Raised from the Ground

by José Saramago

  That’s how it is. The fish dies by its mouth unless, because it looks too small on the hook or will cut a sad figure in the frying pan, the man throws it back in the water, an act of compassion for its youth, perhaps, or mere self-interest on his part, hoping that it will grow larger and reappear later on, but the father rabbit, who would certainly not grow anymore, was saved partly by the honesty of António Mau-Tempo, who, although he was perfectly capable of inventing good stories, did not need to invent a better one, given that it was far harder to hit a rabbit in the ear than in the body, and in the silence of the latifundio, once the sound of firing had died away in the undergrowth, he knew that he could not have lived with the memory of the rabbit’s wide, angry eye as it watched him approach the bush.

  The latifundio is a whole field of twigs, and from each one hangs a squirming rabbit with a hole in one ear, not because it has been shot, but because it has been like that since birth, they stay there all their lives, scrabbling at the earth with their claws, fertilizing it with their excrement, and if there’s any grass, they eat as much of it as they can, nose pressed to the ground, while all around they hear the footsteps of hunters, I could die at any moment. One day, António Mau-Tempo freed himself from the bush and crossed the frontier, he did so for five years running, going to France once a year, to northern France, to Normandy, but he was being led by the ear, caught by the bullet hole of necessity, it’s true he had never married nor had children who needed bread to eat, but his father wasn’t at all well, a consequence of his time in prison, they might not have killed him, but they broke him, and there was an employment crisis in Monte Lavre, whereas in France work was guaranteed and well paid, compared with the norm on the latifundio, in a month and a half he could earn fifteen or sixteen thousand escudos, a fortune. Possibly, but as soon as he arrived home in Monte Lavre, most of that disappeared in back payments, and the little that remained was set aside for the future.

  And what exactly is France. France is an endless field of sugarbeet in which you work a double shift of sixteen or seventeen hours a day, that is, all the hours of daylight and quite a few of the night. France is a family of Norman French, who see three Iberian creatures come through their door, two Portuguese men and one Spaniard from Andalusia, António Mau-Tempo and Carolino da Avó from Monte Lavre and, from Fuente Palmera, Miguel Hernández,* who knows a few words of French, picked up as an emigrant worker, and with those words he explains that they have been hired to work there. France is a cheerless barn where one sleeps little and dines on a dish of potatoes, it’s a land where, mysteriously, there are no Sundays and no public holidays. France is a bent and aching back, like two knives pressing in here and here, an affliction and a martyrdom, a crucifixion on a piece of land. France is to be viewed with one’s eyes a few inches from a sugarbeet stem, the forests and the horizons in France are all made of sugarbeet, that’s all there is. France is this scornful, mocking way of speaking and looking. France is the gendarme who comes to check our papers, line by line, comparing and interrogating, keeping three paces away because of the smell we give off. France is an ever-watchful distrust, a tireless vigilance, it’s a Norman Frenchman inspecting the work we’ve done and placing his foot as if he were stepping on our hands and enjoying it. France is being meanly treated as regards food and cleanliness, certainly compared with the horses on the farm, who are fat, large-footed and proud. France is a bush bristling with twigs, each with a rabbit dangling by the ear like a fish on the end of a rod, slowly suffocating, and Carolino da Avó is the least able to take it, bent double and limp as a penknife in which the spring has suddenly snapped, his blade is blunt and his point broken, he will not return next year. France is long train journeys, an immense sadness, a bundle of notes tied up with string and the stupid envy of those who stayed behind and now say of someone who left, He’s rich, you know, these are the petty jealousies and selfish malice of the poor.

