But São Joaneira was calling down to them:
‘You can come up now, Father. The soup’s on the table!’
‘Go along now, you must be positively faint with hunger, Amaro!’ said the Canon, heaving himself to his feet.
Then, seizing Amaro by the sleeve, he said:
‘Now you’ll find out what chicken soup is like cooked by São Joaneira. Absolutely mouthwatering!’
In the middle of the dining room, which was lined with dark paper, the table with its bright white cloth was a cheering sight, as were the china plates and the glasses glinting beneath the strong light of a green-shaded oil lamp. Delicious smells emerged from the soup tureen, and the plump chicken served on a platter with succulent white rice and pork sausages looked like a dish fit for a king. Slightly in the shadows, one could see the delicate colours of porcelain in a china cabinet; in one corner, by the window, was a piano, covered with a faded satin cloth. Sounds of frying came from the kitchen and these, combined with the fresh smell of laundered linen, made Amaro rub his hands in glee.
‘This way, Father, this way,’ said São Joaneira. ‘You might be in a draught over there.’ She closed the shutters on the windows and brought him a small box of sand in which to place his cigarette butts. ‘And you’ll have a little jelly, won’t you, Canon?’
‘Well, just to be companionable,’ said the Canon jovially, sitting down and unfolding his napkin.
São Joaneira, meanwhile, as she bustled about the room, was admiring the new priest, who had his head bent over his plate, drinking his soup, blowing on each spoonful. He was a good-looking man with very dark, slightly curly hair. He had an oval face, smooth olive skin, large, dark eyes and long eyelashes.
The Canon, who had not seen him since the seminary, thought him much stronger and more manly-looking.
‘You were such a skinny little lad . . .’
‘It’s the mountain air,’ said Amaro, ‘it did me good!’
Then he described his sad existence in Feirão, in Alta Beira, and the harsh winters spent alone with shepherds. The Canon held the wine bottle high above Amaro’s glass and poured it in, making the wine bubble.
‘Well, drink up, man, drink up! You never had wine like this at the seminary.’
They talked about the seminary.
‘I wonder what happened to Rabicho, the bursar,’ said the Canon.
‘And Carocho, the one who used to steal potatoes.’
They laughed and drank, caught up in the pleasure of remembering, recalling old times: the rector’s chronic catarrh, the teacher of plainsong who one day accidentally dropped the copy of Bocage’s erotic poetry that he had been carrying in his pocket.
‘How time flies!’ they said.
São Joaneira then set down on the table a deep dish of baked apples.
‘Well, I’ll have to have some of that!’ exclaimed the Canon. ‘A baked apple is a thing of beauty, and I never turn down the chance to eat one. She’s a wonderful housekeeper, our São Joaneira, oh yes, a wonderful housekeeper!’
She laughed, revealing the fillings in her two large front teeth. She went to fetch the port, then placed on the Canon’s plate, with a great show of devotion, one crumbling baked apple dusted with sugar; and clapping the Canon on the back with her soft, plump hand, she said:
‘He’s a saint, Father, an absolute saint! I owe him so much!’
‘Now, now, that’s quite enough of that,’ said the Canon, but a look of adoring contentment spread over his face. ‘Lovely drop of port!’ he added, sipping his wine. ‘Lovely!’
‘It’s the same bottle we had for Amélia’s birthday, Canon.’
‘Where is Amélia?’
‘She went over to Morenal with Dona Maria. Then, of course, they went to spend the evening with the Gansosos.’
‘São Joaneira’s a landowner too, you know,’ explained the Canon, referring to Morenal. ‘It’s almost an estate!’ And he roared with laughter, his shining eyes tenderly caressing São Joaneira’s ample body.
‘Don’t listen to him, Father, it’s just a little scrap of land,’ she said.
Then, seeing the maid leaning against the wall, racked with coughing, she said:
‘Go and cough in the other room, will you. Honestly!’
The girl left, pressing her apron to her mouth.
‘She doesn’t seem at all well,’ remarked Amaro.
Yes, the girl was very sickly. The ‘poor lamb’ was her goddaughter, an orphan, and possibly tubercular. She had taken her in out of pity . . .
‘And because the maid who was here before was carried off to the hospital, the shameless hussy . . . She got involved with a soldier you know . . .’
Father Amaro slowly lowered his eyes and, nibbling on a few crumbs, asked if there had been much illness that summer.
‘Just a bit of colic from eating too much unripe fruit,’ snorted the Canon. ‘People stuff themselves with watermelons and then get bloated with all that water . . . And fevers of course . . .’
