Raised from the Ground by José Saramago Read Free Book Online Page A

after harvest time the granaries of the thousand anthills of the fields are not all equally full, the profits and losses feed into the great accounting department of the planet and no ant is left without its statistical quota of food. In the settling of accounts it matters little that millions of ants have died from being flooded out, dug up or urinated on: those who lived ate, and those who died left the others behind. Nature doesn’t count its dead, it counts the living, and when there are too many of those, it organizes a new slaughter. It’s all very easy, very clear and very fair, and as far as the memory of ants and elephants can recall, no one in the animal kingdom has as yet complained.
    Fortunately, man is the king of the beasts. He can therefore do his accounts with pen and paper or by other, subtler means, murmured comments, hints, glances and nods. Such mimicry and onomatopoeia come together, in cruder form, in the songs and dances of struggle, seduction and enticement that certain animals use to obtain their goals. This may help in understanding Laureano Carranca, that rigid man of principle, think only of his inflexibility, his chill disapproval of his daughter’s marriage, and the game of emotional weights and measures that he practiced daily, now that he has his grandson João at home with him, an act of reluctant charity, and another, much more favored grandson called José Nabiça. Let us explain why, although it won’t really contribute much to our understanding of the story, only enough for us to know each other better, as the gospels urge us to do. José Nabiça was the child born to one of Sara da Conceição’s sisters and a man whose anonymity consisted in everyone pretending not to know who he was, when in fact his identity was public knowledge. In such cases, there is often a general complicity, based on everyone knowing the truth but feeling curious as to how the protagonists will behave, and what’s wrong with that, given how few distractions life provides. Such love children are often abandoned, sometimes by both mother and father, and consigned to the foundling hospital or left out on the road to be devoured either by the wolves or the Brothers of Mercy. Fortunately for José Nabiça, however, despite the taint of his birth, he was blessed with a father who had a little money and with grandparents who had an eye on a future inheritance, a remote possibility but of some substance nevertheless, enough to be a promise of wealth for the Carranca family. They treated João Mau-Tempo as if he wasn’t of the same blood at all, and so he, as the son of a cobbler-turned-vagrant, would inherit neither money nor land. The other grandson, though he was the son of a sin unpurged by marriage, was treated like a prince by his grandfather, who remained deaf to what people said and blind to the evidence of his daughter’s besmirched honor, and all because he had hopes of a legacy that never materialized. Proof perhaps that divine justice does exist.
    João Mau-Tempo had more than a year of schooling, and that was the end of his education. His grandfather eyed that skinny little body, pondered for the nth time those blue eyes that were immediately lowered in fright, and decreed, You’re to help your uncle in the fields, so behave yourself, because if you don’t, you’ll feel the weight of my hand. By work in the fields he meant clearing land and digging, a kind of brute labor quite unsuitable for a child, but it was as well for him to find out now what his place in the world would be when he grew up. Joaquim Carranca was himself a brute, and would leave João out all night in the fields, on guard in the cabin or on the threshing floor, when such duties were completely beyond the strength of a child. Worse still, during the night, out of pure malice, he would go and see if the boy was sleeping and then throw a sack of wheat on top of him and make the boy cry, and as if that were not enough, or, indeed,