Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  I saw that she and I were growing closer than ever before. It seemed to me now that it was precisely this closeness of spirit that I had been resisting of late, perhaps fearing it as a betrayal of Midnight, Daniel, and Violeta – of all my past.

  “John,” she said, “I understand you better than you think. You see, I share some of the same feelings. Can a woman’s spirit not suffer from strain? Can a mother not wonder about the worth of how she passes her days? Am I so different from you, John Stewart?” She laughed at my surprise. “There are times when I cannot breathe either, you know, as though you and they” – she gestured toward the girls, who were drawing with sticks in the sand – “were a corset being pulled tighter and tighter around me.”

  “You feel such things?”

  She sighed, plainly irritated that the thought had never occurred to me. “John, I have two tiny children who need me all the time, and a husband for whom my fondness knows no bounds but who might have been finding consolation in the arms of another. And I could say nothing, for fear of driving him away from me. Think of the hunger in that.”

  I took her in my arms again and kissed her with a desperate intensity. In our renewed ardor I recognized all I had been withholding from her, all I had failed to do for her.

  “Forgive me,” I said. “I am not so strong as I thought, and I worry that I may fail you when you most need me.”

  This fear was one I’d never contemplated before, but I now realized it had existed in me ever since my father’s death. I have reflected on this period of my life at length in recent years and have concluded that the legacy of my parents’ unhappiness had just caught up with me – and terrified me.

  I explained everything to Francisca, searching desperately for the right words, suggesting hesitantly that we might very well suffer the same fate as my father and mother. They had loved each other once like playful children, after all, and had ended as strangers. They were surely no different from Francisca and myself, and yet their friendship had shattered into recriminations and regrets. “What is to prevent us from becoming like them?” I asked her.

  “John, I do not know if love will stay with us throughout our lives, though I hope and pray it will. So all I can expect of you, and you of me, is honesty. From what you told me of your dear parents, that seems to be the one quality that was missing at times from their marriage. Forgive me if it hurts you to hear that.”

  “Francisca,” I sighed, “it’s not as simple as that. Anything might happen to us, even if we are honest with each other. We cannot know what plans the world has for us.”

  “Yes, that’s true, John. But since we cannot know those plans, we have only our faith in each other to rely on. John, what I think you need to know is this….” She scooped up some sand in her hand. “I shall go with you wherever you wish. And I shall help you accomplish whatever you choose. Or …” She paused. “Or stay behind.” As she sprinkled the warm sand on my toes, she repeated something I had once written to her in a letter: “Just do not soar so high that I cannot catch sight of you. That is not so much to ask, is it?”

  “No, it is more than fair,” I agreed, smiling as best I could to hide how moved I was; by now, the children, sensing something was wrong, were watching us suspiciously. When I saw Graça’s worried face, I covered my eyes with my hands, so that neither of the girls would see my tears.

  Francisca kissed me on the cheek, saying to Graça and Esther, “Everything is fine. Your father and mother are well. They are simply in love, and people who are very fond of each other occasionally go slightly mad.”

  With the girls now clamoring for our attention, we could not wrap the quilt around us and make love, as we wished. But perhaps that was not what we truly needed at that moment. It was, in fact, reassuring and comforting for the four of us to sit together and speak of the ocean and other things beyond our own lives.

  We fetched water for Lídia and Filipa and hitched them to a lamppost – I would pay their owner to retrieve them later. As we started home, I lifted Graça into my arms. She fell asleep immediately, her head on my shoulder, her croquet ball safely stowed in my bag. Francisca cradled Esther, who was carrying a white scallop shell, determined to ask as many questions about it as she could think of.

  When we finally reached home, totally exhausted, Francisca said, “John, know this – should you wish to steal all the goldfinches, jays, and wrens still kept in Porto’s bird market, I shall help you. Plan any escapade you wish – with or without me. I will love you whatever you become and whatever miracles you might make.”

