Fernando settled in his lawn chair, surrounded by the stalks and tendrils of the garden. Now and again he reached up to pick a luscious piece of fruit.
He listened to the sea breezes, to the birds screaming in the wind, to the sound of waves crashing. He felt the sting of salt air and wandered like an old ghost through the mists, through his garden, through the narrow streets and buildings arrayed in the dimensions of an emerald island nestled in the mid-Atlantic.
He strolled the avenida, and stopped at the Café Internacional, to sit and argue the latest news with the other patrons. He glanced across to the Largo do Infante, where he had taken so many of his walks, and farther, to Horta’s harbor, to Pico rising to the heavens, in the distance.
He tipped his hat to the storekeepers, “Bom dia, Senhor Machado,” he said, smiling. Old friends and acquaintances walked past, offering their regards.
Here he would sit and paint to his heart’s content, scenes that appeared before his eyes. He would write poems, too; for here were all the colors, sights, sounds, and smells he could never leave behind. Never again would he have to suffer saudades for all he longed for. Here he found only that which belonged to the Azores and nothing more.
He sat breathing in the air of Faial, as boats sailed in and out of the harbor. Life was good, things as they should be. Those distant unpleasant memories of another life, a life in another place—with no friends, no work, no Azores—he thankfully recognized as a bad dream—a fate that others suffered, perhaps, but not him.
His wife and children had gone on to find a better life, but the Azores contained all he wished for. After all, the islands were a part of him, as much as he was a part of them. He was no longer an exile. He had come home.
THE OLD WOMAN SCURRIED ACROSS THE SAND, BACK AND FORTH. EVERY now and then she would stop, bend down, and poke a stick at something in the sand. Occasionally, she picked up something of interest. Some children passed by on the road and shouted at her. They were too far away for her to make out what was said, but she had heard it all before: “What are you looking for, Mad Marisa? Treasure? Did you lose something? Your husband, maybe?” They repeated the words of their parents. She stood and waved. They laughed and she laughed back at them. She went back to her searching.
Finally she stopped and stared at something white jutting out of the sand. She circled it cautiously, as though it might suddenly spring at her. It was a bone.
“Well, well, what have we here,” she said. “Some ancient sailor, perhaps?”
Looking around quickly, to make sure no one was watching, she bent down and picked it up. She turned the bone over, carefully examining both ends and along its length. The bone was large; most likely it had been a forearm, she thought.
She wrapped it in her shawl and carried it toward home, holding it in the crook of her arm, like a baby.
Everybody knew her as Marisa, the mad woman of Praia Negra, though Marisa wasn’t her real name. They had called her that for so long that nobody could remember what her true name was, or even that the one they called her wasn’t hers.
Some said she had always been mad, but most people believed it was losing her husband that drove her mad. Twenty years had passed since Eduardo had disappeared. Most believed he had left the islands and sailed off to Portugal or Madeira after a woman. There were rumors he had been seen years later.
Still, Marisa didn’t believe any of them. “His boat was wrecked in a terrible storm. Everyone knows he was the best fisherman on the island. He always went farther than the others, and he brought back more fish than anyone else.” Year after year she would tell people: “He’ll come back. He said so. He made a promise. You’ll see.”
A few neighbors kept an eye on her, bringing her home if she got caught in the rain or lost. They left food for her and brought blankets and other household supplies. They had tried to talk her into leaving numerous times, to go to the mainland where she had family. But she refused. “This is where I belong,” she said. “This is my home.”
Every day Marisa left her small stone house and walked up and down the beach. She gazed out over the sea, studying the distance as though awaiting a sign, like the old whale watcher who sat in the lookout up the hill, peering constantly through the slits that served as a window with his pair of binoculars, ready to shoot off the flare announcing that he had sighted a whale in the distance.
She would return and walk in the other direction, combing the wet sand and the rocks for the odds and ends that occasionally washed ashore.
She never walked along the roads except when she went into the village for something. She didn’t walk along the pastures or in the parks either, as though only the narrow strip of sand beckoned her: the thin border between the richly bountiful land of life, and that strange, living mystery out there, rippling with shadows, resounding with death.
After reaching her house, Marisa quickly rinsed the bone with water from the well. It was bleached white and spotless, but she scrubbed it nonetheless.
“Who are you?” she said, stepping inside and setting it down on the table. “Were you a sailor?” She lit a fire in the stove. “Or a fisherman who was washed overboard? Maybe someone killed you, pushed you off a ship. Or did you kill yourself by jumping into the sea?”
She brought out candles and set them on the table near the bone.
“Such great luck to have found you,” she said. “Not just an ordinary find today. And how long have you been dead? Ah, who is to know such things? Maybe you are just some old pirate whose bones have finally washed up.”
