The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales

by Darrell Kastin

  Until one day, when he left to go for a walk alone. Several villagers saw him wandering about, though no one realized that he was out by himself. He did not return, but it wasn’t until the next day that people began asking what had happened to him.

  “I saw him yesterday, walking out of town,” someone from the next village said. The villagers searched everywhere but Timoteo was nowhere to be found.

  He was never seen or heard from again. The three old sisters who lived down the road offered three differing hypotheses as to what had happened to their neighbor. Maria Aurora believed he had walked blindly into the water, headed toward Pico, and drowned somewhere between the two islands. Maria Anúncia said he had left the village for Horta or some other place where there lived a former sweetheart, who now cared for him. And Maria Clementina voiced the opinion that he had successfully traversed the strait between the islands, had found Maria Antónia, and could see perfectly well again with the aid of that girl with the bewitching eyes, whose side he thereafter refused to leave.

  FOR A SHORT TIME AFTER HIS DEATH, GUILHERME GOMES CONTINUED to practice his unrivaled brew of bad habits. He was even more than usually morose, for the realization that he had not reached paradise came as a huge disappointment. Instead, he remained in the village of Santa Luzia, on the island of Pico, where he had lived the entire fifty-eight years of his life. Not only had his surroundings not changed, now that his life was over, but he also discovered that a hangover was just as unwelcome a thing, whether one was dead or alive.

  When he finally stumbled into the house—drunk, as well as feeling somewhat the worse for being dead—his wife, Rosa, scolded him as if nothing had changed.

  “You lousy good-for-nothing,” she shouted, when she found him sneaking in through the back door. “Why don’t you come home sober for once?”

  He waved her away with his hand. “Please, not now. It’s been a hell of a day.”

  But the next day was no different. He was gone in the morning and only crawled home in the afternoon after the bars had closed.

  “Brute, drunk again, are you?” she confronted him. “Why did I marry such a man?”

  “Why are you shouting?” he said, trying to dodge her words, which came at him with such unexpected force. He was surprised to find that not only her words, but her voice, too, had a very unpleasant effect upon him. It was yet one more disappointment for someone who had thought death would bring eternal peace.

  “Just look at you,” Rosa said, shaking her head.

  “I’m not drunk.”

  “Not drunk. Am I blind? Where are you going now?”

  “To find work. I’m going to make money.”

  “Hah! The only work you do is lifting a bottle to your mouth. You’re as useless as those drinking pals of yours.”

  “Quiet, woman,” he said. “Does the whole world have to hear?”

  “Why not? Let them know how I have suffered. The whole world should know what you are!”

  “What I am? What about you? You could drive a saint to drink.”

  “And you talk too much for a dead man!”

  Guilherme roamed the house, trying to get away from his scolding wife, who wasn’t about to let up on him simply because he was dead.

  “Your poor mother suffered, and I, too, suffer. She warned me before I married you. There is no end to the suffering your family has brought into the world.”

  Guilherme ran away, running in death from the sharp-tongued woman, just as he had often run off when alive.

  Some days later Rosa heard her husband had bumped into an old friend, who had informed Guilherme that since he was dead he should return to the cemetery. “That’s your proper place and there you’ll be able to avoid scenes with Rosa.” Rosa, however, doubted Guilherme was capable of staying away since, if nothing else, he was a creature of habit.

  Before going back to the cemetery, Guilherme returned to the house in an uproar, completely indignant. “I’m leaving!” he told Rosa. “I refuse to be hounded and tormented any longer.”

  “Fine, you simpleton. Go on and leave. No one else could put up with you. You’ll see.”

  So Guilherme ended up doing the sensible thing at last—he went to his grave.

  Meanwhile, Rosa struggled as she always had to take care of the children, to scratch enough food out of the patch of soil behind the house, to sew, to tend the animals, to cook and go to church.

  It was difficult and the only blessing was that it had always been difficult; she had never had a glimpse, not even for a moment, of anything else.

