How to Get By in Life with a Pair of Boots | José da Silva Coelho

One day last month I went to the Lyceum to recommend a pupil to the staff and saw little Noronha wearing a boot on one foot and, on the other, a sandal.

It reminded me of how, back when I was a student, a classmate of mine, Severino Peche – no idea where the name came from – got by in life with a single pair of boots.

This Severino Peche was a crafty sort and very idle. He studied only for days he reckoned the teacher might pick him to summarise the lesson. Sometimes,though, his reckoning was out and, to his dismay, the teacher would call his number. Severino then had to slip beneath his desk and either a boy who knew his stuff and needed the mark for his average would present himself as that number or the teacher would note his absence, furious to have been hoodwinked by a pupil he had ticked off in the register as present.

What really demonstrated Severino’s craftiness, however, was the way he got all the way through Lyceum with a single pair of boots.

When the soles had worn through, Severino would send one to the cobbler to be re-soled, the right boot for example, and come to class with a sandal on his right tootsie and pretend he had injured his toes.

The boot repaired, he would hop over to the cobbler’s on his left foot and then swap round the sandal and respective toe trouble.

If a classmate ever asked how cone the problem on his right foot had switched over to his left, Severino had to hand a laconic response– ‘Hi! Hi! Hi-hi!’ – a laugh somewhere between the cynical and the asinine that was very suggestive and satisfied the curious.

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I know a grandee who, like Severino, gets by with just the single pair of boots. However, his boots are the Christmas toast he gives each year at his friends’ houses.

This yuletide address is composed of two sections, which form his pair of boots.

The first, the right boot, consists of greeting those present with ‘good cheer’; the second, the left boot, delivered after a little speechifying, of wishing ‘every happiness’ to one and all.

The very next year, the left boot with its ‘every happiness’ comes first, followed by wishes of ‘good cheer’

Chaps like this, in our little land, never put a foot wrong, since, with only the one pair of boots, they know exactly how to get by like Severino.

José da Silva Coelho (1889-1944), the most prolific Goan short-story writer in Portuguese, is also, perhaps, the one most completely forgotten by posterity. In the 1920s, however, when he published around 50 of his short satirical narratives in the Goan press, mainly in a column entitled Contos Regionais [Regional Stories], he attained great popularity (and notoriety) with his mordant sketches of the social landscape of Goa at that time.

‘The Hesitations of Damião and His First Love’ (1923) includes a number of topoi and issues that recur throughout Silva Coelho’s work. Three key features worth highlighting here are: a wrongheaded, illusory attempt on the part of the protagonist to overturn a disadvantageous situation; ‘fashion victimhood’, or alignment with attitudes depicted as by that time hopelessly outmoded; and a concluding ambivalent moment of realisation about the true state of affairs. Damião, we learn, has fallen into the habit of wavering when decisiveness is required. The problem is that the humble, hunchbacked Damião is incapable by nature of being any other way, which perhaps reflects certain deep-seated ideas concerning the hierarchisation of society held by the author. There is something within the young Goan’s control however: Damião’s emulation of the Portuguese ultra-romantic poet Soares de Passos (1826-1860), which shows him to be in thrall to a Romanticism that had long fallen from fashion in Europe. The ridiculousness of his failed attempt at suicide debunks the young man’s overwrought navel-gazing, suggesting he should adopt an outlook more attuned to the realities of his surroundings, a proposal that would have had both literary and political implications. Here Silva Coelho echoes certain episodes in Jacob and Dulce (1896), the satirical work by his main precursor GIP (the pen name of Francisco João da Costa (1864-1901), whose biography, concerns and attitudes map quite closely onto Silva Coelho’s. If Damião’s ultra-romanticism is ultimately dispelled by the harsh stench of ammonia, his unrequited love vanishes when the object of his affections – perhaps not inaccurately – takes his outward appearance to represent his inner self. As always with Silva Coelho, who was writing in Portuguese-language newspapers subject to official review, there is no clear-cut message, no epiphany, but we, like his coeval readers, can infer certain undertones for an elite Goan audience waiting impatiently for the Portuguese First Republic (1910-1926) to grant its colonies the autonomy it had promised, even as Indian nationalism, with Gandhi at the head of Congress, gained momentum in the neighbouring territories of British India.

Paul Melo e Castro lectures in Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has a long-standing interest in the Portuguese-language literature of Goa and is an occasional translator. His translations of Goan literature have appeared in Indian Literature, Muse India and Govapuri, amongst others. His most recent book-length translation is Vimala Devi’s Monsoon, Seagull, 2019. This translation was supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.