I
The Tower of Seeing the Light
Houses belong to the spiders. They just lend us somewhere to live. The second we leave, at the first silence and emptiness, the real owners reopen their secret offices and go to inspect the state of the property.
Then, obeying the whistle of (almost inaudible) factory steam, they reopen the loom workshops, the silk cisterns and, paying little heed to gravity, these leg-leaden beings proceed to take over the ceilings, the corners of the living room, the chandeliers, the cracks in the floor, the backs of the furniture and the bars of the beds.
The webs return, and the revolution is complete.
They reoccupy the crystal palaces and some die within the first hour, devoured by the stronger ones in the fight for places. But then the purge subsides, and the survivors erect flats on the sofa cushions, weave nurseries in their slippers, practise Olympic trapeze in the arms of the vase, turn the bottoms of mugs into toilets and the window frames into summer belvederes, dig winter gardens in the flowerpots, swing their young in the silverware, meditate in spiritual retreat within the kitchen cabinets, cool off in the snow slide of the enamelled bathtub and hollow out graves for the little ones that stuck their little legs in the light sockets. Their young are geometrically proportionate copies of Mummy Spider and Daddy Spider, but small and fragile, transparent, the liquid flowing inside them visible.
At the end of the day, ruminating their chelicerae in venomous pincers, they settle down on the rafter of some garret and go through the accounts for the rent they charge us, both arms and both legs, plus the building’s damages and the amortisation. Eight black button eyes of various sizes, bright, focused eyes, amanuenses, draw up the balance sheet for the month. The spiders make their sums by touching the tips of their little legs to each other, like children running their fingers along their little thumb, practising arithmetic from their little finger to forefinger— one, two, three, four, five — but the spiders count to eight, because they have more legs than we have phalanges on one hand, the famous arachnids! Then they scribble the totals in a table cell. Even if Aunt Rosa suddenly returns and, furiously waving a broom in the air, annihilates the webs, the trapeze artists’ nets, hurling curses at the big spiders, crushing us if possible, then we know what we’ll do — we’ll crap on the skirting boards in the lounge, leave tiny, dark, rubbery nuggets of shit in the pantry that only come out when attacked with a steel scouring pad or a knife. We hide cocoons in hard-to-reach places and lurk quietly in corners. You have the clocks, we have the time.
But for now, peace.
Then, with a sigh, the spiders remove their four pairs of different-sized glasses and deposit their squared notebook in a crack in the wall. That’s enough for today. They wait for supper on a bouncy bed. Supper, however, can take days, days as quiet as an asterisk in a footnote. If the humans are away a lot, the spiders, time permitting, change their skeleton, and the carapace hangs there, a transparent eight-legged ghost, as if a spider had died. This playacting can fool people while the chitin hardens, and then the same spider reappears, just like new. A leg on a string is the sensor, like a personal landmine, which now knows in advance when someone is approaching and jumps halfway into the air to cut off your balls.
One day, food finally arrives, sliding through the air like a tray across a barroom, carried by a servant dressed in a sailor uniform. A mosquito like that, with a swollen abdomen, drunk on the blood of a maiden who had just been sucked in the village (it entered the room either through the window or the broken roof tile), a green fly with shit on its shoes that was wiping them off and suddenly the air around it becomes sticky, an invisible curtain glues its cellophane wings to it, a spider swoops down fiercely on a pale thread, like a circus performer, already softened by the bite.
The spider pounces Greco-Roman style, and the victims hum defeatedly in the air or on the carpet, covered in silk, the time has come, I die now!
Spiders salivate a lot if the food is good and, half-digested, it melts in their mouths like butter. Just the same as with us, sometimes. Bursting with nutrients and amino acids, they sniff out love, and in this they are also just like us. Mind you, in certain species, the same spider can serve both functions, breeding and then being eaten, but that’s because the female is much larger and it’s she who chews up the male with her sharp mouth after sex, which hardly ever happens among us. It’s usually women who are killed by men, and that happens a lot. These are statistics and it’s all there in numbers. So, after love, the female opens her… her red, moist lips… so beautiful, she approaches again but stops smiling and…
“There, off in the distance, it’s the tower!”
