The Crime of Father Amaro

by José Maria De Eça de Queirós

  The char-à-banc left. And Amaro walked slowly along behind it as far as the Figueira road. It was nine o’clock; the moon had already risen on that hot, calm August night. A faint, luminous mist blurred the contours of the silent countryside. Here and there the moonlit façade of a house stood out brightly amongst the shadows of the trees. By the bridge, he stopped to look down sadly into the river that flowed with a monotonous murmur over the sand; beneath the overhanging trees, the water was pitch-black; elsewhere the light on the water trembled like a piece of glittering filigree work. There he stood in that soothing silence, smoking and tossing his cigarette ends into the river, absorbed in a vague sadness. Then, hearing eleven o’clock strike, he walked back into town, feeling a pang of memory as he passed Rua da Misericórdia; the house, with its windows closed and without any curtains, looked as if it had been abandoned for ever; the pots of rosemary had been forgotten on the window ledge. How often he and Amélia had leaned out over that balcony! There used to be a carnation growing there and, as they talked, she used to break off a leaf and bite it. That was all over now. And in the silence, the shrieking of the owls in the poorhouse wall filled him with a sense of ruin, solitude and irrevocability.

  He walked slowly home, his eyes full of tears.

  The maid came to the stairs at once to say that Esguelhas had come for him twice, around nine o’clock it must have been; he had been in a terrible state. Totó was dying and she would only receive the sacrament from his hand.

  Despite Amaro’s superstitious repugnance at having to go back there that night, for such a sad end, in the midst of the happy memories of his love, he did so to please Esguelhas; but he felt shocked by Totó’s death, coinciding as it did with Amélia’s departure and somehow completing the sudden dispersal of everything he cared about or that had been part of his life.

  The door to the sexton’s house stood ajar, and in the darkness of the hallway, he bumped into two women who were just leaving, sighing heavily. He went straight to Totó’s bedroom: two large candles, brought from the church, were burning on a table; a white sheet covered Totó’s body, and Father Silvério, who had doubtless been called because he was on duty that week, was reading the breviary, his handkerchief spread over his knees, his large glasses perched on the end of his nose. He got up as soon as he saw Amaro.

  ‘Ah, Father,’ he said very softly, ‘they’ve been looking for you everywhere. The poor girl wanted you. When they came for me, I was just off to the Saturday get-together at Novais’ house. What scenes! She died impenitent. When she saw me and realised that you weren’t coming, she made such a fuss. I was afraid she might spit on the crucifix.’

  Without a word, Amaro lifted one corner of the sheet, but immediately let it fall again on the dead girl’s face. Then he went up to the room where the sexton was lying on the bed, sobbing desperately, his face turned to the wall; a woman was with him, but she remained standing in one corner, silent and motionless, her eyes downcast, as if slightly annoyed at the heavy duty that had befallen her as neighbour. Amaro touched the sexton on the shoulder and spoke to him:

  ‘You must resign yourself, Esguelhas. This is what the Lord has decreed. For her it is almost a happy release.’

  Esguelhas turned round and, recognising Amaro through the tears veiling his eyes, he took his hand and tried to kiss it. Amaro drew back.

  ‘Come now, Esguelhas! God will be merciful and will remember your sorrow . . .’

  Esguelhas was not listening, still shaken by convulsive sobs, while the woman in the corner calmly dabbed at the corners of her eyes.

  Amaro went downstairs and relieved good Silvério, taking his place beside the candles, the breviary in his hand.

  He stayed there until late into the night. When the neighbour was leaving, she came in to say that Esguelhas had fallen asleep, and she promised to return at dawn with someone else in order to lay the body out.

  The whole house was immersed in a silence which the proximity of the vast Cathedral building made still gloomier; occasionally an owl somewhere on the buttressed walls would hoot feebly, or the great bell would echo round the rooms. And Amaro, seized by an ill-defined terror, but held there by the superior force of an uneasy conscience, kept praying rapidly . . . Sometimes the book would fall onto his knees, and then, feeling behind him the presence of that corpse covered by the sheet, he would remember, in bitter contrast, other times when the courtyard lay bathed in sunlight and the swallows were flying, and he and Amélia would run laughing up to the room where now, on that same bed, Esguelhas was sleeping, his tears barely dry.

