The Crime of Father Amaro

by José Maria De Eça de Queirós

  Introduction

  Leiria, the setting for The Crime of Father Amaro, is a small town about 60 miles north of Lisbon. The street that now bears Eça de Queiroz’s name is little more than a back alley. Given the portrait that he paints of the town’s inhabitants, this is, perhaps, hardly surprising. According to Eça, the population of nineteenth-century Leiria were narrow-minded, credulous bigots. What was offensive to the good people of Leiria, however, remains a joy to both reader and translator. For the power of the novel lies not just in its unflinching exploration of small-town hypocrisy, but in the sheer verve of the writing and in the strength of characterisation. Eça’s description of what he believed to be a stagnant society is bursting with life and humour. From the first page, on which we meet José Miguéis, the ‘exploding boa constrictor’ of a parish priest, to our encounter on the final pages with the smug and pompous Conde de Ribamar and his vision of a Portugal which is ‘the envy of the world’, we are treated to a gallery of riveting minor characters: Father Natário is a man with a talent for hatred; the parish priest of Cortegaça is so in love with food that he even spices his sermons with cookery tips; Dona Maria da Assunção with her room full of religious images is agog for any hint of sex; Libaninho, who never misses a mass and flirts with all the girls, in fact has a penchant for army sergeants; the administrator of the municipal council spends from eleven o’clock to three each day ogling a neighbour’s wife through a pair of binoculars; Canon Dias cares only for belly and bed. Between them, the clerics and their devout followers commit every one of the seven capital sins.

  As with Dickens, whom Eça greatly admired (though he disliked his sentimentality), the secret of his humour lies in the dialogue and in the detail. Eça has as keen an ear for the way ordinary people speak as he does for the puffed-up excesses of politicians and political radicals. And he can give us the character of a person in one telling detail, for example, the whole of Canon Dias’ satyr nature is revealed in the large, hairy hand with which he pats Amélia’s cheek; the vanity of the lawyer and ‘wit’ Pinheiro is there in the way he ‘smoothes his poet’s hair’; Father Amaro’s cowardice is embodied in his undignified flight – ‘teeth chattering in terror’ – from the barking dogs barring his way to Amélia’s bedroom; the fastidious nature of a clerk is summed up in one sentence: ‘Pires took off his oversleeves and put away his air cushion.’ And Eça can puncture pomposity with one well-judged phrase. This is how he describes a section of Lisbon’s petite bourgeoisie, incensed by the events of the Paris Commune: ‘Men, wielding toothpicks, urged vengeance.’ It is not often that one finds the words ‘toothpick’ and ‘vengeance’ in the same sentence.

  He is the master, too, of the bathetic juxtaposition of events. When Amaro and Amélia exchange their first kiss, Amélia’s aunt is dying in the next room; when they first have sex, Dionísia, Amaro’s maid, goes downstairs and hides in the coal cellar until they have finished; the lovers’ trysting place is the Cathedral sexton’s filthy bedroom, and every sound they make, every creak of the bed, is heard by the sexton’s neurotic paralysed daughter in her room immediately below.

  Equally striking is Eça’s eye for the physical world – when Amaro realises that Amélia loves him, he is described as being like ‘a plump sparrow in a warm shaft of sunlight’; when Amaro and Amélia are lying together in bed looking up at the roof beams, they hear ‘a cat padding across, occasionally catching a loose tile’ or the rustle of a bird’s wings as it alights; and Eça notices how cows drink ‘delicately, noiselessly’ and how fields fill up with mist.

  All these qualities give Eça’s writing a rare density and vitality that lend further substance to his vision of 1870s Portugal.