She didn’t know where to put it. The bone was something special and didn’t seem to belong with the other things she had found over the years—the bottles, rocks, bits of nets, and other debris which lined her windowsills and the shelf that held her dishes.
She left it on the table and examined it for a long time.
The next day she went out for much longer than she normally did, believing that perhaps she had overlooked another piece of bone, or that more had washed ashore during the night.
She didn’t find anything, however—there were only the same old rocks, feathers, seaweed, and shells that always littered the sand. She left them alone, as though she couldn’t be bothered by such ordinary things anymore.
Marisa came back home and began to worry about taking the bone.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “What shall I do? Maybe it was happy where it was.” She wondered if she should return the bone to where she had found it, thinking that maybe it was bad luck or disrespectful to disturb the dead. She didn’t want to give it up, though. Perhaps, she thought, I should take it to the padre instead and have him bless it for me.
But the thought of having to re-bury the bone and the questions the padre might ask if she told him she wished to keep it only made her more confused.
Two days later, after a heavy downpour, she found another bone. It was shorter than the first one, but otherwise of the same solid, polished, and chalk-white material. She was overjoyed at the discovery.
“Two of them, and in such a short time, must be an omen!”
She took it straight home and placed it beside the other. She couldn’t tell if they matched or belonged together, but she saw no other possibility; they had to be from the same unfortunate person.
The next day there was yet another bone, and the day after that several very small ones. She was terrified she might miss a piece and so she searched the area carefully, to make sure none had been overlooked.
Marisa laid them all together on the table, matching them, rearranging them, the larger ones on one side, the smaller ones on the other. She experimented, trying to fit them together.
She didn’t always find the bones in the same spot, but they were never very far from one another, either. She wondered whether the sea washed the bones onto the shore, or if they were uncovered by shifting sands. She even thought that perhaps someone was leaving them for her to find, but that didn’t seem possible. She never saw anyone else on the
sand.
Sometimes she heard strains of an old song, mostly at night, but also during her walks in the daylight. But the sound was always faint and far away, drowned out by the crashing waves. During the storms, too, she heard it, like a frightened cat crying at the door to be let in.
“There is nothing very strange or unusual about a bone, perhaps,” she said. “But bones that sing, well, that is something special, indeed.”
It seemed like too much to ask for, to keep finding more bones, especially since she had already found such an extraordinary number of them. So she kept telling herself that there could not be any more, that she was only checking to make sure, and for no other reason than that. But they continued to appear nonetheless, each new find asking that she would return again.
Once she found an entire hand, lying as though it were reaching out for her. She found a flat piece of wood and carefully laid each bone in order upon the board.
Later she found several ribs, and hummed along as the bones sang to her, louder with each passing day.
In the evenings she sat and sewed. Occasionally she glanced at the arrangements of bones on the tabletop and was aware of an odd sensation, an unreasonable yet unshakable suspicion that grew with each additional piece of the skeleton. As it materialized she couldn’t rid herself of the nagging feeling of familiarity; each piece was like a flavor she had tasted long ago, a word she had once heard spoken and which still echoed.
Often, as she hung up her clothes to dry or worked in her garden, she found herself trembling, unable to shut out the growing realization, the sensations that seized her like the flush of a high fever.
In another week she had finished putting one of the legs together, and then she knew: there was no longer any doubt in her mind—this was her husband’s rib, his leg, his skeleton she was piecing together.
“Eduardo,” she cried, holding one of the ribs in her hand. “I knew you would come back. Piece by piece, across hundreds or thousands of miles after twenty long years. I know now why these bones seemed so precious to me!”
She held each of them, kissed them one by one, whispering her forgiveness. Whenever there was a break or a pause between storms, she returned carrying more bones to add to the growing skeleton. When the rain was unrelenting it was most difficult. She couldn’t stop thinking about what new piece, if any, awaited her, and after looking repeatedly at the bones, she would finally cover them with a blanket and try to think of something else.
She was nagged by constant fears that there would be no more. If two days went by with no new bones, she worried, and she knew she couldn’t possibly live through another day.
While she kept busy collecting and assembling his bones, she felt more alive than she had felt in years. She sang as she worked in the garden and smiled happily as she roamed through the hallways and kitchen, listening as the song of the bones filled the house. The sun shone brighter, and the sea seemed to laugh and dance, sharing her joy. It was as if he were courting her all over again. She remembered Eduardo’s glances and his halting words as he had attempted to win her heart, the way her love for him had grown and their dreams had become one.
With each passing day she learned more about how he should be put together, where each piece belonged. It was painstaking work, like a jigsaw puzzle in which she could see a picture slowly taking shape.
She pieced his other hand together. “How those very hands used to hold mine,” she said, stroking the long, narrow fingers.
The villagers walked past her house and shook their heads. “Listen,” she would hear them say to one another. “Mad Marisa talking to herself. Poor thing!”
