The Devil on Her Tongue

by Linda Holeman

  “Why haven’t I met him?”

  “He lives in Funchal with his wife. Whenever he comes to visit, he asks for my licors. My Telma made the best licors in the parish. Everybody wanted Telma’s licors.”

  “When did she pass on?” I asked.

  “Thirteen years ago. Bonifacio was seventeen and Espirito fifteen years old. She wanted her sons to live in Funchal. She was from Câmara de Lobos, on the ocean not far from there, and never liked the mountains as I did. ‘Promise me, Vitorino,’ she said before she died, ‘promise me our boys will not spend their lives here working themselves to death.’ ”

  He got up and scooped the chestnuts out of the boiling water with a handled sieve, dumped them into a flat wooden bowl and shook them back and forth. Steam rose from them. “Cristiano, come and watch,” he said.

  Cristiano came out from under the table and stood beside Papa.

  Using a small knife, Papa made a cut two-thirds of the way around the flat face of the shell and peeled it away, then eased the rest of the nut out of the skin. “The chestnuts are nice and fresh, so both outer and inner skins come away. This is a good job for a boy when he’s old enough to use the knife. My boys always did this.” He handed the knife to Cristiano. “You are old enough.”

  Cristiano looked at the knife, then picked up one of the chestnuts and slowly, carefully cut it the way Papa had.

  “Good. That’s the way,” Papa said, and Cristiano’s mouth moved in the beginning of a smile. Then Papa added sugar to the hot water the nuts had been in. While we waited for it to come to a boil, Cristiano finished the peeling.

  Papa skimmed froth off the surface of the boiling syrup, then dumped the chestnuts in and let them cook for a few moments. Then he fished them out again, putting them into an empty earthenware jar. “Now you can do the rest,” he said to me, and pulled another jar from a shelf. “Brandy. This much,” he said, holding his thumb and index finger apart. “Let the syrup boil again, and when it cools, pour the brandy over the chestnuts, but don’t stir—the chestnuts fall apart easily. Then put in the stopper. In only two Sundays it will be ready.” He turned to leave. “The chestnuts are delicious to eat, once they’ve sat in the liqueur. They were always Espirito’s favourites. You will like Espirito. He’s a good boy.”

  “We’ll save them,” I said, “for the next time he comes.”

  He nodded. “Tonight we will play dominoes, you and I,” he said, and I smiled at him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  That evening, I hung Bonifacio’s clean shirts, smelling of the mountain air, on his pegs. I straightened a blanket thrown over the chest at the end of his bed, and then, on a whim, knelt in front of the chest and opened it.

  Under a folded pair of old breeches was a worn leather bag with a torn strap. I took it out and looked inside. There was a long black buttoned robe of coarse cotton, as well as a black cincture. I sat back on my heels. Bonifacio’s Jesuit vestments. I imagined him wearing these in Brazil. At the bottom of the bag something glinted. I pulled it out. On a long strip of leather was a heavy pendant with a cross, and on the cross the sign of the Jesuit. As I put it back into the chest, I saw a small cloth sack almost hidden in one corner. I lifted it, then opened the drawstring and gazed in. I dumped the coins onto my skirt and counted them. One hundred and seventy-six réis.

  I sat back on my heels. If Abílio had been correct about the cost of a passage to Brazil, this was enough. I counted the coins again, then put them back into the cloth bag and bounced it on my palm with a sudden lifting joy. I could take them and walk back to Funchal. I knew Abílio had also told me an unaccompanied woman would not be allowed on the long journey across the ocean, but that would be a simple matter to remedy: I would find a family and ask to join them.

  To take Bonifacio’s coins would be stealing. I had only a moment of remorse at the thought, but it was not about taking the money. It was at the idea of leaving Papa and Cristiano.

  Cristiano put his head around the sheet, and I jumped up. He looked at the bag I held, and at the open chest.

  I hurriedly put the money back where I’d found it, arranging the leather bag and clothing as it had been, and slammed the lid of the chest as Cristiano watched me. “Go out and wash your hands and face before bed,” I said, a little more sternly than I’d intended.

