The Head of the Saint

by Socorro Acioli

  She didn’t even sit down. She took the sock out of her top, from the neckline of her blouse, and squeezed it tight in her hand. Meanwhile, he pointed toward the examination table, an iron thing painted in beige, old and peeling like everything else in that town.

  Madeinusa climbed the iron steps and sat on the bed, because something told her to do this. The doctor took hold of his stethoscope nervously, already knowing that the ailment was in her heart.

  Adriano, the timid doctor, brought the end of the stethoscope into contact with the girl’s young skin and listened as she held out the sock and said:

  “It’s just…I’ve…I’ve got a pain in my heart.”

  Nothing else needed to be said for a romance to begin right then, a romance blessed by St. Anthony. Those who are shyest are the wildest when they attack, and Dr. Adriano kissed Madeinusa without even asking her permission. He had no need.

  The health assistant must have heard the racket of the iron bed banging against the wall, and she soon flung open the door and saw the doctor examining Madeinusa with his hands and his mouth, without glasses, in order to see better. They barely noticed their audience.

  It didn’t take long for the talk to reach the ears of Helenice, a former devoted churchgoer, now a devout evangelical, chronically bad tempered, intolerant and prejudiced, miserly and hysterical mother to a deflowered young woman. And thanks to the message from St. Anthony, Madeinusa and Adriano soon set the date for their marriage, as Helenice didn’t want a daughter with a reputation. Either, stated Helenice, the doctor married her and took on her dishonor, or Madeinusa was better off dead, in the name of Jesus Christ, hallelujah.

  Madeinusa’s friend—who did owe her money but had never won on the lottery—was the girlfriend of Aécio Diniz, whose slogan was “He tells it like it is.” Aécio was a presenter on Canindé Radio 89.1 FM and got in touch with Madeinusa less than a week later, interested in learning more about this story of the message from St. Anthony. They set up an interview for the Bride of the Week slot, which had been a great success in the area, though it had been canceled several times recently due to a lack of brides. Those were difficult days for the romantically inclined.

  Canindé was in full pilgrimage season, full of devotees of St. Francis like the ones Samuel had met on the road. There were many of them, thousands of them. Madeinusa put on perfume to speak into a microphone for the first time.

  She told the whole story: that more than a year ago she had tied up St. Anthony under her bed, wrapped in cardboard, hidden from her mother, and prayed for help in getting married to Adriano, the doctor who didn’t even know her.

  “But isn’t it forbidden to keep an image of St. Anthony in Candeia?” asked the reporter.

  “It is, but I managed to get one in secret from the mother of a friend. She’s going to be the matron of honor. And the best man will be Samuel, who brought me the message from the saint.”

  The program was broadcast in Canindé and a number of other nearby towns. Everybody stopped to listen when Madeinusa said that the outsider had heard the thoughts of St. Anthony because he lived inside his head. The episode with the stethoscope also got the attention of the listeners. Naively, Madeinusa recounted it all, repeated it, gave details. Never had Canindé Radio 89.1 FM had so many listeners.

  Madeinusa’s wedding dress was loaned by the beauty parlor owner, who’d worn it for her fifteenth birthday party. It looked as good as new; they just had to leave it out in the sun for a few days to get rid of the musty smell. It was white and puffy, with fake mini-pearls sewn all over it. It was so beautiful that it didn’t fit into Madeinusa’s little dreams. She had to learn to dream bigger.

  Dr. Adriano was no less happy. He scraped together his savings and paid for the wedding party willingly. The biggest expense was doing up the little church of St. Anthony in Candeia; the two of them insisted that the wedding should be held there, in the remains of a town that meant so much to them.

  The door to the little church had been locked with a rusty chain ever since Father Zacarias had been driven out, ever since that sea of misfortune had swept over Candeia. The old parish priest could barely believe it when Adriano’s car pulled up outside his house in Tauá and he asked him to officiate at the wedding. He had baptized Adriano, Madeinusa and almost everyone who was still holding out in Candeia. The doctor told Father Zacarias what had happened, and about Samuel, the outsider. The priest looked up to heaven, utterly convinced.

