The Illustrious House of Ramires E-Book

Eça De Queiroz

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

First published in 1900, the year of Eça de Queiroz's death, the book portrays Gonçalo Mendes Ramires, the latest member of an aristocratic family that predates even the kings of Portugal. In the isolation of the gloomy ancient tower of Santa Ireneia, Gonçalo rehearses the feats of derring-do of an uninterrupted line of ancestors whose most recent contribution is himself, 'a graduate who had failed his third year examinations at university'. Hoping to win some small scholarly reputation and thus secure a political future in the capital, Gonçalo sets out to portray, à la Walter Scott, the adventures of one such ancestor. Eça de Queiroz's luxurious prose lends itself well to both the subtle irony of his morality play and the beauty of a decrepit Portuguese estate with its autumn sun, wilting flowers, faded portraits and other reminders of a bloody and powerful past.

Leseprobe

Contents

The Author

The Translator

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

Afterword

Copyright

The Author

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz was born on 25th November 1845 in the small town of Povoa de Varzim in the north of Portugal. His mother was nineteen and unmarried. Only the name of his father – a magistrate – appears on the birth certificate. Following the birth, his mother returned immediately to her respectable family in Viana do Castelo, and Eça was left with his wet nurse, who looked after him for six years until her death. Although his parents married later – when Eça was four – and had six more children, Eça did not live with them until he was twenty-one, living instead either with his grandparents or at boarding school in Oporto, where he spent the holidays with an aunt. His father only officially acknowledged Eça as his son when the latter was forty. He did, however, pay for his son’s studies at boarding school and at Coimbra University, where Eça studied Law, and was always supportive of his writing ambitions. After working as the editor and sole contributor on a provincial newspaper in Évora, Eça made a trip to the Middle East. Then, in order to launch himself on a diplomatic career, he worked for six months in Leiria, a provincial town north of Lisbon, as a municipal administrator, before being appointed consul in Havana (1872–74), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1874–79) and Bristol (1879–88). In 1886, he married Emília de Castro with whom he had four children. His last consular posting was to Paris in 1888. He served there until his death in 1900 at the age of only fifty-four.

He began writing stories and essays as a young man and became involved with a group of intellectuals known as the Generation of *70, who were committed to reforms in society and in the arts. He published four novels and one novella during his lifetime: The Crime of Father Amaro (3 versions: 1875, 1876, 1880), Cousin Bazilio (1878), The Mandarin (1880), The Relic (1887) and The Maias (1888). His other novels were published posthumously: The City and the Mountains, The Illustrious House of Ramires, To the Capital, Alves & Co., The Letters of Fradique Mendes, The Count of Abranhos and The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers.

The Translator

Margaret Jull Costa has translated the works of many Spanish and Portuguese writers, and her work has brought her many prizes, among them the Portuguese Translation Prize for The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa in 1992; the translator’s portion of the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for A Heart So White; the 2000 Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s All the Names; the 2008 Pen/Book-of-the-Month Club and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prizes for The Maias by Eça de Queiroz; the 2011 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for The Elephant’s Journey by José Saramago; the 2012 Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for The Word Tree by Teolinda Gersão; and, most recently, the 2015 Marsh Award for Children’s Fiction in Translation for Bernardo Atxaga’s The Adventures of Shola.

In 2013 she was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 was awarded an OBE for services to literature. In 2015 she was given an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Leeds.

I

In his slippers and wearing a light linen jacket over his pink cotton shirt, the Nobleman of the Tower had been working since four o’clock in the afternoon, in the heat and silence of a June Sunday. Gonçalo Mendes Ramires – known to everyone as the Nobleman of the Tower both in his own hamlet of Santa Ireneia and in the neat, handsome neighbouring village of Vila Clara, and even in the nearby town of Oliveira – was engaged on writing an historical novel, entitled The Tower of Dom Ramires, which he intended for publication in the first issue of Annals of Literature and History, a new journal founded by José Lúcio Castanheiro, an old friend from his student days in Coimbra, where they’d both attended meetings of the Patriots’ Club held at the house of the Severinas.

The bright, spacious library was lined with heavy rosewood shelves filled with stout tomes from convent and court, dusty and grave in their calfskin bindings; the room, with its blue-painted walls, looked out over the garden through two large windows; one had a velvet-upholstered window seat, while the other broader window opened onto a balcony, where one could breathe in the sweet scent of the honeysuckle twining about the iron balustrade. Bathed in the strong light flooding in from the balcony stood his desk – a vast affair with turned legs – covered by a faded red damask cloth and cluttered with several thick volumes of Genealogical History, the whole of Bluteau’s Portuguese and Latin Vocabulary, sundry issues of Panorama, and, on one corner, a stack of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, serving as a pedestal for a vase of yellow carnations. Seated in his leather chair, scratching his head with a quill pen and looking pensively down at the sheets of foolscap paper on the desk, Gonçalo Mendes Ramires always had the inspiration for his Novel there before him – the Tower, the ancient Tower, looming square and dark above the lemon trees that had grown up around it, a sturdy survivor from the old fortified manor house, the celebrated Solar de Santa Ireneia, seat of the Mendes Ramires family from the middle of the tenth century; ivy now filled the crack – still clearly visible – in one wall, and, silhouetted against the blue of the June sky, were the battlements and the turret with its deep arrow slits and iron grilles.

As even the heir to the Cidadelhe family, that stern genealogist would admit, Gonçalo Mendes Ramires was definitely Portugal’s most authentic nobleman, scion of its oldest family. Few lineages, even those dating from the same period, could trace their ancestry by the purest of male lines back to those shadowy gentlemen who, between the Douro and the Minho, had defended both castle and lands against the French barons who, along with the Burgundian hosts, had assailed them, brandishing both flag and cooking-pot. The house of Ramires marched on, and, always maintaining that same pure male line, from the son of Count Nuno Mendes, that giant of a man Ordonho Mendes, Lord of Treixedo and Santa Ireneia, who, in 967, married Dona Elduara, the Countess de Carrion, daughter of Bermudo the Gouty, King of León.

