The Crime of Father Amaro

by José Maria De Eça de Queirós

  And in front of everyone, Amélia burst into tears.

  She had loved Agostinho, and she could not forget those kisses that night in the dense pine forest. It seemed to her then that she would never be happy again. Recalling the young man in the story that Mr Stork had told her, who, out of love, had sought the solitude of a monastery, she even began considering becoming a nun; she became intensely devout – an exaggerated expression of the tendencies slowly bred into her sensitive nature by her long association with priests ever since she was a little girl; she sat all day reading prayer books; she covered her bedroom walls with colour lithographs of saints; she spent long hours at church, praying to Our Lady of the Incarnation. She heard mass every day and wanted to take communion every week, and her mother’s women friends thought her ‘an exemplary young woman who could bring virtue even to the unbelieving’.

  It was at around this time that Canon Dias and his sister, Dona Josefa Dias, began to frequent São Joaneira’s house. The Canon quickly became ‘a friend of the family’. He and his dog became as regular a fixture after lunch as the precentor and his umbrella had been before.

  ‘He’s such a good friend and so very kind to me,’ São Joaneira would say. ‘But not a day goes by that I don’t remember the dear precentor!’

  The Canon’s sister had by then organised, with São Joaneira, the Association of the Servants of Our Lady of Compassion. Dona Maria da Assunção and the Gansoso sisters also joined, and São Joaneira’s house became an ecclesiastical centre. This was the high point of São Joaneira’s life; as Carlos the pharmacist said with a yawn: ‘The Cathedral has moved to Rua da Misericórdia.’ As well as the canons, the new precentor came every Friday. There were images of saints in the dining room and in the kitchen. Maids were routinely questioned on doctrine before they were employed. For a long time, it was the place where reputations were made and unmade: if it was said of a man, ‘he does not fear God’, it was one’s sacred duty to discredit him. Nominations for the posts of sexton, gravedigger and sacristan were arranged there through subtle intrigues and pious words. The members took to wearing a kind of dark purple habit, the whole house smelled of candle wax and incense, and São Joaneira even monopolized the sale of hosts.

  And so the years passed. Gradually, however, the devout group dispersed; the relationship between Canon Dias and São Joaneira was the subject of much gossip and this drove away the other Cathedral canons; as had become traditional in that diocese, fatal to all precentors, the new precentor had also died of apoplexy; the Friday games of lotto were no longer any fun. Amélia had changed greatly; she had grown; she had become a lovely twenty-two-year-old woman with velvety eyes and dewy lips, and she now found her former passion for Agostinho ‘childish nonsense’. She was still devout, but her devotion had changed; what she loved now about religion and the Church was the pomp and ceremony – the beautiful sung masses accompanied by organ music; the gold-embroidered copes that gleamed in the torchlight, the high altar resplendent with fragrant flowers, the clink of the chains bearing the silver censers, the fiery unison of hallelujahs that would burst forth from the choir. The Cathedral became her Opera House; God was her luxury. She liked to dress up for Sunday mass, to perfume herself with eau-de-cologne and kneel confidently on the carpet before the high altar, smiling up at Father Brito or at Canon Saldanha. But on certain days, as her mother put it, she would ‘shrivel up’: then her old despondency would return, making her skin grow sallow and tracing two deep lines at the corners of her mouth; at such times, she was filled by foolish, morbid longings, and her only consolation then was to stay at home and sing the Santíssimo or the gloomiest parts of the Agonia. When her mood lifted, her taste for the more cheerful rites returned, and then she regretted that the Cathedral was such a large stone structure built in a cold, Jesuitical style; she would have preferred a cosy little church, all gilded and carpeted and lined with paper and lit by gas; and with handsome priests officiating at an altar adorned like an étagère.

  She was twenty-three when she met João Eduardo, on the day of the Corpus Christi procession, in the house of the notary, Nunes Ferral, where João Eduardo worked as a clerk. Amélia, her mother and Dona Josefa Dias had gone to watch the procession from the notary’s splendid balcony that was draped with yellow damask hangings. João Eduardo was there, looking modest and serious and all dressed in black. Amélia had known him for some time, but on that afternoon, seeing the whiteness of his skin and the solemnity with which he knelt down, he seemed to her ‘an excellent young man’.

