Small Memories

slip a hint of this healthy skepticism, the grown-ups tried to convince us that the supernatural not only existed, it existed right there in our house. Two of them-it must have been two, possibly my father and Antonio Barata-went out into the corridor and started pushing toy cars back and forth, from one end to the other, while the grown-ups who had stayed with us in the kitchen said: 'Can you hear? It's the angels.' Now I knew that corridor as well as if I had been born in it and had never noticed any angelic presence there when, for example, placing feet and hands on either wall, I would climb up until I could touch the ceiling with my head. I had never come across a single angel or seraph up there. Later on, when I was an adolescent, I tried to repeat that wall-climbing trick, but couldn't. My legs had grown longer, the joints in my ankles and knees less flexible. Ah, the weight of age…

Another memory (which I wrote about in Manual of Painting and Calligraphy) involves the troubling case of Aunt Emilia, who, as I said earlier, was an elderly lady, who wore her white hair in a bun at the back of her neck, a robust figure, very erect, with a naturally high color made still higher by too much drink, and who always seemed to me exceptionally clean and neat. When it was the season, she used to sell roast chestnuts outside the bar a little further down the street, on the corner of Rua Morais Soares and Rua dos Herois de Quionga, as well as other tidbits-boiled sweets, honey-and-almond bars, loose almonds, and strings of pine- nuts that we called necklaces-that she set out on the tray with folding legs that she used. She would sometimes drink too much wine and get drunk. One day, the other women in the house found her lying on her back on the floor of her room, with her legs spread and her skirt up, singing some song or other while she masturbated. I tried to see what was going on, but the women formed a barrier to block my view. I must have been at most nine years old. It was one of the first chapters in my elementary sexual education.

A third and no less edifying affair was the skill with which people at home deceived the Water Company. They would make a tiny hole in an exposed part of the lead pipe then tie a rag around it, leaving one end hanging down into a pot. The pot would slowly fill up, drop by drop, and because that water didn't pass through the meter, it didn't appear on the bill. When the decanting process was over, that is, when the pot was full, they would run the blade of a knife over the tiny hole, and under this slight pressure, the lead itself would conceal the crime. I don't know how long this went on for, but eventually, the pipe, after multiple piercings, would refuse to remain an accomplice to the fraud and begin spurting water from every orifice, old and new. Then the 'man from the Water Company' had to be summoned urgently. He came, looked, cut into the damaged section of pipe and, not wishing to reveal that he knew all about a trick that could hardly have been new to him, peered inside the pipe and said: 'Yep, it's rotten, all right.' He would solder on a new piece of pipe and leave. He must have been a kind man because he clearly didn't want to get us into trouble by reporting us to the Water Company. As far as I recall, none of the three heads of household was ever present on those occasions, which was just as well, because it wouldn't have been easy to explain how we dared commit such illegal acts with two policemen on the premises, one of whom, moreover, worked in the Criminal Investigation Department. Another hypothesis that might merit serious consideration is that the Water Company employee had already had a word with my father or with one of the other two men and was in on the plot. It could be.

I have little else to say about our time in Rua Herois de Quionga, just a few random memories of little importance: the cockroaches that scampered over me when I was sleeping on the floor; the way we used to eat soup, my mother and I, from the same plate, one on either side, taking turns to dip in our spoons; the morning it rained heavily and I refused to go to school, to my mother's fury and to my own even greater surprise that I would dare to miss classes when I wasn't ill and had no real reason for doing so; sitting at the windows that gave onto the long balcony at the back of the house, watching the raindrops trickling down the panes; looking through the imperfections in the glass at the distorted images these produced; the bread rolls bought from the bakery, still hot and delicious-smelling, and which we called ''sete e meios''-'seven-and-a-halfs,' and the more expensive vianinhas made from finer flour and that I only rarely had the sweet satisfaction of eating… I've always loved bread.

