The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales

by Darrell Kastin

  People who used to visit the house, who always began their visits by running down the list of their latest ailments—“Ah, Dona Sonia, this pain I have here in my back”—who compared their every ache or symptom, trying their best to outdo one another, soon kept their problems to themselves, afraid of disclosing anything to Sonia, who would make any illness her own.

  She was plagued with fevers, chills, aches and pains; she felt betrayed, unloved, lonely, and endured numerous saudades—that famed Portuguese longing, an intense yearning, a fond remembrance laden with a melancholy—for things she couldn’t even name.

  “She’s nothing but a hypochondriac,” her neighbors said. “There is nothing the matter with her. No one could have so much sorrow.”

  It happened over and over. Whenever someone suffered, Sonia stole the suffering from them. When lovers broke up she moaned in heartache, unable to eat or sleep for many days and nights. And when Maria Teresa went into a labor that lasted thirty-six hours, nobody had to be told that Sonia was the one who screamed with pain all day and night, clutching her bedclothes and nearly dying from the ordeal.

  “Why must she take our pain?” Joana Maria dos Santos da Purificação asked. Joana Maria had been diagnosed, by several specialists, as suffering from an incurable melancholia, but that distinction had quickly been snatched away from her—even before she’d had a chance to relish it—by Sonia’s symptoms, which, of course, proved far worse than Joana Maria’s had ever been.

  “Isn’t there enough suffering in the world for everybody?” Joana’s friend Hortênsia asked. “She has to take ours?”

  “Is she so special?” asked Joana Maria. “Does she think she is a saint simply because she can steal our sufferings?”

  Some villagers weren’t disturbed by Sonia’s excesses. “Good,” they said. “Let her suffer. Better her than us.” Many of them, however, were envious as well as suspicious, feeling that not being able to suffer was no life at all. Since life offered but little, they had learned to cling fiercely to what they had.

  Of course, some people were more pious than others, and such distinctions were carefully noted. If one was capable of enduring more than their share of pains and troubles, in the name of God, then certainly God would reward that person for their piety, if not in this life then in the next.

  The villagers disagreed on exactly how and when this state of affairs had come about. Some insisted that Sonia had always been this way, and that things only worsened after marriage and children. Still others claimed that Sonia had been a normal girl and some mysterious event had transformed her life, leaving her forever blighted.

  “What could it be?” her neighbors asked. “What terrible sin turned Sonia de Melo into a thief?”

  Sonia’s great-grandmother had been known throughout the island as a powerful feiticeira, or sorceress, and it was thought by some that Sonia was now paying for the evil eyes which her great-grandmother, Maria Ernesta de Oliveira Moreno, had put on many of the villagers. Or that Sonia had attempted to practice her great-grandmother’s arts before she was ready, and the magic had backfired.

  No one could say exactly how Sonia stole their pain and their anguish, or how her suffering so eclipsed that of the true victims of misfortune that they were left incapable of feeling anything other than a disquieting numbness. But no one doubted the events that took place, and it wasn’t long before people began to shun her.

  “Look, up the road there. Isn’t that Sonia?” Maria de Fátima said.

  “Quick, then, let’s go this way. She won’t see us,” said her neighbor Maria Teresa.

  One night Maria Palmeira’s husband was caught in a storm out in his boat. Sonia’s cries and wails were heard throughout the night, from one end of town to the other. When the storm cleared there was no sign of the boat or the man.

  Sonia spent each of the next nine days in church, weeping as she walked back and forth between her house, pulling her hair out in clumps, pinching her skin until it bruised and bled—more tears than anyone had ever seen. Meanwhile, Maria Palmeira didn’t—indeed couldn’t—shed a single tear.

  Sonia’s husband, José Vasco, helped nurse her back to health. “We need you, Sonia. Think of the children.”

  She burst into tears.

  “What’s wrong?” her husband asked.

  “I am thinking of the children. Oh, the terrible lives they will live. Just think how miserable they will be.”

