big enough to put your hand through and, even more extraordinary, it had been like that for years and years. It seemed as if it must have been old already when it was hung on its hinges. Only later, once my grandfather Jeronimo had died (he departed this life in 1948), did it benefit from a few repairs or, rather, a little patching up. I don't think it was ever replaced though. It was to this most humble of homes that my grandparents came to live after they were married, she-or so people said at the time-the prettiest girl in Azinhaga and he, the foundling from the poorhouse in Santarem, whom people called pau-preto -'blackwood'-because of his dark skin. And there they would live for ever. My grandmother told me that on their wedding night, Grandfather Jeronimo had sat outside the front door, armed with a big stick, waiting for the jealous rivals who had sworn to come and throw stones at the roof. No one came, though, and all night (if you'll allow me to give free rein to my imagination) the moon traveled across the sky, while my grandmother, lying in bed, eyes open, waited for her husband. And it was daylight before they could embrace.
The time has come to speak of the celebrated novel Maria, the Fairy of the Forest, which brought tears to the eyes of so many families in working-class areas of Lisbon in the 1920s. It was published, I believe, by Edicoes Romano Torres and distributed in weekly installments or sixteen-page pamphlets, which were delivered on the same day each week to subscribers' homes. We, too, received it in our top-floor apartment in 57 Rua dos Cavaleiros, but, at that point, apart from a dim memory of tracing the letters of the alphabet on a slate, which was not that helpful, my initiation into the delicate art of deciphering hieroglyphics had not yet begun. The person charged with reading to us out loud, for my mother's and my edification, for we were both of us illiterate-as I would continue to be for some time and as my mother would remain for the rest of her life-was Felix's mother, whose name, however hard I try, I cannot recall. The three of us, reader and listeners, would sit on the inevitable low benches and allow ourselves to be carried on the wings of the word to that world so different from ours. I remember that among the many misfortunes which, over the weeks, rained down upon the head of poor Maria, a victim of the hatred and envy of a wicked and very powerful female rival, there was one episode that would remain forever engraved on my memory. During one of her many adventures, which I have long since forgotten and which it would, besides, be of no interest to detail here, Maria had been imprisoned in the gloomy depths of her mortal enemy's castle, and her enemy-as if to confirm what we, the esteemed readers, already knew from previous episodes, namely, that she had been a nasty piece of work from the cradle up-was taking advantage of the fact that poor Maria was highly gifted in the arts of embroidery and other such feminine crafts and forcing her, under threat of the worst punishments known and unknown, to embroider and sew. She was, as you see, not only evil, but exploitative too. Now, among the many beautiful pieces that Maria had produced during the time of her imprisonment was a magnificent negligee, which the chatelaine had decided to reserve for her own use. Then, in one of those extraordinary coincidences that only occur in novels and without whose aid no novelist would ever bother to write one, the elegant gentleman who loved Maria and whose feelings were tenderly reciprocated came to visit that very castle, never imagining that his beloved was imprisoned there in a dungeon where she was ruining her white fingers by embroidering day and night. The chatelaine, who had long had her eye on him-he being the reason for the bitter rivalry between her and Maria-resolved to seduce him that very night. No sooner said than done. At dead of night, she slipped surreptitiously into her guest's bedroom, having donned said negligee and made herself provocative and perfumed enough to turn the heads of all the saints in the heavenly court, let alone an energetic gentleman in the prime of life, however in love he might be with the pure and long- suffering Maria. Indeed, as he lay in the arms of the immoral creature who had entered his bed, as he bent over the round, intoxicating breasts clearly evident beneath the lace, just as he was about to surrender and fall into the seductive abyss, just when the perfidious creature was about to cry victory, the gentleman recoiled as if he had been bitten by the asp hidden between Cleopatra's breasts, and, grasping the embroidery, cried out: 'Maria! Maria!' What could have happened? I know this will be hard to believe, but this is what the author wrote. In her prison, much as a shipwreck victim throws a bottle into the water in the hope that his message will be picked up by some saving hand, Maria had embroidered a cry for help on the negligee, complete with her name and the place where she was imprisoned. Saved from ignominy at the very last moment, the gentleman violently repelled the lubricious lady and raced off to rescue from captivity his virginal and adored Maria. It must have been around then that we moved to RuaFernao Lopes, which is why The Fairy of the Forest had to finish there, because the subscription had been paid for by Felix's mother. We benefited from that weekly free reading, which was no small thing, especially as far as I was concerned, for even though I was very young at the time, I never forgot that dramatic and troubling episode.