  *

  Gilberto and I were now full partners. I had long since given up hope of selling works based on Goya’s drawings or my own fanciful imaginings. The good citizens of Porto wanted tilework in the old styles – depictions of saints and idyllic landscapes. The Portuguese will probably always be happy to place either St. Anthony or a cow on their walls – it makes little difference to them which.

  For Francisca, I glazed wainscots of my own design and paneled the wall leading to our garden with scenes from Exodus. Animals played all the parts, including that of Moses, who was a lion with eyes glazed in silver and black. I believe Midnight would have admired my work, though most visitors considered it perfectly obscene.

  I was always experimenting with colors and brushes, and I never tired of painting narratives for my family based on Torah stories and Midnight’s animal tales.

  In the children’s room, I plastered tiles of chimeras, dragons, and sphinxes all over the walls. When they were tiny things, they would feign grabbing these creatures in their hands, shake them, then spring their fingers open and allow the winged beasts to fly free. It made them giddy with laughter.

  The girls proved to have very different characters.

  Esther, the youngest, was like Daniel: She always lived an arm’s length from peril and would have it no other way. When she ran it was with perfect abandon, her thick auburn hair flying behind her. She was composed of sprightly things – of butterflies, tops, twigs, and bells. Her mind was a fugue. She could exhaust you by simply sitting on your lap and making requests. No, I cannot read you the story a fifth time tonight…. No, it’s already dark and we cannot walk to the river…. One might have thought her capricious, but time proved that she kept many of her thoughts secret, like Francisca. And like Mama, she was gifted musically, which afforded her a creative outlet. I purchased a violin for her, and with some instruction from a local teacher, she was able to play simple melodies from the Anna Magdalena Bach Songbook by the age of six.

  Graça was demure and thoughtful. Blessed with her mother’s dark knowing eyes, she observed people carefully. She was frequently disappointed that life was not as she would have wished it – that the secret treasure she sought eluded her. Reading to her and consoling her were very serious matters indeed. As a consequence, one of my great joys was to make her laugh. Often, by the light of a single candle at her bedside she would study maps I found for her at Senhor David’s bookshop, rather as though they held the key to the mysteries of life. I predicted that our provincial city at the edge of Europe would become too small for her when she reached adulthood.

  At night I sometimes read to the girls from the Torah, which Graça always enjoyed very much but which put Esther immediately to sleep – not always an easy thing, so it served a useful double purpose.

  After our talk on the beach, things between Francisca and me grew easy and calm. The four of us weeded our flower beds and pruned the roses, sat crosslegged on our bed playing cards, and went to the river to watch the coming and going of ships. We planted four fruit trees given us by Grandfather Egídio in each of the corners of our garden, where Midnight had previously had his medicinal plants: a peach, a lemon, an orange, and a quince.

  Francisca continued to knit her astonishing creations, selling some of the more modest examples at a clothing shop on the Rua das Flores. She also made dresses and shawls for herself and the girls, and waistcoats and suits for me – which made
us infamous in the neighborhood.

  I always spoke to the children in English, as I wanted them to have that advantage in life. Like me, they understood both languages without difficulty by the time they were five or six.

  Once, when the girls were six and seven, we took them to London for a fortnight, handed them over to Mother and Aunt Fiona, and escaped to Amsterdam, where Papa had hoped to take me and where I had long since wanted to see the synagogue. The harmony of its wood and glass, and its simple silence, were thrilling to us both, and I was astonished to find many men and women with whom we could speak Portuguese, though their families had not been back to our homeland in more than two centuries.

  *

  Our family was a happy one, I would say, but more than that I began to perceive it as a metaphorical voyage made by the four of us, with additional travelers – like my mother, Benjamin, Luna, Senhora Beatriz, and even Grandmother Rosa – welcomed along whenever they wished. I still often thought of Daniel, Violeta, and Midnight, of course, at times with pain and guilt. Radiantly defiant of distance and death, they, too, stowed away on our journey – perhaps because so much of them continued to live inside me.

