Raised from the Ground

A Novel

José Saramago

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780547840444
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Portuguese Literature
• Index: Literature

A family of Portuguese farmers struggle to survive as world events pass them by in "a novel that resounds with relevance for our own time" ( New York Times Book Review ). Winner of the City of Lisbon Prize Celebrated author Jose Saramago has delighted readers around the world with his imaginative tales and evocative depictions of life in his native Portugal. His novel Raised from the Ground follows the changing fortunes of the Mau Tempo family—poor landless peasants not unlike Saramago's own grandparents. Set in Alentejo, a southern province of Portugal known for its vast agricultural estates, the novel charts the lives of the Mau Tempos as national and international events rumble on in the background—the coming of the republic in Portugal, the two world wars, and an attempt on the dictator Salazar's life. Yet nothing really impinges on the grim reality of the farm laborers' lives until the first communist stirrings. Raised from the Ground is Saramago's most deeply personal novel, the book in which he found the signature style and voice that would win him the Nobel Prize in Literature.

HERE, IT’S MOSTLY countryside, land. Whatever else may be lacking, land has never been in short supply, indeed its sheer abundance can only be explained by some tireless miracle, because the land clearly predates man, and despite its long, long existence, it has still not expired. That’s probably because it’s constantly changing: at certain times of the year, the land is green, at others, yellow or brown or black. And in certain places it is red, the color of clay or spilled blood. This, however, depends on what has been planted or what has not yet been planted, or what has sprung up unaided and died simply because it reached its natural end. This is not the case with wheat, which still has some life left in it when it is cut. Nor with the cork oak, which, despite its solemn air, is full of life and cries out when its skin is ripped from it.

There is no shortage of color in this landscape, but it isn’t simply a matter of color. There are days as harsh as they are cold, and others when you can scarcely breathe for the heat: the world is never content, the day it is will be the day it dies. The world does not lack for smells either, not even here, which is, of course, part of the world and well provided with land. Were some insignificant creature to die in the undergrowth, it would smell of death and putrefaction. Not that anyone would notice if there were no wind, even if they were to pass close by. The bones would be either washed clean by the rain or baked dry by the sun, or not even that if the creature were very small, because the worms and the gravedigger beetles would have come and buried it.

This, relatively speaking, is a fair-sized piece of land, and while it begins as undulating hills and a little stream-water, because the water that falls from the skies is just as likely to be feast as famine, farther on it flattens out as smooth as the palm of your hand, although many a hand, by life’s decree, tends, with time, to close around the handle of a hoe, sickle or scythe. The land. And like the palm of a hand, it is crisscrossed by lines and paths, its royal or, later, national roads, or those owned by the gentlemen at the town hall, three such roads lie before us now, because three is a poetical, magical, spiritual number, but all the other paths arise from repeated comings and goings, from trails formed by bare or ill-shod feet walking over clods of earth or through undergrowth, stubble or wild flowers, between wall and wasteland. So much land. A man could spend his whole life wandering about here and never find himself, especially if he was born lost. And he won’t mind dying when his time comes. He is no rabbit or genet to lie and rot in the sun, but if hunger, cold or heat were to lay him low in some secluded spot, or one of those illnesses that don’t even give you time to think, still less cry out for help, sooner or later he would be found.

Many have died of war and other plagues, both here and in other parts, and yet the people we see are still alive: some perceive this as an unfathomable mystery, but the real reasons lie in the land, in this vast estate, this latifundio, that rolls from high hills down to the plain below, as far as the eye can see. And if not this land, then some other piece of land, it really doesn’t matter as long as we’ve sorted out what’s mine and thine: everything was recorded in the census at the proper time, with boundaries to the north and south and to the east and west, as if this were how it had been ordained since the world began, when everything was simply land, with only a few large beasts and the occasional human being, all of them frightened. It was around that time, and later too, that the future shape of this present land was decided, and by very crooked means indeed, a shape carved out by those who owned the largest and sharpest knives and according to size of knife and quality of blade. For example, those of a king or a duke, or of a duke who then became his royal highness, a bishop or the master of an order, a legitimate son or the delicious fruit of bastardy or concubinage, a stain washed clean and made honorable, or the godfather of a mistress’s daughter, and then there’s that other high officer of the court with half a kingdom in his grasp, and sometimes it was more a case of, this, dear friends, is my land, take it and populate it to serve me and your offspring, and keep it safe from infidels and other such embarrassments. A magnificent book-of-hours-cum-sacred-accounts-ledger presented at both palace and monastery, prayed to in earthly mansions or in watchtowers, each coin an Our Father, ten coins a Hail Mary, one hundred a Hail Holy Queen, Mary is King. Deep coffers, bottomless silos, granaries the size of ships, vats and casks, coffers, my lady, and all measured in cubits, rods and bushels, in quarts, pottles and tuns, each piece of land according to its use.