It did not take me long to learn to read. Thanks to the training I had begun to receive in my first school, in Rua Martens Ferrao, of which I remember only the entrance and the dark stair, I moved on, almost seamlessly, to the regular study of advanced Portuguese in the form of a newspaper, the Diario de Noticias, which my father brought home with him every day and which I presume was given to him by a friend, a particularly thriving news-vendor perhaps or a tobacconist. I very much doubt that he would have bought it, for the very pertinent reason that we didn't have enough money to spend on such luxuries. To give you a clear idea of the situation, I need say only that for years, with absolute regularity, my mother used to pawn the blankets as soon as winter was over, only to retrieve them once the cold weather began to bite again and she had saved enough to pay back the monthly interest and the amount of the loan. Obviously I couldn't read that august daily newspaper fluently, but one thing was clear to me: the articles in the paper were written using the same characters (although we called them letters, not characters) whose names, functions and mutual relationships I was learning about in school. And so I was reading even before I could spell properly, even though I couldn't necessarily understand what I was reading. Being able to identify a word I knew was like finding a signpost on the road telling me I was on the right path, heading in the right direction. And so it was, in this rather unusual way, Diario by Diario, month by month, pretending not to hear the jokey comments made by the adults in the house, who were amused by the way I would stare at the newspaper as if at a wall, that my moment to astonish them finally came, when, one day, nervous but triumphant, I read out loud, in one go, without hesitation, several consecutive lines of print. I couldn't understand everything I was reading, but that didn't matter. Apart from my father and mother, the other adults present, once so skeptical and now so impressed, were the Baratas. In that house without books, it so happened that there was one fat book, bound, I believe, in sky blue, and which was entitled The Warbler of the Windmill, whose author, if my memory serves me right, was Emile de Richebourg a name that does not feature prominently in any histories of French literature, however detailed, if, indeed, it appears at all, and yet he was a master of the art of using the word to move sensitive souls and arouse the passions. The owner of this literary gem, which appeared to have been originally published in serial form, was Conceicao Barata, who kept it like a treasure in a drawer in the dresser, wrapped in tissue paper and smelling of mothballs. This novel was to be my first great experience as a reader. I was still a long way from the municipal library in Palacio das Galveias, but my first step in that direction had been taken. And thanks to the fact that we and the Barata family lived together for a good two years, I had more than enough time to read to the end and start again. However, try how I might, I cannot, as I can with Maria, the Fairy of the Forest, remember a single passage from the book. Emile de Richebourg would be most offended by such a lack of respect, he who thought he had written his Warbler in indelible ink, but things did not stop there. Years later, I would discover, to my great surprise, that I had also read Moliere in that sixth-floor apartment in Rua Fernao Lopes. One day, my father came home with a book (I can't imagine where he got it from) which was neither more nor less than a Portuguese-French guide to conversation, with the pages divided into three columns, the first, on the left, in Portuguese, the second, in the middle, in French, and the third, alongside that, indicating how to pronounce the words in the second column. Among the various situations in which a Portuguese speaker might need the guide's help to communicate in French (a railway station, a hotel reception, an office hiring out carriages, a port, a tailor's shop, buying tickets for the theater, trying on a suit at the tailor's etc.) there suddenly appeared a dialogue between two men, one of whom seemed to be a teacher of sorts and the other some kind of pupil. I read it over and over because I so enjoyed the astonishment of the man who was unable to believe what the teacher was telling him, that he had been speaking prose since he was born. I knew nothing about Moliere (how could I?), but I made a grand entrance into his world when I had barely got beyond knowing my vowels. No doubt about it, I was a lucky boy.
