“I care not that you burn,” he hissed back. “Not you. But when the flames touch flesh, you will scream Hell’s door open. Do you want your daughter to hear that? Do you? And then her having to climb the pyre herself, little understanding that she will not have to burn as well?”
It was uncanny, that look, as if she saw inside him, saw the small mean thing Pessoa was; while her daughter had looked in him and seen grace.
“I will not scream,” she said. “I will lean into the fire, and drink it, for it will taste better than this, and smell better than you, and I will have a kinder ending than husband would ever give me.”
Afonso wanted to talk to the herbalist, for he quite liked her. He wanted to tell her that Jandira had burst her cocoon and was finally becoming, although he knew not what. The captain held him back.
He would have spoken to the angels, too, and wanted to tell them to take off their silly black robes. They could wear red, like the pretty crimson footprints he had seen on the cobbles. Or blue like the wide sky. Or green like the weeds which grew oftimes between the walls of the houses and the cobbles. Green. That was a happy color.
It was a strange parade, with the angels wandering and having to be herded, with the weeping man carrying the weeping girl, with the people in the windows peeking between their curtains as if afraid to be seen, and him not able to wave. But of all of them, the fat priest, the executioners, the people dressed in black and flames, he was the most important one. So he walked importantly, with his chest out and his chin up.
Just outside the village was a meadow, all happy and green from the rain. And there were marigolds in plenty, and late daisies, and large stacks of wood that were nearly thrice the height of a man. Two of the stacks at the very end were tiny—angel-sized. There in that meadow the procession stopped, and the fat priest spoke, and the people who were in the silly black dresses that barely reached their knees all listened, and more of them were crying now. A soldier brought Afonso a chair, and the captain bade him sit down.
“Will it be long?” he asked.
“A while, sire.”
“Will we have dinner here, then?” He thought a dinner on the grass might be pleasant, for the sun was warm and the breeze brisk, the meadow so pretty, and the daisies fresh-faced.
The captain shook his head. “No. Look there, Your Majesty. See? This part is easy to watch. The effigies first.”
The little wood stacks were not meant for angels, but for two straw figures which were quick to burst into flame.
“It is all most carefully planned. They set the easternmost ones first, sire.” the captain said, “for the afternoon wind is west to east.”
Afonso watched the wind pluck at the straw men and carry bright pieces of them away. “I see Father de Melo.”
All the priests were standing about a woman who should not have been dressed in the short shift at all. Her legs were knobby in some places and fat in others, and her hair had come loose from her bun and stuck up on her head in a fright.
“Do not wave, sire. Father is busy. Now, when the pyre is lit, you may hold on to my hand, if you wish. But do not rise up out of your chair. Nor should you make any outcry, nor a protest of any sort. If you feel the need to vomit, do so to the side there.”
The woman was angry and shouting. “Those priests should stand back,” Afonso said, for she seemed very furious.
A masked executioner came to help her up the stack of wood, but she slapped at him. She hiked her skirt above her skinny shanks and walked up by herself. All the priests below were waving their crosses, waving their crosses, and her laughing down. The executioner tied her about the stake, hands and legs, and then he left her, and she was all alone there, shouting.
The priests hushed their prayers, and Afonso could hear what she said. “…all men murderers! For I look down and see not a woman among you! Cock-proud, cock-stupid. You had best fear me, hadn’t you? Hadn’t you? And do not dare sleep. For I’ll come tonight in your dreams and suck the life out from between your legs!”
Afonso told the captain, “I like her. She is funny, and she reminds me of Jandira.”
On the other side of the wood, the executioner was setting the wood alight. He raced to the front and set that afire, too. Afonso saw the woman look down once before the tinder caught.
The woman’s shouts went shrill. A wall of fire rushed up. She tried to lift herself, she tried in a frenzy, but her legs were bound tight. Her black shift caught, and made the painted flames a radiance. Her hair caught, too, and she screeched loudly and very long. The meadow hushed, and for a while it was only the deep-throated roar of the fire and her screams.
