Read Online The Collected Novels of José Saramago by José Saramago - Free Book Online Page A

faithful knock at the church doors and pray that they might never go without bread, and women who are anxious to find a good husband have Masses celebrated every Friday in the Saint’s honour, why should a soldier not pray to St Benedict for the favours of an English whore, just once, before he meets his Maker, rather than die in ignorance.
    Baltasar Sete-Sóis wandered around the city’s quarters and squares all afternoon. He drank a bowl of soup at the gates of the Convent of St Francis of the City, asked which of the guilds were most generous in distributing alms and made a careful note of three of them for further investigation, the Guild of Our Lady of Oliveira, the patron saint of pastry-cooks, which he had already tried, the Guild of St Eloi, the patron saint of silversmiths, and the Guild of the Lost Child, which aptly described his own situation, although he could scarcely recall ever having been a child, lost yes, if they will ever find him.
    Dusk fell, and Sete-Sóis went off to find a place to sleep. He had already struck up a friendship with another former soldier, older and more experienced, João Elvas who now made his living as a pimp, a profession he pursued by night, and now that the weather was warmer, he made good use of some abandoned sheds against the walls of the Convent of Hope, near the olive grove. Occasionally Baltasar visited João Elvas, with whom you could always be certain of meeting a new face or of finding someone to talk to but rather than take any risks, Baltasar, on the pretext that he wanted to give his right hand a rest after carrying his knapsack all day, attached the spike to his stump, anxious not to alarm João Elvas and the other rogues for it is a deadly weapon as we well know. There were six of them huddled under the shed, but no one tried to do him any harm and he had no intention of harming them.
    To while away the hours before falling asleep, they reminisced about crimes that had been committed. Not their own, the crimes of their leaders, which nearly always went unpunished, even when the guilty parties could easily be identified, the powerful had no fear of being discovered and brought to justice. But the common thieves, bullies, or petty criminals, since there was no danger of anyone betraying the leaders, soon found themselves in Limoeiro prison, where they could be sure of a bowl of soup, not to mention the excrement and urine fouling the cells. Recently they released a hundred and fifty petty criminals from Limoeiro, who were joined by more than five hundred men, who had been recruited for India and then dismissed because they were no longer required, and there were so many of them, and so much hunger, that a plague broke out, threatening to kill all of us, so that the recruits were disbanded, and I was one of them. Another man said, This country is a hotbed of crime, more people are murdered in this city than are killed in war, as anyone who has ever fought will tell you, What do you say, Sete-Sóis, whereupon Baltasar replied, I can tell you how men die in war, but I don’t know how men die in Lisbon, so I can’t make any comparison, ask João Elvas, for he knows as much about military strongholds as he does about city slums, but João Elvas, merely shrugged his shoulders and said nothing.
    The conversation turned back to the previous topic, and they listened to the story of the gilder who stabbed a widow whom he wanted to marry but she refused to satisfy his desire, so he murdered her and sought sanctuary in the Convent of the Holy Trinity, and then there was the tale of the unfortunate woman who rebuked her philandering husband, whereupon he slashed her from head to foot with his sword, and that of the clergyman who, because of some amorous intrigue, was rewarded with three magnificent scars, all these misadventures occurring during Lent, a season of hot blood and dark passions. But August is not much better, as we saw last year, when the dismembered body of a woman