  XXI

  Canon Dias had strongly advised Amaro not to visit Ricoça, at least for the first few weeks, so as not to arouse the suspicions of Dona Josefa or her maid. And Amaro’s life grew even sadder and emptier than it had been before when he first moved out of São Joaneira’s house and came to Rua das Sousas. Almost everyone he knew had left Leiria: Dona Maria da Assunção was in Vieira, and the Gansoso sisters had gone to stay near Alcobaça with the famous aunt who for the last ten years had been about to die and leave them a large inheritance. After the service at the Cathedral, the hours, indeed the whole long day, dragged by as heavily as lead. He could not have been more cut off from human communication than if, like St Anthony, he had lived in the sands of the Libyan desert. Only the coadjutor who, oddly enough, never appeared in happy times, returned now, like the fateful friend of unhappy hours, to visit him once or twice a week after supper, looking ever gaunter and gloomier, with his eternal umbrella in his hand. Amaro hated him; sometimes, to put him off, he would pretend to be absorbed in his reading or, rushing to the table as soon as he heard his slow steps on the stairs, he would say:

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, my friend, but I’m in the middle of writing something.’

  The man would nevertheless sit down, his hateful umbrella between his knees:

  ‘Oh, take no notice of me, Father.’

  And Amaro, tormented by that doleful figure, who did not move from the chair, would angrily throw down his quill, pick up his hat and declare:

  ‘I’m not in the mood for writing tonight, I think I’ll go out.’

  And he would brusquely get rid of the coadjutor at the first street corner.

  Sometimes, weary of solitude, he would visit Silvério, but the phlegmatic contentment of that obese being, his preoccupation with collecting home remedies and with observing the fantastical perturbations of his own digestive system; his constant praise for Dr Godinho, his little ones and his wife; his ancient jokes which he had been repeating for the past forty years and the innocent hilarity that they caused him, all this irritated Amaro. He would leave feeling exhausted, pondering the hostile fate that had made him so different from Silvério. That, after all, was happiness; why could he not be a good priest, stuck in his ways, with a small tyrannical obsession, the spoiled parasite of a respectable family, possessed of quiet blood that flowed along beneath layers of fat, in no danger of overflowing or provoking misfortunes, like a stream that runs beneath a mountain?

  Sometimes he went to see Natário, whose fracture, which had been badly set initially, still kept him in bed with his leg bandaged. But Natário’s room made him feel ill, impregnated as it was with the smell of arnica and sweat, with a profusion of rags soaking in various glass bowls and squadrons of bottles lined up on the sideboard amongst the rows of saints. As soon as Natário saw him, he would launch into a litany of complaints: The doctors were all donkeys! It was just his bad luck! The torments they put him through! Medicine in this country was so backward! And he would meanwhile spatter the black floor with expectorations and cigarette ends. Since he had been ill, he took other people’s good health, especially that of friends, as a personal affront.

  ‘And you’re still fit as a flea, I suppose? Huh!’ he would mutter rancorously.

  And to think how that animal Brito never had so much as a headache! And that fool Ferrão used to boast that he had never been in bed after seven o’clock in the morning
! Idiots all of them!

  Amaro would give him the latest news: a letter he had received from the Canon in Vieira, Dona Josefa’s improving health . . .

  But Natário was not interested in people to whom he was bound by familiarity and friendship; he was only interested in his enemies, with whom he shared bonds of hatred. He wanted to know about the clerk, to find out if he had died of hunger.

  ‘At least I did some good before I got stuck in this wretched bed.’

  His two nieces would appear then – two freckle-faced little creatures with dark shadows under their eyes. Their great concern was that their aunt had not sent the faith healer to make his leg better: that was what had cured the owner of the Barrosa estate, not to mention Pimentel in Ourém . . .

  In the presence of his ‘two little roses’, Natário would grow quieter.

