The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales

by Darrell Kastin

  Jorge shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “That is what we will discover, Jorge,” Valdemar said. “The two principal forces in the universe, Jorge, energy and inertia, life and death—which is the stronger? The force of attraction? The universe may be expanding outward, but perhaps only to reach a point where once again everything converges and becomes one again, like an inverted funnel, the lip spreading out, then folding back on itself, where the past will meet the future.

  “Using the science of captured starlight, which has traveled through the vast ether of space, bringing with it the rarefied air of heaven through which it has passed, I will summon the beauteous apparition of the eyes of the lovely Maria de Conceição de Freitas, reflected in a pool of crystal water.”

  Several days later, Jorge came home and discovered his grandfather dancing with none other than Maria da Conceição de Freitas, a woman who had died some sixty years earlier, and Valdemar’s sweetheart from the days of his youth, long before he and Jorge’s grandmother had met.

  Valdemar turned to Jorge as they danced, and winked. He moved like a man half his age.

  ~ ~ ~

  How his grandfather managed to disappear through the glass eye in the needle, Jorge couldn’t explain. Yet, he had no doubt that was what Valdemar had done.

  It was June 10, the Day of Portugal and Jorge’s thirteenth birthday.

  They’d had a small party downstairs. Jorge’s parents bought him a new bicycle, but it was Valdemar’s gifts that interested him the most: an origami book with fine-colored papers, a book on performing magic tricks—“It will do you good to learn sleight-of-hand,” Valdemar said—and Valdemar’s viola. “I want you to have this, to learn to play. Music expands forever, so what you play now will ring from one end of the planet to the other.”

  There was still one more gift to open. Jorge’s parents protested. “Haven’t you given him enough,” Jorge’s father said.

  Valdemar shook his head. “Go on, open it,” he said.

  Jorge unwrapped the long box, and opening it, saw the telescope. There was a folded tripod, too.

  “That must have cost a fortune,” Jorge’s mother said.

  “He will need it,” Valdemar said.

  Jorge didn’t understand, but was thrilled with the telescope.

  “I can’t wait to look through it,” he said, rushing over to give his grandfather a hug.

  “First, why don’t you make me something with your origami paper?” Valdemar said.

  He watched Jorge expertly fold the bright golden paper into the shape of a three-dimensional star. It was easy for Jorge, who had already gone through several books on the subject and made numerous animals and geometric shapes.

  As Jorge finished making the star, however, Valdemar suddenly leaped to his feet. “Of course, folding, that’s it,” he muttered, “How could I have forgotten?” He quickly made his way up the stairs.

  Later, Valdemar helped Jorge set up the telescope. The two of them peered at the seas of the moon. “Maria they are called in Latin. Mare is just one,” Valdemar explained.

  Before going to bed, Jorge entered the workroom. His grandfather was adjusting several lenses and tubes in front of the glass eye of the needle.

  “Remember everything I’ve told you,” Valdemar said. “In the end, after all my searching, it was you who gave me the answer.”

  “What did I do?” Jorge said.

  “Your origami star,” Valdemar said. “It gave me the idea of folding space and light. That was what I needed to know.”

  When Valdemar stepped into the center of the room, something happened. Jorge watched in amazement. He could see through his grandfather. Jorge stepped forward. Valdemar’s hand rose, palm out as if to stop him. He mouthed the word “good-bye,” and then appeared to slip into the beam of light focused on the tiny chip of diamond embedded in the needle’s eye.

  He was gone. Jorge ran to the needle. He grasped the magnifying lens, and studied the glass. He thought he saw a tiny movement, but then there was nothing, only the light.

  At first, Jorge was happy, thrilled that Valdemar had finally accomplished the difficult feat which had eluded him for so long. He knew that Valdemar had planned everything out. After all, Valdemar had spoken of projections, reflections, and space-time jumps for so many years that Jorge thought nothing of it, as if Valdemar were merely talking about taking a stroll down to the park. By the next morning, however, Jorge realized that Valdemar was gone for good, and he wouldn’t be coming back.

