Celestino had watched Maria Teresa from afar, marveling at her calmness, and her impenetrable smile, which always seemed to say, “I know he will be here, if not now then sooner or later.”
Somehow he had never found his voice around Maria Teresa. There were always reasons why he couldn’t speak to her: “She looks busy. I’ll talk to her later. It’s the wrong day, nothing good ever comes on a Friday. There’re too many people about, I’ll wait until she’s alone. She’s alone, it’ll make her nervous. I’ll wait until there’s someone else around.”
How ironic, he thought, that his voice was now running loose, speaking as freely as the worst gossip. Why hadn’t it gone to speak at Maria Teresa’s window instead of Dona Amélia’s?
Before he knew it, Celestino found himself sitting outside Maria Teresa’s house, taking stock of the situation. The problem, he thought, is far too complex for any doctor to solve. He was on the verge of going to the police with the demand that they assist him in capturing his rogue voice, when he remembered Maria Ginete Toledo, the feiticeira who was said to be descended from Gypsies or Spanish Jews, and who was renowned for her mystical abilities.
The door to Maria Teresa’s house opened and closed. A moment later she stood before him.
“Good afternoon, Celestino,” Maria Teresa said, the ghost of a smile on her lips.
He stood speechless, wringing his hands. He could only nod and take out his pencil to write something.
“You don’t need to write, Celestino. I know what has happened,” she said, her voice rich and deep. “I will help you to find your voice, and then perhaps we shall talk, you and I?” He stared at her face, in which he read an assured strength and determination. He could only nod dumbly. “This has gone on long enough,” she said.
Maria Teresa walked with slow, measured steps in the direction of the plaza at the center of the village.
Celestino wondered at the miracle that had just occurred. He hadn’t said a word. Instead, Maria Teresa had spoken, and had spoken to him about the two of them. “We shall talk,” she had said.
The two of them continued on toward Maria Ginete Toledo’s house.
Celestino stumbled down the street like a drunken man, until they stopped at a small stone hut by the rocks of the shore, where Maria Ginete Toledo lived.
“Go on,” Maria Teresa said, pointing to the door. “I’ll wait here.”
Celestino stepped forward. Tentatively, he knocked at her door. Please don’t take offense, he thought. Don’t change me into a toad or a lizard. He didn’t know what to expect from Maria Ginete. Being a feiticeira, she was capable of anything.
The door opened and he came face to face with Maria Ginete Toledo, who exclaimed, “What took you so long?”
She didn’t wait for him to reply, but boldly took hold of his arm and led him inside. “I’ve been expecting you,” she said.
She sat him down at the table where an oil lamp cast a dim glow to the room.
“Why didn’t you come sooner? Wasting time trying to find your voice, like a man chasing his shadow. Didn’t you know you needed help? Of course not, you’re a man! Need I say more?”
Celestino gave no reply other than a shrug. Maria Ginete spoke forcefully. Her eyes pierced him; she could see in his soul. She was a roundish, plump woman, old, but strong as any man. She wore a black dress, and a shawl; her hands, arms, and ears were draped with gold.
“Come, sit down,” Maria Ginete Toledo said, indicating a chair beside her table on which sat a black cloth, an oil lamp, and a smoky glass orb.
She sat herself down at the other end of the table, then asked to see his hand, which she grasped with what felt like a claw, studying his palm with a discerning eye.
“Hmm, just as I thought,” she said.
Then she peered into the glass. Celestino stared too but could see nothing. The glass looked as dark as the cloth on which it stood.
Maria Ginete mumbled a few incomprehensible words and grinned.
“Yes,” she said, nodding, and releasing Celestino’s hand at last. “Go home, and then wait.”
She stood and shooed him out of the house without ceremony.
“What about my voice,” he managed to write before she slammed the door behind him.
“Your voice will be found, but not by you. Go home and wait. That is all.”
