The Crime of Father Amaro

by José Maria De Eça de Queirós

  A farm labourer, his face as yellow as cider, was walking slowly along with one arm held to his chest, and he stopped João Eduardo to ask where Dr Gouveia lived.

  ‘First street on the left, the green door by the street lamp,’ said João Eduardo.

  And a sudden immense hope illuminated his soul: Dr Gouveia was the man who could save him! The doctor was his friend; he had treated him as such ever since he had cured him of pneumonia three years before; he had heartily approved of João Eduardo’s marriage to Amélia; only a few weeks ago, he had stopped him in the square to ask him: ‘So, when are you going to make that young woman happy, eh?’ And he was feared and respected in Rua da Misericórdia! They and their friends were all his patients and, while scandalised by his lack of religion, they were humbly dependent on his knowledge to treat their various aches and pains and nervous attacks and to dole out medicine. And Dr Gouveia, who was the declared enemy of the priesthood, was sure to be angered by their plot against him; and João Eduardo could already imagine himself following Dr Gouveia into São Joaneira’s house and hearing the doctor rebuke São Joaneira, humiliate Father Amaro and convince the old ladies of their mistake; and then his happiness, unshakeable now, would be restored.

  ‘Is the doctor in?’ he asked almost gaily of the maid who was hanging out clothes in the courtyard.

  ‘He’s in his surgery, Senhor Joãozinho. Go straight in.’

  On market days, there were always a lot of patients up from the country. But at that hour – when the folk from the neighbouring parishes gathered together in the taverns – the only people waiting in the low-ceilinged room furnished with benches, pots of marjoram and a large engraving of Queen Victoria’s coronation were an old man, a woman with a baby and the man with his arm held to his chest. Despite the bright sunlight streaming in from the courtyard and the fresh green leaves of the lime tree brushing against the window, the room seemed terribly sad, as if the walls, the benches and even the marjoram plants were saturated with the melancholy of all the illnesses that had passed through there. João Eduardo went in and sat down in one corner.

  It was gone midday, and the woman kept complaining about how long she had been waiting: she was from a remote parish, had left her sister at the market, and the doctor had been closeted with two other women for a whole hour now. Every few minutes the child would start crying and the woman would bounce her up and down in her arms, until, at last, they both fell silent; the old man rolled up one trouser leg and gazed with satisfaction at the wound on his shin which was bandaged with rags; the other man kept yawning disconsolately and this only made his long, sallow face seem even more lugubrious. The waiting left the clerk feeling enervated and weak; he gradually began to wonder whether it was right to bother Dr Gouveia; he had prepared his story carefully, but it now seemed to him unlikely to be of sufficient interest to the doctor. His despondency grew and was made worse by the bored faces of the other patients. Perhaps life really was a sad affair, filled only with misery, treachery, affliction and illness. He got to his feet and, hands behind his back, stood gloomily studying Queen Victoria’s coronation.

  Occasionally the woman with the baby would half-open the green baize door that led into the doctor’s room to see if the two ladies were still in there. They were, and their slow voices could be heard droning on.

  ‘You could waste the whole day in here!’ grumbled the old man.

  He too had tethered his horse outside the tavern and left his daughter in the market square . . . And then there would be the long wait at the pharmacy afterwards! And it was three leagues back to his parish! Being ill is fine if you’re rich and have plenty of time on your hands.

  The idea of illness and of the loneliness it brings made losing Amélia seem even more unbearable to João Eduardo. If ever he fell ill, he would have to go to the hospital. That wretched priest had taken everything from him – fiancée, happiness, family comforts, sweet companions.

  At last, the two ladies were heard leaving. The woman with the child picked up her basket and hurried in. The old man moved to the bench nearest the door and said with satisfaction:

  ‘My turn next!’

  ‘Will you be long with the doctor?’ João Eduardo asked.

  ‘No, I’ve just got to pick up a prescription.’

  He immediately launched into the story of his wound: a wooden beam had fallen on him; he had thought no more about it, but then the wound had turned septic, and now there he was with only one good leg and in terrible pain.

