The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales

by Darrell Kastin

  Death belongs down there, he thought, not up here where strange butterflies dance around a smoking volcano, as if coming from the earth itself. He swung the net, but they flew right through it. So many, that some kept falling to the ground, in layer after layer. Just like snow.

  IN THE VILLAGE OF PRAIA NEGRA, THE BLIND MAN, TIMOTEO, PAINTED a furious sea with seven thousand white flashing teeth, in a frenzy, against the background of a black, hungry night. The teeth shattered and fell helplessly upon the black rocks of the islands and the sleek black sea. The looming shadow of Pico rose darker than the dark of the night, as if threatening to consume all, and the moon glowered blood-red in a sky that extinguished all traces of light from the stars.

  All of Timoteo’s paintings were night scenes.

  He had worked frantically against the ever-quickening onset of his blindness, and though no one could explain how or why, he still managed to paint, despite the fact that he could no longer see the colors of his paints, or the canvas, or the faces that accompanied the voices of those who spoke to him.

  He ordered that all his colors be mixed very carefully, according to a detailed list of careful measurements he had made himself, with the precision and expertise of a chemist.

  Everyone in Praia Negra remembered when Timoteo first discovered he was losing his eyesight. He suddenly proclaimed he would become a painter. Every day for many months he was seen with paper or canvas and a palette of paints, dabbing a bit of yellow with red or blue, a touch of green with a streak of brown or red, but mostly black with blue or purple, or the deepest, bloodiest violet.

  “What is he doing?” Ermina Gonçalves asked. “What is he painting?”

  “Nothing,” said her friend and neighbor, Maria Lourdes. “Look, it is only a big splash of paint. That’s all. He’s blind. How could he possibly paint anything? Everyone knows the man can’t even see.”

  The villagers exchanged knowing glances. They felt sorry for the old man. It was a pitiful sight.

  Timoteo laughed away his doubters and skeptics. “They think it is funny to see an old blind man like me paint, do they?” he said to those who came to look, or to no one at all; for though he could hear voices, he saw shadows at most. “Why should it be so strange to paint what I see, here”—he tapped his head—“why do I need eyes for what I already know, what I have already seen a thousand times?”

  “First, I must learn to feel the colors, how to mix the shades. All the secrets of light and shadow.” He would go back and cover the piece of canvas with black paint, and then lightly streak the black with a thin glaze of blue or green.

  After nearly a year had passed, he was completely blind. Now he finally began to paint things, places, actual pictures. The villagers flocked in disbelief to see for themselves as Timoteo painted the familiar landscapes of the sea and the islands, the boats, and of course Pico towering majestically to the heavens.

  “Ah, meu Deus!” Rui Manuel de Andrade shouted. “Come look here!”

  Timoteo’s neighbors stood gaping at a scene that was too foreign, too inexplicable, and too frightening to comprehend. Some turned away, quickly averting their eyes with a whispered cry to heaven. Others stood rooted, unable to move or speak, looking at a vision they should have recognized. After all, anyone could see it was Faial—indeed, Praia Negra—that Timoteo had painted. And yet there was something else there, something which, although all of them had felt, none of them had ever actually seen.

  There was something suggestive that lurked, camouflaged in the painting. It was concealed in the blend of colors and brushstrokes, in the imagery of ocean and fields, of houses and nighttime skies.

  “There is some trickery here,” Maria Gomes cried out. “Some kind of devilry, no doubt.”

  It was as if the sea and land had swallowed the sun and all its radiant daylight. Night was everywhere—even the shadows appeared to cast shadows. More than that, although it was clearly a painting of a night scene, anyone could perceive that the night merely masked something else, something that pervaded the entire picture and all life on the island. It was this which all of those who looked upon the painting recognized, even without truly understanding it or being able to point it out, scratching their heads as they tried to see what could not be seen.

