José Saramago

In the thirteenth century and in these the lands of Trás-os-Montes, locals could have known little of the resistance of the materials they employed, or perhaps the builders had renounced all trust in the certainties of this world and determined to construct for all eternity. The traveller entered and surveyed the belfry and the roof, letting his eyes run over them and into the distance, more than a little intrigued by a trans-mountainous land that fails to collapse into the abrupt precipices and valleys his imagination was fabricating. Ultimately it has to be each to its own: this was undeniably a plateau, and the traveller was not going to gainsay his imagination, particularly given how useful it had proved in transforming the church into a tortoise: only a fellow-visitor can judge just how fair and correct such a comparison really is. Two leagues further on lies Caçarelhos... Caçarelhos must have its secrets but nobody revealed any to the traveller when he arrived on a local market day to encounter herds of beautiful honey-coloured cattle, eyes like lifebuoys of tenderness, lips white as snow ruminating in peace and serenity while a thread of saliva slowly dribbles down, all this beneath a forest of lyres, their carapace of horns, natural sound-boxes for the lowing which, from time to time, rises from the candelabra'ed company. Clearly there are secrets in all this, but not the kind to be related in words. It's easier to keep counting the bank-notes, so many for this ox, take the beast with you, you won't regret your choice. The chestnut trees are coated in prickly bobbles, so many that they look like flocks of greenfinches pausing to collect their strength, gathering in the branches ready for great migrations. The traveller is a sentimentalist. He stops his car and picks a spiky sweet chestnut as a simple reminder for many months to come. Now it has dried out, it must be time for him to return and visit the great chestnut tree beside the main road, relishing again the bright morning air culminating in a definite rural promise of chestnuts.