Raised from the Ground

by José Saramago

  It’s hardly surprising that the woman should ask, Where’s our house, a perfectly understandable question in someone who needs to take care of her child and, if possible, put the furniture in its proper place before laying her weary body down in bed. And the man answers, On the other side. All doors are closed, only a few faint chinks of light betray the presence of the other inhabitants. In a yard somewhere, a dog barks. There’s always a dog barking when someone walks past, and the other dogs, caught unawares, pick up the first sentinel’s word and fulfill their canine duty. A gate was opened, then closed. And now that the rain had stopped and the house was near, husband and wife were more aware of the cold wind that came running along the street, before plunging down the narrow alleys, where it shook the branches that reached out over the low roofs. Thanks to the wind, the night grew brighter. The great cloud was moving off, and here and there you could see patches of clear sky. It’s not raining now, said the woman to her child, who was sleeping and, of the four, was the only one not to know the good news.

  They came to a square in which a few trees were exchanging brief whispers. The man stopped the cart and said to the woman, Wait here, and walked under the trees toward a brightly lit doorway. It was a bar, a taberna, and inside three men were sitting on a bench while another was standing at the bar, drinking, holding his glass between thumb and forefinger as if posing for a photograph. And behind the bar, a thin, shriveled old man turned his eyes to the door, through which the man with the cart entered, saying, Good evening, gentlemen, the greeting of a new arrival wishing to gain the friendship of everyone in the room, either out of fraternal feeling or for more selfish commercial reasons, I’ve come to live here in São Cristóvão, my name’s Domingos Mau-Tempo* and I’m a shoemaker. One of the men sitting on the bench joked, Well, you certainly brought the bad weather with you, and the man who was drinking and had just emptied his glass smacked his lips and added, Let’s hope his soles are better than the weather he brings, and the others, of course, laughed. These were not intended as rude or unwelcoming words, but it’s nighttime in São Cristóvão, all the doors are shut, and if a stranger arrives bearing a name like Mau-Tempo, only a fool could resist making a joke of it, especially after that heavy downpour. Domingos Mau-Tempo responded with a reluctant smile, but that’s to be expected. Then the old man opened a drawer and produced a large key, Here’s the key, I was beginning to think you weren’t coming, and everyone stares at Domingos Mau-Tempo, taking the measure of this new neighbor, every village needs a shoemaker and São Cristóvão is no exception. Domingos Mau-Tempo offered an explanation, It’s a long way from Monte Lavre, and it rained while we were on the road, not that there’s any need for him to account for himself, but he wants to be friendly, and then he says, Let me buy you all a drink, which is an excellent way of touching the pockets of men’s hearts. The men who were seated stand up and watch the ceremony of their glasses being refilled, and then, unhurriedly, each man again picks up his glass with a slow, careful gesture, this is wine, after all, not cheap brandy to be drunk down in one gulp. Won’t you have a drink yourself, sir, says Domingos Mau-Tempo, and the old man, who knows the ways of the big city, answers, Here’s wishing good health to my new tenant. And while the men are engaged in these niceties, the woman comes to the door, although she doesn’t actually come in, the taberna is reserved for men only, and she says quietly, as is her wont, Domingos, the child is restless, and what with the furniture and everything being so wet, we need to get unloaded.

  She is quite right, but Domingos Mau-Tempo disliked being summoned by his wife like that, what will the other men think, and as they cross the square, he scolds her, If you do that again, I’ll be very angry. The woman did not respond, too busy trying to quiet the baby. The cart went slowly on, jolting over the bumps. The donkey had stiffened up with the cold. They went down a side street where the houses alternated with vegetable gardens, and they stopped outside a low hovel. Is this it, asked the woman, and her husband replied, Yes.

  Domingos Mau-Tempo opened the door with the large key. In order to enter, he had to lower his head, for this is no palace with high doors. There were no windows. To the left was the fireplace, with the hearth at floor level. Domingos Mau-Tempo made a small, flickering torch from a sheaf of straw and held it up so that his wife could see their new home. There was a bundle of firewood by the chimney breast. Enough for their immediate needs. In a matter of minutes, the woman had laid the child down in one corner to sleep, gathered together some logs and some kindling, and the fire had sprung into life, like a flower on the whitewashed wall. The house was once again inhabited.