  Vasco left the house exhausted. He spent the evening at the café with a glass of aguardente that refilled itself every time he turned around, thanks to the kindness and sympathy of his friend Pedro, behind the counter. Pedro watched Vasco drink. “Poor man,” he mumbled. “He is cursed. No one deserves such a fate.”

  Vasco drank as if the solution to all his problems lay lost somewhere in the bottom of his glass.

  “Don’t worry,” Pedro assured him. “Things will improve.” Pedro didn’t have the heart to repeat the general belief that things couldn’t possibly get much worse for the man.

  José Vasco had worked hard, had always worked hard. Year after year, he waited patiently for something better to come along. One day he awoke and realized that nothing better was going to appear: it was too late—things weren’t going to change. He had what little he had and would never have more than that.

  The other villagers gossiped among themselves, never at a loss to discuss the latest of Sonia’s symptoms and the unfortunate state of her poor family.

  “Vasco should leave that woman,” Joana Maria said. “After all, he is a decent man.”

  “He should find himself another wife, is what he should do,” Hortênsia said. “Then Sonia de Melo would finally have something to cry about!”

  “Yes,” the others agreed. “The poor man, and those children.”

  “Have you seen the daughter?” José Pacheco asked. “Maria Antónia. There is something about that child.”

  “Strange, you mean.”

  “Yes, her eyes.”

  “They are a mystery, indeed.”

  The entire village was afraid of little Maria Antónia’s magnificent eyes. They were of indeterminate color, and churned and swirled with immeasurable depths that clearly contained more than the whole world.

  “I only hope and pray that she doesn’t take after the mother,” said Maria da Conceição.

  Prayers were quickly offered to the Virgin Mother on behalf of Vasco and the children.

  Vasco stumbled home drunk late that night. He fell into bed already asleep.

  In the morning he was awakened by the groans of his wife. “My head,” she said. “I feel like someone beat me with a stick.”

  She had stolen his hangover.

  Without speaking a word, Vasco crawled out of bed and left the house.

  He went to farm his fields, though the soil there was better suited to harvesting rocks than potatoes or wheat. He checked his vineyards: they too were poor. There wouldn’t be much wine this year. Even the few cows he owned were thin and didn’t offer much in the way of milk. All in all, it looked like another miserable year.

  Vasco came home that evening, saddened and dejected, until he noticed Sonia looking as though the whole world had fallen upon her shoulders. She stared at the wall and didn’t even seem to realize that Vasco was there. She sighed and trembled with every breath she took.

  “No dinner?” he asked. “Where are the children?”

  She didn’t answer, but continued staring. Vasco went and gathered the children together. He sent them down the road to his mother’s house.

  What could he do? His sons, Henrique and João, could stay with his uncle and Vasco’s mother. And perhaps his little girl, Maria Antónia, could stay with Sonia’s sister in Praia Negra, on the island of Faial. Sonia’s sister, at least, appeared to be normal. Vasco shrugged.

  “Every family,” he said, “seems to have one who’s crazy and one who is not, one who is beautiful and one who is ugly. God does as he sees fit.”

  It might be
for the best. After all, the children had been forced to keep more than one sickness to themselves, fearful, knowing they couldn’t possibly compete with their mother, who resented any illness or affliction that troubled someone else, including members of her own family.

  Then he went to speak with Sonia. “Maybe I will go to Horta or Terceira, and look for work,” he said.

  Sonia looked at him, her eyes wide and moist with sadness. “Horta? I will be left alone? The children, too?” She fanned herself, exclaiming, “Ah, I feel faint.”

  Vasco left the room. He grabbed his coat and hat, which he normally used only on feast days, and went out.

  Vasco wandered the streets like a sleepwalker, day and night, stopping off at taverns, leaving, stumbling up one road and down another. One day a shopkeeper in town stopped him and told him how sorry he was to hear that one of Vasco’s sisters in America had fallen ill and died. It was the first that Vasco had heard of the news.

  Vasco remained calm and composed. He chuckled to himself, thinking how Sonia would be in mourning at that moment for his sister, even though Sonia had never liked his sister in the first place.

