ABSTRACT
145the Ramires kept sulkily to their lands, drinking and hunting. They reappeared with the Braganzas, and a Ramires, Vicente, Governor of Arms of Entre Douro e Minho for Don João IV, invades Castile, defeats the Spaniards under the Count of Venavente, and takes Fuente Guinal, over whose violent sacking he presides from the verandah of a Franciscan Convent as he stands in his shirt-sleeves eating slices of water-melon. But as the nation degenerated, so did the noble race... Álvaro Ramires, a favourite of Don Pedro II, and a ruffian, used to alarm Lisbon with the trouble he caused, and stole the wife of an inspector in the Royal Treasury whom he had beaten to death by Negroes. Then he set fire to a gambling-house in Seville after losing a hundred doubloons there, and finished by commanding a pirate hooker in the fleet of Murad the Ragamuffin. During the reign of Don João V, Nuno Ramires shone in court, had his mules shod with silver and ruined the family by celebrating sumptuous Church ceremonies where he sang in the choir dressed in the habit of a monk of the Third Order of St Francis. Another Ramires, Cristóvão, President of the Table of Conscience and Order, acted as go-between in the affair between King José I and the daughter of the Prior of Sacavém. Pedro Ramires, Purveyor and Administrator of the Customs, was renowned in all the Kingdom for his obesity, his wit and his fears of gluttony with the Archbishop of Tessalonica in the Palace of Bemposta. Inácio Ramires accompanied Don João VI to Brazil as his Chamberlain, began to trade in Negroes, returned with a chest full of pieces of gold with an administrator of his, a former Capuchin friar, managed to steal from him, and finally died at his country seat after being gored by an ox. Gonçalo’s grandfather, Damião, a liberal doctor of letters devoted to the Muses, disembarked with Don Pedro in Mindelo, composed the rhetorical proclamation of the Party, founded a newspaper, The Antifriar, and after the Civil Wars, dragged out a rheumatic existence in Santa Ireneia, swathed in a thick woollen cape, translating into the vernacular, with the aid of a dictionary and a packet of snuff, the words of Valerius Flaccus. Gonçalo’s father, sometimes adhering to the Regenerators, sometimes to the Historicals, lived in Lisbon in the Universal Hotel, wearing out the soles of his shoes up and down the steps of the Mortgage Bank and along the Arcade, until a Minister of Home Affairs, whose concubine — a singer in São Carlos — had become infatuated with him, appointed him (to get him away from the Capital) Civil Governor of Oliveira. Gonçalo was a graduate who had failed his third year examinations at university.
