Daria

  The next test was conducted using the painting Head of Christ. Again Arsénio forced Francisco to stand naked in front of the head of the saviour and asked him a series of questions about the particular message of the portrait. This time he started with a general question to see if he could trick Francisco into divulging anything; he was hoping that if he could find out one secret, it would then somehow help pull out the other secrets he really wanted to know, secrets pertaining to the particular activities of the guerilla fighters anywhere in the several Províncias do Ultramar. “What did Rembrandt intend to say when he painted Jesus Christ this way?” Arsénio asked. Francisco replied, “I think, sir, that his posture reminds us that he, Jesus, that is, was an intelligent and kind man and looked at the world in a gentle fashion. Don’t you note, sir, the gentle light in his eyes, a light that is then projected with the utmost goodwill on that which is in front of him? And what is in front of him, sir, is you and me, is the world, a world made of many peoples, many races, many men and women, all of them his children, all of whom he loves very much. Don’t you see that, sir?” This answer, which came with a question, really irritated Arsénio, making him curse Francisco, calling him all kinds of very bad names, and striking him several more times with the thick belt. As he was striking and cursing Francisco, he was thinking about the last letter he had received from his cousin Salazar, a letter of unprecedented urgency.

  Dear cousin, we do not have much time to save the nation from the communists, and the Americans seem to have an eye on us too. Dear cousin, we do not have much time, and the time has come to do whatever is demanded from us to save our nation and make our brave ancestors proud. Dear cousin, I am counting on you and the miracle that you can produce to stop our doom. And you know what the reward is. You know what your reward is.

  “You motherfucker from the jungle, what the painting is saying, motherfucker, what it is saying and what master Rembrandt wanted it to really say is this: Christ is Portugal and Portugal is Christ. Can’t you see that Christ’s head is directed southwest in the direction of Portugal, the most southwestern country of Europe? Can’t you see that his head is full of wavy dark hair, and that he has a dark beard and a dark moustache, which most men in Portugal have? Can’t you see that even though Rembrandt was a proud Dutchman, he knew that Christ had been born in Portugal and then travelled the world to preach his faith? Can’t you see that Rembrandt predicted that the Virgin Mary, God be with her, would one day come back to the place where she received the divine seed from God? He predicted she would come back, that she would appear to the three little shepherds in Fátima and give her blessing to the country, the country of God’s predilection.”

  “But sir,” Francisco would counterargue, “can’t we also say that the colour of Christ’s hair and its waviness is possibly indicating that he may have been born in Africa or at least that he chose to appear in a colour that is neither white nor Black, but rather one that stays in the middle, to tell us that all races and colours are good and should therefore be equally valued? Have you read, sir, that part in the Bible that says, or seems to say, that Jesus was from Ethiopia, which is in fact not so far from my country of Mozambique?” Another deluge of blasphemies and name-calling would fall on Francisco followed by heavy strikes with the crocodile’s belt.

  The last part of Francisco’s answer had a particularly negative and infuriating effect on Arsénio: “Mozambique my country? Your country? You are delusional, my friend. Have you not seen the inscription on the municipal building in Lourenço Marques? Have you not seen it? Have you been blind? What does it say, my friend? Tell me what it says!”

  “I have seen it, sir! It says, This is Mozambique. And the name of the city, sir, is not Lourenço Marques but rather Maputo.” This answer, of course, only added insult to injury or, as the proverb goes in Portuguese, made the bad much worse, with a predictable result. The two of them wasted hours like this in front of one painting or another, hours and hours on end devoted to sad fruitless exercises where art and life were being used for evil purposes. By the end of the session, Francisco was still an enigma to Arsénio and Rembrandt an enigma to both Francisco and Arsénio. Meanwhile, boys and girls all over the falling empire were dying, their limbs exploding into a wasteful nothingness, the wealth of minerals and oil and pearls never reaching them or their poor peasant parents, who worked from sunset to sunrise.

