Raised from the Ground

their daughters and sons-in-law could take their pleasures in peace, it would be worthy of being recorded in the very brief history of small human gestures, imagine seeing lots of old ladies wandering about in the shadows or in the moonlight or sitting on the ground next to the low walls or on the steps outside the church, waiting silently, what would they talk about, remembering their own past pleasures, what it had been like or what it had not been like, how long those pleasures had lasted, until one of them says, We can go back now, and they all get up, See you tomorrow, and return to their houses, quietly lifting the latch, and the young couple are perhaps sleeping, quite innocent of any conjugal activities, which can’t happen every night. But Sara da Conceição prefers to err on the side of caution, finding it difficult only when the weather is bad, and then she stands under a porch in the garden, but thanks to Faustina, who understood her, that’s women for you, they would call her in, a sign that the night would be as pure as the cold stars, unless it was on one of those starry nights when João Mau-Tempo sought his legitimate wife beneath the sheets.

Perhaps Sara da Conceição, with all that coming and going, is merely fleeing the dreams that await her, but one thing is sure, at dawn, she will once more find herself in the olive grove, the day after the death, which was when they found the body, as she knows in her dream, and with a bottle of wine and a rag she rubs and rubs, and the head sways from side to side, and when it turns in her direction, her husband fixes her with his cold eyes, and when it turns away, the corpse has no face, which is even worse. Sara da Conceição wakes up in a cold sweat, hears her son snoring, her grandson tossing and turning, but not her granddaughters or her daughter-in-law, they’re women after all, and therefore silent, and she moves closer to the two girls, with whom she sleeps, who can say what fate awaits them, let’s hope a better fate than that of the woman who dreams such dreams.

One night, Sara da Conceição went out and did not come back. They found her in the morning, outside the village, quite lost and talking about her husband as if he were still alive. So sad. Her daughter, Maria da Conceição, who was working as a maid in Lisbon, asked her employers to help, and they did, and yet still people speak ill of the rich. Sara da Conceição traveled from Monte Lavre and, for the first time, took a taxi from the boat in Terreiro do Paço, south and southeast, to the insane asylum in Rilhafoles, where she lived until she died like a wick burning out for lack of oil. Sometimes, but not often, well, we all have our own lives to lead, Maria da Conceição went to visit her mother, and they would sit looking at each other, what else could they do. When, some years later, João Mau-Tempo was brought to Lisbon for reasons we will learn in due course, Sara da Conceição had died, surrounded by the laughter of the nurses, because the poor fool kept humbly asking for a bottle of wine, imagine that, for some task she had to finish before it was too late. Isn’t that sad, ladies and gentlemen.

IN THE INVENTORY OF WARS, the latifundio plays its part, although not a large one. Those Europes, where another war has just begun, play a far greater part, and from what one can ascertain, which is not very much in a land of such ignorance, so removed from the rest of the world, Spain is in such a state of ruin it would break your heart. But any war is a war too many, that would surely be the view of those who died in a war they never wanted.

When Lamberto Horques took charge of the lands in Monte Lavre and environs, the soil was still fresh with the blood of Castilians, although as to freshness, that is merely a rather bloodthirsty image when set beside the far more ancient blood spilled by Lusitanians and Romans, or by the confusing tumult of Alanis, Vandals and Swabians, if they got this far, as the Visigoths certainly did, followed later by the infernal, swarthy caravan of Moors, and then the Burgundians arrived to spill their blood and that of others, and a few crusaders, not all of them heroes like Osberno,^* and then more Arabs, how much death these lands have seen, and the only reason we haven’t mentioned Portuguese blood is because all the blood spilled was Portuguese, or came to be, once enough time had passed for it to be naturalized, which is why we haven’t mentioned the French or the English, for they truly are foreigners.

Things did not change after Lamberto Horques took over. The frontier is an open door, you can almost step across the Caia river, and the plain seems to have been deliberately and lovingly made smooth by warrior angels so that combatants can face each other with no obstacles to get in the way of arrows or, later on, all the many different kinds of bullets. The vocabulary of the armory is very beautiful, from the helmet to the cuirass, from the halberd to the harquebus, from the bombard to the ballista, and if the knowledge that such an arsenal walked, trod and fought in these lands sends a tremor of fear through you, you would tremble again if you saw the efficacy of such inventions. Anyway, blood was made to flow, whether from this wound in the throat or from that belly slit open, and would make an excellent ink in which to write such secret enigmas as whether those people were resigned