The Crime of Father Amaro

by José Maria De Eça de Queirós

  ‘So here I am back with Agostinho.’

  He had been just about to have lunch and he immediately invited João Eduardo to join him. For heaven’s sake, the world wouldn’t end if he missed one day at the office.

  João Eduardo remembered then that he had not in fact eaten anything since the previous evening. Perhaps it was lack of food that had left him in this stupefied, easily discouraged state. He accepted at once, glad, after all the emotions and exhaustions of the morning, to sit down on a tavern bench with a full plate in front of him and with a friend who shared his antipathies. Besides, the buffetings he had suffered had created in him a real craving for sympathy, and so he said warmly:

  ‘It’s good to see you, man. I couldn’t have met you at a better moment. The world’s such a terrible place that if it wasn’t for the times spent with your friends, life wouldn’t be worth living.’

  Gustavo was taken aback by these unprecedented words from the normally reticent João Eduardo.

  ‘Why, what’s wrong? Aren’t things going well? Not getting on with that beast Nunes, eh?’ he asked.

  ‘No, just suffering from a bit of spleen.’

  ‘Spleen’s an English phenomenon! Oh, but you should have seen Taborda in A London Love! Anyway, forget about spleen! What you need is a bit of ballast inside you and plenty of wine to wash it down with!’

  He took João Eduardo’s arm and guided him into the tavern.

  ‘Hello there, Osório! Fraternal greetings!’

  Osório, the owner of the tavern, was leaning on the bar; he was a plump, contented personage, with a fat, mischievous face and with his shirtsleeves rolled up almost to his shoulders to reveal very white, bare arms; he immediately expressed his pleasure at seeing Gustavo back in Leiria. He thought he looked thinner. It must be the bad water in Lisbon and the additives in the wines . . . Now what could he do for the two gentlemen?

  Gustavo planted himself before the bar, his hat pushed back on his head, and prepared to make the joke that had so amused him in Lisbon:

  ‘Osório, bring us a king’s liver and some priest’s kidneys, grilled!’

  Quick as a flash, as he wiped down the zinc counter with a rag, Osório said:

  ‘I’m afraid we don’t have that here, Senhor Gustavo, that’s a Lisbon delicacy.’

  ‘Well, I must say you’re very backward! I had that for breakfast every day in Lisbon. Never mind, just bring us some liver – well done – and some potatoes!’

  ‘You will be served like friends of the house.’

  They sat down at the ‘table for the timid’, between two pine partitions closed off by a cotton curtain. Osório, who thought Gustavo ‘a clever, serious-minded lad’, brought them a bottle of red wine and a dish of olives and, as he polished the glasses on his filthy apron, he said:

  ‘So what news from the capital, Senhor Gustavo? How are things there?’

  Gustavo immediately grew grave, smoothed his hair with his hand and uttered a few enigmatic phrases:

  ‘Very unstable . . . A lot of charlatans in politics . . . The working classes are beginning to organise . . . A lack of unity at the moment . . . They’re just waiting to see how things turn out in Spain . . . It could all turn very nasty . . . Everything depends on Spain . . .’

  But Osório, who had saved a bit of money and bought a small farm, had a horror of upheavals. What the country needed was peace. He was particularly against anything that depended on the Spanish. Surely they knew the saying: from Spain expect neither a good wind nor a good wedding.

  ‘We are all brothers!’ exclaimed Gustavo. ‘When it comes to bringing down Bourbons and emperors, political cliques and the nobility, there are no Spanish or Portuguese, we are all brothers! Fraternity, Osório!’

  ‘Well, you’d better drink its health, then, and drink heartily, because that’s what makes the world go round,’ said Osório placidly, heaving his great bulk out of the cubicle.

  ‘Elephant!’ snorted Gustavo, shocked at Osório’s indifference to the Brotherhood of the People. But what could you expect from a landowner and an election agent?

  He hummed a bit of the Marseillaise, filled their glasses with wine, pouring it from on high, and asked what João Eduardo had been up to. Didn’t he go to The District Voice any more? According to Agostinho, there was no dragging him away now from Rua da Misericórdia.

