The Crime of Father Amaro

by José Maria De Eça de Queirós

‘What are you doing here?’ he exclaimed, as he drew near.

  She stood up with a cry.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he said again.

  When she heard that angry, familiar tone, she anxiously placed one finger on her mouth. Father Ferrão was inside with the blacksmith.

  ‘Listen,’ said Amaro, his eyes blazing, gripping her by the arm, ‘did you confess to him?’

  ‘Why do you want to know? Yes, I did as it happens. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

  ‘You mean you confessed everything?’ he asked, his teeth clenched with rage.

  She lost control and, still addressing him as ‘tu’, said:

  ‘Isn’t that what you always told me, over and over, that the worst sin in the world was to keep anything back from your confessor.’

  ‘You fool!’ roared Amaro.

  His eyes devoured her, and through the choleric mist filling his brain and making the veins in his forehead throb, he found her even prettier than before, with a new roundness to her body that he burned to embrace, with red lips, freshened by the clean country air, which he longed to bite until he drew blood.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, giving in to that brutal invasion of desire. ‘Listen! All right, I don’t care, you can confess to whoever the devil you want . . . but you’ll always be mine, you hear!’

  ‘No!’ she said forcefully, pulling away, ready to flee into the blacksmith’s shop.

  ‘You’ll pay for this, you wretch,’ snarled Amaro, turning his back and striding desperately away down the road.

  And he did not slacken his pace until he reached Leiria, borne along on an angry impulse which, amidst the sweet peace of mid-October, provoked in him plans of cruel revenge. He reached home exhausted, with the flowers still in his hand. But there, in the quiet of his room, he became gradually aware of his utter impotence to act. What could he do, after all? Go around the town telling everyone that she was pregnant? That would be tantamount to denouncing himself. Spread a rumour that she was Father Ferrão’s mistress? That was absurd; he was nearly seventy years old, hideously ugly, and with a totally unblemished past. But to lose her, never to have that snow-white body in his arms again, never to hear those tender words that swept his soul off to some better place than Heaven itself, no, that he could not bear!

  And was it possible that in the space of six or seven weeks she could have forgotten everything? During the long nights in Ricoça, alone in bed, did she never think of those mornings in the sexton’s room? Of course she did; he knew this from all the female confessants who had revealed to him, in great distress, the silent, stubborn temptation that never leaves the flesh once it has sinned . . .

  No, he must pursue her, and use any means he could to communicate to her the desire that burned even higher in him now, even more fiercely.

  He spent the night writing her an absurd six-page letter, full of passionate entreaties, mystical subtleties, exclamation marks and threats of suicide.

  Dionísia delivered it for him early the next day. The reply came that night, via a small boy who worked on the farm. How eagerly he tore open the envelope. All it contained were these words: ‘Please leave me in peace with my sins.’

  He did not give up; the following day, he went to Ricoça again to visit Dona Josefa. Amélia was in the room when he arrived. She turned very pale, but her eyes never left her sewing during the half hour that he spent there, while he sat either sunk in the armchair in tormented, sombre silence or responded distractedly to the chatter of Dona Josefa, who was in talkative mood that morning.

  And the following week, the same thing happened; as soon as she heard him arrive, she would quickly lock herself in her room and would only come if Dona Josefa sent Gertrudes to tell her that ‘Father Amaro wanted to see her’. She would go then and offer him her hand, which always seemed to him scalding hot, only to take up her eternal sewing, next to the window, backstitching away in infuriating silence.

  He had written her another letter. She had not replied.

  Then he vowed not to go back to Ricoça, to spurn her, but after a night spent tossing and turning in bed, unable to sleep, with the vision of her nakedness fixed unbearably in his mind, he would set off again to Ricoça the following morning, blushing when the timekeeper at the roadworks, who saw him pass by every day, took off his oilskin hat to him.

  One rainy afternoon, as he was going into the house, he met Father Ferrão, who was standing at the door, opening his umbrella.

  ‘Fancy meeting you here, Father!’ he said.

