The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales

by Darrell Kastin

  Little things began magnifying and multiplying, becoming large enough to annoy each other.

  “You sweat too much, and smell.”

  “It is the smell of a man,” Constantino said. “Don’t ask me to apologize for that.”

  And when he touched her: “Your hands,” she complained. “They feel rough like the bark of an old tree.”

  “And you, with that, that enormous thing sticking out from your stomach!”

  “I never should have married you, brute!” she said.

  “Bah! I’d walk out of here if I could!” he said.

  “And I would send you packing if I could.”

  And so it went, on and on, day and night.

  The disaster occurred one day after Joaquina’s mother had left for a neighboring village, to visit her ailing sister.

  Joaquina, according to her own testimony, had shut herself in her room, feeling that the birth of the child was imminent, and that she should devote all her time and strength to prayer, in the hopes that God would smile kindly upon the child and protect it from harm.

  Two days later, just before Joaquina’s mother was to return home, her neighbors were alerted to strange and disturbing sounds coming from inside the house. Two women went up to the door and pounded, but no one answered. Fearing that, in Senhora Celestina’s absence, Joaquina might have fallen and hurt herself, or that some complication had arisen concerning her pregnancy, the women opened the door and entered—to find Joaquina in labor. One of the women went for the doctor.

  The doctor took over, sending the women to fetch him water and towels, and ordering everyone else out of the house.

  It was at this moment that Joaquina’s mother arrived.

  The house was in crisis, with everybody scrambling to be of some use, or to inquire about Joaquina and her child, or Joaquina’s poor old mother.

  The doctor, with Senhora Celestina’s assistance, delivered the baby; both Joaquina and son were fine, normal. Things quieted down in the house. The mother was the first to notice her son-in-law’s disappearance. She was furious.

  “Where is he?” each person asked the other, amazed to find that no one had noticed his absence earlier. “Where has he gone?” Questions were asked of everyone outside the house, but no one had seen him.

  “I knew he was no good, that he would leave her the first chance he got,” Dona Celestina said.

  When Joaquina herself was finally questioned about her husband, she couldn’t answer. “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t remember.”

  A thorough search was conducted but turned up nothing. A week later the authorities came to the house to investigate. The doctor was summoned, as were the neighbors who had found Joaquina, along with the priest and even the veterinarian. Joaquina answered their questions as best she could, though she remembered very little—only that she had stayed in the room to pray after her mother had left to visit Joaquina’s aunt, and that her husband, Constantino, had been asleep most of that time. The next thing she remembered was the searing agony of labor, and then the neighbors coming in.

  The investigation proved fruitless, and no trace of Constantino was ever found, nor any explanation for his disappearance. There was another examination, some months later, when someone maliciously suggested to the police, in an anonymous note, that Joaquina, in a fit, had stabbed Constantino and buried him in the yard. The matter was quickly dropped, after a thorough and fruitless search of the yard was conducted. “No woman in her condition could have been capable of such an action,” the chief of police said, wiping his hands of the matter.

  As time passed the stories grew more wild and fantastic, attaining the status of legends in and around Quebrado do Caminho and the neighboring town of Santa Luzia. It was said that Joaquina’s mother had put a disappearing spell upon her son-in-law; that Constantino himself was employed by the devil and had left to continue his dirty work elsewhere; it was even suggested that Joaquina had taken to cannibalism and eaten the poor man, then fashioned a crib for the baby with the bones of her dead husband.

  No one in Horta ever saw or heard from Constantino either, leading the puzzled investigators to scratch their heads in confusion. It was as if he had never existed. All traces of him began to disappear as well. Those questioned would sit back and examine their memories, then shrug, having come back empty-handed, unable to recollect anything concerning the mysterious Constantino Maldonado, other than that they were sure they had heard of him, or that his name was familiar.

  In fact, the only trace left anywhere of Constantino was in the child who bore his name, and in his widow’s daily prayers.

