‘Bring me a light!’ shouted Amaro to Ruça.
He went down to his room, feeling desperate. He placed the candle on the sideboard; the mirror was there before him, and he saw himself in it; he felt ugly and ridiculous with his shaven face, his stiff clerical collar and, at the back, that hideous tonsure. He instinctively compared himself with the other man who had a moustache and all his hair as well as his freedom! Why am I tormenting myself? The other man could be a husband; he could give her his name, a house, motherhood; he could only give her feelings of guilt and the terror of sin! Maybe she did like him, despite his being a priest, but she wanted above all to marry; what could be more natural? She could imagine herself, poor, pretty, alone, and she longed for a legitimate, lasting arrangement that would ensure the respect of her neighbours, the consideration of shopkeepers, and all the advantages of honour.
He hated her then, he hated her prim dress and her honesty. The stupid girl did not realise that right beside her, beneath a black cassock, a devoted lover watched her, followed her, trembling and impatient. He wished she was like her mother or, worse, entirely free, wearing elegant clothes and an impudent topknot, that she showed her legs and stared brazenly at men, a woman as easy as an open door . . .
‘Good God, I’m wishing that the girl was a shameless hussy!’ he thought, slightly shocked at himself. ‘But of course, we can’t think of decent women, so we have to go to prostitutes. A fine dogma.’
He was suffocating. He opened the window. The sky was dark; the rain had stopped; only the owls nesting in the poor-house wall broke the silence.
The taciturn darkness of the sleeping town touched him. And he felt once again, rising up from the depths of his being, the love he had felt for her initially, which was pure and devoutly sentimental: he saw her pretty head, her beauty transfigured and luminous against the thick blackness of the night; and his whole soul went out to her in a swoon of adoration, as if he were praying to the Virgin Mary or saying the Ave Maria; he eagerly begged her forgiveness, fearful lest he had offended her; he said out loud: You are a saint. Forgive me! It was a sweet moment of carnal renunciation.
Then, almost frightened by the delicate sensibilities he had just discovered in himself, he set to thinking nostalgically about what a good husband he would be were he free. Loving, devoted, cheerful, always on his knees in adoration before her. How he would love their little baby son, tugging at his beard. The idea of that unobtainable bliss filled his eyes with tears. He rained down desperate curses on the stupid marchioness who had made him a priest and the bishop who had confirmed him!
‘They ruined me, ruined me!’ he said, slightly crazed.
Then he heard João Eduardo coming down the stairs and the rustle of Amélia’s skirts. He ran over to peer through the keyhole, biting his lips enviously. The door banged shut. Amélia went up the stairs, singing softly to herself. The feeling of mystical love that had pierced him for a moment, as he gazed out at the night, had passed; and he lay down seething with desire for her and for her kisses.
VII
Some days later, Father Amaro and Canon Dias had gone to lunch with the local priest in Cortegaça. He was a jolly, charitable old man who had lived in that parish for thirty years and was said to be the best cook in the diocese. All the neighbouring clergy knew about his famous game stew. It was his birthday and other guests were there too – Father Natário and Father Brito. The former was a brusque, irascible fellow, with deep-set, malicious eyes and pockmarked skin. He was known as the Ferret. He was bright and argumentative; he had a reputation as a great Latin scholar and was alleged to possess an iron logic; people said of him: ‘He’s a viper!’ He lived with two orphaned nieces to whom he claimed to be devoted; he was constantly praising their virtue and referred to them as ‘my two little roses’. Father Brito was the strongest and most stupid priest in the diocese; he had the appearance, manners and rude health of a sturdy peasant from the Beira who handles a crook well, drinks a skin of wine, happily ploughs his fields or plies the trowel when there’s any building to be done and, during hot June siestas, has his brutal way with the girls on the maize ricks. The precentor – always so apt in his mythological comparisons – used to call him ‘the Nemean Lion’.
He had an enormous head covered in woolly hair that came down as far as his eyebrows; his tanned skin had a bluish tinge to it from daily contact with the cut-throat razor; and when he gave one of his bestial laughs, he revealed very small teeth kept very white by a diet of corn bread.
