A reconstructed life · The Atlas
A smuggler's ledger of the boys he saved
“O Livro dos Nomes”✦Portugal✦1989–2001✦2 fragments
On the Portugal–Spain raia a contrabandist broke his trade's first rule — never keep paper — to hide a book of names: thirty-one called-up boys walked over the border so the war could not have them. One name, taken in 1967, he never forgave himself for.
Follow this life on the Atlas- 01
The widow's answer
An answer kept across the border, Alcañices · Winter, 1989
Ovidio,
You write that you and my Serafim never set a word on paper in forty years, because paper hangs people. It does. I am old, the border is dying under our windows, and from now on I will hang nothing but washing — so here are the words, all of them at once.
He kept one paper his whole life, in the false bottom of the grain ark. A book of names. The names are boys, Ovidio — thirty-one of them, alive in France and Luxembourg and wherever else, grown men with children now, because of a path he knew and the nights he chose. The coffee paid for the bread. The names paid for the man.
Light a candle on your side of the raia. From this side it looks the same — he always said so.
Leocádia
- 02
The book of passages
A hidden book of names, Guadramil · Autumn, 2001
From the book of passages — the last years
March 1966. F.T., of this parish. For France, by the old wolfram path. Paid in part, the rest forgiven — for the roof tiles. Delivered.
May 1969. R., nineteen, of Vinhais, called up for Guinea. Moon too strong on the 14th; crossed the 17th. Took nothing from the mother. Delivered.
October 1974. No more entries; the war is over. Final count, in this hand and no other: thirty-one names, thirty-one delivered, one taken — Adelino, February 1967, God rest him and forgive me the path I chose that night.
S.B.