  THE TWO COUSINS. That night Arsénio went to his room in a very foul mood, still cursing Francisco, the communists, and any other bastard who was after the great nation, trying to damage his cousin’s hard work. Sitting on his bed with tears coming to his eyes, Arsénio thought about his cousin and himself when they were two little boys in Vimieiro. He reminisced about his cousin with a mixture of melancholia, love, and, at points, envy. He thought about Vimieiro and their time together as little boys and then young men, beings trying to understand the world and find in it a place for themselves. He respected his cousin immensely. Salazar was a man who had come from nothing and was able to straighten up the country, pulling it out of the anarchy that had befallen it after the Republic’s endless succession of governments with its unending violence, poverty, and economic doom. He had made the escudo gain some value and respect again. His cousin was a taciturn man with a shy sensibility, a love for flowers, and an iron fist, who still thought of himself as being poor and as the son of the poor. It was as if he could never leave behind Vimieiro and the clogs he had worn in his childhood during those harsh winters of Beira Alta. He remembered the times when the snow and the frigid, cutting wind could turn you into an inert mound of shivering or rigid nothingness, when you have to hide inside the granite houses that had no mercy for the weak. They were like dark, sad coffins that reminded you of the death to come, when we all go underground, immobilized by cold and stiffness. Arsénio had worked very hard all his life. He had sacrificed a lot, and he had worked particularly hard ever since he came to Cape Verde years and years ago when his cousin had asked this great favour of him. He had felt he could not say no even though he hated the sun of the tropics. Its sticking humidity made his body and mind slow, a dead man walking, incapable of swift action and thought. But he could not say no because he owed a lot to his cousin. He owed him everything. He owed him his life. But things were getting very hard, very hard indeed, and the only thing that kept him going was the idea that one day he would be the second man of the great nation, as his cousin had promised him, and if his cousin died before him, he would replace him. He only needed to catch the depraved red communists who did not believe there was a God commanding us all and that God was a great friend of the vast and magnanimous Lusitanian nation. He only needed to catch those reds and any other bastard who was trying to undo the beautiful nation that had been fathered by his great Lusitanian ancestors in the 1400s and then cemented by his patient, loving, and powerful cousin in the twentieth century. He only needed to catch those communists and their friends. But things were getting harder, and he had to become more and more inventive with his methods in order to extract any truth from the wretched entrails of those bastards. The first time Arsénio was able to provide his cousin with a big name on the list of the most-wanted red guerrilla fighters, his cousin had rewarded him with a great collection of European art that had kept him going and had, at least initially, revived his soul. He rediscovered his deep desire to paint, to be good, and to believe in the goodness of the world, like when he was a little boy, before his mother went away. António had sent down to him dozens and dozens of paintings that he had received as payment from the Germans in return for wolfram that he had sold to them. Many of the paintings had belonged to the Jews who had been annihilated by the millions in death camps throughout Europe. They had been burned into nothingness, the chimneys expelling dark and grey smoke for days and then months and then years, causing the sun to hide in profound sadness, even as their neighbours swore they knew nothing about it. António had also sent a savvy artsy engineer—a devotee of the postm
odern before the postmodern, who dressed like a Parisian flâneur—to design a special room in Tarrafal, a place with just the right temperature, humidity, and light to properly preserve the paintings and ensure that their beauty and power would not fade. Salazar knew that his cousin was an avid art admirer, and he knew that these paintings had to be hidden in a place where no one could find them so that he would not be accused of aiding Hitler in the killing of Jews. He also knew that one day the paintings would be worth millions.

  Ever since they were little boys, Arsénio would paint and draw beautiful things. He would often stare in ecstasy at the stained glass or the religious art at the local church in Vimieiro. It was as if he had been born an innate artist. In art, he found the solace that most human beings need to be at peace with themselves and the world around them. He would always carry with him a pencil and paper or paint and a brush, and he would paint and draw everywhere, on any surface that could take in his designs and desires: stones, walls, the kitchen floor, white or black clothes. His mother understood his calling and, though she would be annoyed when he damaged the walls and the floor and the clothes with his talent, she would seldom show him her anger. But his father would become very upset, spanking him with a long, sturdy stick and ranting about how his son was a good-for-nothing, not a real man. He insisted that real men do manly things, and he was intent on making his son into a real man; he needed no queer person in his family to bring shame and dishonour. Little Arsénio suffered a lot at the hands of his father, a man full of fury, an ugly fury that could not be tamed, understood, or neatly linked to a source. Arsénio’s calling was so profound and visceral that it became an obsession, and he could not stop drawing or painting. In primary school he was always praised by the teachers for his talent. He would glow with pure pride and happiness, the pride and happiness of human beings who are allowed to do what they love and are valued because of it. The other youngsters were envious of him and would find ways to hurt him, teasing him more and more, telling him his mother was a cuckoo head who needed to go to the manicómio, the lunatic asylum, and that he was just like her. They would call him names and sometimes even accuse him of not being a true Christian, of having tainted blood. They would also tease him because he was always dressed with his clothes inside out and always smelled of garlic as a result of garlic cloves he was made to carry in his pockets. This was part of a plan to cure his mother’s illness—a recipe given by a renowned bruxa, a witch doctor, also referred to as a curandeira (a healer) by some who saw no distinction between two professions whose end goal was the same: the healing of bodily and spiritual malaises.

