Small Memories Read Free

time. Only much later, many years afterward, would he realize that he had been walking along what must have been the remains of a Roman road.
    Nevertheless, these marvels, both mine and those of the precocious manipulators of virtual universes, are as nothing comparedwith the time when, just as the sun was setting, I left Azinhaga and my grandparents' house (I would have been about fifteen then) to go to a distant village, on the other side of the Tejo, in order to meet a girl with whom I thought I was in love. An old boatman called Gabriel (the villagers called him Graviel) took me across the river; he was red from the sun and from the brandy he drank, a kind of white-haired giant, as sturdily built as St. Christopher. I had sat down to wait for him on this side of the river, on the bare boards of the jetty, which we called the port, while I listened to the rhythmic sound of the oars on the surface of the water as it was touched by the last light of day. He was approaching slowly, and I realized (or was it just my state of mind?) that this was a moment I would never forget. A little way along from the jetty on the other side was an enormous plane tree, beneath which the estate's herd of oxen used to sleep out the siesta hours. I set off to the right, cutting across fallow fields, low walls, ditches, through puddles and past cornfields, like a stealthy hunter on the trail of some rare beast. Night had fallen, and the only sound in the silence of the countryside was that of my footsteps. As to whether the encounter with the girl proved a happy one or not, I will tell you later. There was dancing and fireworks, and I think I left the village close on midnight. A full moon, although less splendid than that earlier one, lit everything around.Before I reached the point where I would have to leave the road and set off across country, the narrow path I was following seemed suddenly to end and disappear behind a large hedge, and there before me, as if blocking my way, stood a single, tall tree, very dark at first against the transparently clear night sky. Out of nowhere, a breeze got up. It set the tender stems of the grasses shivering, made the green blades of the reeds shudder and sent a ripple across the brown waters of a puddle. Like a wave, it lifted up the spreading branches of the tree and, murmuring, climbed the trunk, and then, suddenly, the leaves turned their undersides to the moon and the whole beech tree (because it was a beech) was covered in white as far as the topmost branch. It was only a moment, no more than that, but the memory of it will last as long as my life lasts. There were no tyrannosauruses, Martians or mechanical dragons, but a meteor did cross the sky (which is not so hard to believe), although, as became clear afterward, mankind was never at risk. After walking for a long time, and with dawn still far off, I found myself in the middle of the countryside, standing outside a roughly built shack. There, to stave off hunger, I ate a piece of moldy cornbread someone else had left behind, and there I slept. When I woke in the first light of morning and emerged, rubbing my eyes, to find a luminous mist obscuring the fields all around, I felt—if I remember rightly, and always assuming I'm not just making it up—that I had finally been born. High time.

    Where does my fear of dogs come from? And my fascination with horses?
    The fear—which even today, and despite recent happy experiences, I can barely control when face to face with an unfamiliar representative of the canine species—comes, I am sure, from the utter panic I felt as a seven-year-old, when, one night as darkness was falling and the streetlamps were already lit and just as I was about to go into the house on Rua Fernão Lopes, in the Saldanha district of Lisbon, where we lived along with two other families, the street door burst open and through it, like the very fiercest of Malayan or African beasts, came the neighbors' Alsatian