“The priests need to be careful of her,” Afonso said, for it seemed that when the ropes burned through, she would climb down and strike them.
She did not come down. She bellowed. She struggled. And it was not Afonso who sought the captain’s hand; but the captain who sought his. Afonso thought that the burning was not so terrible. True, the woman screamed, but she laughed, too; although it was a laugh that hurt to hear. And then the flames shot up high of a sudden, and the laughs and the screams went quiet, and then it was only the noise of the fire and the whisper of the wind.
He could see her, at times, amid the bright flames: a dark, still figure. The shift had burned off her, but that did not matter, for she had no true nakedness, really, and was a woman no longer. She had changed. All of her was a sort of charcoal; and then that, too, was gone, the hinged floor dropping open, the charred body falling through the embers.
The captain cleared his throat. “An angry old hag,” he said. “Probably nothing could have been done to save the bitch. Let us pray that the rest are not so damnably obstinate.”
Afonso looked up and saw him staring blank-faced and straight ahead. His hand was hot and sweaty. He held Afonso’s fingers tight.
De Melo embraced Maria Elena and welcomed her back into the Body of Christ. She kissed the cross when Soares lifted it to her. She held on to the sleeve of Pessoa’s alb.
Pessoa told her, “We will go up the pyre together, Maria Elena. You and Father Soares and I.”
They had to, for she would not let go his sleeve. He put his arm about her and helped her up the first log, then the next. On one side was the low crackle of her mother’s pyre; on the other, Soares, intoning a Pater Noster.
Then they were at the stake. Below, were Gomes and de Melo, a bright ring of soldiers, and the meadow stretching emerald and wide. The air smelled of wood smoke and pitch and the sweet sick stench of her mother’s burnt flesh.
Soares prayed… panum nostrum da nobis hodie…”
Maria Elena looked down at the gathered soldiers, the waiting priests. The crowd below, all looking up. She held Pessoa tight. “Please, father. Tell me about Heaven.”
What could he say except that it seemed they were already ascending? The meadow was so achingly beautiful, the sky above them wide and waiting, the soldiers below so small.
Soares leaned to her. “Christ waits for you there, for you have been a good girl, Maria.”
Now she gave Soares her desperate longing. “Have I?”
“O, yes.” Soares patted her hand. “A very good girl.”
She looked at Pessoa again. Why? He had naught that would help her. Yet she held him with her clinging, demanding fingers. “And my baby?”
Pessoa said, “I believe that your baby is most likely in Heaven, too.”
“I’m afraid of Purgatory, father.” Her fingers squeezed his, so that bone grated bone. “I do not understand it. Hell is something at least, but Purgatory has always seemed to be an in-between place, somewhere that God might lose souls. I think sometimes—just before I fall asleep—it seems to me, father, that I am lost there. I think I will wander, my baby gone to Limbo, for the sweet was never baptized. I might bear Purgatory with my baby with me, but I am so afraid to be alone.”
Pessoa took hold of her wrists. “Listen to me, Maria.” Easier for him to say it than for Soares to
lie. “I promise you: you will not be in Purgatory today, nor your baby in Limbo.”
“And I can hold it?”
He sensed the oddly gentle, uncannily silent approach of the executioner.
“Not yet,” Soares told him, and then plaintively asked the man, “Must you tie her?” .
Pessoa said, “Look at me, Maria. Look! And listen to me carefully. I promise you: in just a moment you will be in heaven. And once you are there, you may hold your baby.”
The executioner took hold of her hand, but she gasped and snatched it back. Then suddenly she went wide-eyed. “Hold my baby!” she cried. “He can’t take me! I want to hold my baby!”
“Yes. Very soon now.” Pessoa caught her wrist and fumbled for the other, but Soares already held it tight.
The executioner slipped the garrote about her neck, and let the rope rest gently as a length of velvet ribbon.
“Say your prayers. Maria Elena,” Soares said. He looked to the executioner.