“But see, she’s smiling too. She’s crazy, yes, but she’s also happy.”
Just after the second leg was completed, the bones stopped coming. She spent the whole afternoon the next day looking, gasping for breath and straining her brittle lungs, but came home empty-handed and exhausted.
“My God!” she cried, “To have a half-finished husband! Please, let the rest come.”
The next day she looked, mad with fever, burning in her quest to find a piece, any piece, just something to add, something to keep him coming.
She went home convinced it was over, wondering how she could go on. For two days she lay in bed weak and afraid, reluctant to get up and look at him, scared of going to the shore and finding nothing.
There were several more days of rain, and she did little but pace around the house, checking on him again and again, waiting impatiently to go search the beach. In the evenings she sat eating stale bread and homemade cheese, listening to the screams and shrieks, the cries of the wind lashing and pounding against the house, as though the storms were intent on clearing everything off the island. She would hum or sing along with Eduardo, whose resonant voice calmed and reassured her.
On the day following the storm she woke early. The skies were bright and clear. She bundled warmly and went out. It was there, waiting for her, almost as if someone had carefully left it where she was sure to find it: his skull.
“My husband,” she said, holding his skull lovingly in her hands. “Yes, I would certainly recognize you anywhere.”
Now that he was almost complete, she moved him. She put him into his own bed, which still stood beside hers. He lay upon the top sheet, perfectly at peace.
In the nights she looked over, even though she knew he was there, next to her.
He looked better, as each passing day he came to life, stronger, purer, as though he had been distilled, and now only the essentials remained. All the excess, the fancies, the faults and weaknesses of being a man had been stripped away. Time and the terrible ordeal he’d gone through, the long periods of solitude, had made a new man of him.
She sat for several hours every day and talked to him while she knitted a new shawl, telling him about everything that had happened in his absence, the events and circumstances of her life alone, as though she wanted no space, no doubts or shadows, no misunderstandings or secrets between them.
Occasionally, she scolded him for his carelessness, for his foolishness. “Just like a man! To go off, leave your home and family, with no one to look after you, and end up getting yourself killed. It’s a terrible thing!”
Later, as if to make up to him, she brought out a dish of oil and smoothed it on him with a cloth, bone by bone, polishing each until he was radiant.
She held his head in her hands and peered into his sockets, seeing the vast depths of the oceans and feeling the implacable pull of those distant currents. “It’s like listening to a seashell,” she said. “Such distances and depths, which I can see instead of hear. Tell me, then, what happened to you? Where were you all those years?”
And she sat and listened to the whisper like the sea wind cutting through the rigging of the sails, telling her of the endless days at sea, the boat blown off course, the desolation and the fear, the hunger and the dehydration, and later the storm, water rushing everywhere, and finally, the boat going down.
“I know. I told them all,” Marisa said. “I missed you, and to have you back again—it’s a miracle!” She wiped the tears off his skull, and smiled triumphantly.
She began making a new dress. “My wedding dress,” she said, holding it up. She made him lunch and dinner, taking care to fix Eduardo’s favorite meals, and brought him wine when he asked for some. It made her happy to hear him sing or whistle. “Sounds as though the house is filled with birds,” she said happily.
“Tell me,” she sometimes said. “What will we do?” And he would tell her of the boat he would build, how they would leave the island and sail together the way they should have done. “Ah, yes, a honeymoon, just like you promised.”
She smiled, knowing he meant it, and she couldn’t doubt it would happen, not after he had come so far to be with her again.
~ ~ ~
It was Semana do Mar—the Week of the Sea. Every year a great procession would make its way toward the ocean and the seafarer’s church. Most of the town gath
ered, all finely dressed and singing. Some of the children wore white veils upon their heads, and held flowers. The men carried musical instruments, a staff or a cross, and, at the end, the figure of the saint and the infant, high upon their shoulders. Marisa never missed the celebrations.
Stopping a group of youngsters on their way to join the crowd, she had them drag Eduardo’s dory down to the strand. When they had left, she placed a soft mat on the bottom and laid Eduardo out on it, making sure that he was comfortable. She covered him with his only suit.
When the people saw her rowing through the waves towards the church, they shouted and pointed. They hushed as several men ran out into the surf to help her to shore. Marisa stood, proud of her beautiful wedding shawl, and showed them how neatly she had placed Eduardo’s bones. “My husband has come back for me,” said Marisa.
Marisa heard a mad flutter as the villagers raised their hands to cross themselves and whisper a prayer to Our Lady. One woman screamed. The padre quickly blessed Eduardo and Marisa and said a prayer. The villagers whispered: “What can this mean? How is such a thing possible?”
“God has seen fit to bring them together,” one neighbor said. Several others spoke up in agreement.
The padre nodded sympathetically. “Clearly this is God’s wish. He alone could have brought Eduardo back to her.”
The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales Page 15