Older than the so-called County of Portugal and equally robust, the Solar de Santa Ireneia had grown in strength and reputation, resisting both cruel fortune and time. And at every important stage in the History of Portugal, there was always a Mendes Ramires who stood out for his great heroism or loyalty or for his nobility of mind. One of the most courageous of the line, Lourenço – whose soubriquet was the Butcher, and who had shared the same wet nurse as Afonso Henriques (with whom, before being dubbed a knight, he had kept an all-night prayer vigil in Zamora Cathedral) – had fought at the Battle of Ourique, where Jesus Christ had also put in an appearance, nailed to a cross ten covados high and borne aloft on golden clouds. At the siege of Tavira, Martim Ramires, a brother of the Order of Santiago – after smashing down a fortified door with his axe and forcing his way in among the slashing scimitars that cut off both his hands – clambered to the top of a tower, his two wrists spurting blood, shouting gaily to his Captain, Paio Peres, ‘Sir, Tavira is ours! For Portugal and for the King!’ Locked up in his Tower, with the drawbridge raised, and the barbicans bristling with archers, Old Egas Ramires, having decided that the presence of an adulteress would sully the purity of his house, refused to welcome King Fernando and his mistress, Leonor Teles, when they were travelling in the North of the country and indulging in merrymaking and hunting. In Aljubarrota, Diogo Ramires, the Troubadour, defeated a troop of crossbowmen, slew the Governor of Galicia, and it was thanks to him and no one else that the royal standard of Spain fell, the same standard in which, once battle was done, his brother-in-arms, Dom Antão de Almada, had wrapped himself and, singing and dancing, carried it to the Mestre de Avis. Two more Ramires, the aged Sueiro and his grandson Fernão, fought magnificently on the walls of Arzila, and Afonso V, standing before the old man’s body – where it lay, pierced by four arrows, in the castle courtyard beside the body of the Count de Marialva – dubbed both his son the Prince and Fernão Ramires knights, while murmuring tearfully, ‘May you prove to be as good as these men lying here!’ Then Portugal took to the seas! And it was rare for any fleet or battle in the Orient not to include a Ramires or two, with one man in particular entering tragic maritime legend, Baltasar Ramires, a noble captain in the Persian Gulf, who, at the time of the wreck of the Santa Bárbara, donned his heavy armour and stood erect on the forecastle, leaning on his sword, and silently went down with his sinking ship. In Alcácer Quibir, two Ramires, who never left the King’s side, both went proudly to their deaths; the youngest, Paulo Ramires, the royal standard-bearer, was neither injured nor wounded, but, not wishing to live when his King was dead, grabbed an axe and mounted a riderless horse, crying, ‘Go, my tardy soul, and serve thy master!’ and charging into the Moorish hordes, he disappeared forever. Under the reign of the Spanish Felipes, the Ramires withdrew sulkily to their estates, where they hunted and drank. With the Braganças, another legendary Ramires appeared, Vicente, governor of arms in Douro and Minho for King João IV; he invaded Castile, destroyed the Count de Benavente’s Spanish troops and took Fuente Guiñal, presiding over the furious sacking of that city from the balcony of a Franciscan convent, where he sat in his shirtsleeves eating slices of watermelon. However, as the nation declined, so did the noble race of Ramires. Álvaro Ramires, a favourite of King Pedro II, was a thug and a bully: he wrought havoc in Lisbon, kidnapping the wife of a tax inspector whom he’d ordered to be beaten to death by black slaves, setting fire to a gambling den in Seville where he had lost a hundred doubloons, and ending up as the commander of a pirate ship in the fleet of Murad the Ragged. In the reign of King João V, Nuno Ramires shone at court, shod his mules in silver, and ruined the family by paying for endless sumptuous masses, where he sang in the choir wearing the habit of a brother of the Third Order of St Francis. Another Ramires, Cristóvão, president of the Committee for Good Conscience and Order, acted as go-between for King José I and the daughter of the prior of Sacavém. Pedro Ramires, the chief excise officer, was famous throughout the kingdom for his vast girth, his jokes, and his feats of gluttony in the Palace of Bemposta alongside the Archbishop of Thessalonica. Inácio Ramires accompanied King João VI to Brazil as his chamberlain, became a slave-trader and returned home with a trunk full of pieces of gold, which was then stolen from him by an administrator, a former Capuchin monk; he later died on his estate after being gored by an ox. Gonçalo’s grandfather, Damião, a liberal man of letters devoted to the arts, disembarked with King Pedro IV in Mindelo, composed the Party’s bombastic proclamations, founded a journal, The AntiFriar, and, when the Civil Wars were over, dragged out a rheumatic existence in Santa Ireneia, wrapped in a thick woollen greatcoat while he translated into Portuguese – with the help of a lexicon and some snuff – the works of Valerius Flaccus. Gonçalo’s father – sometimes a supporter of the Regeneration Party and sometimes of the Progressive Historical Party – lived in Lisbon in the Hotel Universal, wearing out his shoe leather going up and down the steps of various Ministries and of the Mortgage Bank, until a government minister finally appointed him Governor of Oliveira, purely in order to banish him from Lisbon because the minister’s mistress, a chorus girl at the Teatro São Carlos, had taken rather too much of a shine to him. Our Gonçalo failed his third-year university exams.