  The Crime of Father Amaro is an attack on provincialism, on the power of a Church that allies itself with the rich and powerful, tolerates superstition and supports a deeply unfair and un-Christian society, and, more particularly, it is an attack on the absurdity of imposing celibacy on young men with no real priestly vocation. It is also, I think, like many of his novels, a critique of the position of both men and women in Portuguese society of the time. São Joaneira is kindly and well-meaning, but with a daughter to support after the death of her husband, she becomes the mistress of, first, the precentor and, then, the Canon. The old maids in the book are all mean-spirited, vain, petty and tyrannical, but utterly cowed by men’s authority. Amélia is a simple, essentially good-natured girl, but her whole view of life has been skewed by the overwhelming presence in her life of priests. On the one hand, women’s lives are so narrow that a walk alone to the shops seems daring; on the other, the foundling hospitals cannot cope with the number of abandoned babies, and women who ‘slip’ end up on the street or struggling to bring up illegitimate children on their own. The only woman who appears to have any influence over men in the novel is Teresa, the Countess’ friend (whom we meet in chapter III), but hers is, in a way, the influence of a charming, precocious child and depends entirely on that most ephemeral quality – beauty. The men apparently have the power, but are, in a sense, little more than large, spoiled children. Dr Godinho, for all his booming rhetoric, is afraid of upsetting his lovely, devout wife; when the Canon’s ghastly but devoted sister, Dona Josefa, is stricken with pneumonia, he is lost and bereft; and every priest’s and every petit bourgeois’ household depends for its smooth running on loyal, hard-pushed maidservants, who, unsurprisingly, often seem to fall ill. The men both despise women and need them. The women live in constant fear of offending God, priest, husband, protector or society.

  Although The Crime of Father Amaro is usually described as Eça’s first novel, it is also, in a sense, his fourth. Plagued by his friends for something to publish in their magazine, Eça sent them the unedited draft of a novel – the first version of Father Amaro – on the understanding that they would send him proofs, which he would then edit and return. For some still unexplained reason, his friends, in 1875, began serialising the unedited draft. Eça was incandescent with rage: ‘May Satan devour you, you murderers!’ He eventually forgave them and submitted a longer, revised version of the novel to a publisher. This second version appeared in 1876 and was greeted by almost total silence. Eça even had to beg one of his friends to write a review. However, despite disappointment at this lack of response, Eça had already begun work on a new novel, Cousin Basílio. This dealt with the adulterous affair between the ne’er-do-well Basílio and Luísa, a bored middle-class wife. The novel was an instant popular and critical success and was immediately translated into several languages. Its success – it has to be said – was due in large part to what was perceived as its racy nature. However, when the great Brazilian novelist, Machado de Assis, accused Eça of squandering his talents and of pandering to the worst excesses of realism and Zolaesque naturalism in the 1876 version of Father Amaro, and to a salacious public in Cousin Basílio, Eça was stung. He acknowledged the influence of Balzac and Zola, but denied that his work was a mere imitation of such novels as La Faute de l’Abbé Mouret. It was possibly in response to this criticism, though, that Eça went back to Father Amaro and almost completely rewrote it. That third and final version (on which this translation is based) was published in 1880, and the title page bore the words: ‘Corrected, rewritten and entirely different in form and plot from the original edition.’ In a letter to his friend, Ramalho de Ortigão, Eça wrote: ‘The Crime of Father Amaro is an entirely new novel; all that remains of the book you originally read is the title.’

  So how does this last, much longer version differ from the first and, in particular, the second version? Eça removed the more obviously sensationalist elements – Amaro seducing Amélia in the confessional; Amaro hearing Amélia i
n labour; Amaro drowning his new-born son; João Eduardo seeing Amélia’s corpse being prepared for the coffin. He gave both Amaro and Amélia more of an inner life, so that Amélia, in particular, becomes a far more interesting and more complex person. He also added two new characters – Father Ferrão and Totó – and fleshed out two already existing characters, Dr Gouveia and the goodhearted but virulently anticlerical Morgado. Father Ferrão – the kindly priest who brings spiritual comfort to Amélia later in the novel – provides a necessary contrast to the corrupt and venal clergy who otherwise populate the novel. He also offers a version of Christianity with which Eça had no quarrel, the gospel of equality and tolerance preached by Jesus, rather than the corrupt version which Eça and, in the novel, Dr Gouveia detest. Indeed, Dr Gouveia – the rationalist doctor – becomes the moral voice of the book, expressing many of Eça’s own views on morality and on Church and State. Totó, the sexton’s hysterical, paralysed daughter, is perhaps the boldest addition to the book, providing as she does a grotesque counterpoint to the lovers’ sexual encounters. Her cries of ‘There go the dogs!’ underline the animal lust that Amaro and Amélia try to dress up as romantic love.