  Joaquina wasted no time in assuming the part, dressing in black, clutching her rosary, and living a quiet life with her son, who was rumored to be a quiet, dreamy boy with light features like his father, and who reportedly studied very diligently to become a priest. No one could say for sure, however, since Joaquina never let the boy out of her sight, keeping him safely tucked away within her mother’s house, as if afraid that he too might disappear.

  And this is how one of the poorest souls in all of Pico, Maria Joaquina, came to be regarded as the Saint of Quebrado do Caminho.

  MISFORTUNE FOLLOWED GASPAR HENRIQUES RELENTLESSLY, NO matter where he went.

  There was something that kept people from looking into Gaspar’s eyes, an uneasiness they felt, which made them turn away. He was a composite of artificial limbs and missing pieces, of replacements and scars. He drew misfortune from the most unlikely places. After losing an eye in a fight while visiting the island of Flores, he accepted a glass replacement with his customary resignation to what life proffered. Applying his own personal sense of whimsy and decorum, he painted a landscape scene in miniature upon the new eyeball, tinted, of course, in blue because, “That’s how I now wish to view the world.”

  Gaspar was rootless. He was born on the island of Pico, raised on Faial until his late teens, then dragged by his parents to America, where he learned English, joined the Air Force, and became an American. But after many years working at a Portuguese newspaper, and an unsuccessful marriage, he decided he didn’t belong in America, so he packed up and left for Europe. After eight months of roaming from one end of Europe to the other, he left. Traveling by boat, he drifted from country to country, from place to place, tried his hand at any number of jobs, to say nothing of relationships with women of every type, every color, every nationality imaginable.

  After several years of this he finally ended up back in the Azores, on the island of Pico. He’d arranged to stay in a building that belonged to a family who owed him a favor. It was little more than a stone hut.

  There he settled. He had a cow, a few chickens, a couple of pigs, and a scraggly old cat named Fofinho. He grew his own vegetables and fruit. His needs, he found, were few and simple.

  The people on Pico referred to him as the American, although he hardly considered himself as such. He had thought that perhaps he was a European, but he never found a place that could claim him. Part of the purpose of his travels was to find somewhere he felt he belonged. That was why he had come back to the Azores, where he had begun life. The volcano, he decided, was a part of him, and he of it.

  They accused him of possessing more lives than any one single person had a right to possess. As a result, they felt even more uneasy around him. Nevertheless, Gaspar rode through life as if he were subject to the vicissitudes of the waves and the winds. He possessed a light-hearted recklessness, an exuberance and abandon that ultimately couldn’t help but find expression in the ever-evolving map of carelessness, the weathering, the deep grooves and lines of misfortune that repeatedly marred his physical appearance.

  Though he wasn’t much to look at, some compared him to Magellan, whose nose, it is said, was broken in some forgotten brawl, who bore scars of battle and walked with a pronounced limp, the souvenir of a lance wound in Morocco.

  “I guess I’m just a patchwork man,” Gaspar joked, after losing a gangrenous leg, only to repl
ace it with part of a spar from a nineteenth-century sailing ship. “I want something of the earth, no man-made contraption, no machine, but wood, solid, true.”

  It delighted him to no end that the painted orb which replaced his lost eye tinged everything with a fine blue tint.

  “Life is a game meant to be played,” he would say. “And I carry the proof that I have played it too well.”

  Gaspar had long since given up on trying to figure out the hows and whys of a world that continuously broke its own natural laws.

  He had survived more scrapes, more close calls, more broken bones, more narrow misses—miracles, really—than anyone could possibly count.

  Still, he was a man of boundless energy. I say was because, as far as the world was concerned, his supply of lives had run out. If he was no longer among the living, then he could no longer worry anybody who still was. No one would have to wonder whether he was about to use up what any decent person spent in one brief and uneventful lifetime, or worse still, become filled with the apprehension that, through his own unfailing misfortune, he would bring disaster crashing down upon other heads as well.