I’m in the dead man’s seat, entangled in a verbose nightmare of jarring images.
“Wake up, Cruzeta, didn’t you want to see the tower?!”
“Fuck, don’t shout, Zeca, I was having a dream about spiders, but I’m glad you woke me up. Go on.”
“Tininho, look over there!”
“I’m sick of seeing that tower.”
Tininho, in the back seat, doesn’t even open his eyes. He turns to the side and rests his beard against the threadbare upholstery, dazed by jetlag. Here we are, together again, so many years later, for our Matcha. Matcha is dead. Zeca stops the car, which sighs as if it were dying as well.
Off to the side, beyond the posts for hitching bulls, begins one of the hills belonging to Zeca’s extended family, the estate with a tower, that giant yellowish stake visible in the distance, at the top of a stony hill. both got out to stretch our legs and talk about his great-uncle, the farmer João dos Cães, who a long time ago, — over a hundred years ago, when the 20th century was still in its infancy, —ordered whores from Lisbon for his nephews.
That night, the farmer João dos Cães climbed the stairs of his private tower. After passing the drawing room, located on the Romanesque landing with sentry boxes, where he had left his nephews dancing and groping the girls he rented in the capital, he went round the outside wall and entered the watchtower through the door that could be barricaded in the event of an enemy attack. He had learnt this from the Romans who were there two thousand years ago, but also from those who came after and those who had been there before.
Set into a cliff, the tower was tall and slender, made of brick and concrete reinforced with iron, the French Hennebique system, to imitate real stone. At the top, 40 metres high, was a crown, an open vault with arches, a pastiche of the ruins of the Carmo Convent or a platform for ascending to the heavens. The tower contained an almost vertical staircase. He had it built in rectangular planks, with steps and right angles. The staircase was illuminated by natural light from the arrowslit windows and from there he could, once again in the event of an attack, a threat which hangs over us constantly, watch all the flanks of the earth, from north to south, east to west and all the intermediate degrees of the Alentejo.
The musical tatters of a pasodoble reached his hat, vibrating the brim. Then the chord changed to a slow saia from the Alto Alentejo. A man with a thick, slightly whiny voice sang the tune
Your eyes are beautiful, your eyes are beautiful, your eyes, my love, they captivate my heart.
as he had been to a mass at St Rita’s, he stopped there in the churchyard and, the enamoured man concluded,
I’ve seen so many beautiful faces, yours is the only one I love
your hands are white snow, your breasts are beautiful flowers
he continued his inventory of her body, and now João dos Cães too was humming the rest while ascending the tower
Your lips are lamps of gold, bows to hold love.
At the south window of the fifth floor, almost at the top, he pierced a spider’s web with his hand, peered down at the party 30 metres below and saw the four turrets with the mock arrowslits. Halfway up, standing on the battlements, was his eldest nephew, Quim, who had just turned 17. He was wearing a tight waistcoat like a forcado — the boys who wrestle the bulls at the bullfights — and was clutching a bottle of champagne in his left hand and, in his right, the bodice of a young red-haired woman with ruffles and heeled shoes, who was looking up and frightenedly asking him to come down. The iron taps of his boots chiselled the battlements, a pair of chrome-plated crescents nailed to the soles that made sounds which evoked tap-dancing and stables, setting off sparks and steadying the boy on the ground.
By the looks of it, the pretty girl agreed to come outside to see the stars shining in the sky. It’s one of the grand spectacles of September in the Alentejo, here some are so bright that they seem to be dancing by themselves on the big screen of the universe, the boy explained to her, just wait for it. She had lips of crimson velvet and was maybe 20 years old at the most. It was the evening of the New Moon and would get incredibly dark later, the sun was beginning to hide for the great orgy of the countryside. Without the moon, which dangerously pulls at our sexual hydraulics, so much energy was curious, but there was the heat. The insects on the ploughed hills and stony bluffs were rubbing their legs and abdomens in a crazy male hum, I’m a cicada, I’m a cricket and at midnight I’ll sing gri-gri, gri-gri in my little hole, and terrapins in the pond snorting like cats, and buck rabbits squeaking at does, and hares with pricked ears, standing up, boxing for the female for one last brood of hares, who will be born hairy and open-eyed, filling their bellies with their mothers’ milk and later with fruit, roots and rotten animals.
