climb up to Santarem when the sun was just coming up and spent all morning and part of the afternoon at the market. We did quite well, but still didn't manage to sell all the piglets. My uncle decided that we should return home via the low hills that rise up along that part of the Tejo, I can't remember why now, if, as seems unlikely, my uncle bothered to give me a reason. But it was thanks to that whim of his, that I encountered my first Roman road.
The rain is pouring down, the wind is shaking the leafless trees, and from times past comes an image, that of a tall, thin man, an old man, I realize, now that he draws nearer along the sodden track. He is carrying a crook over his shoulder and wears an ancient, muddy cape from which drip all the rains of heaven. Before him go the pigs, heads down, snouts to the ground. The man approaching, blurred amongst the teeming rain, is my grandfather. He looks weary. He bears on his back seventy years of a hard life full of privations and ignorance. And yet he is a wise man, taciturn, one who opens his mouth to speak only when necessary. Indeed, he speaks so little that we all fall silent to hear him when a kind of warning light illumines his face. He has a strange way of gazing into the distance, even if the distance is only the wall in front of him. His face, fixed but expressive, seems to have been carved out by an adze, and his small, sharp eyes shine sometimes as if something he had long been pondering had finally been understood. He is a man like many others on this earth, in this world, perhaps an Einstein crushed beneath a mountain of impossibilities, a philosopher, a great illiterate writer. Something he could never be. I remember those warm summer nights, when we slept under the big fig tree, I can hear him talking about the life he's led, about the Milky Way, or the Road to Santiago as we villagers still called it, that glowed above our heads, about the livestock he reared, about stories and legends from his remote childhood. We would fall asleep late, well wrapped up in our blankets against the dawn chill. But the image I can't shake off at this melancholy hour is of that old man advancing beneath the rain, stubborn, silent, like someone fulfilling a destiny nothing can change, except death. This old man, whom I can almost touch with my hand, doesn't know how he will die. He doesn'tyet know that a few days before his final day, he will have a presentiment that the end has come and will go from tree to tree in his garden, embracing their trunks and saying goodbye to them, to their friendly shade, to the fruits he will never eat again. Because the great shadow will have arrived, until memory brings him back to life and finds him walking along that sodden path or lying beneath the dome of the sky and the eternally questioning stars. What word will he utter then?
There you were, Grandma, sitting on the sill outside your house, open to the vast, starry night, to the sky of which you knew nothing and through which you would never travel, to the silence of the fields and the shadowy trees, and you said, with all the serenity of your ninety years and the fire of an adolescence never lost: 'The world is so beautiful, it makes me sad to think I have to die.' In those exact words. I was there.
Among the newborn piglets there would be the occasional weakling that would inevitably suffer with the night cold, especially in winter, which could prove fatal. However, as far as I know, no such piglet ever died. Every night, my grandfather and grandmother would go to the sty to find the weakest of the piglets, wash their feet and legs and lay them down in their own bed. They would sleep there together, beneath the same blankets and the same sheets, with my grandmother on one side of the bed and my grandfather on the other, and between them, three or four piglets who must have thought they were in heaven.
