The Head of the Saint

by Socorro Acioli

  “You’re a genius!” Francisco said to Samuel. “Look what we’ve done!”

  “I didn’t know it would all happen so quickly.”

  “But it did, and I’ve already made a tidy profit today.”

  “You’d better split that with me.”

  “Are the two of you planning to make money from the miracles of the saint?” asked Father Zacarias.

  “The parish will benefit, too, Father,” replied Samuel, who had grown up learning how to handle the priests in Horto.

  —

  It was Francisco’s father who thought of asking one of the Canindé artisans to go back to making statues of St. Anthony to sell. It had been forbidden, but that was before the miracle. Now everybody wanted one.

  Expedito, the artisan, went to see the saint’s head to draw the details so that he could make his just the same. That was when he noticed, hidden in a corner, the letter M in a circle.

  “And what’s this?”

  “I don’t know. Can’t be anything important,” replied Samuel.

  All the same, the saint maker recorded the letter and the circle in his drawing. He returned to Canindé quickly: with any luck he’d have a clutch of saints to sell the following day.

  The only people who ever joined Samuel inside the head were Francisco, Father Zacarias and Expedito. The women waited anxiously for a word from Samuel, who was uneasy, torn between taking advantage of the thriving trade, thinking what to do about all those women and feeling sorry, very sorry, that he couldn’t hear the Singing Voice in the midst of all the noise. By now he was desperate to know who it belonged to.

  Fortunately for him, Francisco had an eye for a good opportunity and spotted the potential in one spinster’s desperate appeal: “I want to talk to the saint’s messenger—I’ll pay anything!”

  It was as if she’d spoken some magic words. Francisco didn’t know precisely what to do, but Samuel would certainly be able to put together a plan.

  Candeia was reborn. It was brought back to life by the hands of the faithful women who worshipped around the head of the saint, lit candles, prayed day and night and waited for a chance to talk to the messenger. They wanted to get married. Almost all of them had a secret love hidden in their hearts, sometimes even a forbidden one, but a love of some sort. Others didn’t even have this. They had no focus for their prayers, no particular beloved for the saint to bring to them, but they wanted to get married because, out in the backlands, a woman who doesn’t marry is a cactus without a flower.

  Then came the men, brought to the head of the saint by their curiosity. Aécio Diniz got more slots on Canindé Radio and talked about nothing else. The more people who came to Candeia, the greater the profit for Samuel, Aécio and Francisco, impromptu partners in that enterprise.

  Everyone, without exception, was shocked at the state of neglect Candeia was in. Many had thought no one lived there anymore. Before Samuel’s arrival, only a few of the houses were inhabited. Some men decided to break in and occupy the empty ones, cut back the forest that had grown around and inside them, hang lamps outside, take the hammocks to be washed in the lagoon behind the hill. Many went to fetch their families from Canindé and the surrounding towns.

  A few of the houses weren’t as empty as they looked; their owners were still inside—dead. Chico the Gravedigger had had no idea that these corpses existed; he’d assumed that everyone had left rather than died here. Now he identified each body by his or her house, sometimes by the boots they had been wearing or the locket on a necklace. It would be impossible to identify anyone by anything else, as the bodies no longer had faces.

  The gravedigger made a point of giving a modestly dignified burial to every newly discovered body. He asked the new occupiers to bring the images of the saints from the oratories in each house so they could be buried with their forgotten owners. Then they were buried with Father Zacarias’s blessing and called by their names, and the customary Mass was celebrated for each of them, seven days after their burial.

  Besides the priest and Chico the Gravedigger, nobody else was interested in the bodies. They just wanted to occupy the houses, to remake the town.

  Those who had no families used the larger houses to sell a night’s sleep for five reais. Hammocks were brought in from neighboring towns—admittedly at inflated prices, since by now everybody knew that Candeia had been brought back to life.

  There was absolutely no order to this activity. Candeia did have a mayor and a chief of police, who were actually father and son, but they only ever showed up occasionally, to pay the caretaker at the town hall, the cleaner at the police station and the health center assistant. Dr. Adriano was paid by the state government. They’d have a quick glance at the town, with the mildest look of contempt they could muster, and would leave again without a trace.

  Sometimes the mayor, Osório, would come to his house on his own, in the late afternoon. The house was one of a few he had in the area, but he preferred not to live in this one in Candeia and paid the town hall caretaker to maintain it. He’d park outside the house and spend the night there, dealing with the official municipality paperwork, and then leave. He didn’t have the slightest interest in the problems of the people of Candeia. Last time the townsfolk tried to tell him something, he didn’t come back for four months—and so didn’t release the paltry payment to the town’s three pensioners in that time. No one said a word, he didn’t get annoyed and Candeia died away.

  The activity continued at full pace. The biggest trade was in food and images of the saint. Father Zacarias stayed close to the head as much as he could, to try to understand what was happening, and blessed the statues people brought there, which encouraged sales.

