The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales

by Darrell Kastin

  The next morning the news spread across the town, whispered from ear to ear, making its way inside all the open doors and windows.

  Manuel, José, and Roberto were back at Pedro’s by then, silently nursing the effects of the long night. There they heard the story of how, in the middle of the night, Guilherme Gomes had somehow managed to run away, how even in death he was completely irresponsible, how Rosa had woke in the morning to find several of his bones left behind in the yard in his obvious rush to clear out of town.

  The three men looked up at the grinning skull, perched upon a high shelf behind the bar. Pedro had found it while cleaning, early in the morning. They raised their glasses in one more salute to their old friend, who appeared much happier here, in his new resting place.

  THE WOMAN SAT IN HER BED, PROPPED UP BY HUGE HEAPS OF HEAVY pillows. Blankets lay scattered every which way. She looked, to her husband, like a large, plucked bird tangled in a messy nest.

  “What’s that horrible smell?” her husband said.

  “What smell?”

  “That smell. Like . . . I don’t know what.”

  “I have no idea what you are talking about,” the woman said, as she returned to the careful examination of her wounds.

  The husband threw his hands up in disgust and turned away. He had developed a method of refusing to see what he did not wish to see. His wife, on the other hand, did not live outside of her fascination for the wounds, which for months now had broken out and spread upon her body. They had appeared one day and had stayed with her ever since. From the very first she could not leave them alone. Her husband awoke at night and found the woman bent over, poking the sores with inquisitive fingers, lifting them to her nose and sniffing at them suspiciously.

  “What do you hope to find there?” he asked.

  She merely huffed, or shook her head, or ignored him and remained silent, as though to speak was beneath the dignity of the fate she suffered.

  The husband tried his best to avoid these unpleasant spots. It was inevitable that he should brush up against them, or forgetting, reach to touch his wife, who would scream, cringing at his touch, not from any pain she suffered but because she felt that her wounds were hers and hers alone. For the longest time he was only permitted the barest, most fleeting of contacts. And then not even that. In any event, they were horrible to look upon.

  The husband suspected that his wife was causing the wounds to worsen, enlarging them with her constant attention.

  “Where will this end?” he asked. “Why do you do this to yourself?”

  The woman burst into tears, crying without a break for an entire day and night. Now she began to complain of the accompanying pain, whereas until then the wounds had been painless. Night after night she howled, and her screams invaded the nearby streets, filling the empty silence.

  Advice flooded in from the neighborhood: pray, bathe twice a day in the natural baths at Veradouro, spread the infected areas with the pulped bodies of banana slugs, boil this root, take these herbs, burn these leaves. Meanwhile, her husband spent more hours in the cafés and elsewhere.

  “I don’t have a wife anymore,” he commented sadly. “I have an open wound chained to her holy bed of agonies.”

  His friends drank with him in solace.

  “What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “Why does she carry on so?”

  The others could give no answer, except those few who were inclined to agree that God in his wisdom had chosen her as a martyr.

  “It’s a mystery,” they said with a shrug.

  He went home to find her lying on the bed, moaning, and looking at her various wounds with a handheld mirror. The house was in terrible shape, and the children wandered half-clothed and filthy. Everything was falling apart.

  Her body was swollen with the extravagances of her wounds, which bloomed like malignant, evil-smelling flowers. Her husband fretted, worried about her increasing size. She now took up the whole bed, as if it were all just another attempt to outdo him, to—by sheer bulk—force him out.

  “Look at this place!” he shouted. “Do we all have to rot? Must we suffer too? Are you just going to sit there while we starve and the house comes falling down around us?”

  “It’s your fault!” she shrieked. “You did this to me!”

  He stormed out of the house and walked down the street toward the café. “I did this, she says. I did what?” He wondered if this could be the result of her having children. But then other women had children. This didn’t happen to them. “She sits there day after day hurting herself in this way, unable to do anything else, ignoring me, the children. And she blames me! What will come of us?”

