The Crime of Father Amaro

by José Maria De Eça de Queirós

  ‘Do you need a light?’ called the maid on hearing a visitor’s voice.

  ‘No!’ shouted back Amaro.

  He was afraid that the coadjutor might notice his changed face or that he might settle in for the rest of the night.

  ‘Apparently there was a very interesting article in The Nation the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Really,’ said Amaro.

  He was pacing up and down, following his usual track, from the washbasin to the window; he occasionally stopped to drum with his fingers on the glass; the lamps outside had been lit.

  Then the coadjutor, shocked by the darkness in the room and by that constant pacing, got to his feet and, with great dignity, said:

  ‘But perhaps I’m bothering you . . .’

  ‘No, no!’

  Satisfied, the coadjutor sat down again, his umbrella between his knees.

  ‘The nights are drawing in,’ he said.

  ‘They are . . .’

  Eventually, in desperation, Amaro told him that he had an appalling migraine and that he was going to bed; the coadjutor departed, reminding him once more about the baptism of his friend Guedes’ child.

  Amaro left at once for Ricoça. Fortunately, it was a warm, dark night, presaging rain. He was now seized by a hope that made his heart beat faster, that the child would be born dead! And it was quite possible. As a young woman, São Joaneira had had two still births; Amélia’s state of anxiety had probably disturbed the child’s gestation. And what if she died too? At that idea, which had never before occurred to him, he was suddenly filled with pity and tenderness for the kind girl who loved him so much and who now, because of him, would be screaming out in agony. And yet, if both died, both she and the child, that would mean that his sin and his error would fall for ever into the dark abyss of eternity. He would be, as he had been before he came to Leiria, a tranquil man, concerned only with the Church, and with a life as clean and white as a blank page.

  He stopped at the ruined hut by the roadside where he was to meet the person from Barrosa who would come for the child; it had not been decided whether it would be the man or Carlota. Amaro dreaded handing over his son to that dwarf with the evil, bloodshot eyes. He called into the dark interior of the hut.

  ‘Hello!’

  It was a relief when Carlota’s clear voice said from the blackness.

  ‘Is it here yet?’

  ‘No, we have to wait, Senhora Carlota.’

  He felt pleased. It seemed to him that he had nothing to fear if his child was to be cradled against the robust breast of that fecund forty-year-old, so fresh and clean.

  He prowled round the house, which was utterly dark and silent, as if, on that black December night, it were just a thickening of the surrounding shadows. Not a chink of light emerged from the windows of Amélia’s room. In the heavy air, not a leaf stirred. And no Dionísia appeared.

  The waiting was a torment to him. People might come by and see him prowling about outside, but he could not bring himself to go and hide in the ruined hut with Carlota. He walked the length of the orchard wall and back, and then he saw a glow of light appear at the French windows that opened onto the terrace.

  He ran to the green door in the orchard wall, which opened almost immediately, and, without a word, Dionísia placed a bundle in his arms.

  ‘Is it dead?’ he asked.

  ‘No, it’s alive! A big strong boy!’

  And she slowly closed the door just as the dogs, alert for any noise, began to bark.

  Feeling his son against his chest swept all Amaro’s ideas away like a great wind. What? Give him to that woman, to that ‘weaver of angels’, who would throw him into some ditch along the road or into the latrine at home. No, this was his son!

  But what should he do then? He did not have time to run to Poiais and wake up the other wetnurse. Dionísia had no milk. He couldn’t take it back into town. How he longed to knock on the front door, to rush up to Amélia’s room and place the little one in her bed, all wrapped up, and have the three of them stay there together as if in some cosy, heavenly nest. But how could he? He was a priest. Cursed be that religion that so destroyed him!

  A little murmur emerged from inside the bundle. He ran to the ruined shack and almost collided with Carlota who took the child from him.

  ‘Here he is,’ he said. ‘But listen, I’m serious now. Things have changed. I don’t want him to die. I want you to look after him. What we talked about means nothing. I want you to take care of him. I want him to live. You have his fate in your hands. Look after him!’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said the woman hastily.

