it's hard, not to say impossible, for me to place certain events in time, but I'm sure that the next incident I'm going to tell you about took place before the war in Spain. A very popular game at the time among the lower classes, one that anyone could make at home (I had hardly any toys, and those I had were made of tin and had been bought in the street from itinerant sellers), consisted of a small rectangular board with twenty-two nails hammered into it, eleven on each side, distributed much as footballers used to be before the emergence of modern tactics, that is, five in front, the forwards, three behind them, the midfielders, also known as halves, two others, known as defenders or backs, and finally the goalkeeper. You could play the game using a marble or, better still, a ball bearing, which you guided in between the nails with a small spatula, then pushed it between two posts (because there were goalposts too) and thus scored a goal. People, both children and grown-ups, had enormous fun with these very meager materials, and hard-fought contests and championships were fought. Seen from this distance, it seems, and perhaps very briefly was, a golden age. Not that this was always the case, as you will see. One day, my father and I were on the rear balcony playing (I recall that families with few possessions spent most of their time at the back of the house, mainly in the kitchen), I was sitting on the ground and he on a small wooden bench of the kind that was commonplace then and considered indispensable, especially to the women of the household, who sat there to do their sewing. Standing behind me, watching the game, was Antonio Barata. My father was not a man to let his son beat him and so, implacably, and taking advantage of my limited skill, he scored goal after goal. Barata, as an officer in the Criminal Investigation Department, must have had plenty of training in different ways of putting psychological pressure on the detainees in his care, but clearly thought it a good idea to use that occasion to get in a little extra practice. He kept nudging me with his foot from behind and saying: 'You're losing, you're losing.' The boy I was at the time put up for as long as he could with the father who kept winning and the neighbor who kept taunting him, but eventually, in desperation, he struck Barata on the foot (well, 'struck' is too strong a word to describe a blow dealt by a mere child) and at the same time vented his frustration by using the few words that could be spoken in such circumstances without offending anyone: 'Stop it!' Barely were the words out of his mouth, however, than his all-conquering father slapped him twice across the face, so hard that the blow sent him rolling across the concrete floor of the balcony. After all, he had shown disrespect for an adult. Neither father nor neighbor, both of whom were policemen and honest guardians of public order, ever understood that
From that same balcony, some time later, I courted a girl called Deolinda, who was about three or four years older than me, and who lived in a building in a street that ran parallel to ours, Travessa do Calado, and the back of which looked out onto our house. I should make it clear that this was never a courtship proper, in the sense of my asking for her hand and making more or less lasting promises. ('Would you like to go out with me?' 'Certainly, if your intentions are honorable.') We just looked and waved at each other and talked from balcony to balcony over the intervening yards and washing lines, but we never made any serious commitment. I may have been shy and awkward by nature, but on the occasions when I visited her house (I seem to recall she lived with her grandparents), I went there ready for anything or everything. Both anything and everything turned out to be nothing. She was very pretty, with a small round face, but, to my dismay, had very bad teeth, and, besides, she must have thought me far too young for her to entrust her tender feelings to me. She was amusing herself a little for lack of any better suitor, although, unless I have been much mistaken all these years, I think she regretted that the age difference was so marked. In the end, I gave up the enterprise. Besides, her surname was Bacalhau-salt cod-and I, apparently already sensitive to the sounds and meanings of words, didn't want my wife to go through life burdened with a name like Deolinda Bacalhau Saramago.