  Francisco and his parents had never seen so much money. The radioman, Aécio, was endlessly announcing on Canindé radio supposed miracles performed by the head of the saint. It was like hypnosis—people just kept coming, more and more. Some of the houses in Candeia had their facades painted, and shop signs reappeared: “St. Anthony Hostel,” “St. Anthony Snack Bar,” “St. Anthony Barbers.”

  —

  Even though he had yet to hear the Singing Voice again, Samuel kept his resolve to run away. This was not what he was in Candeia for—he had come following his mother’s instructions.

  Samuel said he was tired. Until not long ago, his life had been about making money at the expense of the faithful Juazeiro pilgrims: singing prayers to Father Cicero, as a guide on the Santo Sepulcro road, selling hats and petitioner ribbons, taking photos of tourists. His greatest dream had been to live as long as possible with Mariinha, have a laugh with his friends in Juazeiro, go out with the young Horto girls, sell hats, sing some prayers. But this dream had died with his mother. Then all he had wanted was to get to Candeia, see his grandmother, meet his father and then kill him, if he had the nerve. It wasn’t looking likely. Old Niceia, his grandmother, was so fierce that no one had gone near her house. Samuel hoped that someone would and that they’d find his father inside—dead or alive.

  “Can you still hear the voices?” Francisco asked Samuel.

  “It’s harder now. Before, when it was quiet round here, I could hear them nice and loud. Now I can’t even hear the singing girl—there’s too much noise, too many women talking. Though there was one day when I heard Helenice, at four in the morning.”

  “What was she saying?”

  “Asking for forgiveness, asking God that all this not be a punishment, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, asking that He watch over Fernando’s soul.”

  “Right, Fernando was her husband. He died—it was his heart.”

  “But I don’t think it was. She says she’s full of remorse, that if she could go back in time she wouldn’t do what she did, that her life would be better with Fernando, that she should have gone with him.”

  “I’ll ask my dad if he knows anything. You think she poisoned the Portuguese man’s fruit juice?”

  “Her husband was Portuguese?”

  “Yeah—and they say
Madeinusa is as beautiful as she is because she’s the spitting image of her dad. But we’ll work all that out later. For now I want to know if you’ve got any plans to perform miracles for these women.”

  “I won’t be able to do what I did with Dr. Adriano for all of them. It was easy when I didn’t hear so many voices. Now it’s tough. I’ve got one who’s in love with a southerner from Caxias do Sul, and I don’t even know where that is—how am I supposed to sort that out?”

  “You just have to say the saint is going to help, but don’t make promises. Come up with some prayer or other for them, the sign of the cross on their forehead, whatever.”

  “I think our best way out would be giving them a time frame, saying it will only work after forty days. By then I will have gone.”

  Francisco’s expression changed to one of shock and sadness.

  “Gone?”

  “Wasn’t that the deal? My leg would get better, and I’d go. I’ve already stayed much longer than I planned. I came to look for my father, and I’ve realized that I’m never going to find him.”

  “But we’re friends. You could get yourself a house to live in, a long way from the head. Just come here to work, like going to the office. Your father must be dead; best forget about him.”

  “The only reason I haven’t left is because of the Singing Voice. I want to know who it belongs to.”

  “And what if she’s one of those women outside?”

  “She never prays, she only sings. She’s sweet, and peaceful. There’s no one like her in the world. She’s nothing like those marriage-crazy ones outside.”

  “You can’t know without checking. Can I announce that the consultations start tomorrow?”

  “Yes. But also say they’ll only last two minutes, because the saint gets a migraine if he works too hard.”

  “I’ll charge two reais per consultation. Do you reckon that’s a sin, Samuel? Do you reckon we should ask Father Zacarias?”

  Samuel sighed, resigned to going along with his friend’s plan. He knew Francisco needed the money. “I’m sure even God doesn’t know what a sin is anymore, let alone the priest.”

  Samuel thought through how the consultations would work: he would receive each of the women inside the head, ask her to tell him the name of her intended—if there was one—and ask her to write the name on a piece of paper, which he would then rub on the right-hand side of the head. If the girl had no object for her affections, her own name would do, but in that case he would rub it on the left. The choice of sides was only to give an impression that there was some method to what he was doing, but it was no more than killing time. After rubbing the piece of paper, he would announce that the effects could take up to forty days. Within two minutes the consultation would be brought to a close. They would bring in between thirty and forty reais per hour, which wasn’t bad, not bad at all.

  They decided not to explain their scheme to Father Zacarias, who might ask questions and complicate everything. All they told him was that the saint had asked that all weddings be carried out in Candeia’s little church—the women were told this, too. That way the priest was happy, and if he knew anything more about their moneymaking plan he didn’t let on—dealing with the saint was the messenger’s job.

  The first three days of consultations were tiresome for Samuel, who had to repeat the same things over and over again, answering the women’s anxious questions, explaining that it might be a while before anything happened.

  With some of the women, the conversation went slightly differently. One girl had such pestilential breath that Samuel needed to ask for some incense from the church before he could breathe comfortably in his house again. Besides the ritual of rubbing the piece of paper on the head, he told this girl to find a chemist’s urgently to buy herself some toothpaste and two brushes: one for her teeth and one to scrub her tongue.