  The café was bustling. He ordered a drink and stood at the counter. He didn’t feel like sitting with anyone, or talking.

  I feel this terrible weight, he thought. Right here. He thumbed his chest.

  ~ ~ ~

  He returned home late, determined to finally do something about the intolerable situation he was in.

  “It’s a reflection of our lives,” his wife stated.

  “What are you talking about?” The smell was overpowering, and he held his nose shut.

  “My wounds. They are a symbol of our life.”

  “Enough! If anything they are a mirror of your blackened soul.”

  She burst into tears.

  “That’s it!” he shouted. “I’ve had enough.” He gathered the children and some belongings and left to go stay with his sister and his brother-in-law, Oliveiros, on the other side of the town.

  His wife’s ceaseless cries were heard all that night by everyone in the entire town. The next day several women went to visit her, to see if there was anything they could do.

  The woman’s husband, now peacefully lodged at his sister Emilina’s home, heard repeated reports about his wife’s condition.

  “They say she hasn’t stopped crying,” Emilina said.

  “Well, at least she’s done shrieking for now.”

  “And that her room is filling with all the tears she’s shed.”

  “What do I care? Let her weep. She has caused enough misery for us all to have a good cry.”

  “Poor woman!” he heard everyone whisper. “How she suffers. And alone and so very wretched.” Anyone who endured such misery was worthy of respect.

  The women of the village came and prepared food for her, as well as every known concoction of herbs, ointments, and salves, in an attempt to relieve her suffering.

  The pain was without respite. Her wounds continued to worsen.

  “Your wife is dying,” Emilina informed her gloomy brother, who had been bored to silence by the repetition of his wife’s name and ailments.

  “We are all dying.”

  He went to work at his menial post in one of the countless government offices, where he performed his tasks with the usual steady, lackluster pace. His sister had her hands full with his as well as her own children. Meanwhile people who’d heard rumors of the stricken woman came from all over to see for themselves the miracle of her pain and suffering. They brought their ill, their injured, their blind and needy.

  “They say your wife’s wounds are now pouring forth a river of black blood,” his sister said.

  “Serves her right.”

  “Shouldn’t you be with her?” Emilina said, wondering why she had allowed him to stay.

  “What can I do? She doesn’t want my help. She only wants to suffer. No one can even share that with her. She’s a very selfish woman, that one, hoarding her precious agonies.”

  “There must be something you can do.”

  “What? I couldn’t plug up all her wounds for her. There are more of them than there is of her.”

  “They’re saying she’s a saint.”

  “Yes, and I’m Judas. It’s only because she’s so stubborn and greedy, too, that they are suggesting she is worthy of being considered a saint.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She could do nothing else. She needs her woun
ds, as much as a hermit needs to be alone to forget life, or a drunk needs to drink. She’s not making any sacrifice but pigheadedly doing precisely what she wants to do and what she can’t help but do.”

  With that he stomped out of the house and went to wash away his woes with drink.

  Several weeks later, after they had dragged the poor unfortunate Father Alves to have a look at her and say a few words to Christ and the Virgin Mother on behalf of the ailing woman, and after exhausting every possible remedy, even those guaranteed by the great-granddaughter of the last benzedeira of Água Zangada, who was rumored to be a sorceress of unequaled powers, the woman finally gave up and expired.

  Still, her husband didn’t believe it. “It’s a trick,” he said. “What next? She is faking, can’t you fools see?”

  They tried to convince him to go have a look for himself, but he couldn’t be persuaded.

  “No, I refuse to go over there. Soon she’ll grow tired of this pretending to be dead—you’ll see.”

  “But senhor,” they said. “She doesn’t move, or speak.”

  “So what? Anyone can do that.”

  “But her heart doesn’t beat.”

  “I admit, she’s very crafty, that woman. I know. Look how long we were married. Very crafty.”

