Journey to Portugal by José Saramago

If there's one thing the traveller values it's knowing the meaning of names, not that this necessarily means going along with every line he's spun. Like the one about Maiorca, a name supposedly derived from a dispute between local inhabitants (who at the time either came from somewhere nameless, or a place everyone has forgotten about) and those of Montemor-o-Velho, a little further on. They claim the residents of Montemor, to irritate the rest and draw attention to the superior height of their lands, threw down the challenge, repeating: "Monte mor. Monte mor," [the higher mountain] so those from Maiorca, lacking arguments of greater weight, answered back: "Maior ca. Maior ca," [higher still here]. On balance it's a simple matter: remove any accent, slur the words, and there you have Maiorca established for evermore. The traveller quite rightly doesn't credit a word of it.

In any case, he has no wish to stoke the flames. Before going to Montemor-o-Velho he has to cross the Mondego and behave like someone who knows nothing of the imaginary quarrel. He looks, or rather stops looking, to other imaginings since the only thing he wants is to see Ereira with his own eyes, the place where Afonso Duarte, among the greatest of Portuguese poets this century-nowadays so incomprehensibly forgotten-was born and lived. Ereira is a place so close to water that, what with the Mondego flooding, and the River Arunca passing so near by, it regularly reaches the houses, as familiarly as old friends greeting one another. It must have been on a day like this that Afonso Duarte wrote: