Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  IV

  Back in 1800, the bird market was not so well established as it is today: It consisted of only a single row of wooden stalls pitched haphazardly, eleven in total on the Tuesday of my visit with Daniel. Each stall held between ten and thirty cages, some on the ground, others on tables. The cages were made of wicker, cane, rusted iron, wire mesh, and in one case – for a golden pheasant – glass and gilding. The number of birds per cage proceeded from a low of one, in the case of most hawks, egrets, crows, and herons, to a high of fifteen or more for the wrens, wagtails, and other small birdies. That day, I counted seventeen European goldfinches trapped in a single tunnel of despair fully as long as my arm but no taller and deeper than the width of a man’s hand.

  Even worse, some birds were kept in direct sunlight with little or no water. A slender parrot with emerald green feathers had plainly been incarcerated in that condition for too long and was lying limp at the bottom of its cage, flies buzzing noisily at its eyes.

  I suppose it was merciful that these creatures could not understand the speculations of marketgoers as to how certain red, rose, and yellow feathers would look when stitched to a hat.

  Inside the largest of the stalls, a woodpecker was lying belly-up at the bottom of a wire-mesh cage, his scarlet-capped head tilted far to the side, squawking in helplessness. One wing was splayed; likely he had broken it trying to fly. I squatted next to him, and Daniel joined me.

  The owner, a bald man with sallow skin and rotting teeth, was calling out to onlookers, “See these beauties of mine! Handsomest birds in Portugal. Step up and get a good look at them!”

  When he paused for a drink from his mug, I pleaded with him to let me free the woodpecker – or allow me to take him to someone who cared for animals.

  He burst out laughing, spraying wine on me. “That one’s ready for the compost heap, son.”

  “You’re the one who belongs in compost, you bastard!” Daniel shouted.

  The man grabbed his broom and tried to whack Daniel on the head, but the lad jumped out of his range and cursed him again.

  While they traded insults, the woodpecker began to choke, and a slender pinkish worm, like a string, slipped out of his mouth. I jumped back, trampling a lady’s foot. She screeched that I was a no-good filthy urchin and described me in a whisper to her lady friend as a worthless mutt. I didn’t know why she used this particular expression, but her words clung tight as a tick to me even then. As a child I was not aware of just how many residents of our small city knew that my father was a foreigner.

  That worm in the woodpecker’s throat is what’s made him ill, I reasoned, pushing my face right up to the cage, wishing to be able to extract the hideous thing.

  The proprietor had given up on trying to knock Daniel on the head and was explaining the advantages of thrushes over larks to an old man with smallpox scars on his cheeks. I pulled Daniel’s sleeve to make him look closer at the bird and said, “See what was inside him?”

  While we stared through the mesh, the worm seemed to turn solid – to become a splinter. All this time I had failed to take note of the creature’s hesitant breathing, but when it ceased, I remarked its absence easily enough. The woodpecker’s eyes remained open but were no longer staring into our world. I called to him, then banged on the cage.

  “Hey, stop that now!” the proprietor ordered.

  Daniel began exhorting me to leave. Just then I realized that the worm was, in truth, the poor bird’s tongue.

  Before we left, Daniel asked again if we could have it, now that it was dead. The proprietor told him that if we would leave and never return, Daniel could open the latch and take him.

  As Daniel lifted the woodpecker out, he said in his most proper voice, “I hope I may count on your presence here on St. John’s Eve. I’ll have silver then for buying a healthy bird.”

  “I’ll be here, though I doubt the likes of you will ever save enough coins for one of my beauties. Now, go away!”

  We placed the woodpecker in a small sack that we begged at a cobbler’s stall. I wished to bury the unfortunate creature, but Daniel said we’d need him to do our painting properly. To my series of ensuing questions, all he’d say was “Hush up, John, I need to think.”

  We sat for some time on the steps of the São Bento Convent, where he could work out the details of his plan while studying the marketplace.

