‘You must be mad. My health isn’t strong enough for music. What a ridiculous idea!’
Gertrudes was no company either; when she was not with Dona Josefa or in the kitchen, she vanished; she had been born in that parish and spent all her free hours talking to her former neighbours.
The worst time was the evening. Having said her rosary, Amélia would sit at the window staring foolishly out at the changing colours of the sunset; gradually all the fields took on the same grey-brown tone; a silence seemed to fall and alight on the earth; then a first small, bright star would twinkle into being; and before her lay only an inert mass of mute shadows as far as the horizon, where a thin strip of pale orange would linger for a moment. Her thoughts, with no gradations of light and shade and no shapes to cling to, would travel far off to Vieira; at that hour, her mother and her friends would be returning from their walk along the beach; all the nets would have been taken in; the lights would be coming on in the fishermen’s cottages; it was the time for tea and jolly games of lotto, when the boys from the town would go round in a gang to the houses of friends, with a guitar and a flute, holding improvised parties. Meanwhile there she sat, all alone!
Then she had to put Dona Josefa to bed and to say the rosary with her and with Gertrudes. Afterwards, they would light the brass oil lamp and place an old hat box in front of it to shade the patient’s face; and all night, in gloomy silence, the only sound to be heard would be that made by Gertrudes’ spindle from where she sat in one corner.
Before they went to bed, they would lock all the doors, in constant fear of thieves; and then the hour of superstitious terrors would begin for Amélia. Surrounded by the black depths of those old uninhabited rooms and by the dark, horrible silence of the fields, she could not sleep. She would hear inexplicable noises: the floor in the corridor creaking beneath footsteps; the flame of the candle suddenly bending as if in response to some invisible breath; or, near the kitchen, the sudden thud of a body falling. Huddled beneath the blankets, she would pile prayer upon prayer, but if she did doze off, the terrors of wakefulness only continued in her nightmare visions. One night, she had been woken suddenly by a mournful voice behind the bedhead saying: Amélia, prepare yourself, your end has come! Terrified, she ran the whole length of the house in her nightdress and took refuge in Gertrudes’ bed.
But the following night, the sepulchral voice returned just as she was dropping asleep: ‘Amélia, remember your sins! Prepare yourself, Amélia!’ She screamed and fainted. Fortunately, Gertrudes, who had not yet gone to bed, heard the scream, which cut through the silence of the house, and ran towards it. She found Amélia sprawled across the bed, her loose hair brushing the floor, her hands as cold as a dead woman’s. She went down to wake the tenant’s wife and it took them until dawn, after frantic efforts, to bring her back to life. Ever since then Gertrudes had slept near her, and the voice from behind the bedhead had not bothered her again.
But after that, the idea of death and the horror of Hell did not leave her day or night. Around that time, a travelling vendor of religious pictures came by the house, and Dona Josefa bought Amélia two lithographs – The Death of the Just Man and The Death of the Sinner.
‘We should all have a vivid image before us,’ she said.
Amélia was sure initially that Dona Josefa – who obviously expected to die with the same pomp and glory with which the Just Man in the picture was dying – wanted to show her, the Sinner, the horrible scene awaiting her. She hated Dona Josefa for that ‘cruel joke’. But her terrified imagination soon gave the purchase of the picture another explanation: Our Lady had sent the seller to present her, in that lithograph of The Death of the Sinner, with a vivid picture of the spectacle of her own death; and she was sure then that it would be exactly so, point by point: her guardian angel fleeing in tears; God the Father turning away from her in disgust; the skeleton of death roaring with laughter; and brilliantly coloured devils with a whole arsenal of tortures taking hold of her, some grabbing her legs and some her hair, and with howls of joy dragging her off to the flaming cave that shook with the roaring storm of laments that issued forth from the place of Eternal Suffering. And she could even see, in the height of Heaven, the great scales, with one of the pans right up high, in which her prayers weighed no more than the feather of a canary, and with the other pan right down low, the chains pulled taut, containing the sexton’s bed and its tons of sin.