  Arsénio’s mother, Camila das Dores, suffered from a powerful delusional disorder. She was never properly diagnosed or treated, for doctors were scarce then and cost money. This illness brought her many moments of joy but also many moments of sadness and profound suffering. Despite the suffering, if she could choose, she would not have been born any other way because the happy moments and the illumination that she gained through her illness outweighed all the suffering. The illness gave her the ability to see into the world in slow motion, as if she were flying, dancing, up in the air like a bird-woman, a being between the here and the beyond, a being that travelled through the cosmos to find meaning and meet God. It gave her the ability to freeze the beauty that exists in the world, or in a moment, and stare at it for hours on end until she became satisfied and replenished, until she was ready to face the ugly again. It gave her the courage to take off and go on many journeys, fabulous wandering trips in search of the sublime. This power would come to her at any given moment, when people least expected it: when she was in mass with the rest of the villagers or when she was working hard in the land on a sunny August day, with her back bent, tending to the corn or the bean crops, steadily moving her heavy shovel to turn the earth around the plants and take away the bad weeds, her body sweating and exhausted. She once had an episode at church, on the day they were celebrating Queen Saint Isabel, the patron saint of the Church of Vimieiro. At the exact moment of the communion, when the priest was putting the sacred wafer in peoples’ mouths and saying Corpo de Cristo over and over again, as if it was the only prayer he had learned in the seminary, and just after Camila had taken her own wafer, she ran to the altar and started hugging all the saints. The hug she gave Queen Saint Isabel was much more prolonged and effusive than those she gave to the rest of the saints. Queen Saint Isabel was a magnificent, saintly, and holy woman who lived in late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and dreamed up ingenious ways to feed the poor, transforming bread into roses, roses into bread, or sometimes even roses into gold. She died from a fever at the age of sixty-five, though, as the story goes, her body remained intact for centuries after it ceased breathing. It was as if she were bearing witness to the fact that the life of the body goes on eternally when fed with the real dreams of a beautiful soul, or that the very existence of the material is part of some great master plan developed by someone with immense power and vision. Camila then proceeded to take down the cross where Jesus Christ stood, placing it flat on the altar’s floor and took off her clothes. With her white undergarments smelling of fresh eucalyptus leaves, which she used as disinfectant, she wiped the blood and sweat oozing from the body of Jesus Christ. She saw him as a happy, happy man, ready to make love with her and show her that this world where we live is much more than a valley of blood, tears, and suffering, that it possesses an astounding, pounding beauty that is pure piano music for our ears and honey for our splendid bodies. She then started fondling the suffering man with her own body, a body still young and full of needs, her large breasts going up and down on the inert, cold body. As she did that, she felt the happiest she had ever felt. She repeated the words of the priest, Corpo de Cristo, and she felt a shower of benevolent illuminating light coming down on her, kissing her body with love—love and life. She felt complete and no longer alone, as though she possessed within her all there was to possess: the Body, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. She became one with the One and had, all over her face and body, the signs of the great possession. The people in the church, many of whom were still taking the wafer from the priest and allowing it to dissolve slowly and gently in their mouths so as not to be called cannibals of the divine, were horrified at the scene they saw at the altar between Camila das Dores and Jesus Christ. They shouted in disbelief, and some, their moment of solace and encounter with God suddenly interrupted, used their teeth to hastily finish up the wafer they had in their mouths. Or they swallowed it intact, quickly and haphazardly, with one single movement of the throat that left them without breath, their air canals momentarily agonizing in affliction. The priest, thus suddenly interrupted during his sacred task and dedicated concentration, let the wafers fall on the floor and break on the hard granite medieval stones of that very ancient church. The church had been built under orders of King Dom Dinis in the fourteenth century when he was about to die. Its completion had taken over seventy-five years, and so the king never got to see it finalized. Dom Dinis was the husband of Queen Saint Isabel, and he was a clever intellectual who composed poetry and had an unrepentant and voracious appetite for women, a man known and commended by nationalist historians for his efforts in solidifying the nation. He even planted the seed of the great empire when he ordered the plantation of Leiria’s pine tree forest, which, years later, provided plenty of wood to build the sturdy and fearless ships and caravels that sailed into faraway seas, facing the darkness of the unknown. This magnificent church, which many called the sublime cathedral, was a stunning medieval building with stained glass everywhere that depicted red roses and big loaves of bread entering the mouths of hungry peasants, recreating Isabel’s miracle of the roses. It had been built to honour her, to display, for all to see, her saintly virtues and inclinations; though some say that the king had it built because he felt an immense guilt for being a womanizer and not sufficiently loving his wife. He wanted to obtain some pardon from God and his saintly wife,
they claim, by building this beautiful sturdy cathedral that reminded human beings of the power of charity and all the goodness that exists in this world. The less religious, and perhaps more devious, showed no qualms about the womanizing inclinations of the king and would jokingly say, laughing out loud, “What do you expect from someone who is married to a saint?”