  He was seen as a man who lived in a different mode than others. He seemed to burn brighter, hotter—not that he sought danger, really. He did not live a life of excess, by any means, but rather as if he’d been born with one foot already in the grave.

  Again I say was because when someone vanishes without a trace, when he isn’t seen or heard from, the world tends to conclude, after a spell, that the person is dead. But then, what does the world know?

  He’d always been extremely thin. People claimed that when he stood sideways he neatly vanished from sight. More than once he’d gotten himself out of a sticky situation by performing contortions that for anyone else would have been physically impossible. Gaspar Henriques was built in a way that made it possible to bend without breaking, to form odd angles at any point on his body, to conform to whatever circumstances required.

  He also was very nearly transparent. It seemed that any strong gust of wind would take him, especially if he flattened himself out in a conscious act of dissipating, blending into his surroundings like the chameleon he was, his bones often pulling free of their sockets, his extremities left dangling comically until Gaspar or someone else properly relocated the loose arm or leg.

  Gaspar had traveled through all parts of the world: he’d been swept overboard in the Indian Ocean and lost in the Amazon. He had trekked through Nepal, island-hopped through the South Pacific, and crisscrossed Africa numerous times.

  Along the way he had encountered various disasters and emergencies. He had been operated on, several times, by native tribesmen, who saved him from ailments that ranged from poisonous snakebites to tropical diseases, drownings to tumors. It was said that he’d had an organ or two removed, that these had been replaced with various implants—including a fibrous plant in one case and several animal parts—miraculously without suffering any sort of rejection or infection.

  He lost a finger in a fight with a drunk outside a bar in Tangiers. A woman who watched as the drunk was being dragged away reportedly picked up the finger and ran off, believing it contained mystical powers; it continued to wiggle months, even years afterwards. She kept the finger in an earthenware jar, attempting, when she brought it out, to read the cryptic meanings of its persistent gestures.

  After each of his trials and ordeals, against either man or a calloused nature which seemed hell-bent on destroying him, there was less and less that remained of Gaspar Henriques.

  “I am merely being honed down to a fine edge,” he would say, raising his shoulders as if to suggest this was Fate, with whom no one could argue.

  Most animals—except, strangely enough, marine mammals and birds—would have nothing to do with him.

  People too shied away, kept their distance. One felt inexplicable things in his presence, troubling waves radiated outward, leaving a wake of disturbances: people suddenly found tears welling in their eyes, a lump in their throats, a dogged sadness biting at their heels.

  Indeed, Gaspar came to believe that if he simply stayed put somewhere, disaster would soon follow—hurricanes, floods, tornados, and fires, leaving him in ruins perhaps, but alive nonetheless.

  “I’ve witnessed more disasters than the Bible,” he often told people.

  Gaspar merely picked himself up afterward and moved on to the next place, wherever he could hop aboard a ship, or a train, or catch a ride farther down the road. Once, when swept out to sea and half-drowned by a hurricane off the island of Flores, Gaspar held on to the fin of a dolphin, which safely guided him back to shore.

  He had scars everywhere and pieces missing here and there, all of which truly did make him look like a patchwork man, not all too well stuck together.

  ~ ~ ~

  Gaspar Henriques spoke at great length with the dead; he knew many of their first names as well as their likes, dislikes, habits, and hobbies. The little cemetery at Quebrado do Caminho was a park where he came to enjoy their company. The dead provided welcome companionship in his otherwise bleak solitude—glimmers of light in the descending darkness of the failing vision of his remaining eye.

  It struck him as magnificently odd and wondrous that, after some fifty years (he didn’t know the exact date of his birth) of wandering back and forth over the surface of the planet, marriage and children, a lifetime of various relationships, that this tiny patch of ground was the place he had been aiming for all along.

  No one could possibly have guessed that the often strange trajectory of his life would land him here in the tiny cemetery in Quebrado do Caminho, on the island of Pico, in the Azores.

