When spring arrived on that April morning, slightly late but in all its vigor, it had been many months since Marcelino Ramos, one of the clerks at H. Silva & Co., had had a day off. He spent the week in the small, ill-lit, airless room where the Silvas—first the father, then the son, and now the grandson—had run their modest retail business for more than a century, and where he worked beneath the vigilant, suspicious, and always oblique gaze of the boss, who seemed convinced that his employees were robbing him of whatever was most precious to him and was his alone, be it phone calls, copying paper, or their time, which also belonged to him, because he bought it by the month. Marcelino spent Sundays at home, doing some book-keeping he had taken on “to fill the holes,” as he put it, while his wife darned clothes or altered a dress that was so old-fashioned she felt ashamed to wear it when she did her morning shopping—her one diversion. And her eyes, when fixed on her work or, if she had no alternative, on her husband’s eyes, were always sad, her voice brusque and very sour.
She never said as much, she may even have thought he didn’t know—since she didn’t consider him to be very bright—but she blamed him for all her ills and for wrecking any hopes she might have had. She had spent years cursing the day she had placed her life in the hands of this quiet, hardworking man, who was, nonetheless, as ill-equipped for life as the most passive of beasts. His boss was devouring him, as he had been for the last twenty years, paying him the same wage as on the day he started; and she was devouring him with her sad, accusing eyes that made him avert his gaze. He was being devoured a little by everyone: those who laughed, those who suffered, those who struggled to achieve an impossible dream. And this seemed to her intolerable. She felt wounded not for him but through him. Her husband was the window that allowed in the rays of sun that were making her shrivel up. This is why she was already an old woman at forty-five and why it had been many years—she had lost count—since she’d sung or laughed. She did occasionally smile at someone she met, purely out of politeness. The equivalent of nodding your head or holding out one’s hand to be shaken.
You would never think it now, but she had once been a fresh-faced, desirable young woman with many hopes for the future, her heart full of dreams, all of which she felt were achievable because, she thought, they were not too ambitious. Among those dreams were living in a nice house, meeting the love of her life, and having one or two children—two would be her ideal. However, she hadn’t had the children she had dreamed of; love had gradually eaten away at time and at all the other wishes that came to nothing; and their apartment, which they lived in because it was rent controlled, was old, damp, and uncomfortable, and in winter the roof leaked. She was a poor woman who had been betrayed by a faithful husband and who, one day—one night—watching him working away at his book-keeping, found herself quite alone in the world, incapable of addressing a single word to him, the kind of word you say to fill the silence. No, all her accumulated resentments had completely dried up her voice, and the only words she had to say were those that were strictly necessary—short and to the point.
He knew all this, although he had never plumbed the depths of her pain. He was a simple man, enough of an optimist to believe that only great suffering brought great pain. He knew she was unhappy but had never thought she was that unhappy. He put it down to bad temper and an inability to adapt to circumstances. It was no secret to him that she blamed him for her frustrations. He knew, too, that this was partly true and that, in her own way, she was right, but, on the other hand, he was sure that he could not have done things any differently.
Spring, then, had been almost punctual and had arrived on that April Thursday at around eleven o’clock in the morning. A pleasant sun, warm and comforting, lay on the streets like a light blanket. The atmosphere in the office, though, was most unpleasant, and the sun coming in through the grubby windows felt dirty and dusty, a sun as old as the office itself, as timeworn as the air they breathed there: a mixture of dust, old papers, and cheap brilliantine—the brilliantine that Alberto applied rather too lavishly.
Hermes Silva, perhaps tempted by the sun (well, anything is possible), had gone over to the coat stand to fetch his hat before fixing his two employees with a penetrating gaze and saying, “Gentlemen, I have to go out for a while to speak with Alves & Alves,” in a tone of voice that meant, “Gentlemen, no idling around while I’m away.” And he slammed the door behind him.
Alberto immediately abandoned his typewriter and ran one plump, stubby-fingered hand over his lustrous hair. Then he said firmly:
“Well, it looks like it’s finally arrived. About time too!”
“What? What’s arrived?”
Marcelino was so immersed in resolving some complicated debit and credit problem that he hadn’t even heard the boss leave and was surprised to find him not at his desk.
“Spring, man!”
“Ah!”
This was a somewhat indifferent response. What was spring to Marcelino, or summer for that matter, or, indeed, winter? The same timetable: long, monotonous days that followed one on the other like beads on a rosary. In summer it was hot and he would take off his coat; in winter it was cold and he would put it on. Of what possible significance could this newborn spring be to him? It was the office during the week, bookkeeping on Sunday accompanied by his wife’s accusing glances and the vast solitude of his existence. He shrugged.
Alberto, though, was looking at him and smiling at an idea that had just occurred to him.
“Listen, my friend.”
Marcelino looked at him, and Alberto turned nervously toward the door through which the boss had just exited, then said in a low voice:
“I’ve arranged a bit of a jaunt into the countryside on Sunday. Do you want to come?”
“I can’t, old man, I’ve got that book-keeping to do.”
“It’s only one day. And we all need a bit of a change now and then.”
“My wife wouldn’t be keen.”
Alberto laughed.
“No, you don’t get it. There aren’t any women involved, well, not our wives anyway. My wife, for example, is going to spend the day with her sister, because I told her I was going to see a friend of mine who’s ill.”
“A friend who’s ill?”
“Yes, you.”
He laughed, pleased at his own cleverness.
