Small Memories by José Saramago Read Free Book Online

whose very innocence saved them from seeming ridiculous. The fruit of my poetic inspiration read thus: "Careful, now, lest someone hear/ The secret I unfold:/ I give to you a china heart/ for my heart you already hold." You must admit that I would have deserved, at the very least, second prize...
    The couple did not appear to get on very well, and his unpleasant Spanish wife found everything about Portugal detestable. While he was patient and refined, discreet and measured in his speech, she was the
guardia civil
type, tall and surly and rather broad in the beam, with a way with words that pitilessly garbled the language of Camóes. That wouldn't have mattered so much if she hadn't been so aggressive. It was in their house that I first started listening to Radio Sevilla after the Spanish Civil War had begun. Oddly enough, given that she was Spanish, I never found out for certain which side they supported. I suspect, however, that Doña Carmen had sided with Franco from the start. Listening to Radio Sevilla, I got into a terrible mental twist from which it took me a long time to free myself. The Nationalist General Queipo de Llano used the station to make his propaganda broadcasts, of which, needless to say, I remember not a word. What did stick in my memory was the jingle that always followed and which went: "If lovely colors make you sing, Revi paints are just the thing." There would be nothing very special about this if it weren't for the fact that I had become convinced that it was General Queipo de Llano himself who recited this cheery advertisement as soon as his broadcast was over. A necessary addendum to the "minor matter" of the Spanish Civil War. Forgive my frivolity. More serious was my throwing out with the rubbish, a few months later, the map of Spain in which I had been sticking pins to mark the advances and retreats of the armies of both sides. It goes without saying that my sole source of information was the censored Portuguese press, which, like Radio Seville, never reported a Republican victory.

    Leandro wasn't the only one to suffer the occasional bout of dyslexia or whatever it was. For example, I insisted that the word
sacerdote
—"priest"—should be pronounced "
saquerdote,
" but since, at the same time, I suspected that I must be wrong, if ever I had to say the word (given that it was such an "erudite" word, this can't have happened very often and would happen even less today, when there are so few priests), I would always find a way of mumbling the word so that no one would have to correct me. I must have been the inventor of the so-called benefit of the doubt. After a while, I managed to resolve the difficulty by myself, and the word once again emerged as it should from my mouth. Another word I had problems with (these stories date from primary school days) was
sacavenense.
As well as meaning "a native of the town of Sacavem," which has now been swallowed up by the insatiable dragon that Lisbon has become, it was also the name of a football club that may or may not have survived the vicissitudes of time and the purgatories of the second and third divisions. And how did I pronounce it then? In a truly shocking way that scandalized all who heard me: "
sacanavense,
" which incorporated into the innocent original the word
sacana
with its echoes of libertinism and masturbation. I can still recall my relief when I was finally able to transpose the ill-bred syllables.

    I must return once again to Rua dos Cavaleiros. The back of our house gave onto Rua da Guia, once known as Rua Suja—Grub Street—that joined another famous street, Rua do CapelÃo, which—accompanied inevitably by a guitar and several glasses of brandy—was always a fateful and unavoidable presence in fado songs and in any reminiscences about that first singer of fados, Maria Severa, and her fictional lover, the Marquis de Marialva. We had a view of the castle too, which is why I remember so vividly those shots