  “Here’s what we do, John,” he finally announced. “We’re going to wait here till that bastard leaves, then follow him.”

  When I asked why, he leaned toward me menacingly and gave me one of his favorite rhymes: Raptado, embrulhado, e entregado … Kidnapped, wrapped, and delivered …

  I was unsure if he meant me or the birdseller, but before I could ask, a hand clamped down on my shoulder. I looked up and, to my horror, discovered the preacher whom we’d seen a few days earlier.

  Struggling free of his grip, I tumbled down the stairs, banging my elbow hard on the granite. The villain’s dark eyes glinted with mirth. Daniel stepped in front of me as my guard. “What the hell do you want?” he demanded.

  The villain fixed his gaze on me over my friend’s shoulder. So transformed was his appearance from the last time we’d seen him that for a few bewildered moments I believed I had mistakenly identified him. Instead of his ragged fur-collared cape, he now wore an elegant scarlet dress coat with small pearls sewn into the wide lapels. On his head sat a black velvet hat, and his hair, exquisitely styled, cascaded in waves to his shoulders. He carried a silver cane under his arm.

  “Blessings unto you, my child,” he said with heavy sincerity. He took a pinch of snuff from a silver box and inhaled sharply into both nostrils.

  “Go away, you bastard!” Daniel demanded.

  “Though we have never met,” he said, winking at me, “I am an admirer of yours.”

  Removing his hat, he displayed its interior to us, then swirled his hand inside and extracted a foot-long indigo feather. Leaning forward, he offered it to me. “I have been watching you for quite some time, little one. So please accept this gift of heartfelt esteem. I, too, am most fond of God’s tiny winged creatures.”

  I shook my head in refusal.

  “Ah, what a shame,” he said sadly.

  He placed the feather back in his hat and smoothed his hair off his brow. His hand was long and thin. It had never known labor.

  “Let me explain, little one. There occasionally appears a face in the crowd that represents all those souls one would like to reach – a beautiful face that is symbolic of all in God’s creation. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  I started to hiccup, which caused him to laugh.

  “You are the son of James Stewart and Maria Pereira Zarco, if I’m not in error.”

  “How … how is it that you know my parents?” I asked.

  “I know who all the Jews are. That is one of my duties.”

  “He’s not a Jew!” Daniel snarled. “Now leave us be.”

  As though confiding a secret, he whispered, “It is your devilish soul I desire, little one. Nothing less.”

  Daniel had had enough. He took a knife from his pocket and brandished it like a sword.

  The preacher placed his hat on his head and made a deep purring noise, then meowed.

  “I shall just say one more thing,” he said with a smile, “and then I shall leave you. Have you never thought of returning with your father to Scotland, dear John? No? Well then, be so kind as to tell your parents from me that that must be your destiny. Let them make plans now, before we meet again. As the Apostle Matthew has told us, The gate that leads to life is small and the road is narrow.”

  “But I’ve always lived here. I’m Portuguese. I was born in Porto.”

  He said nothing, merely crossed himself, then turned around in a slow circle and tapped the ground twice with his cane. His back was to us for a few seconds at least. Turning to face us, he opened his mouth. A bewildered yellow finch peeked into the world, struggling to emerge. The villain held t
he bird’s neck between his teeth, as though in a vise, about to bite down.

  “Please don’t,” I pleaded tearfully. “Please …” In that very instant, I began to think of him as a necromancer, Papa’s word for an evil sorcerer.

  I was sure he was about to commit an unspeakable act. But he wished to make a different point. Opening his mouth fully, he permitted the bird to fly away.

  Daniel took a step back.

  “You see what your friend Lourenço can do, little one? It would be unwise to doubt me. Though the holy delight of burning you in the squares of Portugal is no longer an option, I shall not accept the stain of your presence among us any longer.” He breathed in deeply to quell his rage. “Never forget, the smoke rising off your body is incense to all those of righteous belief.”