All of Creation was whispering in the ears of the ploughman João dos Cães: are we going to hack down the crops, are we going to offend God? Quim was always a precocious lad, but now he’s popped his cherry, he smiled, it’s not night yet, in the red sky I only see Venus, unwavering. The real stars, enchained by the oblique afternoon light, remained locked in the Infinite, waiting for their turn. The little whore from Lisbon got turned on by the golden blue of the plain, the dance music, the military profile of the tower, the champagne from France drunk all afternoon, the temporary feeling of wealth and, something here that’s discussed less frequently, the sweet smell of figs rising from the boy’s crotch.
“Master Quim, when I arrived this morning and saw this tower in the distance, it looked like…
“What does it look like close up?”
“He he he.”
“Ah, ah, ah.”
She reached around the boy’s waist and compared the two architectures.
I hadn’t noticed that before, the farmer marvelled, but now I realise that my tower has the profile of a cock. The drawing room even looks like the ball sack.
“He was spot on, Zeca” I said, appraising the tower in the distance.
“Let me finish, Cruzeta. João dos Cães had a method.”
“Sure, this is my kind of story, get on with it.”
“So, are we leaving or what?” mutters Tininho, opening the car window and yawning.
“Let me fucking finish! Don’t you want to tell the world this story one day, Cruzeta?!”
“I do, but I’m going to make some stuff up, you’ve been warned.”
They’re beautiful, sighed the farmer João dos Cães, I also chose them for their teeth, like the horses, but it was to bring joy and health to my fields that I rented and brought half a dozen women for a week, all speaking Portuguese, from that house with its shutters and vases of flowers in Bairro Alto. I could have smuggled them in from Spain, just a stone’s throw away, and much cheaper, but with all that castaneting nonsense and those bugle voices, sometimes already a bit worse for wear or even totally ruined by intensive rural use. We have all those 19th-century novels to blame for this idea that these Spanish lasses waving their fans about are superior to our Lisbon girls. All that’s over, it’s 1901, the 20th century!
We’re already living human progress here, right in the most far-flung corner of Portugal, on my hill there are dynamos and steam boilers, glowing light bulbs, and I’m not sending those nephews back home until they’re men, not until Sunday lunchtime, happy and with their balls empty for the next month, ready to create legitimate men through ladies of leisure with an estate and a four-poster bed, bastards through maids standing in the pantry and sons of unknown fathers through peasant women lying in the hay. Basic education, the bare minimum.
“The women of Paris, now that’s a different story, they’re like champagne!”
Old João dos Cães grumbled, still drunk as a lord, preparing his lungs and legs for the last flights of stairs in the tower. Stumbling, he climbed up to the open arches at the top.
From there he could see the manor house with the family coat of arms, the chapel with its tiles and gilded woodwork, the overseers’ house, the horse stables and the mares’ corral, the roof of the shelter for the grooms and mules, the kennels, the steam generator cabin and the garage for the car and motorbike. Beyond the hill, just visible from the top of the tower, and at that moment in the dark, drowsy, was our old town. Clinging like a tick to the right ear of the mountain. It’s not long until the show, ruminated João dos Cães, checking his grand silver pocket watch. Half an hour. When it’s almost time, I’ll call you all up here.
From the houses on the hill, a kind of beehive, rose a murmur that coalesced in the swirls of air, human tongues, engines and snouts, connecting rods and jaws trembled in the same excitement. Above it all, the dogs barked at the unfamiliar perfume of Lisbon women, at a nephew’s violet vomit dripping from the south wing and at the remains of chicken pie, chorizo, pork offal sausage, fried rib bones that someone threw from the miniature castle on top of the tower.