  That night, after tea, plump Nunes, in his white waistcoat, strode about the room, exclaiming enthusiastically in his high voice: ‘Take your partners! Take your partners!’ while his eldest daughter, with great brio, pounded out a French mazurka. João Eduardo went over to Amélia.

  ‘Oh, I never dance!’ she said rather abruptly.

  João Eduardo did not dance either, but went and leaned against a door, his hand in his waistcoat, his eyes fixed on Amélia. She noticed and looked away, but she felt glad; and when João Eduardo, spotting an empty chair, came and sat beside her, Amélia, flattered, immediately made room for him, drawing in the silk frills on her dress. The clerk was greatly embarrassed and fiddled nervously with his moustache. At last, Amélia turned to him:

  ‘So do you not dance either?’

  ‘Why don’t you?’ he said softly.

  She leaned back and, smoothing the folds of her dress, said: ‘Oh, I’m too old for such things, too serious.’

  ‘And do you never laugh?’ he asked with an insinuating edge to his voice.

  ‘Only if there’s something to laugh about,’ she replied, looking at him out of the corner of her eye.

  ‘Me, for example?’

  ‘You? Now you’re making fun of me. Why would I laugh at you? Really! What is there about you that would make me laugh?’ And she fluttered her black silk fan.

  He fell silent, trying to think of clever, flattering things to say.

  ‘So you really, really never dance?’

  ‘I told you “No”. You do ask a lot of questions!’

  ‘That’s because I’m interested in you.’

  ‘Oh, really!’ she said, indolently shaking her head.

  ‘Honestly I am!’

  But Dona Josefa Dias, who had been watching them, frowning, came over at that point, and João Eduardo stood up, feeling intimidated.

  At the end of the evening, when Amélia was out in the corridor putting on her cloak, João Eduardo went over to her, hat in hand, in order to say:

  ‘Make sure you wrap up warm. You don’t want to catch cold.’

  ‘So you’re still interested in me, then?’ she said, drawing her woollen shawl around her neck.

  ‘Oh, very interested, believe me.’

  Two weeks later, a travelling company performing zarzuelas came to Leiria. There was much talk about the contralto, La Gamacho. Dona Maria da Assunção had a box and she invited São Joaneira and Amélia to join her; two nights before, Amélia was still frantically making a flowery cotton dress decorated with blue silk ribbons. While La Gamacho, with her powdered face and her Valencian mantilla, rather wearily wielded a sequinned fan and sang a shrill, heartfelt malagueña, João Eduardo, in the stalls, could not take his besotted eyes off Amélia. He went up to her afterwards and offered to accompany her back to Rua da Misericórdia; São Joaneira and Dona Maria da Assunção followed behind with the notary, Nunes.

  ‘So did you like La Gamacho, Senhor João Eduardo?’

  ‘To be honest, I didn’t even notice her.’

  ‘What were you doing then?’

  ‘I was looking at you,’ he replied resolutely.

  She immediately stopped walking and said in a slightly shaken voice:

  ‘Where’s Mama got to?’

  ‘Forget about your Mama.’

  And then, João Eduardo, his face close to hers, spoke to her of his ‘great passion’. He took her hand and kept frenziedly repeating:

 
‘I love you so much. I love you so much.’

  Amélia was still much excited by the music at the theatre; the hot summer night and its vast vault glittering with stars filled her with languor. She let him hold her hand and she sighed softly.

  ‘Do you love me too?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said and passionately squeezed João Eduardo’s fingers.

  But it was, as she put it later, ‘probably just infatuation’, for, days later, when she had got to know João Eduardo better and when she could talk freely with him, she realised that she was ‘not at all drawn to him’. She respected and liked him, and thought him a nice young man; he would make a good husband, but inside her, her heart still slept.

  The clerk, however, began visiting the house in Rua da Misericórdia almost every night. São Joaneira admired his ‘determination’ and his honesty, but Amélia grew ‘cold’. She would wait for him to pass by her window in the mornings on his way to work, and would make eyes at him in the evening, but that was merely so as to keep him happy, in order to have in her empty existence some small amorous interest.

  One day, João Eduardo spoke to her mother about marriage.

  ‘It’s up to Amélia,’ said São Joaneira, ‘but as far as I’m concerned . . .’

  And when her mother consulted her, Amélia replied ambiguously:

  ‘Perhaps later, but not just yet, we’ll see.’

  It was tacitly agreed that they would wait until he had obtained the post of amanuensis in the district government offices, a post generously promised to him by Dr Godinho, the fearsome Dr Godinho!