That was the year Gonçalo Mendes Ramires made his debut as a writer. A fellow student of his, living in the same house, one José Lúcio Castanheiro – a very pale, very thin young man from the Algarve, who wore enormous blue-tinted spectacles, and whom Simão Craveiro used to call, ‘Castanheiro the Patriot’ – had founded a weekly publi-cation entitled The Nation, ‘with the lofty intention (as the advertisement put it) of reawakening, not only among the student population, but throughout the land, from Cabo Sileiro to Cabo Santa Maria, a love – long gone cold – for the beauty, grandeur and glory of Portugal!’Consumed by this idea, ‘his Idea’, and feeling it was not just his vocation but almost his mission, Castanheiro, with the stubborn fervour of the apostle, ceaselessly proclaimed in the bars and cafés of Coimbra’s Rua da Sofia, as well as in the University cloisters and the smoke-filled rooms of his friends – ‘the necessity, damn it, of reclaiming tradition! Of dragging Portugal, damn it, out of the mire of Foreign Influence!’ When the journal managed to appear on three consecutive Sundays, and actually did publish studies crammed with italics and quotations on ‘The Unfinished Chapels of Batalha Monastery’, ‘The Capture of Ormuz’, and ‘Tristão da Cunha’s Embassy to Rome’, it was immediately hailed as a new dawn, still somewhat pale, but no less certain for that, and as a National Renaissance. Warmed by that patriotic flame, a few good souls from the academic world – especially Castanheiro’s house-mates, or, rather, the three with the necessary scholarship and intelligence (because as for the other three, one knew only how to use his fists, the other was a guitarist, and the third was a real prize-winner) – went on to search the Library, scouring fat, previously unread tomes by Fernão Lopes, Rui de Pina and Azurara for great feats and legends – ‘purely Portuguese, purely ours (as Castanheiro urged), and guaranteed to rekindle the nation’s sense of our heroic past!’ Thus the Patriots’ Club came into being, meeting in the house of the Severinas. And it was then, one Sunday after lunch, that Gonçalo Mendes Ramires – a very pleasing youth, always elegant and immaculate in his gown and polished shoes, a fair, slim young man, with porcelain white skin and fine, smiling eyes always quick to fill with tears – presented to Castanheiro eleven sheets of paper entitled Dona Guiomar. In this he recounted the ancient story of the castellan’s wife who, while her bearded, heavily armoured husband was away at the wars battering with his poleaxe at the gates of Jerusalem, she, one moonlit May night, welcomed her curly-haired page-boy into her bare arms and her bedchamber. Then winter came roaring in, and her husband returned, even more heavily bearded and now carrying a pilgrim’s staff. The castle steward, an inquisitive man with a sardonic smile, told him of the betrayal, of the stain on his purer than pure name, honoured throughout the Peninsula! Alas for the page-boy! Alas for the lady! The bells soon tolled their death knell! The executioner, wearing a scarlet hood and leaning on his axe, stood in the castle courtyard between two blocks covered in black cloth. And at the tragic end of Dona Guiomar, as in all such stories and ballads, their graves were dug outside the castle walls, and two white rose trees sprang up, and the wind entwined both scents and flowers. And yet (as José Lúcio Castanheiro remarked, pensively stroking his chin), there was nothing in Dona Guiomar that stood out as ‘purely Portuguese, purely ours, sprouting up from the Portuguese soil and the Portuguese race!’ Then again that sad love affair had taken place in the much-disputed Portuguese territory of Ribacôa; the names of the knights involved, Remarigues, Ordonho, Froilas, Gutierres, had a delightfully Gothic ring to them; every line resonated with authentic cries of, ‘Zounds, sir!’ ‘Thou liest, cur!’ ‘Page, bring me my dark bay horse!’ and all this vernacularity was filled with hordes of stableboys in snow-white tunics, mendicant friars with their faces hidden in the shadow of their cowls, stewards carrying bulging leather money bags and manciples carving gleaming sides of pork. The Novel, in short, marked a salutary return to national sentiment.

‘Besides (added Castanheiro), our friend Gonçalo writes in a terse, manly style, full of archaic colour, yes, wonderfully archaic colour! It reminds me of Herculano’s The Fool or The Cistercian Monk! Dona Guiomar could be from anywhere, from Brittany or Aquitaine, but the Portugueseness of the steward and even the husband are plain to see, they’re Portuguese to their very fingertips, hailing from somewhere between Douro and Cávado. Oh, yes, when Gonçalo immerses himself in our past, in our chronicles, Portuguese letters will at last have found a man with a real sense of the soil, of our race!’

Dona Guiomar filled three pages of The Nation. That Sunday, to celebrate his entry into the world of Literature, Gonçalo Mendes Ramires bought supper for the other members of the Patriots’ Club and for a few other friends too, and there, as soon as they had devoured the chicken cooked with peas, and when the breathless waiters at the Camolino were replenishing the bottles of Colares wine, he was acclaimed as ‘our very own Sir Walter Scott!’ He, for his part, modestly announced that he was going to write a two-volume historical novel based on his own family lore, starting with a sublime early exploit by Tructesindo Mendes Ramires, Sancho I’s friend and standard-bearer. Given the detailed knowledge of clothes and furnishings that he had revealed in Dona Guiomar, not to mention his own ancient lineage, Gonçalo seemed, temperamentally, to be the perfect candidate for restoring the historical novel in Portugal. He had a mission, and he immediately began striding up and down the streets of Coimbra, his cap pulled pensively down over his eyes, like someone busily engaged on reconstructing a whole world. That was the year he failed his exams.

When he returned for his fourth year, the Patriots’ Club no longer filled Rua da Matemática with its former ardour. Castanheiro had graduated and was now vegetating in Vila Real de Santo António; with him went The Nation and the zealous lads who had scoured the library for the chronicles of Fernão Lopes and Azurara; and abandoned by the apostle who had so inspired them, they fell back on the novels of Georges Ohnet and, in the evenings, resumed their games of billiards in the bars in Rua da Sofia. Gonçalo was a changed man too, in mourning for his father, who had died in August; he had grown a beard, and although he was the same affable, gentle soul he had always been, he was more serious now and somewhat averse to suppers and nights out on the town. He took a room in the Hotel Mondego, where he was waited on by Bento, an old servant from Santa Ireneia, complete with white tie, and his preferred companions were three or four lads studying Politics, who often leafed earnestly through the Parliamentary Records, were au fait with certain plots and intrigues in Lisbon, proclaimed the need for ‘positive direction’ and ‘long-term investment in the rural economy’, considered the University’s irreverence for Dogmas to be a piece of despicable, Jacobin frivolity, and, even when strolling in the Choupal by moonlight or along the belvedere known as the Penedo da Saudade, they would hold ardent debates about the two party leaders – Brás Vitorino, the new man behind the Regeneration Party, and the Baron de São Fulgêncio, the old leader of the Progressive Historical Party. Leaning more towards the Regenerationists, because the Regeneration Party traditionally represented for him ideals of conservatism, cultivated elegance and generosity, Gonçalo began to frequent the local Regenerationists’ Club, where, at night, sipping a cup of black tea, he would urge, ‘strengthening the authority of the Crown’ and ‘further colonialist expansion!’Then, in the spring, he sloughed off all that political seriousness and stayed up into the early hours at Calomino’s, consuming huge platefuls of bacalhau to the sound of plangent guitars. He no longer mentioned his great two-volume novel and either withdrew from or forgot his mission to revive the historical novel. It was only during the Easter of his fifth year that he took up his pen again, this time in the Gazeta do Porto, in which he published two acerbic letters addressed to his fellow countryman, Dr André Cavaleiro, whom São Fulgêncio had appointed Governor of Oliveira; indeed, so personal and rancorous were the letters, they even made fun of, ‘His Excellency’s bushy black moustache’. He had signed the letters ‘Juvenal’, as his father had before him, when he had published political articles from Oliveira in that same Gazeta do Porto, where he had friends, one of whom, Vilar Mendes, a distant relative, was editor of the foreign news section. But when Gonçalo read out loud to his colleagues at the Regenerationists’ Club those two resounding blows that would, ‘knock Senhor Horseman off his horse!’, one serious young man, the nephew of the Bishop of Oliveira, could not conceal his surprise.