  Domingos Mau-Tempo led the donkey and the cart in through the gate to the yard, and started unloading the furniture and carrying it into the house, where he set it down willy-nilly, until his wife could come and help him. The mattress was wet on one side. The water had got into the clothes chest, and one leg of the kitchen table was broken. But on the fire was a saucepan of cabbage leaves and rice, and the baby had suckled again and fallen asleep on the dry side of the mattress. Domingos Mau-Tempo went out into the yard to do his business. And standing in the middle of the room, Sara da Conceição, Domingos’s wife and João’s mother, stood quite still, staring into the flames like someone waiting for a garbled message to be repeated. She felt a slight movement in her belly. And another. But when her husband came back in, she said nothing. They had other things to think about.

  DOMINGOS MAU-TEMPO will not make old bones. One day, when he has given his wife five children, although not for that most mundane of reasons, he will put a rope around the branch of a tree, in a desolate place almost within sight of Monte Lavre, and hang himself. Before he does this, however, he will carry his house on his back to other places, run away from his family three times, but fail to make his peace with them on that third occasion because his hour will have come. His father-in-law Laureano Carranca had predicted just such an unfortunate end when he was forced to give in to Sara’s stubbornness, for, so besotted was she with Domingos Mau-Tempo that she swore that if she could not marry him, she would marry no one. Laureano Carranca would roar furiously, He’s a ne’er-do-well and a drunkard and will come to no good. And so the family war raged on until Sara da Conceição fell pregnant, a conclusive and usually highly effective argument when persuasion and pleading have failed. One morning, Sara da Conceição left the house, in May it was, and walked across the fields to the place where she had arranged to meet Domingos Mau-Tempo. They were there for half an hour at most, lying amid the tall wheat, and when Domingos returned to his lasts and Sara to her parents’ house, he went off whistling with satisfaction, while she was left shivering despite the hot sun beating down on her. And when she crossed the stream by the ford, she had to crouch down beneath some willows and wash away the blood flowing from between her legs.

  João was made, or to use a more biblical term, conceived, on that same day, which, it would seem, is most unusual, because, in the haste and confusion of the moment, semen does not necessarily do its job the first time, only later. And it’s true that there was considerable consternation, not to say suspicion, regarding João’s blue eyes, for no one else in the family had such eyes nor, as far as they could recall, had any relative, close or distant, we, however, know that such thoughts were grossly unfair to a woman who, after much soul-searching, had deviated from the straight virginal path and lain down in a wheatfield with that one man alone and, by her own choice, opened her legs to him. It had not been the choice, almost five hundred years before, of another young woman, who, standing alone at the fountain filling her jug with water, was approached by one of the foreigners who had arrived with Lamberto Horques Alemão, the governor of Monte Lavre appointed by Dom João the First, by a man whose speech she couldn’t understand, and who, ignoring the poor girl’s cries and pleas, carried her off into the bracken where, purely for his own enjoyment, he raped her. He was a handsome fellow with pale skin and blue eyes, whose only fault was the fire in his blood, but
she, naturally enough, could not bring herself to love him, and when her time came, she gave birth alone. Thus, for four centuries those blue German eyes appeared and disappeared, like the comets that vanish and return when we least expect them or simply because no one has bothered to record their appearances and thus discover a pattern.

