João Mau-Tempo has never been a man for going to mass, but now that he lives in Monte Lavre, he goes to church now and then both to please his wife and out of necessity. He hears Father Agamedes’s fiery sermons and compares them in his head with what he has picked up from the papers handed to him in secret, he makes his own judgment as a simple man, and while he believes some of the things written on those papers, he doesn’t believe a word the priest says. It seems that Father Agamedes himself finds it hard to believe, with all that ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth, which does not look good on one of God’s ministers. When mass is over, João Mau-Tempo goes out into the square along with the rest of the congregation, and there he finds Faustina, who had been sitting with the other women, and he walks part of the way home with her before going to join some friends to have a drink, just one, though the others laugh at him, You drink like a little boy, Mau-Tempo, but he merely smiles, a smile that says everything, so much so that the others say nothing more, it’s as if the body of a hanged man had suddenly dropped down from one of the beams in the inn. Then one of his friends says, Did Father Agamedes give a good sermon today, a question that has no answer, because he is one of the few men in Monte Lavre who never goes to mass, he only asks in order to provoke, João Mau-Tempo smiles again and says, Oh, it was the usual thing, then says nothing more, because he’s nearly forty now and never drinks so much that he loses control of his tongue. It was that same friend who gave him the papers, and they look at each other, and Sigismundo, for that is his friend’s name, winks and raises his glass of wine to him, Good health.
IT WAS WHILE ANTÓNIO Mau-Tempo was employed tending pigs that he met Manuel Espada, who had been forced to take such unskilled work because he could find nothing else once he and his companions had become dubbed locally, and for two leagues around, as strikers. Like everyone else in Monte Lavre, António Mau-Tempo knew what had happened, and in his still childish imaginings, he found some similarities with his own rebellion against the pine-nut-roasting, stick-wielding foreman, although he never confessed as much, especially given that Manuel Espada was six years older than him, long enough to separate a mere child from a lad and a mere lad from a man. The foreman of these pigs didn’t work any harder than the other one, but he, at least, had age as an excuse, and the lads he employed didn’t mind taking orders from him, after all, someone has to be in charge, him in charge of us and us in charge of the pigs. The working day of the swineherd is very long, even in winter, the hours pass so slowly they positively dawdle, like a shadow moving from here to there, and pigs are creatures of little imagination, their snouts always pressed to the ground, and if they do wander off, they mean no mischief, and a well-aimed stone or a sharp thump on the back with a stick will bring them, ears twitching, back to the rest of the herd. The pig soon forgets such incidents, having a poor memory and being little prone to bearing grudges.
There was, then, more than enough time to talk, while the foreman dozed under the holm oak or tended the animals farther off. Manuel Espada spoke of his adventures as a striker, although he never exaggerated, that wasn’t in his character, and he shed a little light on the kind of thing that can happen on the threshing floor at night with the female workers, especially the ones from the north who have no men with them. The two became friends, and António Mau-Tempo greatly admired the older lad’s serenity, a quality he lacked, for, as we will see later on, he was always itching to be up and off. He had inherited the vagabond tendencies of his grandfather Domingos Mau-Tempo, with the great and praiseworthy difference that he had a naturally sunny temperament, which didn’t mean, however, that he was always laughing and joking. Nevertheless, he had the same tastes and anxieties of any lad his age, and took on the ancient and never resolved question of what separates boys from sparrows, he always spoke his mind and was, on occasions, impetuous, and those qualities will make him a touch impatient and something of a wanderer. He’ll enjoy dances, as his father did in his youth, but will care little for large gatherings. He will be a great teller of tales about things he has either seen or invented, experienced or imagined, and he will possess the supreme art of being able to blur the frontiers between the two. But he will always work hard at acquiring all the rural skills. We’re not reading this future in the palm of his hand, these are simply the elementary facts
