The crowd buzzed with the miracle that had taken place. The children filled the boat with flowers. The villagers began walking slowly, many barefoot, holding lighted candles, toward the whalemen’s church. Marisa asked to follow the procession in her dory.
One of the neighbors helped her through the surf and returned to the procession along the beach, while the guitarras and the horns played sweetly.
As the procession arrived at its destination, Eduardo reached up, set the small sail, and headed out for the open sea.
A few of the villagers started running to another boat, as if to bring her back, but Marisa saw the priest restrain them and raise his hand in benediction.
Ah, thought Marisa, the good priest understands. She wove the flowers into her hair and waved good-bye from the back of the boat.
Eduardo sailed a perfect course away from the island, until it disappeared from Marisa’s view. His song had ended. Now there was only the sound of the wind in the sail and the sea breaking against the small boat.
CONSTANTINO MALDONADO GAZED DOWN AT THE WOMAN BELOW HIM with prolonged embarrassment, at a complete loss to explain how, now that their lovemaking was over, he couldn’t uncouple himself. Though he struggled, they couldn’t separate.
He laughed a very halfhearted laugh.
“Just one moment,” he said, squirming, trying to get away.
The woman, her eyes growing wide with fear and incomprehension, began trying to push him away. Constantino tried to rise, straining and inhaling the stale breath of the woman, the odor of garlic and onions lingering, as she panted from the exertion of trying to free herself.
It was no use. They were stuck fast.
“How in the devil?” Constantino asked.
The young woman panicked. “What if someone finds us?” she said. “My mother. She will soon be home! What will we do?”
“Relax,” he ordered soberly. “It’s the only way.” They both made a great effort to relax, and Constantino tried to roll off the woman. Then they twisted, turned and struggled, but no matter what they did they were unsuccessful in breaking free of one another.
She began to cry. “What has happened? What will I do? What have you done to me?”
What a fix, he thought. She sobbed quietly, as if afraid of upsetting him. Her dark, work-roughened skin contrasted sharply with Constantino’s fair, almost pale complexion.
Why had he come here to Quebrado do Caminho, involving himself with a woman this far beneath him? She was just a poor country girl, after all, a peasant who didn’t know anything beyond her own village, how to wring a chicken’s neck, or milk goats. What did she know about music, poetry, the world, life? He couldn’t very well go back to Horta and let his friends see them together. He’d be the laughingstock. But, then, how could he remain here, too, where he would also be exposed to ridicule and humiliation?
Here he was, a man of education—an aristocrat, if not exactly wealthy—quite literally stuck to an ignorant girl—a most embarrassing situation—unable to free himself, when all he wanted was to be as far away from her as possible.
At any moment the girl’s mother would arrive home, find them together, and then what?
The girl, Maria Joaquina, amid all the twisting about, shoving, and pushing, kept gathering up the sheets in a futile attempt to cover herself.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Do you think I want the whole world to see?”
“Unless you let me go everyone will soon know, regardless.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“I’m not doing this.”
“Well it’s not me,” he said.
They heard the sound of the door to the house open and shut, and then the steady tap-tapping of Maria Joaquina’s mother’s hard-soled shoes on the floor. She called her daughter’s name, and the girl choked back a cry. The woman came toward the room where the two lovers lay, and pushed open the door. There was a sudden gasp and the instantaneous flutter of her hands rising, imploring toward heaven, “Oh, Our Lady!” the woman shrieked. “In my own house!” Her hands sketched the sign of the cross several times. “Oh, dear Mother of God!” She covered her eyes and turned away but then just as quickly turned around once again, facing the man and her daughter joined in their moment of sin. “Get out, you!” she shouted, pointing her finger at Constantino. “Get out!”
Maria Joaquina continued grabbing at the sheet—covering one part, then exposing another, and so on—while the man to whom she was joined attempted to calm the two women down.
“Please, please, senhora, this will do none of us any good.”
The mother’s lips didn’t cease their motions as she raised a litany of curses and invocations. “How could you do this to my little child, my helpless innocent? Tempter! Devil! You, with all your fine airs and fancy talk. Seducer!” She came toward them threateningly. “May your children have club feet and be idiots!” Quite possibly she realized that any child they might have would be her grandchild, for she suddenly stopped cursing the unborn, but continued to heap a steady stream of abuse upon the two before her.
The old woman turned toward her daughter, who shook in fear, clutching the sheets and mopping up her tears.
“You tramp!” she shouted. “A fine bitch in heat. Such sin! Never, in all my years. Will you be happy, now, that they’ll be dragging our name through the streets?” She turned an imploring and apologetic look up to heaven. “Right here in front of God!”
“Senhora,” the man, pleaded, “Dona Celestina.” He explained to the woman their unfortunate circumstance as best he could, and urged her to be sensible and go out and find them a doctor. Finally, the woman, without a word, got up and left.
She came back an hour or so later with an old country man who called himself a doctor—though most sensible people never referred to him as such, or trusted him to diagnose anything more serious than a headache or cold. He was an ugly, heavyset man, who sweated profusely, and was generally considered a pompous ass by his friends and neighbors. Regardless, he was still the only one who even remotely passed for a doctor on that side of the island. One went to real doctors and hospitals—which people called slaughterhouses—only to die.
