The Devil on Her Tongue

by Linda Holeman

  We trailed a row of pilgrims, and eventually arrived at Santa Luzia. Standing on the large open terrace outside the church, we surveyed the vista of Lisboa and the Tagus spread below us. Murmurs came through the open doors. “The Mass has begun,” Cristiano said.

  Just as I opened my mouth to respond, there came a noise like the hollow, distant rumbling of thunder. It grew louder and louder, terrible in its intensity. The great thudding seemed inside me, and I thought, for that instant, that my time had come: that this is what it was when the heart lurched and tore and then stopped.

  And yet in the next instant, I realized I had no pain, and that it wasn’t my heart but the heart of the earth that pounded and shook.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX

  The earth shuddered, jerking upwards, and I saw the church behind Cristiano sway. I grabbed him; everything trembled as if caught in a convulsive fit. Cristiano and I held on to each other, trying to stay upright as the rumbling and shaking grew fainter, and then stopped. But before we could speak, the terrible quaking beneath our feet began again, as if that first shock had been only a test, and the second one would carry the true horror.

  We were thrown to one side and then the other, as if back on the Bom Jesus during a storm. Below us, the buildings of Lisboa swayed like saplings in the wind and, clutching Cristiano, I watched them crumbling in vast clouds of dust and debris.

  Screams came from all around as people were crushed by falling walls, and I tore my gaze from the hell below to look at Santa Luzia. Some rushed from the church as it caved in, pushing, scrambling, screeching as the ground rocked. Through a gaping hole in its front wall I saw statues tumbling from their niches. The candle holders hanging from the ceiling, lit with hundreds of candles, swung wildly and then were wrenched loose and fell onto the heads and shoulders of those still trapped inside.

  Cristiano and I were carried along in the frenzied crowd as the ground continued to shake. We rose and fell with the movement of the earth. I was pushed violently from behind and went down, trying to put my hand over my head as I was trampled.

  And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the shaking stopped.

  I don’t know how long I lay where I had fallen, something heavy across my back and legs. But finally I lifted my cheek. A piece of shutter was in front of my face, and I looked through the broken slats. It was a vision only the worst nightmare could conjure.

  Lying everywhere were bodies. Not just whole, bleeding bodies, but parts of bodies. Limbs. A torso. A hand clutching a rosary lay on a block of stone in front of the shutter. I knew from the fingernails that it was a female hand. I watched it as though waiting for the fingers to begin praying the decades of the rosary. With strange calmness I likened that hand to the one of Our Lady of the Grapes, broken and resting, pale and unmoving, on the chapel floor.

  I felt as though I had cotton in my ears; the shrieks and wails of the injured and those calling for others in the thick dust from the fallen stone were strangely muted. I didn’t know whether I was hurt or not: I felt nothing. After some time I moved my head enough to see that the weight on me was the sprawled body of a man. He was covered with broken stone, and part of his head was caved in. His body had protected me.

  It took an interminable length of time to manoeuvre myself out from under him. I slowly got to my knees and then shakily to my feet. At that moment my hearing unblocked, and the world came back with a terrible, shocking clarity, so loudly I put my hands over my ears. The screams of the dead and dying were unlike anything I’d ever imagined. Others wept, praying, “Most Holy Mary, Virgin and Mother of God, save us, save us.”

  I added my voice to the cacophony, screaming Cristiano’s name. I stumbled in a circle, stretching my hands in front of me as if I were blind, as if reaching for him, even though I couldn’t see him.

  And then I realized I was looking at him. He stood a short distance from me, so coated in dust I hadn’t recognized him. It was as if he was in his old nightmare, unmoving, his eyes wide. Weeping, I climbed over stones and bodies. I grabbed him and said, “Are you hurt? Cristiano, are you hurt?” but he didn’t answer me. And then a third rumble came, and now all around us was a different cry—“Terremoto! Terremoto!”—and we braced ourselves for the next quaking of the earth.