  “A miracle from St. Anthony! He may take his time, but he never fails!”

  They painted the church inside and out. It was small; not even thirty people could fit inside it. They brought in laborers from nearby towns. The floor was washed more than four times, scrubbed till the brooms were ruined, and the benches coated with varnish and a lot of poison against the termites, which didn’t think to spare a house of God.

  Despite the evidence of the apparent miracle, the people of Candeia still believed that St. Anthony brought only misfortune, and no one wanted anything to do with this change. They still nurtured a hatred for the saint who had betrayed them, who hadn’t even been strong enough to prevent his own head being left on the ground, far from his body, like any old decapitee. If St. Anthony was so powerful, why did he not make the impossible possible? Why would he allow such misfortune to happen? Those who remained in the town had turned away from Catholicism and learned to love images that had nothing to do with God.

  “This is the work of The Enemy!” cried Helenice, who would not refer to Mr. Satan by name.

  Adriano got hold of a suit for Samuel, the best man. A suit, tie, shoes, eau de cologne, socks and underpants. He made sure Samuel had a bath, inviting him to his own house to scrub off every last dot of grime. And he even paid for him to get a haircut with the same barber in Canindé who had done the bride’s hair. They arrived at the ceremony together, in the same car, under the alert gaze of the curious onlookers, who had been waiting at the door to the church for hours.

  Madeinusa was beautiful. Adriano was moved. Samuel, unrecognizable. Now it really was possible to see how handsome this outsider was. In the little church the crowds of women jostled for a glimpse of the saint’s messenger. Apart from the priest, the groom, the best man and Francisco, there were hardly any men at the ceremony. Those who reported back later said that there were sixty-four women.

  Adriano came out of the church carrying the bride in his arms. She threw the bouquet of plastic flowers, which was pulled apart by a number of women and transformed into several treasured relics of the first new miracle of St. Anthony of Candeia, through his intermediary, Samuel, the carrier of the messages of heaven.

  Madeinusa and Adriano were the embodiment of people’s hopes and prayers, and the women who had been at the wedding spread the word that there had indeed been a romantic miracle—a miracle that had joined this man and wife.

  The details of the miracle got around, too: the head of the saint, the messenger, the consultation, the wedding, the honeymoon. The local girls pictured the newlyweds in a hotel on the beach in Fortaleza, running happily along the edge of the sea that Madeinusa would be seeing for the first time and swearing their eternal love. They imagined Adriano and Madeinusa concluding what they had begun when Dr. Adriano had first placed his icy stethoscope against Madeinusa’s burning skin. There would be nothing to stop them: not the wrath of the mother of the bride, not the opposition from the groom’s family—a trained doctor marrying a girl with practically no education. Their situation was all due to the saint.

  The girls sighed. They yelled as though hysterical. They were in agonies of envy. They wanted to find love, too.

  And each time they told the story, new details made the wedding a supernatural event. They said that St. Anthony had appeared to Samuel and whispered his messages, that the spirit of the saint had entered his body, acting through him. The story spread from woman to woman like wildfire, covering a bigger and bigger area, right into the middle of the pilgrimage to St. Francis in Can
indé. The next-door town was full of people, and what should have been a period of faith and prayer was transformed into a carnival of frenzied women as they heard the message of hope from the wedding saint so close by. Their plans for faith, contrition and self-sacrifice drastically changed course.

  Although Samuel had planned to leave his home in St. Anthony’s head as soon as his leg was fixed, he found that it wasn’t that easy. The voices kept him there, kept talking to him. They came not just in the morning and evenings now but at other times, too.

  The day after the wedding, Samuel was woken before five in the morning, dazed with the clamor of women praying. There were six or seven that day. A dozen on the next. Another twenty on the third, and within a month there were more than he could count. It was no longer possible to differentiate one from another, nor to hear the voice of that one sweet singer as clearly as before. The women revealed that they’d tied the saint beneath their bed, buried him in the yard, dunked him in a bucket of water—and that they would only release him from his punishment after they had won the man they loved.