  António Mau-Tempo and Miguel Hernández know about such things, they write to each other in the meantime, Mau-Tempo from Monte Lavre, Hernández from Fuente Palmera, they are simple letters with spelling mistakes in nearly every word, and so what Hernández reads is not quite Portuguese and what Mau-Tempo reads is not quite Spanish, but a language common to them both, the language of little learning and much feeling, and they understand each other, it’s as if they were signaling to each other across the frontier, for example, opening and closing their arms, the unmistakable sign for an embrace, or placing one hand on the heart, signifying affection, or merely looking, which indicates a readiness to reveal one’s thoughts, and both sign their letters with the same difficulty, the same grotesque way of holding the pen as if it were a hoe, which is why it looks as if a physical effort were needed to form each letter, Miguel Hernández, uh, António Mau-Tempo, uh. One day, Miguel Hernández will stop writing, two of António Mau-Tempo’s letters will go unanswered, and however hard you try to explain these things, they still hurt, it’s not exactly a great misfortune, I’m not going to lose my appetite over it, but this is merely what one says to console oneself, perhaps Miguel Hernández has died or been arrested, as happened with António Mau-Tempo’s father, if only he could go to Fuente Palmera to find out. António Mau-Tempo will remember Miguel Hernández for many years to come, whenever he speaks of his time in France, he will say, My friend Miguel, and his eyes will fill with tears, he’ll laugh them off and tell a story about rabbits or partridges, just to amuse people, none of it invented, you understand, until the wave of memory calms and ebbs away. Only then does he feel any nostalgia for France, for the nights spent talking in the barn, the stories told by Andalusians and those who came from the other side of the Tagus river, from Jaén and Évora, stories about José Gato and Pablo de la Carretera, and those other crazy nights when their work contract had ended, and they went whoring, stealing hasty pleasures, allez, allez, their unslaked blood protesting, and the more exhausted they were, the more they wanted. They were driven out into the street by a rapid-fire language they couldn’t understand, allez, nègres, that’s how it is with dark-skinned races, everyone’s a black for those born in Normandy, where even the whores think they’re pure-bloods.

  Then one year, António Mau-Tempo decided not to return to France, partly because his health was suffering. After that, he went back to being nothing but a latifundio rabbit, caught on a twig, scratching away with his claws, the ox returns to the furrow, the stream to its familiar course, alongside Manuel Espada and the others, cutting cork, scything, pruning, hoeing, weeding, why do they not weary of such monotony, every day the same as the last, at least as regards the scant food and the desire to earn a little money for tomorrow, which hangs over these places like a threat, tomorrow, tomorrow is just another day, like yesterday, rather than being the hope of something new, if that’s what life is.

  France is everywhere. The Carriça estate is in France, that’s not what it says on the map, but it’s true, if not in Normandy, then in Provence, it really doesn’t matter, António Mau-Tempo no longer has Miguel Hernández by his side, but Manuel Espada, his brother-in-law and his friend, though they are very different in character, they are scything, doing piecework, as we shall see. Gracinda Mau-Tempo is here too, pregnant at last, when it seemed that she would never have children, and the three of them are living, for as long as the harvest lasts, in an abandoned laborer’s hut, which Manuel Espada has cleaned up to make comfortable for his wife. No one had lived there for five or six years, and it was a real ruin, full of snakes and lizards and all kinds of creepy-crawlies, and when it was ready, Manuel Espada, having first sprinkled the floor with water, went to fetch a bundle of rushes to lie down on, and it was so cool inside that he almost fell asleep, it was just an adobe wall with a covering of gorse and straw to serve as a roof, then suddenly a snake slithered over him, as thick as my wrist, which is not of the slenderest. He never told Gracinda Mau-Tempo, and who can say what she would have done had she known, perhaps it wouldn’t have bothered her, the women in these par
ts are made of stern stuff, and when she arrived at the hut, she found it all neat and ready, with a truckle bed for the couple, another for António Mau-Tempo and a large sack to share as a blanket, that is how intimately people live on the latifundio. Oh, don’t get all hot under the collar, Father Agamedes, where have you been, by the way, these men are not really going to sleep here, if they do lie down on the bed, they will do so simply in order not to die, and now is perhaps the moment to speak about pay and conditions, they’re paid so much a day for a week, plus five hundred escudos for the rest of the field, which must all be harvested by Saturday. This may seem complicated, but it couldn’t be simpler. For a whole week, Manuel Espada and António Mau-Tempo will scythe all day and all night, and you need to understand exactly what this means, when they are utterly exhausted after a whole day of work, they will go back to the hut for something to eat and then return to the field and spend all night scything, not picking poppies, and when the sun rises, they will again go back to the hut to eat something, lie down for perhaps ten minutes, snoring like bellows, then get up, work all day, eat whatever there is to eat and again work all night, we know no one is going to believe us, these can’t be men, but they are, if they were animals they would have dropped down dead, only three days have passed, and the two men are like two ghosts standing alone in the moonlight in the half-harvested field, Do you think we’ll make it, We have to, and meanwhile Gracinda Mau-Tempo, heavily pregnant, is weeding in the ricefield, and when she can’t weed, she goes to fetch water, and when she can’t fetch water, she cooks food for the men, and when she can’t cook, she goes back to the weeding, her belly on a level with the water, her son will be born a frog.

