1930
How people get lost! The language that my blood understands - is this. The food that my stomach desires - is this. The ground that my feet know how to tread - is this. And yet, I am no longer from here. I seem like one of those trees that are transplanted, that have poor health in the new country, but that die if they return to their native land.
Diary I Bucolic
Life is made of nothings:
Of great mountains stopped
Waiting for movement;
Of undulating wheat fields
By the wind;
Of dwelling houses
Fallen and with signs
Of nests that once existed
In the eaves;
Of dust
Of shadow of a fig tree;
Of seeing this marvel:
My Father raising a vine
Like a mother braiding her daughter's hair.
This Trás-os-Montes of my soul! You cross the Marão, and immediately enter paradise! (…)
Diary IThe day was the camellias and the climbing plants that I planted with my Father. Few times, in these thirty years, have I felt so united, so certain, as next to those seventy planting flowers. Because my Father, so thin and so bent over the earth, fills with peace and confidence the most bewildered restlessness.
Diary II went to the Village to meet her in the Carreira Garden. The bust of Camilo, startled, looked at me tragically from head to toe. I calmed him down: - No, we don't have Ana Plácido, comrade!
Diary I1940
Here I am. I came to show the wife to the old ones, to the Senhora da Azinheira and to the negrilho. They all liked her.
Diary IThe day was in Guiães, hunting and grape harvesting in the morning, and reading verses in a cemetery in the afternoon that has to be seen to be believed. If one day it comes to the point, I will write a page about these Transmontan necropolises, of granite, nestled on top of a mountain, with the air of someone washing their hands of this life and death.
Diary II went to show her the Village. But I went to show it to her as my grandparents showed it to their women - on foot. It was only six leagues…
Diary I Holy Day
Day of Sun and Christmas;
Wars are going on in the world and my sight hurts;
But, with God in the Marão without snow, there is no evil
That resists.
Moreover, out of time, this Latin
That Father Bento knows, is enough
To transcend me
And as many bad news as the mail drags.
1950
The family manor, ground floor, with tile-vã, topped by its quartered coat of arms, with hoes in all fields… It was from this reality that I departed, and it is to this reality that I always return, no matter how many turns I take in the paths of life. It is a certainty of a milestone with witnesses, which never leaves me disoriented when I want to revive the extremities of the soul. Just dig a little into the crust of appearance, and there I am in the matrix, confronted. (…)
Diary VIIII came to get the old man, but I return without him. I don't have the courage to pull him out of bed and take him down there, as I didn't have the courage to lift the daughter from the cradle and bring her up there. (…) And here I am, crucified between discouragement and hope, with the past and the future in each hand, unable to tie them.
Diary VIIIPresentation of the granddaughter to the grandfather. The best viaticum I could bring to the old man for the journey beyond, which he is about to make. I put in his dry arms the tender life shoot, and the peace that my own existence never gave him surrounded him like a radiance. (…) The marathon of life now had three relays: one tired, who had completely lost the race; another getting tired, who would certainly lose it too; and another still, entirely fresh, who could very well reach the end victorious.
Diary VIIIHere I am rooting the daughter, immersing her in the earth as my Father used to do with the tender shoots of a prized rhododendron. I want from her also the extension of the red vitality of some honored and obstinate chromosomes.
Diary VIII1960
The native house updated, with all the shadows of the past painted white. Human nature is like this. The most affectionate and faithful always ends up whitewashing the sooty walls of memory. It doesn't forget the dead; it simply stops remembering them.
Diary IXI rotate three hundred and sixty degrees on the axis. And I am left with the image of what I am in my eyes: the human incarnation of these immovable, dry and desperate mountains, which wait for the storms of winter and the sun of spring with the same unbreakable stoicism.
Diary IX Ember
I warm the dreams by the fireplace,
Without noticing the ashes of the ember.
Or I look at them distractedly,
In the dull unconsciousness
That they are the veronica of death.
Seated in the usual chair,
Unreal diligence
That crosses, slowly, the cold night,
Alienated from myself,
I give concrete heat to fantasy
As if the fire were imagined.
The hallucinations that can arise from a sudden psychological decompression! After a few days of total isolation here, this morning, in the Village, I had the sensation that I was in Paris.
