Small Memories Read Online Free PDF

rather less about the other Barata brother, but I can still see him, small, round and rather plump. If I ever knew what he did for a living, I have long since forgotten. I think his wife's name was Emília and his, I believe, was José: having been buried for years beneath many layers of forgetting, those names, like that of the supposedly flighty Conceição, rose obediently from the depths of memory when summoned by necessity, like a cork float held fast on the riverbed, but which suddenly breaks free of the accumulated mud. They had two children, Domitília and Leandro, both slightly older than me and both with stories to tell, and in the case of Domitília, to my great good fortune, with some sweet memories to recall. Let's begin with Leandro. At the time, he didn't seem particularly intelligent, in fact, he didn't seem very intelligent at all or else made no effort to appear so. His Uncle Antonio Barata, who never wasted his breath on circumlocutions, metaphors or evasions, called him a fool straight out. In those days, we all had to learn from the
Cartilha Maternal
—the
Mother's Primer
—written by João de Deus, who, in his lifetime, enjoyed a deserved reputation as both an excellent person and a wonderful teacher, but who had, whether intentionally or not, given in to the sadistic temptation to strew his lessons with various lexical traps, or perhaps, out of sheer ingenuousness, it simply never occurred to him that they could be perceived as traps by those catechumens less well fitted by nature to deal with the mysteries of reading. We were living, at the time, in Rua Carrilho Videira, on the corner of Rua Morais Soares, and I remember the tempestuous lessons Leandro received from his uncle and which always ended in Leandro receiving several hard slaps (as with the palmer or ferrule, also known as the "girl with five eyes," the slap was considered an indispensable educational tool) each time poor Leandro encountered a particularly abstruse word, which, as I recall, he never once managed to pronounce correctly. The fateful word was
acelga
—meaning "Swiss chard"—which he pronounced "
a cega
" His uncle would roar: "
Acelga,
you fool,
acelga!
" and Leandro, already braced and ready to be cuffed round the ear, would repeat: "
A cega
" Neither his uncle's aggression nor Leandro's dreadful anxiety achieved anything, for even if they had threatened him with death, he would still have said "
a cega
" Leandro was, of course, dyslexic, but that word, while it might have appeared in the dictionaries of the day, was unknown to the primer written by our good and much-loved João de Deus.

    As for Domitília, we were caught one day together in bed, playing at what brides and bridegrooms play at, active and curious about everything on the human body that exists in order to be touched, penetrated and fiddled with. When I try to pinpoint what age I was then, I think I must have been about eleven or perhaps slightly younger (I can't be certain because we lived twice in Rua Carrilho Videira, in the same house). We two bold creatures (who knows which of us had the idea, although it's likely that the initiative came from me) were spanked on the bottom, purely as a formality I think and not very hard. I'm sure the three women in the house, including my mother, would have laughed about it afterward, behind the backs of the precocious sinners who had been unable to wait until the proper time for such intimate discoveries. I remember crouching on the balcony at the back of the house (on a very high fifth story), crying, withmy face pressed between the railings, while Domitília, at the other end, accompanied me in my tears. But we didn't learn our lesson. A few years later, by which time I was living at 11 Rua Padre Sena Freitas, she went to visit Aunt Conceição, and it happened that not only were my aunt and uncle not in, my parents were out as well, and so we had plenty of time for more detailed