The History of the Siege of Lisbon

As for Raimundo Silva, whose main concern is to defend as best he can the unorthodox theory that the crusaders refused to take part in the conquest of Lisbon, he will be as satisfied with one character as with another, although, obviously, being a somewhat impulsive fellow, he cannot avoid sudden feelings of sympathy or aversion, peripheral, as it were, to the crux of the matter, which often allow acritical preferences or personal antipathies to prevail over rational judgments, or, as in this case, historical facts. He was drawn more by young Mogueime's lack of inhibition than his powers of narration as he listened to his account of the attack on Santarém, more by his humanitarian sentiments than any literary skills, indicative of a sound morality untainted by the negative influences of the milieu, that had led him to take pity on the Moorish women, and it is not because he does not care for the daughters of Eve, however degenerate, for had he been in the valley, instead of striking down their husbands with his sword, he would have indulged his flesh as avidly as the others, but to slit the throats of these women a minute after having kissed and bitten them with sheer pleasure, never. Therefore Raimundo Silva assumes Mogueime as his character, but believes certain points ought to be clarified beforehand, so that there will be no misunderstandings that might later prejudice, once the bonds of inevitable affection that tie the author to his worlds become binding, prejudice, as we were saying, the full assumption of causes and effects that must tighten this knot with the double force of necessity and fatality. It is necessary, in effect, to know who is lying here and who is telling the truth, and we are not thinking about the question of names, whether it is Mogueime or Moqueime as some will get round to calling him, or Moigema, as has been said, names are certainly important, but only become so once we know them, until then, a person is simply a person, and nothing more, we look at him, he is there, we recognise him somewhere else, I know him, we say, and leave it at that. And if we eventually come to know his name, it is more than likely that of his full name we shall limit ourselves to choosing or accepting, with more precise identification, only a part of it, which goes to prove that if the name is important, not all of it has the same importance, that Einstein should have been called Albert is of no real interest, just as we are indifferent to the fact that Homer had other names. What Raimundo Silva would dearly love to confirm is whether the waters of the fountain of Atamarma were really as sweet as Mogueime claimed, announcing the future lesson of The Chronicle of the Five Kings of Portugal, or whether they were, in fact, bitter, as expressly stated by Fray Antonio Brandão, whom we mentioned earlier, in his esteemed Chronicle of Dom Afonso Henriques, who actually goes so far as to say that it was because the waters were so bitter that the fountain was called Atamarma, which if put into the vernacular and made intelligible would strictly be called the Fountain of the Bitter Waters. Although it may not be the most important problem to resolve, Raimundo Silva took the trouble to reflect long enough to conclude that, logically, although as we well know reality does not always follow the straightforward path of logic, it would not make sense, waters on land generally being sweet, to presume to distinguish a fountain by the properties associated with fountains, just as we would not call a fountain surrounded by ferns, a fountain of maidenhairs, then he thought, until he had further evidence of other fountains, historical and authenticated, that the waters of Atamarma must have been bitter, and, continuing to think, that one day he will find out by the most practical means, namely, by drinking them, whereby he will finally reach the firm conclusion, in terms of experimentation and probability, that they are brackish, thus satisfying everyone, since you could say that brackish is somewhere between sweet and bitter.