Raised from the Ground by José Saramago Read Free Book Online

account open the door, because he couldn’t answer for his actions, How dreadful, Anyway, his wife went to speak to her in-laws, who were most upset to learn that their son had become a werewolf, because there weren’t any others in the family, and so they went to a holy woman who recited the prayers of exorcism appropriate to such cases, and she told them that the next time he was changed into a werewolf, they must burn his hat, and then it would never happen again, and this proved to be a sovereign remedy, because they burned his hat and he was cured, Do you think burning his hat cured him because the sickness was in his head, I have no idea, the woman never said, but let me tell you of another, similar case, a man and his wife lived on a farm near Ciborro, why these things only happen between couples, I don’t know, where they raised chickens and other livestock, and every night, because it happened every night, her husband would get out of bed, go into the garden and start clucking, can you imagine, and when his wife peered around the door, she saw that he had been turned into a huge chicken, What, the same size as that pig, You may laugh, but just hear me out, this couple had a daughter, and when their daughter was about to get married, they killed a lot of chickens for the wedding feast, because that was what they had most of, but that night, the wife didn’t hear her husband get out of bed or hear him clucking, and you’ll never guess what happened, the man went to the place where the chickens had been killed, picked up a knife, knelt down by a bowl, and stuck the knife in his own throat, and there he stayed until his wife woke to find the bed empty, went in search of her husband and found him dead in a great pool of blood, you see, like I said, it’s the fates.
    Domingos Mau-Tempo went back to his old ways, wine, idleness, beatings, fights and insults. Mama, is Papa cursed, Don’t say such things about your father. These are words often spoken in such circumstances, and neither those intended as an accusation nor those intended to absolve should be taken seriously. Poverty was casting a dark shadow over the faces of these people, and the children who were old enough to do so went begging. However, there are still some kind, conscientious people, such as the owners of the house in which the Mau-Tempo family lived, who often gave them food, but children can be cruel, and although when bread was being baked in the owners’ house they always reserved a bread roll for João Mau-Tempo, the boys of the family, who went to the same school and were all friends, used to play a practical joke on João Mau-Tempo, tethering him with a rope to the trough with the bread roll before him and refusing to let him go until he had eaten it. And people say there’s a God.
    Then, what had to happen, happened. Domingos Mau-Tempo reached the last of his misfortunes. One afternoon, he was sitting on his bench polishing the heel of a shoe when he suddenly put everything down, untied his apron, went into the house, made up a bundle of clothes, took some bread out of the bread bin, put everything in a knapsack and left. His wife was working, along with her two youngest children, João was at school, and the other one was idling about somewhere. This was the last time Domingos Mau-Tempo left home. He will still appear to say a few words and to hear others, but his story is over. He will spend the next two years as a wanderer.

 
     
     
     
     
    N ATURE DISPLAYS REMARKABLE callousness when creating her various creatures. Apart from those who die or are born crippled, some do manage to escape and thus guarantee the results of nature’s engeneration, to coin an ambivalent and therefore equivocal noun that combines generation and engendering, with just the right cozy margin of imprecision that surrounds the many mutations of what one says, does and is. Nature does not itself parcel out the land, but uses the system to its advantage. And if