Hunting Midnight sc-2

by Richard Zimler

  The men trumpeted their bravery by telling what they would have done to the evil brute had they arrived in time. The women scoffed at what precious little use any of them were in times of real need. Alas, none of this was of any help to Senhora Beatriz or Daniel, who were looking at each other as though they were the only two people on the street. She was being led limping into her home, clearly more concerned for the lad’s sake than her own. That sight made a solemn impression on me and I wondered how they knew each other.

  The men now began demanding that Daniel leave their neighborhood. “You’re going to end up flogged if you don’t get out of here before I count to five! You don’t belong here, son,” Tiago the roofer shouted.

  This struck me as unjust. As a lad of nine, I did not know that Daniel might have been in real danger. In those days, even a young boy could have his head impaled on an oakwood stake if the villainous driver were to die and if Senhora Beatriz’s testimony failed to justify his courage. I was also unaware that a count whose royal-blue damask breeches had not been soaped, scrubbed, ironed, and perfumed in a timely manner, whose wine-stained brocade doublet was still hanging like a rain-drenched bat from a cord in Senhora Beatriz’s back garden, was entitled to have his coachman beat the offending laundress near senseless. Anyone dissatisfied with this sort of justice could send his written protest to the Bishop, our mad Queen Maria, or even Pope Pius VII, who, even if he sympathized, would have been far too busy evading capture by Napoleon to open any communiqués from overseas. In short, one could send a letter of indignation to whomever one chose because it would make no difference.

  No, I was not aware of these things, and so as I watched Tiago the roofer confronting Daniel, I was outraged.

  The lad gazed down at his feet, confused. He had expected praise no less than I.

  “Christ, I only wanted to help,” he finally said. “I had to. She’d have been deader than a drum otherwise.”

  Daniel covered his eyes with his hand, unwilling to cry in front of the men, then rubbed his temples with his thumb and forefingers, as though to banish unwanted thoughts — a gesture of distress that I would come to know only too well over the next years. With maturity that I found extraordinary, he then said, “I guess I’ll be going now. Good day to you all.” Before parting, he went to retrieve his stone.

  “Son, leave that be,” Tiago advised, pointing a finger of warning. “You’ve done enough damage for one day.”

  Daniel picked up his stone nevertheless, eliciting reproaches from Tiago and the others. What added depth to my solidarity with him at that moment was his shorn scalp, plainly an attempt to rid him of head lice. This style was unfortunate, for it made him look ill and poor and might have inspired these men to act more harshly than was appropriate. If he had had blond ringlets of hair falling to the crimson collar of an expensive silken coat, this confrontation might have instead ended with pats on the back.

  I ran forward. “Senhor Tiago,” I cried. “Senhor Tiago, Senhora Beatriz was being beaten. The lout was kicking her!”

  “John, go home immediately,” he said, furrowing his brow in displeasure.

  “She was hurt,” I cried, “and her eye was nearly closed. It was big and puffy. Couldn’t you see it? It was wrong to have done that to her. The man, he was … he was a bloody poltroon.” I said these last words in English; it was my father’s term for a dastardly wretch, and I could think of nothing in Portuguese to equal it.

  Sensing in Tiago’s glare that he had not understood me, I frantically sought a worthy translation. He had other plans and grabbed my arm.

  “Come, son, I’m taking you back to your mother,” he said, his eyes glinting with righteousness.

  “If you don’t let me go …” I shouted.

  “Then what?” he laughed.

  I considered kicking him where the fabric in his tattered trousers hung suggestively forward, but sensed that this would only get me into deeper trouble.

  “Make fun of me if you like,” I declared, trembling, trying to imitate my father’s voice, “but if you don’t leave this lad alone …”

  Pity my youth, I couldn’t for the life of me think of a way to boldly conclude this exciting start to a sentence. And I still had not freed my arm from Tiago’s hairy grip.

  Daniel, however, made an end to my threatening sentence unnecessary. Rearing back, he hurled his stone right at Tiago’s tyrannical face, but at half speed, so to speak, giving the man ample chance to duck.