  This is the family’s first move. They came from Monte Lavre to São Cristóvão on a strangely rainy summer’s day. They traversed the whole district from north to south, what on earth can have made Domingos Mau-Tempo decide to move so far away, well, he’s a bungler and a good-for-nothing, and things were getting difficult for him in Monte Lavre because of drink and certain shady deals, and so he said to his father-in-law, Lend me your cart and your donkey, will you, I’m going to live in São Cristóvão, By all means go, and let’s hope you acquire a little common sense, for your own good and for the sake of your wife and son, but be sure to bring that donkey and cart back promptly, because I need them. They took the shortest route, following cart tracks, or highways when they could, but mostly heading across country, skirting the hills. They lunched in the shade of a tree, and Domingos Mau-Tempo gulped down a whole bottle of wine that he soon sweated out again in the heat of the day. They saw Montemor in the distance, to the left, and continued south. It rained on them when they were just one hour from São Cristóvão, a deluge that presaged no good at all, but today it is sunny, and Sara da Conceição, sitting in the garden, is sewing a skirt, while her son, still rather unsteady on his legs, is feeling his way along the wall of the house. Domingos Mau-Tempo has gone to Monte Lavre to return the donkey and cart to his father-in-law and tell him that they’re living in an excellent house, that customers are already beating a path to his door and that he won’t lack for work. He will return on foot the following day, as long as he doesn’t get drunk, because apart from his drinking, he isn’t a bad man, and God willing he’ll sort himself out, after all, there have been worse men than him and they’ve turned out all right in the end, and if there’s any justice in the world, what with one small child and another on the way, he’ll shape up to be a respectable father too, and as for me, well, I’ll do what I can to give us all a good life.

  João has reached the end of the wall, where the picket fence begins. He grips it hard, his arms being stronger than his legs, and peers out. His horizon is quite limited, a strip of muddy road with puddles that reflect the sky, and a ginger cat sprawled on the doorstep opposite, sunning its belly. Somewhere a cock crows. A woman can be heard shouting out, Maria, and another, almost childish voice answers, Yes, Senhora. And then the silence of the great heat settles again, the mud will soon harden and return to the dust it was. João lets go of the fence, that’s quite enough looking at the landscape for the moment, executes a difficult half-turn and commences the long journey back to his mother. Sara da Conceição sees him, puts her sewing down on her lap and holds out her arms to her son, Come here, little one, come here. Her arms are like two protective hedges. Between them and João lies a confusing, uncertain world with no beginning and no end. The sun sketches a hesitant shadow on the ground, a tremulously advancing hour. Like the hand of a clock on the great expanse of the latifundio.

  When Lamberto Horques Alemão stepped out onto the terrace of his castle, his gaze could not encompass all that lay before him. He was the lord of the village and its lands, ten leagues long and three leagues wide, and he had the right to exact a tribute, and although he had been charged to go forth and multiply, he had not ordered the rape of the girl at the fountain, it happened and that was that. He himself, with his virtuous wife and his children, will scatter his seed where he pleases, depending on how the mood takes him, This land cannot remain as uninhabited as it is now, for you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of settlements in the whole estate, while the uncultivated areas are as many as the hairs on your head, Yes, sir, but these women are the swarthy cursed remnants of the Moors, and these silent men can be vengeful, besides, our king did not call on you to go forth and multiply like a Solomon, but to cultivate the land and rule over it so that people will come here and stay, That is what I am doing and will do, and whatever else I deem appropriate, for this land is mine and everything on it, although there are sure to be people who will try to hamper my efforts and cause trouble, there always will be, You are quite right, sir, you obviously gleaned such knowledge from the cold lands of your birth, where people know far more than we natives of these remote western lands, Since we are in agreement, let us discuss what tributes should be imposed on these lands I am to govern. Thus, a minor episode in the history of the latifundio.