  *

  During the first years of my marriage, I learned nothing more of Midnight’s death and the loss of affection between my parents. Curiously, an odd, persistent doubt remained with regard to my father, as I had never glimpsed his body after his death. In many a dream I discovered him in the midst of crowds – at the marketplace in Porto’s New Square, at the Great Fair in London’s Hyde Park, in the synagogue in Amsterdam. He was alive, and he had absented himself from our family, believing he had caused enough misery.

  Upon waking, the pain of him not knowing Francisca or my daughters would sometimes constrict my chest so badly that I’d have to jump up simply to breathe.

  I occasionally gave in to the mad belief that these dreams of him might be true – that he had not died in Porto, that Sergeant Cunha had identified him mistakenly. Or lied.

  I never mentioned my doubts to anyone but Francisca.

  “Where would he have gone?” she had asked, sitting up with me in bed one night.

  I could not say. But I had a better question: “Will he ever return?”

  XXVII

  Fairly early on in our marriage, Francisca and I developed a strategy to fool fertility into glancing the other way when we were feeling amorous. Yet despite all our many precautions, in early April of 1822, a child-to-be made its presence keenly felt every morning to my wife.

  Remembering how she had suffered after the birth of Esther, I was furious with myself for allowing this to happen. In the past, I had sneered at couples who forswore the pleasures of intimacy, preferring abstinence. But now I dearly wished that we had listened to reason.

  “Very well, perhaps we ought to have two beds,” she agreed when I told her that I thought it best that we abstain from now on.

  “Absolutely right!” I declared, oblivious to her trap.

  “But I am apt to become lonely at times,” she said sadly. “Would you mind me occasionally sleeping beside you?”

  “No, that would be acceptable – occasionally.”

  She knelt next to me. “And would you come to me if you grew lonely? We are friends, after all, and I should hate to think of you all alone and miserable.”

  “Yes, indeed, I should tiptoe to your bed.”

  “Now, in either of those cases,” she added thoughtfully, “I might then brush up against you. Accidentally, of course. The bed being so small, you understand. And if your flagstaff were to stand up – accidentally, I mean. What then?”

  “Then you would have to fight me off.”

  “And if I should endeavor to lose too swiftly,” she giggled, “would you be very cross with me?”

  Wagging my finger like Mother, I told her, “Very well, you may be pleased, but I’ll not again play Jason to your Medea. If that enraged harpy dares set foot in our house again, this time I shall chain her to our bed.”

  Smiling, she placed my hand over her belly. “We shall have ourselves another healthy child – now stop ranting and bring in more wood for the fire.”

  Over the coming weeks, despite my grave reservations, I grew resigned to another baby, particularly as our girls were greatly excited about having a little brother or sister. The two of them scribbled lists of names and howled with laughter over the worst possible choices – Adalberto for a boy and Urraca for a girl. Witnessing their delight, I came to the conclusion Francisca’s pregnancy was a good thing, after all.

  Then Francisca hemorrhaged. I was at my workshop, and Esther came running to fetch me. By the time we reached home, Benjamin, Senhora Beatriz, and a local midwife were already at Francisca’s bedside. She had stopped bleeding, but we had lost the child.

  “It’s my fault,” she moaned as I kissed her tears away.

  “No one is to blame. The important thing is that you get better quickly.”

  That evening her condition took a turn for the worse and she lost consciousness. Neither I nor her father could rouse her. Esther again ran to fetch Benjamin. Thanks to his ministrations, Francisca awoke for a time, but she was so weak that she couldn’t keep her eyes open.

  “I’m here,” I told her. “What may I get for you?”

  She was very pale. “Sing,” she said. “Let me hear your voice. I do not wish to lie here in the dark without your voice.”

