Excerpt
Out of their long discussions on being different, some of his father’s
words stayed with him all his life. “Fortunate are those who come to get
a sense of themselves early in life. Many don’t have a sense of themselves
and their opinions and visions are really prefabricated. They simply function
by rote. They have never begun to exercise their minds and that is,
partly at least, how to get away from this terrible condition of fear.”
Ken went back to the market again after that conversation, but in a
half-hearted way. It was never the same. The people no longer told him
to go away and they no longer called him the anti-Christ. But they looked
through him. To those people he no longer existed and their attitude underlined
his feeling of being different.
But secretly, Ken liked the idea of being special and it added to his
growing sense of confidence. He had a clear sense of who he was though
he could not express it in words. Rui called him a prodigy and a genius
and talked about him to his many well-connected friends. Consequently,
adults didn’t often treat him as a child.
But he was different in other ways as well. In the summer he tore
through the streets in shorts and bare feet like a street urchin. He didn’t
go to school and spent most of his time with Francisco and his peasant
friends – all this while the children of the well-to-do families on the Avenue
of Princes attended school, wore proper uniforms and mingled with
people of their own class.
Ken’s father, too, was considered an eccentric. He loved gardening and
began to dig an enormous vegetable patch on his property, to prove a
theory about future food production. He also fished, which was not a
sport in Portugal but a job. He brought the Boy Scout movement to Portugal
and encouraged the children of the poor to enrol.
I’ve never seen anyone who was as loved as he was. No matter what was
going on he seemed to go through the world with an incredible fearlessness.
He had a gentle quality that was so attractive. Everyone was attracted to
him. He was a magnet. Being the son of such a person allowed one much
latitude.
It also gave the young boy great responsibilities at an early age. His
father taught him that he was utterly accountable for his own behaviour
and that he should consider every action with great care. However, that
didn’t necessarily mean he should be careful. In the end, he only had
himself to answer to. “We all end up in the same place,” his father said.
“We all end up alone in bed and we have to face ourselves and how we
have lived.”
He didn’t advocate revolution but he did say that a person should live
by his own code, which required that a person should have one – and that
required thought and making the effort to come to know oneself.
Libros Libertad 