The Crime of Father Amaro

by José Maria De Eça de Queirós

  Occasionally, he would rebel against this weakness and stamp his foot.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, I must be sensible! I must show some self-control!’

  He would go downstairs then and leaf through his breviary; but as soon as he heard Amélia’s voice upstairs or the tick-tack of her boots on the floorboards . . . that would be it! His devotion was snuffed out like a candle; his good resolutions fled, and his mind was once more filled by a flock of vehement, insinuating temptations, rubbing up against each other like doves in a dovecote. He was utterly enslaved, and how he suffered! He would bemoan his lost liberty then: how he longed not to see her, to be far from Leiria, in some remote village, amongst placid people and with only an old housekeeper for company, full of proverbs and ideas for saving money, and where he could stroll in his garden when the lettuces were growing green and where the cockerels crowed as the sun came up. But Amélia was calling to him from above, and the enchantment would begin again, ever more insidious.

  Supper time was the best part of the day, at once the happiest and the most dangerous of times. São Joaneira would carve, while Amaro talked and spat olive stones into the palm of his hand before lining them up on the table cloth. Ruça, whose consumption grew worse with each day that passed, served the food clumsily, constantly coughing. Amélia would sometimes spring up to look for a knife or a plate in the sideboard, and Amaro would immediately get up too, eager to help.

  ‘No, you stay where you are, Father,’ she would say. And she would place a hand on his shoulder, and their eyes would meet.

  Amaro, legs outstretched and napkin on stomach, felt utter contentment, savouring the warmth of the room; after his second glass of red Bairrada wine, he would grow expansive and make little jokes; sometimes, with a tender gleam in his eyes, he would even fleetingly touch Amélia’s foot under the table; or else, adopting a look of sincerity, he would say how he wished he had a little sister like her.

  Amélia enjoyed dipping her bread in the juices of the stew, and her mother always said to her:

  ‘I really wish you wouldn’t do that in front of Father Amaro.’

  And he would say, laughing:

  ‘But I like doing it too. You see we’re in sympathy! In tune!’

  And they both dipped their bread in the juices and, for no good reason, burst out laughing. When dusk fell, Ruça would bring in the lamp. The gleaming glasses and plates made Amaro feel even happier and even more tender; he would call São Joaneira ‘Mama’; Amélia would smile, eyes downcast, biting into the peel of her tangerine. Then coffee would be served, and Father Amaro would spend ages cracking open nuts with the back of his knife and tipping the ash from his cigarette into his saucer.

  Canon Dias always arrived around then; they would hear him lumbering up the stairs, calling out:

  ‘Permission for two to enter!’

  It was him and his dog, Trigueira.

  ‘God bless, and a very good evening to one and all!’ he would say, peering round the door.

  ‘Would you like a drop of coffee, Canon?’ São Joaneira would immediately ask.

  He would sit down, with a loud ‘Uf!’ and say: ‘Yes, why not!’ Then clapping Amaro on the shoulder and looking at São Joaneira, he would ask:

  ‘How’s our boy, then?’

  They all laughed and discussed the stories of the day. The Canon usually had a copy of the newspaper, The Popular Daily, in his pocket; Amélia was interested in the latest serial and São Joaneira in the amorous messages in the personal column.

  ‘Honestly, some people just have no shame!’ she said gleefully.

  Amaro talked about Lisbon, about the scandals of which his aunt had told him, about the noblemen he had met in the house of the Conde de Ribamar. Amélia listened with rapt attention, her elbows on the table, absentmindedly chewing on a toothpick.

  After supper, they all visited São Joaneira’s crippled sister. The nightlight would be sputtering out on the bedside table, and the poor old woman, barely visible beneath the bedclothes, and wearing a ghastly black lace cap on her head, which only made her pale face, wrinkled as a rennet apple, seem even paler, would stare at them all fearfully with her small, sad, sunken eyes.

  ‘It’s Father Amaro, Aunt Gertrudes!’ Amélia bawled in her ear. ‘He’s come to see how you are.’