  “Why do you spend so much time here?” Mariana Antonia dos Reis—born in 1857, died in 1894—asked him.

  “To keep alive memories,” he answered. “Perhaps we can keep each other alive after a fashion.”

  He watched the sun edging nearer the horizon through Mariana’s left eye. It was a breathtaking sight.

  “It is good that you like it here,” Rosa said. “Otherwise my poor husband wouldn’t know what to do with himself.” They laughed. Rosa and Miguel’s marriage had continued to season well after their deaths, but it was true that Miguel was Gaspar’s special comrade, helping him along with sturdy arms and legs and two good eyes, taking a keen interest in his life, which was the one last link Miguel maintained with the world of the living. But more than this, Miguel and the others found that, in listening to Gaspar, they experienced things they wouldn’t otherwise have seen, smelled, tasted, or heard—things that Gaspar somehow made real with his stories of explorers and sailors, of star-crossed lovers and brave adventurers.

  “There’s no place I’d rather be and no better company,” Gaspar said.

  “No?” Mariana said. “Aren’t there girls in the town you talk to?”

  “Whose perfume you can breathe?” Rosa said.

  “Whose eyes you can gaze upon,” Miguel said with a heavy sigh, gazing up toward the stars. “And whose hands you can hold.”

  “No, I’m afraid not. Like so many things in the world of today, for me they are a monumental disappointment. For all their perfumes and substance, they are far more invisible than you, and I don’t exist much for them either. We don’t seem to share much in common. It’s as if we are from different worlds. They peer straight through me.”

  Mariana smiled.

  “Besides, they don’t hold a candle to you,” he said softly.

  He winked and rose as Miguel came to his side.

  “You are going already?” Mariana asked.

  “Yes. I’ll be back, though. I promise. Till tomorrow.”

  “Till tomorrow,” Mariana said.

  Assisted by Miguel, Gaspar left the graveyard, limping on his one good leg, the other with its worn but solid wood and metal fittings trembling with each step, as if longing to take root in the soil beneath his feet; the parts of him which were flesh and blood edged nearer to uselessness, increasingly unable t
o accommodate him in his changing world. Gaspar returned to his room, rented in the house of old Luisa Figueiredo.

  He had absolutely no idea how he had returned to this place. Quebrado do Caminho, after all, was a long way from Los Angeles, where he last remembered being, though he could no longer say when that had been. Things merely happened, more frequently since his eyes went bad. Gaspar had been forced to leave his job after he lost the leg and his vision began to fail.

  There’d been times when he saw nothing, when he would navigate by smell and some innate sense of air currents and pressures. Other times he saw more than the surface appearance, farther, deeper, than eyes were ever meant to see.

  He remembered growing up in Quebrado when he was a boy. He’d dreamed for many years of returning. To this place, where time had nothing at all to do with clocks, and where he didn’t have to constantly assure himself that anything was possible, for it was demonstrated all around him. The disability check he received went a lot farther in the Azores. Here his needs were simpler, he could find peace of mind, recollect his thoughts—scattered memories and dream fragments—into something that resembled order. It was almost as though he was simply where he should be, where he had to be. As if he could not exist anywhere else.

  “It’s okay to have only one leg,” Gaspar explained to the sullen ghost by his side. “The more parts I lose, the stronger I become.”

  “How is that?” Miguel asked.

  “It’s a matter of concentrating one’s powers. The less of me there is, the more potent what remains becomes. If I lose a finger, the life, the energy, doesn’t remain with the finger, but relocates instead in the hand, making the hand even stronger. Anyway, it’s a theory of mine.”

  The ghost nodded somewhat less than convincingly.

  “That and the art of opening up new possibilities, new ways of seeing, utilizing other senses.”

  Something had to explain the extreme variations of time and place, of sight and sound, which were now such an integral part of his life. What should be wasn’t, and what was hitherto impossible, no longer was.