It was winter then. The heavy rains and the southwesterly winds blew ceaselessly, and the harsh weather was an affliction to the poor. Starving families went to the Town Hall to beg for bread. Mr Stork came every day at midday to give her a piano lesson; his blue umbrella left a rivulet of rain down the stairs; he would be shivering with cold, but with his old man’s pride, he did his best, when he sat down, to hide his sodden shoes and their flapping soles. What he complained about most was having cold hands, which prevented him from playing properly and, in the office, from writing.
‘My fingers go all stiff,’ he would say sadly.
But after São Joaneira had paid him for the first month of lessons, the old man turned up looking very pleased and wearing a pair of thick, woollen gloves.
‘They look nice and warm, Mr Stork!’ said Amélia.
‘I bought them with your money, my dear young lady. Now I’m saving up for some woollen socks. God bless you, my dear, God bless you!’
And his eyes filled with tears. Amélia became ‘his dear little friend’. He confided in her: he would tell her about his financial problems, about how much he missed his daughter, about his glorious career at Évora Cathedral, when he would accompany the Benediction before the Archbishop himself, resplendent in a scarlet surplice.
Amélia did not forget Mr Stork’s woollen socks. She asked the precentor to give him a pair.
‘And why should I? Just for your sake?’ he said with his loud laugh.
‘Yes, for my sake.’
‘She doesn’t mean it, Precentor!’ said São Joaneira. ‘The very idea!’
‘I do mean it! You will give him a pair, won’t you?’
She threw her arms about his neck and smiled sweetly at him.
‘You siren!’ said the precentor, laughing. ‘The cheek of the girl. She’s the very devil. Oh well, there you are.’ And he gave her some money to buy the socks.
The following day, she wrapped them up and wrote on the paper in large letters: ‘To my dear friend Mr Stork, from his pupil.’
One morning, seeing him looking even paler and gaunter than usual, she said suddenly:
‘Mr Stork, how much do they pay you at the office?’
The old man smiled:
‘Well, my dear girl, how much do you think? A pittance. Four vinténs a day. But Senhor Neto helps me out . . .’
‘But is that enough, four vinténs?’
‘Of course not.’
They heard her mother approaching, and Amélia gravely resumed the air of a student and began practising her scales, looking very serious.
But after that, she so pestered and pleaded with her mother to give Mr Stork lunch and supper on the days that he taught her, that her mother finally gave in. Thus the two of them became close friends. And poor Mr Stork, emerging from cold isolation, took refuge in that unexpected friendship as if in a warm shelter. He found in her the feminine element that all old men love, the soft, caressing timbre of voice and the thoughtfulness of a nurse; he found in her the sole admirer of his music; and she was always interested in his stories of the old days, in his memories of the ancient Cathedral in Évora that he loved so much, and which made him exclaim, whenever he spoke of processions or church celebrations:
‘Ah, Évora’s the place for that!’
Amélia worked very hard at her playing; it was the best and most precious thing in her life: she could play quadrilles and ancient arias by old composers. Dona Maria da Assunção was surprised that he did not teach her Il Trovatore.
‘So lovely!’ she used to say.
But Mr Stork only knew classical music: Lully’s lovely, ingenuous arias, motifs from minuets, and elegant, pious motets from sweet monastery days.
One morning, Mr Stork found Amélia looking very pale and sad. She had been complaining of feeling unwell since the previous evening. It was a very cold, cloudy day. The old man thought it would be best if he left.
‘No, no, Mr Stork,’ she said, ‘play something nice for me.’
He took off his cape, sat down and played a simple, but very sad tune.
‘That’s beautiful!’ said Amélia, standing next to the piano.
And when the old man played the final notes, she asked:
‘What is it?’
Mr Stork told her that it was the beginning of a Meditation composed by a friend of his who was a friar.
‘Poor man,’ he said. ‘He certainly had his cross to bear.’
Amélia immediately wanted to hear his story, and sitting down on the piano stool, with her shawl wrapped about her, she said:
‘Tell me, Mr Stork, tell me!’