The door closed behind him, and Celestino stood alone in the night. He felt utterly without hope. If Maria Ginete Toledo could not help him retrieve his voice what more could he do?
He looked around but Maria Teresa was nowhere to be seen. Where had she gone? And why had she left? It was odd that she hadn’t entered Maria Ginete’s home, too. She had been there, hadn’t she?
Celestino shook his head. He followed Maria Ginete’s advice, not out of any hope that remained, but because he could think of nowhere else to go.
As he walked home he again heard those sounds like muffled murmurs. They mingled with the wind, the occasional barking of a dog, the crowing of a rooster, and the lowing of a cow, growing louder with every step. As he passed Maria Teresa’s house the sound grew to such a pitch that he had to stop his ears. It was a song of desire unlike any he had ever heard before, a wail of passion, a surge that threatened to consume everything.
Then Maria Teresa was there, walking up the street as if to meet him. He smiled, thinking that he could recognize her from a kilometer’s distance.
Celestino stood frozen on the stone street, his mind filled with the sound of unleashed longing. He watched her approach, until he realized that the sound was coming from him.
His mouth was open wide; he was shouting her name at the top of his lungs.
A moment later she was in his arms.
“Celestino,” she gasped. He clung to her, and couldn’t stop saying her name, over and over. She led him inside, shushing him calmly and quietly, as he let all the words that he had saved over the many years, all the things he had longed to tell her, finally have their voice.
AS THE FIRST TREMORS SHOOK THE EARTH, CONSTANÇA MORAIS OPENED her eyes and rose from her bed for the first time in seven years. She scurried to the back door and called to her children, though her voice sounded like the rasp of an old gate that had rusted shut. It was soon discovered that the tremor had opened a vent in the ground out in the fields. Steam and smoke emanated from the crack, and the smell of sulfur filled the air.
Constança’s husband, Álvaro, was instantly cured of his love for the grocer Pereira’s wife. Even though Constança had been asleep for seven years, she knew everything that had gone on.
“In my dreams,” she confided to her best friend, Filipa, “I heard and saw everything.”
Without Constança saying a word, Álvaro felt the heavy weight of shame and remorse for the accumulation of all his terrible sins over the last seven years, illuminated—or so it seemed to him—by Constança’s sudden wakefulness, and doubly illuminated—he saw the sins, like a shopping list—whenever he looked upon the unforgiving eyes of his newly wakened wife.
He resolved at long last to reform himself. “How could I do this to the woman I love?” he was heard to ask. “Still, what right has a woman to sleep for seven long years?”
It was a question no one was prepared to answer.
Constança felt her insides twist up in knots with the knowledge that her daughter, Manuela, was no longer living her own life, but had somehow slipped into Constança’s misbegotten youth. It was as clear as holy water the mistakes she would soon make. So she ordered Manuela to make her way to the church on her knees, every day of the week, to do penance for improper behavior with a neighbor boy whom Constança had never liked, and whom she banished forever from her sight, from the property, and from Manuela’s heart.
“How could she see that Gonçalves boy?” Constança moaned. “He is just as bad as his father and everyone else in that family of bad blood! One drop of their blood is enough to cause ruin for seven generations!”
“Are you sure?” Filipa
asked. “I never saw them together.”
“Of course, I’m sure,” Constança declared. “I’ve seen the way they make eyes at one another. I must put a stop to it right now. Trust me, once you start down that road, I know all too well where it leads.”
Their son, Francisco, who had hired on with men who were making a new road and repairing an old one, was gone much of the time working. And when he wasn’t working he drank and chased women.
“I should think,” Constança said to Filipa, “that something, perhaps, in all that time would have changed, but look, nothing is different. Nothing ever changes.”
“Perhaps, you shouldn’t be too hard on them,” Filipa said. “After all, there was no one around to make sure they didn’t go bad. Manuela is a beautiful girl; it’s not her fault that Carlos Gonçalves finds her attractive.”
“I too was cursed that way, and look where it got me,” Constança replied. “No, this suffering will do her good. She will be strengthened for it.”
Álvaro was asked how it had been, living with a sleeping woman for seven years.
“You get used to anything,” he said.
The men snickered and laughed because all of them knew that Álvaro had had no shortage of company during those seven long years of sleep, and because they knew that now his time of plenty had come to an end.
“She was always foremost on my mind,” he said.
“Why did it happen?” Filipa asked Constança.
“I do not know. Perhaps to see things clearer.”
“And Álvaro?”
“Look what a good husband he has suddenly become. He was never like this. Not even before we were married.”
It was true. Álvaro now waited on the woman hand and foot. Not only did he stay away from other women completely, but Constança was all he could talk about.
Constança sat in her bed—from which she claimed she could not rise—holding a copy of her favorite book, The Unsolvable Enigma, by Sebastião Augusto do Canto e Castro. She could not remember when or even if she had read it, though she knew its contents from beginning to end, in that mysterious way she seemed to know everything. “Ah, Filipa, how that man could write. A regular philosopher!”
“I have no time for books,” Filipa said. “Why fill your head with all that nonsense?”
The villagers ran out of their homes at the occasional rumblings of the earth, and the sounds of the buildings shaking. They set up blankets outside or, if they were lucky, a tent, where they could sleep beneath the glass eye of the moon. Constança, however, ignored the tremors and refused to budge.
“What is this thing for?” Constança said with disgust, spreading her hands at the bed on which she lay. Filipa, who sat nearby, looked up.
“What?”
“This bed. I have no idea. I haven’t been able to sleep since I woke.”
“I knew this would happen!” said Álvaro, who had just come up to the bedroom door to ask if Constança needed anything. “You used up all your sleep during those seven years.”
“You mean?” said Filipa.
“She will be awake for seven more years.”
If the previous seven years had been difficult, Álvaro found this new condition even worse. He slinked through the house at all hours like a thief, shying away from the ever-open eyes of his sleepless wife.
Sometimes she seemed to stare without seeing anything, then she would appear to look right through him. “I can’t hide,” Álvaro said in desperation. “Her eyes are everywhere.” It was more than he could stand. Still, he knew this, like her long sleep, was just one more sign that his wife was attempting to escape her fate.
He thought of running off to see Pereira’s wife, but he knew if he did Constança would be there, watching. It was utterly hopeless.
“Where can a man go when, no matter where he goes, there are those eyes seeing everything?”
Álvaro stepped outside. He watched Manuela making her way to the church, taking each painful step on her bare knees, as she now did every day. There were tears running down her cheeks, but the girl suffered the punishment imposed by her ever-vigilant mother in silence, clutching her rosary, ignoring the cuts and bruises.
Constança watched Manuela from her window. “She will thank me later for this. When she stops living my life and finds her own.”
Filipa propped Constança as comfortably as she could, where she could look out from the bedroom window, and watch life pass by like a stream. Sparks of commentary fired from her mouth, her lips opened with a burst, then closed, tightly drawn together like the strings of a purse. She took notice of everything that passed by her window.
“Maria Aurora is in love,” she said, looking after the figure of her neighbor.
“What have you heard?” Filipa asked.
“Nothing,” Constança replied. “I don’t need somebody to tell me something when I can see with my own eyes Maria Aurora walks as only a woman in love can walk.”
She continued to gaze down at the quiet dirt street.
“There is nothing down that road,” she said. “It is empty.”
“What are you saying, Constança?” Filipa asked.
“Look around you. Nothing is as it should be. When did this happen? Was it always this way?”
Filipa didn’t understand a word of Constança’s wild talk and, frightened that some new turn of events had taken place, ran off to find Álvaro.
