São Cristóvão is a very old settlement. It is thought that it developed from a small group of mediaeval houses near the location of the modern-day village parish church. The first references to the village date back to the 16th century, when São Cristóvão parish church was built, in late Gothic style. The parish of São Cristóvão belongs to the municipality of Montemor-o-Novo, with an area of 156.33 km² and a population of 540 in 2011.
The early 20th century — Resignedness and Banditry. As regards this point of interest, we look at the examples that “João Mau-Tempo” provides with reference to his father “Domingos” and “José Gato”, in São Cristóvão.
A lack of employment and the high cost of living were features of socioeconomic life for almost all Alentejo people for much of the 20th century. With no other means of providing food for their families, many workers simply gave up the struggle and became migrant workers, wandering round from place to place in the Alentejo, Ribatejo or the Algarve, or even committed suicide.
“Domingos Mau-Tempo” provides an example of both forms of Resignedness. We should remember that the Alentejo region has the highest suicide rate in Portugal and one of the highest in Europe. Some workers who had a job were also involved in banditry, ranging from the theft of olives to robbery by organised gangs, of which “José Gato” was a member.
Type of tour:
Points of Interpretive Interest
Tour name:
The Mau Tempos’ First Move | The stories of Zé Rato
Location:
38°29’30”N 8°18’25”W Largo de São Cristóvão
Parish:
São Cristóvão
County (distrito):
Montemor-o-Novo
Route:
Escoural – EM535 – EN253 – Saint Cristopher
Type:
Walking tour
Distance:
300 m between points of interest
Average duration:
45 minutes
Type of surface:
Urban paths
Signage:
Yes
Landowners:
Public paths
Sights to see:
www.cm-montemornovo.pt
Parish Council 266 837 118
GNR National Guard police 266 837 129
Arriving at São Cristóvão via Estrada Nacional 253, when the white houses come into view, you soon see the Largo – the square. Sometime in the early 20th century, one stormy night the “Mau-Tempos” left “Monte Lavre” and drove to São Cristóvão by donkey cart. When they arrived, the cart stopped in the square.
To the left, almost hugging the low horizon, a small settlement turned its white walls to face the west. As we said before, the plain was vast and smooth, interrupted only by a few holm oaks, alone or in pairs, and little else. From that modest vantage point, it was not difficult to believe that the world had no known end. And seen from there, in the yellowish light and beneath the great leaden sheet of the clouds, the settlement, their destination, seemed unreachable. São Cristóvão, said the man. […]
All doors are closed, only a few faint chinks of light betray the presence of the other inhabitants. In a yard somewhere, a dog barks. There’s always a dog barking when someone walks past, and the other dogs, caught unawares, pick up the first sentinel’s word and fulfil their canine duty. A gate was opened, then closed. And now that the rain had stopped and the house was near, husband and wife were more aware of the cold wind that came running along the street, before plunging down the narrow alleys, where it shook the branches that reached out over the low roofs. Thanks to the wind, the night grew brighter. The great cloud was moving off, and here and there you could see patches of clear sky. It’s not raining now, said the woman to her child, who was sleeping and, of the four, was the only one not to know the good news. They came to a square in which a few trees were exchanging brief whispers.
(Raised from the Ground, Saramago, 2018, p. 6, pp. 10-11)
We heard the testimony of Jesuíno Nifra, sharing his memories of the Largo at a time not long after the era during which the action in José Saramago’s book takes place.
“In this square there was just brush and some large holm oak trees. They were very big. There was nothing here, not over there either, nothing at all … there was absolutely nothing here. […] Here there were two taverns, and here stood a very large holm oak tree, there where the telephone booth is, very big they were. And the people, there was no entertainment for them, they played malha (a traditional game similar to quoits) in the shade of the holm oak tree, even in summer. As it provided shade, that was where the fun was to be had. This was all just scrub, all of it, from here to there.” (Nifra, 2018).
“Domingos Mau-Tempo” is a character whose personality contrasts with that of “João Mau-Tempo”. The former is violent, irresponsible and alienated from his family, and leads a life that ends up in resignedness. He is constantly drunk, and finally gives up on life and commits suicide. This contrasts with the responsible and aware stance of “João Mau-Tempo “, the activist and revolutionary. From his father, he learns the meaning of injustice committed against the weakest members of society, witnessing his father’s violent abuse of his mother, and the example of resignedness in the face of the miserable conditions in which the people of the Alentejo lived.
The character “Domingos Mau-Tempo” is based on António Domingos Serra, grandfather of António Serra, who gave us his testimony describing his family.