  Still laughing, Vasco began inflicting pain upon himself. If there was a rock in the road he intentionally tripped on it; if he passed a donkey that was known to bite or kick, he encouraged the beast to do its worst.

  At first he wasn’t sure whether these attempts at harming himself were working. But he heard some gossip, and finally began stopping by his house to see for himself. There was Sonia, each and every time, holding her foot, or her head, or her side, moaning. Vasco smiled, relieved. If he had hurt himself on the arm, there was a corresponding bruise, purple or reddish, upon Sonia’s arm.

  Satisfied, Vasco left in search of new ways in which to hurt himself.

  The villagers thought poor Vasco had lost his mind. He was in terrible shape, covered with scrapes and bruises. Practically a day didn’t go by when he didn’t receive some new injury. Some people claimed to have seen him hitting himself, while others swore that he had begged them to hit him.

  But it was his expression through all this that caused the most alarm in the villagers. No matter how badly he was hurt, his expression was one of utter contentment, of inexplicable peace, of joy.

  Sonia suffered, as only she could. “Ah, meu Deus, my own children and husband have abandoned me. I am a forgotten and unloved woman!” Her neighbors heard her endless sighs, as she stared out her open windows, where she looked longingly up the same empty street, crying rivers of tears and bemoaning her plight. “I am forsaken.”

  During her husband’s absence, Sonia became stricken and helpless, unable to do even the simplest things for herself. Each breath was a labor, every movement an ordeal.

  Vasco subjected himself to every conceivable hardship, to all forms of abuse, to any possible method of pain or displeasure. He relished them all, savored every one with an unquenchable enthusiasm. No matter how bruised and battered, how sore or uncomfortable, he was filled with a newfound sense of satisfaction, knowing that back at home, his wife Sonia was suffering all his agonies.

  Vasco stopped eating food. He slept outside in the cold, without any covering. He went about barefoot until his feet were raw and blistered.

  And still, he wore a look of happiness, which was all the more disconcerting and unusual to the townspeople, because none of them could recall having seen Vasco laugh or smile before. “No,” Gil Garante reflected. “He never used to smile. He never had anything to smile about.” The others agreed.

  Sonia’s neighbors tried to inform her of Vasco’s strange behavior, amid all her sufferings. “Dear Mother of God, now my husband has lost his mind!” she exclaimed.

  One day Vasco stood on the edge of a cliff, waiting for death to take him.

  He tried working his feet into a trick from which he wouldn’t be able to back out, knowing he couldn’t intentionally jump. Any fool knew that to kill oneself was a hell of a mortal sin; but an accident—well, now, that was another matter altogether. And what else could it be but a tragic accident if Vasco had a bit too much to drink, stumbled on the edge of the cliff, and drowned in the sea below?

  But if he did drown, he thought, other things might go badly. He decided against taking the risk. He turned, ready to walk away, but then stumbled on a root and fell backwards, over the cliff to the sea below.

  But Vasco was not falling—death, like everything else, was giving him the cold shoulder. He remembered the words of his grandmother, Dona Maria da Conceição: “No one ever dies on this island because they are all born dead. And all one can do is wait for that time which is not of being born or dying, but the birth of unbeing.”

  He floated up above the cliff, realizing that his grandmother had been right. He was a simple man who hadn’t had much time to learn more than what was necessary for survival. Like most people who’d known her, he’d believed his grandmother was somewhat eccentric and her words wholly incomprehensible.

  His grandmother had believed that life was itself a ridiculous predicament. Thus Vasco reasoned, if we are all born dead to begin with, well, then to live or die, does it make any difference? Once you are dead does it really matter that, for a few brief moments, you were alive? How does one weigh a lifetime against an awaiting eternity of oblivion? Death, after all, seemed to be the natural order of things, with life a mere afterthought, a momentary flicker of consciousness, no different from a dream, really.

  Thus Vasco didn’t fall and didn’t die. Instead, he walked back to Santa Inês feeling very tired, longing for the time when he could at long last rest.