  He ducked behind the sheet and was gone.

  I was almost asleep when Bonifacio got back. I sat up as he opened the bedroom door and went to his side of the room.

  “Where have you been?” I asked.

  “In the hills. It’s peaceful there, with no voices, no stares. No temptations. I feel closer to God,” he said, his voice muffled behind the curtain.

  I lay back down, but in the next instant he pulled the sheets open and I sat up again, staring at him in the darkness. “What do you want?” I asked, not exactly fearful, but unnerved by the way he stood, so still, his face shadowed.

  “Come to the sitting room,” he said, glancing at Cristiano’s sleeping form. “Please,” he added, and at that I pushed back the blanket.

  He looked a moment too long at me in my nightgown. I grabbed my shawl from the end of my bed and wrapped it around myself as I followed him. He sat at the table, and I sat across from him.

  “Don’t,” he said, as I reached for the flint beside the candle in the middle of the table. “It’s easier for me in the dark.” He stared towards the window, and I watched his profile.

  “I thought that with time …” Bonifacio glanced back at me. “I thought that perhaps time would heal. It’s been almost ten months since … since we left Brazil. But the wound has only festered in both of us, left untreated. Left unspoken. I do want the boy to find relief from his misery. I did not bring him here to live in fear and hatred.”

  I waited. I heard him lick his lips.

  “Father Monteiro knows. I daily make my confession and do my penance. He assures me God forgives me. But I don’t feel His forgiveness. Father Monteiro suggested I tell you what happened, so that you might help the child. I know that no one will ever be able to help me. And I don’t deserve help.” He cleared his throat. “I have to tell you now, before I lose my courage.” He gave a sudden mirthless laugh, the first laugh I had heard from him.

  “Courage,” he said, with another, painful, laugh. He stopped abruptly. “I told you Cristiano’s mother was a slave, brought from West Africa to sieve for diamonds around Tejuco.” He sat for a moment in silence, as if unsure how to continue.

  “Yes,” I finally said, thinking he might be waiting for a reaction from me.

  “I was alone in the church at the mission. It was growing late, and I was extinguishing the last of the candles before going home. The Fathers lived in a separate dwelling a little distance away.

  “A young mulatto woman, Vovo, ran into the church, dragging her boy by the hand. I had baptized Vovo and her son the year before. The boy had been sired by Vovo’s owner, Nuno Travino, in a union not unusual for the owners and their female slaves.

  “She was wild-eyed, panting. She spat a diamond into her hand. ‘Help me, Father Bonifacio, help me,’ she said. She looked fearfully over her shoulder. ‘They’re coming for me,’ she told me, and shoved the rough diamond into my hand. It was larger than any I’d seen. ‘Take it, and protect me,’ she begged.

  “Slaves were allowed to wear only the flimsiest of clothes, and had their heads shaved so they couldn’t hide any diamonds they found. As they left the streams each evening, they were forced to lift their loincloths and open their mouths to an overseer. I don’t know why Vovo took this chance. I don’t know how she spirited such a large diamond from the stream, or how it became known that she had it. But three men burst into the church. I recognized them: Travino’s overseers. Vovo crouched behind the altar, but they’d seen her. It was all happening so quickly, Vovo screaming as they pulled her up.

  “I told them that this was a place of God, and that the woman was protected within the sanctified walls. But they cared nothing for
God’s house. Two of them dragged her outside, all the way to the edge of a deep ravine behind the church. The other forced me to follow, one arm twisted behind me, a knife held to my throat. The diamond was hidden in my clenched hand. There was a gibbous moon. I remember the moon,” he said, his voice faltering. His shoulders had been high, as if he were protecting himself, but now they fell.

  I sat very still.

  “My robe and cross meant nothing to those men. I had always thought … I thought that my robe would protect me—that I was untouchable because of my faith.”

  “Why didn’t you give them the diamond?”

  I heard him swallow. “As I entreated them to leave, the pig cut me. He slashed through my robe, across my chest, and I fell, overcome with pain and shock, and …” Again he stopped.

  “But why didn’t you give them the diamond?” I asked again.