She fell into a kind of hysterical melancholy that aged her prematurely; she stopped washing or bothering with her clothes, not wanting to care for her sinful body; she found any movement or effort repugnant; she found even praying too much, as if she believed that prayers were pointless; and she hid away in the bottom of a chest the layette she had been sewing for her baby, because she hated the being that she could now feel moving about inside her and which was the cause of her perdition. She hated it, but not as much as she hated the priest who had made it, the wicked priest who had tempted her, ruined her and hurled her into the flames of Hell! The despair she felt when she thought about him! There he was comfortably ensconced in Leiria, eating well, confessing other women, perhaps even courting them, and there she was all alone, gradually sinking into eternal perdition, with her wretched womb stuffed with the sin that he had placed there!
This permanently overwrought state would surely have killed her if Father Ferrão had not started paying regular visits to the Canon’s sister.
Amélia had often heard them talk about him in Rua da Misericórdia; they said that Ferrão had ‘odd ideas’, but no one could deny his virtue or his priestly knowledge. He had been a priest there for many years; bishops had come and gone in the diocese and he had stayed on, entirely forgotten, in that poor parish, where he was paid little and late and where he lived in a house that let in the rain. The last vicar general, who had never lifted a finger to help him, was, however, generous with words:
‘You are one of the good theologians of the kingdom. You are predestined by God for a bishopric. You could get a mitre yet. And you’ll go down in the history of the Portuguese Church as a great bishop, Ferrão!’
‘A bishop, Vicar General! That would be wonderful! But I would have to have the temerity of an Afonso de Albuquerque or a Dom João de Castro to accept such a responsibility before the eyes of God.’
And so there he had stayed amongst the poor, in a village with little land, surviving on two slices of bread and a cup of milk, wearing a spotlessly clean cassock on which the many darns traced a map, and prepared to march half a league through the wildest storm if a parishioner had a toothache, or to spend an hour consoling an old woman whose goat had died . . . And he was always good-humoured, always had some money in his pocket if his neighbour needed it, and was a great friend to the children, for whom he would make boats out of cork, and if he saw a pretty girl, an unusual occurrence in his parish, he would exclaim: ‘God bless you, my dear, don’t you look lovely!’
And yet, even as a young man, he had been so famous for the purity of his habits that they had nicknamed him ‘the virgin’.
He was also a perfect priest in his zeal for the Church, spending hours in prayer before the Sacrament, carrying out with fervent joy the smallest practices of the devout life; purifying himself for the tasks of the day with a period of profound mental prayer and meditation on the faith, from which his soul emerged more agile, as if from a fortifying bath; preparing himself for sleep with one of those long, pious, invaluable examinations of conscience favoured by St Augustine and St Bernard, as well as by Plutarch and Seneca, and which serve to provide a detailed and subtle correction of minor defects, the meticulous perfecting of active virtue, undertaken with the fervour of a poet revising a cherished poem . . . And any free time he had, he would spend immersed in a chaos of books.
Father Ferrão had only one fault: he loved to hunt! He did his best to restrain himself because hunting is very time-consuming and it is cruel to kill a poor bird going busily about the fields on its domestic business. But
on bright winter mornings, when there was still dew on the broom bushes, if he saw a man walking by with sprightly step, his shotgun on his shoulder, his hunting dog at his heel, he would gaze longingly after him. Sometimes, temptation won; he would furtively pick up his shotgun, whistle to his dog Janota and, with his greatcoat flapping in the wind, off he would go, that illustrious theologian, that mirror of piety, across the fields and the valleys . . . And shortly afterwards: bang! bang! A quail or a partridge would fall to the earth. And the saintly man would return, with his shotgun under his arm and the two birds in his pocket; but he always kept close to the walls, repeating his rosary to the Virgin and responding to the greetings of people along the way with downcast eyes and a criminal air.
Despite Father Ferrão’s shabby appearance and large nose, Amélia took an immediate liking to him the first time he visited the house; and her sympathy only grew when she saw that Dona Josefa received him unenthusiastically, despite her own brother’s respect for Father Ferrão’s knowledge.