  But the third shock was not as strong as the second. And when the earth was once more still, and Cristiano and I had not died, had not been crushed beneath the tumbling walls of stone as we crouched, covered in debris, in the open space of the small square, my only thought was of Candelária.

  Cristiano helped a man pull his limp wife from beneath a pile of stone, and I picked up a child with a bloodied head while its mother stood looking around her in shock, whimpering, “João, João,” until I put the child into her arms. She looked at him as though she didn’t know him, and continued to repeat his name.

  “We have to go,” I said to Cristiano. “Come. Down into the Terreiro do Paço, where we will be safe should there be another earthquake. Look,” I told him, pointing over a broken wall. “Look at all those on the open quay, where nothing can fall on them. Let’s go.”

  Others, thinking the same, were pushing ahead of us. The narrow lanes were blocked with stones and with bodies, with furniture and burning timber. We fell over and over, crying out as we pushed forward and were pushed from behind, stumbling downwards.

  “Come this way,” I panted, pulling Cristiano from the crowd towards a cracked-apart building. “Through here, away from the others.”

  As we clambered over a fallen wall, I straightened and looked below. The quay was filled with people rushing towards the water, many dragging others. Hundreds were crowding onto the ships docked there, wishing to be on the water should another quake occur, and to escape the fires that were burning everywhere. I was about to continue downwards when I saw something I couldn’t understand. I stopped, staring in disbelief. Cristiano had continued ahead of me, and now I screamed to get his attention. “Cristiano, no! Stop! Don’t go down. Come back up!” I kept shouting, until finally he heard me over the calls and cries and looked back at me.

  “Come, come up here,” I shouted, beckoning, and he climbed to join me, and then he saw what I had seen: the river disappearing, rolling back from the harbour as if it were a carpet peeled from a floor. Within minutes we could see the sandbars far out at the mouth of the Tagus. In front of the marble quay was the exposed riverbed, filled with half-submerged barrels and crates and all manner of objects caught in the sludge. Some people climbed down from the boats and off the quay into that mire, tugging at found treasures.

  And as we watched this unbelievable emptying of the harbour and the river beyond, I was filled with the most terrible premonition. “Higher. Higher, Cristiano!” I turned and started back up the way we’d come, holding my skirt above my knees.

  “Why are we going back up?” he called behind me, as we fought against the masses heading down.

  “The water,” I said over my shoulder. “The Tagus leads to the ocean. The ocean is taking it, but something is wrong. It can’t be pulled away without coming back. It will have to come back.”

  Cristiano climbed beside me then, and we held each other’s arms, and moved slowly past the burning rubble of Santa Luzia. When I couldn’t go any farther, I stopped, panting, leaning against a section of ancient wall. I pressed my hand against my side, and Cristiano climbed onto the wall and looked out over the debris of the broken city and the departed river.

  And then he breathed, “Salva nos. Doce Jesus, save us,” and I climbed up beside him and saw a vast body of water, rising like a mountain, heaving and swelling and rolling towards Lisboa, towards the wharves and the ships, laden with people looking for salvation from the destruction of earth and fire. It came roaring and foaming, rushing at the quay, and although we were too far away to hear the screams, I saw the people running, running away from the quay as they’d run towards it, running back into the burning city. Those foraging on the bottom of the river struggled to climb out as
the water returned with ferocious speed. The ships were ripped from their anchors, and tumbled and tossed, crashing into each other. Some turned keel upwards as if caught in the grip of a violent storm, and bodies were thrown from them and sank under the water. As Cristiano and I watched, the wave swept away the buildings on the riverbank, and then the entire quay and its people. All was swallowed up and disappeared, as if into the depths of a whirlpool, and did not reappear.

  We stayed where we were for some time, until I grew aware of the pain of my torn and bruised flesh. I saw, beneath the dust, all of Cristiano’s cuts, some still trickling blood. The earth’s tremors continued, but eventually the flooding water stilled.

