TE19 Iberian Adventure

Autobiografia

from Lisbon. A cleaning volunteer at the mother church, Our Lady of Purification Church, she had memorized the mass book long before. Certain grievances—her marriage, her twenty-fifth anniversary—had crystallized into a gaseous, silly, expectation- free satisfaction. The first Sunday of every month she would confess a selection of sins, only the ones that would not make the church prior frown on her. Had she been told that her son had gotten lost in Lisbon, she would have had a hard time believing. On the one hand, José had been alone in the city for ten years, long enough to become familiar with every alleyway; on the other hand, she was not capable of conceiving that the writing of a book should be the reason for troubles of such magnitude. For her own atonement, her son fed that blind influence, the books. Rather had he caught meningitis like the neighbor’s boy—he had lost a little of his hearing but had become a mechanic lauded by everyone. In the months of July of his puberty, while other boys shot sparrows with pressure guns, healthy marksmanship practice, José spent hours hidden and silent, read lying in bed, or wrote insanities leaning over a notebook. At first his mother prayed, asked Cecilia the patron saint of poets to spare her son, to free him of those ideas. Getting no answer, she resigned and lowered her eyes before God, accepting His mysteries. From then on she began praying for her son to Saint Alexis the protector of beggars. After dropping out of college, at age twenty-four or twenty-five, José showed up in Bucelas with his first novel in hand, proud and conceited. His mother congratulated him; she realized the

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