The History of the Siege of Lisbon

Raimundo Silva has not visited the castle in months, but he is on his way there now, he has just made up his mind, although he thinks that may be why he decided to go out in the first place, otherwise the idea would not have occurred to him so naturally, at heart, let us assume, he felt a certain repugnance, an irresistible reluctance to enter the kitchen, but he did it all the better to deceive himself, he feared that to the suggestion, Let's visit the castle, he might churlishly have replied, To do what, and this is precisely what he was unable or at a loss to confess deep down. Savage gusts rent the air, the proof-reader's hair is windswept, the lapels of his coat flap like wet sheets. It is ridiculous to go to the castle in such weather, to climb those exposed towers, he could even be blown off one of those stairways without a handrail, the advantage is not to have anyone there, to be able to enjoy the place without any onlookers, to see the city, Raimundo Silva wants to see the city, although he cannot think why. The vast esplanade is deserted, the ground flooded with puddles of water transformed by the wind into tiny waves, and the trees creak as they are shaken about by the wind, this is almost a cyclone, an exaggeration permissible in a city which in the year nineteen hundred and forty-one suffered the as yet modest effects of the tail-end of a hurricane which people still speak of today when they complain of the damaging consequences there will be a hundred years hence in the wake of the great fire that destroyed the Chiado. Raimundo Silva goes up to the wall, looks way down into the distance, the roof-tops, the upper regions of the façades and gables, to the left the muddy river, the triumphal arch of the Rua Augusta, the tangle of intersecting streets, the odd corner of a square, the ruins of the Carmo, as well as those resulting from the fire. He does not linger there, and not because he is greatly troubled by the wind, he vaguely knows that this unusual outing has a purpose, he has not come here to contemplate the towers of the Amoreiras, it was nightmare enough to have them appear in a dream. He entered the castle, he never ceases to be surprised that it should be so small, almost like a toy castle, another Lego or Meccano set. The high walls reduce much of the wind's impact, breaking it down into many contrasting currents that penetrate the arches and passageways. Raimundo Silva is on familiar territory, he will climb to the ramparts near'Sâo Vicente, from there to examine the lie of the land. And there is the mound of the Graça, facing the highest of the towers, and the descent to the Campo de Santa Clara, where Dom Afonso Henriques encamped his soldiers, our own men and the first parents of the nation, because their ancestors who were born much too soon, could not possibly have been Portuguese. This is an aspect of genealogy that is often overlooked, the need to examine what for all its lack of importance, gave life, place and occasion to the importance acquired by what we now consider to be important.

This was not the place where the meeting took place between the crusaders and the king, it must have been further down on the other bank of the estuary, but what Raimundo Silva is looking for, if the phrase has any meaning, is an impression of something visually tangible, something he would not be able to define, yet capable, for example, of transforming him this very moment into a Moorish soldier watching the shadowy forms of the enemy and the glinting of swords, but which, in this instance, by means of some secret mental circuit, hopes to receive, as tangible evidence, the detail missing from the narrative, namely, the indisputable reason for the crusaders' departure after that decisive Not.

The wind continues to buffet Raimundo Silva, obliging him to hold on to the battlements in order to keep his balance. For a moment, the proof-reader feels utterly ridiculous, becomes aware of his theatrical, or better still, cinematographic posturing, his coat has become a medieval cloak, his flowing hair plumes, and the wind is no longer wind, but a current of air produced by a wind-machine. And just at that moment, as he became somewhat defenceless and innocent because of the irony directed at himself, there finally surfaced clearly in his mind and with no less irony, the much sought-after motive, the reason for that Not

, the ultimate and irrefutable justification for his assault on historical truth. Now Raimundo knows why the crusaders refused to help the Portuguese to besiege and capture the city, and he is about to return home to write The History of the Siege of Lisbon.

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