‘But Gonçalo, I always thought you and Cavaleiro were close friends! If I remember rightly, when you arrived in Coimbra for your first year, you lived in his house in Rua de São João. Don’t the Cavaleiros and the Ramires enjoy a traditional, almost historic friendship? I hardly know Oliveira myself, I’ve never actually been there, but I understand that Cavaleiro’s estate shares a boundary with Santa Ireneia!’

And Gonçalo screwed up his face, his smooth, smiling face, and declared tartly that Corinde did not share any boundary with Santa Ireneia, that between the two estates there ran a stream, appropriately named the Coice, the Kick; and that Senhor André Cavaleiro, more horse than horseman, was the vile creature who grazed on the other bank!

The bishop’s nephew applauded this riposte, exclaiming:

‘Very funny, sir!’

A year after graduating, Gonçalo went to Lisbon to sort out the mortgage on his Praga estate, near Lamego, on which the tithe of ten réis and half a chicken owed to the Abbot of Praga was causing unspeakable hold-ups on the Board of the Mortgage Bank; but he went, too, hoping to get to know his party leader, Brás Vitorino, to show his loyalty and submission to the party line, and to pick up a few tips on how to become a politician. One night, when he was returning from supper with the Marchioness de Louredo, his ancient ‘Aunt Louredo’, who lived in Santa Clara, he bumped into José Lúcio Castanheiro in the Rossio; Castanheiro was now working for the Treasury, in the department dealing with National Heritage. Thinner and gaunter than ever, his spectacles even larger and darker, Castanheiro still burned, as he had in Coimbra, with the flame of ‘his Idea’: ‘the resurrection of a sense of Portugueseness’! Expanding his plan for The Nation to be something worthy of the capital city, he was now devoting all his labours to the creation of a fortnightly review, seventy pages long, with a blue cover, and entitled Annals of Literature and History. On that soft, warm May night, as they strolled together around the dried-up fountains in the main square, the Rossio, Castanheiro – who was carrying under his arm a roll of paper and a fat folio bound in calfskin – first recalled the jolly gatherings in Rua da Misericórdia, then lambasted the dearth of intellectual life in Vila Real de Santo António, before returning eagerly to ‘his Idea’, begging Gonçalo Mendes Ramires to let the new journal publish the Novel he had spoken of in Coimbra, about his ancestor Tructesindo Ramires, Sancho I’s standard-bearer.

Amused, Gonçalo confessed that he had still not begun that great work!

‘Ah,’ murmured Castanheiro, stopping in his tracks and fixing him with hard, dark, disconsolate eyes. ‘So you didn’t carry on? You lost faith in the Idea?’

He gave a resigned shrug, accustomed now, in the course of his mission, to these fallings away from the patriotic cause. He would not even allow Gonçalo, humbled by his friend’s pure and constant show of Faith, to make excuses or carry on about the laborious task of drawing up an inventory of the house following his father’s death.

‘No, that’s it. Procrastinare lusitanum est. Start work this summer. For the Portuguese, my boy, summer is the season of good fortune and bold exploits. Nuno Álvares was born in the summer in Bonjardim! The Battle of Aljubarrota was won in the summer! Vasco da Gama reached India in the summer! And this summer, our Gonçalo will write his sublime little Novel! Besides, the first issue of the journal is only due out in December, probably on the first of the month. So you have three whole months in which to bring back to life an entire world. I mean it, Gonçalo! It is a duty, a solemn duty, especially among the young, to work for the Annals. Portugal, my boy, is dying from a lack of national pride! We are dying miserably from the disease of being insufficiently Portuguese!’

He stopped and waved one thin arm, like the lash of a whip, as if hitting out at the Rossio, the City, and the whole Nation. Did Gonçalo know the secret behind this sinister state of affairs? The worst among the Portuguese despised their country, and the best knew nothing about it. The remedy? To reveal the real Portugal, to popularise Portugal. Yes, dear friend, we must blazon abroad the name of Portugal, so that everyone knows it, at least as well as they know James’ Cough Syrup! So that everyone embraces it, just as they have embraced Congo Soap! So that its heroes and their exploits – even its defects – will be known and embraced and loved, down to its very cobblestones! This was his aim, the greatest task one could possibly undertake in this drab period of our History, and that was why he had founded the Annals. To bellow forth, to thunder out the name of Portugal, to shout it from the rooftops, to announce the unexpected news of its greatness! And it was especially incumbent on the descendants of those who had made the Kingdom to undertake the pious work of remaking it. How? By reviving Portugal’s past, its traditions, damn it!

‘Take your family, for example. Throughout the history of Portugal, there has been a long beautiful line of Ramires. Even that judge who, one Christmas, ate two suckling pigs at a sitting! He was merely a belly, but what a belly! There was in that belly a heroic vigour that was evidence of a race, a race that, as Camões put it, went beyond mere human strength. Two suckling pigs, damn it! It’s quite moving really. And the other Ramires men, the ones who fought at Silves, at Aljubarrota, at Arzila, those who went to India! And the five valiant men, about whom you may not even know, who died at the Battle of Salado! Breathe life back into those men and reveal their marvellous heroism and their sublimely unbending will, both of which provide a superb lesson for the young. It’s bracing, damn it! A new awareness of our former greatness would shake up our feeble, flabby acceptance of remaining small and insignificant! That is what I mean by reviving the past. And if you were to do that, Ramires, how chic that would be! How chic, damn it! A nobleman, the greatest in Portugal, who, in order to reveal his country’s heroic past, does not even have to leave his house, all he has to do is consult his thousand-year-old family archives. It’s just amazing! And you don’t have to write a long novel… A long, involved novel wouldn’t really fit with the review’s militant nature. A short story will do, twenty or thirty pages. Of course, we can’t actually pay you anything right now, but then you don’t need the money! Besides, it isn’t a matter of money, but of social renewal… In Portugal, literature carries all before it. I know that in your last year in Coimbra, you were involved with the Regenerationists, well, my friend, your Novella could lead us all to Parliament! It is the pen, not the sword, that rules kingdoms. Think about it. Though I must say goodbye now, because I still have to make a legible copy of this article by Henriques about Ceylon. You don’t know Henriques? Of course you don’t. No one does. Well, whenever the great Academies of Europe have some question about Ceylonese history or literature, they call for Henriques!’