  The roofer dove to the ground, relinquishing his hold on me.

  “Go on!” Daniel shouted at me, waving furiously. “Close your goddamned snout and run, you little mole! You’re free!”

  II

  Sometimes I think that hope is not all individual in nature, that it exists as an ether that suffuses into us at the moment of birth. Of late, I have even come to the unlikely conclusion that nature bestows upon us hands and feet, eyes and ears, so that we may work as loyal servants to this boundless mist of hope, performing when we can the delicate alchemy of turning it into tangible reality — giving it form and influence, so to speak. So when I found myself free from Tiago’s grasp, I served hope as well as my young heart knew how and bolted up the street, full of wild joy, paying no heed to the shouted commands behind me, wishing only to befriend the defiant lad who had helped me.

  I caught up to Daniel outside the city gates. “What are you following me for, caralho!” he snapped.

  Caralho was a rude reference to the male member. Many residents of Porto commonly ended their sentences with such swear words.

  At a loss for words, I trudged forlornly behind him. Finally, I piped up that I wished to thank him for freeing me from Tiago the roofer.

  “You’re a strange little mole,” he said.

  “No, I’m not,” I replied, wounded, because I was not yet aware that he was right.

  In a singsong voice, he then said, “Esquisito e pequenito, corajoso e faladoso…”

  It was a rhyme describing me, I was sure, and it meant, “strange and small, courageous and talkacious.” This last word, faladoso in Portuguese, was plainly an invention of his own.

  I began to believe in that moment that he might be clever. He gave me a wily smile, his tongue darting out. One of his canine teeth was missing and made him look a bit daft. I knew nothing of Shakespeare then, but I can easily imagine now that Puck was penned with an actor of Daniel’s temperament in mind.

  He then told me of his fisherman father, who was away in Newfoundland. The lad was going to join him at sea in two years, after his fourteenth birthday. He said that his mother was a seamstress at a dressmaking shop on the Rua dos Ingleses, one of our most elegant streets.

  “She makes things for all the wives of the wealthiest merchants,” he boasted. Sensing my suspicion that this was rather far-fetched given the state of his clothing, he added with assurance, “Ma sewed a dress for Queen Maria once. Long and purple, with lace everywhere. You never saw so much fabric. Shit, you could have clothed two or three cows in it.”

  I would have wished to learn more about the similarities between dressing Queen Maria and a small herd of cattle, but he forestalled my questions by pointing to his house just ahead — a moss-covered hovel on a narrow dark street by the river. A straggle of honeysuckle snaked up the facade and peaked over the rooftop, bees zooming through the perfumed flowers.

  Daniel took a key from his pocket. We entered a tiny square room, no larger than five paces of a man from side to side. The ceiling sagged at its center and was covered by a fuzzy black mold that gave off a sour smell. I worried about being buried alive, but he pushed me inside.

  A faded floral rug was spread over the chipped tile floor to the fireplace at the back wall. Fuzzy brown cabbage leaves floated in the water of a wooden basin sitting before it. A granite crucifix above the hearth caught my attention. The Savior’s visage was painted over in a ghastly array of colors. I never asked Daniel who did it, but it occurs to me now that he was the likely culprit. We kep
t neither cross nor rosary at our house, my father dismissing any and all objects of Christianity as tokens of superstition.

  Raising his eyebrows mischievously, Daniel led me into a slightly larger room, where a cracked window at the back wall allowed a gloomy light to filter through. Two rude mattresses were wedged into the outside corners.

  Daniel hopped around the sprawling mess on the floor with deft little leaps and succeeded in reaching a chest fashioned of old planks. Opening it, he pulled out a roughly carved wooden mask with a bulbous snout and hollows for eyes. Two V-shaped sticks had been inserted in holes in its prominent brow, creating spiky antlers. The mouth was a somber slit.

  He placed it over his face and was transformed into a creature of the forest. My heart sank. I said, “You ought to be careful. Changing into animals can be dangerous.”

  “It’s just a mask, silly.” He offered it to me.

