One afternoon, seeing her leaving the Cathedral, he waited for her outside the pharmacy, and with great resolve said:
‘I want to talk to you, Miss Amélia . . . Things can’t go on like this . . . I can’t . . . You’re in love with the priest.’
She bit her lip and turned pale.
‘How dare you insult me like that!’
And, outraged, she tried to walk on.
He grabbed the sleeve of her jacket.
‘Listen, Miss Amélia, I don’t mean to insult you, but you don’t understand . . . It’s nearly breaking my heart . . .’ And his voice faltered with emotion.
‘You’re wrong, you’re wrong . . .’ she stammered.
‘Swear to me then that there’s nothing between you and the priest!’
‘I swear on my own salvation that there’s nothing between us. But I’ll tell you something else, if you ever mention this again, or insult me, I’ll tell Mama everything, and you needn’t ever come to our house again.’
‘But, Miss Amélia . . .’
‘Look, we can’t stand here talking. Dona Micaela is over there watching . . .’
An old lady had lifted the muslin curtain at a low window and was peering out with gleaming, greedy eyes, her withered face pressed eagerly to the glass. They parted, and the old lady, disappointed, let the curtain fall again.
That night, while the ladies were noisily discussing the missionaries who were preaching in Barrosa, Amélia, swiftly plying her needle, said to Amaro in a low voice:
‘We must be careful . . . Don’t look at me so much and don’t sit so close. Someone has already noticed.’
Amaro immediately pushed his chair back to be nearer Dona Maria da Assunção, but despite Amélia’s advice, he could not take his eyes off her in silent, anxious interrogation, afraid that her mother’s distrust or the old ladies’ malice might already be ‘creating a scandal’. After tea, amidst the noise of chairs being rearranged for lotto, he asked her quickly:
‘Who was it who noticed?’
‘No one. I’m just afraid. We must hide our feelings.’
From then on there were no more sweet, stolen glances, no more chairs drawn up close together at the table, no more secrets; and they took a kind of piquant pleasure in affecting cold manners, proud in their certainty of the passion inflaming them. While Amaro somewhere else in the room chatted to the ladies, it was delicious to Amélia to adore his presence, his voice, his jokes, with her eyes chastely fixed on João Eduardo’s slippers which, very astutely, she had once again begun to embroider.
The clerk, however, was still troubled; it bothered him to find the priest there every night, looking so at home, with his prosperous face, enjoying the old ladies’ veneration. Amélia, it was true, behaved herself and was faithful to him, but he knew that the priest wanted her, was watching her, and despite that oath on her own salvation, that assurance that ‘there was nothing between them’, he feared that the stubborn admiration of the old ladies, for whom the priest was ‘an angel’, was seeping into Amélia; he would only be happy once (having obtained a post with the district governor) he had removed Amélia from that fanatical household; but this happiness was a long time in coming, and every night, he left Rua da Misericórdia feeling more in love, but with his life devoured by jealousy and a hatred of all priests and yet lacking the courage to give Amélia up. That was when he started wandering the streets until late; sometimes he even retraced his steps in order to look up at her closed windows; then he would stroll along the avenue by the river, but the cold rustle of the branches over the black waters only made him feel even sadder; he would go then to the billiard hall, and for a while would watch the pairs of men playing, and the scorekeeper, his hair all dishevelled, leaning on the cue rest, yawning. The room would be filled by the choking smell of cheap oil. Then he would leave and walk slowly over to the office of the local newspaper, The District Voice.
X
The editor of The District Voice, Agostinho Pinheiro, was, in fact, a relative of João Eduardo’s. He was popularly known as Rickets, because of the large hump on his back and because of his scrawny, consumptive body. He always looked rather grimy, and his sallow, effeminate face and debauched eyes spoke of ancient, infamous vices. He had (so it was said in Leiria) been up to all kinds of roguery. And he had so often heard people exclaim ‘If it wasn’t for that hump on your back, I’d break your bones’ that, finding his hump sufficient protection, he had acquired an air of serene impudence. He was from Lisbon, which made him even more suspect in the eyes of Leiria’s grave bourgeois inhabitants; he attributed his hoarse, grating voice to his lack of tonsils, and, since he played the guitar, he deliberately kept his nicotine-stained fingernails long.
