JOSÉ CALMEDO IS JUST one guard among many. You wouldn’t notice him on parade, he’s no more striking than any of his colleagues, and when he’s not on parade, but on patrol or otherwise on duty, he’s a quiet, easygoing fellow who always seems to have his mind on other things. One day, quite unexpectedly, perhaps even to himself, he will hand in his application for discharge to the commander of the Monte Lavre barracks, who will then begin the necessary procedures, and he will take his wife and two children far from there, learn to live the life of a civilian and spend his remaining years forgetting that he was once a guard. He is, however, a man with a history, which we do not, alas, have time to go into here, except to mention his family name, a story that is both brief and charming, and illustrative of the beauty of names and their unusual origins, for it is the fault of our feeble memory and our lack of curiosity that makes us ignore or forget, for example, that the name Sousa* means wild dove, isn’t that lovely, and is not just the very ordinary name set down in the register of births, which immediately clips its wings, that’s the trouble with writing things down. But best of all are the names born out of the distortion of other names or of words that never had any intention of becoming names, for example, Pantaleão became Espanta Leões, pity the poor family who has to go through life with a duty to drive away lions in city and country. But we were talking about the guard José Calmedo and the brief and charming history of his name, born, or so the story goes, from the unintentional bravado of an ancestor of his, who, unaware of the very real danger he was in, was not as frightened as he ought to have been, and responded to the person asking about his lack of fear, Qual medo, what fear, and people were so amazed by the spontaneous effrontery of that question that this unintentional hero and his descendants, including this guard and his children, were known ever after as Calmedo, although later, another version was born, because Calmedo means very hot, windless weather, which is what it’s like as he leaves the barracks now, carrying his secret orders.
It’s three kilometers there and three kilometers back on foot, but that’s what a guard’s life is like, although not, of course, for the mounted guard, anyway, there’s José Calmedo heading down the hill in Monte Lavre to the valley, he skirts around a village toward the west, then heads north along the road, with ricefields to his left, it’s a beautiful July morning and hot, as we said before, but it will be even hotter later. There’s a little stream down below, much thirst and little water, his boots strike the surface of the road, and he feels very much a man as he strides it out, while his head is full of stray clouds, words that once had meaning but have lost it, well, we were walking along the road, but now we’ve gone down the bank to the right, into the cool shade beneath the viaduct, and are now sitting beneath the whispering branches of the poplars, the place is deserted, who would have thought it, the empty pool, the ruined water wheel and, beyond it, the brick kiln with the broken roof, it seems that the latifundio corrodes everything that gets in its way. José Calmedo rests his rifle on his shoulder, takes off his cap and uses his handkerchief to wipe the sweat from his brow, where the dark and the light skin show the effect of the sun or the lack of it, it’s almost as if the top part of his head belonged not to him but to his cap, although these, of course, are pure imaginings.
It’s not much farther, he’s going to Cabeço do Desgarro and should arrive there in time for lunch. He will return with João Mau-Tempo, on the pretext of some insignificant matter that has nothing whatever to do with João Mau-Tempo, it doesn’t need to be a complicated story, the simpler the better, the more credible. He can see the hut among the trees and the men, who stand around the fire, removing the pot before it boils over or burns, it won’t take long, he just has to go over to him and say, Come with me to the barracks, but José Calmedo doesn’t take the few steps that would place him where he could be seen by everyone, should they look. He hides behind some high bushes and stays there, allowing time for João Mau-Tempo to finish his sparse lunch, while in the sky occasional clouds continue to pass, so few that they don’t cast a shadow. José Calmedo is sitting on the ground smoking a cigarette, he has propped his rifle against the trunk of
