Small Memories by José Saramago; Margaret Jull Costa

Author:José Saramago; Margaret Jull Costa
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Autobiography
ISBN: 9780151015085
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

I was never much of a fisherman. Like any boy of my age and modest means, I used an ordinary rod with a hook, sinker and cork float tied to the fishing line, nothing that remotely resembled the modern artifacts that would appear later on and which I saw in the hands of certain local amateurs when I was already grown up and had abandoned my piscatorial dreams. Consequently, I never caught anything more than a few small carp, a young barbel (very rarely), and many hours spent in vain (well, none were spent in vain, because, without my realizing it, I was "fishing" for things that would be just as important for me in the future, images, smells, sounds, soft breezes, sensations). In the sun, if it wasn't too fierce, or in the shade of a weeping willow, waiting for a fish to bite. Seated at the water's edge, I usually fished in "our village's river," the Almonda, in the late afternoon, because when the weather was too hot, the fish disappeared into their hiding places on the riverbed and wouldn't take the bait. At other times, I would sit on one side or other of the river mouth or, on a few notable occasions, would row farther off, across to the south bank of the Tejo and stay there, in the shelter of a brake of trees as if under a canopy, and that was what I liked best. The local fishermen emeriti would boast of having their own methods, their own strategies, their own magical arts, which usually lasted for a season and then gave way to other methods, strategies and magical arts that were always better than the previous ones. I never found any of them useful. The only one I can remember was a special rose dust (I never knew at the time, and still don't know to this day, which part of the rose the cognoscenti pulverized: I assume it was the petals), thanks to which—once it had been thrown into the water like some kind of poetic bait—the fish would flock, if you'll forgive the inappropriate comparison, like pigeons to chaff. I, poor wretch, never touched that gold dust with my unworthy fingers. And that must explain my ill luck in catching, or failing to catch, the largest (although forever invisible) barbel in the entire piscine history of the Tejo. I will describe very simply the whole regrettable affair. I had gone with my fishing tackle to the mouth—as we called it—of the Almonda, where, at the time, a narrow tongue of sand reached out into the Tejo, and there I was, with the day fading fast and not a twitch from the cork float to indicate any signs of subaquatic life, when, suddenly, without even having felt the initial exciting tremor that announces a fish trying to nibble the bait, the float plunged down into the depths, almost snatching the rod from my hands. I pulled and was pulled, but the struggle was short-lived.

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