There haven’t been that many changes. Weeding and planting the ricefields is done exactly as it was in my grandfather’s day, the creepy-crawlies in the water haven’t changed their stings or their slime since the Lord God made them, and if a hidden sliver of glass cuts a finger, the blood that flows is still the same color. You would need a lot of imagination to invent any extraordinary incidents. This way of life is made up of repeated words and repeated gestures, the arc made by the sickle is precisely adjusted to the length of the arm, and the sawing of the blade through the dry stems of wheat produces the same sound, always the same sound, how is it that the ears of these men and women do not grow weary, it’s the same with that hoarse-voiced bird that some say lives in the cork oak, between the bark and the trunk, and that screams whenever they tear off its skin or perhaps pluck out its feathers, and what is left is painful, goosepimpled flesh, but this idea that trees cry out and feel pain comes purely from the narrator’s private imaginings. We would do far better to notice Manuel Espada perched, barefoot, at the top of this cork oak, for he is a serious, barefoot bird, hopping from branch to branch, not that he sings, he doesn’t feel like singing, the real boss here is the cork ax, chop, chop, chop, making circular incisions around the larger boughs and vertical ones on the trunk, then the handle of the ax serves as a lever, go on, push, there, can’t you hear the hoarse-voiced bird that lives in the cork oak, it’s screaming, not that anyone feels any pity. The cylinders of bark rain down, falling on the cork already cut from the trunks, there is no poetry in this, we’d like to see someone make a sonnet out of one man losing his grip on his ax and watching it skitter down the branch, catching the bark as it falls, and impaling itself in a bare foot, coarse and grubby but so fragile, because when it comes to skin and the blade of an ax, there is little difference between the delicate, rosy foot of some cultivated maiden and the calloused hoof of a cork cutter, it takes the same time for the blood to spurt out.
But here we are talking about work and the working day, and we nearly forgot to describe the night when João Mau-Tempo arrived back in Monte Lavre, when his house was filled almost to bursting with his closest friends and their wives, those who had them, as well as a cacophony of young lads, some of them intruders, unrelated to any of those present, not that anyone cared, and António Mau-Tempo, who had finished his national service and was now working on the cork plantations, and his sisters Gracinda and Amélia, and his brother-in-law Manuel Espada, a whole crowd of people. Faustina cried all the time, out of joy and grief, she had only to recall the day on which her husband was arrested, who knows why, and taken to Vendas Novas and to Lisbon, with no idea when, if ever, he would come back. She didn’t talk about the sad case of her stockings ruined by the tarmac, not a word, that would remain forever a secret between the couple, both of whom felt slightly ashamed, knowing that, even in Monte Lavre, someone might make fun of them, the poor woman with her stockings stuck fast to the tarmac road, dreadful, who wouldn’t do their best to avoid such mockery. João Mau-Tempo described his misfortunes and spared no detail, so that they would know just what he had suffered at the hands of the dragons of the PIDE and the national guard. All of this would be confirmed and repeated later by Sigismundo Canastro, but although he wasn’t so insensitive as to treat the matter lightly, he did tell the most alarming stories as if they were perfectly natural, and recounted everything with such an air of simplicity that not even the women wept for pity, and the young boys moved away, disappointed, he might as well have been talking about the state of the wheatfields, and perhaps, who knows, they were, indeed, one and the same thing. Maybe that is why, one day, Manuel Espada approached Sigismundo