  The old lady made a supreme effort and said in a plaintive voice:

  ‘Ah, it’s the boy.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, it’s the boy,’ they all said, laughing.

  And the old lady kept murmuring in amazement:

  ‘It’s the boy, it’s the boy.’

  ‘Poor soul!’ Amaro would say, ‘Poor soul! May God give you a good death!’

  And with that, they went back into the dining room where Canon Dias was sitting slumped in the old armchair upholstered in green cotton, his hands folded on his belly. He would say:

  ‘How about a bit of music, Amélia?’

  She would sit down at the piano.

  “Play “The Farewell”, Amélia,’ São Joaneira would say, taking up her knitting.

  And Amélia, lightly touching the keys, would begin to sing:

  Ah, farewell, farewell!

  Gone now are the days

  When I lived happy by your side . . .

  Her voice was filled with melancholy, and Amaro, blowing out his cigarette smoke, found himself plunged into a mood of pleasant sentimentality.

  When he went downstairs to his room at night, he was always in a state of high excitement. He sat down to read The Canticles to Jesus, a translation from the French published by the Society of the Slaves of Christ. It is a devout work, written in a clumsy, would-be lyrical style, which couches prayers in the language of lust. Jesus’s presence is invoked and demanded with the stammering impatience of wild concupiscence: ‘Oh come, beloved of my heart, adorèd body, my impatient soul desires you! I love you with a desperate passion. Burn me! Scorch me! Come! Crush me! Possess me!’ And a divine love, grotesque in its intentions, obscene in its physicality, moans and roars and declaims its way through a hundred inflamed pages in which the words ‘pleasure’, ‘delight’, ‘delirium’ and ‘ecstasy’ are repeated over and over with hysterical insistence. These frenetic monologues, breathing mystical lust, are followed by imbecilic advice from sacristans, devout notes answering tricky questions about fasting, as well as prayers for women in labour! A bishop gave his approval to this excellently produced little book, and students read it in convent schools. It is both devout and titillating; it has all the eloquence of eroticism and all the sentimentality of religious devotion; it is bound in morocco leather and is given to confessants to read; it is the canonical Spanish fly!

  Amaro would read until late, slightly troubled by those sonorous lines, each one tumescent with desire; and sometimes, in the silence, he would hear Amélia’s bed creaking upstairs: the book would slip from his hands, he would lean his head back in his armchair, close his eyes and imagine her in her corset sitting at the dressing table, loosening her plaits; or bent over, undoing her garters, so that the half-open neck of her chemise revealed her two white breasts. He stood up, clenching his teeth, feeling a brutal longing to possess her.

  He suggested that she too should read The Canticles to Jesus.

  ‘It’s a really lovely book and so devout!’ he said one evening, placing the book in her work basket.

  The following day, at breakfast, Amélia looked terribly pale and had dark circles under her eyes. She complained of insomnia and palpitations.

  ‘Did you enjoy the Canticles?’

  ‘Oh, yes, the prayers are really beautiful!’ she replied.

  She did not look at Amaro all day. She seemed sad and, sometimes, for no reason, her face would flame with blood.

  The worst times for Amaro were Mondays and Wednesdays, when João Eduardo came to spend the evenings en famille. Then Amaro did not emerge from his room until nine o’clock, and when he went up for tea, it filled him with despair to see the clerk with his cloak wr
apped about him, sitting next to Amélia.

  ‘Those two have been chattering away as usual, Father!’ São Joaneira would say.

  Amaro smiled wanly, slowly cutting up his toast, his eyes fixed on his cup.

  When João Eduardo was there, Amélia was not as cheerfully familiar with Amaro, indeed, she barely raised her eyes from her sewing; the clerk said little, but sat smoking a cigarette, and there were long silences during which one could hear the wind moaning as it blew down the street.

  ‘I pity anyone out at sea tonight!’ São Joaneira would say as she slowly knitted a sock.