They talked then about the intermittent fever common in the country and about the air in Leiria.
‘I’m much stronger these days,’ said Father Amaro. ‘Yes, thank God, my health is good now.’
‘And may God keep you in good health too, because you don’t know how precious it is until you lose it,’ exclaimed São Joaneira. And she launched into an account of the household’s one great misfortune: a sister, not quite right in the head, who had been paralysed for the last ten years. She was nearly sixty now and last winter she’d caught a very nasty cold and ever since then, poor dear, she’d been on the decline . . . ‘Earlier this evening, she had a coughing fit, and I really thought her time had come. But she’s quieter now.’
Sitting with the cat on her lap and monotonously rolling bread balls between her fingers, she spoke further about that ‘misfortune’, then about her Amélia, about the Gansosos, about the former precentor and about how expensive everything was . . . The Canon, replete, was finding it hard to keep his eyes open; everything in the room was gradually falling asleep, even the oil lamp was burning down.
‘Well, my friends,’ said the Canon, bestirring himself at last, ‘it’s getting late.’
Father Amaro got up and, eyes lowered, said grace.
‘Do you need a nightlight, Father?’ asked São Joaneira solicitously.
‘No, Senhora, I never use one. Goodnight!’
And he went slowly down stairs, toothpick in mouth.
São Joaneira lit the way for him with the oil lamp. On the first stair, however, Father Amaro turned and said pleasantly:
‘Of course, tomorrow is Friday and a fast day.’
‘Oh, no,’ said the Canon, who was pulling on his cloak, yawning, ‘tomorrow you’ll be having lunch with me. I’ll call for you here, then we’ll visit the precentor, go to the cathedral and take a turn about the town . . . We’ll be having squid, you know, which is a near miracle here, because we almost never get fish.’
São Joaneira reassured Father Amaro:
‘Don’t you worry, Father, I always keep the fast days.’
‘I only mention it,’ said Father Amaro, ‘because nowadays, alas, no one bothers.’
‘Oh, you’re absolutely right,’ she broke in, ‘but I put the salvation of my soul above all else.’
Downstairs the bell rang loudly.
‘That’ll be my daughter,’ said São Joaneira. ‘Go and open it, will you, Ruça!’
The door slammed and they heard voices and laughter.
‘Is that you, Amélia?’
A voice called out ‘Bye, then!’ And almost running up the stairs, her clothes slightly caught up at the front, came a lovely young woman, strong, tall and sturdy, a white shawl over her head and clutching a sprig of rosemary in her hand.
‘Come along, dear. The new parish priest is here. He arrived tonight. Come along.’
Amélia had stopped, slightly embarrassed, looking up at the stairs where Father Amaro was standing leaning on the banister. She was breathin
g hard from running; her face was flushed, and her dark, lively eyes were shining; she exuded an air of freshness and of brisk country walks.
Father Amaro continued on down, keeping close to the banister to allow her to pass, and murmured ‘Good evening’, his eyes downcast. The Canon stumped down the stairs towards her saying:
‘And what time do you call this, you scamp?’
She giggled shyly.
‘Now off to bed with you,’ he said, patting her cheek with his large, hairy hand.
She ran past him, and the Canon left, having fetched his umbrella from the downstairs living room, and having told the maid not to bother lighting the stairs for him:
‘It’s all right, I can see. Now don’t you catch cold, young lady. I’ll see you at eight then, Amaro. Be up and ready! Off you go, young lady, goodnight, and pray to Our Lady of Charity to get rid of that cough of yours.’
Father Amaro closed his bedroom door. The bed had been turned down, and the clean white sheets gave off the good smell of freshly laundered linen. Above the bed hung an old engraving of Christ crucified. Amaro opened his breviary, knelt down by the bed and made the sign of the cross; but he was tired and kept yawning; above him, too, through the ritual prayers he was mechanically reading, he began to hear the tick-tack of Amélia’s shoes and the rustle of her starched petticoats as she undressed.
III
Amaro Vieira was born in Lisbon in the house of the Marquesa de Alegros. His father was the Marquis’ servant; his mother was the personal maid and almost a friend of the Marchioness. Amaro still owned a book, Child of the Jungle, complete with crude, coloured illustrations, on the first blank page of which was written: ‘To my esteemed maid and ever-faithful friend, Joana Vieira – from the Marquesa de Alegros.’ He also owned a daguerrotype of his mother: a stout woman with thick eyebrows, a large mouth with sensually parted lips and a high colour. Amaro’s father had died of apoplexy, and his mother, who had always been so healthy, succumbed a year later to an inflammation of the larynx. Amaro was six years old at the time. He had an older sister who had lived with their grandmother in Coimbra since she was small, and an uncle, a wealthy grocer in the Estrela district of Lisbon. However, the Marchioness had grown fond of Amaro; she kept him at home with her, in a kind of tacit adoption, and she began, with great scrupulousness, to watch over his upbringing.