  I felt exhaustion unlike any I’d ever known, and thought I might not be able to move. But I had to find my daughter. Cristiano and I slowly, slowly started the descent through Alfama a second time. The danger lay not only in the sudden falling of buildings shaken off their foundations but also in the fires raging everywhere. Every cathedral and church and chapel had been ablaze for All Saints’ Day. With the falling walls and columns, the candles had lit all the curtains and altar cloths and then spread to the woodwork.

  “We must get to Alcántara,” I told Cristiano. I couldn’t bear to say her name, couldn’t bear to think of my daughter as we passed the ruined, broken bodies of infants and children everywhere, some in their dead parent’s arms, others alone in the rubble, limbs askew, like tossed-aside dolls.

  Survivors were attempting either to save those who could be saved or to leave the city, moving away from the centre towards higher ground and open air. In all the narrow streets Cristiano and I stumbled through there were bodies, half buried and half burned, three, four, five or six in a heap, of those who had been crushed by the collapsing buildings as they tried to flee. The hardest to bear were those people still alive and crying out for help, the weight of the stone upon them too great for those trying to lift it off. People tore at timbers and stones with bleeding hands, crying misericórdia, mercy, charity, the world is at an end, misericórdia. We clambered over or went around fissures in the buckled stone streets, some wide enough for bodies to have been caught within. Coaches and carriages and carts lay atop dead horses and mules, and riders were crushed under their dead mounts.

  We passed a cemetery with the graves heaved up, the smell of raw earth and the putrefaction from the broken caskets so powerful I had to cover my nose with my arm. Bones and skulls lay about, and, horror of horrors, already the looters were at work, their greed more powerful than the reek of death and decay. Their faces covered with strips of cloth against the stench, men calmly picked through the decomposing flesh and bones and wormy rags to remove the jewels of the dead, pulling off cold, rotting fingers and ears to more easily remove the rings and ear bobs.

  In contrast, priests knelt, giving absolution to the dying. As we walked out of Lisboa with those limping and bleeding, those half naked, those carrying dead children in their arms, the flames burned all around us, moving in red waves before my eyes, and the very air felt bloodstained.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  The ground continued to shake in sudden small starts and fits, and at every tremor, cries of “Terremoto!” again filled the air. Cristiano was limping heavily. We passed a huge shaggy dog with blood on its fur, flies already gathering, bound to its master by a leather strap wrapped tightly around the dead man’s arm. The animal struggled and whimpered, maddened by the smells of blood and death around him. Cristiano stopped and pulled the leather strap free, untying it from the animal’s neck. The dog shook himself, sending droplets of blood flying, and then stood looking up at Cristiano. I touched his arm, and we started again, the dog following.

  As we passed a marker along the road to Alcántara, I turned once to look back at Lisboa, and could see only a cloud of dust and smoke too vast to describe. A man came towards us. Everyone else was walking out of Lisboa, but he walked towards it. I grabbed his arm. “Convento Teresa de Jesus,” I said. “Have you passed it? Does it still stand?”

  One of the man’s ears had been torn from his head. The wound was thickly scabbed. He looked at me, using a strip of rag to polish a silver button he held.

  “Is it standing?” I asked again, but he kept polishing the button.

  He held it in front of my face. “Have you seen a button like this?” he asked, and then said, “Teresa de Jesus? Rubble. Nothing but rubble. If you find my button, will you let me know?”

  “Don’t listen, Diamantina,” Cristiano said, pulling on my arm as I stood, one hand over my mouth. “He’s lost his mind. We have to keep going.”

  Outside the convent, filthy water littered with unspeakable debris swirled against the grey walls. Although parts of the main building still stood firm, there was obvious damage to the roof. A jumble of stone and tile was spilled along one entire side. I waded through the ankle-high water to the door, and put up my fist to pound on it, but at the first touch it swung open. I went inside and saw a novice, wandering the empty corridor.

  “Where are the children?” I asked her. “The children from the orphanage.”

  The novice looked at me, blinking tearfully. She was perhaps a little older than Cristiano. Her head scarf was torn and marked with something oily, and there was a gash on the back of her hand. Her bottom lip trembled.

  I grabbed her arm and shook it.

  She looked down at my hand, streaked with ash, nails broken and rimmed with blood, and then up at me with something like surprise.