He hurried off, still clutching the roll of paper and the fat volume, and Gonçalo caught a last glimpse of him in the lit doorway of the Tabacaria Nunes, waving one thin, apostolic arm at a very plump man, wearing a vast white waistcoat, who drew back in alarm at this rude interruption of his quiet enjoyment of the soft, warm May night and a large cigar.

The Nobleman of the Tower returned to the Hotel Bragança, impressed by and pondering the Patriot’s idea. He found everything about it deeply seductive, and it suited him down to the ground; yes, contributing to a substantial seventy-page journal like that, in the company of learned writers, university teachers, former ministers, even councillors of state, and making clear his ancient lineage, older than the Kingdom itself, made popular in a tale of heroic beauty, in which the proud, courageous Ramires soul would be shown to full effect, as would his serious academic turn of mind, his noble bent for erudite research, all this would appear just at the moment when he was hoping for a career in Parliament and politics! And the actual work itself, the essential nature of the ancient Ramires family, the archeological resurrection of medieval life, having to fill a hundred sheets of foolscap with powerful prose, none of this frightened him. No, because, fortunately, he already had that ‘work’, cut out of good cloth and skilfully stitched together by his Uncle Duarte, his mother’s brother (his mother was born into the Balsas family of Guimarães), who, in his years of idleness and imagination, from 1845 to 1850, between graduating from university and qualifying as a lawyer, had been a poet, and the weekly journal The Bard, published in Guimarães, had included a short poem of his in blank verse, The Castle of Santa Ireneia, which he had signed with the initals D.B. The castle in the title was Gonçalo’s castle, that most ancient of mansions of which all that remained was the dark tower among the lemon trees in the garden. And the poem sang, with romantic grace, of a noble episode in which Tructesindo Ramires, Sancho I’s standard-bearer, had done himself full justice during the squabbles between Afonso II and his siblings. That copy of The Bard, bound in morocco leather and bearing the Ramires coat of arms – a black goshawk on a scarlet ground – had remained in the family archive as yet one more example of the Ramires’ heroic history. And often, as a child, Gonçalo, having been taught by his Mama, would recite the opening lines of the poem, so harmonious in their melancholy:

In the pale evening light, among the leaves

That Autumn was slowly yellowing…

It was precisely this, his remote ancestor’s sombre exploit, that Gonçalo Mendes Ramires had had in mind when his supper companions and fellow supporters of The Nation had proclaimed him their ‘very own Sir Walter Scott’, and when he had decided to write a modern novel of epic realism in two stout tomes, creating a rich and colourful study of the Portuguese Middle Ages. Now it would, with delicious ease, provide him with the basis for the brief, sober, thirty-page Novella required by the Annals.

He opened the window of his hotel room. And leaning on the balcony, finishing his cigar, in the soft, drowsy May night, before the silent majesty of the river and the moon, he savoured the thought that he would be spared the laborious task of poring over chronicles and tedious folios. Yes, Uncle Duarte had done all the historical groundwork, and with great thoroughness and skill too. The Solar de Santa Ireneia, with its deep moat, its barbican tower, its keep, its dungeon, its beacon and its standard; the huge figure of old Tructesindo, with his long, wild ancestral hair and beard spilling over onto his coat of chain mail; the Moorish servants in leather tunics, digging the irrigation ditches in the orchard; the lay brothers sitting around the fire, mumbling fragments from The Lives of the Saints; the young page-boys playing at soldiers – all these things came vividly to life in Uncle Duarte’s poem! He could still recall certain episodes: the jester being beaten; the banquet with the stewards opening barrel upon barrel of beer; Violante Ramires’ journey to the convent of Lorvão…

By the Moorish fountain, among the elm trees,

The cavalcade comes to a halt…

The whole passionate, barbarous plot, the fierce fights in which family feuds were settled at knife-point, the heroic words spoken by lips of iron – all this was there in his uncle’s sonorous, balanced lines…

Hear me, Monk! The house of Ramires,

Stone by stone, would crumble into dust

Were a bastard’s abject foot to cross

Its yet pure, unsullied threshold!

All he had to do was transpose the fluid formulae of the Romanticism of 1848 into his own terse, manly prose (as Castanheiro had described it) with its excellent touch of archaism, reminiscent of Herculano’s The Fool. Was that plagiarism? No! Who had more right to the memories of the historic Ramires family than he? The resurrection of the old Portugal, so beautifully captured in The Castle of Santa Ireneia, was not the individual work of Uncle Duarte, but of all the Herculanos, Rebelos, Academies and of erudition in general. And, besides, who would know about that poem now, or even about The Bard, that slender weekly journal published over a period of five months fifty years ago in a provincial town? He hesitated not a moment longer, utterly seduced by the idea. And while he was undressing, having first gulped down a glass of water and bicarbonate of soda, he was already chiselling out the first line of the story, in the lapidary style of Salammbô. ‘It was a winter’s night in the Solar de Santa Ireneia, in the vaulted room of the keep…’

The next day, he sought out José Lúcio Castanheiro in the National Heritage department, rather hurriedly, since, after a meeting at the Mortgage Bank, he had promised to go with his cousins, the Chelas, to see an exhibition of embroidery in Livraria Gomes. And he announced to the Patriot that he would definitely send him the Novella for the first issue of the Annals, and that he had already chosen the title: The Tower of Dom Ramires.

‘What do you think?’

José Castanheiro, in his alpaca jacket, held two scrawny arms up to the vault of the narrow corridor in which he met him and exclaimed:

‘Wonderful! The Tower of Dom Ramires. Tructesindo Mendes Ramires’ great deed as told by Gonçalo Mendes Ramires! And in the self-same Tower too! In the very Tower where old Tructesindo did the deed; and seven hundred years later, in that same Tower, our Gonçalo tells the tale! Now that is what I call reviving the past!’