  It was lonely too, however, and after some months, though she wouldn’t admit it, not even to herself, she decided that it was proper and necessary for her to pay a visit to the cemetery where her husband was buried.

  “If I don’t the whole world will be wagging their tongues about it,” she said.

  Rosa climbed the hill for the first time since the funeral and sat down on a stone beside the dry and cracked mound of earth that was Guilherme’s grave.

  “Don’t think just because I’m here that I’ve come to sweet-talk you. If you had to go and die, at least you could have seen fit to leave your family in a better way. Little Maria Alice is sick again. Your son Vasco is as stupid as his grandfather and doesn’t know from nothing.”

  During Rosa’s outburst Guilherme remained glum and silent, listening to the stream of words with the stoic patience only the dead can truly appreciate.

  “Yes, we’re in fine shape,” Rosa continued. “Our chickens are laying fewer eggs, and the cows—I won’t even begin to tell you about the cows. It’s a shame! It is only because you are a Gomes that my life is not fit for a dog. If I’d had any concern for the world I would have drowned your children and myself and wiped out the family name, and this curse, once and for all, instead of prolonging this agony. Then I wouldn’t have to live a life of such misfortune.”

  She returned to the cemetery repeatedly to pour out her complaints, her problems, to vent her sorrows and anger to a husband who found, much to his dismay, that he could no longer run away. At the same time, however, Rosa always made sure to tend to the gravesite. She swept away dirt and leaves; she wiped the stone cross tenderly; she even brought flowers to place on the stone. And Guilherme smiled as best he could, for it had been many long years since Rosa had shown him such tenderness, and nobody had to tell him that, while honey is sweet, the bee stings.

  One day while tidying up the grave, wiping away dirt and pulling out weeds, she saw a bone. When she bent down to examine it, she discovered that a whole pile of bones had emerged from the ground.

  “So, you couldn’t stay put, huh? I should have known. Don’t tell me, you’re on your way to some bar. Is that it? Well, we’ll just see about that.” Of course she couldn’t know if that, indeed, was where he was heading, or if he had simply been pushed out because of overcrowding. Soil was precious on the island. Generally there were far more rocks than dirt. Because of this, people were frequently buried atop their ancestors.

  Rosa left to find a large wicker basket. She returned to the cemetery and carefully placed each bone in the basket, which she carried home. Then, with the utmost exactitude, she set all the bones in an order that more or less resembled her husband on a simple bed she had made up for him on a mat on the floor. Most of the bones, if not precisely in the correct arrangement, at least were fairly close.

  “There, now you can see for yourself what goes on around here,” she said, “and I don’t have to break my back climbing the hill just to visit you.”

  She tried to ignore the shame and disgust she felt, seeing him in such a debilitated condition. He looked even more frail and helpless than when he was alive.

  “If I didn’t know you so well, I’d think maybe I got the wrong husband by mistake. You look terrible.”

  She brought him an old broken mirror.

  “Take a look at yourself.”

  It was true. Nobody could deny that Guilherme was looking his worst.


  The poor man, stretched out helplessly, suffered a daily deluge of insults, drowning in the ceaseless flood of her fury. He wished he could live again, if only to leave the island, to swim if he had to, and find some remote corner of the world where he would never again have to endure the harsh sound of his wife’s laments and condemnations.

  He cursed the shifting in the earth that had caused his bones to break free.

  “Why couldn’t I have been pushed down deeper into the ground instead of into her arms?” he asked the interminable silence.

  Rosa paraded their daughter past Guilherme.

  “Look. Look at this poor child, sick with everything imaginable. Tell me who will take her for a wife?”

  Guilherme tried to turn over but remained immovable.

  “Here’s your son,” Rosa said. “Another one of fine Gomes stock. He’ll grow up to be a drunk just like his father and his grandfather. Thank God you’re dead and can’t knock me up again.”