  ‘What about you, have you got anything seriously wrong with you?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I’m not ill,’ said João Eduardo, ‘I have some business with the doctor.’

  The other two men eyed him enviously.

  At last it was the turn of the old man and then of the sallow-faced fellow holding his arm to his chest. Left alone, João Eduardo paced nervously up and down the room. It now seemed to him extremely difficult simply to walk in unannounced and ask the doctor for his protection. What right did he have? He considered complaining first of pains in the chest or of some stomach upset, and then, by the by, telling him of his misfortunes . . .

  But just then the door opened, and there before him stood the doctor, drawing on a pair of woollen gloves, his long, grey beard spilling over his black velvet jacket, his broad-brimmed hat on his head.

  ‘Ah, it’s you, young man! Has something happened at São Joaneira’s house?’

  João Eduardo blushed.

  ‘No, Doctor, I wanted to talk to you in private.’

  He followed him into his office. Dr Gouveia’s famously dusty office, with its chaos of books, its panoply of Indian arrows and its two stuffed storks had the reputation in Leiria of being ‘an alchemist’s cell’.

  The doctor took out his watch.

  ‘A quarter to two. You’ll have to be brief.’

  The look on the clerk’s face made it clear that he would have great difficulty in condensing an extremely complex narrative.

  ‘All right,’ said the doctor, ‘just take your time. There’s nothing harder than being clear and brief; you need genius to achieve that. Now, what’s the matter?’

  João Eduardo then gave a garbled account of events, emphasising the priest’s treachery and Amélia’s innocence.

  The doctor listened, stroking his beard.

  ‘So you and the priest,’ he said, ‘both want the girl. Since he is more intelligent and more determined than you, he has got her. It’s the law of nature; the strongest one pounces and eliminates the weaker one; he gets both the woman and the prey.’

  João Eduardo thought this was a joke. He said in a tremulous voice:

  ‘You’re making fun of me, Doctor, when my heart has been cut to pieces.’

  ‘No, I’m not,’ said the doctor kindly. ‘I’m merely philosophising, not making fun . . . But what do you want me to do about it?’

  It was exactly what Dr Godinho had said to him, only more pompously.

  ‘I’m sure that if you spoke to her . . .’

  The doctor smiled.

  ‘I can prescribe this or that medicine to the girl, but not this or that man. Do you expect me to go and say: “Miss Amélia, you must choose João Eduardo”? Do you expect me to go and say to the priest, a scoundrel I have never even met: “Please desist from seducing this young woman”?’

  ‘But they slandered me, Doctor, they described me as a man of bad habits, a rogue . . .’

  ‘No, they didn’t slander you. In the eyes of the priest and of those ladies who spend the evenings playing lotto in Rua da Misericórdia, you are the rogue; a Christian who writes articles attacking parish priests and canons, people who are vital to them in their attempts to communicate with God and to save their souls, is a rogue. They didn’t slander you, my friend.’

  ‘But, Doctor . . .’

  ‘Listen. In obeying the instructions given her by Father whoever-he-is and getting rid of you, the girl is merely behaving like a good Catholic. That’s my view. The ent
ire life of a good Catholic, her thoughts, her ideas, her feelings, her words, how she spends her days and nights, her relationships with her family and her neighbours, what she has for supper, her clothes and her amusements, are all regulated by ecclesiastical authority (parish priest, bishop or canon), approved or censured by her confessor, under the advice and guidance of her spiritual director. A good Catholic, like your Amélia, has no life of her own: she has no reason, no desire, no will, no feelings of her own; her priest thinks, wants, decides and feels for her. In this world, her sole task, which is at once her sole right and her sole duty, is to accept that guidance, to accept it without argument and to obey him regardless of the consequences; if she disagrees with his ideas, it means that her ideas are false; if she wounds his feelings, then her feelings are to blame. Given these facts, if the priest says to the young woman that she should not marry or even talk to you, she proves, by obeying him, that she is a good Catholic, a true devotee, logically following the moral rule she has chosen. And that is that; and forgive the sermon.’