When they were just about to sit down at the table, Libaninho arrived in a state of great agitation, arms flapping, beads of sweat standing out on his bald head, and exclaiming in shrill tones:
‘Oh, my dears, you must forgive me, I got held up. I dropped in at the Church of Our Lady of the Hermitage where Father Nunes was saying a votive mass. It was just what I needed and I feel so much better for it!’
Gertrudes, the priest’s tough old housekeeper, came in at that point bearing a vast tureen of chicken soup, and Libaninho skipped around her and began his usual jokes.
‘You know, Gertrudes, I know who could make you happy!’
The old woman gave a ponderous, kindly laugh that made her bosom quake.
‘Well, you’ve left it a bit late in the day . . .’
‘Ah, women are like pears – best when they’re big and ripe. That’s when they’re good and juicy!’
The priests cackled with laughter and happily settled down to eat.
The entire lunch had been cooked by the priest, and as soon as they began their soup, the compliments began to fly.
‘Wonderful. Absolute heaven. Gorgeous.’
The excellent man was scarlet with pleasure. He was, as the precentor used to say, ‘a divine artist’. He had read every cookbook and knew innumerable recipes, and he was very inventive. As he himself said, tapping his skull, a lot of his best ideas had come out of his own head! He was so absorbed in his ‘art’ that, sometimes, in his Sunday sermons, he would give to the faithful kneeling before him not God’s word but advice on ways of cooking salt cod or what spices to use in stews. And he was perfectly contented there with his vegetable patch and with old Gertrudes – who also had superb taste in food – and he had but one ambition in life: to have the bishop to lunch one day.
‘Now, Father Amaro, please, have a bit more stew! Dip a bit of bread in the sauce. That’s it! What do you think, eh?’ Then, modestly: ‘I know I shouldn’t say so, but the stew has turned out really well today.’
As Canon Dias remarked, it was good enough to tempt St Anthony in the desert! They had all removed their capes and were sitting in their cassocks, collars loosened, eating slowly, barely talking. The following day was the festival of Our Lady of Joy, so the bells in the neighbouring chapel were ringing out; and the good midday sun glittered brightly on the china, on the fat blue jugs brimming with Bairrada wine, on the saucers full of red peppers, on the cool bowls of black olives, while the good priest himself, eyes wide, bit his lip as he carefully carved white slices from the breast of the stuffed capon.
The windows opened onto the garden outside. Two large red camellia bushes grew by the window, and above the tops of the apple trees was a bright patch of intensely blue sky. A water wheel creaked in the distance, and washerwomen could be heard pounding clothes.
On the sideboard, amongst various books, a figure of Christ, with yellow skin and scarlet wounds, stood sadly on a pedestal against the wall; and beside him, cheerful saints beneath glass domes recalled the gentler side of religion: the kindly giant St Christopher crossing the river with, on his shoulder, the divine child, smiling and bouncing the world in his hand like a ball; the gentle shepherd St John dressed in the fleece of a sheep and wielding not a crook but a cross; the good gatekeeper St Peter, carrying in his clay hand the two holy keys that open the locks to Heaven! On the walls, in garish lithographs, the patriarch St Joseph was leaning on a crook from which white lilies bloomed; St George’s rearing horse trampled the b
elly of a startled dragon; and good St Anthony was standing by the side of a stream, smiling and talking to a shark. The clink of glasses and the clatter of knives filled the room and its smoke-blackened oak ceiling with unaccustomed jollity. And Libaninho, as he demolished his food, joked:
‘Gertrudes, my flower, pass me the green beans, will you? And don’t look at me like that, you minx, you make my heart pound.’
‘You old devil!’ said Gertrudes. ‘Mind what you’re saying. You should have spoken up thirty years ago, you rascal . . .’
‘Oh, Gertrudes,’ Libaninho exclaimed, rolling his eyes, ‘don’t say things like that, you send shivers down my spine!’
The priests were all choking with laughter. They had drunk two jugs of wine already, and Father Brito had unbuttoned his cassock, revealing a thick woollen vest on which the maker’s label, in blue stitching, was a cross superimposed on a heart.
