Small Memories

One day, during a mechanics class, I broke a pointer. The teacher had not yet arrived and we were making the most of the opportunity to have a good time, some were telling jokes, others were throwing paper planes or balls of paper, still others were playing at "palms" (a magnificent exercise for honing the reflexes, because the player holding his open palms out for the other player to strike has to move very fast to avoid the next blow), and I, intending to exemplify the use of the lance-why I don't know, perhaps because of some film I'd seen-grabbed the pointer and raced toward the blackboard, to which I'd given the role of the enemy to be unhorsed. I misjudged the distance and hit the board so hard that the pointer broke into three pieces in my hand. The incident was greeted with applause by some, but others fell silent and looked at me with that expression on their faces which means the same in every language in the world: "You're in for it now," while I, as if I believed a miracle were possible, tried to fit the broken pieces of wood together again. When the miracle didn't happen, I was just depositing the remains on the teacher's dais when the teacher came in. "What happened?" he asked. I came up with a hasty explanation ("The pointer was on the floor and I inadvertently stepped on it, sir") which he pretended to believe. "Well, you'll have to buy another one," he said. So it was and had to be. It didn't occur to anyone at home to go to a shop selling school equipment and ask how much a new one would cost. It was assumed that it would be far too expensive and that the best solution would be to go to a sawmill and buy a piece of wood of about the same size that I could then work on to produce something as similar as possible to the real pointer. And that's what happened. For good or ill, neither my father nor my mother got involved. Over a period of perhaps two weeks, including Saturday afternoons and Sundays, I slaved away with my knife like a condemned man, planing and sanding and filing and waxing the wretched piece of wood. My experience of working with tools at Azinhaga paid off. The final result was not what you might call perfection, but worthy enough to take the place of the broken original, and it won the necessary administrative approval and an understanding smile from my teacher. Bear in mind that my specialty was mechanics not carpentry.

José Dinis died young. Once the golden years of childhood were over, we had each gone our separate ways, then, some time later, when I was in Azinhaga, I asked Aunt Maria Elvira: "What's José Dinis up to these days?" And she said quite simply: "José Dinis died." That's the way we were, we might be hurting inside, but we put up a hard front. Things are as they are, you're born, you live and you die, and there's no point making a fuss about it, José Dinis came and went, tears were shed at the time, but the fact is that people can't spend their entire lives grieving for the dead. I would like to think that no one now would remember José Dinis if these pages had not been written. I'm the only one who can remember how we used to balance rather precariously on the steps of the harvester and cross the field from end to end, watching as the machine cut down the ears of wheat and how we would get covered in dust in the process. I'm the only one who can still remember the superb watermelon with its dark green skin that we ate on the banks of the Tejo, because the melon patch was in the river itself, on one of those tongues of sandy soil, sometimes quite extensive, that were left exposed each summer when the volume of water diminished. I'm the only one who can remember the creak of the knife as it opened, the bright red slices and the black seeds, the "castle" (in other places they call it the "heart") that was left in the middle of the melon as we sliced away at the flesh (the knife wasn't long enough to reach the very center of the fruit), and the way the juice trickled down your throat onto your chest. And I'm the only one who can remember the time I betrayed José Dinis. We were walking along with Aunt Maria Elvira, searching for corn, each with our own row to follow and a bag slung round our neck, breaking off the ears of corn that the pickers had inadvertently left on the stalks, and suddenly I spotted a huge ear of corn in José Dinis' row, but I said nothing, waiting to see if he would walk past without noticing it. When he, the victim of his small stature, did precisely that, I went and picked the cob. The fury of the poor plundered boy was a sight to see, but Aunt Maria Elvira and the other adults present said I was quite right, if he had seen it, I wouldn't have picked it. They were wrong. If I had been generous, I would have given him the corncob or said simply: "Look, José Dinis, right there in front of you." I could blame this on the constant state of rivalry we lived in, but I suspect that on the Final Day of Judgment, when my good and bad actions are placed in the balance, it will be the weight of that ear of corn that sends me down to hell…

A short distance from my grandparents' yard was a ruined farm building, what remained of some old pig pens. We used to call them Veiga's pig pens, and I would walk through them whenever I wanted to take a shortcut through the olive groves. One day, when I was about sixteen, I came across a woman in there, standing up among the weeds, pulling down her skirt, and a man buttoning up his trousers. I turned away and went and sat on a wall by the road, near an olive tree at the foot of which, a few days before, I had seen a large green lizard. After a few minutes, I saw the woman hurrying away through the olive grove opposite, almost running. The man emerged from the ruins, came over to me (he must have been a tractor driver brought in from outside to do a particular job) and sat down beside me. "Nice woman," he said. I didn't respond. The woman kept appearing and disappearing among the trunks of the olive trees, moving further off all the time. "She said you know her and would tell her husband." I still did not respond. The man lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out twice, then he let himself slide off the wall and said goodbye. "Goodbye," I said. The woman had finally disappeared from view. I never saw the green lizard again.