As a young man, his friend had fallen passionately in love with a nun; she had died in the convent as a consequence of that unfortunate love affair; and he, out of pain and longing, had become a Franciscan friar . . .
‘I can see him now . . .’
‘Was he handsome?’
‘Indeed he was. A handsome young man in the prime of life . . . One day, he came to see me while I was playing the organ: “What do you think of this?” he said. It was a piece of sheet music. It opened in the key of D minor. He started playing and playing . . . Oh, my dear, what music! But I can’t remember the rest!’
And much moved, the old man once again played the plangent notes of that Meditation in D minor.
Amélia thought about the story all day. That night she had a high fever and her sleep was filled with obscure dreams, all dominated by the figure of the Franciscan friar, standing in the shadow of the organ in Évora cathedral. She saw his deep-set eyes shining in his gaunt face, and in the distance, the pale nun, in her white habit, clinging to the black bars of the monastery, her body racked by the sorrows of love. Then, through the cloister came a line of Franciscan friars on their way to the choir. He came last of all, his shoulders stooped, his hood over his face, his sandals scuffing the stone floor, while a great bell sent the death knell ringing out in the cloudy air. Then the scene changed to a vast black sky into which a mystical wind swept up two lovingly entwined souls in monastic garb, and emanating from them, as they turned and turned, was the ineffable sound of insatiable kisses; but they dissolved like mist and, out of the vast darkness, she watched the emergence of a huge blood-red heart, pierced by swords, and the drops of blood falling from the heart filled the sky with scarlet rain.
The next day, her fever had abated. Dr Gouveia reassured São Joaneira:
‘It’s nothing to worry about, Senhora. She is fifteen, after all. Tomorrow she’ll feel a bit sick and dizzy and then that will be that. She’ll be a young woman.’
São Joaneira understood what he meant.
‘She’s a hot-blooded young thing and she’ll be a woman of strong passions!’ added the old doctor, smiling and taking a pinch of snuff.
Around this time, the precentor, having had his lunchtime bowl of soup, dropped dead of apoplexy. This was a terrible shock for São Joaneira. She spent the next two days weeping and moaning and wandering from room to room in her petticoats, her hair all dishevelled. Dona Maria da Assunção and the Gansoso sisters came to try and calm her down, to ease her pain, and Dona Josefa Dias summed up the feelings of everyone present, saying:
‘Don’t worry, my dear, you’ll soon find another protector.’
The precentor died at the beginning of September. Dona Maria da Assunção, who had a house on the beach at Vieira, suggested that São Joaneira and Amélia go with her to take the waters in order to give São Joaneira a change of scene and a change of air, good, healthy air, and thus dissipate her grief.
‘It would be a great kindness on your part,’ São Joaneira had said. ‘I keep remembering that it was here he used to put his umbrella, and that over there he used to sit watching me sew . . .’
‘Now, now, enough of that. Eat and drink, take some seawater baths, and see how you feel. He was in his sixties, you know.’
‘Ah, my dear, it’s in times of trouble that one knows who one’s friends are.’
Amélia was only fifteen, but
she was already tall and shapely. She loved Vieira! She had never seen the sea before and she never tired of sitting on the beach, fascinated by that vast expanse of gentle, blue, sunlit water. Sometimes, the slender thread of smoke from a steamship would cross the horizon; the monotonous, sighing rhythm of the waves lulled her to sleep; and all around her, as far as the eye could see, the sands glittered beneath the navy blue sky.
How well she remembered it! She would get up early in the morning. That was the time for bathing: the canvas tents were lined up along the beach; the ladies sat on deck chairs chatting, their sunshades open; the men, in white shoes, were stretched out on mats, smoking and tracing lines in the sand, while the poet Carlos Alcoforado, terribly tragic and much stared at, would walk gloomily along the seashore, all alone apart from his Newfoundland dog. Amélia would emerge from her tent, wearing her blue flannel bathing suit, a towel over her arm, and shivering with fear and cold; she furtively made the sign of the cross and then, holding the hand of the bathing assistant and slithering on the sand, she would enter the water, wading with difficulty through the greenish waves boiling about her. A wave would rush, foaming, towards her, and she would dive in, only to bob up again, breathless and excited, spitting salt water. But when she came out of the sea, she felt so pleased with herself. With a towel coiled about her head, she would drag herself back to the changing tent, panting and struggling with the weight of her sodden bathing suit, but smiling and exhilarated; and all around her friendly voices would ask:
‘What’s it like today? A bit chilly, eh?’
