nowadays, was miraculously healed, without any doctor having laid a finger on him, and even if he had done so, it would have been to no avail. Nor are there any signs, no doubt because he was a person destined to rule, that he had to importune the heavenly powers, we refer to the Virgin and the Lord, not to the angels of the sixth hierarchy, in order to produce this edifying outcome, thanks to which, who knows, Portugal may owe her independence. It so happened that Dom Egas Moniz, the tutor of young Afonso, was asleep in his bed when Holy Mary appeared to him in a vision and said, Dom Egas Moniz, are you asleep, and he, not knowing whether he was awake or dreaming, asked, in order to be certain, My Lady, who are you, and she politely replied, I am the Virgin, and I command you to go to Carquere in the municipality of Resende, and if you dig there you will find a church which was once built in my name, and you will also find my statue, repair it for it is in a lamentable state after being so sadly neglected, and then you must keep vigil there, and you will lay the boy on the altar, whereupon I assure you he will be instantly cured and restored to health, and take good care of him thereafter, because I happen to know that my Son is thinking of entrusting him with the destruction of the enemies of the Faith, and obviously that is something he cannot do with stunted legs. Dom Egas Moniz awoke as happy as could be, convened his aides and, mounting his donkey, made his way to Carquere and ordered his men to dig at the spot pointed out by the Virgin, and lo and behold there was the church, but the surprise is ours rather than theirs, for in those blessed times warnings from on high were never gratuitous or misleading. It is true that Dom Egas did not carry out the Virgin's instructions to the letter, for when she told him to dig, it is our understanding that she meant with his own hands, and what did he do, he ordered others to dig, the serfs working the land most likely, for even at that time these social inequalities existed. Let us be grateful that the Virgin is not easily offended, otherwise she might have shrivelled up little Afonso's legs once more, because just as there are miracles that do good, some miracles have proved to be harmful, as those wretched pigs in Holy Scripture can testify, for they threw themselves over the precipice when Sweet Jesus put the demons that had been plaguing the possessed man into their bodies, whereby these innocent animals suffered martyrdom, and they alone, for much greater was the downfall of the rebellious angels who were immediately turned into devils when they rebelled, and as far as we know, not one of them died, which makes it difficult to pardon the improvidence of Our Lord God, who carelessly missed the opportunity of putting an end to this unfortunate race once and for all, wise is the proverb that cautions, he who spares his enemy, will perish at his hands, let us hope that God will not have cause to repent one day when it is much too late. Nevertheless, if at that fatal moment he should have time to remember his past life, let us hope His spirit will be enlightened and He will understand that He should have spared all of us, vulnerable pigs and humans, those vices, sins and feelings of discontent which are, as the saying goes, the work and mark of Satan. Between the hammer and the anvil we are a red-hot iron, which has been beaten so much that the heat is extinguished.
For the present, we have had enough of sacred history. We do want to know, however, who wrote the tale about the beautiful awakening of the muezzin at dawn in Lisbon, with so many factual details that it sounds like the testimony of some eyewitness here in our presence, or, at least, the ingenious use of some contemporary document, not necessarily relevant to Lisbon, because, for the purpose, one would only need a city, a river and a clear morning, the most banal of compositions, as we know. The reply, surprisingly enough, is that no one wrote it, and despite appearances, it is not written, the whole thing was nothing more than vague thoughts in the proof- reader's mind as he was reading and correcting what he had surreptitiously missed in the first and second proofs. The proof-reader has this remarkable flair for splitting his personality, he inserts a
The first dubious point, according to the inverse order of the narrative, is that fanciful idea that there existed on the parapets of the verandahs of minarets, marks in the stone which, probably in the form of arrows, pointed in the direction of Mecca. However advanced at that time the geographical and surveying skills of the Arabs and other Moors, it is most unlikely that they knew how to determine with the accuracy insinuated, the position of a Kaaba on the surface of the planet, where there is certainly no lack of stones, some more sacred than others. All these things, whether they be reverences, genuflections or upward and downward glances, are performed by way of approximation, upon sensing, if we may be allowed this expression, that what really matters is that God and Allah can read into hearts and do not take offence when, out of ignorance, we turn away, and when we speak of ignorance it can be as much ours as theirs, for they are not always to be found where they promised to be. The proof-reader belongs to that age when a man was taught to trust and firmly believe in road-signs, therefore, do not be surprised that he should have fallen into this anachronistic temptation, perhaps driven by sudden compassion, bearing in mind the muezzin's blindness. It is well known that, no matter the quality of the cloth, knots are inevitable, some even claim that the better the cloth the more knots there are likely to be, and that where there is one knot there are bound to be two, and there we have the second error, and this time much more serious, because it would lead the unsuspecting reader, had it been written, but fortunately it never was, to accept the description of the muezzin's actions after waking up, as being correct and in accordance with the Moslem way of life. This is wrong, we insist, inasmuch as the muezzin, the term preferred by the historian, did not carry out the ritual ablutions before summoning the faithful to prayer, consequently finding himself in a state of impurity, a most improbable situation if we consider how close we still are in time to the early origins of Islam, a little over four centuries, in the cradle, as it were. Later on there will be much laxness, no strict observation of fasting, spurious interpretations of the rules that seem reasonably clear, the problem being that there is nothing that tires people more than the strict observance of precepts, before the flesh submits the spirit has already weakened, but no one takes the spirit to task, it is the poor flesh they revile, insult and censure. Even in these days of total faith, the muezzin would be the lowest of men if he were to dare climb the minaret without having purified his soul and having first washed his hands, and so he is declared innocent of the crime attributed to him by the unpardonable flippancy of the proof- reader. Despite the professional competence with which we hear him express himself during the conversation with the historian, it is time to introduce the first hint of doubt about the consequences of the trust invested in him by the author of