Thus flowed the rivers and the four seasons of the year, on those one can rely, even when they vary. The vast patience of time and the equally vast patience of money, which, with the exception of man, is the most constant of all measurements, although, like the seasons, it varies. We know, however, that men were bought and sold. Each century had its money, each kingdom its man to buy and sell for maravedis, or for gold and silver marks, reals, doubloons, cruzados, sovereigns or florins from abroad. Fickle, various metal, as airy as the bouquet of a flower or of wine: money rises, that’s why it has wings, not in order to fall. Money’s rightful place is in a kind of heaven, a lofty place where the saints change their names when they have to, but not the latifundio.

A mother with full breasts, fit for large, greedy mouths, a womb, the land shared out between the largest and the large, or, more likely, joining large with larger, through purchase or perhaps through some alliance, or through sly theft, pure crime, the legacy of my grandparents and my good father, God rest their souls. It took centuries to get this far, who can doubt that it will always remain the same?

But who are these other people, small and disparate, who came with the land, although their names do not appear in the deeds, dead souls perhaps, or are they still alive? God’s wisdom, beloved children, is infinite: there is the land and those who will work it, go forth and multiply. Go forth and multiply me, says the latifundio. But there is another way to speak of all this.

THE RAIN CAUGHT UP with them toward the end of the afternoon, when the sun was barely a half-span above the low hills, to the right, however, the witches were already combing their hair, for this is their favorite weather. The man reined in the donkey and, to relieve the animal’s load on the slight incline, used his foot to shove a stone under one wheel of the cart. This rain is most unseasonable, whatever can have got into the ruler of the celestial waters. That’s why there’s so much dust on the roads as well as the occasional dried cow pat or lump of horse dung, which no one has bothered to pick up, this being too far removed from any inhabited place. No young lad, basket over his arm, has ventured this far out in search of some natural manure, tentatively picking up the crumbling sphere, which is sometimes cracked like a ripe fruit. In the rain, the hot, pale earth became spattered with sudden dark stars, falling dully onto the soft dust, and then a torrent flooded everything. The woman, however, still had time to lift the child down from the cart, out of the concave nest formed by the striped mattress squeezed in between two large chests. She held him to her breast, covered his face with the loose end of her shawl, and said, Good, he’s still asleep. This was her first concern, the second was, Everything’s going to get drenched. The man was looking up at the high clouds, wrinkling his nose, and then, in his male wisdom, he declared, It’ll pass, it’s only a shower, but just in case, he unrolled one of the blankets and draped it over the furniture, Why did it have to rain today of all days, damn it.

A flurry of wind sent the now sparse drops flying. When the man gave the donkey a slap on the back, it shook its ears vigorously and tugged at the shafts and the man helped by pushing against the wheel. They set off again up the slope. The woman followed behind, her child in her arms, and, pleased to see him sleeping so soundly, she peered down at him, murmuring, There’s a good boy. The ground to either side of the cart track was thick with undergrowth, in which a few lost, choked holm oaks stood, trunk-deep, abandoned or perhaps born there. The wheels of the cart gouged and squelched a path through the sodden earth, and now and then gave a sudden violent jolt whenever a stone raised a shoulder above the surface. The furniture creaked beneath the blanket. The man, walking beside the donkey, his right hand resting on the reins, was silent. And so they reached the top of the hill.

A great mass of dense, towering clouds was heading toward them from the south over the straw-colored plain. The path plunged downward, barely distinguishable between the crumbling ditches planed almost flat by the winds sweeping in across the empty expanse. At the bottom, the path would join a wide road, a rather ambitious word to use in a place so ill served by roads. To the left, almost hugging the low horizon, a small settlement turned its white walls to face the west. As we said before, the plain was vast and smooth, interrupted only by a few holm oaks, alone or in pairs, and little else. From that modest vantage point, it was not difficult to believe that the world had no known end. And seen from there, in the yellowish light and beneath the great leaden sheet of the clouds, the settlement, their destination, seemed unreachable. São Cristóvão, said the man. And the woman, who had never traveled so far south, said, Monte Lavre is bigger, which, while apparently a merely comparative statement, hinted perhaps at homesickness.

