They say that the honorable and pious people of small Portuguese towns almost always lack the fame that outlaws, criminals, musicians and actors, bullfighters and local prostitutes who make many happy with thousands of joyous and simulated fornications can achieve, even with a lasting legacy after their death. Essentially, for a long time now, those who earn a living from the most impure professions, according to the prevailing morality, leave a mark on the memory of their contemporaries above the kind, hardworking, and upright. We say this to tell you that the over-eighty inhabitants of the town of Jonar, upon Tongoy Froje's return to the city for a few days, let him know that although several decades had passed since his departure, things were still the same and that they had not forgotten him. His name was still on everyone's lips, and his old age, his short graying hair, his beardless face, and his disheveled appearance had not prevented them from recognizing him after so many years.

Tongoy spent a week in Jonar retracing the steps of his adolescence. It was unusual that he didn't go to Sintra, the town of his childhood. One March morning, in the years when Oliveira Salazar was still in power, he had half-heard, from the living room, a drunk who had gone to his stepfather's tobacco shop to pawn a viola for any kind of bottle, any kind of drink, which he ultimately never recovered because he had committed suicide, as he recalled. The next day, the boy who was once Tongoy asked his mother for the instrument and obtained it, because he wouldn't have achieved anything with his stepfather. They hated each other and would hate each other even more over the years. The request to his mother had not been caused by a whim, but was the work of destiny's mysterious push to give him his saddest years.

Now he was in the place where his house had been, the tobacco shop, and where he had practiced his first songs learned at a local music school where they taught him old fados with his viola accompanied by guitar, but without bass or percussion, as is done today. After six years of having the viola, he recalled, he began to give paid serenades and to anonymously support the clandestine rallies and meetings against the dictatorship with love songs that did not speak of the end of oppression or freedom, but of difficult, unfulfilled loves, passionate crimes, in short, all the possible melodrama of the human beings who inhabited that western edge of the Iberian Peninsula. Over the years he understood the meaning of the verses better and modified them to be the second voice of protest against Salazar's oppression. It wasn't that he sang during marches or rallies; his performance occurred in the celebration of nothing, when the disturbances and confrontations between the marchers and the public force or the clandestine meetings were over, and he was called upon by the movement's leaders to go to their homes or to a bar in a poor neighborhood to sing for a few and help them in their alcoholic escape with love songs or songs of social protest, composed by him, but above all by other comrades in the country. The words comrade, cause, ideal, revolutionary values, the system, among others, were everything then.

Tongoy had already spent six days in the city, touched by the invisible contempt of his contemporaries from years ago, who refused to sell him food, drinks, or anything, for having been a red, a comrade of the cause, as well as a musician. His stay in the city was thwarted by the need to go to grocery stores and commercial warehouses where they didn't know his past, almost on the outskirts of the city, where trucks with two and three chassis unloaded food to be stored, assessed, and then distributed throughout the city. This coming and going from the dilapidated house to the outskirts of the city on his car, under the summer heat, irritated him, disarmed him, tired him greatly, and reminded him who he was to the unfortunate old men of the town.

The day before leaving, he received his only visitor at his house very early in the morning. It was a former comrade of the communist cause named Omar Febres da Quinta, who came to deliver his first viola. Omar didn't arrive with it, but asked permission and went to open a small room in the middle of the only hallway of that house, now full of dust, almost without furniture, plagued by ants and weeds everywhere. It was an uninhabitable space for anyone. Tongoy followed him. He watched him set a chair on top of a table and then climb onto it to move two panels of the ceiling. From the false ceiling, Febres lowered a black case with silver clasps containing the instrument. For lack of light and air, Tongoy violently and without delay opened the room's windows. Then he opened the case and took out a viola without strings but whole and without further damage. He took it in his hands as if to play it or cradle it and looked out the windows where a brown color was already growing that was not the constant yellow of the twelve hours of what would be his penultimate day in Jonar. Looking closely, it wasn't that, but the struggle between the particles of settled dust of many years and the dawn that hadn't quite happened in that room or in the rest of the city. As the dust dissipated, he saw the frame and sill of the windows turn green as the light grew. He turned his gaze to Febres, who understood and knew everything, closed his eyes, and remembered the day his stepfather returned early from a trip and found him naked with his mother's arms around his thighs, while he played a barely learned song and looked out the green and sad windows.

Tongoy had jumped out of one of those windows, he didn't know which one, towards exile, leaving the viola and the trail of a bad reputation stirred up by his stepfather. He would always be a red – but not an incestuous one, since his stepfather wasn't interested in spreading this – and a tavern musician. A fame that, despite the passage of time, still persisted among the unfortunate octogenarian Salazarists of the city. He had always been heartbroken after the escape, but without being able to give color to his pain in his head, now it was clear, his sorrow was of green windows (Green sad windows).