Indeed, after some hours of talk with him alone, the old woman, in all her authority as an experienced religious devotee, had condemned him with the words:
‘The man has no morals!’
They had not really understood each other. Having lived for so many years in that parish of five hundred souls, all of whom, mothers and daughters, fell into the same mould of simple devotion to Our Lord, Our Lady and St Vincent, the patron saint of the parish, good Father Ferrão had had little experience of the confessional, and he suddenly found himself face to face with the complicated soul of a town devotee, with a stubborn, tortured form of religious fanaticism; and when he heard her extraordinary list of mortal sins, he murmured in horrified tones:
‘Most odd, most odd . . .’
He realised at once that he had before him an example of that morbid degeneration of religious feeling known in theology as scrupulosity, and by which all Catholic souls are affected nowadays; but after certain of Dona Josefa’s revelations, he feared that he really might be in the presence of a dangerous maniac, and, gripped by the singular horror priests have of the mad, he instinctively pushed back his chair. Poor Dona Josefa! The very first night that she had arrived at the house (she told him), just as she was beginning the rosary to Our Lady, she had suddenly remembered that she had left behind the red flannel petticoat that had proved such an efficacious cure for the pains in her legs . . . She began the rosary thirty-eight times and each time that red flannel petticoat came between her and Our Lady. In the end, she had given up out of sheer exhaustion and fatigue. And then she had immediately felt intense pain in her legs and something like a voice inside her telling her that it was Our Lady who was revenging herself by sticking pins in her legs.
Father Ferrão started.
‘But Senhora!’
‘And that’s not all, Father.’
There was another sin that was tormenting her: when she prayed, she sometimes felt an urge to expectorate, and with the name of God or the Virgin Mary still in her mouth, she had to clear her throat; lately, she had taken to swallowing the phlegm, but was worried that the name of God or the Virgin would slide down into her stomach wrapped in phlegm and get mixed up with her faeces! What should she do?
A wild-eyed Father Ferrão wiped the sweat from his brow.
But that was not the worst: the worst thing had happened the night before; she had been sitting quite calmly and virtuously praying to St Francis Xavier when suddenly, how she didn’t know, she had started wondering what St Francis Xavier would look like naked!
Father Ferrão was too stunned to move. Then seeing her looking eagerly across at him, waiting for his words and his advice, he said:
‘And have you been experiencing these terrors, these doubts, for very long?’
‘Always, Father, always!’
‘And have you lived with other people who, like you, are subject to these worrying thoughts?’
‘Everyone I know, dozens of my friends, everyone . . . The Enemy has not just chosen me. He attacks everyone.’
‘And what remedy are you usually given for these anxieties of the soul?’
‘Oh, Father, those saintly men in Leiria, Father Amaro, Father Silvério, Father Guedes, they always got us out of any difficulties . . . And they did it so skilfully, so easily . . .’
Father Ferrão said nothing for a moment; he felt sad to think that throughout the land all those hundreds of priests were wilfully leading the flock into these dark realms of the soul, keeping the world of the faithful in abject terror of Heaven, representing God and his saints as a court which was no less corrupt and no better than the court of Caligula and his freed slaves.
He tried then to shed a broader, brighter light on that nocturnal, fanatical mind inhabited by phantasmagoria. He told her that all her anxieties came from an imagination tormented by a fear of offending God. That God was not a fierce, angry master, but an indulgent, caring father. That one must serve him with love not fear. That all these scruples – Our Lady sticking pins in her legs, God’s name slipping down into her stomach – were the product of a sick mind. He advised her to trust in God and to eat well in order to recover her strength. And not to wear herself out by praying too much.
‘And when I come back,’ he said at last, getting up to say goodbye, ‘we will talk about all this again and try to calm that soul of yours.’
‘Thank you, Father,’ she replied coolly.
And when Gertrudes came in shortly afterwards with the hot water bottle for her feet, Dona Josefa burst out indignantly, almost weeping:
‘The man’s useless, useless! He just didn’t understand. He’s an impostor, a freemason, Gertrudes! How shameful, and in a man of God too!’
