they hadn’t lost, of course, but there had been something offensive about the whole situation, they had been treated with scorn, stood in line to hear the administrator’s sermon, while the lieutenant watched from the sidelines, memorizing their faces and features. They were even angry at the people who had interceded on their behalf, and whose pleas probably wouldn’t have helped at all if the incident hadn’t taken place two days before a bomb attempt on Salazar’s life, from which he escaped unharmed.
That Sunday, the four went to the square, but could find no one to take them on. The same thing happened on the following Sunday and the Sunday after that. The estate has a long memory and good communications, it misses nothing and passes on the word, it will forgive only when it chooses to, but it will never forget. When they finally did find work, they each went their separate ways. Manuel Espada had to go and tend pigs, and during his time as a pigherd, he met António Mau-Tempo, who, later on, when the time comes, will become his brother-in-law.
SARA DA CONCEIÇÃO IS not well. She has taken to dreaming about her husband, barely a night passes when she doesn’t see him lying on the ground in the olive grove with the purple mark of the rope on his neck, she can’t let his body go to the grave like that, and then she starts washing his neck with wine, because if she can make the mark disappear, she will have her husband back again, alive, which is the last thing she would want when awake, but that, inexplicably, is how it is in the dream. This woman, who traveled around so much when young, lives a very quiet, stable life now, but then she always did really, she helps out in the house of her son João Mau-Tempo and her daughter-in-law Faustina, she takes care of her granddaughters, Gracinda and Amélia, tends to the chickens, darns and redarns the clothes, patches up trouser seats, a skill learned during her short time as a stitcher of uppers to soles, and she has a strange habit that no one can understand, which is to go out walking at night when all her family is sleeping. True, she doesn’t go very far, fear won’t let her, the end of the street is quite far enough. The neighbors say she’s slightly mad, perhaps she is, because if all the old mothers came out into the street at night so that their sons and daughters-in-law or