Meanwhile, Manuela had returned from her visit to the church. She sat in the back of the house, quietly knitting a shroud out of spider webs and the translucent wings of insects. She had forgotten to speak since her mother had awakened. Nor had she looked at anything or anyone. She had worn a path between the house and the church, and not once had she wavered from that track.
Now she was blind, deaf, dumb, and invisible—though she still heard, spoke, saw, and was seen in her own fashion.
Álvaro, tired of feeling the penetrating gaze of his wife, and anxious from feeling exposed and unable to hide, came home. “I will never set foot outside this house again,” he said. “I can’t go out there. Not like this!”
Álvaro sat back in his chair, content to relinquish the life of coming and going.
He watched Manuela, no longer recognizing her as his own daughter, as she toyed with beams of light in the corner, sending them like tamed birds to fly this way and that. She spoke in cheerful tones to the voices of the air, sea, and earth, which sang their songs in a manner that had nothing to do with time or birth or death, but only with that which had always been, and would be forever. All Álvaro saw was her mouth opening and closing, until she was done with her shroud, and then he saw nothing.
Had his daughter vanished into thin air, or had she taken flight with a pair of luminous wings?
Constança’s gaze, like a milhafre’s, saw even beyond the bend of the road and the buildings that obscured the view. The shaking of the earth had gotten worse, and as everyone seemed to breathe the fear that Pico would erupt, they constantly looked over to watch the mountain.
“The whole world is upside down,” Constança said, while Filipa prayed hard and fast for the speedy recovery of her dear friend and companion. “Maria da Conceição,” Constança continued, “is very unhappy with her lot and, in fact, I see that she is in love with Pedro’s oldest boy, Eduardo, who of course went off and married that hussy, Maria Matos.”
Constança went on and on, listing who should be with whom, and what so and so should be doing with his or her life.
“You!” she shouted when Guilherme Gomes, drunk as usual, tried to sneak past unseen. “You should go off and hang yourself. Your poor wife and children! You are good for nothing.”
And when Senhora Velas walked by, “You, senhora, are living a lie!” And then when Senhor Campos paid a visit next door. “Senhor Campos, you married someone else’s wife!”
Manuela once beautiful and now invisible, hid her good looks with the disguises of her friends, the elements. They took her laughter and happiness,
her smiles and pretty features, and the natural radiance of her spirit. Those things that had once been hers now soared in the air with the feathers and songs of birds, swam with the fish, and blew with the winds; they moved silently in the sunless subterranean pools of water, coursed through the soil to smile upon the trees and plants, to kiss the green grass and fruit growing in such rich abundance; they became mixed with the rains which fell down upon everything.
Manuela left the house dressed in a hundred never minds, a thousand nos and nays, the words and sentiments of her prayers. In the shadow of her fasting and resolve and renunciation, she traveled the course to the church on her knees, which no longer registered pain. She felt instead only the voluptuous pleasures of her knees torn raw by the rocks, the stones and dirt embedded deeply in her flesh.
No one looked at her. No one saw.
Except Constança, who breathed a sigh of relief. “She has saved herself, that girl. If she keeps this up she will become a saint!”
Manuela carried a growing bundle of spider-web refuse, of dirt and sticks and leaves, while at the same time shedding the husks and skins, the remains of her vegetable, mineral, and animal body.
Filipa told Constança that she had heard Senhor Campos was leaving for America. “They say his wife will wait and join him later,” Filipa said.
“No,” Constança said.
“No?”
“This land is the land of mother’s milk. He will go and no matter how far he goes or for how long, he will think of this island, and all it means, wringing his heart. How he was born here, how all he knows is here, and how far away he is. He will not be here, and he won’t be there, but lost somewhere between. Until one day, when he envisions the island and his return, the future home he will have with Maria, when he will slip and fall into the sea and drown with the fishes. Even then he will swim toward here, but he will not reach our island. And she, she will sit in her window and look down the road for the rest of her life, unable to leave, wondering if and when her man will return, along a road from which nothing will ever come.”
The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales Page 12