not only was he unable to be present at his son's birth, the earliest he could get back was shortly after December 16th, probably the 17th, which was a Sunday. Then, and I imagine now as well, a child's birth had to be registered within thirty days or you had to pay a fine. In those patriarchal times, and given that it was a legitimate birth, it would never have occurred to anyone that my mother or some other relative could go to the registry office, and given that the father of a child was officially considered to be the newborn's sole progenitor (on my enrollment card for secondary school, only my father's name appears, not my mother's), we waited for his return, and so as not to have to cough up for the fine (any amount, however small, would have been too much for the family's pocket), two days were added to my actual date of birth, and the problem was solved. Life in Azinhaga being what it was, painful and difficult, men would often go away to work for weeks on end, which is why I couldn't have been the first or the last example of such minor deceits. When I die, I will be two days older than the birth date on my identity card, but I hope no one will notice.
Living to our right on the same floor (we had not yet left Rua Padre Sena Freitas) was a family comprising a couple and their young son. The husband worked as a painter at the Viuva Lamego ceramics factory in Largo do Intendente. The wife was Spanish, although I don't know from which part of Spain, and her name was Carmen, and their son, a fair-haired little boy, would have been about three (that's how I still remember him, as if he had never grown during all the time we lived there). We were good friends, the husband and I, which must seem surprising, given that he was an adult, practicing a profession unusual in my tiny world, and I was just an awkward adolescent, full of doubts and certainties, although unaware of either. His surname was Chaves, I can't remember his first name or perhaps I never knew it, and so for me he was always and only Senhor Chaves. To keep ahead of his work or possibly to earn extra money, he would often work late at home, and that was when I used to visit him. I would knock on the door, his wife would open it-she was always very brusque and barely took any notice of me-and I would go through to the little dining room where there stood, in one corner, lit by a reading lamp, the potter's wheel at which he worked. The high stool on which I always sat was there waiting for me. I used to enjoy watching him painting the already glazed ceramics with an almost gray paint which, after firing, would become the familiar blue of that particular type of pottery. And as the flowers, volutes, arabesques and scrolls flowed from his brushes we would talk. I may have been young and with, as you can imagine, limited experience of life, but I sensed that this sensitive, refined man was lonely. Today, I'm sure of this. I continued to visit him even when my family moved to Rua Carlos Ribeiro, and one day, I took him a few lines of popular verse I had written and which he then transferred onto a little heart-shaped dish whose intended recipient was Ilda Reis, with whom I had just started going out. If my memory serves me right, that must have been my first 'poetic composition,' rather belated, it must be said, when you consider that I was almost eighteen or had already turned eighteen. Chaves was lavish with his praise and thought I should enter it in the jogos florais, as the delightful poetry contests much in vogue at the time were known and whose very innocence saved them from seeming ridiculous. The fruit of my poetic inspiration read thus: 'Careful, now, lest someone hear/ The secret I unfold:/ I give to you a china heart/ for my heart you already hold.' You must admit that I would have deserved, at the very least, second prize…
The couple did not appear to get on very well, and his unpleasant Spanish wife found everything about Portugal detestable. While he was patient and refined, discreet and measured in his speech, she was the guardia civil type, tall and surly and rather broad in the beam, with a way with words that pitilessly garbled the language of Camoes. That wouldn't have mattered so much if she hadn't been so aggressive. It was in their house that I first started listening to Radio Sevilla after the Spanish Civil War had begun. Oddly enough, given that she was Spanish, I never found out for certain which side they supported. I suspect, however, that Dona Carmen had sided with Franco from the start. Listening to Radio Sevilla, I got into a terrible mental twist from which it took me a long time to free myself. The Nationalist General Queipo de Llano used the station to make his propaganda broadcasts, of which, needless to say, I remember not a word. What did stick in my memory was the jingle that always followed and which went: 'If lovely colors make you sing, Revi paints are just the thing.' There would be nothing very special about this if it weren't for the fact that I had become convinced that it was General Queipo de Llano himself who recited this cheery advertisement as soon as his broadcast was over. A necessary addendum to the 'minor matter' of the Spanish Civil War. Forgive my frivolity. More serious was my throwing out with the rubbish, a few months later, the map of Spain in which I had been sticking pins to mark the advances and retreats of the armies of both sides. It goes without saying that my sole source of information was the censored Portuguese press, which, like Radio Seville, never reported a Republican victory.