“Pater Noster, qui es in cae—”
Such merciful violence, that quick twist of the handle. Pessoa held her struggling wrist, held her. He could not look into her terrified face; and yet to be kind, he must. She shuddered. She held the lace of his alb in her fists. One last heartbeat, then the feverish yearning in her eyes went out. She fell limp, Pessoa falling with her. Soares went to his knees, praying.
The executioner pulled the body away, and Maria Elena’s fingers came loose, leaving handprints, sweated furrows in the cotton. When he looked up, Pessoa saw her already being tied to the stake. Her head was hanging down lower and more helpless than it ever could in life. Still, the executioner, a cautious man, put his hand over her mouth to check for breath.
Someone plucked at his sleeve, and he thought—O God, he feared—that it was Maria Elena.
Only Soares. “Come down, Manoel. He is ready to set the wood alight.”
Afonso did not like to see the girl set ablaze, for she was just Pedro’s age. Executions were for grown people, for murderers and Spaniards. They were for those who plotted against the crown.
He fidgeted in his seat. The captain gave a cautionary tug to his fingers. “Sometimes it helps to think of something else, sire. A novena, perhaps. Or counting. That always does well for me.”
Next to burn would be the man and the girl. They sat together at the base of a stack of wood, and there the priests stood in a knot with the executioner, arguing. Afonso wanted to leave the meadow for home now. He very much wanted his own room, the damp mildew smell of the castle, his window which looked out on the Alfama. He raised his head to the sky and tried to think of something else. He tapped his foot. He counted, but too soon reached the end of his numbers. He counted once more to five.
Perhaps a novena. “Sacred Heart of Jesus, I trust in Thee… .” He stopped, confused. Somehow he had begun in the middle of the prayer, and could not remember the rest.
The captain bent down to him. “Sire?”
He could not count well, but he knew how to mark his fingers. Nine. All the fingers but his left thumb. Afonso held down his second finger and said. “They kingdom come.”
The executioner could not pry Marta out of her father’s clutches. “See why we do not allow the condemned to touch?” the man asked, exasperated. “Look you! We have this, father! And what good is this?” Behind the mask, his eyes gleamed, less with fury than frustration. “Worse for them, that they become willful, and cannot be managed except to hurt them!”
Soares knelt by where Guilherme sat, cradling his daughter. “Let her go. Guilherme,” Soares said. “It is time.”
Castanheda shook his head.
Pessoa told him, “I beg you, Guilherme. I would not have the guards hurt you.” That hand, a huge soldier’s hand, was tangled in her loose, brown hair. Five fingers. At the fifth Station. Jesus was helped by Simon. Lead me through my daily trials.
Guilherme’s huge body twisted in a child’s posture of woe. He lifted his tearstained face. “Take me first.”
Soares touched his shoulder. “We cannot.”
“Please. I cannot watch her die.”
Soares said, “Then she would see you die, instead, and that would be more cruel.”
Little Marta curled in his lap as if she slept, her face hidden against her father’s broad chest, her bloody feet tucked under her. She was—no, all of them—they were all of them so tired.
Pessoa, who was weary, too, bent down and said, “If you die first, who would carry her up the pyre, Guilherme? And her feet hurting her so. Go ahead and carry her up. They will let you do that.” He rose, turned to the executioner. “Let him do that.”
The executioner, job all unraveled, shrugged. He went up alone.
Soares took Castanheda’s arm, Pessoa the other. They went up the logs—the miracle of one foot and another—until they were at the top, and Soares was saying, “Guilherme, you must put her down.”
More difficult a duty than Maria Elena’s, even though it was not Pessoa that Marta clung to. She wailed piteously when guards came to lead her father away.
“Be strong,” Soares commanded her. “Listen to me! Do you understand, Marta? You must be brave for your father.”
Her small hands. Pessoa had not noticed that she clutched a rosary. Five fingers. Five. The fifth Glorious Mystery, when Mary is crowned Queen of Heaven.
The executioner took her wrists and bound them to the stake.
“Not so tightly,” Pessoa said.