  João Eduardo listened with mingled respect and horror to these words, lent even greater authority by the doctor’s placid face and fine grey beard. It seemed to him almost impossible now to win back Amélia, if it was true that she did belong so absolutely, with all her soul and all her senses, to the priest who confessed her. But why then was he considered to be a bad husband?

  ‘I could understand it,’ he said, ‘if I was a man of bad habits, Doctor. But I’m well-behaved; I work hard; I don’t frequent taverns or lead a dissolute life; I don’t drink, I don’t gamble; I spend my evenings at Rua da Misericórdia or at home doing work for the office . . .’

  ‘My dear boy, you might well possess all the social virtues, but, according to the religion of our country, any values that are not Catholic values are by definition useless and pernicious. Being hard-working, chaste, honest, fair, truthful are great virtues, but to the priests and to the Church they don’t count. You could be the very model of kindness, but if you didn’t go to mass, didn’t fast or go to confession, didn’t doff your hat to the priest, you would be considered a rogue. Other people far greater than you, whose souls were perfect and who lived impeccable lives, have been judged to be out-and-out scoundrels because they were not baptised. You’ve probably heard of Plato, Socrates, Cato, etc. They were all men famous for their virtue. Well, a certain Bossuet, who is a great authority on doctrine, said that Hell is full of such men’s virtues. This proves that Catholic morality is different from natural morality or social morality. But these are difficult things for you to understand. Shall I give you an example? According to Catholic doctrine, I am one of the most shameless men to walk the streets of Leiria; my neighbour Peixoto, who beat his wife to death and is in the process of doing the same to his ten-year-old daughter, is held by the clergy to be an excellent man because he fulfills his duties as a Catholic and plays the bass tuba at sung masses. That, my friend, is the way things are. And it must be good, because thousands of respectable people think it is, and the State thinks so and spends a fortune on keeping things the way they are, and forces us to respect the way things are, and I myself pay 1,200 réis a year so that things remain the same. You, of course, pay less.’

  ‘I pay seven vinténs, Doctor.’

  ‘But you at least go to the festivals, hear the music and the sermons, you get something in return for your seven vinténs. My 1,200 réis is totally lost; my only consolation is that the money is going towards maintaining the splendour of the Church, the same Church that considers me an outlaw while I’m alive and has a first-class Hell ready for me when I die. Anyway, I think we’ve talked enough. What else can I say?’

  João Eduardo was utterly downcast. Listening to the doctor, it seemed to him, more than ever, that if a man of such wise words and such a superfluity of ideas were to take an interest in him, then the intrigue would easily be undone and his happiness and his place in Rua da Misericórdia recovered for ever.

  ‘You can’t help me, then?’ he said gloomily.

  ‘I could cure you of another bout of pneumonia. Have you got any pneumonia for me to cure? No? Well, then . . .’

  João Eduardo sighed:

  ‘But I’m a victim, doctor!’

  ‘No, you’re wrong. There should be no victims, except when it comes to preventing tyrants from seizing power,’ said the doctor, putting on his broad-brimmed hat again.

  ‘But in the end,’ João Eduardo exclaimed, clinging to the doctor with the desperation of a drowning man, ‘in the end, what that scoundrel of a priest wants, regardless of what pretexts he invents, is the girl. If she was an ugly old woman, he wouldn’t care how impious I was. What he wants is the girl!’

  The doctor shrugged.

  ‘It’s only natural, poor thing,’ he said, grasping the door handle. ‘What do you expect? As regards women, he has the same passions and organs as any other man; as a confessor, he has the importance of a God. He will obviously use that importance to satisfy those passions, and the fact that he has to disguise the fact with the appearances and pretexts of the divine office is, well, natural . . .’

  When João Eduardo saw him opening the door and saw the hope that had brought him there about to vanish, he said angrily, thrashing the air with his hat:

  ‘Damn all priests! I’ve always hated the whole lot of them! I’d like to see them wiped from the face of the Earth, Doctor!’