  ‘Poor things, it’s not for lack of care from them that I haven’t yet recovered. But dear God, I’ve suffered!’

  And the ‘two little roses’ would simultaneously turn aside and dab at their eyes with their handkerchiefs.

  Amaro left, feeling even more irritated.

  In order to tire himself out, he would go for long walks along the Lisbon road. But as soon as he left behind him the bustle of the town, his sadness only intensified, in keeping with the landscape of sad hills and gnarled trees; and his life seemed to him then just like that long, monotonous road, devoid of any interesting features, stretching out desolately into the evening mists. Sometimes, on the way back, he would go into the cemetery and stroll past the ranks of cypresses, smelling the sweet scent emanating from the clumps of wallflowers; he would read the epitaphs; leaning on the gilt railings around the Gouveia family tomb, he would study the carved emblems, a helmet and a sword, and read the black letters of the famous ode which adorned the stone:

  Pause, traveller, to contemplate

  These mortal remains,

  But if with grief your heart o’erflows,

  Cease your mourning now.

  For João Cabral da Silva Maldonado

  Mendonça de Gouveia,

  Noble youth and graduate,

  Son of illustrious Seia,

  Ex-administrator of the municipal council,

  And Commander of the Order of Christ,

  He, traveller, was a mirror of virtue

  And the enemy of vice.

  Then came Morais’ lavish mausoleum, on which his widow, who, rich and in her forties and now living in concubinage with the handsome Captain Trigueiros, had ordered these pious lines to be carved:

  Wait amongst the angels, husband,

  For your dear heart’s other half,

  Left alone on Earth, abandoned,

  To weep, to pray, no more to laugh.

  Sometimes, at the far end of the cemetery, close to the wall, he would see a man kneeling by a black cross overshadowed by a weeping willow next to the paupers’ grave. It was Esguelhas, his crutch laid on the ground, praying over Totó’s grave. Amaro would go and speak to him and, on terms of equality justified by the place itself, they would even stroll along familiarly, shoulder to shoulder, talking. Amaro, out of kindness, would try to console the old man: what good had life been to the poor girl if she was to spend it lying on a bed?

  ‘It was still a life, though, Father. And now here I am alone day and night.’

  ‘We all have our solitudes, Esguelhas,’ Amaro would say sadly.

  The sexton would sigh then and ask after Dona Josefa and about Miss Amélia.

  ‘She’s living at the farm.’

  ‘Poor thing, she must be bored there.’

  ‘Well, we all have our cross to bear, Esguelhas.’

  And they would walk on in silence amongst the box hedges surrounding plots full of the black of crosses and the white of new gravestones. Sometimes Amaro would recognise a grave that he himself had consecrated and sprinkled with holy water: where would they be now those souls whom he had distractedly commended to God in Latin, hurriedly mumbling his way through the prayers in order to go and meet Amélia? They were the tombs of people from the town; he knew the members of the families by sight; he had seen them with their faces bathed in tears, and now they strolled along together down the Alameda or exchanged jokes over the counters of shops . . .

  He would return home feeling even sadder, and then the long, endless night would begin. Sometimes he would write to the Canon. At nine o’clock he had some tea, and then he would pace up and down in his room, smoking cigarette after cigarette, stopping at the window to look out at the black night, occasionally reading an article or an advertisement in the newspaper, only to resume his pacing, yawning so loudly that the maid could hear him in the kitchen.

  To pass these melancholy nights, and out of an excess of idle sensitivity, he tried his hand at writing poetry, putting his love and the story of those happy days into the familiar formulae of lyrical nostalgia:

  Do you recall our days’ delight,

  Bewitching angel, Amélia mine,

  When everything with love was bright

  And life was tranquil and divine?

  Do you recall that poetic night

  When the Moon was shining in the sky,

  And we, Amélia, did our souls unite,

  And offered up prayers to God on high?

  But despite all his efforts, he could never get beyond those two stanzas – even though he had produced them with promising facility – as if his being contained only those two isolated drops of poetry, and once they had been squeezed out of him, nothing was left but the dry prose of a carnal temperament.