  Another girl, who was hugely fat, had leaned back against the side of the saint’s head and made the poor thing roll over till his nose was almost in the earth. She’d had to lean on the opposite side to right it. Samuel made up an instruction from the saint that she must eat nothing but pineapple for a fortnight in order to purge herself of her sins, and that she must walk daily from Candeia to Canindé to light a candle to the saints, Anthony and Francis, who during their lifetimes had been friends.

  Bit by bit Samuel began to embellish the advice he gave. Francisco looked after the queue and the collection of the money. Aécio Diniz took charge of selling the statues of the saint, the medallions, T-shirts and other bits and pieces, besides devoting practically his whole radio program to the latest events in Candeia. The proceeds were divided between the partners, under the supervision of Chico the Gravedigger, who couldn’t add two and two but was a very honest man.

  Francisco did his best to fill the consultation schedule for the whole day so they could earn as much money as possible. When the forty days were up, the trick would be discovered, the town would unmask the impostor and Samuel would disappear—leaving Francisco to pose as a victim of the deception. Francisco couldn’t think of a new plan for after that; it was best just to make the most of the present. Every night before going to sleep, Francisco thought how much he was going to miss Samuel when he left.

  On the eleventh day after consultations began, the queue of women anxious for a paltry word from St. Anthony’s messenger was surprised by the news that there would be a wedding the following morning. Samuel received an invitation via a messenger: he was to be best man. The bride was sorry not to have invited him personally, but she was busy getting her dress fitted. She insisted that Samuel had to be there at the altar, though he couldn’t remember seeing the bride, Madalena, for a consultation.

  —

  But the truth was, she would have been hard to miss. Madalena was the obese girl—ugly, oily-skinned, slick-haired—who arrived in Candeia a short time later, fifteen kilos thinner, in a wedding dress. She was married in a well-attended ceremony to the love of her life: a former work colleague. Their romance had been interrupted when he’d been transferred back to Caxias do Sul, where he was born. The girl had been sure that she would never find anyone else like him—this man who didn’t even answer her letters—until the day when everything changed.

  Aécio Diniz invited the groom to be interviewed on the radio—which now had a studio in Candeia itself.

  “So one day I was working and I thought about Madalena. There was a voice telling me to leave my life in Caxias do Sul and come here to be with her. I sold everything I had: a green VW Beetle, two loudspeakers and a karaoke machine. All I wanted was to be near her.”

  “So you arrived here in Candeia with lots of money?” asked the presenter.

  “None at all. I spent it all on the tickets.”

  The bride took the microphone.

  “He arrived rich in love and beauty—that’s what matters in life.”

  The two of them wouldn’t stop their passionate kissing.

  Even Aécio Diniz shed tears at the testimony of the southerner who was so mad about Madalena. The girl revealed in this interview that Egídio had experienced that sudden and devastating feeling of passion the same day as her consultation with Samuel, the miracle worker. Father Zacarias, hearing the interview, called on Samuel to explain this miracle.

  “I lied to this woman,” Samuel confessed. “I deceived poor Madalena, telling her to eat fruit for a fortnight, to walk here, there and everywhere, and now I hear about this miracle. I don’t do miracles, Father, nothing of the sort, I came to Candeia at the request of my mother.”

  “What did you feel when you talked to Madalena? Any dizziness, any light-headedness, some sixth sense? Did you feel anything strange?”

  “I did. That day I had a stomachache. I was blown up like a balloon, full of gas. What’s happening, Father?”

  “I don’t know, my child. None of the books I’ve read describe anything like it. But I shall pray to God to forgive you, for whatever it may be.”

  “I think
it’s best for me to leave. I wanted to go sooner.”

  “You want to leave?”

  “Yes, I only came to look for my father, but I soon realized I’m never going to find him.”

  “So what kept you in Candeia?”

  “The Singing Voice. It’s a girl whose voice sings inside the saint’s head, and I wanted to find out who she is. It’s the only thing that makes me happy.”

  “Maybe it’s just an illusion. The Devil is filled with cunning wiles.”

  —

  By now there was electricity in Candeia, though the mayor had nothing to do with it; it was being taken from the lampposts along the highway. Still, the mayor was due to arrive at any moment, alarmed from hearing the news about how much had happened during his absence and in such a short space of time.

  The second wedding took place. And a third, fourth and fifth. All the women who had consulted the saint’s messenger had then, inexplicably, found the love of their lives. Samuel was invited to be the best man for every one of the weddings, until Francisco explained to the brides that this would no longer be possible. There were three or four weddings a day, and he was needed at the saint’s head for the consultations. The guests of all the happy couples helped to fill the town.

  The owners of the recently established restaurants, hostels and cafés were only interested in their trade, filling their pockets with money, then redecorating the buildings to attract more customers. Now the town had houses painted in different colors, street lighting and a blue church, and the main square was being redeveloped.

  One of the couples who celebrated their ceremony in the little Candeia church came from Baturité. They stayed in the town for their honeymoon, along with the bride’s parents, who declared they had never seen anywhere so beautiful.