In heaven, the angels are leaning on the windowsills or over that long balcony with the silver balustrade that runs right around the horizon, you can see it perfectly on a clear day, and they are pointing and calling mischievously to each other, well, it’s their age, and one angel higher up the scale runs off to summon a few saints formerly linked with agriculture and livestock, so that they can see what’s going on in the latifundio, such upheavals, dark knots of people walking along the roads, where there are roads, or along the almost invisible tracks across the fields, taking shortcuts, in single file, around the edges of the wheatfields, like a string of black ants. The angels haven’t enjoyed themselves so much in ages, the saints are giving gentle lectures about plants and animals, although their memory isn’t what it used to be, but still they expound on how to grow wheat and bake bread, and how you can eat every bit of a pig, and how if you want to know about your own body, just cut open a pig, because they’re just the same as us. This statement is both daring and heretical, it brings into question the whole of the Creator’s thinking, had he run out of ideas when it came to creating man and so simply copied the pig, well, if enough people say so, it must be true.
The saints live so high up and so far away, and have so completely forgotten the world in which they lived, that they can find no explanation for the trail of humans walking from Casalinho to Carriça, from Monte da Fogueira to Cabeço do Desgarro, and now, while some head off in that direction, others are going farther afield, to Herdade das Mantas, to Monte da Areia, all of which are places where the Lord never trod, and even if he had, what would he or we have gained. They’re heretics, Father Agamedes will bawl each day, and he’s bawling these words out now from the window of his house, because the pilgrims are beginning to arrive in Monte Lavre, can this be the new Jerusalem, it’s like the morning procession on Ascension Day, and the corporal has just run across the road, heading who knows where, someone must have summoned him, The boss wants to speak to you, and he pulls on his beret and tightens his belt, that’s military discipline for you, because the guards fall just short of being an army, and it is precisely that shortfall that makes them feel hard done by, he enters the perfumed cool of the cellar where Humberto is waiting, Right, you know what’s been happening, and Corporal Tacabo does know, it’s his duty to know, that’s what he’s paid for, Yes, sir, the strikers have been visiting the workers on the estates and now they’re back, So what are we going to do, I’ve asked for orders from Montemor, we’re going to find out who’s behind the mutiny, Don’t worry, I have a list of names here, twenty-two of them, they were seen at Ponte Cava before they set off, and while he’s saying this, Corporal Tacabo has poured himself a drink, Norberto paced back and forth, bringing his heels down hard on the flagstones, They’re troublemakers, idlers, that’s what they are, they don’t want to work, if the right side had won the war, they wouldn’t dare to so much as wag a finger, they’d be quiet as mice, happy to be working for whatever we were prepared to pay them, this is what Alberto says, and the confused corporal doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t like the Germans and wants nothing to do with the Russians but he has a soft spot for the English, and when he thinks about it, he’s not quite sure who it was who won the war, but he takes the list of names, it will look good on his service record, twenty-two proven strikers is no small thing, even though the angels find it all