  And that empty existence brought about such a subtle relaxation of the whole mechanism of will and action that any task with which he might have been able to fill the tedious, cavernous, endless hours weighed on him as hatefully as an unfair burden. He far preferred the tedium of idleness to the tedium of occupation. Apart from the strict duties which he could not neglect without provoking scandal and censure, he gradually disencumbered himself of all the practices of inner zeal: mental prayer, regular visits to the Sacrament, spiritual meditations, saying the rosary to the Virgin, the nightly reading of the breviary, the examination of conscience – replacing all these works of devotion, these secret means to progressive sanctification, with his endless pacing from the washbasin to the window, and with the cigarettes that he smoked down to his blackened fingertips. He gabbled his way through morning mass; he carried out his parish duties with mute impatience; he had become the embodiment of the ritualists’ Indignus sacerdos; and he possessed every one of the thirty-five defects and seven half-defects which the theologians attribute to the ‘bad priest’.

  All that remained of his sentimental nature was an enormous appetite. And since he had an excellent cook, and since Dona Maria da Assunção, before she left for Vieira, had left him a store of one hundred and fifty masses at one cruzado each, he banqueted on chicken and on jelly, washed down with a piquant Bairrada wine that the Canon had chosen for him. And he would spend hours at the table, legs outstretched, smoking a cigarette over coffee, regretting that he did not have his Amélia to hand.

  ‘I wonder what poor little Amélia will be up to now?’ he thought, yawning and stretching with boredom and languor.

  In Ricoça, poor little Amélia was cursing her life.

  During the journey in the char-à-banc, Dona Josefa had tacitly made her feel that she could expect from her neither her former friendship nor her forgiveness. And that is how it was once they were installed in the house. The old woman became utterly unbearable: in the cruel formality with which she ceased to address her as tu, addressing her instead as ‘Miss Amélia’; in her abrupt refusal to allow Amélia to plump up her pillows or rearrange her shawl; in her reproachful silence whenever Amélia spent the evening in her room, sewing; in her constant weary allusions to the sad burden God had charged her with at the end of her life . . .

  Amélia inwardly accused Amaro: he had promised that her godmother would be all charity and complicity; he ha
d ended up abandoning her to the ferocity of a fanatical old virgin.

  When she found herself in that great mansion, in a chilly bedroom painted canary yellow and lugubriously furnished with a canopied bed and two leather chairs, she spent all night crying with her head buried in the pillow, further tormented by a dog stationed beneath her window, who kept up his howling until dawn, doubtless bewildered to see lights and movement in the house.

  The following day, she went down to the farm to visit the tenants. She thought they might be kindly people with whom she could pass the time. She met a woman, as tall and gloomy as a cypress tree, dressed in heavy mourning; the large black scarf pulled down low over her forehead gave her the look of a penitent in a religious procession, and her whining voice was as sad as a death knell. The man was even worse, rather like an orang-utang, with his two enormous ears sticking out from his skull, a hideously prominent chin, discoloured gums, a gawky, tubercular body and a sunken chest. She hastily left and went to see the orchard; she found it much neglected; the paths between the trees were overgrown with damp grass, and there was something unhealthy about the shade cast by those closely planted trees in that low-lying plot of land surrounded by high walls.

  She preferred to spend her days indoors, endless days in which the hours moved by as slowly as a funeral cortège.

  Her room was at the front, and from the two windows she had an impression of sad fields stretching out before her, a monotonous undulation of barren plots with, here and there, the occasional scrawny tree, and a suffocating atmosphere in which it seemed there was always a whiff of nearby swamps and steamy shallows whose malarial airs even the September sun failed to dissipate.

  First thing in the morning, she would go and help Dona Josefa get up and make her comfortable on the sofa; then she would sit nearby and do her sewing, just as she used to do in Rua da Misericórdia with her mother; but now instead of the chats she and her mother used to enjoy, there was only Dona Josefa’s intractable silence and her constant wheezing. She thought about having her piano brought from town, but when she mentioned it, the old woman exclaimed bitterly: