Small Memories Read Online Free Page B

"This is it." But he didn't come out again. I still don't know what went on inside. Was it that when his wife told him what had happened, he decided that it wasn't worth taking seriously anything a mere lad had said? Had she been generous enough not to say a word to her husband about the unfortunate episode and decided to swallow the insult hurled at a pair of feet that were hardly her fault anyway? Had she thought of all the scornful names she could call me, "stammerer," for example, but had chosen instead, out of charity, to keep silent? The truth is that when my aunt summoned me to supper, I wasn't filled only with a sense of satisfaction. Oh, I was glad that I'd managed to pretend a courage that was, in fact, merely borrowed, but I also had the uncomfortable feeling that I'd missed out on something. Would I really have preferred to have had my ears boxed or been given a good spanking, which I was still of an age to receive? Well, no, my thirst for martyrdom didn't go that far. I'm sure, though, that something that night was left hanging in the air. Or, rather, as I write about it now, perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the attitude of those hated neighbors in Mouchão dos Coelhos was simply the second lesson I needed to learn.

    It's time to explain the reasons behind the original title I gave to this memoir—
The Book of Temptations
—which, at first sight, and indeed at second and third sight, seems to have nothing to do with the matters dealt with so far nor, it must be said, with those I will touch on later. My initial ambitious idea—from the days when I was working on
Baltasar and Blimunda
all those years ago—had been to show how sainthood, that "monstrous" manifestation of the human spirit, disturbs, confuses and disorients nature, and is capable of subverting our permanent and apparently indestructible animality. It seemed to me at the time that the crazed saint depicted by Hieronymus Bosch in his
Temptation of St. Anthony
had, by the mere fact of being a saint, drawn up from the depths all the forces of nature, visible and invisible, the mind's most grotesque and most sublime thoughts, lusts and nightmares, every hidden desire and every manifest sin. Oddly enough, my attempt to transpose such a thorny subject (I soon realized that my literary gifts fell far short of such a grandiose project) onto a simple repository of reminiscences that clearly called for a more modest title, didn't mean that I hadn't at some point found myself in a similar situation to that of the saint. For as a creature of the world, I must also be the seat of all desires and the object of alltemptations, simply because "it goes with the territory." What difference would it make if we were to replace St. Anthony with a child, an adolescent or an adult? Just as the saint was besieged by imaginary monsters, I, as a child, was subject to the most appalling night terrors, and the naked women who continue to cavort lasciviously around all the Anthonys of the world are no different from the fat prostitute who, one night, as I was on my way to the Cinema Salão Lisboa, alone as usual, asked me in a weary, indifferent voice: "Do you want to come up to my room?" That was in Rua do Bem-Formoso, next to the flight of steps there, and I must have been about twelve. And while it's true that some of Bosch's phantasmagoria make any comparison between saint and child seem ludicrous, this is perhaps only because we don't remember or don't wish to remember what went on in our heads as children. That flying fish which, in Bosch's painting, carries the saint through air and wind, is not so very different from our body flying in dreams, as mine often did through the gardens separating the buildings in Rua Carrilho Videira, grazing the tops of the lemon trees and medlar trees or rising up with a simple flap of the arms and hovering above the rooftops. And I can't believe that St. Anthony experienced worse terrors than, for example, the recurring