  “You don’t know?” His voice rose. “You don’t realize what kind of man I am? I didn’t give it to them because I was afraid. Just one slash of the knife and I turned into a quivering rabbit. I was afraid that they’d think I was helping her, that I was part of it,” he said, “and that they’d kill us both.”

  He said nothing more for so long that I finally asked, in a quiet voice, “What happened to her? To Vovo?”

  “While two of the men held her on the ground, the third pried open her mouth and stuck his fingers down her throat until she gagged. He jammed his fingers up her nostrils and into her ears. Then he ripped her shift down the front and threw it from her, and searched inside her body.” He put his hand over his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me, or couldn’t bear to remember what he’d seen. “Vovo stared at me through all of this in her nakedness and humiliation, as that animal dug inside her. She pleaded with me. ‘Father Bonifacio,’ she kept calling, ‘please help me. You can help me, Father Bonifacio. Stop them, stop them,’ until one struck her in the mouth with his fist to silence her.”

  “But Bonifacio, why—”

  “I lay on the ground not far from Vovo, but I watched the horror unfolding as if from a great distance,” Bonifacio continued. “I lay bleeding, in a strange dream world.” Finally he took his hand from his eyes. “But then the man with the knife said, ‘She swallowed it. You swallowed it, didn’t you?’ In that instant I knew what they would do, and yet I lay there protecting myself like a frightened animal. Protecting myself. Myself. And then the man with the knife went to work on her.”

  I put my hand over my mouth.

  Bonifacio wept quietly at first, and then with great shuddering sobs.

  I didn’t know what I felt at that moment. Horror at the story of brutality? Revulsion for his weakness? I watched him weep, and thought of the little boy in the next room.

  Eventually he wiped his eyes and nose with his sleeve. “She didn’t make a sound as they butchered her, looking for the diamond. She never once said I had it. She accepted her fate. In spite of the most unbearable agony as the men dug through her entrails, she quietly waited for her death, and she knew me for the coward I was.

  “She was able to speak once more before she died. ‘My boy,’ she said, a whisper, but I heard her. ‘Save my boy, Father.’ It was only then I thought of the child. I followed her gaze, and saw him, pressing the dress they had torn from her body to his face. He saw what they did to her. And then he looked at me, and ran.”

  I heard Cristiano’s breathing, ragged, loud, from the bedroom. His nightmare was beginning. I felt as though I’d been hammered in the throat.

  “The diamond cut into my hand as I lay there. I watched, in this strange dream, as the men lifted Vovo’s body and threw it into the ravine.” He tried to draw in a breath, but it was shaky and uncontrolled. “I don’t know how long I lay there. When I realized I was able to rise, I opened my hand. The diamond burned my flesh as though it was the devil’s fork. I threw that evil gem into the dark ravine. Eventually I found myself in my room. When I took off my robe, the cut still bled, but it was not deep. It was not deep.” His voice was so low I had to lean forward.

  “I stayed on my knees for the rest of the night, praying for Vovo’s soul, and for my own salvation. She was with God, but I was lost to Him by my own doing. My prayers felt false. By morning I was fevered, so filled with contempt for myself that I fell ill. I started to the church to confess, but instead went to the village. I told myself I would see Vovo filing with the others to the river with her sieve. That it hadn’t really happened. I tried to convince myself it had been a terrible nightmare.”

  He laid his hands on the table in a helpless gesture and stared at them.

  Finally I said, “What happened, Bonifacio?”

  He raised his head. “The news in the village was that the mulatto slave Vovo had been found dead on the rocks at the bottom of the ravine. Her body, it was said, had been ravaged by wild boars after she died. The story was that she had been drinking a homemade licor with some of the young male slaves, and in her drunkenness fell to her death. This, all the Portuguese in the village said, was what happened when you drank and ran with men. I knew that what was spoken in the slave quarter would not be the same story, that they knew she had been killed, but who among them could stand up and be a voice for their fallen sister? Because she was lighter-skinned, the Portuguese village gossip went on, she felt herself above the other slaves. Pride, they muttered, and the wages of sin. There, in the public square, I leaned over and was sick.”