  Father Ferrão responded quite naturally:

  ‘It’s rather less of a surprise to see you here, since you visit every day.’

  Amaro could not control himself and, trembling with rage, he said:

  ‘And what business is it of yours whether I visit or not? Is this your house?’

  This entirely unjustified rudeness offended Father Ferrão.

  ‘Well, it would be better for everyone concerned if you did not visit.’

  ‘And why is that, Father, tell me, why is that?’ shouted Amaro, beside himself.

  The good man shuddered. He had just committed the gravest fault a Catholic priest can commit: what he knew about Amaro and about his love affair, was a secret of the confessional, and he was betraying the mystery of the sacrament by showing that he disapproved of Amaro’s persistent desire to sin. He took off his hat and said humbly:

  ‘You’re quite right, Father. Forgive me. I spoke without thinking. Good afternoon, Father.’

  ‘Good afternoon, Father Ferrão.’

  Amaro did not go into the house. He returned home in the now pelting rain. As soon as he arrived, he wrote another long letter to Amélia, in which he told her what had happened with Father Ferrão, heaping accusations on him, especially that of having betrayed the secret of the confessional. This, like the other letters, received no reply.

  Then Amaro began to believe that such resistance could not possibly arise so suddenly from mere repentance and a terror of Hell. ‘There’s some man involved,’ he thought. And, eaten away by black jealousy, he began to prowl around the house at Ricoça at night, but he saw nothing; the house remained dark and asleep. On one occasion, however, as he approached the orchard wall, he heard ahead of him on the road from Poiais a voice singing in maudlin tones ‘The Waltz of Two Worlds’, and saw the bright point of a lit cigar approaching in the darkness. Frightened, Amaro took shelter in a ruined shack on the other side of the road. The singing stopped, and Amaro, peering out, saw someone in a light-coloured cloak stop and gaze up at the windows of the house. A wave of jealousy gripped Amaro and he was just about to leap out and attack the man, when he saw him walk calmly off again, holding his cigar aloft and singing:

  Can you hear ringing in the mountains

  That mighty terrifying roar . . .

  The voice, the cloak and the walk he recognised at once as João Eduardo’s, but he was sure that if a man was visiting Amélia at night or going into the farm, that man was certainly not João Eduardo. Fearful of being discovered, Amaro ceased his prowlings round the house.

  It was indeed João Eduardo, who, whenever he passed Ricoça, by day or by night, would pause for a moment and look sadly up at the walls where she lived. Because, despite his many disappointments, Amélia was still the poor lad’s beloved and the most precious thing on earth. In Ourém, in Alcobaça, at the various inns where he had stayed, even in Lisbon, where he had arrived like the keel of a wrecked ship washed up on the shore, her presence had not for a moment ceased to inhabit his soul, nor had he ever stopped tenderly thinking of her. During those bitter days in Lisbon, the worst in his entire life, working as a runner for an obscure law firm, lost in that city that seemed to him as vast as a Rome or a Babylon and in which he experienced the harsh egotism of the bustling multitude, he had struggled to keep alive that love which was to him like a sweet companion. He felt less alone as long as he could hold in his mind that image with which he would maintain imaginary conversations on his e
ndless walks along the Cais do Sodré, blaming her for all the grinding sadnesses of his life.

  And that passion, which was to him a vague justification for his misery, made him seem more interesting in his own eyes. He was a ‘martyr for love’ and that idea consoled him, just as, during his first period of despair, it had consoled him to feel that he was ‘a victim of religious persecution’. He was not merely another poor devil whom chance, idleness, fate, the lack of friends and the patches on his jacket kept fatally locked in the privations of dependency: he was a man with a great heart who, after a heroic struggle, had been forced by a catastrophe that was part-romantic and part-political, by a domestic and social drama, to traipse from one law office to another with a bag full of legal documents. Fate had made of him a hero like so many of the heroes he had read about in sentimental novels. And he attributed his worn jacket, his frugal suppers, the days when he had no money for cigarettes, to his fateful love for Amélia and to his persecution by a powerful class, and thus, out of a very human instinct, he attributed a very grand origin to his trivial afflictions. When he saw people whom he termed ‘happy’ – men driving carriages, young men walking along with a pretty woman on their arm, people well wrapped up against the cold on their way to the theatre, he felt less unfortunate thinking that he too possessed a great inner luxury – that unhappy love affair. And when he, by chance, was offered a job in Brazil and the money for his passage, he idealised the banal adventure of emigration, repeating to himself over and over that he was going across the seas, exiled from his own country by the combined tyrannies of the priesthood and of the authorities, and all because he had loved a woman!