  ‘That’s just more foolishness,’ said the doctor, resigned to listening further and so pausing in the doorway. ‘Listen. Do you believe in God? In God in his Heaven, in the God who is up there in Heaven and who rules from on high over justice and truth?’

  Surprised, João Eduardo said:

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘And in original sin?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And in a life hereafter and in redemption, etc.?’

  ‘I was brought up in those beliefs . . .’

  ‘So why do you want to wipe priests from the face of the Earth? You should, on the contrary, feel that there are too few of them. As far as I can see, you are a rationalist liberal at the outer limits of the Constitution . . . But if you believe in God in Heaven, who guides us from above, and in original sin and in the hereafter, you need a class of priests who will explain doctrine and God-revealed morality to you, who will help you to cleanse yourself of that original stain and prepare you for your place in Paradise! You need priests. And it strikes me as a terrible lack of logic on your part to discredit them in the newspapers . . .’

  Astonished, João Eduardo could only stammer:

  ‘But, Doctor . . . Forgive me, Doctor, but you . . .’

  ‘Speak up, man! I what?’

  ‘You have no need for priests in the world.’

  ‘Nor in the next. I have no need for priests in the world because I have no need for a God in his Heaven, which means, my boy, that I have my own God inside me, a principle that guides my actions and my judgements: common conscience. Perhaps you don’t quite understand. I’m expounding subversive doctrines here . . . And now I really must go, it’s three o’clock . . .’

  And he showed him his watch.

  At the door into the courtyard, João Eduardo said again:

  ‘Forgive me, Doctor . . .’

  ‘That’s quite all right. And forget all about Rua da Misericórdia.’

  João Eduardo said passionately:

  ‘That’s easy enough to say, Doctor, but when passion is gnawing away at you inside . . .’

  ‘Ah,’ said the doctor, ‘passion is a great and fine thing! Love is one of the great forces of civilisation. Used well it can build a world and would be enough for us to carry out a moral revolution.’ Then changing his tone: ‘But listen. Love is not always passion and it does not always have its seat in the heart. The heart is the term we ordinarily use, out of decency, to designate another organ. And in matters of sentiment that is usually the only organ involved. And in those cases, the unhappiness does not last. Goodbye, and I ver
y much hope that you fall into the latter category.’

  XIV

  João Eduardo walked down the road, rolling a cigarette. He had been left weak and drained by his night of despair, by that morning spent in futile wanderings, and by his conversations with Dr Godinho and Dr Gouveia.

  ‘It’s over,’ he was thinking. ‘I can do nothing more. I’ll just have to accept it.’

  His soul was exhausted by all that passion, hope and anger. He would like to go and lie down in some isolated place, far from lawyers, women and priests, and to sleep for months. But since it was already after three, he hurried to the office. He would probably be given a lecture for arriving so late. Ah, but his was a sad life!

  He had turned the corner into the main square, when just outside Osório’s eating house, he bumped into a young man wearing a light-coloured jacket edged with black ribbon; the young man’s moustache was so dark that, against his extremely pale skin, it looked false.

  ‘Hello, João Eduardo! How are things?’

  It was Gustavo, the typesetter from The District Voice, who had gone to Lisbon two months before. According to Agostinho, he was an intelligent lad and very learned, ‘but with some alarming ideas’. He would sometimes write articles on foreign affairs, full of resonant, poetic phrases, cursing Napoleon III, the Czar and all oppressors of the people, bemoaning the enslavement of Poland and the misery of the proletariat. The friendship between himself and João Eduardo had grown out of conversations they had had on religion, in which both gave vent to their hatred of the clergy and their admiration for Jesus Christ. Events in Spain had so inspired him that he had even had hopes of joining the International; and his desire to live amongst the workers, where there would be associations, speeches and fraternity, had taken him to Lisbon. He had found a good job there and good comrades. But since he had to care for his infirm old mother and it was cheaper if they lived together, he had returned to Leiria. Besides, with the elections looming, The District Voice was doing so well that the three typesetters were to be given a wage increase.