  Valdemar’s family phoned the police. A frantic search was made. News reports described him as helpless and sickly—neither of which was true. They made him out to be a tottering, frail man who had wandered off and forgotten where he was, who he was.

  People sent flyers with his picture in a thousand directions, and television reports requested anyone who saw him to call the 800 number listed. Jorge knew it was useless, they wouldn’t find him. The police investigation turned up nothing. No trace of him was found. Of course, no one cared to listen to Jorge when he tried to explain where Valdemar had gone. As far as they were concerned, he was simply a missing person, whereabouts unknown.

  After several months they gave up. The family assumed he had slipped into the sea and washed away. They could imagine no other possibility for how a full-grown man could disappear. But Jorge could.

  His grandfather was where he wanted to be. Valdemar had succeeded in projecting himself into the very place he sought. And who could say that by so doing he hadn’t slightly, perhaps imperceptibly, altered our world—in essence opening the doorway a chink, creating a pathway through which others might conceivably follow?

  Jorge continued to arrange the lenses, attempting to make a projection in the same way that Valdemar had used them to summon Jorge’s grandmother whenever he wished to speak with her.

  Sometimes, as he peered through the telescope, Jorge would see what he thought was a glimpse, a passing wisp, streaking across the night sky like a shooting star. Or he’d find a nebulous light, flaring or pulsing as if winking, communicating to some other region or far-off being, where there had only been dark, empty space before. He waved wildly, sure that Valdemar was able to see him.

  Jorge hoped that, given enough time and patience, he might eventually find his way there, too; where, in another time and place, the elements would reform and perhaps the light grandfather had become would form into matter once again—a new star illuminating a distant, silent corner of space. And perhaps by then Jorge would be transformed as well: a newly formed comet or planet revolving around a bright new star.

  Valdemar had found what he had been looking for, what he strove for so long to find: a way to that special realm, that place in space and time where he belonged, where there are no limits or restrictions, where past and future converged, just as he had said.

  The old conjurer, even now, was probably recapturing lost moments, perhaps reciting a poem in the arms of Jorge’s grandmother, if not with his beloved, Maria da Conceição de Freitas. For in Valdemar’s universe there was room and love enough for both.

  THERE IS A LEGEND, NOW LOST TO THE EXTREME VICISSITUDES OF TIME, that long ago in the area between the Azores and the continent of Portugal lay the most fertile and beautiful of lands. This was long before Portugal was yet a country, when the Lusitanians, a mysterious Celtic tribe, then inhabited the region.

  Some say an enormous island lay just offshore, Atlantis, if you will. Others insist that the mainland itself extended to the Azores, and that the islands are the last remains of that fair land, Lusitania. And in the midst of this paradise lived Pedro, the troubadour, who composed songs and sang like no other.

  Pedro had always been a large man. He was known to have a strong appetite for those things which were his particular passions: food, drink, conversation, songs and stories, natural beauty, women, laughter, and living life to its fullest. When he loved there was no stopping him—no limits, and certainly no half measures. And what he lov
ed perhaps more than anything was the countryside, the land where he was born.

  From his early youth, the mountains and fields surrounding his home fascinated him. He was often seen wandering the hills and forests, the rocky outcroppings, the streams and creeks. He would seek out the oldest men and women and listen to their stories about the past, the people and the places. They told him tales about the ancient families, the history, the myths and legends of the land. And through it all, Pedro listened enraptured, drinking in every word. Then he would go wandering, singing songs, his poems—songs about this river, that hill, a valley over there, a mountain farther to the east, a beautiful girl who lived in a particular forest, or an ancient king or warrior, as if he had been taught those songs by the very places themselves.