  It was at this time that Guilherme became aware of a different thirst than any he had ever known, a profound and tireless thirst that gnawed at his existence like the most unbearable longing, a thirst not even death could kill.

  If only I could drink, he reflected, at least a sip or two of wine, perhaps I could endure this. But of course he was in no condition to drink, unable to move, trapped as he was in the world of the living and no longer in the ground, the very ground which appeared to have leached out his last bit of strength. He wasn’t even able to drink the moisture of the earth through his parched bones, which he might have done had he still been in his grave.

  He dreamed of his friends holding court in the bars, drinking and joking among themselves, so far removed from their homes and their problems, while he was imprisoned with this woman who refused to leave him in peace.

  What is the point of dying? he wondered. If one only continues to suffer?

  During a rare moment of stillness in the house, he noticed a strange sound that reminded him of coins falling, of water rushing down a stream, of birds chirping. Then he heard voices speaking. It was his daughter and several of her friends, come to poke fun at him: this poor man, naked and helpless for all the world to see. At least Rosa could have had the respect to cover him up.

  The girls finished with their fun and scampered away, leaving him alone and sulking. But in a short time half the town decided to pay a visit to Guilherme’s home. Everybody wanted to take a peek at the remains of “that nogood husband of Rosa’s.” They crowded into the room, laughing and poking at his bones. One or two spilled some wine on him, which—though he cursed their carelessness—his parched bones relished nonetheless.

  Rosa even allowed that buffoon, Francisco, who ran the market, to bring his dog into the house. The dog began licking one of Guilherme’s leg bones and nearly ran off with it before somebody finally had the decency to chase the dog away.

  The townspeople, greatly amused at his expense, were oblivious, of course, to the terrible insults Guilherme unleashed upon each and every one of them: “You, Maria azelha—the dimwit” and “You, Marco o lobo—the wolf” and “You, Alfredo frouxo—the weak.”

  Finally they left. Rosa seemed to be in a good humor for once. She walked from room to room, whistling and singing, picking up after her neighbors.

  Guilherme wished he had something particularly vile to say to her, but he was silent in his rage.

  He was awakened later that night by a warm breath, smelling of aguardente. He was being carried.

  “Shh!” he heard, as several people clumsily removed his bones from the house. There were three or four, he thought, all evidently drunk.

  Outside they whispered to one another, and Guilherme recognized his friends.

  “Let’s take him to Pedro’s first.” It was Manuel.

  “That was always his favorite hangout.” He recognized José’s voice, too.

  “Come on, let’s hurry while the night’s still young.” Roberto, of course! Where there was José, there was Roberto.

  The whole gang was there, ready to drink the night away. And they had gone out of their way to include their old friend, Guilherme, for a night on the town, just like old times.

  He felt like weeping, but just then Roberto tripped and dropped the handful of bones he was carrying. He kneeled, scrambling to pick them up, and no one except Guilherme noticed that one or two were left behind in the dirt.

  They reached Pedro’s café and seated themselves around one of the tables. They ordered drinks and laughed.

  “What will Rosa do when she wakes up?” Manuel said.

  “She’ll know. If there’s a drink to be found, Guilherme will stop at nothing!” José said, laughing and pounding the table. “Only Rosa could drive a man away even after he’s dead!”

  “What are you devils up to now?” Pedro asked.

  “Here,” Roberto said. “Look who we brought along.”

  Pedro stared down at the bones the others had piled on one of the chairs.

  “It’s Guilherme!” the three drinking buddies proclaimed.

  “Now I’ve seen everything,” Pedro said. “You fools are crazy.”

  They ordered more drinks, and every once in a while Manuel took Guilherme’s drink and poured a little into the dead man’s grinning skull.

  “Still drinks like a fish, doesn’t he?” Manuel said.