Two weeks later, back at Santa Ireneia, Gonçalo dispatched a servant with a cart to Oliveira, to the house of his brother-in-law, José Barrolo, the husband of Gracinha Ramires, with orders to bring back the whole wonderful classical library that Barrolo had inherited from his uncle, the Dean of the Cathedral, the complete set of Genealogical History, and (he added in a letter), ‘any books that you find bearing the title Chronicles of King So-and-so…’ Then, from his own dusty shelves, he disinterred the novels of Sir Walter Scott, various issues of Panorama, Herculano’s History, The Fool and The Cistercian Monk. Thus provided for and with a thick pile of foolscap ready on his desk, he began rewriting Uncle Duarte’s poem, intending initially to transpose to a chill December morning – as being more in keeping with the harsh feudal life of his forebears – that glittering cavalcade of damsels, monks and men-at-arms whom Uncle Duarte had set against the gentle, autumnal melancholy of the plains of the Mondego:

In the pale evening light, among the leaves

That Autumn was slowly yellowing…

However, since it was June at the time, and the Moon was waxing, Gonçalo decided instead to take advantage of the sensations of heat and moonlight and leafy groves of trees, and to place, right at the very beginning of the Novella, the vast, dark Solar de Santa Ireneia in the silence of an August night and beneath the glow of the full moon.

And, with the help of The Bard, he had already blithely filled two whole pages, when an argument regarding his tenant, Manuel Relho, who worked the land for a rent of eight hundred mil-réis, came to disrupt those early stirrings of the Nobleman of the Tower’s fresh, new inspiration. For many orderly, well-behaved years, Relho had made a habit of getting blissfully, slowly drunk each Sunday, but since Christmas, he had begun to indulge in wild, noisy drinking bouts three or four times a week, during which he would beat his wife and generally disrupt the peace by standing, drunken and dishevelled, in the street, stick in hand, defying the whole village. Finally, one night, when Gonçalo, having finished his tea, was seated at his desk laboriously excavating the ancient foundations of the Solar de Santa Ireneia, Rosa the cook suddenly started screaming, ‘Help, help, save us from Relho!’ And above the noise of her screams and the barking of the dogs, came the sound of first one stone, then another, striking the library’s venerable balcony! Gonçalo immediately considered grabbing his pistol, but just that afternoon, his servant, Bento, had taken the one and only ancient weapon in his possession down to the kitchen for a general clean and de-rust. Alarmed, he ran to his bedroom, locked the door, and, in his haste to barricade himself in with the chest of drawers, caused glass bottles, a tortoiseshell box and even a crucifix to fall to the floor and break. The shouting and barking in the courtyard died away, but that night, Gonçalo did not budge from his well-defended refuge, smoking cigarettes and thinking dark thoughts about Relho, whom he had always previously forgiven and treated kindly, but who had now stoned the windows of the Tower! Early the next morning, he summoned the local alderman; still trembling, Rosa showed him the red marks on her arms left by Relho’s fingers; and Relho, whose lease was due to end in October, was dismissed from the farm, along with his wife, his few belongings and his bed. Another farmer from Bravais, José Casco, who was respected throughout the parish for his serious nature and his astonishing strength, immediately came to ask Gonçalo if he could rent the land around the Tower. However, following his father’s death, Gonçalo Mendes Ramires had decided to increase the rent to nine hundred and fifty mil-réis, and so a crestfallen Casco went back down the steps. He returned the next day and studied every inch of the land, crumbling the soil between his fingers, scrutinising the stable and the cellar and counting the olive trees and the vines; finally, visibly panting with the effort, he offered nine hundred and ten mil-réis! Gonçalo refused to give way, certain that his price was a fair one. José Casco returned again with his wife; then, one Sunday, he brought both his wife and a friend, and spent a long time slowly scratching his clean-shaven chin, taking a few suspicious turns around the threshing-ground, the vegetable plot and the granary, all of which made that June morning unbearably long for the Nobleman, who was sitting on a stone bench in the garden, underneath a mimosa tree, reading the Gazeta do Porto. When an ashen-faced Casco came and offered him nine hundred and thirty mil-réis, Gonçalo threw down his newspaper, declaring that he would rather farm the land himself and show just what could be done with some up-to-date knowledge, phosphates and machinery! The man from Bravais then gave a deep sigh and agreed to pay nine hundred and fifty mil-réis. In time-honoured fashion, the Nobleman shook the farmer by the hand, and the farmer went into the kitchen to drink a large glass of wine and wipe away the anxious sweat drenching his brow and his powerful neck.

However, as if hampered by all these worries, Gonçalo’s creative flow dried up and became no more than a slow, turgid trickle. When he sat down at his desk that afternoon, ready to describe the salle d’armes in the Solar de Santa Ireneia on a moonlit night, all he succeeded in doing was slavishly turning Uncle Duarte’s flowing lines into rather insipid prose, with no interesting modernising touches to lend a lordly majesty or a nostalgic beauty to the thick walls where the moonlight, slipping in through the barred windows, set the tips of lances and the crests of helmets sparkling. And from four o’clock onwards, in the heat and silence of that June Sunday, he laboured long and hard, driving his pen on as if it were a very slow plough cutting through stony ground, only to furiously cross out the one flabby, inelegant line he did manage to write; and sometimes angrily, loudly kicking off his morocco leather slippers, then putting them on again, sometimes sitting inert and resigned to the sense of sterility overwhelming him, he stared out at the Tower, that most difficult of Towers, black among the lemon trees and against the blue sky, all encircled by the peeping flight of the swallows.

Finally, feeling utterly discouraged, he threw down his disastrously stubborn quill and tossed his precious copy of The Bard into a drawer, which he then slid shut.

‘It’s no good, I can’t write a thing. It’s the heat! That and spending the whole morning waiting for that brute Casco to…’

Glumly scratching the back of his neck, he re-read his last grubby, scribbled line:

‘ “…In the broad, high-ceilinged room, where the pale, broad rays of moonlight…” “Broad” and “broad”! And those pale rays, those eternal pale rays! And the wretched castle, so complicated to describe! And old Tructesindo, who I just can’t seem to get at all! In short, a complete disaster!’

He sprang to his feet, knocking over his leather chair; then he stuck a cigar between his teeth and stormed out of the library, slamming the door behind him, filled by a sense of the immense tedium of the work, of the confusing, tangled world of the Solar de Santa Ireneia and of his huge, iron-clad ancestors with their ringing voices, as hard to grasp as coiling smoke.