  Samuel’s habit on waking had been to move lazily up to the top of the head, where he could hear the Singing Voice. There he would stay, all day long, listening to the one voice that never prayed, never asked for anything. It just sang, sometimes at different times of day. Samuel had not realized, not yet, just how much listening to the singing had become an addiction, as vital as breathing, the only joy in his life, which had so little hope. But it was just when he most needed it—when he most wanted to spend the whole day thinking about recent events, listening to the Singing Voice and deciding when would be the best time to leave town, if he could force himself to do so—that things changed in the head of the saint.

  Suddenly it was different. The voices weren’t just coming from within the concrete, as he saw when he pulled back the curtain he’d put at the neck of his saint’s-head house and looked outside. He didn’t get a chance to count them, but he guessed there were already more than forty women there. Two of them were approaching on their knees, and some of them sped up when they saw that Samuel was at the makeshift door.

  Within seconds the spinsters had invaded the head of the saint, kissed Samuel’s hands, showed him the photos of the men they loved and asked all at once what they should do. Some of them knelt, a couple of them crying at the emotion of it all. Yet they kept coming into the home of St. Anthony’s messenger, and when there were twelve of the desperate women trampling Samuel, touching the concrete, talking, shouting and crying, a strange vibration made the head of the saint begin to shudder. At first the women seemed to feel nothing and just kept on coming in. They looked at the scribbles, the names, the arrows, frowning in confusion; they talked and talked, and the head kept shuddering. Samuel felt as though the shaking was in his own body, that bit by bit the head was turning into a strange extension of himself, linked to him by that absurd ability to hear the prayers and music.

  —

  Meanwhile, in the little church of St. Anthony, Father Zacarias was about to ring the parish bell, which, having been silent for so many years, he had restored to once again wake the town. He had planned to do six peals of the bell; the crowds running toward the head of the saint stopped him.

  —

  Samuel was already desperate, hemmed in by women who trod on his mattress, knocked over his belongings, broke off bits of the head to take away as concrete relics (later, in some cases, even selling them) and kissed his hands. He was getting more and more alarmed at the trembling he had never felt in his house before. Father Zacarias arrived at just the right moment and, realizing the poor boy’s alarm, ordered all the women out—out of a place he had not yet been inside himself.

  The women did as the priest told them. All Catholics fear figures of religious authority. He told them to wait outside and say the rosary to St. Anthony.

  Father Zacarias went into the head, which was still shuddering. He tried to talk to Samuel, but with each question the intensity of the shaking increased. It lessened slightly with silence, then increased again as he spoke, till it was possible to feel the ground near the head trembling, too.

  Outside, all the women were kneeling and saying the rosary when yet another band arrived from Canindé, shouting and running toward the head. All Samuel wanted was to listen to the song—the song that he hadn’t been able to hear since the women had arrived—and this seemed more important than his fear of another invasion.

  Now more than fifteen women ran into the head as though they were entering the Pearly Gates. The head’s shuddering increased significantly, and the priest finally understood what was going on.

  “Oh, sacrilege! St. Anthony has a migraine!”

  There was a great commotion. The saint’s head was pulsing more strongly on the left side. That was it; all that trembling made sense now.

  Francisco arrived at the same time, and he couldn’t believe his eyes. He saw a sea of women surrounding the head of the saint, a bewildered Samuel, the priest trying to calm everyone down, women fainting. It was the hot sun, the heightened emotion. And there was no point in Francisco asking them to leave, because they had no intention of budging. On the contrary, there were more and more of them arriving, showing not the slightest intention of leaving the miracle worker’s side until something happened.

  Francisco was flabbergasted. It was too ridiculous to be true: Candeia, once again, was full of people. He fetched his father, who returned with him to the head. (As a gravedigger he didn’t have much to do, since the few people in the town died slowly.)