  Who would have thought then, as he packed his suit away in a metal trunk, that only a few weeks later he would once more be living barely half a league from those same priests and those same authorities, gazing tenderly up at Amélia’s window! And all because of that most unusual man, the Morgado de Poiais, that is, the heir to the Poiais estate, who was neither a true heir nor even originally from Poiais, but merely a wealthy eccentric from near Alcobaça, who had bought the property from the noble family of Poiais, and who had received, along with possession of the land, the honorary title of Morgado – it was this saintly man who had saved him from the horrors of seasickness and from the hazards of emigration. He had chanced to meet him in the office where he was still working on the eve of his departure. The Morgado, who was a client of old Nunes, knew his story and knew about the article he had written in The District Voice and about the scandal in the Cathedral square, and had conceived for him an ardent sympathy.

  The Morgado had a fanatical hatred of priests, so much so that he never read about a crime in a newspaper without deciding (even when the guilty party had already been sentenced) that there must be a priest involved in it somewhere. It was said that this rancour had its origins in his unhappy first marriage to a famously devout woman in Alcobaça. As soon as he met João Eduardo in Lisbon and learned of his imminent departure, he immediately had the idea of bringing him back to Leiria, installing him in Poiais, and handing over to him the primary education of his two small children, as a clear affront to the diocesan clergy. He assumed too that João Eduardo was an unbeliever, and this fitted in with his philosophical plan to bring up his children to be ‘out-and-out atheists’. João Eduardo accepted with tears in his eyes, for the post brought with it a magnificent salary, a position, a family, and an ostentatious rehabilitation.

  ‘I will never forget what you have done for me, sir!’

  ‘I’m doing it entirely for my own pleasure. I want to provoke those scoundrels! We leave tomorrow!’

  In Chão de Maçãs, as he got down from the train, the Morgado immediately exclaimed to the station master, who did not know João Eduardo or his story:

  ‘I have brought him back with me in triumph! He has come to beat the whole priesthood to a pulp. And if there are any costs to pay, I will pay them!’

  The station master was not in the least surprised, for the Morgado was generally considered to be mad.

  It was in Poiais, on the day immediately following his arrival, that João Eduardo learned that Amélia and Dona Josefa were staying at the house in Ricoça. He found this out from Father Ferrão, the only priest to whom the Morgado would speak, and whom he received in his house not as a priest, but as a gentleman.

  ‘I admire you as a gentleman, Senhor Ferrão,’ he used to say, ‘but as a priest, I loathe you.’

  And good Father Ferrão would smile, knowing that the ferocious exterior of this stubborn unbeliever concealed both a saintly heart and a true benefactor of the parish poor.

  The Morgado was also a great lover of old books and a tireless debater; sometimes the two of them would have tremendous battles about history, botany, hunting methods . . . When Father Ferrão, in the heat of argument, proposed some contrary opinion, the Morgado would exclaim loftily:

  ‘Are you saying that as a priest or as a gentleman?’

  ‘As a gentleman, Senhor Morgado.’

  ‘Then I accept your objection. It’s very sensible. If you were putting the same objection forward as a priest, however, I would break your bones.’

  Sometimes, hoping to annoy Father Ferrão, he would show João Eduardo to him, fondly patting the young man on the back, as if he were a favourite horse.