A boy’s voice shouted to the dogs, get stuck in, mastiffs, mongrels, mutts, we’ve got plenty to eat, there’s no point in waiting for us to starve to death, we, the besieged, have stockpiled enough food to last us for years, we’ll withstand the siege! And everyone laughed at the joke, the privileged ones above the law. What does it matter, we’re not the ones cleaning up the mess.
Crazed by the musky odour of the prostitutes, some dogs howled despite the moon’s absence. It just so happened that none of the barking bitches were in heat that night.
João dos Cães used to say that he had left his heart buried somewhere, like a roll of money in a tin can that he couldn’t find now, and that was why he didn’t get married. His heart was rusty, in fact, he even envisioned a heart shaped like a tin opener. Like all Alentejanos, he had a knack for uncanny poetry which enabled him to utter when drunk, in public at a summer festival, single verses such as
“From my old tin opener heart!”
waiting for a popular poet to offer him a gloss for this motto, but in vain, nobody ever took him up on it.
In fact, he wanted to enjoy himself unburdened by matrimony until he was old, then he’d see how things were. In addition to raising dogs, horses and nephews and looking after the tower he had built, in one of the most outrageous caprices ever to be seen beyond the river Tejo, he was also an afficionado of the global novelty of motorcycles and officially credited as the 2nd motorcyclist in Portugal. He also owned the first four-wheeled car in the city, but, to his dismay, not the first in Portugal – there’s always some bastard who’s quicker. João dos Cães had arrived two months ago from Paris, where he’d brought a Clément voiturette, which he’d unpacked in the capital’s harbour in disassembled parts and then reassembled, and he’d returned to the Alentejo in two days, driving along the roads that led to the estate. With it, he brought kilos of dust on his overcoat, on his pilot’s goggles, on his copper pipes, on his leathers and rubbers, on the back of his champagne bottle, blowing up the engine on the bends and bumps, scaring the people of this louse hole to which he was returning, as His Majesty King Carlos used to say, announcing himself in a claxon as vibrant as a medieval horn, at almost 25 kilometres an hour! At such high speeds, he was at risk of brain damage.
The boss is back girls and ladies, bringing with him a new internal combustion engine, the other piston you probably already know or else will soon, laughed João dos Cães as he spied the first bristles of beautiful harvesters in the fields, lifted by the summer breeze. The golden wheat itself seemed to bow to the lord of the manor A brave man, he drove at night with his headlights made of wax candles.
But this phase had begun two years earlier. He had appeared on a motorcycle, civilisation’s latest invention. The gentleman from Dois Riachos, a slim, handsome man in his late thirties, a sword on two legs, was radiating an entirely new magnetism. He crossed the plains snarling his Peugeot motorcycle with its state-of-the-art Dion-Bouton internal combustion engine among the peasants’ daughters and wives, speeding along the tracks and leaving them shaking in their skirts.
He was much discussed, in droll whispers among the women, in the alarm provoked by the oil fumes, the scent of laurel and lemon that lingered in the air at harvest time. But he also rode chestnut horses from England, Arabian mares and Alter stallions, saddled cream-coloured Isabella mares, cherry-red horses, little brown garranos, rosilhos of three colours mixed in a vermilion of white, yellow and scarlet hair, he harnessed spotted horses, faded gold bays, roans, in short, he rode anything he fancied. What’s more, the boss bathed on Saturdays and his chest had never been swirled with dirt.
As a consequence of these evident privileges, among the day labourers he hired were men who, even more than a full meal of bread, garlic, olive oil and coriander — with olives if they were lucky, an egg in the case of a miracle — dreamed of splitting his head open or slashing his wiry neck with a razor. Every year they would come back for the harvest and mull it over, because sooner or later they would be stricken with a deadly envy. They composed prehistoric Alentejo songs for a choir of men with scarves around their necks dragging their feet, arm in arm, with lyrics that spoke of a boss’s gushing blood dyeing the golden ears of corn the colour of pomegranates, darkening them to blackberries, watering the satyr’s land. And there were many Joãos dos Cães from the Tagus to the Algarve.