The doctor entered the house unable to understand what all the fuss was about, why this mad woman had dragged him out of his chair and away from his aguardente and brought him here. Once he saw for himself, however, he found this most singular situation particularly intriguing. “This is the most interesting case I have seen in all my years of doctoring,” he said, trying to stifle a laugh. “I have waited all my life for just such a case!” He took down copious notes in a worn black booklet, wanting to know all the particulars: how long they had been like that, how long their coupling had been, how they had attempted to extricate themselves, so far.
“So!” the mother asked. “What are you going to do about this?”
After a thorough examination, the doctor stood up and exclaimed: “There is only one way I know of to solve this problem.”
“Hurry man, hurry,” Constantino said.
The doctor left the room with Senhora Celestina; they returned carrying several buckets of cold water, which they threw onto the couple, who screamed and cursed, but were still stuck fast together, shivering from the cold.
“Well?” Senhora Celestina said to the doctor.
“I’m afraid, senhora, there is nothing more I can do.”
“But will they go on like this then, forever?”
“That is difficult to say. Perhaps they will, uh,”—he coughed—“separate in time. Or, perhaps . . . ?” He shrugged, as if to leave that question to their imagination.
“There must be something that can be done,” Constantino said, impatient and even more irritated after being drenched.
“Maybe,” the mother suggested, “a specialist is what is needed. Senhor Guapo just might know what is best in a condition like this.”
“You mean the veterinarian?” the doctor said with
a snort. “What does he know? Cows, horses, yes—but this is another matter. For this you need a medical specialist. Someone from the mainland.”
However, no one seemed interested in bringing in an outsider, and besides, finding a person from another island or the mainland would take time. Joaquina’s mother insisted that the vet was a sensible and practical man, who more than once had proved to be more capable than fancy specialists. “It’s worth a try,” Constantino said.
Later in the day the vet came—a wiry, dried-out husk of a man, who looked as if he were made of corn stalks. He reeked of horse dung and cow’s milk. He pondered over what to do, gave several puzzled exclamations. He squirmed and shifted round in his seat, changing his position every few minutes, as if uncomfortable with himself, unsure what to do with his arms and legs.
“Well!” the mother said.
“I must be alone with them for a moment,” he answered.
She left the room and the good vet went to work. He was a man who had had much experience in the ways of cattle and sheep, goats and horses, and had even helped to deliver a child once or twice, but this was something completely beyond his simple expertise and experience. They had no luck, and after some time he came out rubbing the side of his face.
“I’m sorry,” he said, shrugging, and leaving the house with his tail between his legs.
“Imbecile,” said the mother.
So Constantino and this young, unrefined girl—the daughter of a poor and simple farmhand who one day had sighed deeply at the futility of his life, gave up, and died—made the best of it. They shut themselves up in their room, hidden away from the world.
On occasion the old woman still tried to come between them, to pull them apart, but it did no good. She created various medicinal concoctions, which she felt might somehow facilitate their separation, burning rosemary to ward off any lingering evils, and making them ingest teas brewed with bitter-tasting roots and berries.
Word spread around the village and people came by to have a look at the impossible, though the mother quickly shooed them away, calling them names and insulting each and every one of their ancestors. “Go on, you busybodies,” she said. “Keep your noses where they belong. Let a poor family suffer in peace.”
Senhora Celestina quietly prayed for them both, as well as for the child she soon learned would be born—after the doctor confirmed her suspicions. She lamented their sin, their shame, and their fate. Her husband had died and left her with nothing but problems—and now this. Who could have put this terrible curse upon her family? Things like this couldn’t happen without someone wishing evil upon one of them, or the entire family.
“We must get you married,” she informed the couple—always referring to them in the singular now—“right away. I will call Father Alves. At least that way God may be tolerant with us and spare this house from any more catastrophes.”
What could they say or do? The girl’s mother fashioned an outfit for them, covering that part which needed covering, and disguising their plight, so that they almost looked like two separate people.
Father Alves came. Blind as a bat, he didn’t even notice the peculiar arrangement of the couple, their unusual closeness. “It’s good to see two people who love each other so much,” he said, smiling fondly. “Yes, yes,” Senhora Celestina said, as she rushed the priest into performing the ceremony. Father Alves blessed them both, jovial at the happy union of such a pair and commenting warmly on how well it boded for their future happiness.
The couple were quickly pronounced man and wife.
At moments Constantino attempted to be philosophical about his fate. “Perhaps I am overlooking the true significance of this situation,” he said to himself one night, as Joaquina slept. He mulled the idea over and over. “Here I am, trapped, in a sense, chained, to this poor ignorant child. Could there be some reason for this?” The cause persistently eluded him and yet he followed, hunting its trail and trying repeatedly to pin it down. He had never heard of anyone in his family suffering the same fate, and so he doubted that it had been inherited from his side.