“I know that my grandfather was an individual who came here via Lavre and Cortiças de Lavre. He met my grandmother and they got together and had children. He always had a troubled life, and was always on the move … he did some stupid things and had to move on as he earned a bad reputation here. He was in São Cristóvão, then São Geraldo, then Ciborro, he was in Feiteira and here in Lavre. And eventually there was nowhere for him to go with that kind of reputation.” (Serra, 2019).
At the junction with Rua dos Centenários, you come to Rua 1º de Maio. In the period during which the novel is set, in the early 20th century, this street was popularly known as Rua dos Sapateiros due to the large number of shoemakers who lived and worked in it. This was the case of “Domingos Mau-Tempo”, who set up a cobbler’s workshop in the street.
The cart went slowly on, jolting over the bumps. The donkey had stiffened up with the cold. They went down a side street, where the houses alternated with vegetable gardens, and they stopped outside a low hovel. Is this it, asked the woman, and her husband replied. Yes.
Domingos Mau-Tempo opened the door with the large key. In order to enter, he had to lower his head, for this is no palace with high doors. There were no windows. To the left was the fireplace, with the hearth at floor level.
The water had got into the clothes chest, and one leg of the kitchen table was broken. But on the fire was a saucepan of cabbage leaves and rice, and the baby had suckled again and fallen asleep on the dry side of the mattress. Domingos Mau-Tempo went out into the yard to do his business. And standing in the middle of the room, Sara da Conceição, Domingos’ wife, and João’s mother, stood quite still staring into the flames, like someone waiting for a garbled message to be repeated. She felt a slight movement in her belly. And another. But when her husband came back in, she said nothing. They had other things to think about.
Rua 1º de Maio (CMMN, 2019) (Raised from the Ground, José Saramago, 2018, pp. 12-13).
Jesuíno Nifra recalls the standard of living in São Cristóvão in the era during which the novel is set, and tells us about this street.
“The street over there was known as Rua dos Sapateiros because of the many shoemakers who lived in it. Today many people live in it who didn’t live through those times, so they don’t know this. At that time, there was no television, so any poor couple, not now, in the past, ninety years ago, or maybe a hundred, eighty, seventy years ago, poor families all had six or seven or eight children, some ten or twelve. And those who didn’t own the house due to having inherited one couldn’t afford to have one built, so they all slept in a small space with an area of four or five square metres, the parents and all the children slept together. There was a bed for the parents and a table next to it, and that’s how it was at that time. When it rained, sometimes it was better to be outside than inside. Of course, these houses didn’t belong to the landlords, well, they belonged to them but the landlords didn’t have them knocked down and rebuilt. It was like a form of punishment for being poor, it was terribly sad, so I stayed in one place, then another, these were all houses that were in such poor condition, but there was no way of making things better, that was what things were like sometimes, and to going inside a house was just like what José Saramago wrote in his book.” (Nifra, 2018).
At the other end of the square you will find Rua dos Centenários, where most shops were located in the first half of the 20th century. The village had a population of around two thousand and many people worked at the nearby mine in the 1940s to 1960s. There were always five or six taverns in the village and “Domingos Mau-Tempo” was a regular customer at all of them. He had an alcohol problem, which made him irresponsible and abusive towards his family. “Sara da Conceição” showed him unconditional affection, hoping to keep the family together, and silently endured all the violence, finding solace in her husband’s smallest gestures which approximated affection.
He’s a child of the wind, a wanderer, this bad-weather Domingos, who returns from the taberna and enters the house, bumping into the walls, glancing sourly at his son, and for no reason at all, lashes out at his wife, wretched woman, let that be a lesson to you. And then he leaves again, goes back to the wine and his carousing mates, put this one on the slate, will you, landlord, of course, sir, but there’s quite a lot on the slate already, so what, I always pay my debts, don’t I, I’ve never owed anyone a penny. And more than once, Sara da Conceição, having left her child with the neighbour, went out into the night to search for her husband, using the shawl and the darkness to conceal her tears, going from taberna to taberna, of which there weren’t many in São Cristóvão, but enough, peering in from outside and, if her husband was there, she would stand waiting in the shadows, like another shadow. And sometimes she would find him lost on the road, abandoned by his friends, with no idea where his house was, and then the world would suddenly brighten,because Domingos Mau-Tempo, grateful to have been found in that frightening desert, among hordes of ghosts, would put an arm around his wife’s shoulder and allow himself to be led like the child he doubtless still was.
(Raised from the Ground, José Saramago, 2018, pp. 19-20)
We return to the conversation with Jesuíno Nifra, and he tells us his memories about the taverns in São Cristóvão.
