But the ants won. In the fading evening light, the men gathered in the square and the overseers came, grim-faced and silent, but defeated, Tomorrow you can work for thirty-three escudos, that was all they said and then they withdrew, humiliated, thinking vengeful thoughts. That night, joy was unconfined in the tabernas, João Mau-Tempo, most unusually, dared to drink a second glass of wine, the shopkeepers are hoping to get some of their debts repaid and are considering raising their prices, at the mention of money the children cannot even think of what they would want to buy, and since the body is sensitive to the contentments of the soul, the men moved closer to the women, and the women closer to the men, and they were all so happy that if heaven understood anything about human lives, you would have heard hosannas and the clamor of trumpets, and the moon was its usual bright, lovely June self.
And now it’s morning again. Each day’s work is worth an extra eight escudos, which is less than a ten-tostão increase per hour or almost nothing per minute, so little that there isn’t a coin small enough to represent it, and each time the sickle cuts into the wheat, each time a left hand grasps the stems and a right hand deals a final, decisive blow with the blade at ground level, only someone versed in higher mathematics could say how much that gesture is worth, how many zeros you would have to add to the right of the decimal point, in what thousandths we could measure out the sweat, the tendon in the wrist, the muscle in the arm, the strained back, the eyes fogged with fatigue, the broiling noonday heat. So much suffering for so little reward. And yet there are still some who sing, although not for long, because they soon hear the news that yesterday, in Montemor, the guards rounded up agricultural workers in the area and put them in a bullring, penned in like cattle. Those with long memories remembered what had happened in Badajoz,* the carnage that took place there, again in the bullring, it doesn’t seem possible, they machine-gunned the whole lot of them, but it won’t be like that here, we’re not that cruel. Dark presentiments fill the countryside, the line of reapers advances hesitantly, unrhythmically, and the furious foremen take out their anger on the workers, anyone would think it was their money, Now that you’re earning more, I’ve suddenly got a fieldful of malingerers. The line grows livelier, they don’t want to seem to be in the boss’s debt, they move more quickly, but then their imaginations turn back to the bullring in Montemor full of our people, from all over the latifundio, and fear so dries the mouth that some call to the water carrier to let them drink, Who knows what will happen to us. The guards know, as they walk over the clods of earth, a few at each end of the line, rifles at the ready and fingers on the trigger, If anyone makes a run for it, shoot in the air first, then aim at their legs, and if you have to fire a third time, make sure you don’t have to shoot again. The reapers straighten up when they hear the names, Custódio Calção, Sigismundo Canastro, Manuel Espada, Damião Canelas, João Mau-Tempo. These are the local mutineers, the others are being rounded up right now, or they already have been or soon will be, if they thought they wouldn’t have to pay the price for their insubordination, they were roundly deceived, they clearly didn’t know the latifundio. Those left behind lower head and arms, bow their whole trunk with heart and lungs, their back struggling to keep them upright, and the sickle again slices through the wheat, cutting what, why, the dry stalks of course, what else. And beside the workers, the foreman growled like a wolf, You’re lucky you weren’t all taken away, that’s what you deserve, if it was up to me, I’d teach you a lesson you wouldn’t forget.
The five conspirators are flanked by the guards, who taunt them, So you thought you could lead a strike and get off scot-free, did you, well you’ve got another think coming. None of the five men replies, they hold their heads high, but have pangs in their stomachs that are not hunger pangs, and they’re strangely unsteady on their feet, that’s what fear does, it takes you over and it makes no difference if you speak or keep silent, but it will pass, a man is a man, whereas, even today, we can’t be quite sure whether a cat is an animal or a human. João Mau-Tempo makes as if to say something to Sigismundo Canastro, but we never find out what it is because, as one man, one commander, with one will, the guards say, If you open your gob, we’ll hit you so hard you’ll leave teeth marks in the road, and so no one else dares say a word, and they arrive in Monte Lavre in silence, go up the ramp to the guards’ post, because they had been arrested by then, all twenty-two of them, so someone had obviously betrayed us. They put them in an enclosure in the yard at the back, piled them in with nowhere to sit but the ground, although what does that matter, they’re used to it, weeds can survive the hardest of frosts, they have skin as thick as donkey hide, which is just as well, because that way they get fewer infections, if it were us, frail city dwellers, we wouldn’t stand a