They were halfway down the hill when the rain returned, at first in the form of a few plump drops threatening a downpour, so much for it being a passing shower. Then the wind swept across the plain, pushing everything before it like a broom, scooping up straw and dust, and the rain advanced from the horizon, a grayish curtain that soon obscured the distant landscape. It was a steady rain, of the sort that looks set in for many hours, one that arrives and is reluctant to leave, and when, finally, the earth can’t cope with all that water, it’s hard to know then if it’s the sky or the earth doing the drenching. The man again said, Damn it, the kind of thing people say if they have learned no grander expressions. Shelter is far away, and with no coats to put on, they have no alternative but to receive on their backs whatever rain may fall. From there to the village, given the speed at which this weary and somewhat reluctant donkey is traveling, it will be at least another hour’s journey, and by then it will be dark. The blanket, which barely protects the furniture, is soaked and dripping, the water falling in drops from the white threads, what hope for the clothes in the chests, the few migratory possessions of this family who, for reasons of their own, are making this cross-country trek. The woman looks up at the sky, an ancient, country way of reading the great blank page above our head, this time in order to see if the sky is clearing, which it isn’t, looking, rather, as if it were heavy with dark ink, the weather won’t change this evening. The cart travels onward, it’s a boat plunging into the deluge, it’ll go under at any moment, that seems to be why the man is driving the donkey forward, but it’s only so that they can reach that holm oak, which will shelter them from the worst of the storm. Man, cart and donkey have arrived, and the woman is nearly there, sliding about in the mud, she can’t run, she would wake her child, that’s how the world is, we never notice other people’s problems, not even when the people involved are as close as mother and son.

Underneath the oak tree, the man was gesticulating impatiently, he obviously doesn’t know what it’s like to carry a child in his arms, he’d be better employed checking that the ropes on the cart haven’t slackened, because traveling at that speed, the knots are sure to have slipped or the furniture shifted, and the last thing we need now is for the little furniture we have to fall and break. Under the tree, the rain is lighter, but large drops still fall from the leaves, this is no dense orange tree, standing beneath these enormous, widespread arms is like standing beneath a porch full of holes, indeed, it’s hard to know where to stand, but just then the child began to cry, prompting the mother to perform a more urgent task, unbuttoning her blouse and giving him her breast, almost empty of milk now, barely enough to stave off hunger. His crying stopped at once, and mother and child were at peace, wrapped about by the steady murmur of the rain, while the father walked around the cart, untying and retying knots, bracing his knee on the side of the cart to pull the ropes tight, while the donkey, abstracted, shook his ears hard and gazed out at the puddles and the flooded path. Then the man said, We were so near, and then all this rain, these were words spoken in mild anger, uttered almost unthinkingly and hopelessly, as if to say, the rain won’t stop just because I’m angry, well, that’s the narrator speaking, which we can quite do without. We would be better off watching the father, who asks at last, How’s the child, and goes over and peers under the shawl, he is her husband after all, but so quickly and modestly does his wife cover herself up that he can’t be sure now whether it was his son he wanted to see or her bare breast. He just had time to make out, in the tepid darkness, in the scented warmth of crumpled clothes, his son’s intensely blue eyes watching him from that private interior, with that strange pale light that usually stared out at him from the cradle, transparent and stern, an exile among the dark brown eyes of the family he was born into.

The heavy clouds had thinned a little, the first torrent of rain had slowed. The man stepped out onto the path, looked up questioningly at the sky, turning to the four cardinal points, and said to his wife, We’d better go, we can’t stay here until it’s dark. And his wife said, Let’s go then. She withdrew her nipple from the baby’s mouth, the child sucked air for a moment, seemed about to cry, then stopped, rubbed his face against the now withdrawn breast and, sighing, fell asleep. He’s a quiet child, good-humored, and a friend to his mother.