Still, shadows of doubts came treading, unbidden and troubling, upon these moments of reflection, begging at the doors of his consciousness, easily gaining a foot in the door. “Then again, it could all be some trick conjured by the two of them, mother and daughter. What do I know about them? Nothing. Perhaps the grandmother was a benzedeira of this village. This may all be witchcraft, fashioned to take advantage of my position, my name, my aristocracy.”
On the other hand, he knew he had taken advantage of the girl’s innocence and naïveté. Perhaps God was punishing him for his sins?
He stared out the window at the stark landscape of Pico. The mountain was shrouded in its usual gloomy cloak of unrelenting clouds; the sea whispered and its waves eternally winked, as if gratefully passing on to more interesting climes. Fifteen miles out to sea, the shadowy mountain range of São Jorge loomed above the water. Constantino sighed the helpless sigh that was becoming a recurring sigh of resignation. He believed that the mass of rock before him—the cooled remnant of a molten volcanic thrust through the earth’s crust—along with the green vines and fields, the whitewashed houses and stone buildings, even the cows, that all these were conspiratorially mocking his plight.
He was brought back to the here and now by the voice of the woman to whom he was stuck, asking him whether he thought the baby would be a boy or a girl, or if their predicament might somehow adversely affect the child. Again he sighed, wondering why it was that even the sound of her voice so irritated him now.
Joaquina grew with the child at an incredible rate, becoming as large and round in days what normally would have taken months. To Constantino’s horror, he found himself suffering some of the same symptoms as she. Whenever the girl burst into tears, so would he. When she felt tired and slept for hours and hours, he would do the same. He shared her many aches and pains, the same cramps and pressures. The two of them together were a pitiful sight.
They felt depressed about the same things, fought with Maria Joaquina’s mother about the same things, and were swept along together by every stray emotion under the sun. The baby rolled round and round between them the whole while, while the parents resembled two ruffled, squawking birds, each struggling to sit on the same egg.
But they didn’t always feel in unison, didn’t always have the same desires. One might wish to take a walk, the other to sit. One might want to face a certain way as they slept, while the other would wish to face in the opposite direction, or not to sleep at all. These disagreements only caused more problems.
“This is unnatural, as everyone has said,” Joaquina complained. “Only the devil could make two people stick together like this. Everyone in the village believes the devil himself caused this.”
Constantino ignored his young wife’s outburst. Instead he pondered how the child would be born, with the added complication of himself being somewhat in the way. He couldn’t very well trouble his wife with unanswerable questions, even though she asked herself the same things, and kept him awake during the night.
Sometimes he would respond to her talk of the devil. “It was God’s doing,” he would say. “Only God could think of something as dreadful as this!” But she failed to find his attempt at a joke humorous.
As Joaquina’s belly grew with the child, life became much more uncomfortable for them both. Even the most ordinary of mundane acts became nearly impossible.
Constantino longed for the days when he had met with friends, talked and joked, read and composed verses for the ladies. He longed for the days when he could be alone. He wondered if he would ever return to the simple, unfettered joys of those times. If Joaquina and her mother could care for the child, after it was born, perhaps then he would be free and could flee to Horta, to see to business matters . . .
On top of everything else, he continuously wondered whether the child really was his. Lately, he had become more and more convinced that he was in fact the in
nocent victim of these two women’s malevolent witchcraft or ingenious fraud.
One day Joaquina proclaimed that she was giving up the material life, that henceforth she would devote her life to serving God. “My child will be a child of God,” she said. “We will serve God together.”
“First it’s the devil, now God. Besides, you are married,” Constantino argued.
“I cannot be a nun,” she said with sadness. “But I can still devote myself to God.”
Her mind seemed made up. Still, to Constantino it seemed a strange thing, given their unusual circumstances. He felt a trifle bothered, besides, that she had all these thoughts about God and the devil, and did not seem to appreciate who her child would have for a father and be thankful for that fact.
“You could have done far worse than me for a husband,” he said.
“Some husband,” Joaquina said. “You cannot right a wrong simply by marrying me.”
Sometimes, while Constantino snored loudly, Joaquina read verses from her mother’s Bible, reciting her prayers, making promises and offering sacrifices to the saints.
Constantino tried to sleep as much as possible, hoping to wake up one day and find himself a free man again. His laziness irritated his wife and mother-in-law.
“Any good husband would be doing something to provide for his family,” Joaquina’s mother said. “Look at you sleeping your life away, living here like a prince.”
“Like a prince, you say!” Constantine shouted. “No, not like a prince, but like a prisoner.”
Joaquina too found fault with her husband’s behavior. “You are not setting a good example for our child. There are many things we will need. How will you provide for me, and the child? Besides, it wouldn’t do you any harm to pray as well. Maybe the child won’t grow up as lazy as his father.”
Constantino prayed, but only that the ordeal would end, that he could resume his unencumbered life of style and comfort, chasing the pretty girls of Horta. “I’ve learned my lesson,” he cried, though he couldn’t have said what the lesson was. Then he closed his eyes and resumed sleeping.
The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales Page 16