A poor man came to the door mournfully repeating the pater noster, and while Gertrudes was placing half a loaf of corn bread in his bag, the priests discussed the bands of beggars currently roaming the parishes.
‘There’s such a lot of poverty!’ said the good priest. ‘Canon Dias, do have a bit of wing!’
‘A lot of poverty and a good deal of idleness too,’ said Father Natário harshly. He knew a lot of farms that were short of labourers, and yet you get these great hulks, strong as oaks, bleating out their pater nosters at people’s doors. ‘They’re nothing but a bunch of scroungers!’
‘Now, now, Father Natário,’ said the priest. ‘There is genuine poverty out there. There are families around here, a man, his wife and their five children, who sleep on the ground like pigs and eat nothing but weeds.’
‘Well, what do you expect them to eat?’ exclaimed Canon Dias, licking his fingers after having gnawed all the flesh off the capon wing. ‘Do you expect them to eat turkey? To each his own.’
The good priest settled back in his chair, smoothed his napkin over his stomach and said unctuously:
‘Poverty is, of course, pleasing to Our Lord.’
‘Exactly,’ put in Libaninho in simpering tones, ‘if there were only poor people in the world, this would be the Kingdom of Heaven right here.’
Father Amaro commented gravely:
‘And it’s a good thing that the rich have something to leave their money to, for building chapels, for example . . .’
‘Property should be in the hands of the Church,’ broke in Natário authoritatively.
Canon Dias belched loudly and added:
‘For the glory of religious worship and the propagation of the faith.’
The main cause of poverty, Natário declared pedantically, was immorality.
‘Now, don’t let’s get into that,’ said the priest, pulling a face. ‘At this very moment, in this parish alone, there are more than twelve single women all pregnant. And, gentlemen, if I speak to them, if I reprehend them, they just laugh in my face.’
‘Where I come from,’ said Father Brito, ‘around the time of the olive harvest, there was always a shortage of workers, and so migrant workers would be called in. And the shameless behaviour that went on . . .’ He told them about the migrant workers, men and women, who travelled around offering their services at various farms, about their promiscuous lives and wretched deaths. ‘You had to rule them with a rod of iron!’
‘Oh, dear, oh dear,’ said Libaninho to no one in particular, but clutching his head in his hands. ‘It is such a sinful world. It’s enough to make your hair stand on end.’
But the parish of Santa Catarina was the worst. The married women there had lost all morals.
‘They were like bitches on heat,’ said Father Natário, loosening his belt buckle.
And Father Brito told them about a case in the parish of Amor: girls of sixteen or eighteen who used to meet together in a hayloft – Silvério’s hayloft – and spend the night there with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells.
Then Father Natário, whose eyes were already glinting, his tongue sharpened, leaned back in his chair and, speaking very clearly, said:
‘Well, I don’t know what goes on in your parish, Brito, but it’s the person at the top who sets the tone . . . And I’ve heard tell that you and the adminstrator’s wife . . .’
‘That’s a lie!’ shouted Brito, turning scarlet.
‘Oh, Brito!’ everyone said, in gentle admonishment.
‘It’s a lie!’ he yelled.
‘And just between ourselves, my friends,’ said Canon Dias, lowering his voice, a mischievous, confiding light in his beady eyes, ‘she’s quite a woman too.’
‘It’s a lie!’ boomed Brito. Then, in a torrent of words: ‘I know who’s been spreading this around, it’s the owner of the Cumeada estate, and all because his administrator didn’t vote for him in the election. But sure as I’m standing here, I’ll break every bone in his body!’ His eyes were bloodshot and he was shaking his fist: ‘Every bone!’
‘It’s really not that important,’ said Natário.
‘I’ll break every bone, every one!’
‘Calm down, old chap!’ said Libaninho tenderly. ‘Get a grip on yourself.’
But reminded of the influence wielded by the estate owner, who was, at the time, the opposition candidate and had won two hundred votes, talk turned to elections. Everyone there, apart from Father Amaro, knew, as Natário put it, how ‘to stitch up votes for a deputy’. The anecdotes flowed; each of them had some triumph to recount.