  ‘Listen . . . The child isn’t warm enough. Put my cloak around him.’

  ‘He’s fine, sir, fine.’

  ‘No, damn it, he’s not! He’s my son and he must have the cloak around him. I don’t want him to die of cold.’

  He threw it around her shoulders and over her chest, covering the child, and the woman, who was beginning to get annoyed, hastened away.

  Amaro stood in the middle of the road, watching her disappear into the darkness. Then, after that initial shock, all his nerves succumbed to a womanly weakness, and he burst out crying.

  For a long time, he prowled around the house. But it remained sunk in the same terrifying darkness and silence. Then, feeling sad and weary, he walked back into town as the Cathedral clock was striking ten.

  At that hour, in the dining room at Ricoça, Dr Gouveia was calmly eating the roast chicken that Gertrudes had prepared for his supper after the toils of the day. Father Ferrão was sitting with him, watching him eat; he had brought the sacraments with him in case of danger. But the doctor was pleased; the girl had been very brave during the eight hours of labour; the birth had gone well and the result was a healthy boy who would do great honour to his father.

  In his modesty as a priest, Father Ferrão chastely lowered his eyes when the doctor mentioned these details.

  ‘And now,’ said the doctor, biting into a chicken’s wing, ‘now that I have brought the child into the world, you gentlemen (by which I mean the Church) will get hold of him and won’t let go of him until he dies. On the other hand, albeit less enthusiastically, the State will keep its eye on him too . . . And so the poor wretch begins his journey from cradle to grave, flanked by a priest and a police officer!’

  Father Ferrão bowed and took a loud pinch of snuff in preparation for the debate.

  ‘The Church,’ continued the doctor serenely, ‘begins imposing religion on a child when the child barely knows he’s alive . . .’

  Father Ferrão interrupted, half serious, half joking:

  ‘Doctor, purely out of charitable concern for your soul, I feel I should warn you that Canon 13 of the Holy Council of Trent imposes the punishment of excommunication on anyone who declares baptism to be meaningless, the punishment to be imposed with no right to appeal.’

  ‘Noted, Father. I am accustomed to the kindnesses extended to myself and other colleagues by the Council of Trent.’

  ‘It was a very important assembly!’ said Father Ferrão, scandalised.

  ‘Oh, sublime, Father, a sublime assembly. The Council of Trent and the French National Convention were the two most remarkable assemblies of men that the world has seen . . .’

  Father Ferrão made a grimace of disgust at this irreverent comparison between the holy authors of doctrine and the murderers of good King Louis XVI.

  But the doctor went on:

  ‘Then the Church leaves the child in peace for a time while he does his teething and has his first attack of worms . . .’

  ‘Go on, doctor, go on!’ murmured the priest, listening to him patiently, his eyes closed, as if to say: ‘Go on, bury your soul deep in the abyss of fire and pitch!’

  ‘But when the first signs of reason appear in the child, when, in order to distinguish him from the animals, it becomes necessary for him to have some understanding of himself and of the universe, in walks the Church and explains everything! Ev
erything! And so completely that a boy of six who doesn’t even know his alphabet has a vaster and more certain knowledge than all the royal academies of London, Berlin and Paris combined! The rascal does not hesitate for a moment when it comes to explaining how the universe and its planetary systems were made, how the creation of the earth came about, how the different races arose, how the geological revolutions around the world occurred, how languages developed, how writing was invented . . . He knows everything: he possesses the rules, complete and immutable, for directing all his actions and forming all his opinions; he even has answers to all the great mysteries; he might be as myopic as a mole, but he can nevertheless see what happens in the depths of sky and earth; he knows, as if he had seen it with his own eyes, what will happen to him after death . . . He has a solution to every problem . . . And when the Church has made of this great lad a marvel of knowledge, then they teach him how to read . . . Why? I ask myself.’

  Father Ferrão was dumb with indignation.

