Read Online Raised from the Ground by José Saramago - Free Book Online

workers. His oldest sons now refused to work for him and went in search of employment on other estates, which offered more humane foremen and more security, although more security meant only that they would not die quite so soon.
    These were good times for discipline. Sara da Conceição, who, understandably enough, could not forget the bad example set by her husband nor the worm of guilt that gnawed away inside her for the unfortunate manner of his death, was always saying, João, if you don’t toe the line, I’ll give you a sound beating, we’ve got a living to make. That is what his mother told him, a sentiment reinforced by Lameirão, who used to say, According to your mother, all she wants from you are your bones to make a chair with and your skin to make a drum. When two such authorities were so clearly of one mind, what could João do but believe them. But one day, worn down by beatings and overwork, he braved the threat of being flayed and boned, and spoke frankly to his astonished mother. Poor Sara da Conceição, who knew so little of the world. Amid screams and sighs, she said, That wretched man, I never said any such thing, a mother doesn’t give birth to a child in order to be the death of him, oh, how the rich despise the poor, that monster doesn’t even love his own children. But we ourselves have said as much before.
    João Mau-Tempo is not the stuff of heroes. He’s a skinny little ten-year-old runt, a scrap of a boy who still regards trees as shelters for birds’ nests rather than as producers of cork, acorns or olives. It’s unfair to make him get up when it’s still dark and have him walk, half asleep and on an empty stomach, the short or long distance to wherever his place of work happens to be, and then slave away all day until sunset, only to return home, again in the dark, mortally tired, if something so like death can be called tiredness. But this child, a word we use only for convenience’s sake, because this is not how the latifundio categorizes its population, people are either alive or dead, and all one can do with the dead is bury them, you certainly can’t make them work, anyway, this child is just one among thousands, all the same, all suffering, all ignorant of what evil they committed to deserve such a punishment. On his father’s side, he comes from tradesmen’s stock, his father a shoemaker, his grandfather a carpenter, but see how destinies are forged, there is no bradawl here, no plane, nothing but dry earth, killing heat, deathly cold, the great droughts of summer, the bone-deep chill of winter, the hard morning frost, lace, Dona Clemência calls it, cracked, bloody, purple chilblains, and if that swollen hand rubs against a tree trunk or a stone, the soft skin opens, and who can say what misery and pain lies beneath. Is there no other life than this drudgery, an animal living on the earth alongside other animals, the domestic and the wild, the useful and the harmful, and he himself, along with his human brothers, is treated as either harmful or useful, depending on the needs of the latifundio, now I want you, now I don’t.
    And sometimes there is no work, first the youngest are dismissed, then the women, and finally the men. Caravans of people set off along the roads in search of a miserable wage somewhere else. At such times, there’s not a foreman or an overseer to be found, far less a landowner, they’re all shut up in their houses, or far away in the capital or some other hiding place. The earth is either a dry crust or pure mud, it doesn’t matter. The poorest boil up some weeds and live on those, their eyes burn, their stomachs bloat, and this is followed by long, painful bouts of diarrhea, the sense that the body is letting go, detaching itself, becoming fetid, an unbearable weight. You feel like dying, and some do die.
    As we said before, there is war in Europe. And war in Africa too. But these things are like shouts from a hilltop, you know you shouted, and