Contrary to what I said earlier, the Barata family did not first enter my life when we moved from Rua dos Cavaleiros to Rua Fernao Lopes. Thanks to some documents I had assumed lost, but which providentially turned up when I was searching for something else entirely, my disoriented memory has finally been able to fit together various disparate pieces of the puzzle and replace what was uncertain and doubtful with what was right and true. Here then, for the record, is the exact and definitive list of our frequent changes of residence: we started out in a place known as Quinta do Perna-de-Pau, in the Picheleira district of Lisbon, then moved to Rua E (which later became Rua Luis Monteiro) in Alto do Pina, and from there to Rua Sabino de Sousa, followed by Rua Carrilho Videira (that's where the Baratas appear for the first time), Rua dos Cavaleiros (without the Baratas), Rua Fernao Lopes (with the Baratas again), Rua Herois de Quionga (still with them), back to the same house in Rua Carrilho Videira (again with the Baratas), then to Rua Padre Sena Freitas (with only Antonio Barata and Conceicao), and finally to Rua Carlos Ribeiro (independent at last). Ten homes in just under ten years, and I don't think it was because we couldn't pay the rent. As you see, I was quite right when I said that we had lived in Rua Carrilho Videira twice, but I made a serious miscalculation when, forgetting a few basic matters of sexual physiology and hormonal development, I added that I was eleven at the time of that encounter with Domitilia. I got that completely wrong. In fact, I could only have been six at the time and she would have been about eight. If I had been eleven, and tall for my age too, she would have been thirteen, and in that case the whole affair would have been much more serious and the punishment for the crime rather more than a couple of slaps on the bottom. Anyway, now that I've sorted that out and the weight of error has been lifted from my conscience, I can continue.

In those days, when people couldn't afford to pay for a moving van, they would employ mocos- de-fretes -'porters'-whose only equipment was a couple of poles, some rope and a shoulder pad apiece to bear the weight. And, of course, a great deal of stamina. But they didn't transport the smaller things, which is why my mother, over the years (I'm not imagining this, I saw it with my own eyes), had to trudge miles back and forth between the different houses, carrying baskets and bundles on her head, or balanced on her hip if that was easier. Perhaps on one such occasion she would have recalled the day when, returning from the village fountain all confused and excited because my father had just asked her if they could be sweethearts, she forgot that she was carrying a water jug on her head and neglected to stoop down when going into the house. The jug struck the lintel and fell to the floor. Shards and water everywhere, my grandmother telling her off, then perhaps laughing when she found out the cause of the accident. You might say that my life started there too, with a broken water jug.

My mother arrived in Lisbon with us children in the spring of 1924. In December of that same year, Francisco died. He was four years old when bronchial pneumonia carried him off. He was buried on Christmas Eve. I don't really believe in so-called false memories, I think the difference between those and the memories we consider certain and solid is merely a question of confidence, the confidence that we place in the incorrigible vagueness we call certainty. Is the one memory I have of Francisco false? Perhaps, but I have spent the last eighty-three years believing it to be true. We are in a cellar in Rua E, in Alto do Pina, there is a chest of drawers underneath a horizontal opening in the wall, long and narrow, more of a slit than a window, level with the pavement outside (I can see people's legs through what must be a curtain), and the bottom two drawers are open, with the lower one pulled furthest out to form a step with the one above. It's the summer or perhaps the autumn of the year in which Francisco is going to die. At that moment (the photo is there for all to see), he is a happy, sturdy, perfect little boy, who, it would seem, cannot wait for his body to grow and for his arms to be long enough to reach something on top of the chest of drawers. That's all I can remember. Maybe my mother arrived to put a stop to Francisco's mountaineering ambitions, I don't know. I don't even know if she was at home, or if she had gone to scrub the steps of some neighboring building. If she had to do that kind of work later on, out of necessity, when I was already grown up enough to understand what was happening, it's more than likely that she was doing it then, when the need was even greater. As Francisco's brother, I would have been unable to help the daring mountaineer had he fallen. I must have been sitting on the floor, pacifier in my mouth, little more than eighteen months old, concerned, without even realizing that I was, with recording what I was seeing in some part of my small brain so that, a whole lifetime later, I could describe it to you, dear reader. That, then, is my earliest memory. And it may well be false.

There is nothing false about what comes next however. The grief and the tears, could they be summoned up