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dog, which immediately began to pursue me, filling the air with its furious, thunderous barking, while I, poor thing, desperately dodged behind trees to avoid him as best I could, meanwhile calling for help. The aforementioned neighbors—and I use the word only because they lived in the same building as us, not because they were the equals of nobodies like us who lived in the attic room on the sixth floor—took longer to restrain their dog than even the most elementary charity demanded. Meanwhile—if my memory is not deceiving me, and I'm not being misled by my humiliation and my fear—the owners of the dog, young, refined, elegant (they must have been the teenage children of the family, a boy and a girl) were, as people used to say then, laughing fit to burst. Fortunately, I was quick on my feet, and the animal never caught me, still less bit me, or perhaps that wasn't its intention; it had probably been startled to find me standing outside the door. We were both afraid of each other, that's what it was. The intriguing thing about this otherwise banal episode is that I knew, when I was standing outside the front door, that the dog, that particular dog, was waiting there to go for my throat. Don't ask me how, but I knew.

    And the horses? My problem with horses is a more painful one, of the kind that leaves a permanent wound in a person's soul. One of my mother's sisters, Maria Elvira by name, was married to a certain Francisco Dinis, who worked as a keeper on the Mouchão de Baixo estate, part of Mouchão dos Coelhos, the name given to the whole of a particularly large estate on the left bank of the Tejo, more or less in a direct line with a village called Vale de Cavalos, or "Valley of Horses." Anyway, to return to myUncle Francisco. Working as a keeper on such a large and powerful estate meant that he belonged to the aristocracy of the countryside: double-barreled shotgun, green beret, white shirt buttoned up to the neck regardless of whether it was blazing hot or freezing cold, red belt, knee-high leather boots, short jacket and, naturally, a horse. Now, in all those years—and from eight untilfifteen is a lot of years—it never once occurred to my uncle to lift me up into that saddle and I, presumably out of a kind of childish pride of which I couldn't even have been aware, never asked him to do so, however much I wanted him to. I can't remember by what circuitous route (possibly because she knew another of my mother's sisters, Maria da Luz, or one of my father's sisters, Natália, who had worked as a maid for the Formigal family in Lisbon's Estrela district, in Rua dos Ferreiros, a street in which, an eternity later, I, too, would live), but one day, a lady, still fairly young, moved into Casalinho, as my maternal grandparents' house had always been known; she was, as people used to say then, the "lady friend" of a gentleman who owned a shop in Lisbon. She was unwell and in need of rest, which is why she had come to spend a little time in Azinhaga, to breathe in the good country air and, in so doing, improve by her presence and her money the food that we ate. With this same woman, whose name I can't quite remember (perhaps it was Isaura, or perhaps Irene, no, it was Isaura), I enjoyed several enjoyable bouts of hand-to-hand combat and a few arm-wrestling matches, which always ended with me (I must have been about fourteen at the time) throwing her down onto one of the beds in the house, chest to chest, pubis to pubis, while my grandmother Josefa, whether knowingly or innocently I'm not sure, would laugh out loud and say how strong I was. The woman would sit up, excited and flushed,smoothing her disheveled hair and swearing that if we had been fighting for real, she wouldn't have allowed herself to be beaten. Fool or utter innocent that I was, I could have taken her at her word, but never dared. Her relationship with the shopkeeper was a well-established one, proof of which was their pale,