  ‘Too right!’João Eduardo would say.

  His words and manners irritated Father Amaro; he detested his lack of religious feeling and his neat, black moustache. When he was there he felt trammelled by his own priestly shyness.

  ‘Play something, Amélia,’ São Joaneira would say.

  ‘I’m too tired!’ Amélia would reply, leaning back in her chair with a weary sigh.

  São Joaneira, who did not like to see ‘glum faces’, would suggest a game of three-handed brag, and Father Amaro would then take up his brass candlestick and go down to his room, feeling most unhappy.

  On such nights, he almost hated Amélia; he found her stubborn. The clerk’s inclusion in the household seemed to him scandalous: he even resolved to speak to São Joaneira and tell her that allowing her daughter’s young man into the house like that could not possibly be pleasing in the eyes of God. Then, when he was feeling more reasonable, he decided to forget all about it, he even considered leaving the house and the parish. He would imagine Amélia wearing a crown of orange blossom and João Eduardo in tails, his face all flushed, returning from the Cathedral, married . . . He saw the bridal bed with its lace-trimmed sheets . . . And all the evidence, the certainty that she loved that ‘fool of a clerk’ pierced his chest like daggers . . .

  ‘Well, let them get married, and the Devil take them . . .’

  He hated her then. He would ostentatiously lock the door as if to keep the sound of her voice and the rustle of her skirts out of the room. But shortly afterwards, he would sit as he did every night, motionless and anxious, listening with pounding heart to the noises she made upstairs as she undressed, still chattering to her mother.

  One day, Amaro had lunched at the house of Dona Maria da Assunção and then gone for a stroll along the road to Marrazes; on his return later that afternoon, he had found the street door in Rua da Misericórdia open; on the mat on the landing were Ruça’s cotton slippers.

  ‘Silly girl!’ thought Amaro. ‘She must have gone to the well and forgotten to close the door.’

  He remembered that Amélia had gone to spend the afternoon with Dona Joaquina Gansoso, on a farm near Piedade, and that São Joaneira had mentioned going to visit the Canon’s sister. He slowly closed the door and went up to the kitchen to light his lamp; the streets were wet from the morning rain and he was still wearing his rubber galoshes, so his feet made no noise on the floor; as he went past the dining room, he heard a loud cough from behind the cotton portière at the door of São Joaneira’s bedroom; surprised, he cautiously lifted one edge of the curtain and peered through the half-open door. Merciful God! São Joaneira, wearing only a white petticoat, was lacing up her corset; and there, on the edge of the bed, in his shirtsleeves, sat Canon Dias, huffing and puffing!

  Amaro went downstairs, gripping the banister; very slowly he closed the front door behind him and wandered about near the Cathedral. The sky had clouded over and small drops of rain were falling.

  ‘Good heavens,’ he kept saying in astonishment.

  He had never for a moment suspected such a thing. São Joaneira, slow, lazy São Joaneira! The Canon, his former teacher of Moral Theology! An old man, untroubled by the sexual impulses of young blood, who should be enjoying the peace that came with age, good food and ecclesiastical honours. What was a strong young man supposed to do then, one whose veins burned with the demands of abundant life? So it was true what people had whispered in the seminary, what old Father Sequeira, for fifty years the parish priest in Gralheira, used to say: ‘They’re all made of the same clay.’ They were all made of the same clay all right – they rise in the ranks, they are admitted to chapters, they run seminaries, they guide minds, they are all the while wrapped up in God as if in a state of permanent absolution, and yet meanwhile, in some back alley, there is a quiet, plump woman in whose house they can smoke cigarettes and pinch chubby arms, finding some respite from devout poses and from the austerity of their office.