  It becomes clear in this version that, as Father Ferrão says of João Eduardo’s article in The District Voice, Eça is not writing against the priests, but against the Pharisees, be they religious or lay, for the priests are not the only hypocrites. In the expanded 1880 version Eça gives the likes of Father Natário, Canon Dias, Dona Josefa, Bibi – the secretary general – Dr Godinho and Carlos the pharmacist ample opportunity to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. We are presented with a whole society which – with a few rare exceptions – would not know the truth if it was bitten by it. The 1876 version ends with Amaro’s flippant comment that now he is careful only to confess married women. Both versions place the novel in a specific historical context, the period before and after the 1871 Paris Commune, thus contrasting the smug stagnancy and backwardness of nineteenth-century Portugal – city and country – with the social and political upheavals occurring elsewhere in Europe. The 1880 version goes further and has the unbearably self-satisfied Conde de Ribamar – Father Amaro’s protector – pontificate about Portugal as an ideal of peace, prosperity and stability. Father Amaro, Canon Dias and the Count are standing, at the time, beneath the statue of Luís de Camões, Portugal’s national poet, whose masterpiece, The Lusiads, celebrates Portugal’s bold, heroic past. As Eça comments: ‘a country for ever past, a memory almost forgotten’.

  José Maria de Eça de Queiroz was born on 25th November 1845 in the small town of Povoa de Varzim in the north of Portugal. His mother was nineteen and unmarried. Only the name of his father – a magistrate – appears on the birth certificate. His mother returned immediately to her respectable family in Viana do Castelo, and Eça was left with his wetnurse, who looked after him for six years until her death. Although his parents did marry – when Eça was four – and had six more children, Eça did not live with them until he was twenty-one, living instead either with his grandparents or at boarding school in Oporto, where he spent the holidays with an aunt. His father only officially acknowledged Eça when Eça himself was forty. His father did, however, pay for his son’s studies at boarding school and at Coimbra University, where Eça studied Law. After working as the editor and sole contributor on a provincial newspaper in Évora, he made a trip to the Middle East. Then, in order to launch himself on a diplomatic career, he worked for six months in Leiria as a municipal administrator, before being appointed consul in Havana (1872–74), Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1874–79) and Bristol (1879–88). In 1886, he married Emília de Castro with whom he had four children. His last consular posting was to Paris, where he served until his death in 1900.

  He began writing stories and essays as a young man and became involved with a group of intellectuals known as the Generation of ’70, who were committed to reforms in society and in the arts. He published only five novels during his lifetime: The Crime of Father Amaro (3 versions: 1875, 1876, 1880), Cousin Basílio (1878), The Mandarin (1880), The Relic (1887) and The Maias (1888). His other novels were published posthumously: The City and the Mountains, The Illustrious House of Ramires, To the Capital, Alves & Co., The Letters of Fradique Mendes, The Count of Abranhos and The Tragedy of the Street of Flowers.

  I

  It was Easter Sunday when the people of Leiria learned that the parish priest, José Miguéis, had died of apoplexy in the early hours of the morning. The priest was a large, red-faced man, known amongst the other clergy of the diocese as ‘the glutton of all gluttons’. Remarkable tales were told of his voracious appetite. Carlos, the apothecary, loathed him, and whenever he saw the priest leaving the house after a post-prandial nap, face all flushed and body replete, he would say:

  ‘There goes the boa constrictor, off to digest his lunch. One day he’ll explode!’

  And explode he did, after a fish supper, just when Senhor Godinho, who lived opposite, was celebrating his birthday, and his guests were wildly dancing a polka. No one regretted his death, and there were few people at his funeral. Generally speaking, he was not greatly respected. He was basically a peasant with the manners and thick wrists of a farm labourer; he had hairs sprouting from his ears and was brusque, gravel-voiced and coarsely spoken.