They were walking along together now, wrapped about by the rain, so wet that not even a cozy barn would tempt them, they’ll stop only when they reach their new home. The night was coming on fast. In the west, there was only a last faint glow that grew gradually red, then was gone, and the earth was a dumb, black well, full of echoes, how large the world seems at nightfall. The squeaking of the wheels seemed louder, the stuttering breath of the donkey as unexpected as a secret suddenly spoken out loud, and the whisper of their wet clothes was like a continuous murmured conversation between friends, with no awkward silences. For leagues around, not a light was to be seen. The woman crossed herself, then made the sign of the cross over her son’s face. At this hour of night, it’s best to defend the body and protect the soul, because ghosts begin to appear on the roads, either passing in a whirlwind or sitting down on a rock to await the traveler, of whom they will ask three questions to which there is no answer, who are you, where do you come from and where are you going. The man walking alongside the cart would like to sing, but he can’t, all his energy is going into pretending that the night doesn’t frighten him. Not much farther, he said when they reached the road, we just keep going straight now and this is a better road too.

Ahead, far away, a flash lit up the clouds, no one could have guessed they were so low. Then a pause and, finally, the low rumble of thunder. That’s all we need. The woman said, Holy Saint Barbara save us, but the thunder, if it wasn’t a remnant of some distant storm, seemed to be taking a different route, either that or Saint Barbara had shooed it away to places of lesser faith. They were on the road now, they could tell because it was wider, although any other differences could only be found with great patience and by the light of day, they had come through mud and potholes, and through mud and potholes they continued, and now it was so dark that they couldn’t see where they were putting their feet. The donkey advanced by instinct, walking alongside the ditch. The man and the woman skidded along behind. Now and then, if the road curved, the man ran blindly ahead to see if he could catch a glimpse of São Cristóvão. And when they saw, amid the darkness, the first white walls, the rain suddenly stopped, so abruptly that they barely noticed. One moment it was raining, the next it wasn’t. It was as if a great roof had stretched out over the road.

It’s hardly surprising that the woman should ask, Where’s our house, a perfectly understandable question in someone who needs to take care of her child and, if possible, put the furniture in its proper place before laying her weary body down in bed. And the man answers, On the other side. All doors are closed, only a few faint chinks of light betray the presence of the other inhabitants. In a yard somewhere, a dog barks. There’s always a dog barking when someone walks past, and the other dogs, caught unawares, pick up the first sentinel’s word and fulfill their canine duty. A gate was opened, then closed. And now that the rain had stopped and the house was near, husband and wife were more aware of the cold wind that came running along the street, before plunging down the narrow alleys, where it shook the branches that reached out over the low roofs. Thanks to the wind, the night grew brighter. The great cloud was moving off, and here and there you could see patches of clear sky. It’s not raining now, said the woman to her child, who was sleeping and, of the four, was the only one not to know the good news.

They came to a square in which a few trees were exchanging brief whispers. The man stopped the cart and said to the woman, Wait here, and walked under the trees toward a brightly lit doorway. It was a bar, a taberna, and inside three men were sitting on a bench while another was standing at the bar, drinking, holding his glass between thumb and forefinger as if posing for a photograph. And behind the bar, a thin, shriveled old man turned his eyes to the door, through which the man with the cart entered, saying, Good evening, gentlemen, the greeting of a new arrival wishing to gain the friendship of everyone in the room, either out of fraternal feeling or for more selfish commercial reasons, I’ve come to live here in São Cristóvão, my name’s Domingos Mau-Tempo^* and I’m a shoemaker. One of the men sitting on the bench joked, Well, you certainly brought the bad weather with you, and the man who was drinking and had just emptied his glass smacked his lips and added, Let’s hope his soles are better than the weather he brings, and the others, of course, laughed. These were not intended as rude or unwelcoming words, but it’s nighttime in São Cristóvão, all the doors are shut, and if a stranger arrives bearing a name like Mau-Tempo, only a fool could resist making a joke of it, especially after that heavy downpour. Domingos Mau-Tempo responded with a reluctant smile, but that’s to be expected. Then the old man opened a drawer and produced a large key, Here’s the key, I was beginning to think you weren’t coming, and everyone stares at Domingos Mau-Tempo, taking the measure of this new neighbor, every village needs a shoemaker and São Cristóvão is no exception. Domingos Mau-Tempo offered an explanation, It’s a long way from Monte Lavre, and it rained while we were on the road, not that there’s any need for him to account for himself, but he wants to be friendly, and then he says, Let me buy you all a drink, which is an excellent way of touching the pockets of men’s hearts. The men who were seated stand up and watch the ceremony of their glasses being refilled, and then, unhurriedly, each man again picks up his glass with a slow, careful gesture, this is wine, after all, not cheap brandy to be drunk down in one gulp. Won’t you have a drink yourself, sir, says Domingos Mau-Tempo, and the old man, who knows the ways of the big city, answers, Here’s wishing good health to my new tenant. And while the men are engaged in these niceties, the woman comes to the door, although she doesn’t actually come in, the taberna is reserved for men only, and she says quietly, as is her wont, Domingos, the child is restless, and what with the furniture and everything being so wet, we need to get unloaded.