  Guilherme floated in a sea of happiness, as he silently blessed each dear friend who poured a drink onto his bones. But it really wasn’t the drink that set his old heart aglow, as much as it was the sweet companionship of friends, friends who not only understood him but appreciated him as well. This, he now discovered, was what he had longed for all these many years.

  After another round of drinks they stumbled out into the night and made for Vergilio’s place, accompanied by several of Pedro’s customers. When they got to Vergilio’s, Guilherme was distressed to find that more of his bones had been lost along the way.

  His friends began recounting the tragicomical stories of Guilherme’s life: how he could out-drink anybody; how he sponged food off friends and neighbors whenever Rosa kicked him out of the house, sometimes for weeks at a time—a tale that brought tears to all the listeners’ eyes. They enumerated the many times Rosa had made public Guilherme’s frequent sins, how she always said she was through with him and wouldn’t take him back and how, time after time, once her anger wore off, there Guilherme would be, back home again. “Even after he died, she still took him back!” Roberto said, to a thunderous applause. They also told how if Guilherme knew of somebody worse off even than himself, he would fetch that person a bottle, and hand over his last scrap of food; how he never had a cruel thing to say about anyone. Even when drunk he was everyone’s friend and no one’s enemy, unlike Luís Carvalho, who picked a fight with somebody every time he drank. All this brought cheers and calls of what a worthy friend Guilherme had been.

  They hadn’t been too long at Vergilio’s before one of the men decided they should go elsewhere; after all, this was a night for celebration. It wasn’t every night that they could drink with a dead man. They must be sure to make it a night to surpass all others, a night that would be talked about for years and years. A night to reestablish Guilherme Gomes as the master of serious drinkers once and for all!

  Through the night Guilherme was transported along the old familiar roads, past the homes of his friends and relatives, past the places and people he had known all his life. He heard the songs of his buddies and the voice of Father Fagundes offering communion, he saw his wedding and his newborn children, and during all of this he felt an integral part of everything around him, as if all the moments of his life were occurring simultaneously.

  They staggered from place to place, carrying Guilherme’s drenched bones each time, pouring drink after drink down their friend’s open mouth. They stumbled and crawled onward, and whenever they dropped the ever-lighter stack of bones, they picked up as many as they could find, and continued on to the next place.
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br />   Guilherme didn’t know if it was the drink or the fact that there was now less of him, but he was feeling the effects of the rowdy night. Everything seemed more and more distant, sights blurred and sounds grew muffled and thin, until they became a pleasant hum in the air.

  Still, Guilherme felt he was where he belonged: he was with good friends, in the village where he had been born. I’m at home, he thought, and he had never been happier in all his life. His friends were celebrating him as a hero, as if he had somehow become greater with his death. Guilherme wondered if they could see, as he now clearly saw, how the aura of death transformed everything, much in the same way that the drink had always done, making him feel, in a way, greater, grander, part of something far larger than himself. If it were possible he would have beamed with a wide happy smile of joy.

  His friends grabbed whoever was around to join them. Some decided to start over and headed back to Pedro’s Café; others trailed off to home and sleep. Some found themselves holding a bone, without remembering exactly why or how they had come into possession of it, and so tossed it in someone’s yard, or along the side of the road.

  Soon only Manuel, José, and Roberto remained, along with a scrawny dog, which had followed them around for the past few hours. The dog sat under the table and gnawed on a bone.

  “What a night,” Manuel said, slurring his words.

  “I never drank so much in all my days,” said José.

  “We should go home and rest,” Roberto said.

  The others agreed. The skies had lightened. It was close to dawn.

  “Say, where is Guilherme?” Manuel asked.

  They looked around, but Guilherme was gone. They quickly searched the ground and their pockets. Nothing.

  “Wait.” Roberto pulled out a slender bone from his coat pocket.

  “That’s it? All that remains of our friend?”

  “What will Rosa do?” José said. “Everyone knows that woman’s a powder keg.”

  They quickly returned to Guilherme’s house, placed the single bone on the ground, then made like the wind for their own beds.