  ‘Tell me, Father, why do you have them learn to read? The whole of universal knowledge, the res scibilis, lies in the Catechism: he only has to memorise it and the boy has immediate knowledge and awareness of everything . . . He knows as much as God. In fact, he is God.’

  Father Ferrão started.

  ‘This is not argument,’ he exclaimed. ‘These comments are mere Voltairean jibes! Such matters should be treated with more respect . . .’

  ‘Jibes, Father? Take just one example: the development of languages. How did they come about? It was God, who, unhappy with what was going on in the Tower of Babel . . .’

  At this point, the door opened and Dionísia appeared. Shortly before, in Amélia’s room, he had told her off in no uncertain terms, and now she addressed him in terrified tones.

  ‘Doctor,’ she said, in the ensuing silence, ‘Miss Amélia has woken up and wants to see the baby.’

  ‘So? The child has been taken away, hasn’t it?’

  ‘It has,’ replied Dionísia.

  ‘Then there’s no more to be said.’

  Dionísia was about to close the door, but the doctor called her back.

  ‘Listen, tell her she can see the child tomorrow . . . tell her that they’ll bring her the child tomorrow without fail. Lie to her. Lie like a dog. Father Ferrão here gives you permission. Tell her to go to sleep, tell her not to worry.’

  Dionísia withdrew. But they did not resume their argument; confronted by the thought of that mother who had awoken after the exhaustion of labour and was demanding to see her son, the son who had been taken far away and for ever, the two men forgot all about the Tower of Babel and the development of languages. Father Ferrão seemed particularly moved. The pitiless doctor, however, was soon reminding him that these were the consequences of the priest’s position in society . . .

  Father Ferrão looked down, busy with his snuff, and did not reply, as if unaware that a priest was involved in this whole unhappy story.

  Taking up his own idea, the doctor discoursed on the preparation and education of clerics.

  ‘There you have an education based on an absurdity: resisting the perfectly fair demands of nature and resisting the most lofty demands of reason. Preparing a priest is like creating a monster who will spend his whole wretched life waging a desperate battle against the two irresistible facts of the universe – the force of Matter and the force of Reason!’

  ‘What are you saying?’ exclaimed the priest, astonished.

  ‘The plain truth! What does the education of a priest involve? Primo: preparing him for celibacy and virginity, that is, for the violent suppression of the most natural of feelings. Secundo: it trains him to avoid any knowledge and any ideas that might shake the Catholic faith, that is, the forced suppression of the spirit of investigation and examination and, therefore, of all real human knowledge . . .’

  Father Ferrão had stood up, filled with pious indignation:

  ‘Do you deny that the Church has knowledge?’

  ‘Jesus, my dear Father,’ the doctor continued unperturbed, ‘Jesus, his first disciples and the illustrious St Paul all declared in parables and epistles, in that whole extraordinary verbal outpouring, that the products of the human spirit were useless, puerile and, worse, pernicious.’

  Father Ferrão was pacing about the room, bumping into the furniture like a goaded ox, clutching his head in despair at such blasphemies. Unable to control himself any longer, he cried:

  ‘You don’t know what you’re saying! Forgive me, doctor, I humbly beg you to forgive me . . . You are driving me into mortal sin . . . But this is not argument . . . this is the stuff of journalism.’

  He then launched into a heated dissertation on the wisdom of the Church, on its lofty studies of Greek and Latin, on an entire philosophy created by the holy fathers . . .

  ‘Read St Basil!’ he exclaimed. ‘There he says that studying the great secular authors is the best possible preparation for studying the sacred texts! Read The History of Monasteries in the Middle Ages! There you had science and philosophy . . .’