  ‘So when’s this wedding, then?’

  João Eduardo blushed and said vaguely:

  ‘We haven’t quite decided yet . . . There have been a few problems . . .’ And he added with a wry smile: ‘We’ve had a couple of spats.’

  ‘Over nothing, I suppose,’ said Gustavo, with a shrug expressive of his revolutionary scorn for such sentimental frivolities.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ said João Eduardo. ‘I just know that it’s most upsetting. They bring a man very low, Gustavo.’

  He fell silent, biting his lip, to emphasise the emotions shaking him.

  But Gustavo found anything to do with women ridiculous. It wasn’t the time for love . . . The man of the people, the working man who clung on to some woman’s skirts, was of no use to anyone. He was a traitor! This was no time to be thinking about love affairs, but about restoring freedom to the people, taking work out of the claws of the wealthy, putting an end to monopolies and working towards a republic! It wasn’t self-pity that was needed, but action, strength! And he emphasised the final word, brandishing his scrawny, tubercular wrists over the large plate of fried liver that the waiter had just brought.

  Listening to him, João Eduardo remembered the days when Gustavo had been madly in love with Júlia from the bakery and would turn up at work with eyes as red as coals and fill the place with terrible, thunderous sighs. Every sigh would be greeted by his colleagues with a mocking clearing of the throat. One day, Gustavo and Medeiros even came to blows in the courtyard.

  ‘Look who’s talking,’ João Eduardo said at last. ‘You’re just like everyone else. You’re full of talk, but when it’s your turn, you’re just the same as all of us.’

  Gustavo was shocked – ever since he had started frequenting the Alcântara Democratic Club in Lisbon and helped to draw up a manifesto for their brothers on strike at the cigarette factory, he considered himself to be devoted exclusively to the service of the Proletariat and the Republic. Him? Like all the others? Waste his time on women?

  ‘I’m afraid you’re very much mistaken,’ he said and retreated into a shocked silence, furiously cutting up the fried liver on his plate.

  João Eduardo feared that he might have offended him.

  ‘Come on, Gustavo, be reasonable. A man can have his principles and work for a cause, but also get married, enjoy a bit of comfort and have a family.’

  ‘Never!’ exclaimed Gustavo passionately. ‘A man who marries is lost. From then on all he cares about is earning his daily bread, staying in his burrow, getting up in the night to tend to his screaming, teething babies, without a moment to spare for his friends . . . Useless! A traitor! Women understand nothing about politics. They’re afraid of their man getting caught up in riots or having problems with the police. He’s a patriot bound hand and foot. And when he has some secret to keep . . . well, a married man can’t keep a secret. Sometimes a whole revolution has been compromised because of that. To hell with the family! Osório, more olives!’

  Osório’s belly appeared between the partition walls.

  ‘What are you two gentlemen arguing about? You sound like the Maia Group disrupting a municipal council meeting.’

  Gustavo leaned back on his bench, his legs outstretched, and asked him loftily.

  ‘Osório, you can decide this. Tell my friend here. Would you be prepared to change your political opinions to please your wife?’

  Osório rubbed the back of his neck and said in a playful tone:

  ‘I’ll tell you this much, Gustavo. Women are far more intelligent than we are. When it comes to politics and business, if you do what they say, you won’t go
far wrong. I always consult my wife, and, if you must know, I’ve been doing so for twenty years and it’s worked so far.’

  Gustavo leaped up from the bench:

  ‘Traitor!’ he yelled.

  Osório, who was used to that favourite expression of Gustavo’s, was not in the least put out; with his love of sharp ripostes, he even joked:

  ‘I don’t know about traitor, but trader certainly. Just you wait until you get married, Senhor Gustavo, and then we’ll talk again.’

  ‘Come the revolution, we’ll march in here with rifles on our shoulders and haul you up before a court martial, you capitalist!’

  ‘But meanwhile the best thing to do is to drink up,’ said Osório making a slow retreat.

  ‘Hippopotamus!’ grumbled Gustavo.

  And since he loved arguments, he started up again, maintaining that any man infatuated with a woman could not be relied on to stand firm on his political beliefs . . .