Diary IXWith so many judgments on the skin - and fresh, almost all! -, I reach the end of life in complete ignorance of the only one that truly interested me to know: that of these people. What will they think of the rascal who crosses the village square two or three times a year with a rifle on his shoulder, and disappears mysteriously in the mountains, always with the same bombazine pants, the same Basque beret, and the same hollow face? Will they know that, obliged by the force of destiny to emigrate to other worlds, I left my soul here, which I come from time to time to incarnate? (…)
Diary IX Primary instruction
Don't know: imagine…
Let the master speak, and daydream…
Old age is what knows, and only knows
That the sea doesn't fit
In the puddle that innocence opens in the sand.
Dream!
Invent an alphabet
Of illusions…
A secret a-b-c
That you spell on the margins of lessons…
Fly through the window
To meet any sun that smiles at you!
Wings? They're not needed:
You go in the arms of the breezes,
Aides of fantasy…
Here we are, Zé Ferreiro and I, at the anvil. He hammering the iron, and I the words. But in my forge there are more hammer blows and fewer sparks…
Diary X(…) Everything I am clearly is not from here. But everything I am obscurely belongs to this ground. My life is a viola string stretched between two worlds. In the other, I hear its music; in this one, I feel its vibrations.
Diary XWhatever the season of the year and the direction followed, before leaving home I already know what food the eyes will have along the way. Snow on Larouco, fire-colored rhododendrons in Magueija, chestnut groves dripping chestnuts in Carrazedo de Montenegro. But I always leave with the same excitement, and return with the same dazzlement. For the true believer, the mass, which never varies, never repeats itself. And my mass is this. An intimate and daily communion with nature, in the trances of its perpetual agony, death and resurrection.
Diary XRye threshing in the threshing floor next door, which belongs to the family, where sixty years ago my Mother hurriedly left the sickle, to come crawling, already with the water bag broken and crucified with pain, to give birth to me under the tiles. As I listen to the dull thud of the flails threshing the sheaves, I philosophize about that distant birth, which the date and the casually reconstructed scenario cruelly recalled. It seems it was an easy birth, and no one predicted that I would come out a poet. But I did. And then the difficulties began. Tempted by the promises of imagination, although shyness objected, and pushed by circumstances, which for a long time I called destiny, I jumped the risk of the parish, set sail for the unknown, and when I realized it, I was entangled in a thicket of habits and contradictions from which I could never get out.
Diary XOf all the myths I know of, it is that of Antaeus that I most admire and that I most often put to the test, without forgetting, of course, to reduce the size of the giant to human scale, and the divine body of the Olympic Earth to the natural ground of Trás-os-Montes. And there is no doubt that the results obtained confirm its veracity. Whenever, about to succumb to the disease of discouragement, I touch one of these rocks, all the lost energies begin to run through my veins again. It's as if I received an instant transfusion of sap. (…)
Diary XIWhenever I come up here, I begin to see the Marão and the Douro, and I start thinking about death, what saddens me most is not being able to leave my eyes to my daughter in my will.
Diary XI1970
The whole day in bed nursing a real flu. The life of the village reaches my room through familiar noises to which I immediately give true meaning. The neighing of Zé Ferreiro's horse recognizing his steps on the sidewalk from the shop, Roberto's ox cart creaking loaded with firewood, Gomes' clogs clattering in the threshing floor. The haste of one tells me if he's watering in the meadow, if the thunderstorm is around, if there's a fire. The bell ringing, if it's mass, funeral or novena. And I am all a moved communion with the fabric of the lives that surround me. Even so walled up and steaming with fever, discoursing or delirious, I don't know well, I see myself once again possessed by the revelation of my unity. The unity of a man whom destiny tried to tear away in every way, but who only needs to feel the signs of this primordial ground to find himself firm and certain in the depth of the roots and naturally integrated into the harmonious game of the multiple connections of gregarious existence.
Diary XIIThe old school of Mr. Botelho finally rebuilt and updated. More sun, more hygiene, less grammar and less slaps. But the mimosas of my childhood were missing in the yard around. And I spent the afternoon with iron and shovel in hand planting them. I won't be here to see them grown like those of yesteryear. Let it be. My purpose was not to reflower the past, but to flower the future.
Diary XIIStruggling with my ghosts, who never cease to be present on this date, I keep stoking the fire in the fireplace. It's my Father, it's my Mother, it's my Grandfather… They are seated by my side, silent, in a lethal recollection. They came because I came, and as they told me long ago everything they had to say, they just keep me company. It's a supplementary supper, consecutive to the other, but silent and abstinent, which the rest of the family, who are already sleeping, doesn't share. The night is long, and none of us is in a hurry. And we let the sacred hours run, waiting for the morning light. In it, they will return discreetly to the peaceful world of the dead and I will wake up dazed in the disturbing world of the living. Until another Christmas brings us together again, still here, united by my memory, or there where I imagine them remembered of me in eternal oblivion.