  ‘Look at him! He’s already finished off one priest, and he’ll kill two or three more yet. And if they arrest him, I myself will save him from the gallows.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be very difficult, Senhor Morgado,’ said Father Ferrão, calmly taking a pinch of snuff. ‘There are no gallows in Portugal any more.’

  The Morgado was furious. No gallows? And why was that? Because we had a free government and a constitutional monarchy! If the priests had their way, there would be a gallows on every square and a bonfire on every corner!

  ‘Tell me something, Senhor Ferrão, are you going to defend the Inquisition here in my house?’

  ‘Please, Senhor Morgado, I didn’t even mention the Inquisition . . .’

  ‘Ah, that was only because you were afraid to, because you knew perfectly well that I would have plunged a dagger into your heart!’

  And he said all this at the top of his voice, cavorting about the room, creating a veritable gale with the prodigious skirts of his yellow dressing gown.

  ‘Deep down he’s an angel,’ the Father said to João Eduardo. ‘He would give his own shirt even to a priest if he knew he needed it. You’ll be all right here, João Eduardo. You just have to ignore his little obsessions.’

  Father Ferrão had become fond of João Eduardo, and having heard from Amélia all about the famous article in The District Voice, he had wanted, to use his favourite expression, ‘to get a feel for the man’. He had spent whole afternoons talking with him in the avenue of laurels in the garden of his house, where João Eduardo came to stock up on books; and beneath the ‘exterminator of priests’ as the Morgado called him, he found a poor, sensitive lad with a rather sentimental view of religion, a longing for domestic peace and a real enjoyment of his work. Father Ferrão had an idea which seemed to him to have come from above, from God’s will, because it came to him one day when he had just finished his devotions to the Sacrament; his idea was to marry João Eduardo to Amélia. It would not be difficult to bring that weak and tender heart to forgive her mistake; and now that all passion was spent, the passion that had entered her soul like the Devil’s breath, driving her will, her peace of mind and her modesty down into the abyss, the poor girl, who had been through so much, would find in João Eduardo’s company a remnant of calm and contentment, a safe and cosy haven, a sweet refuge and a purification from the past. He said nothing to either of them about the idea he was nurturing. It was not the moment now, not while she was carrying in her womb the other man’s child. But he was lovingly preparing for that moment, especially when he was with Amélia, telling her all about his conversations with João Eduardo, about some particularly sensible comment he had mad
e, about the excellent skills as a tutor that he was developing in educating the Morgado’s children.

  ‘He’s a fine young man,’ he would say. ‘A family man . . . the sort to whom a woman could really entrust her life and her happiness. If I were a man of the world and I had a daughter, I’d happily give her to him.’

  Amélia did not respond, she merely blushed.

  She could no longer object to these persuasive commendations by bringing up the one great obstacle – the article in The District Voice, his lack of belief! Father Ferrão had demolished that one day by saying:

  ‘I read the article, Senhora. The lad was writing not against priests, but against the Pharisees!’

  And to attenuate that harsh judgement on the priests mentioned in the article, which was the least charitable thing he had said in years, he added:

  ‘It was a grave fault, for which he has repented. He paid for it with tears and with hunger.’

  And that touched Amélia.

  It was about this time too that Dr Gouveia began visiting Ricoça because Dona Josefa had grown worse with the coming of the cold autumn days. At first, Amélia used to shut herself up in her room when he came, trembling at the thought of being seen in her present state by old Dr Gouveia, the family doctor, that man of legendary severity. In the end, though, she had had to go to Dona Josefa’s room to receive her instructions as nurse, as to when the various medicines were to be taken and what food was to be prepared. And one day, accompanying the doctor to the door, she had stopped in her tracks when she saw him pause and turn, stroking the long white beard that spilled over his velvet jacket.

  ‘I was quite right when I told your mother you should get married!’ he said.

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Now, now, child, I meant no harm. You’re quite right. Nature demands conception not marriage. Marriage is just an administrative formula.’

  Amélia was looking at him, uncomprehending, two round tears running slowly down her cheeks. He patted her paternally under the chin.