  ‘But what philosophy, Father, what science? By philosophy they meant half a dozen concepts of a mythological bent, in which mysticism replaces social instincts . . . And as for science . . . it was the science of commentators and grammarians. Times changed, though, and new sciences were born of which the ancients knew nothing and for which ecclesiastical education offered neither basis nor method, and there was an immediate antagonism between them and Catholic doctrine. Initially, the Church even tried to suppress them by persecution, imprisonment, fire! You can’t deny it, Father. Yes, fire and imprisonment. The Church can no longer do that and so it merely fulminates against them in bad Latin. And meanwhile, in seminaries and schools, it continues to teach the old science that predates these new sciences, ignoring them, despising them, taking refuge in scholasticism. There’s no use clutching your head . . . The Church is alien to the modern spirit, hostile in its principles and methods to the development of human knowledge . . . You can’t deny that! Just look at the Syllabus with its third rule excommunicating Reason . . . In Canon 13 . . .’

  The door opened timidly; it was Dionísia again.

  ‘Miss Amélia is crying. She says she wants her baby.’

  ‘Oh, dear, that’s not good,’ said the doctor, adding after a moment: ‘How does she look? Is she flushed? Restless?’

  ‘No, sir, she’s fine. But she just keeps crying and talking about the baby. She says she has to see him now.’

  ‘Talk to her, distract her . . . See if you can get her to go to sleep.’

  Dionísia withdrew, and Father Ferrão asked cautiously:

  ‘Do you think getting upset could harm her?’

  ‘Yes, it could, Father, it could,’ said the doctor rummaging around in his bag. ‘But I’m going to send her to sleep . . . But it’s true, you know, Father, the Church nowadays is an intruder.’

  Father Ferrão again clutched his head.

  ‘You don’t have to go very far. Just look at the Church in Portugal. It’s really most gratifying to see its current state of decay.’

  Then still standing, the bottle of medicine in his hand, the doctor painted in broad strokes a picture of this state of decay. The Church had once been the Nation; now it was a minority tolerated and protected by the State. It had dominated the law courts, the royal councils, the Treasury, the Navy, it had waged war and peace; nowadays a member of parliament with a good majority had more power than the whole of the clergy put together. It had been the one great source of knowledge in the country; now all it could do was mumble a bit of dog Latin. It had been rich, it had owned whole districts in the country and whole streets in the city; now it depended for its pathetic daily bread on the Ministry of Justice and had to beg for alms at the doors of chapels. Once it had recruited its members from amongst the nobility, from amongst the best in the land; and now, in order to get enough people, it found itself in the embarrassing position of having to go recruiting in orphanages. It h
ad been the repository of national tradition, of the country’s collective ideal, and now, having lost its links with the national consciousness (if there is such a thing) it was a foreigner, a citizen of Rome, receiving both law and spirit from there . . .

  ‘Well, if the Church is in such a bad state, all the more reason to love it!’ said Father Ferrão, getting to his feet, red-faced.

  But Dionísia had once again appeared at the door.

  ‘What is it now?’

  ‘Miss Amélia is complaining of a weight on her head. She says she can see flashing lights in front of her eyes . . .’

  Dr Gouveia said nothing and immediately followed Dionísia out of the room. Left alone, Father Ferrão paced up and down, pondering a counter-argument bristling with quotations, with the formidable names of theologians, which he would bring crashing down on the doctor. But half an hour passed, the oil lamp was burning down, and the doctor did not return.

  Then he began to feel worried by the silence filling the house, in which the only living sound was that of his own footsteps going back and forth. He opened the door very slowly and listened, but Amélia’s room was a long way off, at the far end of the house, near the terrace; neither sound nor light came from there. He resumed his solitary pacing, and a vague sadness began to invade his being. He too wanted to go and see the patient, but his own character and his priestly modesty would not even allow him near a woman in bed, in childbirth, unless she was in danger of dying and in need of the sacraments. Another long, even gloomier hour passed. Then, on tiptoe, blushing in the darkness at his own audacity, he ventured out into the corridor; he listened, terrified, to the sounds coming from Amélia’s room, a dull, confused sound as of scampering feet, as if there were a fight going on. But not a sigh or a cry. He went back into the dining room and, opening his breviary, he began to pray. He heard Gertrudes come running by. He heard a door in the distance slam. Then the noise of a brass bowl being dragged across the floor. Finally, the doctor appeared.