Small Memories by José Saramago

a large beast, but it certainly wouldn't end up dying of old age, someone else was bound to catch it one day. In a way, though, with my hook caught in its gills, it bore my mark, it was mine.

    One day I was fishing in the Tejo estuary, for once in peace and harmony with José Dinis (I'm not sure that it really was the estuary, because we hadn't walked that far, nor in the right direction, to have come so close to the river; it was probably just a large pool, deep enough not to dry up in the searing summer heat and inhabited by a few colonies of fish that had arrived there with the floodwaters), and we had already caught two scrawny specimens, when two boys, more or less our age, appeared, who must have been from Mouchão de Cima, which is why we didn't know them (nor would that have been advisable), even though we only lived a stone's throw away. They sat down behind us, and the usual conversation began: "Had any bites?" and we said "Oh, not too bad," reluctant to give them any information. In the end, so that they wouldn't make fun of us, we told them that we'd caught two fish and that they were in the pot. The "pot" was a cylindrical tin with a tight lid and a wire handle that you could sling over your arm. These pots, usually slung from a pole carried over the shoulder, were used by the workers to carry their food to the fields, a thick tomato soup perhaps, if it was the season, or cabbage soup with beans, or whatever was within the means of each individual. Having made it clear that we weren't as green as we looked, we turned our attention to the floats sitting utterly still on the leaden surface of the water. A great silence fell, time passed, and after a while, one of us glanced behind and saw that the boys had gone. Our hearts fell when we opened the pot. Instead of the two fish, there were two twigs floating in the water. How the thieves managed, without making a sound, to take off the lid, remove the fish and escape is something I still don't understand. When we got home and described what had happened, Aunt Maria Elvira and Uncle Francisco roared with laughter. We could hardly blame them, it was all we deserved.

    It must be said that I was even less skilled as a hunter than I was as a fisherman. Only one sparrow ever fell to my catapult, but I killed it so ineptly and in such sad circumstances that one day I had to ease my conscience and express my sorrow by recounting the vile deed in a story. However, while I may have been no marksman when it came to the birds of the air, the same was not true of the frogs of the Almonda, which I felled with a slingshot that was as accurate as it was pitiless. The truth is that children's cruelty knows no limits (which is the real reason why adult cruelty knows no bounds either): what harm had those innocent batrachians done to me as they sat taking the sun in the shifting mud, enjoying the warmth from above and the cool from beneath? The stone whistled toward them, hitting them full on, and the poor frogs gave their last leap and lay there, belly up. The river—more charitable than the perpetrator of those deaths—washed away the few drops of spilled blood, while I, triumphant and unaware of my own stupidity, went upstream and downstream in search of new victims.

    It's odd that I've never heard anyone anywhere else mention the "seamstress." As the precocious rationalist I had already shown myself to be at a tender age (you need only recall the heretical episode at Mass, when the bell rang and I craned my neck to see what it was they didn't want me to see), I thought, and I think I even suggested as much to my mother, that it might just be woodworm or some other similar creature, a ridiculous idea because woodworm (which aren't really worms, but larvae) couldn't live inside the thick mortar used in buildings then, which was far too hard to chew, although not as hard as modern-day cement and concrete. So what was it then? In the silent house, my mother would always