Leandro wasn't the only one to suffer the occasional bout of dyslexia or whatever it was. For example, I insisted that the word sacerdote-'priest'-should be pronounced 'saquerdote,' but since, at the same time, I suspected that I must be wrong, if ever I had to say the word (given that it was such an 'erudite' word, this can't have happened very often and would happen even less today, when there are so few priests), I would always find a way of mumbling the word so that no one would have to correct me. I must have been the inventor of the so-called benefit of the doubt. After a while, I managed to resolve the difficulty by myself, and the word once again emerged as it should from my mouth. Another word I had problems with (these stories date from primary school days) was sacavenense. As well as meaning 'a native of the town of Sacavem,' which has now been swallowed up by the insatiable dragon that Lisbon has become, it was also the name of a football club that may or may not have survived the vicissitudes of time and the purgatories of the second and third divisions. And how did I pronounce it then? In a truly shocking way that scandalized all who heard me: 'sacanavense,' which incorporated into the innocent original the word sacana with its echoes of libertinism and masturbation. I can still recall my relief when I was finally able to transpose the ill-bred syllables.
I must return once again to Rua dos Cavaleiros. The back of our house gave onto Rua da Guia, once known as Rua Suja-Grub Street-that joined another famous street, Rua do CapelAo, which-accompanied inevitably by a guitar and several glasses of brandy-was always a fateful and unavoidable presence in fado songs and in any reminiscences about that first singer of fados, Maria Severa, and her fictional lover, the Marquis de Marialva. We had a view of the castle too, which is why I remember so vividly those shots whistling over our roof. We lived on the top floor (we almost always lived on the top floor because the rent was cheaper) in a room with use of kitchen, as the advertisements would inform us. There was no mention of a bathroom because such luxuries simply didn't exist, just a drain in one corner of the kitchen, open to the elements shall we say, which was intended for all manner of slops, both solid and liquid. At one point in my novel Manual of Painting and Calligraphy, I write about the women who used to carry to the aforesaid drain the receptacles used for all nocturnal and diurnal deposits and which were usually covered by an immaculate white cloth and called bacios-'chamber pots'-or, more rarely, penicos -'pisspots'-perhaps because the latter was considered too plebeian by the families who used them. Bacio was more refined. I associate the house in Rua dos Cavaleiros and its steep, narrow stairs with the nightmares that afflicted me while asleep and awake, for as soon as night fell, every corner would fill up with shadows from which monsters would reach out to me with great clawed hands, terrifying me with their diabolical grimaces. I remember sleeping on the floor in my parents' room (there was, as I said, only one) and calling out to them, shaking with fear, because underneath the bed or inside an overcoat hanging from the hook or within the distorted shape of a chest of drawers or a chair, indescribable beings were stirring and threatening to leap out at me and devour me. The main source of these terrors was, I believe, that famous fleapit cinema in the Mouraria district, where, with my friend Felix, I received spiritual nourishment from the thousand faces of Lon Chaney, from wicked, cynical people of the very worst kind, from ghostly visions, supernatural magic, accursed towers, dark underground passageways and from the whole paraphernalia, still in its infancy then, of cut-price collective and individual fear. In one such film, the leading man (that was what he was called in those days, although we denizens of the Fleapit referred to him unceremoniously as 'the guy') was seated romantically on a balcony, his right arm resting on the balustrade, and, to judge by the expression on his face, he was thinking of his beloved. Then, after a moment of suspense, a sinister, hooded leper began to climb toward him with agonizing slowness, finally placing one of his disease-ridden hands on the pure