  He produced a lighted candle from out of his hand. Twisting it in the air, it became a silver tostão coin. He held it up before us, then threw it at my feet. I let it clang on the steps, then picked it up. I was going to give it back to him, for I believed I might gain his favor by doing so, but he told me to keep it.

  “You see,” he said, pointing first at me, then Daniel, “the Jew among us can always be found if we but leave a single coin in view!”

  The crowd that had gathered around us howled with delight. An elderly woman stepped forward and threw an apple core at me, and several men began to shout at us.

  I cannot say how long they had seen fit to witness this cruel encounter in rapt silence, but when I turned back, the necromancer was striding away from us.

  Daniel took the coin from me and whispered, “Never mind, John, we’ll see that bastard swinging from a gallows someday.”

  V

  As a child, I knew nothing of Christian religious practice, having been strictly forbidden by my atheist father from attending weekly Mass with my mother and grandmother and only having witnessed a formal service on one occasion. Of that single visit to the Church of Mercy in the year of 1791, I confess that I own not a single recollection. This profound ignorance is due to no deliberate act of forgetfulness on my part, but rather to my extreme youth. For the momentous occasion in question was none other than my own rapid-fire Baptism.

  Father had opposed my christening vehemently and refused to attend, preferring to sulk inside a cloud of pipe smoke in his study. It was, however, a religious duty insisted upon by my mother, who had fixed her most determined gaze at my father for days on end until, sensing his troops outmanned by this Medusan onslaught, he extended the white flag of surrender. The logic behind her offensive was this: She wished to spare me the unfortunate fate of a German girl with Humanist parents whom she had befriended as a lass and who had for years been referred to as “the infidel” and “the savage” by a good many children and adults for not having had her original sin erased with holy water.

  Depending on whom you believe, she had either told my father, “I will hold this against you forever if you prevent it” (my mother’s version), or “I will have it done in secret and you will not know a thing until it is over” (my father’s).

  As it happens, I was not only nearly completely ignorant of the Christian faith as a child but also of Jewish beliefs and history. All I knew for certain was that Moses was a prophet who’d had horns on his head. I owed this latter tidbit of knowledge to the Olive Tree Sisters, who’d shown me – when I was five – an engraving of the Lawgiver with two spikes poking from his brow. Graça had told me that all Jews had such protuberances thousands of years ago but that they had fallen off in successive generations from disuse. Luna swore that a few ancient members of this race had even possessed furry tails.

  Soon after that, I learned there were no Jews to be found in Portugal. I discovered this when I asked Professor Raimundo, my tutor, if he could suggest a Jewish person I might follow, as I was eager to spot any sign of a tail or horns.

  “Happily, we can no longer observe that stubborn race,” he’d replied, rooting in his ear with the long curling nail of his little finger. “There are no Jews left in Portugal, for the wise men of our Church had the foresight to cleanse the monarchy of such heathens long ago.”

  To my further inquiries, he told me that in 1497 the Jews had been converted upon threat of death and made into so-called New Christians. Beginning in 1536, those New Christians who continued to practice their old religion in secret were arrested and placed in dungeons by Inquisitors, prosecutors sanctioned by both Church and King.

  Professor Raimundo had been noticeably put out by my questions and resorted to frequent pinches of snuff to steady his nerves. Sneezing, he had added that the Inquisition had – unfortunately – been stripped of much of its power some fifteen years before my birth. Even so, Jews were still forbidden from founding a community in Portugal. As to what practicing Judaism might entail, he rested his hands on his ample paunch, grimaced in distaste, and replied, “They stubbornly refuse to believe in the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Hence, the prayers they speak in their temples are nothing more than blasphemies against the Son of God and the Virgin.”

  In my innocence, this seemed a reasonable assertion. Jews were plainly a disagreeable people.

  Being a monstrously insistent young lad, I then asked if there wasn’t even one last member of this tribe in Porto whom I might secretly study. Inhaling another dusting of snuff, Raimundo snapped, “Not that I am aware of, but you would do well to ask your mother.”

  I considered that a strange comment, but since he refused to utter another word on the subject, I resolved to do as he suggested.

