Morning journal lisbon 19951/8/2024 I was 13 or 14 years old when we finally lived in a house (very small) just for us: until then we had always lived in parts of the house, with other families. Although the conditions in which we lived had improved somewhat with the change, we would never come to know a real economic breakthrough. A few months after we settled in the capital, my brother Francisco, who was two years older than me, would die. Perhaps because he participated in the Great War, in France, as an artillery soldier, and knew other environments, different from the village, my father decided, in 1924, to leave the field work and move with his family to Lisbon, where he began to exercise the profession of public security police, for which “literary qualifications” (common expression then…) were no longer required than reading, writing and telling. Although I came into the world on November 16, 1922, my official documents state that I was born two days later, at 18: it was thanks to this small fraud that the family escaped payment of the fine due to the lack of declaration of birth within the legal deadline. Only when I was seven, when I had to present an identification document at primary school, did it become known that my full name was José de Sousa Saramago… However, this was not the only identity problem I was faced with in the baby crib. (It should be clarified that saramago is a spontaneous herbaceous plant, whose leaves, in those times, in times of need, served as food in the kitchen of the poor). José de Sousa would also have been my name if the civil registry official, on his own initiative, had not added the nickname for which my father's family was known in the village: Saramago. My parents were called José de Sousa and Maria da Piedade. I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village located in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the river Almonda, some hundred kilometers northeast of Lisbon.
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