then, or perhaps I'd only just noticed it. And during a game we were playing one day, I had to fall to the ground, but I decided to do it very slowly, saying: "
à o efeito redentor.
" The others took no notice, perhaps because that expression, which I had only just learned, wasn't familiar to them at all.
Out of school, I remember engaging in some terrific battles with children from the neighboring houses, battles that involved much hurling of stones, but which, fortunately, never ended in blood and tears, although there was no shortage of sweat. As shields we had saucepan lids that we found among the rubbish. Now, I've never been particularly brave, but I remember once going on the attack beneath a hail of stones and how that one heroic gesture routed the two or three enemies opposing us. Even now, I have the sense that in advancing like that, barefaced, I was disobeying one of the unspoken rules of engagement, that each army should stay where it was and take aim at the other side from that position, with no charges or countercharges. More than seventy years later, in an image shrouded in the mists of memory, I can see myself with a saucepan lid in my left hand and a stone in my right (plus two more in my pockets), while missiles from both sides flew over my head.
What I remember most vividly about Senhor Vairinho's classes is the moment when, at the end of the lesson, with his four students lined up in front of his desk on the stage, he would write that day's marks in his beautiful hand in our black-bound exercise books, abbreviating the marks to B, A, G, E: bad, average, good, excellent. I still have that exercise bookand it shows what a good student I was: there were very few "bads," not many "averages," lots of "goods" and a fair number of "excellents." My father would sign at the bottom of the page each day, signing himself Sousa, because he never liked the Saramago he had been obliged to adopt by his son. It was a source of great pride to my family, both in the city and the village, that I passed the fourth-year exam with distinction. The oral exam took place in a ground-floor room (well, it was ground-floor in relation to the back of the building, which gave onto the playground, but first-floor in relation to the street) on a morning of brilliant sunshine, with a breeze wafting in through the windows open on either side, the trees in the playground looking green and leafy (I would never play in their shade again), and with my new suit, if my memory can be trusted, pinching me under the arms. I remember hesitating over one question from the jury (perhaps I didn't know the answer, perhaps my stutter had tied my tongue, as sometimes happened), and someone, a fairly young man whom I had never before seen in the school and who was standing just three steps from me, leaning against the frame of the nearest doorâone of the doors that opened out onto the playgroundâwhispered the response to me. Why was he there and not inside the room with everyone else? A mystery. That was in June of 1933, and in October, I would go to Liceu Gil Vicente, which was based then in the former monastery of São Vicente de Fora. For some time, I thought that the two went together, the name of the school and the name of the saint. I could hardly have been expected to know who Gil Vicente was.
I suppose (I can't be sure) that it was thanks to those "lessons" gleaned from the Portuguese-French conversation guide and to my retentive memory that I managed to shine at my new school the very first time I was called to the blackboard, where I wrote the word
papier
and a few others with such ease that the teacher could not conceal his satisfaction, thinking, perhaps, that he had before him an expert in the language of Molière. When he told me to sit down again, such was my pleasure at having cut a good figure that, as I left the platform, I couldn't resist pulling a face to amuse my classmates. It was done purely out of nervousness,
à o efeito redentor.
" The others took no notice, perhaps because that expression, which I had only just learned, wasn't familiar to them at all.
Out of school, I remember engaging in some terrific battles with children from the neighboring houses, battles that involved much hurling of stones, but which, fortunately, never ended in blood and tears, although there was no shortage of sweat. As shields we had saucepan lids that we found among the rubbish. Now, I've never been particularly brave, but I remember once going on the attack beneath a hail of stones and how that one heroic gesture routed the two or three enemies opposing us. Even now, I have the sense that in advancing like that, barefaced, I was disobeying one of the unspoken rules of engagement, that each army should stay where it was and take aim at the other side from that position, with no charges or countercharges. More than seventy years later, in an image shrouded in the mists of memory, I can see myself with a saucepan lid in my left hand and a stone in my right (plus two more in my pockets), while missiles from both sides flew over my head.
What I remember most vividly about Senhor Vairinho's classes is the moment when, at the end of the lesson, with his four students lined up in front of his desk on the stage, he would write that day's marks in his beautiful hand in our black-bound exercise books, abbreviating the marks to B, A, G, E: bad, average, good, excellent. I still have that exercise bookand it shows what a good student I was: there were very few "bads," not many "averages," lots of "goods" and a fair number of "excellents." My father would sign at the bottom of the page each day, signing himself Sousa, because he never liked the Saramago he had been obliged to adopt by his son. It was a source of great pride to my family, both in the city and the village, that I passed the fourth-year exam with distinction. The oral exam took place in a ground-floor room (well, it was ground-floor in relation to the back of the building, which gave onto the playground, but first-floor in relation to the street) on a morning of brilliant sunshine, with a breeze wafting in through the windows open on either side, the trees in the playground looking green and leafy (I would never play in their shade again), and with my new suit, if my memory can be trusted, pinching me under the arms. I remember hesitating over one question from the jury (perhaps I didn't know the answer, perhaps my stutter had tied my tongue, as sometimes happened), and someone, a fairly young man whom I had never before seen in the school and who was standing just three steps from me, leaning against the frame of the nearest doorâone of the doors that opened out onto the playgroundâwhispered the response to me. Why was he there and not inside the room with everyone else? A mystery. That was in June of 1933, and in October, I would go to Liceu Gil Vicente, which was based then in the former monastery of São Vicente de Fora. For some time, I thought that the two went together, the name of the school and the name of the saint. I could hardly have been expected to know who Gil Vicente was.
I suppose (I can't be sure) that it was thanks to those "lessons" gleaned from the Portuguese-French conversation guide and to my retentive memory that I managed to shine at my new school the very first time I was called to the blackboard, where I wrote the word
papier
and a few others with such ease that the teacher could not conceal his satisfaction, thinking, perhaps, that he had before him an expert in the language of Molière. When he told me to sit down again, such was my pleasure at having cut a good figure that, as I left the platform, I couldn't resist pulling a face to amuse my classmates. It was done purely out of nervousness,
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