  Sometimes he would be found standing beside a tree or sitting on a rock, looking out over the view, staring so intently he wouldn’t hear anyone as they approached, even if they called his name. People said he was far away, lost in the past, that he would never become a wealthy man chasing after all his dreams of inconsequential things, things that even then were beginning to fade from memory.

  It was said that he knew every corner of the land, every rock and cave, every trail, the peak of every hill, as well as every ravine or gully. He knew the animals, the birds, and the properties of the plants that grew there. He knew of every hero and every villain who had passed through those parts. He knew the names of places no one else knew, old names no longer used.

  And as all this took place, he grew larger, with each mouthful of sweet chestnuts, grown from the soil he roamed, with every olive produced from this land that was so special, so unique to him; for he could taste the land in everything he ate or drank: every peach, plum, or pear ripened from the sunlight, the water, and the soil.

  He tried to show other people. “Here, see this spot, yes, right there, between these two hills, hear the wind that blows unlike any other? Hear that sound? The sound of the wind and the land, our land, our past.” But the others shook their heads. They could not see. They did not hear. They wanted that piece of land over there in order to cut the trees, or they desired a woman from a neighboring village; they wanted wealth, or children, or a larger house, or a new boat.

  But they heard Pedro sing and could feel the ebb and flow, the longing, the love and sadness conveyed in ways which made the women sigh and the men stop what they were doing and try to remember something they had forgotten long ago.

  Pedro was able to recount a story for everything, always ready to sing a song or recite a poem, to quote an old saying, a proverb, even a rhyme or riddle, as well as perform the dances and the music that were part of their history.

  Springs of cool, fresh water bubbled from the ground in holy, sacred places, full of spirits and magic from a time long forgotten in the past. Ghosts of the Jews of antiquity, who had sailed over from the Holy Land, of the ancient Phoenicians, the Celts who had sailed from the north, the Visigoths, then the Romans and, of course, the Moors, the Suevi, and the Gypsies as well. Each of these peoples left their mark, a trace of having lived there, in their words, in their instruments, their food and children, their music—but it was of and for the Lusitanians that Pedro lived, breathed, and sang his songs, calling to the ancient race.

  Pedro drank dark red wine made from the grapes that grew here, bottle after precious bottle, as if it were sweet life itself. He drank and grew larger still.

  He ate the potatoes as if they were small clumps fashioned from the very soil in which they grew, seedlings of the earth he could taste with each bite. With each mouthful he drew into himself the spirits, the music and magic of the land. Occasionally he ate an olive whole, pit and all. Sometimes, as he had done when he was a child, he ate a small piece of dirt, or a tiny stone or two. And in each taste he found a sound, a word, a meaning.

  People remarked, of course, on his size. A large man, very large, teeth like the blades of a hoe, huge hands and feet. But one who could laugh and joke and tell stories like no one else.

  He would sing and dance, like King Dom Pedro of old, who with whip in hand would dance through the streets of Lisbon accompanied by his band of musicians, singing and laughing, drinking, to forget his woes.

  Pedro, the wandering troubadour, ate and drank, and ate and drank, and it is said that some people saw their lands shrinking or drying up, even as he grew larger.

  No one, of course, dared speak the unspeakable, the impossible, that Pedro was somehow eating their lands, but they dreamed it nonetheless, and they thought it during their waking moments when they tried to work what land was left them. And they saw it, too, when they looked at the man who seemed to encompass so many fields and mounds of soil and trees, so much of his country, in his ever-increasing size, so many ancient secrets which sparkled in his eyes. But then, perhaps it was only that Pedro remembered what they had all forgotten.

  Some said that when he sang they heard the breezes that once blew through the stalks of milho painço—millet corn—on their lands, heard the whisperings of the streams, now dried, in his voice. When thunder was heard roaring in the heavens, they said Pedro was laughing. Some claimed he baked his loaves of bread first with small amounts of soil mixed in with the fine flour produced from the neighboring fields, then used more and more soil, until finally they were nothing more than clumps of baked earth that he consumed regularly, with an unfailing appetite.