  All seemed to mock and mimic the darkness underlying everything, even the glimmers here and there that weren’t the night or its shadows: a luminous streak of violet that peered from the murky body of the ocean, an errant reflection cast by some careless fool passing by with a lamp, a scarlet tear from the nocturnal rumblings of the volcano, a streak of dull orange or brown that was the last gasp of a frail moon, squeezed and strangled by the calamity of oppressive night. It was as though the feeble light was life itself, laughing at the people because life wasn’t theirs, because the night, the shadows, and their mortality were all they really possessed.

  Everyone who peered at Timoteo’s paintings felt strange internal stirrings, unnamable aches, longings for things that had never been or could never be.

  It was the same with each and all of Timoteo’s mysterious works of art. The villagers were increasingly frightened of the visions; soon only a handful of souls dared gaze at them, and then only fleetingly, as if fearful they might be caught looking at some forbidden and perhaps dangerous object.

  “There is some evil here. After all, if a blind man cannot see, how then can he paint?” Gil Matos said.

  “And why are they all of nighttime, darker than night?” asked Maria das Flores.

  “Perhaps because he is blind and cannot see the devil is revealing himself by guiding Timoteo’s hands,” Hortênsia Pereira suggested.

  “I told you all!” Gil Matos said. “Only the supernatural could be behind something like this.”

  They watched, suspicious and fearful, while Timoteo stood in the dark night, sniffing the air. “Ah, there is a full moon tonight.” The villagers shuddered as they looked up to find the blind man was right. It suddenly seemed colder, too, which wasn’t due to the moon or any chill in the air but to the fact that Timoteo somehow knew things he shouldn’t have known. He uttered crazy, impossible things. “There is a young man down that street who is dreaming of a woman he loves on the very next street,” or, “There is a young girl across the channel, over on Pico, who has just now discovered how terribly alone she is, and the unbearable secret fear she has that she will be seen for who she truly is, that the eyes of others will pierce though and peer into her frightened heart,” or, “A whole village will soon awaken to the thoroughly sad and painful realization of the terrible price of beauty.”

  Still, Timoteo, unaffected by the disturbances he caused his neighbors, continued to paint, slowly, methodically. A lone boat on the water between Faial and Pico, with a tortured thread of light from an oil lamp in the boat’s cabin allowing a sliver of silver to peer out from the inexorable shadow of darkened boat, sea, island, and nighttime sky.

  After he had finished this latest painting, Timoteo put away his paints and supplies. “I have nothing more to do,” he told the few villagers who bothered to listen. “I will paint again only when I have eyes with which to see.” He sat alone in his room.

  Life continued as it always had in and around the village of Praia Negra, and the people quickly forgot all about Senhor Timoteo, the sad, old blind man whose collection of paintings in the room in which he lived were his only source of illumination.

  ~ ~ ~

  Maria Antónia, the youngest daughter of Sonia and José Vasco dos Santos, had grown into a fine young woman, and carried the secret of the sea and the wind in the eternal ebb and flow, the waxing and waning, the bewitching gray-green gaze of her eyes. She came to Praia Negra from the village of Quebrado do Caminho, on Pico, to stay with her mother’s sister’s family, after her own mother had taken seriously ill and her father had disappeared. Her mother wasn’t expected to live, so arrangements had been hastily made.

  Maria Antónia’s aunt took one look at her niece’s eyes and made
a prophesy: “Ah, there will surely be trouble here.”

  She was a girl who caused waves of disturbances wherever she went. Not by anything she said or did, but by her mere presence—her eyes, for one, her voice, her smile, and her overwhelming and all-encompassing beauty. No one could look at her without thinking that the old stories were true, that she was descended from a creature of the sea; that her mother’s grandmother had washed up on the shores of the island, a mermaid, or siren, or one of the one hundred Nereides said to inhabit the ocean depths. She had decided to live among humans on dry land after falling in love with a young man of the island. And anyone who had any doubts on the matter simply had to look into Maria Antónia’s eyes to see that it was all true, for every shade and hue of the ocean could be observed in her eyes, which seemed like two glass orbs in which the sea ebbed and flowed.

  In the dark they gave off a luminescence that was startling to all who saw them. “My God,” her uncle Fernando Gomes said, “It is as if she has the moon inside her.”

