Raised from the Ground

The bastards, they’re after my beans, and so what did he decide to do, I’m going to confront them, he said, and so he tethered his horse out of sight, took a large sack with him, because in summer you don’t need a blanket, and a big stick. Shortly afterward, he heard rustling, it was José Gato tossing three or four bundles of beans in a cloth to shell them, but everything was so dry that the beans crunched underfoot, and then, at the agreed hour, a member of the gang came to help him carry away the beans, about a hundred liters of them. They were probably going to sell them to Manuel da Revolta in exchange for bread and other essentials, I’m not sure. José Gato was completely absorbed in his work, and Marcelino, barefoot, was drawing closer and closer, his own description of it was very funny, I was barefoot, you see, gradually edging nearer, and I got within about six or seven meters of the guy, another three or four meters and I could have hit him with my stick, but he was too sharp and he heard me, and just when I thought I’d deal him a blow with my stick, in two hops he was gone, now you see him, now you don’t, and I was pretty quick off the mark myself, but there he was pointing his rifle at me. José Gato said, or so Marcelino said, You’re lucky, you were kind to a friend of mine once, that was at a time when the guards were doing their worst and Marcelino had given shelter and food to one of the gang, You’re lucky, otherwise, I would have shot you dead. But Marcelino was a brave man too in his own way, Hang on, this calls for a smoke, and he pulled out his tobacco pouch, rolled himself a cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, lit it, then said, Right, I’m off now.

Later, the gang were all arrested. It started in Piçarras, in an out-of-the-way place between Munhola and Landeira. There was a showdown with the guards, shots were fired, it was like a war. The guards caught them, but every one of them was given a job by local farmers, Venta Rachada became a watchman on a vineyard in Zambujal, and others the same. I would love to have heard one of those conversations between guards and farmers, We’ve arrested a man, Oh good, I’ll have him, I don’t know who was the more brazen of the two. José Gato was only arrested some time later, in Vendas Novas. He was living with a woman who sold vegetables there and he always went about in disguise, which is why the guards never caught him. Some say she gave him away, but I don’t know. He was taken prisoner at his lover’s house, in the cellar, when he was sleeping, in fact, he had said once, If they don’t catch me while I’m sleeping, they won’t catch me at all. Rumor had it that he was taken to Lisbon, and just as the others were given jobs by farmers, it was said that he had been sent to the colonies as a member of the PVDE. I don’t know if he would ever have agreed to that, I find it hard to believe, or perhaps they killed him and that was the story they made up, it wouldn’t be the first time.

José Gato had many good qualities. He never stole from the poor, his intention being to steal only from the rich, as people say José do Telhado used to. Once, Parrilhas came across a woman who had gone shopping for her family, and he robbed her, the wicked devil. Unfortunately for him, José Gato found the poor woman sobbing. He asked what was wrong and realized from what she said that Parrilhas had been her attacker. He gave the woman enough money for three loads of shopping and Parrilhas got the worst beating of his life. Quite right, too.

José Gato was a man with no illusions, small in stature but brave, as you’ll see from something that happened in Monte da Revolta. At the time, it was a very international place, you got people there from all over, suffice it to say that a man from the Algarve who was working on clearing the land managed to build a little cabin for himself, and there were others like him, with no house and no home, or if they had one, they kept quiet about it. A man there tried to provoke an argument between Manuel da Revolta and José Gato, telling Manuel da Revolta that José Gato had boasted about how he was going to sleep with Manuel’s wife. But Manuel da Revolta, who trusted José Gato, said to him straight out, So-and-so told me this. José Gato said, The bastard, let’s go and see him, and so they did, and when they got there, he said, This is what you told Manuel, and I’d like to hear you say the same to my face. The other man answered, Look, I was a bit drunk at the time, but you never said anything of the kind, and that’s the honest truth. José Gato said very calmly, Walk a hundred paces ahead of me, that way he knew he had no chance of killing the man, then he fired two or three shots at his back, so that a couple of pellets just stuck in his flesh while the others ricocheted off, then he gave him a couple of lashes with a whip as he lay on the ground, Behave like a man from now on, and don’t go playing any more childish pranks on people. It always seemed to me that José Gato got involved in a life of crime only because he couldn’t earn enough to eat.

He was in this area when I was a little boy. He was the foreman