At the last election, Father Natário had bought eighty votes.
‘Good heavens!’ they all said.
‘And do you know how? By a miracle!’
‘A miracle?’ they repeated, shocked.
‘Yes, gentlemen.’
He had come to an arrangement with a missionary, and on the eve of the election, people in the parish had received letters from Heaven, all signed by the Virgin Mary, in which they were asked, with promises of salvation and threats of eternal damnation, to vote for the government candidate. Clever, eh?
‘Brilliant!’ they all said.
Only Amaro seemed surprised.
‘Well,’ said their host ingenuously, ‘I wish I’d thought of that. I have to slog round from door to door.’ Then he smiled sweetly and added. ‘It’s always worth telling them that you’ll let them off the tithe, of course.’
‘And then there’s the confessional,’ said Father Natário. ‘It all goes through the women, but you can rely on them. You can get a lot of votes in the confessional.’
Father Amaro, who had been silent until then, said gravely:
‘But confession is a very serious act, and using it like that in an election . . .’
Father Natário, who, by then, had two scarlet roses in his cheeks, and whose gestures were grower ever wilder, said rather rashly:
‘You don’t mean you take confession seriously, do you?’
There was general amazement.
‘Take confession seriously?’ shouted Father Amaro, pushing back his chair, his eyes staring.
‘Now really Natário!’ they all exclaimed.
‘Listen, dear creatures! I don’t mean that confession is to be taken lightly. I’m no freemason, you know that. All I’m saying is that it’s a means of persuasion, of finding out what’s going on, of directing the flock this way or that . . . And when it’s used in the service of God, it’s a real weapon, yes, that’s what it is – absolution is a weapon!’
‘A weapon!’ they all exclaimed.
Their host protested, saying:
‘Natário, really, that’s going too far!’
Libaninho had crossed himself and was saying that his legs were positively trembling with fear.
Natário got annoyed.
‘Are you telling me,’ he thundered, ‘that each of us, just because we’re priests and because the bishop placed his hands on us three times and said the Accipe, that we each have a direct mission from God – that, when it comes to absolution, we are God!’
‘
Of course!’ they all cried. ‘Of course!’
And Canon Dias, brandishing a forkful of beans said:
‘Quorum remiseris peccata, remittuntur eis. That’s the formula, and the formula is everything, my boy . . .’
‘Confession is the very essence of the priesthood,’ said Father Amaro in scholarly fashion, fixing Natário with his gaze. ‘Read St Ignatius! Read St Thomas!’
‘Leave him to me,’ yelled Libaninho, leaping from his chair, in support of Amaro. ‘Leave him to me, my friend. Just let me at the impious swine!’
‘Gentlemen,’ bawled Natário, enraged at the opposition he had aroused, ‘just answer me this.’ And turning to Amaro, he said: ‘You, sir, for example, when you’ve had your breakfast, eaten your toast, drunk your coffee and smoked your cigarette, you then go into the confessional, perhaps worrying about some family business or lack of money or suffering from a headache or a stomach ache, do you really think that you are there, like a God, to absolve people of their sins?’
The argument took them by surprise.
Canon Dias, put down his knife and fork, raised both arms, and with comic solemnity exclaimed:
‘Hereticus est! You’re a heretic!’
‘Hereticus est indeed!’ grumbled Father Amaro.
But Gertrudes came in at that point with a large dish of rice pudding.
‘Let’s talk no more about these things,’ said their host sagely. ‘Let’s just eat our rice pudding. Gertrudes, get the bottle of port out!’
Natário, leaning on the table, was still hurling arguments at Amaro.
‘To absolve is to exercise grace. Grace is an attribute of God alone: no writer speaks of grace as being transmissible. Therefore . . .’
‘I have two objections,’ cried Amaro, in polemical pose, wagging a finger.
‘My dears,’ said their good host, greatly upset. ‘Stop arguing, you won’t enjoy your pudding.’
He poured out the port in order to calm them down, filling the glasses slowly and carefully.
‘1815!’ he said. ‘It’s not every day you drink a port like this!’
The Crime of Father Amaro Page 11