  Timoteo was Maria Antónia’s great uncle on her mother’s side, and he lived alone in the small one-room house next door to the girl’s aunt. Maria Antónia was eager to see her Tio Timoteo, whom she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl. But she was told that he couldn’t be bothered, that he was old and needed to be left alone.

  Day after day Timoteo sat in his room trying to summon the memories of things—people, clouds, shapes and colors, the lost faces of his family and friends—vague images that came and went, which slipped though his fingers like the finest sand.

  Maria Antónia finally couldn’t wait and snuck timidly up to the door of Timoteo’s house and knocked. She was overjoyed to meet her uncle, even though she’d been warned that the old man could no longer see and was as helpless as any baby. Timoteo opened the door.

  “Tio Timo”—her pet name for him—“it’s me, Maria Antónia. Please, come with me, Tio!” Maria Antónia said.

  “Alas, my dear,” he said. “You have come for me at last.” Maria Antónia pulled him away from his darkened room, determined to lighten her uncle’s life.

  For the first time in many long months, Timoteo laughed and came alive. Upon this meeting little Maria laughed away the clouds that had dimmed his sight. Taking him by the hand she led him on a walk through town.

  The air in and around Praia Negra vibrated and hummed as Maria Antónia walked down the streets, to church or the market, to school, or to play with the few girls her own age.

  Her effect on the town was registered by the scale of silent complaint that accompanied the countless sighs, the tender longings, the restless emotions and, of course, the glances that followed not only her every move, but also her expected arrivals, her painful departures, and the constant hopes of seeing her pass by.

  In the cafés and taverns, on the streets and in the market, people stared, swept up in the daydreams caused by a glimpse of Maria Antónia.

  Maria Antónia ordered Timoteo to stop all his nonsense and resume painting at once. “You can see as well as anyone, Tio Timo,” she said. “I don’t want to hear anything more about you being blind. Please, now, paint a picture for me.” She sat by as he set up his paints and canvas once again, for how could he refuse this delightful child?

  She possessed an otherworldly quality. Her rosy cheeks appeared as if they had been kissed by the angels, and her mouth promised undying love, joy, and laughter, the promise of an unquenchable life.

  One of the villagers happened to pass by the spot where Timoteo stood painting; he stole a quick look, then stopped in his tracks, struck speechless. He finally managed to cry out. Others rushed to see. Soon a large group stood and gasped in disbelief at Timoteo’s new canvas.

  It showed the stone mosaic of Praia Negra’s narrow main street, the shadowed gray of the buildings hugging each other closely, familiar to them all, but there, like a dream, a vision, almost completely obscured by the lightless night, were radiant orbs, two eyes that seemed, even there in the night, to represent a separate world unto themselves, a tiny glimpse of a heaven none of them could ever have imagined.

  Timoteo found, much to his surprise and amazement, that his vision was now illuminated, the shadows dissipated, the fog cleared; images danced before his eyes, and he drank up everything there was to see.

  People found it difficult to tear themselves away from the painting. They knew those eyes. They had seen them and felt them tug at their own hearts, felt the pain and ache that accompanied such a sight. All of them had tried to follow and fathom those crystalline pools—their radiance, their impenetrable mystery, their indefinable color—to discover the secret realm in which they resided and reigned.

  But, everyone asked themselves, how did Timoteo, the old blind man—he who couldn’t see anything—how was it he saw that which he painted, and painted so beautifully, how had he made them no less enchanting and powerful than the real ones?

  “I don’t need these to see,” Timoteo answered impatiently, gesturing at his useless eyes. “I knew she was here the moment she arrived.”

  Day after day all of the townspeople—not only the men and the children—came by to gaze at Timoteo’s pictures, at the radiant colors, as if seen for the first time, because no one could fully describe what those colors were.

  “They are blue,” one man said.

  “No, they are green—green as the pastures of Pico,” said another.

  “You don’t know what you are saying,” said a woman who chanced by. “They are gray. Anyone can see that!”