  The devout ladies had never taken to him: he used to belch while hearing confession and, having always lived in village parishes or in the mountains, was oblivious to certain finer points of religious devotion. He thus immediately lost nearly all his female confessants, who went instead to the unctuous Father Gusmão, who always knew the right thing to say.

  And when the pious ladies who did remain faithful came to José Miguéis with talk of scruples and visions, he would scandalise them by grunting:

  ‘Nonsense, Senhora! Pray to God for some common sense and a bit more grey matter.’

  He found their keenness on fasting particularly irritating.

  ‘Why there’s nothing wrong with eating and drinking, woman,’ he would roar, ‘nothing wrong at all!’

  He was a staunch supporter of Prince Miguel, and thus the views of the liberal parties and of their newspapers filled him with irrational choler.

  ‘Damn them!’ he would exclaim, brandishing his vast red umbrella.

  Latterly, he had grown more sedentary and lived entirely alone apart from an old maidservant and a dog called Joli. His only friend was the precentor, Valadares, who was in charge of running the diocese at the time because, for the last two years, the Bishop, Dom Joaquim, had been resting at his estate in Alto Minho, a martyr to his rheumatism. The priest had a great deal of respect for the precentor, an austere man with a large nose and poor eyesight, who was a great admirer of Ovid and who pursed his lips when he talked and liked to pepper his conversation with mythological allusions.

  The precentor was fond of the priest. He used to call him Friar Hercules.

  ‘“Hercules” because he’s strong,’ he explained, smiling, ‘and “Friar” because he’s a glutton.’

  At the priest’s funeral, the precentor himself sprinkled holy water over the grave and, since he had been in the habit of offering the priest a daily pinch of snuff from his gold snuffbox, he muttered to the other canons as he threw the first ritual handful of earth onto the coffin:

  ‘That’s the last pinch he’s getting from me!’

  The whole chapter of canons laughed uproariously at the diocesan governor’s joke; Canon Campos repeated it that same night while taking tea at the house of Novais, the local deputy, where it was greeted with delighted laughter, and everyone praised the precentor’s many virtues and remarked respectfully that ‘the precentor really was most terribly witty’.

  Days after the funeral, the priest’s dog Joli turned up, wandering across the square. The maid had been taken to hospital with a fever, the house was all shut up, and the dog, abandoned, trailed its hunger from door to door. It was a small, very fat mongrel, that bore a faint resemblance to the priest
. Accustomed to being around cassocks and desperate for a master, as soon as it saw a priest it would go whimpering after him. But no one wanted poor Joli; they would drive him away with the tips of their umbrellas, and the dog, like a spurned suitor, would howl all night in the streets. One morning, the dog was found dead outside the poorhouse; the dung wagon carried it off and, when the dog was no longer to be seen in the square, the priest José Miguéis was finally forgotten.

  Two months later, the people of Leiria learned that a new parish priest had been appointed. Apparently, he was a very young man, just out of the seminary. His name was Amaro Vieira. His appointment was put down to political influence, and the local newspaper, The District Voice, which supported the opposition, wrote bitterly of Golgotha, of ‘favouritism at court’ and of ‘the reactionary clergy’. Some priests were quite shocked by the article and it was spoken of in resentful terms in the presence of the precentor.

  ‘Oh, there’s certainly been some favouritism, and he does have sponsors,’ said the precentor. ‘The person who wrote to me confirming the appointment was Brito Correia. (Brito Correia was then Minister of Justice.) ‘He even says in the letter that the priest is a handsome, strapping lad. So it would seem,’ he added with a smug smile, ‘that “Friar Hercules” will perhaps be succeeded by “Friar Apollo”.’

  Only one person in Leiria, Canon Dias, had actually met the new priest, for the Canon had taught him Ethics in his first years at the seminary. At that time, said the Canon, the priest had been a shy, spindly, pimply youth.

  ‘I can see him now in his threadbare cassock and looking for all the world as if he were suffering from worms! But he was a good lad and bright too.’

  Canon Dias was a well-known figure in Leiria. He had grown fat of late, his prominent belly filling his cassock; and his grizzled hair, heavy eye bags and thick lips brought to mind tales of lascivious, gluttonous friars.