She is quite right, but Domingos Mau-Tempo disliked being summoned by his wife like that, what will the other men think, and as they cross the square, he scolds her, If you do that again, I’ll be very angry. The woman did not respond, too busy trying to quiet the baby. The cart went slowly on, jolting over the bumps. The donkey had stiffened up with the cold. They went down a side street where the houses alternated with vegetable gardens, and they stopped outside a low hovel. Is this it, asked the woman, and her husband replied, Yes.

Domingos Mau-Tempo opened the door with the large key. In order to enter, he had to lower his head, for this is no palace with high doors. There were no windows. To the left was the fireplace, with the hearth at floor level. Domingos Mau-Tempo made a small, flickering torch from a sheaf of straw and held it up so that his wife could see their new home. There was a bundle of firewood by the chimney breast. Enough for their immediate needs. In a matter of minutes, the woman had laid the child down in one corner to sleep, gathered together some logs and some kindling, and the fire had sprung into life, like a flower on the whitewashed wall. The house was once again inhabited.

Domingos Mau-Tempo led the donkey and the cart in through the gate to the yard, and started unloading the furniture and carrying it into the house, where he set it down willy-nilly, until his wife could come and help him. The mattress was wet on one side. The water had got into the clothes chest, and one leg of the kitchen table was broken. But on the fire was a saucepan of cabbage leaves and rice, and the baby had suckled again and fallen asleep on the dry side of the mattress. Domingos Mau-Tempo went out into the yard to do his business. And standing in the middle of the room, Sara da Conceição, Domingos’s wife and João’s mother, stood quite still, staring into the flames like someone waiting for a garbled message to be repeated. She felt a slight movement in her belly. And another. But when her husband came back in, she said nothing. They had other things to think about.

DOMINGOS MAU-TEMPO will not make old bones. One day, when he has given his wife five children, although not for that most mundane of reasons, he will put a rope around the branch of a tree, in a desolate place almost within sight of Monte Lavre, and hang himself. Before he does this, however, he will carry his house on his back to other places, run away from his family three times, but fail to make his peace with them on that third occasion because his hour will have come. His father-in-law Laureano Carranca had predicted just such an unfortunate end when he was forced to give in to Sara’s stubbornness, for, so besotted was she with Domingos Mau-Tempo that she swore that if she could not marry him, she would marry no one. Laureano Carranca would roar furiously, He’s a ne’er-do-well and a drunkard and will come to no good. And so the family war raged on until Sara da Conceição fell pregnant, a conclusive and usually highly effective argument when persuasion and pleading have failed. One morning, Sara da Conceição left the house, in May it was, and walked across the fields to the place where she had arranged to meet Domingos Mau-Tempo. They were there for half an hour at most, lying amid the tall wheat, and when Domingos returned to his lasts and Sara to her parents’ house, he went off whistling with satisfaction, while she was left shivering despite the hot sun beating down on her. And when she crossed the stream by the ford, she had to crouch down beneath some willows and wash away the blood flowing from between her legs.

João was made, or to use a more biblical term, conceived, on that same day, which, it would seem, is most unusual, because, in the haste and confusion of the moment, semen does not necessarily do its job the first time, only later. And it’s true that there was considerable consternation, not to say suspicion, regarding João’s blue eyes, for no one else in the family had such eyes nor, as far as they could recall, had any relative, close or distant, we, however, know that such thoughts were grossly unfair to a woman who, after much soul-searching, had deviated from the straight virginal path and lain down in a wheatfield with that one man ...