  The harvest is done, and in the agreed time too, Gilberto came to pay these two ghosts, but he’s seen plenty of ghosts in his time, and António Mau-Tempo has now gone to work on the other side of this France, this killing field. Manuel Espada and his wife Gracinda Mau-Tempo stayed on in the hut until it was time for her to give birth. Manuel Espada took his wife home and then went back to the Carriça estate, where, fortunately, there was work. Anyone who remains unsurprised by all this needs to have the scales removed from his eyes or a hole bored in his ear, if he hasn’t got one already and sees them only in the ears of others.

  GRACINDA MAU-TEMPO gave birth in pain. Her mother Faustina came to help her during labor, along with old Belisária, who had long practiced as a midwife and been responsible for a fair few deaths in childbirth, of both mothers and babies, but to make up for this, she did create the finest navels in Monte Lavre, and while this may sound like a joke, it isn’t, rather, it deserves to be the subject of obstetric research into just how Belisária managed to cut and suture umbilical cords in such a way that they resembled goblets straight out of the thousand and one nights, which, opportunity and audacity allowing, one could verify by comparing them with the bare bellybuttons of the Moorish dancers who, on certain mysterious nights, cast off their veils at the fountain in Amieiro. As for the pain suffered by Gracinda Mau-Tempo, it was neither more nor less than that suffered by all women since Eve’s fortunate sin, fortunate, we say, because of the earlier pleasure enjoyed, a view that does not sit well with Father Agamedes, who disagrees out of duty and possibly conviction, as the upholder of the most ancient punishment in human history, meted out by Jehovah himself, You will give birth in pain, and so it has been all the days of all women, even those who didn’t know Jehovah’s name. The rancor of the gods lasts much longer than that of men. Men are poor wretches, capable of terrible vengeance, but capable, too, of being moved to tears by the slightest thing, and if the time is right and the light propitious, they will fall into their enemy’s arms and weep over how strange it is to be a man, a woman, a person. God, Jehovah or whoever, never forgets anything, the sinner must be punished, which is why there is this endless line of gaping vulvas, dilated, volcanic, out of which burst new men and new women, all covered in blood and mucus, all equal in their misery, but so instantly different, depending on the arms that receive them, the breath that warms them, the clothes that cover them, while the mother draws back into her body that tide of suffering, even while the last flower of blood drips from her torn flesh, and while the flabby skin on her now empty belly slowly stirs and hangs in folds, that is when youth begins to die.

  Meanwhile, up above, the balconies of heaven are deserted, the angels are taking a nap, of Jehovah and what remains of his wrath there is no news that makes any human sense, and there is no record that the celestial fireworks were summoned to conceive, create and launch some new star to shine for three days and three nights above the ramshackle hut that is home to Gracinda Mau-Tempo, Manuel Espada and their first child, Maria Adelaide, for that is the name she will bear. And we are in a land that does not lack for shepherds, some who were shepherds as children and others who continued to be and will be until the day they die. The flocks are large too, we saw one of six hundred sheep, and there’s no shortage of pigs either, although the pig is not really a suitable animal for nativity scenes, it lacks a sheep’s elegance, thick coat, soft woolly caress, pass me my ball of yarn, will you, darling, such creatures are made to bend the knee, whereas the pig rapidly loses its sweet look of a pink, newborn bonbon and becomes instead a bulbous-nosed, malodorous lover of mud, sublime only in the meat that it gives us. As for the oxen, they are busy working, nor are there so many of them on the latifundio that they can afford to attend belated scenes of adoration, and as for the donkeys, beneath their saddle cloths there are only sores, around which buzz bluebottles excited by the smell of blood, while in Manuel Espada’s house the flies swarm feverishly above Gracinda Mau-Tempo, who smells like a woman who has just given birth, Keep those flies off, will you, says old Belisária, or perhaps she doesn’t, so used is she to this accompanying halo of winged, buzzing angels, who appear as soon as summer arrives and she has to go off to help some woman in labor.