  And this had been Amélia’s life until Amaro arrived, and during the night, these memories came to her in fragments, like scraps of cloud blown along and scattered by the wind. It was late by the time she fell asleep, and when she woke, the sun was already high, and she was still yawning and stretching when she heard Ruça say in the dining room:

  ‘Father Amaro is just on his way out with the Canon; they’re going to the Cathedral.’

  Amélia leaped out of bed, ran to the window in her nightdress, raised one corner of the curtain and peeped out. It was a splendid morning, and Father Amaro was standing talking to the Canon in the middle of the road, blowing his nose on a white handkerchief and looking very elegant in his fine cloth cassock.

  VI

  Right from those first few days, Amaro felt happy, swathed as he was in comfort. São Joaneira took almost maternal care over his underwear, she made him little treats to eat, and his room was always ‘bright as a new pin!’ Amélia treated him with the piquant familiarity of a pretty relative: ‘They really hit it off,’ as Dona Maria da Assunção said delightedly. The days slipped by easily for Amaro, with good food, a soft mattress and the sweet company of women. The weather was so mild that the lime trees in the garden of the bishop’s palace had flowered already: ‘Almost a miracle!’ people said. The precentor, who stood in his nightshirt looking out at them every morning from his bedroom window, recited verses from Virgil’s Eclogues. For Amaro, after the prolonged gloom of his uncle’s house in Lisbon, the discomforts of the seminary and the harsh winter in Gralheira, life in Leiria was like entering a warm, dry house after having spent all night tramping the mountains amidst thunder and rain and finding a cheerful, crackling fire and a bowl of delicious, steaming soup.

  Well wrapped up in a big cloak, thick gloves and woollen socks beneath his tall, red-shanked boots, he would set out early to say morning mass at the Cathedral. The mornings were cold, and at that hour, only a few devout women, dark shawls over their heads, would be knelt in prayer here and there near the gleaming white altar.

  He would go straight to the sacristy and hurriedly pull on his vestments, stamping his feet on the flagstones, while the sluggardly sacristan told him the news of the day.

  Then, with the chalice in his hands and eyes lowered, he went into the church; there, having cursorily genuflected before the Holy Sacrament, he walked slowly up to the altar, where the two wax candles burned palely in the bright light of morning, then he put his hands together and, head bowed, murmured:

  ‘Introibo ad altare Dei.’

  ‘Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam,’ the sacristan would respond, carefully pronouncing each syllable of the Latin.

  Amaro was no longer filled by the tender devotion he had felt when he first celebrated mass. ‘I’m used to it now,’ he said. And since he took supper early and, at that hour, had still had no breakfast, he was beginning to feel hungry and would deliver the holy readings of the Epistle and of the Gospel in a rapid, monotone mumble. The sacristan stood behind him, arms folded, slowly stroking his thick, neatly trimmed beard and casting sideways glances at Casimira França, the cathedral carpenter’s devout wife, whom he had had his eye on since Easter. Broad swathes of sunlight poured in through the side windows. The vague sickly smell of dried rushes filled the air.

  Having gabbled his way through the Offertory, Amaro cleansed the chalice with the purificator; the sacristan, slightly bowed, fetched the hosts and presented them to him, and Amaro could smell the rancid hair oil that gleamed on the sacristan’s head. At that point in the mass, Amaro, out of mystical habit, was always filled by genuine emotion. Arms outstretched, he would turn to the congregation and loudly utter the universal exhortation to prayer: Orate, fratres! And the old women leaning against the stone pillars, with their idiotic faces and drooling mouths, would clasp their long, black rosaries more tightly to their chests. Then the sacristan would kneel behind him, lightly grasping the hem of Amaro’s chasuble in one hand and holding up the bell in the other. Amaro would consecrate the wine and would take the Host in his hands – Hoc est enim corpus meum! – lifting up his arms to Christ and his blood-red wounds where He hung on the dark rosewood cross; the bell would toll slowly; cupped hands would beat breasts; and in the silence, they could hear the ox carts jolting by over the broad flagstones outside the Cathedral, on their way back from market.

  ‘Ite missa est!’ Amaro would say at last.

  ‘Deo gratias!’ the sacristan would answer with a loud sigh, relieved that his duties were over.