  João Eduardo was smiling sadly, in mute disagreement, thinking to himself that, despite his passion for Amélia, he had not been to confession for the last two years.

  ‘I’ve got proof,’ bawled Gustavo.

  He cited a freethinker of his acquaintance who, in order to keep the peace at home, fasted on Fridays and raked the path to the chapel every Sunday . . .

  ‘And that’s what will happen to you! You have pretty sound ideas about religion, but one day I’ll see you in a red habit and carrying a candle in the Easter procession. Philosophy and atheism are cheap when you’re talking over billiards with the boys, but putting it into practice in the family, when you’ve got a pretty wife who’s religious too, that’s very difficult indeed. And that’s what will happen to you, if it isn’t happening already. You’ll throw your liberal convictions in the ash can and doff your hat to the confessor.’

  João Eduardo turned scarlet with indignation. Even in the days of his happiness, when he was sure that Amélia was his, that accusation (which Gustavo only made in order to provoke an argument) would have scandalised him. But now when he had lost Amélia for having declared out loud, in a newspaper, his horror of priests! Now, with his heart broken, bereft of joy, precisely because of his liberal opinions!

  ‘It’s ironic that you should say that to me of all people,’ he said sombrely and bitterly.

  Gustavo guffawed:

  ‘Why, I didn’t know you’d become a martyr to freedom!’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me, Gustavo, please,’ João Eduardo said, very shocked. ‘You don’t know what’s been happening. If you did, you wouldn’t say that . . .’

  He then told him the story of the article in The District Voice, not mentioning that he had written it while aflame with jealousy, but presenting it instead as a pure affirmation of principles. And he pointed out to him that, at the time, he had been about to marry a very devout young woman from a household that saw more priests than the Cathedral sacristy.

  ‘And did you sign it?’ asked Gustavo, aghast at the revelation.

  ‘Dr Godinho didn’t want me to,’ João Eduardo said, blushing slightly.

  ‘And you tore them off a strip, did you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I really went for them.’

  In his enthusiasm, Gustavo yelled for ‘another bottle of red!’

  He joyfully filled their glasses and drank a toast to João Eduardo.

  ‘I’d love to read it! Can I send it to the boys in Lisbon? What effect did it have?’

  ‘It caused an almighty scandal.’

  ‘And the priests?’

  ‘They were furious!’

  ‘But how did they find out it was you?’

  João Eduardo shrugged. Agostinho hadn’t told anyone. He suspected Godinho’s wife, who had found out from her husband and then passed it on to Father Silvério, her confessor, the one who lives in Rua das Teresas . . .

  ‘A big fat chap, looks as if he had dropsy?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘The brute!’ roared Gustavo furiously.

  He now regarded João Eduardo with new respect, the João Eduardo who had been so unexpectedly revealed to him as a champion of free thought.

  ‘Drink, my friend, drink!’ he said, affectionately filling his glass, as if João Eduardo’s heroic effort on behalf of liberalism still required a great deal of encouragement, even several days after the event.

  And what had happened? What had the inhabitants of Rua da Misericórdia had to say about it?

  Touched by such intense interest, João Eduardo blurted out his secret. He even showed him Amélia’s letter which, poor thing, she had doubtless been driven to write in mortal terror of Hell, under pressure from the furious priests . . .

  ‘And here I am, Gustavo, a victim of events!’

  He was indeed, and Gustavo regarded him with growing admiration. He was no longer shy little João Eduardo, Nunes’ clerk, the importunate suitor of Rua da Misericórdia, he was the victim of religious persecution. He was the first such victim Gustavo had seen, and he found João Eduardo suddenly interesting, even though he did not appear in the traditional poses of propaganda posters, tied to a post in the middle of a bonfire or fleeing with his terrified family, pursued by soldiers galloping out from the surrounding shadows. He secretly envied him that social honour. The boys in Alcântara would certainly be impressed. It was pretty clever too to be a victim of reactionary forces without being obliged to give up the pleasure of eating Osório’s fried liver and having your wages paid promptly each Saturday. But it was the priests’ behaviour that angered him most. In order to revenge themselves on a liberal, they had intrigued against him and taken his fiancée from him. What scoundrels! And forgetting his recent sarcastic remarks about Marriage and the Family, he fulminated against the clergy who always strive to ruin that perfect social institution of divine origins.