  Miracles do happen, though. The child is lying on the sheet, they smacked her as soon as she came into the world, not that this was necessary, because her first cry was already forming in her throat, and one day she will shout other things that now seem quite impossible, she cries, although she sheds no tears, merely screws up her eyes, making a face that would frighten any visiting Martian, but which, nonetheless, makes us sob our hearts out, and since it is a bright, warm day and the door is open, there falls onto this side of the sheet a kind of reflected light, where it comes from doesn’t really matter, and Faustina Mau-Tempo, so deaf that she cannot even hear her granddaughter crying, is the first to see her eyes, which are blue, as blue as João Mau-Tempo’s eyes, two drops of sky-bathed water, two round hydrangea petals, but neither of these vulgar comparisons serves, they merely reveal a lack of imagination, no comparison will serve, however hard future suitors may struggle to come up with one that does justice to these eyes, which are blue, not aquamarine or azure, not some botanical caprice or the product of some subterranean forge, but bright, intense blue, like João Mau-Tempo’s eyes, we can compare them when he arrives, and then we will know what kind of blue it is. For now, though, only Faustina Mau-Tempo knows, which is why she can proclaim, She has her grandfather’s eyes, and then the other two women want to see as well, Belisária, much put out at being deprived of her midwife’s privileges, and Gracinda Mau-Tempo, a jealous she-wolf to her cub, but Belisária takes her time, which is why Gracinda Mau-Tempo is last, not that it matters, she will have time enough to be attached by her nipples to that sucking mouth, she will have time to lose herself in contemplating those blue, blue eyes while the milk flows from her breast, whether here beneath these badly laid roof tiles, or beneath a holm oak in the middle of the countryside, or standing up when there’s nowhere to sit, or hurriedly when she can’t dawdle, milk that flows, in small and large quantities, from that breast, that life, like white blood made out of the other, red variety.

  Then the three kings arrived. The first was João Mau-Tempo, who came on foot when it was still light, so he needed no st
ar to guide him, and the only reason he didn’t arrive earlier was male modesty, because, were such things the norm in that time and place, he could easily have been there at the birth, after all, what’s wrong with seeing your own daughter give birth, but it’s simply not done, people would talk, such ideas belong in the future. He arrived early because he’s currently out of work, and has been clearing a piece of land he’s been given to cultivate, and when he went into the house, his wife wasn’t there, but his neighbor informed him that he was the grandfather of a little girl, and he was pleased, but not as pleased as you might expect, because he would have preferred a boy, men do, in general, prefer boys, and then he left the house, walked at his usual slow, swaying pace, caught between two different pains, one here, the other there, the old pain acquired carrying logs to the charcoal pit, and the other, a dull ache, was the result of being forced to stand for hours like a statue, he looks like a sailor fresh off the boat after a long voyage, disconcerted to find that the ground he walks on doesn’t move, or as if he were riding on the back of a camel, the ship of the desert, a comparison that paints exactly the right picture, for, given that João Mau-Tempo is the first of the magi to arrive, it is only proper that he should travel according to his condition and tradition, the others can choose their own mode of transport, and he brings no gifts to speak of, unless the ark of suffering that João Mau-Tempo carries in his heart could be considered a gift, fifty years of suffering, but no gold, and incense, Father Agamedes, is for the church, and as for myrrh, that’s been used up on those who died along the way. It seems rather mean and in somewhat bad taste to give such a gift to a newborn, but these men from the latifundio can only choose from what they, in turn, were given, as much sweat as one could want, enough joy to fill a toothless smile and a plot of land large enough to devour their bones, because the rest of the land is needed for other crops.