António Mau-Tempo did not spend long with the pigs. He left Manuel Espada there and went off to learn skills that the latter, being older, already knew, and at thirteen, he was working with grown men, burning undergrowth, digging ditches, building dams, tasks requiring good strong arms. By the time he was fifteen, he had learned to cut cork, a precious skill at which he became a master, as, to be frank, he did with everything he turned his hand to. When he was still very young, he left his mother and father and traveled to places where his grandfather had left his mark and a few bad memories. But he was so very different from his grandfather that it never occurred to anyone that they could possibly belong to the same family, despite having the same surname. He was very drawn to the sea, he discovered the banks of the river Sado, and walked its whole length, which is no small journey, just to earn a bit more money than the pittance being offered in Monte Lavre. And one day, much later, as we will describe in due course, he will go to France to exchange a few years of life for a little hard currency.
The latifundio has its pauses, the days are indifferent or so it seems, what day is it today, for example. It’s true that people die and are born just as they did in more remarkable times, hunger still doesn’t always take account of the needs of the stomach, and the heavy workload hasn’t grown much lighter. The biggest changes happen outside, there are more roads and more cars on them, more radios and more time to listen to them, understanding them is another skill entirely, more beers and more fizzy drinks, but when a man lies down at night, in his own bed or on the straw in a field, the pain in his body is just the same, and yet he should consider himself lucky to be employed. There’s nothing much to say about the women, their fate as beasts of burden and bearers of children remains the same.
However, when one looks at this apparently lifeless swamp, only someone born blind or choosing not to see could fail to notice the watery tremor rising suddenly from the depths to the surface, the result of accumulated tensions in the mud, caught up in a chemical process of making, unmaking and remaking, until the liberated gas explodes. But to notice this, you have to look hard and not say as you pass by, There’s no point hanging around here, let’s go. If we were to go away for a while, distracted by different landscapes and picturesque events, we would notice, on our return, how, contrary to appearances, everything is finally changing. That is what will happen when we leave António Mau-Tempo to his life and return to the thread of the story we began, though all this is merely hearsay, including the story about José Gato and the misfortune that befell him and his companions, as António Mau-Tempo can witness and testify.
This isn’t one of those tedious tales about the Brazilian bandit Lampião, nor of others nearer to home, such as João Brandão or José do Telhado, who were bad people or, who knows, just wrong-headed. I don’t mean by this that there had never been any shady characters on the latifundio, no bandits who would leave a traveler dead and stripped of everything he had, regardless of how little that was, but the only one I knew of was José Gato, he and his companions, or should I say gang, whose names, if I remember rightly, were Parrilhas, Venta Rachada, Ludgero, Castelo and others whose names I’ve forgotten, well, one can’t remember everything. I’m not even sure they were bandits. Itinerant workers, yes, that’s what they were. If they wanted to work, they would work as hard as anyone else, they weren’t criminals, but one day, it was as if they suddenly got the wind up their tails or something, and they put down their hoes or their axes, went to the overseer or foreman to receive what was owed to them, because no one ever dared to withhold their pay, and then they vanished. At first, they went their separate ways, each silent, solitary man for himself, and only later did they get together and form a gang. When I met them, José Gato was already the head of the gang, and I don’t think anyone would have tried to take his place. They stole mainly pigs, of which, it must be said, there was no shortage. They stole in order to eat and also to sell, of course, because a man cannot live only by what he eats. At the time, they had a boat anchored in the Sado river, and that was their slaughterhouse. They slaughtered the animals and placed the meat in the salting trough for times of need. And speaking of the salting trough, they once ran out of salt and were discussing what to do and what not to do, and José Gato, who was a man of very few words indeed, told Parrilhas to go to the saltworks. Normally, José Gato only had to say, Do this, and like the word of God, it was done, but for some reason Parrilhas refused to go, a decision he lived to regret. José Gato snatched off Parrilhas’s hat, threw it in the air, picked up his rifle and blasted the hat to pieces with two shots, then he said to Parrilhas in the quietest of voices, Go and get the salt, and Parrilhas saddled up the donkey and went to get the salt. That was the kind of man José Gato was.
For anyone living in one of the work camps nearby and who was brave enough, José Gato was the main