  When I asked her, she calmly replied, “No, John, there are neither Jews nor New Christians residing in Porto at the present time.”

  She presumed that Raimundo might have wrongly believed her familiar with such matters since the home we lived in, which had been in her mother’s family for generations, was at the heart of what had once been a small Jewish quarter prior to the Inquisition. My father was present for this explanation and puffed on his pipe without saying a word.

  *

  It was atop these slanders and fanciful images that the necromancer’s accusation of my being Jewish now found awkward footing. Giving in to my worst fears, I begged Daniel to search my head and nether regions for indications of unsightly growths of any telltale sort. He took to this task with admirable solemnity. We must have looked a sight with my breeches down and him squatting to gaze at my hindquarters. To my solemn relief, he soon dismissed my fears.

  *

  While hunting with Daniel for discarded bottles and trinkets on the riverbank that afternoon, I began to think that a life without close friends was not an inevitability for me. I remember being quite literally shaken by this knowledge when he grabbed my hand without warning and said, “I’ve found something, John, hurry!”

  He raced ahead, shouting that he’d spotted a tabletop sticking out of some mud and that it was perfect for carving. “Run! Come on! Faster!” His green eyes were aglow with the pleasure of having me share in his discovery.

  So excited did he become when we had safely unearthed his treasure that he began flapping his hands as though to brush away bees. A year or so later, he would offer the tabletop, intricately carved with the mischievous faces of children hiding in trees, to a young girl called Violeta. He would place me right at the center, replete with a beaked nose and gaping mouth.

  I understand now that Daniel, more than anyone I ever met, saw through the surface of objects to what lay hidden beneath. Would it be an exaggeration to say that he was capable of seeing the potential in me, as well, and that I loved him for it?

  I remember when we first pulled the tabletop out of the mud that afternoon, he stomped around as though seeking to create footprints so deep they could never be washed away by the river. Perhaps what he most wished with his carving was to offer a permanent impression of himself to the world.

  We were too young to know that he had already – in only a few days – created deep and lasting marks in me. And even if we’d known, I do no
t believe we’d have spoken of it.

  *

  At the stroke of four o’clock we returned to New Square, to follow the bald birdseller to his home. It was nearly an hour later when he and his wife loaded their cages into the back of their wagon and headed off. On the far side of the Gate of Oaks, they turned toward the town of Valongo and soon stopped at the Douro Inn, a grim-looking establishment. When they resumed their journey a half hour later, we continued our eager pursuit. But the birdseller now lashed his mares into a gallop and we were soon left shielding our eyes from the dust they threw up in their wake. Daniel turned this disheartening situation to our advantage by returning to the Douro Inn and making inquiries of the innkeeper, who told us that the birdseller and his wife were in the habit of stopping there for a drink every Tuesday and Saturday, prior to the market and occasionally afterward. The lad made a point of asking about St. John’s Eve, and we were told that they generally came to the inn early that morning.

  Outside, Daniel put his arm around my shoulder and whispered conspiratonally, “Kidnapped, wrapped, and delivered … Now, listen, John. We’ll have to come back here at dawn on the Twenty-Third. Which means we have only” – he counted by tapping his fingers on the top of my head – “five days. So starting tomorrow, we paint.”

  *

  I later discovered that Daniel, on returning home, placed the dead woodpecker on his bed, sat on the floor beside it, and got to work with his tools and pinewood. His goal was to create at least ten carvings before St. John’s Eve, which he estimated would occupy him from sunup to dusk on each of the next five days.

  That afternoon, Senhora Beatriz interrupted his feverish work with a knock at his door. Her puffy eye was bruised blue and yellow and had nearly closed. She walked with a limp. Two of her ribs had been broken and she breathed with noticeable pain as well. Remaining in the doorway, she thanked Daniel for coming to her rescue. He received her thanks with a downcast gaze, worried that his knowledge of their kinship might overwhelm him should he look her directly in the eye.