Raised from the Ground

waiting, and he says this gravely, as is his custom on all occasions, a manner that makes him seem older than his years, and there was already quite an age difference, as Faustina had pointed out to Gracinda when Gracinda told her that Manuel Espada had asked her to be his girl, But he’s much older than you, What’s that got to do with it, Gracinda had replied, offended, and quite right, too, because that wasn’t what mattered, what mattered was that she had liked Manuel Espada ever since that June day in Montemor, what did age have to do with anything, although Manuel Espada, when he spoke to her, had also pointed this out, I’m seven years older than you, and she, smiling, not sure quite what she was saying, had replied, The husband should be older than the wife, and then she had blushed because she realized that she had said yes without actually saying yes, as Manuel Espada realized, and he passed on to the next question, So that’s a yes, is it, and she said, Yes, and from then on they spent time with each other as the rules of courtship demanded, at the front door of her house, because it was too soon for him to be allowed into the house, but where Manuel Espada did not follow the rules was in speaking to her parents right away, rather than waiting until both he and she were sure of their feelings and of their ill-kept secret. It was then that João Mau-Tempo and Faustina explained, and this was hardly news, that marriage was an economic impossibility just then, and that they would have to wait, I’ll wait as long as I have to, said Manuel Espada, and then he left, determined to work and save, although he also had to help his own parents, with whom he still lived. These are the problems of ordinary life, which change little or so little in two generations that one hardly notices, and Gracinda Mau-Tempo knows that in future she will have to agree, by negotiation with her mother, how much of her wage she can put aside for her trousseau, as is her duty.

We have spoken a great deal about men and a little about women, but only in passing, as fleeting shadows or occasionally essential interlocutors, as a female chorus, albeit usually silent because weighed down either by some burden or by the weight in their bellies, or else, for various reasons, in the role of mater dolorosa, a dead son or a prodigal son, or a daughter dishonored, there’s never any shortage of them. We will continue to talk about men, but also more and more about women, and not because of this particular courtship and future marriage, because we have already witnessed the respective courtships and marriages of Sara da Conceição and Faustina, Gracinda’s grandmother now long gone and her mother happily still alive, and we said little about them, there are other reasons, as yet somewhat vague, and that’s because the times are changing. Declaring their feelings at the door of a prison, or, rather, in a barracks and a place of death, which comes to the same thing, goes against all the traditions and conventions, and at a time of such suffering too, doubtless compensated by the joys of an as yet timorous freedom, fancy a young man saying to a young woman, Will you be my girl, ah, it’s all very different from when I was their age.

Gracinda was born two years before her sister Amélia, who, because she had filled out early, looked, to the ill informed, about the same age. There was little physical resemblance, perhaps because the family blood was so mixed and so prone to produce singularities. We have only to think of that ancestor who came from the cold north and raped a girl at the fountain, a crime that went unpunished by his lord and master, Lamberto Horques, who was more concerned with origins of another kind and with horses. However, so as to confirm how small and modest a world this is, here we have Manuel Espada asking Gracinda Mau-Tempo to marry him next to that very same fountain, next to a field of bracken, which will not this time be trampled and broken until the body of the rape victim gives in, defeated. If only we could tie up all the loose ends, the world would be a stronger and better place. And if the fountain could speak, for example, which it would be perfectly justified in doing, given that it’s been a constant source of pure, bubbling water for over five hundred years, or longer if it was a Moorish fountain, anyway, if it could speak, we think it would say, This girl has been here before, an understandable mistake, over time even fountains get confused, not to mention the vast difference in how Manuel Espada behaves toward Gracinda, merely taking her hand and saying, So that’s a yes, is it, and then the two of them walking back, leaving the bracken for another occasion.

These three children know a lot about many different things. There are only four years between António Mau-Tempo, the oldest, and Amélia Mau-Tempo, the youngest. Once, they were just three bundles of ill-nourished, ill-dressed flesh and bone, as they continue to be today as adolescents, if that word isn’t too refined for these lands and these latifundios. They were carried on the backs of father and mother or in baskets on their parents’ heads, when they could still not walk or their little legs got tired quickly, or on their father’s shoulders or in their mother’s arms, or on their own two feet, they traveled more, given their age, than the wandering Jew. They battled with mosquitoes in the ricefields, poor, defenseless innocents who didn’t even know to brush from their faces the squadrons of flying lancers that whined with pure, intense pleasure. However, since mosquitoes have very