“The taverns here, it was rare that there wasn’t a disturbance – it always happened, always, always. A lot of people worked at the mine: two or three thousand. The mine here in Santa Susana was nothing in comparison, and a lot of people were here. There was nothing here, and outside the village even less. They came here, a lot of people gathered here. There wasn’t a Saturday, there wasn’t a Sunday that there weren’t fights and some received head injuries. Zé Banha, Bubule, Tourinho, João da Bicha and Chico Francisco do Ricome … and Ramos! These were the taverns that were here. There weren’t that many people but there were many taverns … And so that was where people went at that time, we had nothing, we got together on Saturdays to have a drink. The little glasses like three pennies, tiny, there weren’t any bigger ones. That’s where it all went on, it all happened there …” (Nifra, 2018).
Zé Rato’s stories
At the São Cristóvão tavern stories about Zé Rato were told, demonstrating how people resorted to banditry as the only way to survive under a regime in which worker exploitation on the latifundia was the norm. The “José Gato” character in the book is a fictional reference to Zé Rato, son of “Aunt Parrochinha”, who lived near São Cristóvão and often travelled through the parish, visiting the homes of the poorest to give them food that he had stolen from the large farm stores. Author José Saramago tells us that readers of the book, like the character “António Mau-Tempo”, have “João Mau-Tempo” as their teacher and “José Gato” to explain things. “José Gato” appears at key points in the narrative of “João Mau-Tempo”, taking on either an active or passive role. While “Domingos Mau-Tempo” was the one who began to inculcate in “João Mau-Tempo” basic ideas about injustice, “José Gato” contributed to “João Mau-Tempo” learning about notions of justice.
When António Mau-Tempo spends time in Monte Lavre, João Mau-Tempo forgets that he is his father and older than him and starts dogging his footsteps, as if he wanted to find out the truth behind those absences, as far away as Coruche, Sado, Samora Correia, Infantado and even the far side of the Tagus river, and the true stories he hears from his son’s mouth both confirm and confuse the legend of José Gato, well, legend is perhaps a exaggeration, because José Gato is nothing but an inglorious braggart, he allowed us to be driven from Monte Lavre to prison, the stories are important more because they involve António Mau-Tempo, who was either there himself or heard about it later, than because they are picturesque facts that contribute to the history of minor rural crimes. And João Mau-Tempo some- times has a thought that he cannot really put into words, but which, from the glimpse we’ve had of it, seems to say that if we’re talking about good examples, perhaps that of José Gato is not so very bad, even if he is a thief and doesn’t turn up when he’s needed. One day, António Mau-Tempo will say, In life I’ve had a teacher and an explainer, but now, I’ve gone back to the beginning to learn everything over again. If you need an explanation, let’s say that his father was the teacher, José Gato the explainer, and that what António Mau-Tempo is learning now he will not be learning alone. (Raised from the Ground, Saramago, 2018, p. 196)
The subversive actions of the character “José Gato” challenge the order of society and at the same time address its failings, restoring a measure of justice where there is none. Some say he was from Montemor-o-Novo, others from São Cristóvão or Alcácer do Sal, but everyone agrees that this was the Alentejo Zé do Telhado, the Robin Hood of the Alentejo latifundia, a true inspiration in the midst of so much injustice. This form of resistance, through smuggling and crime, was sometimes the only means of survival for rural workers during serious economic crises. Such narratives with some historical basis are part of the Alentejo oral tradition.
Later the gang moved to Vale de Reis, you city folk just can’t imagine how wild it is round there, grottoes and caves and evil-looking swamps, no one else would go anywhere near, not even the guards, they didn’t dare.
(Raised from the Ground, Saramago, 2018, p.129)
The stories of Zé Rato are still told by the older inhabitants of the village of São Cristóvão. Jesuíno Nifra remembers him as a hero who saved many people from hunger. In the conversation he had with us, we still recognise “Marrilhas”, which is a reference to the outlaw Marradilhas, as well as an allusion to the place that Saramago described as the “Vale de Reis area”, where the gang had its hideout.
“So, working and not earning anything, that’s his life, almost like a kind of politician, not earning anything … He was facing up to the reality of life. And he formed that [the Zé Rato gang] plus others. They didn’t hurt anyone, but those two who had a bad reputation were that Marradilhas and that Estriga. They were dangerous. It was Zé Rato, Aunt Parrochinha’s son, so many times she kissed my portrait, poor thing, she was like a mother to him, she had a picture […] Over there, their hideout is Serrinha. There were tunnels there, which were so old that no one could remember where they were. They had surveillance, just like the troops, sentries keeping guard. I saw that. Later, many people went there, just to see. To get there, there was a undergrowth as well as trees. Only they knew where to sink tunnels deep down.”
(Nifra, 2018).