The District Voice had been created by a group of men known in Leiria as the Maia Group, who were particularly hostile to the district governor. Dr Godinho, who was the group’s leader and official candidate, had found in Agostinho, as he put it, ‘just the man they needed’, for what the group needed was an unscrupulous rogue who knew how to spell and who could redraft in sonorous terms the insults, calumnies and allusions that they brought to his office in the form of unedited jottings. Agostinho was a shaper of villainies. They paid him fifteen mil réis a month and allowed him to live above the office in a crumbling third-floor apartment in an alleyway off the main square.
Agostinho wrote the editorial, the local news, as well as the Correspondence from Lisbon, and Prudêncio, a graduate, wrote the literary pages under the heading Cultural Notes from Leiria. He was a very decent lad, who found Agostinho utterly repulsive; however, such was his appetite for publicity that he made himself sit down fraternally at the same desk every Saturday to check the proofs of his prose – a prose so overflowing with imagery that the people who read it would mutter: ‘Such opulence!’
João Eduardo was equally aware that Agostinho was a worthless individual, and he would never have dared to be seen in the street with him during the day, but he enjoyed going late at night to the newspaper office, where he would smoke cigarettes and listen to Agostinho talking about Lisbon, about the different jobs he had had – on the editorial staff of two newspapers, in a theatre in Rua dos Condes, in a pawnshop and in various other institutions. His visits to Agostinho were secret.
At that time of night, the typesetting room on the first floor was closed (the newspaper was printed on Saturdays), and João Eduardo would find Agostinho upstairs, hunched over his desk, wearing an old fur jacket whose silver fastenings had long since been pawned, poring over long sheets of paper by the ghastly light of an oil lamp; he was busy composing the newspaper, and the dark room looked like a cave. João Eduardo would lie down on the wickerwork couch or search out Agostinho’s old guitar and strum a lighthearted fado. The journalist, meanwhile, resting his head on one fist, would labour on, ‘the words just weren’t flowing’, and, when not even João Eduardo’s fado inspired him, he would get up, go over to a cupboard, pour himself a glass of gin which he would gulp down noisily, then give an almighty stretch, light a cigarette and sing hoarsely to the guitar accompaniment:
It was that tyrant Fate
Who led me to this life,
And the guitar: dir-lin, din, din, dir-lin, din, don.
To this life of black despair,
where all around is strife.
This always brought back memories of Lisbon, because he would end by declaring bitterly:
‘God, this is a dreary place!’
He could not stand the fact that he was living in Leiria, instead of drinking in Tio João’s tavern in the old Moorish quarter of Lisbon, with Ana Alfaiata or Bigodinho, listening to João das Biscas, who, with a cigar in the corner of his mouth, one weeping eye half-shut against the smoke, would draw plangent notes from the guitar and sing of the death of Sofia!
Then, in order to comfort himself with the certainty of his own talent, he would read his articles out to João Eduardo in a very loud voice. And João became interested because these recent ‘
creations’ were always giving the clergy ‘a good dressing-down’ and thus coincided with his own preoccupations.
It was around this time that, over the famous matter of the poorhouse, Dr Godinho had grown increasingly hostile towards the Cathedral chapter and to the priesthood in general. He had always hated priests; he suffered from a chronic liver disease and, because the Church made him think of the cemetery, he hated cassocks, since they seemed to him a reminder of the shroud. Thus, urged on by Dr Godinho, Agostinho, who had a great well of bile to plumb, stepped up his criticisms; however, given his weakness for literature, his vituperations were encrusted in such thick layers of rhetoric that, as Canon Dias said: ‘he was more bark than bite’.
On one such night, João Eduardo found Agostinho all fired up about an article he had written that evening, and which was full of wit ‘worthy of Victor Hugo himself’.
‘Just wait – it’s really something!’
As usual, it was a diatribe against the clergy and a eulogy of Dr Godinho. Having celebrated the virtues of the doctor, ‘that highly respected family man’, and his eloquence in the courts, which ‘had saved so many unfortunates from the sword of the law’, the article addressed Christ in raucous tones: ‘Who would have thought (roared Agostinho), O Immortal One who died for us on the Cross, who would have thought, as you hung there exhausted and dying on Golgotha, who would have thought that one day, in Your name, in Your shadow, Dr Godinho would have been expelled from a charitable institution, Dr Godinho, a man so pure of soul, so talented . . .’ And Dr Godinho’s virtues paraded slowly by, solemn and sublime, leaving in their train a host of noble adjectives.
