Small Memories by José Saramago Page A

say at some point, as though it were the most natural thing in the world: "There's the seamstress." And I would press my ear to the place on the wall she had indicatedand I could hear, I swear I could hear, the unmistakable sound of a sewing machine, the pedal-operated variety (there was no other kind then) and also, sometimes, another characteristic sound, slower, that of braking, when a seamstress raises her right hand to the wheel to stop the movement of the needle. I heard them in Lisbon, but also in Azinhaga, in my grandparents' house, where Grandmother Josefa or Aunt Maria Elvira would say: "There's the seamstress, there she is again." The sounds that emerged from the innocent blankness of the whitewashed wall were just the same. The explanation I was given was quite fantastical—how could it not be?—namely, that what we were hearing was the sad consequence of an irreverent seamstress who had worked on a Sunday and been condemned for that grave fault (there was no information about the identity of the judge) to work at her sewing-machine for all eternity inside the walls of houses. This mania for mercilessly punishing any Christian who needed to work on a Sunday had claimed another victim in the distant past, or so they told me, the man in the moon, the man you can see so clearly from here below, with a bundle of firewood on his back, and who was placed there, shouldering that eternal load, to serve as a lesson to anyone rash enough to be tempted to follow his bad example. But to go back to the "seamstress" in the walls, I don't know what can have happened in the world for her to have disappeared so completely, because it's over seventy years now since I last heard her and I can find no one else who has. Perhaps her sentence was commuted. If so, I hope the same mercy is shown to the man in the moon. The poor thing must be worn out. Besides, if they removed him from there, if they got rid of that shadow, the moon would give more light and we would all stand to gain.

    As I've mentioned before, my grandparents' house was called Casalinho, and the name of the district was Divisões, perhaps because the rather sparse olive grove opposite (it became a football field later on and more recently still was turned into a park) had various owners, and each tree, as if they were cattle not trees, bore carved on the trunk its owner's initials. The house was of the very roughest construction, one story high, although it was raised about three feet above the ground in case of flood, with no window on the blank frontage, just the traditional door with the hatch in it. There were two spacious rooms, the
casa-de-fora
—the "outside room," so called because it gave onto the street—which was furnished with two beds and a few chests, three if my memory serves me right, and the kitchen, both rooms having only roof tiles above and a dirt floor beneath. At night, once the oil lamp had been turned out, you could see the occasional vagabond star twinkling through the chinks in the roof. At irregular intervals, perhaps every two or three months, my grandmother would resurface the floor of the
casa-de-fora.
She would dissolve the requisite amount of mud in a bucket of water and then, on her knees, using a cloth soaked in the mixture, she would shuffle backward, making sweeping movements with her arm and gradually covering the floor with a new layer. We were not allowed in until the mud had dried completely. I still have the smell of that damp mud in my nose and, in my eyes, the red of the floor growing gradually paler as the water evaporated. As I recall, the kitchen floor didn't receive the same treatment, it was swept, of course, although not much, but it never received that coating of mud. Apart from the beds and the chests, there was in the
casa-de-fora
a tall, unvarnished wooden table with an old mirror, tarnished and flawed, a mantel clock and a few other worthless knick-knacks. (Much later, long after I was forty, I