He caught a wry glitter in the eyeholes of the mask, then the man sighed and shook his head. “She’ll fight the garrote.”
Marta peered anxiously at the executioner, first over one shoulder, then over the other.
Soares bade her kiss the cross, and she did. He opened his missal. The executioner knelt to tie her legs. Pessoa bent with him. “When I clench my fist, thusly,” he whispered. The man nodded and Pessoa arose. About the meadow were gathered flowers and soldiers, the sweet-faced daisies all looking up, and marigolds, too, as bright as candle flames. Pessoa heard the crackle of Maria Elena’s fire, but above him was that wide deep sky, and there perhaps Maria Elena held her baby. The fourth Glorious Mystery.
Pessoa heard Marta praying, and realized he was not hearing Latin.
The garrote was already about her, the rope loose enough for her to pray. “…protection of the living and the salvation of the dying. Purest Mary…”
Not an Act of Contrition, for that had come in the jail. She instead sought comfort from a simple novena.
Her voice trembled. “…sacred name. Mary, Mary. What a consolation, what sweetness…”
Pessoa looked at the executioner. He clenched his fist.
Before he even went up the pyre, the man in the black began screaming and shaking his head as if the flames on his shift were burning him. And though he and the two priests walked up the wood together, he cursed them as they went. He cursed Father de Melo. He cursed the fat priest, too, which Afonso very much liked.
“He is a nice man, I think,” Afonso told the captain.
“Yes, sire. I am told that he was a soldier, and was awarded a medal by you for great bravery.”
“Did I give him a medal?” Afonso peered at the man this way and that. “I do not remember.”
“No, sire. But it matters little now.”
Shouts from Father de Melo, from the fat priest, and still the two other priests were praying and one was trying to get the man to kiss the cross. The more the priest tried, the more the man turned his face away, and the louder he cursed. The fat priest began barking orders. Two guards climbed the pyre and led the priests away.
“Will it be over soon?” Afonso asked.
The captain nodded vaguely. “You know? It is interesting that I can still recite The Lusiads, and I learned it, O, years ago now, in school. Is that not strange? Do you remember your Camões, sire?”
When the priests climbed down, the man on the stake grew quiet. He looked about him. Afonso caught sight of the executioner
standing behind the pyre with a torch.
The captain cleared his throat. “First canto: ‘This story is of heroes who left Portugal behind. Who opened a passage to Ceylon and crossed seas where no man had yet sailed’ ”
Such a silence across the grassy meadow. The white knot of priests, and the man in black on the stake, peering anxiously about.
The captain’s words came in a lunatic and unsteady gallop. “ ‘This is a story of kings who progressed beyond faith and empire, who struck fear among the heathens of Africa and Asia.’ ”
The executioner disappeared behind the mound of wood.
“And … and something, something, something,” the captain said. “My memory is imperfect, I find. O! O yes. How stupid of me. O yes, I know. ‘So let us hear no more of Ulysses and Aeneas and their travels, or Alexander and Trajan and their victories. I speak of the courage and repute of the…’ ”
The wood at one corner went up in a rush. The executioner quickly ran the other three, touching torch to kindling. Even before the flames had touched flesh, the man started to scream.
The man fought the ropes as if he would climb the stake and make an assault on Heaven. He fought so, he kicked his leg ropes free. His shouts were terrible, first hoarse, then, when the flames reached him, going shrill as a woman’s. And even higher, until they were thin and sharp as a trapped stoat’s. The man danced atop the wood, in that bright inferno. He raised such a clamor that Afonso could not bear to hear it. He could not bear to see him twitch. “No!” Afonso said. “No!” They must bring the man down, for it was not right for anything to scream thus. He clapped his hands to his eyes, then to his ears, and then to his eyes again, slapping himself so fast and hard that his head rang; and still he could hear the man shrieking.
Pessoa thought, if God is good…. But how could He exist in Guilherme’s unbearable screams, that pain so near to Heaven? It would break any father’s heart.
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