However, these ditties of vengeance for seduced brides or raped daughters, prima nocta and other unbelievable injustices of poverty in the Alentejo have yet to circulate to this day. They vanished from the landscape. Only the later, sad and consoled songs remained, the ones about agreeing to work until you die of hunger because the Alentejo is so beautiful, some cheerful, others painfully beautiful, doves and brambles here, blackbirds and nightingales in the brook there, sparrows on the roof, countless love songs, even, from further south the song of men who, one suspects, want to be imprisoned in each other, like the ditty of ó António, beautiful António, sit here by my side in this new perch made from the root of the carnation, made from the leaf of the rose.
And other disarming ones, like the one about a man having to love a stone, because stones are firm, less duplicitous and more sensible than women, or being so tortured by jealousy of his sweetheart that the spurned boy hangs himself in the circle of the moon to watch his love wandering around the streets, poor soul.
Or even going cap in hand to the boss begging, give me a cigarette, I’ve run out of tobacco… So we see, there’s a bit of social-political commentary here and there too. At the end of this ditty, we’re even reminded that if death were in it for the money, heaven forbid, the rich would buy death, only the poor would die. And later, during the long night of fascism, they were forbidden to sing at night, the National Guards beat up and arrested anyone who sang in taverns, in the street, damn society, you’re so badly organized, those who don’t work have everything, those who work have nothing. And the guards and secret police didn’t want anyone singing that there are wolves that don’t live in the mountains, that was code for them and their armies of snitches. At Christmas, some would turn from the affectionate adoration of the Child Jesus to his masters: let’s sing the Kings at the door of the farmer, who has a beautiful wife and a flower for a daughter.
But, I repeat, wholly secret songs, ones that remain unknown to this day, the ancient ditties of blood splashing like gooseberries, like tomato juice, of homicidal revenge and of forcibly turning the unjust world upside down! This is the great songbook of cante alentejano which remains to be discovered. At dawn, the hour when a man’s imagination is at its most agonising, when the evening or afternoon forms cascades of doubts — where is she, what are they getting up to? —, thinking that if the boss does that to my wife, I’ll have to do him in then hang myself. How can you always hear birds, so big and beautiful, and not find the sinister songs? Who hid these ditties? Don’t tell me there isn’t one!
But nothing bad happened in 1901 to João dos Cães, the farmer with the mares and motorcycles, not least because he donated generously to churches and charity. Every year, at Easter time, he would wipe his slate clean of sins and lusts, and the bishop would guarantee him a place in heaven, with parking for his infernal car.
João dos Cães spent several decades in relative peace, but the debt of his landowning ways would befall his nephews. For example, one of them, Zeca’s grandfather, got out of the carriage in which he was returning home with his wife and young son, in the clearing where the bullring was later built, said he was just going to urinate, give me a minute, I’ll be right back, disappeared behind a bush, and the only sound heard was the thunder of the pistol, his brains blown out.
And so on, until we arrive at today, the 21st century, when death in the Alentejo doesn’t stop for rich or poor, at least suicide. Perhaps the only time that death isn’t in it for the money is suicide, although there’s some fresh news on the subject, which I’ll return to in due course.
In the Alentejo, we still do more harm to ourselves than to others — this continues in general terms.
The excerpt of Against Fraternity by Esteve Soler, translated from the Catalan by H.J. Gardner appears courtesy of the translator.
7.
Her father says she came into life quietly. Hair as dark as the black- ness she came from. Eyes as light as the day beginning for the first time. She is a girl, and although they were anticipating a boy, they are delighted. Everything went well. It is twenty to twelve at night. The wind has the strength of a giant’s breath and hailstones as big as coals are falling from the skies. Her mother’s womb is the gate through which reality can be found, the painful white surfaces of life, the cold that makes her gasp for air. Tonight she has been brought to life.
откъс
Death Bed