  Nobody blamed Pedro for what was happening, and in fact many pointed out that, if he grew more enormous as the lands disappeared, it wasn’t his fault. One or two poetic souls insisted that this was what came of forgetting; that if Pedro was so large it was because he had taken all the stories, the songs and poems, the language, the history and the myths, leaving a land stripped bare, because the people had long turned their backs on the richness of their past.

  The springs continued to dry up, fields blew away, and people moved away from the villages, left the land, or simply moved farther inland to other places, found new homes and new fields to sow.

  The hills and rocks, places where forests had grown, receded. Now the sea came in to fill the empty places newly made.

  Pedro became a legend, a story many of the young people didn’t believe, as he continued to roam, digging up the stray snippet of song, a song of a lost place, a myth of ancient seafarers and warriors.

  The last few people began to leave. Not only did the land no longer hold anything for them, the land was no longer there.

  For a time a large hole, like a giant rift hewn out of the earth, stood where the villages and much of the land had been. People said that Pedro was down at the bottom of that hole, for no one had seen him for some time. Sounds, it was claimed, could be heard coming from this hole, though no one cared to venture close enough to find out.

  If a particularly beautiful young woman was discovered to have disappeared, she was said to be Pedro’s bride, gone to join him, down at the bottom of that deepest of holes, where so much of their beloved lands had disappeared. These stories were much like the old tales of Moorish princesses who fell in love with a Christian prince or nobleman, or similar stories of Christian princesses who had fallen in love with a Moorish prince—tragic heroines who so often accompanied their lovers in death, as opposed to parting forever.

  Pedro chewed the very last stones that remained, tasted the deeply buried secrets of time, his love for people and places which lay embedded in everything that filled that land, everything whose essence he had now consumed, until the waves flooded the entire region, leaving nothing but a last outcropping of rock jutting from the sea, which for generations would prove hazardous to vessels sailing along that part of the coast. And far off in the ocean, the Azores were all that remained of the western edge of the land that Pedro had consumed.

  DONA LEONOR’S IRREPRESSIBLE DRESS SWEPT DOWN THE AVENIDA Diogo de Teive as if caught by a sudden covetous wind. Marveling at the playfulness of the dress, the way it fluttered and rippled ceaselessly, I followed, determined not t
o let it out of my sight.

  I tried to drink in its colors, though none were pure or remained fixed. Instead, they changed and shifted continuously, as if liquid. It was as if each strand sought to combine with others and become not just another shade, but many different colors. There was also a language that the dress conveyed—not of words, but of something similar to the correspondences of the wind, the ocean, the flights of birds—while my heart, fanned by this language of articulate gestures, grew delirious, and urged me to gallop in mad pursuit.

  I blinked and rubbed my eyes. Would this mirage suddenly vanish? Was the miracle ethereal like a rainbow, ever moving out of reach as you approached it? For miracle it was. The dress made Dona Leonor even more irresistible, and I wondered, had she made the dress more than it had been to begin with, imbuing each thread with the charm of her lively spirit, her essence?

  I followed the dress past the cathedral and the cafés, then through the Praça do Infante by the waterfront. Whether Dona Leonor knew I was there, I can’t say. But I would have happily pursued her over sheer cliffs, the widest deserts, or burning coals in order to keep that dress in my sight.

  I had been forced to accept the harsh reality that Leonor, the beautiful youngest daughter of the noble Meneses family, could never have anything to do with me, the grandson of a poor dairy farmer, and the son of an even poorer poet. My father, self-taught and rejected by his own father, wrote a series of sonnets, as well as a book of aphorisms which summed up his personal philosophy of an intense metaphysical nature, in which the Azores and its people featured predominantly.

  He taught me how to appreciate beauty in all its subtle guises, that only the grandest of dreams were worth dreaming, and that love and dreams were one and the same: “Without one you cannot have the other,” he proclaimed.