II

Yawning and adjusting his baggy silk trousers to stop them slipping down, Gonçalo – afflicted by a slight ache in the small of his back and having spent the whole day lounging on the blue damask sofa – slouched languidly across the room to peer out at the Chinese lacquer clock in the corridor. Half past five! He considered going for a walk along the shady road to Bravais, just to clear his head. Or perhaps he should pay a visit (as he had been intending to do since Easter!) to old Sanches Lucena, who, in the General Election in April, had once again been elected deputy in the constituency of Vila Clara. The journey to Feitosa, Sanches Lucena’s estate, would mean an hour’s ride though, and that could prove uncomfortable with that nagging pain in his lower back, which had come on the previous evening, after he had taken tea at the club in town. Undecided about what to do, he was walking slowly along the corridor in order to call Bento or Rosa and ask them to bring him some lemonade, when, in through the open verandah windows, came a loud, metallic voice, which grew louder the more jocular the tone, filling the whole courtyard with the hollow regular rhythm of a hammer hammering:

‘Oh Senhor Gonçalo! Oh Senhor Gonçalo! Oh Senhor Gonçalíssimo Mendes Ramires!’

He instantly recognised the voice of Titó, or António Vilalobos, his distant relative and old friend from Vila Clara, where that excellent, stout fellow of old Alentejo stock had moved for no other reason than his bucolic fondness for the town.

For eleven years now he had filled the place with his imposing limbs, the slow thunder of his booming voice, and with his idleness, which overflowed onto benches, street corners, the doorways of shops and taverns, sacristies where he would sit arguing with the priests, and even into the cemetery where he would spend time philosophising with the grave-digger. His brother – eldest son and heir of the Cidadelhe family (the aforementioned genealogist) – who had provided Titó with an allowance of eight moedas just to keep him away from Cidadelhe, from his own grubby harem of country lasses and (it was hoped) from the somewhat perverse task on which he had now embarked, namely, The Real Inquisition, an enquiry into the bastard lines, sundry sins and illegitimate titles of the noble families of Portugal. And Gonçalo had loved Titó, that kindly Hercules, ever since his student days in Coimbra, seduced by his prodigious strength, his incomparable ability to drink a whole barrel of beer and devour a whole lamb, and, most of all, by his supreme independence of mind, backed up by the very large cane he carried and by that allowance, those eight moedas safe in his pocket, which meant that he feared nothing and wanted nothing either on Earth or in Heaven. Gonçalo leaned over the balcony and shouted:

‘Come up, Titó! Come upstairs while I get dressed. You can have a glass of gin and then we can walk to Bravais together.’

Seated on the edge of the round, waterless pool in the centre of the courtyard and looking up at the great house, Titó – his broad, frank, sunburned face framed by a thick, reddish beard – was slowly fanning himself with an old straw hat:

‘No, I can’t, I’m afraid. But listen, do you want to come and have supper at Gago’s with me and João Gouveia? Videirinha’s coming too and bringing his guitar. We’ve got ourselves a huge mullet, an enormous one, that I bought this morning for five tostões from a woman on the coast. Cooked by Gago himself! What do you think? Gago’s going to open a new barrel of wine from the Abbot of Chandim. It’s a local wine and very good stuff indeed.’

And Titó very delicately tweaked his own ear to indicate that he knew what he was talking about. Gonçalo, still pulling on his trousers, was unsure.

‘My stomach’s been a bit delicate lately. And ever since last night I’ve had a pain in my kidneys or my liver or my spleen or one of those organs! I was planning to have nothing for supper but some chicken broth and a bit of broiled chicken. Oh, but what the hell – tell Gago to prepare me just a small piece of roast chicken… Where shall we meet? At the club?’

Titó stood up and positioning his straw hat on the back of his head, said:

‘No, I’m not going to the club tonight. I have a lady to see. Meet me by the fountain between ten and half past. Videirinha will be there with his guitar. Between ten and half past. Don’t forget! And I’ll order a little roast chicken for the gentleman with the bad back!’

And with that he walked with bovine slowness back across the courtyard, pausing by the bush growing next to the door to pick a rose, which he then stuck in the buttonhole of his olive-green velvet jacket.

Gonçalo had immediately decided not to bother with supper at home, convinced of the benefits of fasting until ten o’clock, after a brisk walk to Bravais and along the Riosa valley. And before going back into his room to get dressed, he called for Rosa the cook, but neither she nor Bento responded – for he had bellowed out Bento’s name too – in the heavy silence of those shadowy paved depths, under the great vaulted ceilings, which were all that remained of the old palace, restored by Vicente Ramires after his campaign in Castile, but later put to the torch by King José I. Then Gonçalo went down two of the worn stone steps and thundered out another cry that echoed round the Tower – now that the bells no longer worked. And he was just about to continue on into the kitchen, when Rosa appeared. She had gone out into the garden with Crispola’s daughter and hadn’t heard him.

‘I’ve been calling for about an hour! But you and Bento are nowhere to be found! It’s simply to say that I won’t need any dinner tonight. I’m going to eat in Vila Clara with friends.’

Standing in the echoing depths of the corridor, Rosa looked most alarmed. ‘But, Senhor Doutor, aren’t you going to eat anything at all until late in the night?’ The daughter of a former gardener at the Tower, she had grown up there and was already the cook when Gonçalo was born, and she had always addressed him as ‘young master’ or even ‘my dear’ until he left for Coimbra and became, for her and for Bento, Senhor Doutor. And the Senhor Doutor should, at the very least, have a little chicken broth, which she had been slowly cooking since noon and which smelled positively divine!

Gonçalo consented – for he never disagreed with any decision made by Rosa or Bento – and was already going back up the steps, when he demanded to know about Crispola, a poor widow who, with a whole troupe of starving children to feed, had fallen ill with a terrible fever at Easter time.

‘She’s much better, Senhor Doutor. She’s out of bed now, that’s what her daughter told me. But she’s still very weak.’

Gonçalo came down another step, leaning on the banister so as to immerse himself more deeply in that sorry tale.

‘Listen, Rosa, if the little one’s still there, poor thing, why doesn’t she take home the chicken I was going to have for dinner. And the broth too. Yes, let her take the whole panful! I can just have some tea and biscuits. Oh, and send Crispola ten tostões as well. No, make that two mil-réis! But don’t just send her the chicken and the money without a word. Say that I hope she continues to make a steady recovery and that I’ll drop in soon to see how she is. And tell Bento to bring me up some hot water!’

Standing in his bedroom in his shirtsleeves before a vast mirror supported by two gilded columns, he studied, first, his tongue, which, he thought, seemed somewhat furred, then, fearing some sign of a bilious attack, the whites of his eyes. He ended up contemplating his ‘new look’, for he had shaved off his beard in Lisbon, preserving only a light, curly brown moustache and a small goatee that made his slender, aquiline, still creamy-white face seem even longer. He despaired, however, of his hair, which, although attractively wavy, was very thin, and, despite all the pomades and treatments he used, his parting was growing ever higher and now began almost in the middle of his clear brow.