Diary XIIIThe house searched by a cinematographic objective. It cost me the eyes of my face to consent to the violation, but the patient tenacity of the director and a strange feeling of near end overcame my scruples. Let the intimacy of a man who surrounded himself with intimate symbols be laid bare by the image: my Father's scales, my Mother's distaff, a flag of souls, a stone calvary, a clay Last Judgment, a mortar, a shell… It may be that a future reader thus approaches my memory more sympathetically, before the reality that I only showed him in writing.
Diary XIIIThe native house. The sacred retreat of memory. Eternity paralyzed.
Diary XIII1980
The native house, ripe cherries, nests, flowers… But I can't find myself in this maternal and bucolic peace. I'm already living today in the anguish of tomorrow.
Diary XIIIAs the horizons of the world expanded for me, with needs of all kinds that I can no longer renounce, life made me a ubiquitous being. I have here the support roots and there far away the pastures…
Diary XIIIMan of many letters, I don't know if suspicious that the flagrancy of the natural always falls short of the literature that reflects it, wanted to see to believe. And he came from Paris to walk the Cartesian suspicion in this harsh reality that I painted in the books and now I will lay bare without the mediation of words. I believe he returns surrendered and has something to tell. The mountain, so Celtic, seemed bewitched; the Douro, amazed at the feet of S. Leonardo, was a mirror of eternity; and the roncão he drank will never leave his palate. In that, no one beats me. When I receive someone here, I am a host of certain success. Thanks to the resources in which this ground is prodigal, my guests leave doubly entertained. I fascinate their senses and intoxicate their memory.
Diary XIIIThe paternal house. The sacred matrix of the family. But I begin to have no words for the emotion I feel when I enter it. I swallow them all.
Diary XIVVisit from Camilo José Cela, who came to Portugal to receive a prize. In my Iberian fervor, I don't know to what extent I am frequently led to invest each singular Spaniard I know with all the genuine greatness of Spain. Which will often not fail to disconcert the contemplated. Maybe that's what happened today.
Diary XIV Mute
There are no muses here.
There are tutelary shadows
To which I live obliged
And devoted,
And they inspire me too.
But so quietly
That my song
Is always like a murmured psalm
At an altar.
So brief and restrained
So as not to disturb
In the present the silence of the past.
So many pages and so many poems that I have written here, and I die in the conviction that I said nothing significant about my connection to the land where I was born and from which I truly never left. Everything I was far away, only served to sink my roots deeper. (…)
Diary XVCramming the car trunk for escape. Potatoes, apples, walnuts, eggs, partridges and alheiras. But I leave out the scattered melancholy of a Christmas - already manifest in the cordial countenance of everyone and in the very solemn and frozen character of the time - that will not follow me and will remain hurting my soul like a remorse, for only here do I know how to celebrate it. Closed, the house is like a no to the past. The dead, inside it, will have no fireplace, no memory.
Diary XVI say goodbye to the paternal house, to the garden, to the negrilho and to the rocks. Of the only riches that I truly liked to possess in the world, and of which I am greedy. That I didn't have to earn, but to deserve.
Diary XVI go and come. I get lost there and find myself here.
Diary XVMyths are eternal truths. When I arrive here, I always feel like a weakened Antaeus, touching the encouraging earth and recovering my strength. Not those of the body, but those of the soul. It's a sudden taste for being in the world, an intimate and healthy joy of the spirit, as if I were suddenly given reasons for life that I don't have far away. I know it's in this ground that I must be buried. But not even that certainty softens my exaltation. In the dialogue with my ancestors, who lie in it and I resurrect at every moment, the very obsession with death that I carry with me transforms into an inexpressible feeling of perenniality.
Diary XV1990
(…) For a long time I have known that I am the usufructuary of a sacred inheritance, which I will only deserve if I never forget that S. Martinho is a cradle where I have to be born every hour and die one day.
Diary XVII enter the paternal house in the usual somnambulism. Since I left it for the first time, I never crossed its thresholds entirely master of myself. (…) Destiny exaggerated with me. It shuffled my condition. It planted me here and uprooted me from here. And never again did the roots hold me well in any land.
Diary XVI