The Marquesa de Alegros was widowed when she was forty-three and spent most of the year living quietly on her estate in Carcavelos. She was by nature a passive, languidly benevolent person; she had her own chapel, was devoted to the priests at São Luís, and always had the interests of the Church at heart. Her two daughters, having been brought up both to fear Heaven and to care deeply about Fashion, were at once excessively devout and terribly chic, speaking with equal fervour about Christian humility and the latest clothes from Brussels. A journalist of the time said of them: ‘Every day they worry about what dress they should wear when it comes to their turn to enter Paradise.’
Adrift in Carcavelos, on that estate criss-crossed by aristocratic avenues full of the cries of peacocks, the two girls grew bored. They plunged into the occupations afforded them by Religion and Charity: they made clothes for the parish poor and embroidered antependia for the church altars. From May to October they were entirely absorbed in the work of ‘saving their souls’; they read benign devotional literature. With no theatre, no visitors and no dress shops, they welcomed the priests’ visits and gossiped about the virtues of the various saints. God was their summer extravagance.
The Marchioness had decided from the very beginning that Amaro should enter the ecclesiastical life. His thinness and his pallor seemed to cry out for a life of seclusion; he was already fond of the chapel, but what he liked most was to be amongst women, snuggled up in the warmth of their skirts, listening to them talk about saints. The Marchioness did not want to send him to school because she feared the impiety of the times and that he might get into bad company. Her own chaplain taught him Latin, and her eldest daughter, Dona Luisa, who had a hooked nose and read Chateaubriand, gave him lessons in French and geography.
Amaro was, as the servants put it, a ‘bit of a namby-pamby’. He never played games and never ran about in the sun. When he accompanied the Marchioness on an afternoon stroll along the avenues of the estate, and she took the arm of Father Liset or of Freitas, her respectful administrator, he would walk by her side, silent and shy, fiddling clammily with the linings of his trouser pockets and feeling slightly afraid of the thick groves of trees and the lush, tall grasses.
He became increasingly fearful. He could only sleep with a nightlight burning and with his bed drawn up near that of an old nursemaid. The maids feminized him; they thought him pretty and would encourage him to nestle amongst them; they would tickle him and smother him in kisses, and he would roll in their skirts, brushing against their bodies, uttering little contented shrieks. Sometimes, when the Marchioness went out, they would dress him up as a woman, all the while hooting with laughter; and he, with his languid manner and voluptuous eyes, would abandon himself to them, half-naked, his face flushed. The maids also made use of him in their intrigues with each other: Amaro became their bearer of tales. He became a tittletattler and a liar.
By the time he was eleven, he was helping with Mass, and on Saturdays, he would clean the chapel. That was his favourite day; he would shut himself up inside, place the saints on a table in the sunlight and kiss each one of them in turn with a mixture of devout tenderness and greedy delight; and he would work away all morning, humming the Santíssimo, getting rid of any moths in the Virgins’ dresses and polishing the Martyrs’ haloes.
Meanwhile, he was growing up; his pale, diminutive appearance remained unchanged; he never laughed out loud and he always had his hands in his pockets. He was constantly in and out of the maids’ rooms, rummaging about in drawers; he would finger their dirty petticoats and sniff the padding they wore in their clothes. He was also extremely lazy, and in the mornings, it was hard to wrench him from the unhealthy, lethargic somnolence in which he lay, swathed in blankets and with his arms around the pillow. He was already slightly hunched, and the servants used to call him ‘the little Father’.
One Sunday before Ash Wednesday, as she walked out onto the terrace after morning mass, the Marchioness suddenly dropped dead of an apoplexy. In her will, she left a legacy that would pay for Amaro, the son of her maidservant Joana, to enter the seminary at fifteen and become ordained. Father Liset was charged with carrying out this pious duty. Amaro was, by then, thirteen.