  His sister, exasperated by her brother and his children, who seemed destined to stay forever in her house, came to tell him the news. “She is dead. I saw for myself.”

  “Don’t believe it. She’s made fools of all of you.”

  It was some time before he finally gave in. The townspeople told him that proof of the miracle lay in the fact that, here, weeks after she had died, there was still no odor of a rotting corpse; it was as if she were only asleep, like her husband had said all along.

  He decided at last to go have a look for himself.

  He walked into his own home and barely recognized it. It was spotless. There were candles burning everywhere, and the hush of many people milling in and out of the place, who were nevertheless subject to the solemnity of their purposeful visit.

  “Looks like a chapel,” the husband cried. “Where’s my wife?” He was led into the bedroom. Everywhere, new furniture had replaced the old. Even the huge broken-down bed, which his wife had converted into her own private universe, had been replaced with a much grander, modern bed.

  He gave a whistle.

  The people—mostly strangers, though there were some he knew—continued to file past the woman, to whom he now turned his gaze for the first time in months.

  What they said about her was true. She sat like a giant stone Buddha, her enormous belly and her legs and arms swollen like tree trunks and all covered with crater-like sores. She hadn’t decomposed at all, but was perfectly intact, as though she slept.

  Many of the visitors mouthed prayers and genuflected, while almost every one of them left money on the plate at the foot of the bed.

  He waved his hand in front of her face. Her blank eyes didn’t flinch, but stared out as though seeing something extremely far in the distance.

  The procession urged him to move forward. “Go on,” he heard, “Let us get close to her. Give us a chance to see.”

  He suddenly snapped to attention. “Get out,” he shouted.

  There were grumbles of dissatisfied voices.

  “Go on. Viewing hours are ended. Come back tomorrow morning.” He shuffled everyone out of the house, and went back to his sister’s.

  He knew he couldn’t stay forever at his sister’s house; it was too small for both families, and besides, her husband Oliveiro was a conservador, always spouting off about his right-wing politics. He needed his own house back.

  In the morning he returned home with his children, who assisted in taking money from the strangers for entrance and selling lottery tickets. In the evenings, the husband closed down the house and went to sleep beside his wife, happy, even content with his life, dreaming dreams and smiling the smile of a happily married man.

  CELESTINO AZEVEDO HAD NEVER STOPPED TO THINK ABOUT HIS OWN voice. He always took it for granted, unless he strained it, or became sick and found it faltering. But he never thought he might lose it the way someone might lose a hat or a walking stick.

  Until that very day, when Celestino’s voice chose to abandon him, he had never given it a second thought. He assumed he’d come down with a sudden illness that would pass in a day or two. After several failed attempts to speak, he decided not to talk for the rest of that day and night, assuming that time and rest would provide the remedy to cure his speechlessness. It was less difficult than he thought it would be, for if someone spoke to him he nodded, smiled, or winked, to which they ascribed their own meanings, and continued talking as though he were participating in the conversation.

  After twenty-four hours had passed, however, Celestino opened his mouth—but again nothing came out. Not so much as a moan or a gasp. Not a sound.

  The same thing occurred the following day.

  After three days he thought about seeing a doctor in the city, but people in the village have a saying: “You go to the doctor when you’re ready to die.” Since Celestino was in no way ready for death, he put off going to the doctor. Instead, he waited, anxious to see if his voice would return. After all, who ever heard of such a thing? One day you’re going along fine, and the next you cannot speak. He’d known of people who went blind, but never a healthy man losing his voice for no apparent reason.

  As he lay in bed searching even in sleep for his missing voice, his mouth opened, as if to groan or grunt, but only silence would greet him.

  In the night itself he heard sounds: faint whispers and rustlings. The meanings of these late-night susurrations eluded him; they sounded like the murmurs of the sea rather than the wind or a human voice, though Celestino sensed something human in them, some desire or longing which had increased in intensity to the point of becoming audible.

