Small Memories by José Saramago Page B

bought in a Lisbon antique shop a similar clock, which I still have today, like something borrowed from my childhood.) The mirror was part of a small, rather inelegant dressing table, also unvarnished, with a central drawer and two small side drawers full of useless bits and pieces, and these contents remained unchanged, it seemed, from one year to the next. Photos of the family were gathered together on the table like a galaxy of faces; it never occurred to anyone to arrange them, like a decoration, on the whitewashed walls of the
casa-de-fora.
They were placed there like saints on an altar, like the disparate parts of a collective reliquary, fixed and immutable. The kitchen was the world. There were two beds, a table that wobbled on the uneven floor and so always had to have something jammed under one leg to keep it level, two blue-painted chairs, and the fireplace with, at the back, the "fireplace doll," a blurred, vaguely anthropomorphic figure, which disappeared, along with everything else, when Uncle Manuel, the youngest of my maternal uncles and a policeman like my father, inherited the house after my grandmother died, only to build in its place a house that anyone with even average taste would have found hideous, but which he must have thought extraordinary. I never asked him if he was pleased with his work, because, in keeping with deep-seated family tradition, we were no longer on speaking terms. I imagine that the "doll" was a rough representation of some pagan domestic genius, for example, one of the Roman penates (a common Portuguese expression of the day was
regressar a penates
which meant simply "to go home"). As far as one could tell from the shape, it must have been made out of square bricks, two of which were stuck in the wall, side by side, to form the upper part of the trunk, with another placed on top of them in the center as the neck and a third placed end on to represent the head. It was my grandmother who called it the "fireplace doll," and that satisfied me until, years later, thanks to the cognitive virtues of reading, I thought I had discovered its true identity. Had I really? The fireplace was a small one, only large enough for two to sit around, usually my grandfather and myself. In winter, when the water froze in the jugs overnight and, in the morning, we had to break the ice with a stick, we would be burned to a crisp in front and shivering behind. When the cold gripped, there was very little difference between being inside or out. The kitchen door, which gave onto the yard, was extremely old and more like a gate than a door, with cracks in it big enough to put your hand through and, even more extraordinary, it had been like that for years and years. It seemed as if it must have been old already when it was hung on its hinges. Only later, once my grandfather Jerónimo had died (he departed this life in 1948), did it benefit from a few repairs or, rather, a little patching up. I don't think it was ever replaced though. It was to this most humble of homes that my grandparents came to live after they were married, she—or so people said at the time—the prettiest girl in Azinhaga and he, the foundling from the poorhouse in Santarém, whom people called
pau-preto
—"blackwood"—because of his dark skin. And there they would live for ever. My grandmother told me that on their wedding night, Grandfather Jerónimo had sat outside the front door, armed with a big stick, waiting for the jealous rivals who had sworn to come and throw stones at the roof. No one came, though, and all night (if you'll allow me to give free rein to my imagination) the moon traveled across the sky, while my grandmother, lying in bed, eyes open, waited for her husband. And it was daylight before they could embrace.

    The time has come to speak of the celebrated novel
Maria, the Fairy of the Forest,
which brought tears to the eyes of so many families in working-class areas of Lisbon in the 1920s. It was