wet, it doesn't break your bones.' He was right. I took up my pitchfork again and unhurriedly, patiently, like a good workman, completed the task, drenched but happy.
A rough wattle-and-daub fence separated the two parts of the yard, with the inevitable gate to allow access to both. Immediately to the left stood the enormous stack of straw, with its typically pyramidal shape, a rectangular base narrowing toward the top, the clandestine fruit of my grandmother's dawn raids on the stubble in the wheat fields-carried out behind the keepers' backs-along with some of the other village women, all armed with a rake, a piece of cloth and some string. Next to it, so close that its branches touched the topmost part, was the big fig tree, or, quite simply, The Fig Tree, because although there was another one, it never grew very large, either because it wasn't in its nature to do so or out of respect for its veteran companion. There was also a venerable olive tree whose twisted trunk propped up the fence separating the two sections. Because of the brambles surrounding it and the hawthorn that stood menacing guard over it, that tree was the only one near my grandparents' house that I never climbed. There were a few more trees, although not that many, a couple of blackthorns that did the best they could, a rather miserly pomegranate, a few quince trees whose fruit you could smell ten paces away, a laurel and another olive tree or two. What little land remained was used for growing vegetables, especially kale, which sprouted all year round and therefore constituted the main ingredient in the local cuisine-boiled kale and haricot beans served with a little olive oil, and now and then, a plate of breadcrumbs made from cornbread fried in garlic with the main course served on top. The yard on this side was a narrow strip of land about one hundred and sixty to one hundred and seventy feet long, bordering an olive grove belonging to a man called Salvador and, on the other side, separating it from the street, grew a thick hedge made of reeds, brambles, the inevitable agaves and the occasional elder. From beneath that hedge I picked up, on two or three occasions, the dried skins that snakes had sloughed off when they no longer fitted them. The skins were good for some disease that afflicted pigs. Toward the end of that strip of land, it narrowed to a point, like the tail of a turtle. That was where my grandmother and I would go to do our business when we got caught short and didn't have time to go farther into the olive grove. (My grandfather had to resolve the matter wherever he happened to be with the pigs.) And the reader should not be surprised by that euphemistic turn of phrase 'do our business.' It was the law of nature. Even Adam and Eve had to do their business in some corner of paradise.
The chest was decorated with blue oil paint, a somewhat drab color like that of a rather grubby sky. It was in the outside room, next to the street door, on the right as you came in. It was big or, rather, enormous, it was the bean chest. My grandmother warned me not to open it because the dust from the beans caused terrible itching, covering the skin of anyone unwise enough to open the chest with
I was not at the time, nor am I now, a great lover of that pruriginous legume, and so lifting the portentous lid of the chest just to peer in at some beans that were identical to other beans I could look at and handle without risk was not something that aroused my ten-year-old's curiosity, which was occupied with adventures of quite another caliber, such as exploring the banks of the Almonda and the Tejo or the labyrinthine tangle of undergrowth in Paul do Boquilobo. However, my grandfather's gentle irony, so often repeated, gradually wore away at my sensibility and provoked my young pride, so that one day, when I was alone in the house, I went over to the chest and, with a great effort, lifted the heavy lid as high as I could and then pushed it so that it fell with a thump against the whitewashed wall. There lay the beans. A little of the very fine dust veiling their beige skins had been stirred up with the sudden current of air and began to settle on my hands and forearms, where the promised skin eruption and itching would take only seconds to appear. However, as if the evolving state of my hands were not sufficient proof for my stubborn self, I plunged them in among the malignant beans, making the beans sift and rattle, and creating, this time, a veritable cloud of dust. This would be the moment to describe the ensuing itchy consequences if I did not have another tale to tell. As I moved round the chest toward one corner in order more easily to reach the upper edge of the lid and close it, I noticed that the lid itself was lined with newspaper. My grandparents' house was not a house of readers, for as I have said more than once, both were illiterate. If ever an uncle of mine came to stay, on leave from his military service for example, he would, if he could read at all, only be capable of deciphering the very largest and crudest of letters. The presence of those pages from
I was ten, but I could already read fluently and understand perfectly everything I read, and considering my tender age, I didn't make too many spelling mistakes either, not that this, at the time, was considered something deserving of a medal. You will understand, then, that despite the almost unbearable itching that cried out for the cool balsam of a bowl of cold water or a little vinegar, I seized the opportunity to plunge into the varied bit of reading that chance had placed in my path. It was the summer of 1933, and I was ten years old, and of all the news items published in
Around this time (perhaps still in 1933 or possibly 1934, if I'm not getting my dates mixed up) as I was walking down Rua da Graca, on my accustomed route between Penha de Franca, where I was living, and Sao Vicente, where I went to school, I saw, hanging on the door of a tobacconist's shop, right opposite the old Royal Cine, a newspaper whose front page bore a perfect drawing of a hand reaching out to grab something. Underneath were the words: 'An iron hand in a velvet glove.' The newspaper in question was the satirical weekly
Don't ask me why, but those two images have stayed with me all my life-that of Dollfuss smiling as he watched the troops march past, when he had possibly, who knows, already been condemned to death by Hitler, and Salazar's iron hand concealed beneath a soft, velvet glove of hypocrisy. We often forget what we would like to remember, and yet certain images, words, flashes, illuminations repeatedly, obsessively return to us from the past at the slightest stimulus, and there's no explanation for that; we don't summon them up, they are simply there. And it is those memories that tell me that although, at the time, I was basing myself more on intuition than, of course, on any real knowledge of the facts, Hitler, Mussolini and Salazar were, in my view, all chips off the same block, first cousins, each with the same iron hand, the only difference being the thickness of the velvet and how tightly the hand could squeeze.
When the Spanish Civil War broke out, I had already moved from secondary school at the Liceu Gil Vicente to technical college at the Escola Industrial de Afonso Domingues, in Xabregas, and I was doing my best to learn, as well as Portuguese, mathematics, physics, chemistry, mechanical design, mechanics and history, a little French and literature (it amazes me to think that in those days they taught French and literature at a technical school) and, finally, which was the real reason I was there, to penetrate, little by little, into the mysteries of the profession of general mechanic. I read in the press that those on one side in the Spanish Civil War were known as reds and