  His friends and neighbors repeatedly asked what was wrong. “Are you sick? How come you don’t speak?” By signs and writing he made clear that he could not speak. They were quick to think he was having fun with them. “Come on, stop pulling our leg, Celestino, you’re having a nice joke, eh?”

  At first people reacted to his inability to speak by raising their voices, as if by hearing their shouting, he would suddenly be able to respond.

  Some took his silence as an affront. “You always thought you were better than us, and so now you refuse to even speak?”

  “I’ve lost my voice,” he wrote on a notepad, showing it to each and every one he met. Those who felt insulted continued to feel insulted and stormed off in a huff, muttering to themselves about people who could stand to be taken down a peg or two. Or else they would repeat what they had said, as if he hadn’t heard them.

  Others began greeting him with a slap on the back, “So, did you find your voice yet?” “Are you still in your vow of silence?” some joked.

  But his voice still showed no sign of returning.

  Sometimes he saw the butcher or the refuse collector and they would speak in serious tones: “Say, I heard your voice last night, over by the graveyard.” Or, “I could have sworn I heard you shouting in the middle of the night down the Avenida da Liberdade, where that irresistible vision of loveliness Maria Almeida lives.”

  Celestino didn’t know if they were merely jesting, or if, as the old saying goes, every big lie contains a small truth. So he went to the places where they told him they had heard his voice. He couldn’t say that he heard it himself, but thought he could feel an echo of his voice lingering in these places, the way you can taste a smell or smell a taste. Maybe it was only the fact that he had been to all of these locations a thousand times over the years, and had likely spoken on numerous occasions in each one, so that something of his voice remained.

  He left his house and roamed the streets, hoping to take his voice by surprise. But how does one trap a voice which can be heard here one minute and over there the next, which can speak in a shout or a wh
isper, and fall silent at will?

  One night, as Celestino was searching for his missing voice, he ran into Carlos Monteiro, the shoemaker. Carlos called to him, and seemed in a particularly good mood.

  “Celestino, you old devil,” Carlos said, nudging him with his elbow.

  Celestino looked puzzled. He shrugged, and made a face to show he didn’t understand.

  Carlos grinned. “I heard you speaking at the window of the widow Dona Amélia. I never knew you could talk like that. Why, you’re a poet, Dom Celestino. A real Don Juan.”

  “But I haven’t gone by Dona Amélia’s house,” Celestino wrote as fast as he could on his notepad.

  “I heard you with my own ears.”

  “I can’t yet talk,” Celestina wrote.

  “It was your voice, I’d swear to that. And the things you said to her. Why, you had Dona Amélia giggling, and crying, ‘Stop Celestino, please stop!’ I wish I could talk like that. A tongue of honey.”

  Celestino walked away, scratching his head. So now he was Dona Amélia’s lover! What next? The trouble a voice can cause, he thought. Usually one has control over what one says. This circumstance was new to him and showed just how dangerous an unguarded voice could be. He realized he had no idea what his voice was capable of saying, what words might serve its purpose, which was as deep a mystery to Celestino as the mystery of a woman’s heart, or the sea, or the secrets of the stars.

  What can I do? Celestino wondered.

  Meanwhile he caught wind of his voice’s latest mishap: it had caused a row at the Taberna Rui Gomes, uttering some derogatory words into the ears of Fernando Lima, the sausage-maker, about a local fisherman named Manuel Gomes, and then mouthing a challenging response in Manuel’s ear.

  The taberna was tiny, a few square feet, but was soon filled with fists, shouts, and oaths.

  Celestino wandered, keeping to himself for fear of hearing any more frightful news. He had to find a way out of his troubles before things worsened.

  He thought about Maria Teresa, a schoolteacher he had always admired but had never spoken to, though he had wanted to for many years. She was a woman of unfathomable calmness. She’d never married, though men certainly did notice her. She had quietly rebuffed each of them, as though she were waiting for a particular suitor who was scheduled to come and marry her at an appointed hour.