  But everyone knew they were all of those: sometimes blue, but with gray mostly, then streaked with green, always in combinations never seen before.

  “Her eyes are so deep,” said Paulo Carvalho, one of the girl’s many admirers.

  “As deep as the sea,” said another.

  “You mean the heavens,” insisted Paulo.

  It was truly a spectacle to behold. Here was a young woman not yet fully grown, and yet her effect upon everyone was such that, if she told them all to jump off a cliff into the sea, or swim to Pico, they would have done it without hesitation—though don’t think for a moment that people actually said or did anything to show the girl that they thought the world of her. Their tongues and mouths were incapable of expression; even their hands and arms lost all sense in her presence, becoming useless appendages. They communicated instead with long faces, eyes staring off, sometimes a silly smile on the lips—flickering, fleeting, then gone—and with sigh after long, forlorn, breathless sigh.

  Timoteo and Maria Antónia were now nearly inseparable. He hobbled after her, chasing his visions—which only remained his, some said, as long as she was near—or sat her down beside him to glean the deepest depths of the mysteries behind the shapes and colors he now saw.

  Ah, how the neighbors began to talk!

  “She should be sent back to her mother,” Maria das Flores said.

  “And Timoteo, too,” said Hortênsia Pereira. “He should be sent away.”

  “Yes, we should be rid of them both!” said Maria Furtado.

  “How can a blind man suddenly walk around like anyone else?” Gil Matos said.

  “It’s a sign of more troubles to come, just wait and see,” Hortênsia said.

  “No, certainly nothing good can come of this!” Maria das Flores agreed.

  Timoteo laughed at their fears and their gossip. And he painted each of the townspeople, one after another, but in a manner that none had ever seen before.

  Dona Lucia da Silveira, the wealthiest woman in the village, whom the others always called a judia—the Jew—paused beside Timoteo as he stood before one of his paintings, paintbrush in one hand and palette in the other.

  “So, old man,” she said. “What are you painting this time?”

  “Only what I can see and nothing more,” he replied. Others, too, stopped and looked, though none could identify the figure in the painting, familiar as it was, until Dona Lucia herself glanced at it and realized in an instan
t who it was. Herself, and no other! But not her as she’d been photographed once or twice in her youth. In this portrait she noted the shadows and secrets of her innermost heart, her deepest desires and her deepest fears, all exposed for the entire world to see!

  She nearly fell in a dead faint.

  The next day, Senhor Velas happened to pass by; he too saw himself upon one of Timoteo’s canvases. He gasped and looked around quickly, wondering if any of the others had noticed. But no one said anything. Couldn’t they see?

  And so it went day in and day out. Each day a new inhabitant of the village appeared with the help of Timoteo’s hand and brush. Each looked in horror, then reddened with embarrassment and quickly glanced round, certain that everyone else had seen, and was laughing at them.

  All their faults, weaknesses, and vices were shown glaring, exaggerated, and grotesque under the painful illumination of Timoteo’s artistry.

  “There’s been nothing but trouble since that girl arrived,” the villagers remarked. People began to shun her; even her friends suddenly found reasons to stay clear of her. Maria Antónia’s aunt didn’t know what to do; she was afraid of the poor girl. “That girl and her family are cursed,” the aunt said. “Why did I ever take her in?”

  Finally, word came that other arrangements had been made. Maria Antónia was shipped back to Pico to stay with her grandmother and her brothers, in Santa Inês. The townspeople came and saw the girl off, waving, crying, telling her what a dear, beautiful child she was, how they loved her, nearly worshipped her, how sorely missed she’d be—forever in their hearts and memories.

  After Maria Antónia left, the village let out a collective sigh.

  Once again, Timoteo walked around in a cloud of despair, unable to see and at a complete loss around his paints. He couldn’t even manage to hold a brush correctly anymore.

  “My eyes have gone,” he was heard to say. “My sight has left me.”

  His canvases stood empty and his paints dried out. Timoteo sat helpless, no longer venturing forth without the assistance of a friend or neighbor.