  And when, having kissed the altar, Amaro came down the steps to give the blessing, he was already thinking gleefully of breakfast in São Joaneira’s bright dining room, with some of her excellent toast. At that hour, Amélia would be waiting for him with her hair loose over her dressing gown, and the good smell of almond soap on her fresh skin.

  Half-way through the day, Amaro would go up to the dining room where São Joaneira and Amélia would be sewing. He was bored downstairs, he would say, and had just come up for a chat. São Joaneira would be sitting on a small chair by the window, her spectacles perched on the end of her nose while she sewed and with the cat snuggled up amongst the folds of her woollen skirt. Amélia would be working at the table, with the sewing basket beside her. When she had her head bent over her work, he could see the straight, clean parting in her hair, almost drowned by her abundant locks; her large gold earrings, in the form of droplets of wax, trembled and cast a tiny, flickering, tremulous shadow on her fine throat; the faint bistre shadows beneath her eyes shaded smoothly into the delicate golden brown of her skin, beneath which beat her strong blood; and her full breast slowly rose and fell. Sometimes, she would stick her needle in the cloth, stretch languidly and smile wearily. Then Amaro would say jokingly:

  ‘Come on, lazybones! A fine housewife you’d make!’

  She would laugh then and they would talk. São Joaneira knew all the interesting news of the day: the major had dismissed his maid; someone had offered Carlos the postman ten moedas for his pig . . . Ruça would occasionally go to the cupboard for a plate or a spoon: then they would talk about the price of food and about what there was for supper. São Joaneira would remove her spectacles, cross her legs and, bouncing one slipper-shod foot up and down, would tell him the menu:

  ‘We’ve got chickpeas today. I don’t know if you like chickpeas, but I thought just for a change . . .’
/>   Amaro liked everything and even discovered that he and Amélia shared certain tastes in food.

  Then, growing bolder, he would rummage in the workbasket. One day, he had found a letter; he asked her who her lover was, but she replied emphatically as she continued her backstitching:

  ‘Oh, no one loves me, Father . . .’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say that,’ he said, but then stopped, his face flushed, and he gave an embarrassed cough.

  Sometimes Amélia would treat him with extreme familiarity; one day, she even asked him to hold a skein of silk thread for her to wind.

  ‘Honestly, Father!’ exclaimed São Joaneira. ‘What cheek! Give some people an inch . . .’

  But Amaro made himself ready, laughing contentedly: he was at their disposal, even as a holder of skeins! They just had to tell him what to do. And the two women laughed out loud, charmed by his manners, which they found ‘almost touching’. Sometimes Amélia would put down her sewing and take the cat on her lap, and Amaro would go over to her and run his hand down the cat’s spine, so that the cat arched its back and purred with pleasure.

  ‘Do you like that?’ she would say to the cat, her face all flushed and a tender light in her eyes.

  And Amaro would murmur in a slightly troubled voice:

  ‘There kitty, kitty, kitty!’

  Then São Joaneira would get up to give her idiot sister her medicine or to go into the kitchen. And they would be left alone; they did not speak, but their eyes held a long, silent dialogue that filled them both with the same sleepy languor. Amélia would softly sing ‘The Farewell!’ or ‘The Unbeliever’. Amaro would light a cigarette and listen, tapping his foot.

  ‘That’s really lovely,’ he would say.

  Amélia would sing more loudly, sewing furiously; and at intervals, she would draw herself up and study her tacking or her backstitching, smoothing it out with one long, polished fingernail.

  Amaro thought she had beautiful nails, because everything about her seemed to him perfection: he liked the colours of her dresses, he liked her walk, the way she ran her fingers through her hair, and he even gazed tenderly at the white petticoats that she hung out to dry at her bedroom window, suspended from a cane. He had never lived in such intimacy with a woman before. When he noticed her bedroom door ajar, he would cast greedy glances inside, as if trying to catch glimpses of paradise: a skirt hanging up, a discarded stocking or a garter left on top of the trunk were all like revelations of nakedness that made him turn pale and clench his teeth. And he could never get enough of seeing her talk or laugh or walk along in her starched skirts that brushed against the narrow door frames. By her side, feeling weak and languid, he forgot he was a priest: the Priesthood, God, the Cathedral, Sins were left far down below somewhere; he could see them very faintly from the height of his rapture, as from the top of a hill one can see the houses disappearing into the valley mists; and he thought only how infinitely sweet it would be to kiss her white throat or to nibble the lobe of her ear.