  I took it and stared through the eyes. He told me he’d made it himself. When I asked how, he pulled an iron chisel, two short knives, and mallets of varying sizes from the chest.

  “Where’d you get all that?”

  “I bought some of them with what I get collecting clothes for Senhora Beatriz to wash. I begged the others from a cooper I know. He gives me what he doesn’t need.”

  “You work for Senhora Beatriz?”

  “I do.”

  I hoisted myself up onto the rim of his chest. A score of masks nestled in among the old clothes. Some had antlers, others horns. A few had serrated mouths, like the teeth of a wolf, and one had the pointed snout of a mosquito.

  We decided to bring the masks of a frog and a deer with us to my tarn outside Porto. Daniel also took from beneath his straw pillow a tiny canvas pouch with a drawstring opening. He slipped it over his neck. “There’s a charm inside,” he explained to me. “A monk wrote it out for Ma to give to me. She says I have to wear it to protect me when I leave the city, because there are lots of witches hiding in the countryside. She says they have hair like horse manes and smell like leeks.”

  Daniel opened the pouch and lifted out a piece of old brown paper, folded in four. “I can’t read nothing — you read it to me,” he said, opening it up.

  The talisman was written in a rough scrawl and said:

  Divine Son of the Virgin Mary, who was born in Bethlehem, a Nazarene,and who was crucified so that we might live, I beseech thee, OLord,that the body of me be not caught, norput to death by the hands of destiny. If anyevil should wish to track me or watch me, in order to take me or robme, mayits eyes not see me, mayits mouth not speak to me, mayits ears not hear me, may its hands not seize me, may its feet not overtake me. MayI be armed with the sword of St.George,covered with the cloak of Abraham,and sailin the arkof Noah.

  I was most impressed and reread it while he slipped on his mildewed leather shoes and grabbed a threadbare quilt in case it got chilly in the woods, since he was planning on spending the night.

  Our path out of town took us past the market of wild birds by the São Bento Convent. So moving were the peeps of distress coming from the larks and thrushes caged inside this ramshackle row of wooden stalls that my hands formed fists.

  “I’d like to destroy this all!” I declared.

  Daniel summoned me ahead with a swear word, and I thought, mistakenly, that he hadn’t noticed my anger. By the cattle pens we saw a wiry, long-haired man in a ratty fur-collared cape, a most impractical covering in the June heat. Overturning a wicker basket, the man climbed on top. The skin of his hands and face was bone-white. Crouching as though to do battle with a dragon, he began to shriek that the body of Christ was the only way toward redemption. We stopped to listen and heard him announce that all Jews, Protestants, and pagans would be expelled from Porto. We who were left would come to live in a City of God through the drinking of the Savior’s blood.

  “Filth, vermin, excrement of the devil!” he shouted. “We must fling all the Marranos into the dung heaps and be done with them once and for all!”

  There was that word again — Marranos. It rankled me that I did not know its meaning. And twice in one day I had heard it.

  Daniel shook his head when I asked him what it might mean, and he dragged me away. Just then, the preacher ceased his rant. Made curious by the silence, I turned and found him staring directly at me. Grinning, he motioned for me to come closer to him — or so it seemed at the time. My heart was thumping a warning.

  A squat man with a feather in his cap then led a goat at the end of a tether, a noose around its neck, to the preacher.

  “In the guise of a goat comes the devil!” the preacher told the crowd. “And in the guise of the devil comes the Jew!”

  Taking a blackened knife from his coat, he jumped down from the basket. When he thrust it into the poor creature’s side, it shrieked and shuddered, then fell to its knees. Blood sluiced from its wound like water from a spigot. Holding his hands to this living fountain, the preacher smeared his face and hair with blood, raised his arms, and called on the Lord to witness this sacrifice. Cries of terror pierced the air as onlookers scattered in all directions.

  Noting my fear, Daniel said, “John, any old bugger with a rusted blade can kill a goat. Come on — let’s go.”

  “But he knows me. He looked at me.”

  Daniel sighed theatrically, replying that I must have been mistaken. It would be several years before I would see the connection between this hate monger and the beating of Senhora Beatriz.

