Lídia Jorge

All his other children had been taught by energetic men, hard, tough and irreproachable, men who never allowed children to fidget, who dealt out punishments and never smiled, but imposed order and tried to inculcate obedience and thus make every child into a good worker. The school in São Sebastião had four windows that faced onto the street. At each of them there was nearly always a child wearing a donkey's head, complete with cloth ears and prominent teeth. But behind the big mouth, the child's face was easily identifiable. The whole of São Sebastião would know which child had been punished. The masks ceased being masks and became the children themselves. The shame of the children. And shame had always been an essential element in the creation of obedience, especially during the diligent 1930s. All his children, including Adelina Dias, had experienced that rigorous, formative, punitive discipline, as was only right. "All of them, apart from Walter," Francisco Dias would say, and sometimes, his feet in alpargatas, the hobnail boots laid aside, he couldn't even manage to doze off in his mahogany chair. And all because of his youngest son. Walter's niece would be watching.

Yes, unlike the others, the youngest son was destined to be taught by an incompetent newcomer, a small man with a beardless face, who would light a fire on top of the desk and burn paper and the heads of matches, or alcohol and cotton wool inside bottles. Every so often, he would take the children up into the grey São Sebastião hills and tell them to observe nature, to spy on the animals. He told them to measure the course of the sun with a stonemason's rule, obliged them to go to school at night in order to explain eclipses to them, had them record such pointless things -as the different positions of a horse's legs when it ran and when it walked. He didn't teach them anything. He himself made special tubes through which he would have the children look at birds, when all the children needed to know about birds was which were useful and whick were not and which set men a good example by their habits, and then to write this down in a neat hand. But that pervert brought actual birds, alive and dead, into the classroom, where he would open out their wings to show the children the different sorts of feathers, the way the feet were articulated when they landed and when in flight. And that is how Walter first started drawing animals in motion, especially birds. Francisco Dias would tell this to anyone who cared to listen. She listened.

How could she not? She learned that this teacher had been driven out of São Sebastião because of a petition which many had "signed" with a thumbprint. One December night in 1935 they had come for the beardless teacher. The teacher had been forced out of education and had died young, having nothing else to do, watched as he was on all sides, but meanwhile he had done irreparable harm wherever he had taught. You could see it clearly in the person of Walter.

Francisco Dias remembered being called in to see that frail teacher, just to be told by him what extraordinary hands Walter had, hands that drew as if :the memory of nature were concealed beneath their fingertips. A truly remarkable talent. And although at the time, Walter and the others were more often than not drawing St Sebastian and Our Lady of Suffering, Francisco Dias suspected that those drawings were just a cover for the children to continue drawing entire animals, including their reproductive organs, an excuse for his son to draw birds. He also discovered that while they did not put the saints' names beneath their drawings of saints, their drawings of birds appeared complete with their Latin nomenclature. Francisco Dias himself had written to the police commissioner telling him of his suspicions, and he himself had instigated the petition of thumbprints, and it was on his initiative that the teacher had disappeared. But for various miseducated children it had been too late. Too late for his son, Walter, who escaped the house in order to go and draw birds.

The letters that reached Valmares and were delivered to the São Sebastião post office were wise letters, letters that concealed what should be concealed and that spoke only of what could be spoken of. Measured letters with each word weighed, each sentence honed. The Dias brothers felt comfortable at a distance and did not want to come back, unlike other emigrants from Valmares who wrote poignant, nostalgic letters and made phone calls that must have cost as much as a plane ticket, and who occasionally paid rowdy visits that seemed to give them the strength to go on and that seemed to be their real reason for living. Those letters, I remember, always began the same way. You can tell a mile off that they don't miss Valmares at all. More than that, they must dread having to divide up amongst them the empire of stones that Francisco Dias' house has become.

They must want to avoid the drama, the discord, the hysteria involved in sharing out a legacy of nothing and for nothing. The absent Dias brothers are willing to pay in order to have nothing, so as not to inherit stony, weed-grown fields, sandy, chalky lands that no one wants to plant or build on or do anything with. Between the sea and the mountains, their father created an empire out of a worthless bit of land, not realizing he would end up a king of stones. Indeed, each night, the stones roll down from the walls built decades before. Amongst them the dwarfish trees bloom as if neglect were a vitamin and scorn the best possible manure, as if they grew in order not to be seen. Only the king of those scrublands has failed to realize that they dominate his territory. The Dias brothers, scattered throughout the Americas, do not want the bother of that grim legacy, of those fields rapidly reverting to type – arid lands which are the natural habitat of desolation, the genet and the fox.

The Dias brothers, scattered throughout the Americas, do not want the bother of that grim legacy, of those fields rapidly reverting to type – arid lands.