  ‘This calls for a truly fiercesome revenge! They must be crushed!’

  Vengeance was precisely what João Eduardo thirsted after. But what form should it take?

  ‘Why, you should reveal everything in another forthright article in The District Voice!’

  João Eduardo told him what Dr Godinho had said: from thenceforth The District Voice was closed to all freethinkers.

  ‘The ass!’ roared Gustavo.

  But he had an idea, damn it! They would publish a pamphlet, a pamphlet of twenty pages, what in Brazil was called a ‘smear sheet’, written in an ornate style (he would take care of that) and which would fall upon the clergy like an avalanche of mortal truths.

  João Eduardo warmed to the idea. Encouraged by Gustavo’s active sympathy for his plight, seeing in him a brother, he shared with him his last, most painful secrets. What lay at the bottom of the intrigue was Father Amaro’s passion for Amélia, and it was in order to get her that he had driven João Eduardo out . . . The enemy, the villain, the bully – was the priest.

  Gustavo clutched his head; such a case (which, in the places where he worked, was pretty small beer) happening to a friend of his and to a fellow democrat who was sitting there before him drinking, seemed to him monstrous, on a par with the senile madness of Tiberius, who, in perfumed baths, violated the delicate flesh of patrician young men.

  He could not believe it. João Eduardo provided him with more proof. And then Gustavo, whose lunch of fried liver had been drowned in vast amounts of red wine, raised two clenched fists and, with scarlet face and through gritted teeth, he roared out:

  ‘Down with religion!’

  From the other side of the partition wall a mocking voice croaked a response:

  ‘Long live Pius IX!’

  Gustavo got to his feet in order to punch the interloper, but João Eduardo restrained him. Gustavo meekly resumed his seat and drank down the last drop of wine in his glass.

  Then, elbows on the table, face to face, the bottle between them, they discussed in low voices their plan for the pamphlet. Nothing could be easier; they would write it together. João Eduardo wanted to write it in the form of a novel with a dark
plot, giving the parish priest all the vices and perversions of Caligula and Heliogabalus. Gustavo, however, preferred to take a philosophical angle as regards style and principles, which would demolish absolute Papal authority once and for all! He would take responsibility for printing it, in the evenings, and for free, of course. Then they foresaw a sudden problem.

  ‘Paper, how will we get the paper?’

  It meant an expenditure of nine or ten mil réis, which neither of them had, nor did they have a friend who shared their principles and would advance them the amount.

  ‘Ask Nunes for an advance on your salary!’ Gustavo suggested brightly.

  João Eduardo scratched his head disconsolately. He was imagining Nunes’ devout fury – as a member of the parish council and a friend of the precentor – when he read the pamphlet. And if he ever found out that his clerk had written it, using the office quills and the best office paper . . . He could see him now, apoplectic with rage, raising his vast body up onto the tips of his white shoes, and declaring shrilly: ‘Get out of here, you freemason, get out!’

  ‘Then I really would be in a mess,’ said João Eduardo, ‘no fiancée and no bread.’

  This reminded Gustavo too of the certain anger of Dr Godinho, the owner of the printing press. For Dr Godinho, after his reconciliation with the personnel of Rua da Misericórdia, had publicly resumed his considerable position as pillar of the Church and protector of the Faith . . .

  ‘Damn it, it could cost us very dear,’ he said.

  ‘It’s impossible!’ said João Eduardo.

  Then they both cursed roundly. Fancy losing an opportunity like that to expose the clergy for what they were!

  Just as a fallen column seems larger than when erect, so their plan for a pamphlet, now that it was not to be, seemed to them of colossal size and importance. It was no longer a matter of demolishing one bad parish priest, it would have been the ruin, far and wide, of the clergy, of the Jesuits, of temporal power and of other terrible things. Damnation! If it wasn’t for Nunes, if it wasn’t for Godinho, if it wasn’t for the nine mil réis’ worth of paper . . .