  *

  In my youth I thought there could be no greater gift than being able to speak with animals. So as soon as we reached our lake, I stood and imitated the call of a kingfisher I spotted high up in an oak tree. When I ceased my calls, my avian friend contemplated the water thirty feet below. Then, without warning, he hurtled downward like a winged arrow, cutting into the water and disappearing.

  “What’s happened to him?” exclaimed Daniel.

  “You’ll see.”

  Emerging a few seconds later, none the worse for his swim, the bird flew back to his tree, a silvery minnow writhing in his beak. When I turned to share my joy with Daniel, I expected to see his wily smile, but he was sobbing.

  I watched him without saying a word, his hands covering his eyes, since I was sure he would not want me to call attention to his display of emotion. When I finally dared to question him, he glared at me viciously. I decided to go on a brief bird-watching expedition in the woods. When I returned, he made me swear to keep a secret, then told me that Senhora Beatriz was his grandmother. “Her daughter gave me up as a baby. She left me on the wheel. The nuns gave me to my adoptive mother and father.”

  Left on the wheel was the Portuguese expression for placing an unwanted infant on a turntable set inside the window of a charitable institution maintained for just this purpose. The turntable was partitioned by a wooden board to keep the identity of the mother a secret. Babies left there were cared for by nuns and, if possible, given to new parents.

  “Why did she give you up?” I asked.

  Daniel wiped his nose with his hand, picked up a branch from the ground, and began making fierce cuts in it with a short-bladed knife. “Don’t know. She’s dead now — the fevers took her a year after she gave me to the nuns. She was just nineteen. She must have been too poor to care for me.” He looked off into the distance. “I only found out about her because one day Senhora Beatriz was delivering laundry to a neighbor of ours and saw me in the street. She got a big fright and went all pale. Like she’d seen a ghost. Bobo de merda, sem cabeçeira, vá-te-embora, vá agora.”

  This was another of the rhymes I would come to associate with Daniel. It meant, Fool without wit, boy of shit, leave today and go away.

  “See, I looked just like her dead daughter — but I only found that out later.”

  He fashioned two tiny holes in his wood with the point of his blade, then scored some curving lines. “I secretly followed Senhora Beatriz to her house and began to go there every day at the same time. She’d always look sad
, then close her shutters.”

  I twisted my head to see his work better, but he held it away from me and said he’d clout me if I peeked again.

  “John, you can be damned sure I’ve got a head filled with shit, because the next thing I did was tell my mother about Senhora Beatriz. She never stays at home now — Ma, I mean. I haven’t even seen her in a year. The last time I did, the old donkey grabbed me hard” — the lad’s eyes shone with rage — “and slapped me right across my face. She told me to beg forgiveness for being born. Everything got broke in her life when she took me in. That’s when I found out I was adopted.”

  Holding his knife like a pen, he made a long circular incision across his design.

  “Then, one day, Senhora Beatriz came to our house — maybe two years ago. I invited her inside, but she wouldn’t come in. She started crying right in the doorway. I went to her, but she told me to stay back. She said she needed a lad to collect soiled linens and things. She’d pay me.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What do you think I said? I’d never have been able to buy my carving tools without her money. That’s how I get all my things, John. So, about six months ago, I was at her house and she sat me down and gave me some biscuits. She showed me a tiny painting with a woman’s face. The whole thing wasn’t any bigger than my palm. And the woman’s face looked like mine. She said that that was why she got a fright the first time she saw me, because I looked so much like her.”

  “The woman in the painting was your mother?”

  He nodded. “Her name was Teresa. Senhora Beatriz told me she’d given up a baby she’d had with a man who’d run off. They weren’t married. Senhora Beatriz sure was angry at him for leaving her. She said he was a clothing merchant from Lisbon and that he’d ruined her daughter with his silk and promises. Not that she said the baby they’d had was me, of course. She thinks I haven’t figured it out. I haven’t told anyone but you, so you’ve got to keep quiet.”

  “Why don’t you tell Senhora Beatriz you know? She’s your grandmother.”