  “These people are going to need places to sleep,” said Chico the Gravedigger, as kind as ever.

  They improvised some tents with twisted tree trunks and old sheets from the abandoned houses. They found water coolers, jugs and pans and filled them with water for all the pilgrims.

  The saint’s head hadn’t stopped trembling. In the crowd was a medicine woman, and she made the region’s most effective herb syrups. It was said she had even cured a minister in Brasília of cancer. The priest asked her to help the saint get better. “If only we had a little fire to make him some tea, the poor thing…”

  Samuel had an improvised stove, so he began to boil water.

  Seemingly from nowhere, the medicine woman found the cinnamon and other ingredients that were now smoking in the pan. She climbed up onto the saint’s chin and threw the foul-tasting liquid into his gigantic mouth.

  “Isn’t there a big cloth we can use to cover his eyes? In this hot sun a migraine will only get worse,” she called from her perch on his nose, where she was now massaging pork fat between his two huge eyes.

  Francisco and his father arranged four sheets and blankets, also taken from the abandoned houses, to cover his eyes. Samuel gave him another dose of tea, and bit by bit the vibrations began to abate. It was already nearly noon when the women asked whether there was somewhere nearby that served food. Only Helenice’s place, Francisco replied. The women went there, but their journey was in vain.

  “I’m not serving anyone who’s come here to trouble Candeia. That there’s the work of The Enemy, and God protect me from being any part of it,” said Helenice.

  “But we’ve got nothing to eat!”

  “You can starve to death as far as I’m concerned. You’re not getting a grain of rice out of me.”

  Only later did Samuel let out a little laugh when Francisco told him about this bit of defiance on Helenice’s part.

  “Leave it to me. I know how to persuade that poisonous snake.”

  The news that these women were surrounding the saint’s head in search of a love miracle attracted the Canindé radioman again, who went over to record interviews for his show.

  Seeing Aécio Diniz’s big car with the trunk open gave Francisco an idea. Francisco persuaded the driver to take him and his father to buy food in Canindé. There would be rice, green beans, onions, coriander, curd cheese, dried beef. A good stew would assuage everyone’s hunger nicely.

&n
bsp; They soon returned with the ingredients and asked Francisco’s mother to take charge of the catering. They took over the kitchen of the old Candeia school, which had been out of action for many years. Father Zacarias had kept the key. It was the door he had been sorriest to close. The few children who’d stayed behind had gone to school in Canindé. But now the men took turns at repairing and cleaning the place to get rid of all the bugs and plants that had invaded. They fetched firewood and set everything up in the kitchen as best they could—at least enough to prepare a meal.

  “Resurrection,” the priest was saying.

  Around four in the afternoon, two huge steaming pans of stew were carried out to the front of the school and served on the plastic plates they had found inside.

  “It’s one real for each plate of stew!” said Francisco with confidence.

  “You’re going to charge these people for food?” complained the priest.

  “If I don’t charge them, how am I expected to pay for what I bought in Canindé, Father? The man let us have it on credit, but we agreed that I’d return with the money tomorrow.”

  What Francisco managed to get from the women who ate the St. Anthony stew, as he called it, was enough to pay off the debt and buy more food for the following day. He and his father also bought two tanks for storing water to sell at ten cents a cup, and they used plates, cups and cutlery from the abandoned homes of Candeia.

  Francisco and the radioman formed a partnership. Bit by bit the area surrounding St. Anthony’s head became a small pilgrim village. Samuel, confused and disturbed, remained in the head, trying to hear the Singing Voice that had disappeared in all the commotion. He had lost his music, the sweet singing, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave before he knew who had made it.

  Whilst supervising the reopening of the school kitchens and ministering spiritual support to the faithful, Father Zacarias sensed that Samuel was in great need of his guidance. While the women respected his orders not to invade the head of the migraine-prone saint, the parish priest talked to Samuel about the miracles, trying to understand what was going on. He wanted to know more about Samuel’s life, to understand where his gift had come from, but as he started to listen for the first time, Francisco appeared.