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Archive for January, 2010

We often saw them moving nonchalantly along the streaming, dirt-strewn concrete floor of the Bourda Market, swaying from side to side as they went before disappearing into the spaces between the crates and bags of produce or underneath the crude, wooden stalls put up by vendors.
I never saw anyone kill one of those monster roaches : perhaps they were simply too big to squash with a single blow, and a prolonged battle would be too messy and ultimately pointless, since they were an accepted part of the market’s verminous population.
Even the huge rats which we occasionally glimpsed running along the gutters, their long, leathery tails disappearing into a drainpipe, were not worth comment.
The Market authorities, hopelessly outnumbered, had, with almost philosophical calm, simply given up the fight against the inevitability of vermin.
Cockroaches in the home, however, were fair game; and their numbers could be kept down by regular spraying with insecticide and by deftly squashing them with a slipper or a length of rolled-up newspaper when the opportunity arose.
I was reluctant to kill any cockroach, although I hated them, and my squeamish efforts usually ended with the creature’s escape. My mother, however, had no such qualms. Her dislike of all crawling creatures was accompanied by an urge to exterminate them that was almost evangelical.
I remember her chasing a centipede, slipper raised, chanting “by Saint Peter, by Saint Paul” like a deadly mantra. This was supposed to make the creature’s escape impossible, but it didn’t always work. That particular phrase was the one she used because it was supposed to be a specific charm for catching centipedes. It seemed really odd to me: my mother wasn’t even a Catholic.
Years later, I realised that it was further evidence of the survival of the Portuguese culture my mother had inherited, though she never spoke of it.
Fortunately, centipedes were rare. House cockroaches, however, were a daily fact of life. They were always lurking in dark corners; watchful, secretive and sly creatures, emerging in the dark or when your back was turned. If you left food on the table for too long, even during the daytime, you might return to find several roaches already darkening the plate.
If you woke up at night you had to switch on the lights and wait a moment before stepping into the dining room or kitchen, their favourite haunts.
You could hear the scratchy, whispering sound their hard, serrated legs made as they ran across the wooden floor.
Their swift running was hard to follow, and you couldn’t see them easily because they always ran on the dark, wood-trimming along the corners of the room.
We had a wooden cupboard with a hinged, curved lid on top that covered its entire width. We called it a ‘safe’. It was kept in the kitchen and used to store cutlery and perishable foods like rice, flour and sugar.