  So I sang for her – all the Scottish, English, and Portuguese songs I had ever learned. I continued until daybreak, when she again lapsed into a deep slumber. When my voice failed, I spoke the poetry of Robert Burns, which is song to me even when recited.

  Grandmother Rosa sat with Francisca for a time, gripping her hand between both of hers, as though to squeeze strength back into her. She and my father-in-law tried to lead me away from her so I might eat or sleep. They promised to stay, but I would not leave her. I asked only for hot tea so that I could continue to sing.

  I was convinced that if I were to step away from her for even a moment, I would lose her forever. My father-in-law brought me my King of Diamonds waistcoat, which I put on, hoping to draw her toward life with all the beauty she had ever given me. Benjamin held my hand and whispered prayers over her for a time, writing secret inscriptions in Hebrew upon her forehead to protect her from harm. The girls took turns bringing me strong bitter tea made by Grandmother Rosa, their faces questioning and frightened. Esther scrambled up into bed and lay with her mother on occasion, whispering in her ear.

  “You are my one true and good friend,” I told Francisca, “and you cannot leave me.” I was sure that I could pull her back to me with my devotion.

  *

  Sometime after dawn, I felt her hand twitch. She had stopped breathing. In trying to rouse her, I discovered more blood on the sheets. I shouted for Benjamin, but it was too late.

  This, then, was the last lesson Francisca taught me: that I, John Zarco Stewart, had no magic at all. There were no songs of love powerful enough to defeat death. All of the most important things were beyond our control.

  *

  She may also have taught me one other thing: If there was a God, then He was what Benjamin referred to in Hebrew as Ein Sof – a Lord of infinite vastness totally removed from our concerns, deaf to our prayers.

  *

  Grief …

  My grief soon became a palace shrouded by perpetual night, where I had at my disposal a hundred rooms of despair, each crowded with visions of what was and what might have been. During the summer and autumn of 1822, and much of the next year as well, I paced its cold stone corridors, climbed its high staircases, and polished its statues of memory. During those first and most terrible weeks of loss, I blamed myself for never having loved her enough. In my madness, I ranted to the girls about their father’s selfishness, though they had no idea what I meant.

  I sat sometimes holding the love letter from Joaquim to Lúcia that had fluttered out of The Fox Fables when I was seven years old, wi
shing I had written to Francisca all that I had ever felt for her.

  My hair grew wild and I refused to shave. I ached to be held by her again. I often stared in my mirror and wondered how such an empty man as I could proceed alone into the future.

  I regretted having done so few drawings of her. At times, I could no longer remember the shape of her eyes and the contours of her slender hands. I thought I would go insane not being able to bury my nose in her hair at night.

  Luna Olive Tree, Senhora Beatriz, and other neighbors made condolence calls, bringing us bread and soup. Grandmother Rosa and many other women whom I’d never even met sat with the lasses at our hearth and whispered to them of the pain and worry of motherhood, warning them about the obligations of marriage and the duplicity of men, lamenting having had their youthful forms stolen by birthing. Strangers cleaned our chimney and patched the Lookout Tower. Secret Jews came to my shop and talked to me about the Mount of Olives.

  For nearly a year, I did what was expected of me. I created enough jars, vases, and ewers to hold the waters of the Douro. My glazes were mixed with spite for those who were happy.

  I looked after our daughters as best I could and saw to it that they continued their lessons. Esther refused to play her violin for two months and stayed in her bed until I absolutely insisted she get up. Graça caused me endless worry with her terrible insomnia, an affliction she had doubtless inherited from me. Then there were times when she metamorphosed into a bolt of lightning, eager to lash out at her sister and me.

  I tried my best to be understanding and to console them both. I passed the greater part of each and every day in their company, but sometimes I fear I was of precious little true help to them. I began to understand more of why Mother had distanced herself from me after the death of both Midnight and Father. We were alike in so many ways, she and I, and for too long I simply lost all desire for conversation, could think of no subject worth my full attention, not even – I am sorry to say – the misery of my children.