Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  I intended to scurry off if he threatened me, but instead, he turned to gaze at an urchin on the other side of the street. The lad looked at least three years my senior and wore a ragged shirt and soiled breeches. So filthy were his bare feet that they looked like roots pulled from the soil. His head was shaved.

  This was the early summer of 1800, and despite the dawn of a new century, it was still a time when children never spoke to adults without first being invited to do so. A rock hurled by a miserably clothed waif at a liveried coach driver in the service of a man of riches was tantamount to heresy.

  The injured man stood up with difficulty, dabbing at his cheek with his fingertips. Staring in disbelief at the blood left on his hand, he lurched forward. “You little son of a bitch!” he sputtered. Summoning his flagging strength, he hurled the stone with a grunt.

  The weapon sailed over and past its youthful target and rebounded off the granite facade of the house belonging to Senhor Aurelio, the shoemaker. That was the last act our evildoer was going to attempt that day. His eyeballs rolled back in his head and he crumbled to the ground, his head meeting the street with a dry thud that did not sound promising.

  I was shivering with fear and anticipation. I had never felt so alive. Imagine – a rock hurled by a filthy urchin felling an ugly brute not two hundred paces from my house!

  Senhora Beatriz was sitting up now, her arms clasped around her belly as though protecting an unborn child. She was shaking her head in confusion, plainly trying to understand what had happened. Blood flowed from her bottom lip to her chin; one of her eyes was swollen shut and would later grow infected. It became a milky marble with a cloudy gray center for the rest of her days.

  Daniel rushed to her, but she waved a trembling hand to halt his advance. “Go home,” she said, wiping her mouth. “We’ll talk later. Leave before there’s more trouble. Please.”

  He shook his head. “I will not. At least, not until that shit gets swept into a dung heap,” he said, pointing to the villain.

  Daniel’s accent gave him away as a resident of one of the crumbling riverfront neighborhoods. I was jealous of the way he seemed made for Porto, a city that had its share of gentlemen’s clubs and formal gardens but had at its heart a labyrinth of dark alleyways patrolled by peddlers, waifs, and petty thieves.

  “Daniel, pay attention to me,” Senhora Beatriz replied, drawing determined breaths. “You must leave the city. Two days from now we will meet at your home. Please, before there’s trouble …”

  The senhora would have pleaded further, but neighbors were beginning to gather. Very shortly, a group of men – some still in their night clothes, a few of them bare-chested – had formed a circle around the fallen driver.

  “Is he dead?” Senhor Tomás asked his brother-in-law Tiago the roofer, who was holding the back of his hand to the man’s nose to see if he could detect breathing.

  Various neighborwomen were now rushing to the aid of Senhora Beatriz, lifting her to her feet and making inquiries about the man and what had so incensed him.

  I moved closer to the group of men. “No, he’s still alive,” said Tiago disappointedly – a perfect start to a new day of gossip would have required a murder, of course.

  Senhora Maria Mendes, who was built like a bull, pushed her way through the men and spat in the insensible villain’s face.

  “Pig!” she yelled.

  “And you there, son!” shouted Tiago the roofer at Daniel. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing throwing stones at people?”

  “Now wait a minute,” came Senhor Paulo the tinsmith to the lad’s defense, “he was only helping Senhora Beatriz.”

  “But with a stone the size of an orange?” cried Senhor Alberto.

  “Had I a knife, I’d have slit the driver’s throat!” exclaimed a man hidden from me.

  “Gouged his eye out!” declared another.

  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 kept 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, O Lord, that the body of me be not caught, nor put to death by the hands of destiny. If any evil should wish to track me or watch me, in order to take me or rob me, may its eyes not see me, may its mouth not speak to me, may its ears not hear me, may its hands not seize me, may its feet not overtake me. May I be armed with the sword of St. George, covered with the cloak of Abraham, and sail in the ark of 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 o
ne 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.