  THIS SO-CALLED SHOEMAKER is really nothing but a cobbler. He soles and heels and dawdles over his work when he isn’t in the mood, often abandoning last, awl and knife to go to the taberna, he argues with impatient customers and, for all these reasons, beats his wife. Not just because he is obliged to sole and heel, but also because he can find no peace in himself, he’s a restless man who has no sooner sat down than he wants to get up again, who as soon as he has arrived in one place is already thinking about another. He’s a child of the wind, a wanderer, this bad-weather Domingos, who returns from the taberna and enters the house, bumping into the walls, glancing sourly at his son, and for no reason at all lashes out at his wife, wretched woman, let that be a lesson to you. And then he leaves again, goes back to the wine and his carousing mates, put this one on the slate, will you, landlord, of course, sir, but there’s quite a lot on the slate already, so what, I always pay my debts, don’t I, I’ve never owed anyone a penny. And more than once, Sara da Conceição, having left her child with the neighbor, went out into the night to search for her husband, using the shawl and the darkness to conceal her tears, going from taberna to taberna, of which there weren’t many in São Cristóvão, but enough, peering in from outside, and if her husband was there, she would stand waiting in the shadows, like another shadow. And sometimes she would find him lost on the road, abandoned by his friends, with no idea where his house was, and then the world would suddenly brighten, because Domingos Mau-Tempo, grateful to have been found in that frightening desert, among hordes of ghosts, would put an arm about his wife’s shoulders and allow himself to be led like the child he doubtless still was.

  And one day, because he had more work than he could cope with, Domingos Mau-Tempo took on an assistant, thus giving himself more time with his fellow drinkers, but then, on another ill-fated day, he got it into his head that his wife, poor, innocent Sara da Conceição, was deceiving him in his absence, and that was the end of São Cristóvão, which the guiltless assistant had to flee at knifepoint, and Sara, pregnant, quite legitimately, for a second time, underwent her own painful via dolorosa, and the cart was loaded up again, another trek to Monte Lavre, more toing and froing, We’re fine, and your daughter and grandson are happy, with another on the way, but I’ve found a better job in Torre da Gadanha, my father lives there and will be able to help us out. And once more they set off north, except that this time the landlord was waiting for them on the way out of São Cristóvão, Just a moment, Mau-Tempo, you owe me for the rent and the wine that you drank, and if you don’t pay up, me and my two sons here will make you, so pay me what you owe or die.

  It was a short journey, which was just as well, because almost as soon as Sara da Conceição set foot in the house, she gave birth to her second son, who, for some forgotten reason, was named Anselmo. He was fortunate from the cradle on because his paternal grandfather was a carpenter by trade and very pleased to have his grandson born so close to home, almost next door. His grandfather worked as a carpenter and had no boss and no apprentice, no wife either, and he lived among lengths of timber and planks, permanently perfumed by sawdust, and used a vocabulary particular to laths, planes, battens, mallets and adzes. He was a serious man of few words and not given to drinking, which is why he disapproved of his son, who was hardly a credit to his name. Given Domingos Mau-Tempo’s restless nature, however, his father had little time in which
to enjoy being a grandfather, just long enough to teach his oldest grandson that this is a claw hammer, this is a plane and this a chisel. But Domingos Mau-Tempo could bear neither what his father said nor what he didn’t say, and like a bird hurling itself against the bars of its cage, what prison is this in my soul, damn it, off he went again, this time to Landeira, in the extreme west of the district. Preferring this time not to approach his father-in-law, who would find such wanderings and uncertainties odd, he had, at some expense, hired a cart and a mule, intending to keep quiet about his plans and tell his father-in-law later. We never seem to settle anywhere, we go from one place to another like the wandering Jew, and it’s not easy with two small children, Be quiet, woman, I know what I’m doing, there are good people in Landeira and plenty of work, besides, I’m a craftsman, not like your father and brothers tied to their hoes, I learned a trade and have a skill, That’s not what I’m saying, you were a shoemaker when I married you and that’s fine, but I just want some peace and to stop all this moving around. Sara da Conceição said nothing about the beatings, nor would it have been appropriate, because Domingos Mau-Tempo was traveling toward Landeira as if to the promised land and carrying on his shoulders his eldest son, holding on to his tender little ankles, which were a bit grubby, of course, but what does that matter. He barely felt the weight, because years of sewing leather had given him muscles and tendons of iron. With the mule trotting along behind, with a sun as warm as a cozy blanket, Sara da Conceição was even allowed to ride in the cart. But when they reached the new house, they found that their furniture was once again badly damaged, At this rate, Domingos, we’ll end up with no furniture at all.