  Sonia, never to be outdone, did the only thing she could do under the circumstances: she stole Vasco’s death.

  Such a terrible commotion rumbled up the narrow stone streets of the village, as word of Sonia’s death made its way from house to house, to the cafés, the market, a restaurant or two. Even those working in the fields outside Santa Inês soon heard the news of how Sonia de Melo had suddenly gone to the angels.

  This was how Vasco learned that his wife had passed away. He returned home greatly disturbed. Not only had Sonia taken his death by drowning, but he now felt all of his own pain and suffering once again. Sonia had escaped; she was finally free of the troubles and burdens of her unhappy life. But he, Vasco, was without a wife and children, even poorer than he had been before, and suffering from all the pains and deprivations he had so recently endured.

  ~ ~ ~

  This is the story as it happened in the village of Santa Inês, on the island of Pico. But this isn’t the end of the story. That didn’t take place until seven years had gone by.

  The funeral procession slowly and solemnly passed through the narrow streets of Santa Inês. They were finally going to bury Senhor José Vasco de Melo.

  “There’s no turning back now,” José Pacheco said.

  “He’ll be put into the ground like anyone else,” said Pedro, who owned the café. “This matter will be settled once and for all.”

  “Yes,” said Joana Maria. “There’ll be no more of this foolishness.”

  “Dead is dead,” Hortênsia said.

  “At last!” they all said at once.

  Everybody attending the funeral had heard Vasco refer to himself as a dead man; “I died seven years ago,” he said repeatedly, to anyone who would listen, even upon the last day he was alive. “I am simply waiting to die my true death.” And so for seven long, dreary years, he had awaited this day.

  The villagers all knew about Vasco’s foiled attempt to jump from the cliff, and they knew as well that Sonia had stolen his death from him. For seven years they had watched a dead man who hadn’t yet decided to give up the ghost. For seven long years half the village had treated him as if he were a ghost, and the other half as if nothing had happened, as if he were no different from the Vasco of old.

  “What do we know of such things,” they said. “For all we know he may live forever.”

  And then one day, without warning,
he dropped dead. Gone! And what do you think? Did poor Vasco finally go to his long-awaited and much-needed rest? And what about Sonia? Who knows? However, rumor has it that she is busy stealing all of Vasco’s heavenly pleasures—along with everyone else’s—right this very moment.

  MARIO STARED, ENTRANCED, WHILE BEFORE HIS VERY EYES JOANA Medroso made her way down the hill, floating several inches off the ground. She looked no different from the other girls her own age, but Mario knew she wasn’t like any of them.

  Why, after all, did she have to admonish the birds and butterflies not to follow her, whenever she walked to town? When they were younger Joana had allowed Mario to visit her secret corner of the yard, where she had demonstrated a special way of charming spiders into building extraordinarily ornate webs, designs that she herself had helped to create.

  No one could believe it when Joana Medroso had announced she would marry Joaquim, least of all Mario. He had watched her from near and far; somehow, he felt that she couldn’t possibly go off and marry someone else, that the two of them were in some way linked, sharing a mystery that was merely waiting to work itself out, to reveal a wealth of new meanings—an unfolding and flowering of certain unspoken promises.

  It had been two years since the wedding, but Mario still refused to recognize her husband’s place. He would only call her Joana Medroso, never by Joaquim’s family name. Joaquim, he insisted, was an impostor, a bum who hardly ever worked and who sponged off her parents. Joana deserved much better. And now that she had been unable to have a child, even after two years of marriage, he was sure it had something to do with their secret.

  In all of Horta, and indeed in all the Azores, Mario knew there was not another girl like his Joana Maria.

  Joana was only a couple of years older than Mario, yet she still treated him like a child. True, they had played games together while their mothers chatted, and it was not so long ago that she had shown him the hidden garden in the very back of her family’s yard. Still, he’d had to bear the pain and shock of her marriage, though he couldn’t quite imagine how it had happened. He had seen nothing between them. It must have been all her mother’s doing.