The yard was divided into two parts that were different in shape and size. You could get to the first-the smaller one, which was more or less square-by the two stone steps outside the kitchen door or through a gate that opened directly onto the street and whose main purpose was in fact to let the pigs through, when, at the first light of dawn, my grandfather went out with them or when, almost at sunset, he brought them home again. We used it as well, of course, but for the animals it was the only way in and out. In that part of the yard, under a lean-to that always seemed to me to be on the point of collapse, were the pigsties, about four or five, where the sows lay, their teats exposed, suckling their young, and where they would sleep all night and as much of the day as the piglets would let them. All you had to do was open the doors of the pigsties for each sow to enter the appropriate one, taking her respective litter with her. I can't remember them ever once making a mistake, but it was not unknown for one or more of the piglets, blind with impatience, to go through the wrong door. They didn't stay there long. Incredible though it must seem to anyone who has never seen such things or heard tell of them, the sow knew each piglet from the way it sucked at the teat, and so she would use her snout to eject any interlopers. It would have made more of an impact had she bitten them, but I never saw that happen. The poor piglet had discovered, too late, that this was not his mother and he would squeal in distress for someone to help him. My grandfather or my grandmother would say to me: 'Zezito, go and sort him out, will you?' And I, an advanced student in matters of pig-breeding, would grab the intruder by one of its back legs, supporting it under the belly with my other hand, and take it back to its home sweet home, to the peace of hearing its real mother grunt with pleasure because the prodigal had returned. And how did I know which sty the stray belonged to? Nothing could be simpler. Each piglet had had a small amount of hair shaved off its body, one stripe for the first sty, two stripes for the second and so on. (Far more complex was the system of signs used by my grandmother to work out how much money she was spending at the grocer's, and I never knew her to be so much as a centavo out. In a notebook, she would draw circles with a cross inside them, circles with no cross, crosses outside the circles, dashes that she called 'sticks,' and other symbols I cannot now recall. She would sometimes compare her own accounts with the list presented to her by the shopkeeper, Vieira, and often came out best. I will never forgive myself for not having asked her if I could have one of those notebooks for myself, for it would be documentary, even scientific proof that my grandmother Josefa had reinvented arithmetic, not that there's anything extraordinary or unusual about that in a family like mine, when one recalls that Jose Dinis solved the historic problem of squaring the circle when he was not yet ten years old.) Apart from the sties and the troughs where the pigs could enjoy their swill, sometimes enriched with a couple of handfuls of corn flour, there was also a henhouse, a rabbit hutch and a stable for the donkey. However hard you may try, there is never much to say about a henhouse, you simply hope that the chickens who live there get along well together and with the cockerel who covers them, that they produce eggs to sell, eggs that hatch to produce chicks, and eggs to eat at table on special occasions. My grandparents' henhouse was no exception, it had the same breeds any other henhouse would have, although doubtless fewer than most of them as regards the number of chickens and eggs produced. The rabbit hutch, on the other hand, does have a story. Uncle Carlos would visit it now and then, always at dead of night, in the brief intervals when he wasn't in the village lock-up in the square or hiding somewhere or other on suspicion of theft, especially of copper wire from telegraph poles, a highly prized commodity that he positively craved. He wasn't a bad man, he just drank too much and had difficulty in distinguishing what was his from what was other people's. I don't think he preferred rabbit meat to chicken, it was simply that the rabbits were, shall we say, dumb, a couple of squeals and that was that, they didn't protest when grabbed by the ears and stuffed inside a sack, whereas the chickens were capable of kicking up a row that would wake the whole neighborhood. My grandmother always got up when the still distant dawn was just a glimmer, and when she rose from her bed, she could consider herself very lucky indeed if Carlos Melrinho, as a filial souvenir of his latest nocturnal foray, had been charitable enough to leave her a rabbit or two. Unforgivable some will say, but it pays to know that not everything is as nice as pie even in the lives of the best families. Anyway, there are plenty of people out there who steal much more than copper wire and rabbits and still manage to pass themselves off as honest folk in the eyes of the world. In those times and in those places, things were what they appeared to be. Perhaps the one exception was the aforementioned stable for the donkey. The name came from a time when it was, indeed, home to a female donkey I never knew. Despite the passing years, the name stayed, and just so that there should be no doubt about its beginnings, the hut still contained the old manger, as if the donkey's ghost were doomed to return each night to gorge on the memory of beans and straw. And apart from the bread oven that stood to one side of the kitchen door, the inventory of this part of the yard will be complete with the mention of the other pigsty, larger than those in which the sows and their litters would fit, although only just. This larger sty was home to the pig that had been chosen to be fattened up-although this didn't happen every year-an ungrateful beast whose bedding I, pitchfork in hand, would change at least once a week, removing the stinking straw, filthy with piss and shit, and replacing it with new straw that would take less than an hour to lose its natural freshness. One day, as I was engaged on this task, it began to rain, first a few fat, sparse drops, then hard and insistently. I thought it best to take shelter in the donkey's stable, but my grandfather's voice brought me up short: 'Finish what you've started. Rain only makes you