  Cristiano whimpered, hoarsely whispering.

  “I also heard that her child was found nearby, hiding. He had witnessed his mother’s immoral behaviour, the gossip continued, and her fall to the rocks below. As I stood in the warm dust of the village square, my own vomit splattered down my robe and on my feet, I knew I must go to Nuno Travino immediately. I would identify the three men who had killed his slave. I would have been believed—I was a priest and they ignorant, low-minded overseers without respect for a missionary Father. Even if they weren’t punished—for slaves died brutally and often—I thought that at least the name of Vovo wouldn’t have been so dirtied. At that moment, one of those overseers passed me in the square. He gave me a knowing, threatening smile, putting his finger to his lips. I saw my own body at the bottom of the ravine. Later I reasoned that surely they wouldn’t murder a priest, but …”

  Bonifacio stopped, and I smelled his fear. A spasm, as if he’d experienced a sudden sharp pain, passed over his face. “My bowels churned, and I had to fight not to soil myself. I realized that for all I had seen of the world, both here on Madeira and in Brazil, I had never really been tested. Even though I had sailed across the ocean and started a new life, I did not know what I was made of. I had felt protected by the Church, by my robe and cross, by living what I believed to be a pious, righteous existence. I didn’t know who I was, or what I was capable of outside of prayers and meditations.

  “And when I truly saw myself for the first time that day, I was revolted. I knew that I would not report the men because of my cowardice, just as I had not saved Vovo the night before. I knew with complete certainty that I was as low as the serpent that came to Eve and whispered, Do as you please, and as low as Judas in the Garden of Gethsemane. God had put a test in front of me, and I had failed. I failed God, and knew I no longer deserved to walk and live with Him.”

  Cristiano screamed then, and I ran to him. I did what I could to wake him and bring him back to this life, away from the one I now knew he lived at night. I soothed him, holding him until his eyes closed and he again slept.

  The bedroom shutter banged in the wind, and I gently put Cristiano down and closed it. The room was dark save for a long sliver of moonlight shining in through one broken slat. It fell over Cristiano. I now understood why he was afraid of the church and the priest’s robes—and why he hated Bonifacio.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  When I went back to the sitting room, Bonifacio had lit a candle, and there was a jug of water on the table, and he held a cup. Before I sat down, he started t
alking, but now he spoke rapidly, as though he needed to finish the story as quickly as possible.

  “Father Nóbrega, my superior, heard my full confession. I begged him to tell me what I could do to find understanding for the girl’s suffering and death. How would I ever be granted absolution? Father Nóbrega knew how I loved Tejuco, so he suggested that as penance I leave it. Leave Brazil, and spend a full year in solitude and prayer at a monastery far in the north of Portugal. Segregated from others, with only God for company. ‘This is your crucial moment, Father Bonifacio, your time of testing,’ he said, ‘and you must learn from it.’

  “For the next three days and nights, I did not sleep or eat. I stayed on my knees, praying, like Christ in the Garden of Olives, to find the strength to cope with my penance.

  “On that third dark night, He finally spoke to me. What Father Nóbrega offered as penance was not enough: the sacrifice of leaving Tejuco and spending time in isolation would not absolve me. I knew what my sacrifice must be. Like Adam and Eve, I had to be cast out. I went to Father Nóbrega and told him I was leaving the priesthood.” He lifted his cup and drained it. The candle flame flickered with his movement.

  “He argued that I had shown absolute willingness to do God’s bidding over the years we had worked together. ‘How can you abandon God?’ he asked me. I wasn’t abandoning God, I told him, but no longer deserved to be His messenger. He asked me where I would go. I told him I didn’t know but would be shown the way. I would continue to put my trust in God, even though He could no longer trust me.

  “I was twenty-nine years old, and had spent my adult life walking and living with Christ and doing His work. I knew that leaving the priesthood wouldn’t change my oath to live a life of poverty, obedience and chastity. Those oaths I would keep, but I had to make further amends.”

  From outside came the first sleepy twittering of the awakening birds.

  “And Cristiano?” I said quietly.