I have explained elsewhere how and why I acquired the name of Saramago. How Saramago was not a family name from my father's side, but the nickname-meaning 'wild radish'-by which the family was known in the village. How when my father went to the registry office in Golega to declare the birth of his second son, the clerk (who was called Silvino) was drunk (although my father always claimed Silvino acted out of pure spite) and he, under the influence and without anyone noticing this onomastic deception, decided to add Saramago to the plain Jose de Sousa that my father intended me to be. And, as it turned out, thanks to what was clearly divine intervention, on the part, that is, of Bacchus, the god of wine and of those who drink too much of it, I later had no need to invent a pseudonym with which to sign my books. I was very lucky indeed not to have been born into one of the families in Azinhaga, which, at the time and for many years afterward, had to put up with far more scurrilous nicknames- Pichatada, Curroto and Caralhana-all of which referred to various parts of the male anatomy, namely cock, bum and balls. My family was unaware that I had entered life marked by the name of Saramago until I was seven, for it was only when they had to present my birth certificate in order to enroll me in primary school that the raw truth surfaced from the bureaucratic depths, to the great indignation of my father, who, since moving to Lisbon, had grown to dislike the nickname. The worst of it was that, since-as was apparent from his papers-he was called plain Jose de Sousa, the Law, ever strict and suspicious, wanted to know why it was that his son was called Jose de Sousa Saramago. Feeling intimidated and wanting to make sure that everything was right and proper, my father had no alternative but to reregister himself under the name of Jose de Sousa Saramago. This must, I imagine, be the only case in the whole history of humanity of a son giving his name to his father. Not that it helped us or humanity very much, because my father, steadfast in his antipathies, always insisted on being called plain Sousa.
One day, a neighbor of ours-well, I call him neighbor not because we knew him, but because he lived in the same street (which, at the time, was still Rua Padre Sena Freitas)-went mad. He was a young man in his twenties who was said to have lost his wits by reading and studying too much. Just like Don Quixote. I remember one attack he had, the only one we actually witnessed, for afterward we heard nothing more of him and presumed that he had been interned in Rilhafoles, the local insane asylum. Anyway, on that day, we-my mother, Conceicao and I- heard terrible, heartrending cries coming from outside and ran to the window to find out what was going on. He lived on the top floor of a much taller building than ours, on the other side of the road and slightly to the right of the house we lived in, on the corner of Rua Cesario Verde. We saw him appear at the window again and again, as if he were intending to throw himself out, the proof of which was that two hands immediately appeared behind him, tugging at him, while he struggled and cried out over and over, in the most pitiful way: 'Ay, Santo Hilario! Ay, Santo Hilario!' Why he was calling on Santo Hilario we never found out. Shortly afterward, an ambulance arrived, he was bundled inside and never came back, not at least during the time we lived there.
By then, I was already studying at technical college, the Escola Industrial de Afonso Domingues, in Xabregas, after two short years at secondary school, the Liceu Gil Vicente, which in those days was part of the Sao Vicente de Fora monastery. Here follows a chronology of my brief career as a student: I entered secondary school in 1933, when I was still only ten (classes started in October and my birthday falls in November), I was there during the school terms of 1933?1934 and 1934?1935, and I left to go to the technical college when I was comingup to thirteen. Of course, since technical subjects like Trade Skills, Mechanics and Mechanical Design form no part of the normal secondary school curriculum, I was in the first year for those subjects and the second year for everything else. So the sequence of my career there was as follows: '35?'36, second and first year; '36?'37, third and second; '37?'38, fourth and third, '38?'39, fifth and fourth, '39?'40, fifth. The excursion to Sameiro-the one where I rode the horse that ignored me when I got off-took place at the end of '38?'39 school year, just before the exams, and during that trip, I had the misfortune to twist my left foot jumping over something, cracking my heel bone in the process. As a result, I had to spend more than a month with a plaster cast up to my knee. There was a curved metal bar on the bottom of the cast, the ends of which were embedded in the plaster, and this was called a stirrup. That plaster boot was elaborately decorated with signatures, drawings and doodles by my fellow students. One of them suggested using it as a crib in the math exam: 'Just pull up your trouser leg and Bob's your uncle.' I managed to pass the exam without following his advice.
I think the time has come for me to tell you about another episode related to my arrival in the world. As if the delicate identity problem provoked by my surname wasn't enough, there was a further problem with the date of my birth. I was born on November 16, 1922, at two o'clock in the afternoon, and not on November 18 th as the register of births, marriages and deaths would have it. My father was working away from home at the time and so