  “Where is my child? Her name is Candelária. She is almost five, and in the orphanage.” I shook her arm a second time, and then a third, and finally she flinched.

  “We were all in the church, for the All Saints’ Day Mass,” the girl said, “but the smallest girls were in the chapter house beside it, because they—”

  “Were they hurt?” I cried now, my voice hoarse with smoke and fear.

  “I don’t know … the Abbess … she’s dead, and I don’t know …” She stared at me as if waiting for me to tell her what to do. I knew she was suffering from shock, and I tried to speak more calmly.

  “Can you take me to the youngest girls?” I asked, and she nodded.

  She turned and started down the hallway, but then stopped and looked at me. “The Abbess is dead,” she repeated. “Others are dead. None of us know what to do.”

  “It will be all right,” I encouraged, trying to keep her moving.

  She opened a door, and as I pushed her aside and went in, at first I only saw little girls lying on the hard stone floor. I didn’t know if they were alive or dead. A few sisters moved between them. Then I grew aware of sobbing and wailing, and the overpowering smell of urine and blood and vomit. Some of the children had parts of their heads or bodies wrapped in gauzy linen, and still blood seeped through. Others lay unmoving. The light was strangely bright, and I looked up at the pale, desolate sky through the hole in the roof.

  I walked among the children. They all looked alike, in their filthy brown tunics and white blouses, all with dark hair. I stooped and looked into the faces of little girls, some with eyes wide and terrified and in pain, others with eyes closed and too still. One lay on her back, staring at that white sky with the unmistakable gaze of death, and I bent and closed her lids with my palm.

  And then there she was, on her side with her back to the room. How could I have thought I wouldn’t recognize her? Of course I knew my daughter’s hair, her back, the way she liked to draw up her top leg and stretch out the bottom one. I spoke her name, and when she didn’t move, I dropped to my knees and put my hand on her shoulder. It tensed, and I let out a long cry and she sat up, and turned, and the look on her face … I cannot describe it without weeping.

  She flung herself against me and I held her, weeping into her soft hair while her small, busy fingers combed through my tangles, and she said, “Mama, Mama, it’s all right, don’t cry. I knew you were coming for me. I knew you would come,” she kept saying, comforting me—her comforting me—u
ntil I could no longer kneel but stood and picked her up as I had when she was smaller. Now her long legs dangled against me. She had, in the last year, grown too tall to be carried easily, but on this day she was light in my arms as I carried her out of the rubble and away from the weeping and praying, out into the air, where Cristiano waited, the big dog sitting beside him.

  It was growing dark by the time we finally arrived on the outskirts of Santa Maria de Belém, because where else were we to go? I heard, as we walked, that the area had not been badly affected. All along the way there was debris from the waves, splintered timber from broken boats and occasionally a larger vessel grounded. Worse was what the water had carried from Lisboa, and I often pressed Candelária’s face against my skirt or urged Cristiano to pick her up and hide her face against his shoulder as we passed corpses, some already being feasted upon by vultures and stray dogs. Carts bumped along the road, carrying the bodies of the dead or those who still breathed.

  The open spaces around the parish were filled with crowds of people. Braziers and torches had been lit to show the way. Already priests and nuns were handing out bread and blankets. I turned again to look at Lisboa. The whole city was ablaze, the flames reflected in the eyes of those who watched in silent grief. The earth still trembled, and at each tremor there were muted, weary cries.

  Candelária was too pale, and Cristiano’s face was fixed in exhaustion as he slowly hobbled to a patch of grass with Candelária. The dog followed, then sat and licked one paw.

  “We’ll stay here tonight, and tomorrow we will go to Dona Beatriz.” I couldn’t remember how to get to her home, or how much farther it was; I only knew we couldn’t go on. I left the children and got blankets and bread and flagons of water. We lay under the night sky, and within moments both Candelária and Cristiano slept. I was between them, Candelária held against one side and Cristiano’s back curled against the other, and although my body was desperate for rest, my mind would not be stilled.