“Well, you have been ill on occasion, haven’t you, my friend? And always on a Sunday too! And of course you haven’t anyone to look after you…”
“But I do…”
“No, my friend; you’re a bachelor.”
He came closer and said in an even quieter voice:
“You could do the same. You tell your wife that on Saturday you’ve got to go and see your poor colleague Alberto, who has no family in Lisbon, and that’s that. I usually take my girl, Arlete, and a friend of hers, Lurdes, who’s a real stunner. My cousin comes too, but he can’t this time, because he has to go to Porto to sort out some business about an inheritance or something equally boring, a real drag. We always have lunch, usually sardines, at a bar where I bet you anything you want you’ll eat better than you can at the Avis, and then we go for a little stroll. You’ll love it, my friend. Quick, make up your mind, Silva will be back soon. I’m telling you, that Lurdes is really something!”
Marcelino did feel tempted. Sorely tempted. That outing into the countryside, which his colleague had presented to him as a possibility, suddenly seemed to him like a return to his youth. That promise of a Sunday jaunt had awoken something in him, something barely visible, hidden somewhere far off in the mists of the past. That mist was gradually lifting though, the image becoming clearer, and he could see a young twenty-something called Marcelino—at least he thought it was him—with a friend and two professionally cheerful women, all of them out on an excursion. They took a picnic, a big bottle of wine, and they ate in the friendly shade of an olive tree. It had been spring then too, and one of the women had started singing a fado. She had a thin little voice, like broken glass, but there, in the open air and after a few glasses of vinho verde, it sounded quite marvelous. He could still remember her. She was very thin, had a pale moon-face, dark eyes, a slight squint, and a small, plump mouth, heavily lipsticked. Her name was Ilda, at least that was the name she was known by, and their affair had lasted a few months. Then he’d left her, the day he met a pure, young thing with whom he had fallen in love and who he ended up marrying. Goodness, that was a long time ago!
“Quick, make up your mind; the guy’ll be back any minute!”
Alberto wrenched him from his daydream, and Marcelino found himself once again old and tired and sad in the office of H. Silva & Co.
“OK, I’ll go.”
His words coincided with the sound of the door opening, and as the boss entered the room he shot his two employees a probing glance. Alberto was already back at his typewriter, and Marcelino looked as if he hadn’t so much as raised his eyes from his accounts book.
However, Marcelino couldn’t now see the figures on the page, which were dancing before him. He was alarmed at his own words, which he had spoken almost without thinking. He was vaguely beginning to understand that he had allowed himself to be drawn in by those ancient images buried deep inside him, which Alberto’s unexpected invitation had brought to the surface. He had agreed without a thought for his wife, his work, the money he would spend, his life as a serious, responsible man, all of which were quite incompatible with jaunts into the countryside in the company of two loose women. And now it would be difficult to back out. Did he even want to back out? Did he want to say No to Alberto?
No, he didn’t. So much so that when the time came to leave the office, while he was putting on the crocheted scarf his wife had made for him—in her usual silent way—he asked Alberto:
“So when do we set off?”
“Oh, we’ve got time to think about that,” Alberto said, laughing. “Lots of time!”
Alberto might have time, Alberto might have lots of time, with many years ahead of him, but he did not. That’s why he was in a hurry, a great hurry. That’s why he suddenly wanted Sunday to come quickly and for them to leave early. At home with his wife—who was busy darning socks and suffering the effects of a heavy cold, while he grappled with the book-keeping that had, all of a sudden, become strange and incomprehensible, as well as deeply boring—he was dreaming about the outing and about that “stunner” Lurdes, who, in his imagination, had Ilda’s pale face and shrill little voice. And he was thinking this in silence, but so loudly, so emphatically, that once or twice he looked up, afraid his wife might have actually heard him say, “It’s on Sunday, this Sunday.”
The next day, though, as he was crossing a street on his way to work, a truck ran him over. He was thinking about Sunday and was so deep in thought that he didn’t even see the truck or hear the simultaneous shouts of the people nearby. He didn’t hear or see anything. The last image in his mind was that of Ilda’s face (the face of a woman he hadn’t seen for more than twenty years and to whom he hadn’t given a thought in all that time), and the last sound was that of her voice singing an old fado.
Marcelino’s body did not go serenely into the ground, as had happened to other people of his acquaintance. It spent some time in the morgue, where it was cut open, and only afterward could he have the decent funeral his wife wanted for him. There were not many people at the funeral. Neither of them had any family, and Marcelino was a glum, silent man who had never made friends easily. The truth is that only two people accompanied him: his wife, all in black, dry-eyed and filled with a dull pain that was something like rage at the man who had died and left her still more alone; and Silva, all black tie and grave demeanor, genuinely and silently regretting the loss of that excellent employee, because, in those wretched times, good employees were few and far between.
Alberto wasn’t there. Marcelino was buried on the Sunday, and Alberto had already arranged everything with the girls, and it didn’t seem right to postpone it in order to go to a funeral. However, since the cemetery where Marcelino was going to be buried was the Lumiar cemetery, they crossed paths near Campo Grande. Alberto, who was in the tram with Lurdes, Arlete, and a friend he’d invited at the last minute, reverentially doffed his hat. Then he leaned toward one of the girls, a peroxide blonde with an equine face, and said:
“That guy in the coffin, he’s the colleague I told you about. What bad luck, eh? Poor devil. I feel sorry for him.”
The woman said “Ah!” and drew her coat more closely about her, because a shudder had run through her from head to toe. And so for a few minutes, the tram accompanied Marcelino’s funeral, behind his wife and Silva.