The Marchioness’ daughters immediately left Carcavelos and went to live in Lisbon, in the house of their paternal aunt, Dona Bárbara de Noronha. Amaro was sent to his uncle’s house, also in Lisbon. His uncle, the grocer, was a very fat man, married to the daughter of an impoverished civil servant; she had only accepted his proposal in order to escape her father’s house, where the meals were frugal, where she had to make the beds and where she was never allowed to go to the theatre. But she loathed her husband, his hairy hands, the shop, the area they lived in, as well as her very commonplace married name, Senhora Gonçalves. Her husband, though, adored her as the delight of his life, his one luxury; he loaded her with jewels and called her ‘his duchess’.
Amaro did not find in his uncle’s house the affectionate, feminine atmosphere in which he had been so warmly wrapped in Carcavelos. His aunt barely noticed him; dressed in silks, her face heavily powdered, her hair in ringlets, she spent all day reading novels and newspaper reviews of plays, waiting for the moment when Cardoso, the Teatro da Trindade’s leading man, would pass by beneath her windows, tugging at his shirt cuffs. The grocer, however, seized on Amaro as an unexpected extra pair of hands and set him to work in the shop. He made Amaro get up at five o’clock every morning, and the boy would sit at one corner of the kitchen table, trembling in his blue cloth jacket, hurriedly dipping his bread in his coffee. Both aunt and uncle hated him; his aunt called him ‘the slowcoach’ and his uncl
e called him ‘the donkey’. They begrudged him even the sliver of beef that he ate for his supper. Amaro grew even thinner and cried himself to sleep every night.
He knew that when he was fifteen, he would enter the seminary. His uncle reminded him of this every day:
‘Don’t think you’re going to spend the rest of your life here, idling your time away! As soon as you’re fifteen, it’s off to the seminary with you. I’m under no obligation to support you, you know. I don’t believe in keeping a dog and barking myself.’
And the boy began to think of the seminary as a liberation.
No one ever consulted him about his inclinations or his vocation. They simply thrust a surplice on him; his passive, easily-led nature accepted it, as he would a uniform. Indeed, he did not dislike the idea of becoming a priest. Since leaving the perpetual prayers of Carcavelos, he had retained his fear of Hell, but had lost his fervour for the saints; however, he remembered the priests who used to visit the Marchioness’ house, sleek men with very white skin, who dined with the nobility and took snuff from golden snuff boxes; and he liked the idea of a profession in which one spoke softly to women – living amongst them, gossiping, conscious of their penetrating warmth – and received gifts from them on silver trays. He remembered Father Liset and the ruby ring he wore on his little finger; and Monsignor Savedra with his fine gold-rimmed spectacles, sipping his glass of Madeira. The Marchioness’ daughters used to embroider slippers for them. One day, he had seen a bishop, a jovial, well-travelled man, who had been a priest in Bahia and had visited Rome; and there in the living room, surrounded by adoring women, all smiling beatifically, with his priestly hands that smelled of eau-de-cologne resting on the gold handle of his walking stick, he had sung for them in his beautiful voice:
Mulatto girl from Bahia
Born in Capujá . . .
A year before entering the seminary, his uncle sent him to a teacher to give him a better grounding in Latin, and thus excused him from serving behind the counter. For the first time in his life, Amaro was free. He went to school alone and wandered the streets. He saw the city, watched the infantry performing military drill, peered in at the doors of cafés, read posters advertising plays at the theatres. Above all, he began to notice women – and everything he saw filled him with deep melancholy. The saddest time was at dusk, on his way back from school, or on Sundays after he had been for a walk in the Jardim da Estrela with his uncle’s assistant. He had been given a garret room, with a tiny window looking out over the rooftops. He would lean there watching as points of light gradually lit up the city below: rising up from there, he seemed to hear a dull murmur: it was the sound of the life he did not know and which he decided must be wonderful, with cafés ablaze with light and women in silk dresses rustling along the colonnades outside the theatres; he lost himself in vague imaginings, and fragmented female forms would suddenly loom out of the black depths of night: a foot shod in a serge ankle boot and a leg encased in a very white stocking, or a plump arm with the sleeve pushed up to the shoulder . . . Down below, in the kitchen, the maid would begin singing as she washed the dishes: she was a fat girl with a lot of freckles; and then he felt like going downstairs and brushing past her, or sitting in a corner and watching her plunge the dishes into the scalding water; he remembered other women he had seen in the narrow streets, bareheaded, wearing noisy, starched skirts and down-at-heel shoes: and a kind of languor rose up from the depths of his being, a desire to embrace someone, a desire not to feel alone. He judged himself to be most unfortunate and even considered killing himself. But then his uncle would call up to him from downstairs:
The Crime of Father Amaro Page 3