  Other thoughts followed: what kind of people are they, São Joaneira and her daughter, to live off the late-blooming lubricity of an old Canon? São Joaneira had certainly been pretty, trim, desirable – once! In how many other arms had she lain before ending up, in her declining years, with that stingy, ageing lover? The two women were simply not honest! They took in guests, they lived as concubines. Amélia went alone to church, to the shops, to the farm, and who knows, with those dark eyes of hers, perhaps she had already had a lover! He mulled over particular memories, making connections: one day, she had been standing by the kitchen window, showing him a pot of columbines; they had been alone and suddenly, blushing furiously, she had placed one hand on his shoulder and looked up at him with shining, pleading eyes; on another occasion, she had brushed her breast against his arm!

  Night had fallen and with it came a fine rain. Amaro hardly felt it as he walked briskly along, obsessed by a single delicious idea that made him tremble: to become the girl’s lover, just as the Canon was the mother’s lover! He could already picture that easy life of shame: while, upstairs, plump São Joaneira showered kisses on her asthmatic Canon, Amélia would creep down to his room, clutching her white petticoats to her, a shawl about her bare shoulders . . . He would wait for her in a state of frenzy. He no longer felt for her a sentimental, almost painful love; now the wicked idea of two priests and their two concubines living cosily together filled that man bound by his vows with depraved pleasure. He almost skipped down the street. What a find that house had turned out to be!

  The rain was falling heavily now. When he entered, a light was on in the dining room. He went up.

  ‘Goodness, you’re frozen!’ Amélia said, when she shook his hand and noticed that it was cold and damp from the mist outside.

  She was sitting at the table, sewing, a cloak about her shoulders; nearby, João Eduardo was playing a game of brag with São Joaneira.

  Amaro sat down, feeling rather awkward; for some reason, the presence of the clerk brought him abruptly back to harsh reality; seeing him, her fiancé, so close to Amélia, as she sat beside the familiar oil lamp, bent over a piece of honest sewing, in her dark, high-necked dress, all the hopes that had been dancing wildly about in his imagination gradually shrank and shrivelled, one by one.

  And everything around him seemed somehow more modest: the wallpaper with its pattern of green sprigs, the cupboard full of gleaming Vista Alegre china, the charming, pot-bellied water jar, the old piano balanced precariously on its three well-turned legs, the toothpick holder they were all so fond of – a chubby Cupid holding an open umbrella bristling with toothpicks – and that quiet game of brag accompanied by the time-honoured jokes. It was all so proper!

  Then he fixed on the rolls of fat on São Joaneira’s neck as if expecting to find there traces of the Canon’s wet kisses: ‘You are definitely a cleric’s concubine.’ But Amélia? With those long, lowered eyelashes, those fresh young lips! She probably knew nothing of her mother’s licentious behaviour, or else, she knew about it and was determined to establish herself firmly in the security of a legal marriage. Amaro scrutinised her from the shadows as if to find proof of her virginal past in her placid face.

  ‘Are you a bit tired tonight, Father?’ São Joaneira asked. And to João Eduardo: ‘A trump please, Mr Head-in-the-Clouds.’

  The lovesick clerk was not concentrating.

  ‘It’s your turn,’ São Joaneira kept telling him.
r />   Then he forgot to ‘buy cards’.

  ‘Really, my boy,’ she said languidly, ‘I’ll box your ears in a minute.’

  Amélia continued sewing, head bowed; she was wearing a small black jacket with glass buttons that disguised the shape of her bust.

  And Amaro grew angry with those eyes fixed on their sewing, with that loose-fitting jacket hiding her greatest beauty. And he could not even hope! Not one bit of her would ever belong to him, not even the light in her eyes or the whiteness of those breasts. She wanted to get married and was keeping everything for the other man, for that simpering idiot, playing cards! He hated him then, with a hatred that was mingled with envy for his black moustache and his right to love . . .

  ‘Are you feeling unwell, Father?’ asked Amélia, seeing him fidgeting in his chair.

  ‘No, I’m fine,’ he said sharply.

  ‘Oh,’ she responded with a slight sigh, resuming her rapid tacking.

  The clerk, as he shuffled the cards, had begun talking about a house he wanted to rent, and the conversation turned to domestic arrangements.