‘It’s so unfair. I’ll be bald by the time I’m thirty…’

He remained standing at the mirror, otherwise pleased with what he saw and recalling what his Aunt Louredo had said in Lisbon, ‘Dear boy, a bright, handsome lad like you shouldn’t go off and bury himself in the provinces! There are no nice young men in Lisbon. We need a good Ramires here!’ No, he wouldn’t bury himself in the provinces, beneath the ivy and the melancholy dust of inert objects, like his Tower! But how could he possibly afford an elegant life in Lisbon, among his historic relatives, with his remaining income of only one thousand eight hundred mil-réis, which was all that was left once he had paid off his father’s debts! And he was really only interested in living in Lisbon if he had some political position – a seat in Parliament, influence in his Party, a slow, certain climb to Power. And what he had so sweetly dreamed of in Coimbra during conversations with friends at the Hotel Mondego now seemed so remote as to be almost unattainable, hidden behind a high, harsh, impenetrable wall, in which there was not a single door. Besides, how could he become a deputy? There would be no General Election for a while, now that the ghastly Baron de São Fulgêncio and the Historicals were firmly entrenched in power for another three whole years. And even if there were a by-election, what chance would he have, given that, ever since his student days in Coimbra – albeit lightheartedly and merely because it was the elegant thing to do – he had always been a Regenerationist, whether in the club at Couraça, in his letters to the Gazeta do Porto, or in his passionate diatribes against the governor, the hateful Cavaleiro? Now all he could do was wait. Wait and work, trying to gain some social substance, wisely building a modest political reputation on the strength of his vast, historic name; and weaving a precious web of ever-wider political alliances from Santa Irenéia to Terreiro do Paço in Lisbon. Yes, the theory was splendid, but how did one go about acquiring real substance, reputation and political allies? ‘Work as a lawyer, write for the newspapers!’ had been the friendly, throw-away advice from his party leader, Brás Vitorino. Work as a lawyer in Oliveira or even in Lisbon itself? No, he couldn’t, not with his innate, almost psychological horror of legal proceedings and paperwork. Set up a newspaper in Lisbon as his fellow resident at Coimbra’s Hotel Mondego, Ernesto Rangel, had done? That was an easy enough task for the adored grandson of Senhora Dona Joaquina Rangel, who had ten thousand barrels of wine stored away in cellars in Vila Nova da Gaia. Battle away as a journalist on a newspaper in Lisbon? During the weeks he had spent in the capital, with all his time taken up by the Mortgage Bank and his cousins, he hadn’t managed to establish any kind of lasting, useful relationship with the big Regenerationist papers, A Manhã and A Verdade. The truth was that, in the wall separating him from wealth and success, he had found only one small chink, tiny but hopeful – the Annals of Literature and History, with its team of professors, politicians, even a minister, and even an admiral, that dreadful bore Guerreiro Araújo. Yes, he would appear along with his Tower in the Annals, revealing his rich imagination and broad knowledge. Then, climbing up from Invention to the more respectable terrain of Erudition, he would write an article (the idea had come to him on the train back from Lisbon!) on the Visigothic Origins of Public Law in Portugal. Naturally he knew nothing about the Visigoths or those Origins, but he could simply cobble together an elegant summary from the wonderful A History of Public Administration in Portugal lent to him by Castanheiro. Then leaping from Erudition to the Social and Pedagogical Sciences, why shouldn’t he compile an excellent, statesmanlike Reform of the Legal Education System in Portugal, in two sizeable instalments? Thus he would advance, building and shaping his literary pedestal, keeping close to the Regenerationists, until they got back into power, and then the triumphal arch he was hoping for would open up in that wall. Standing in the middle of his room in his long johns, his hands on his hips, Gonçalo Mendes Ramires concluded that he really must make haste and write his Novella.

‘But how am I going to finish it? It’s so bogged down, stuck fast, its liver completely shot?’

Bento – an old man with a dark, clean-shaven face and beautiful, curly white hair, and always looking clean and fresh in his cotton jacket – entered slowly, carrying a jug of hot water.

‘Bento, did you find a glass bottle containing some white powder in the suitcase I brought back from Lisbon or in the trunk? It’s an English remedy given to me by Dr Matos… the label is in English, with an English name, “fruit salts” or something…’

Bento bowed his head, closed his eyes and thought deeply. Yes, in the bathroom, on top of the red trunk, there was a bottle containing some powder. It was wrapped in an ancient sheet of parchment, like the paper in the archives.

‘That’s it!’ cried Gonçalo. ‘When I went to Lisbon, I needed to take certain documents with me because of that wretched business in Praga, and in all the confusion, I took from the archives that perfectly useless piece of parchment. Fetch it for me will you, but be careful with the bottle!’

First, though, Bento painstakingly fastened his master’s agate cufflinks and laid out on the bed a jacket and a pair of neatly pressed trousers made of light cheviot wool. Still gripped by the idea of the articles he would write for the Annals, Gonçalo was standing at the window, leafing through A History of Public Administration in Portugal, when Bento returned with the roll of parchment, from which dangled a lead seal on a tattered bit of ribbon.

‘The very thing!’ exclaimed Gonçalo, throwing the book down on the windowsill. ‘I wrapped the bottle in that roll of parchment so that it wouldn’t get broken. Unwrap it and put it on the chest of drawers. Dr Matos recommended that I take it with warm water on an empty stomach. It fizzes as if it were boiling, but it cleans the blood and clears the head. And I am in great need of a clear head! You have some too, Bento. And tell Rosa to try it as well. Everyone takes fruit salts now, even the Pope!’

Bento had very delicately unwrapped the bottle, spreading out on the marble top of the chest of drawers the stiff parchment on which someone’s sixteenth-century writing lay wrinkled and yellow and dead. Buttoning on his collar, Gonçalo said:

‘And to think I took it with me to sort out that business in Praga! A parchment dating back to the time of King Sebastião… All I can make out is the date, fourteen hundred, no, fifteen hundred and seventy-seven. On the eve of the voyage to Africa. Oh well, it kept the bottle safe.’

Bento, who had now taken out a white waistcoat from the drawer, cast a sideways glance at the venerable piece of parchment.

‘It must have been a letter from the King to one of your ancestors…’