She never again revealed to him the fearsome sins that she continued to commit; and when he dutifully tried to resume the education of her soul, she said bluntly that, since she normally confessed with Father Gusmão, she was not sure that it would be correct to receive moral instruction from another.
Father Ferrão turned very red and said:
‘You’re quite right, Senhora, quite right; one cannot be too careful in these matters.’
He left, and thenceforth, having gone into her room to enquire after her health, to talk about the weather, the season, the various illnesses doing the rounds, or about some festival at the church, he would hastily say goodbye and go out onto the terrace to talk to Amélia.
Noticing how terribly sad she looked, he had immediately taken an interest in her, and for Amélia, his visits were a distraction from the solitude of the house; and they became such good friends that, on the days that he regularly called, Amélia would put on a shawl and walk along the Poiais road and wait for him by the blacksmith’s shop. She found Father Ferrão, who was a tireless talker, very entertaining, his conversation was so different from the gossip of Rua da Misericórdia, just as the sight of a broad valley with trees, planted fields, rivers, orchards and the sound of people working brings rest to eyes accustomed to the four whitewashed walls of a garret room in the city. In fact, these conversations bore a marked resemblance to weekly magazines like The Family Treasury or Evening Readings, in which there is a little of everything – moral doctrine, travel stories, anecdotes about great men, articles about farming, jokes, the sublime details of a saint’s life, the odd poem and even useful tips, like the one he gave Amélia about how to wash flannel without it shrinking. It was only dull when he talked about his parishioners, about their marriages and christenings, about their illnesses and other problems, or when he started on his hunting stories.
‘Once, my dear young lady, I was heading for Córrego das Tristes when a flock of partridges . . .’
Amélia knew then that, for at least an hour, she would be regaled with the exploits of his dog Janota and with his own extraordinary feats of shooting, which he would act out, complete with bird noises and the bang bang of the gun. Or else with descriptions of the big game hunting that he read about with such glee – tiger hunts in Nep
al, lion hunts in Algeria and elephant hunts, bloodcurdling stories that dragged the girl’s imagination far away to exotic lands where the grass grows as tall as pine trees, where the sun burns like a brand, and the eyes of some wild beast glint from behind every branch. And then, apropos of tigers and Malays, he would remember a curious story about St Francis Xavier, and that would set him off, this inveterate talker, on a description of derring-do in Asia, armadas in India and the famous stockades in the siege of Diu!
It was on one such day, in the orchard, when Father Ferrão, having begun by setting out the advantages to Canon Dias of transforming the orchard into arable land, had ended by describing the dangers faced so bravely by missionaries in India and Japan, that Amélia, intensely afflicted by her night-time terrors, had spoken to him of the noises she heard in the house and how they frightened her.
‘Why, you should be ashamed of yourself,’ he said, laughing, ‘a woman of your age being afraid of bogeymen.’
Touched by his kindness, she told him about the voices she heard at night behind the bedhead.
He grew serious.
‘Senhora, these are imaginings that you must try at all costs to control. There have doubtless been miracles in the world, but God does not start talking to just anyone from behind the canopies of beds, and he does not allow the Devil to do so either. Those voices, if you really hear them and if your sins are very grave, do not come from behind the bed, but from you yourself, from your conscience. And even with Gertrudes, or indeed a hundred Gertrudes, sleeping near your bed, or even a whole battalion of infantry, you would still hear them. You would hear them even if you were deaf. The important thing is to calm the conscience that is pleading for penance and purification.’
They had gone up onto the terrace as they talked, and Amélia had sat down wearily on one of the stone benches there and was looking out at the farm in the distance, the roofs of the barns, the long avenue of laurel bushes, the threshing floor, and, farther off, the flat fields freshened by that morning’s light rain; the evening now was bright, calm and windless, with large, unmoving clouds that the sunset painted with bright, tender pinks . . . She was thinking about Father Ferrão’s sensible words, about the sense of repose she would feel if each of the sins that weighed like rocks upon her soul were to become light and to be dissipated by an act of penitence. And she was filled by a desire to be at peace and to rest like the quiet fields that lay before her.
The Crime of Father Amaro Page 41