Then, in the afternoon, they would go for walks along the beach, collecting shells; they would watch the nets being hauled in and the sardines, seething in their thousands, gleaming on the wet sand; they would gaze on long vistas of sumptuous golden sunsets above the vast expanse of sad sea which sighed and grew dark.
Soon after she arrived, Dona Maria da Assunção had been visited by a young man, the son of a relative of hers, Senhor Brito de Alcobaça. The young man’s name was Agostinho, and he was about to start his fifth year at university as a law student. He was a slender youth, who affected a monocle, had a brown moustache and a goatee beard, and wore his long hair combed back. He could recite poetry, play the guitar, recount anecdotes about first-year students and tell jokes, and he was well-known amongst the men in Vieira because ‘he knew how to talk to women’.
‘He’s a rogue that Agostinho,’ they would say. ‘Always joking with the ladies. He’s the life and soul of every party.’
Amélia noticed right from the start that Agostinho’s eyes were always fixed on her, like the eyes of a lover. Amélia would blush scarlet and feel her breast swell beneath her dress; she admired him and found him ‘very charming’.
One day in Dona Maria da Assunção’s house, Agostinho was called upon to recite a poem.
‘But, dear ladies, I can’t do it to order, you know!’ he exclaimed jovially.
‘Now, don’t play hard to get,’ they insisted.
‘All right, then, let’s not fall out over it.’
‘What about “The Jewess”,’ suggested the tax-collector from Alcobaça.
‘“The Jewess”?’ Agostinho said, ‘No, it has to be “The Dark-haired Girl”!’ And he looked straight at Amélia. ‘It’s a poem I wrote yesterday.’
‘Fine, agreed!’
‘And I’ll accompany you,’ said a sergeant from the 6th Infantry, picking up a guitar.
A silence fell. Agostinho pushed back his hair, adjusted his monocle, rested both his hands on the back of a chair and, fixing his gaze on Amélia, he began:
‘To The Dark-haired Girl from Leiria.
Born amongst the green fields
For which Leiria is so famous,
Your face, my dear, is fresh as a rose,
And your name sounds like a mel . . .’
‘Excuse me,’ exclaimed the tax-collector, ‘but Dona Juliana seems to be unwell . . .’
This was the daughter of the clerk of the court from Alcobaça; she had grown suddenly very pale and was slowly sliding off her chair in a swoon, arms hanging loose, chin on her chest. They splashed her face with water and helped her into Amélia’s room. When they had loosened her clothing and given her some vinegar to sniff, she raised herself up on one elbow and looked around; her lips began to tremble and she burst into tears. Outside, the men in the group were saying:
‘It must be the heat.’
‘I know what kind of heat she’s suffering from,’ snorted the sergeant from the 6th Infantry.
Greatly put out, Agostinho fiddled with his moustache. Some of the ladies took Dona Juliana home. Dona Maria da Assunção and São Joaneira, well wrapped up in their shawls, went too. It was windy, a maid lit the way with a lantern, and they walked along the sand in silence.
‘This is all to your advantage, you know,’ Dona Maria da Assunção said to São Joaneira in a low voice, hanging back slightly.
‘Mine?’
‘Yes, yours. Didn’t you realise what was going on? Back in Alcobaça, Juliana was being courted by Agostinho, but here the lad only has eyes for Amélia. Juliana realised when she saw him reciting that poem to Amélia, and, of course, she fainted!’
‘Oh, really!’ said São Joaneira.
‘Don’t pooh-pooh the idea. Agostinho inherited a nice bit of money from his aunts. He’s a real catch!’
The following day, at the bathing hour, São Joaneira was getting changed in the tent and Amélia was sitting on the sand, waiting and staring out to sea.
‘Hello there. All alone?’ a voice behind her said.
It was Agostinho. Amélia said nothing and began tracing patterns in the sand with her sunshade. Agostinho sighed, smoothed out another area of sand with his foot and wrote AMÉLIA. Her face scarlet, she made as if to rub it out.
‘Now, now!’ he said. And bending down, he whispered: ‘That’s the name of “The Dark-haired Girl” you see. “Her name sounds like a melody”!’
She smiled and said:
‘Well, you made poor Juliana faint yesterday.’
‘What do I care about her? I’m sick of the silly nincumpoop. What does she expect? That’s the way I am. I can as easily say that I no longer care about her as I can that there’s a person for whom I would do anything . . . I know . . .’
‘Who is it? Is it Dona Bernarda?’
She was a hideous old woman, the widow of a colonel.
‘That’s right,’ he said, laughing. ‘That’s who I’m in love with, Dona Bernarda.’
‘Ah, so you’re in love!’ she said slowly, concentrating on drawing in the sand.
‘Tell me something, are you making fun of me?’ exclaimed Agostinho, pulling up a chair and sitting next to her.
Amélia immediately stood up.
‘Don’t you want me to sit next to you?’ he asked, offended.
‘No, I was just tired of sitting down.’
They both fell silent for a moment.
‘Have you been into the sea yet?’ she asked.
‘I have.’
‘Is it cold today?’
‘It is.’
Agostinho had grown extremely monosyllabic.
‘Are you annoyed with me?’ she asked sweetly, placing her hand on his shoulder.
Agostinho looked up and seeing her lovely, golden face all smiles, he said fiercely:
‘I’m mad about you!’
‘Sh!’ she said.
Amélia’s mother emerged breathlessly from inside the tent, a scarf around her head.
‘Cooler today, don’t you think?’ Agostinho remarked, removing his straw hat.
‘Oh, I didn’t know you were here.’
‘Just out for a stroll. About time for lunch, don’t you think?’
‘Won’t you join us?’ said São Joaneira.
Agostinho gallantly offered his arm.
And from then on he was always by Amélia’s side, bathing with her in the morning and walking by the sea in the afternoon; he would collect shells
for her and had written her another poem – ‘The Dream’. One verse was terribly passionate:
I held you against my breast
And felt you tremble, flutter, surrender . . .
She murmured these lines excitedly to herself at night, sighing and hugging the pillow.
October was coming to an end, the holidays were over. One night, Dona Maria da Assunção’s happy band and their friends went for a moonlight walk. On the way back, however, the wind got up, heavy clouds filled the sky and a few drops of rain fell. At the time, they were in a small pine forest, and the ladies ran, shrieking, for cover. Agostinho grabbed Amélia by the arm and, laughing loudly, plunged into the trees, far from the others. Then, amidst the monotonous, moaning murmur of the branches, he said to her in a low voice, his teeth clenched:
‘I’m mad about you!’
‘I know you are,’ she muttered.
But Agostinho suddenly adopted a grave tone.
‘I may have to leave tomorrow.’
‘You’re leaving?’
‘Possibly. It isn’t certain yet. I have to register at university the day after tomorrow.’
‘You’re leaving . . .’ sighed Amélia.
Then he seized her hand and squeezed it hard.
‘Write to me!’ he said.
‘And will you write to me?’ she asked.
Agostinho grasped her by the shoulders and covered her mouth with bruising, voracious kisses.
‘Stop it, stop it!’ she gasped.
Then with a soft moan, like a bird cooing, she abandoned herself to him. Suddenly Dona Joaquina Gansoso’s shrill voice called:
‘The rain’s letting up. Come on, come on!’
And Amélia, flustered, broke free and ran to huddle beneath her mother’s umbrella.
The following day, Agostinho did, in fact, leave. The first rains had arrived, and soon Amélia, her mother and Dona Maria da Assunção would also have to go back to Leiria.
The winter passed.
One evening, in São Joaneira’s house, Dona Maria da Assunção reported that, according to a letter she had received from Alcobaça, Agostinho Brito was about to marry a young woman from Vimeiro.
‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed Dona Joaquina Gansoso, ‘The lucky little madam will get his thirty contos!’
The Crime of Father Amaro Page 8