Then, momentarily ceasing in his contemplation of Dr Godinho, Agostinho addressed himself directly to Rome: ‘Do you come here at the height of the nineteenth century to throw in the face of liberal Leiria the rules of the Syllabus of Errors? Fine, then. If you want war, you shall have it!’
‘How about that, João?’ he said. ‘It’s powerful stuff, don’t you think, and philosophical too!’
Then he resumed his reading:
‘“If you want war, you shall have it! We will raise high our flag, which you may be quite sure is not the flag of demagogy, and with strong arms we will hoist that flag above the highest bastion of public liberty, and we will cry out to Leiria, we will cry out to Europe: let us fight, children of the nineteenth century, let us fight for progress!” That’ll show ’em!’
João Eduardo, who had remained silent for a moment, said, fitting his words to Agostinho’s sonorous prose:
‘The clergy want to drag us back to the dark days of obscurantism!’
Such a literary phrase took Agostinho by surprise; he looked at João Eduardo and said:
‘Why don’t you write an article yourself?’
João Eduardo replied, smiling:
‘Oh, I’d tear those priests off a strip, Agostinho . . . I’d show their rotten underbelly, because I know what they’re like . . .’
Agostinho urged him to put this reprimand in writing:
‘It would be just the job!’
Why, only yesterday, Dr Godinho had said to him: ‘Attack anything that smells of the priesthood! Any scandal you hear, print it! If there isn’t any scandal, then make it up!’
And Agostinho added kindly:
‘And don’t worry about the style, I can always smarten it up for you.’
‘We’ll see, we’ll see,’ muttered João Eduardo.
From then on, Agostinho kept asking him:
‘What’s happened to that article of yours? Bring me that article.’
He really did want it, because he knew that João Eduardo had intimate knowledge of ‘São Joaneira’s little canonical clique’ and imagined that he was privy to all kinds of infamies.
João Eduardo, however, was unsure. What if he was found out?
‘Nonsense!’ said Agostinho. ‘I’ll publish it under my name, as an editorial. Who will ever know?’
It happened that, on the following night, João Eduardo caught Father Amaro slipping a note to Amélia, and the next evening, with the pallor of one who has not slept, he turned up at the newspaper office bearing five long sheets of paper, written in the tiny, neat hand of a clerk. It was his article and was entitled: ‘The New Pharisees’. After a few flowery thoughts about Jesus and Golgotha, João Eduardo’s article was, beneath allusions which were about as diaphanous as cobwebs, a vengeful attack on Canon Dias, Father Brito, Father Amaro and Father Natário. Each of them got his just deserts, as Agostinho joyfully exclaimed.
‘When will it come out?’ asked João Eduardo.
Agostinho rubbed his hands and thought.
‘It’s strong stuff! It practically names names, but don’t worry, I’ll sort that out.’
He cautiously showed the article to Dr Godinho, who thought it ‘a vile calumny’. Dr Godinho and the Church had merely had a slight difference of opinion; he acknowledged that, in general, religion was necessary for the masses; besides, his wife, the lovely Dona Cândida, was extremely devout and had commented of late that she was finding the newspaper’s war on the clergy distinctly troubling; and Dr Godinho did not want to provoke unnecessary hatred amongst the priests, foreseeing that his love of domestic peace, order and his duty as a Christian would soon force him into some form of reconciliation, ‘which was against his best instincts, but nevertheless . . .’
Thus he merely said to Agostinho:
‘This cannot be published as an editorial, but merely as some sort of “personal statement”. Those are your orders.’
So Agostinho told João Eduardo that the article would be published as a ‘personal statement’ and signed: ‘A Liberal’. João Eduardo had wanted to end the article with the words: ‘Mothers, you have been warned!’ Agostinho suggested that this final warning might give rise to the jocular riposte: ‘Warned or warmed?!’ After long discussions, they decided to close with: ‘You have been warned, you men in black!’
The following Sunday, the article appeared, signed: ‘A Liberal.’
Father Amaro had spent all of that Sunday morning, on his return from the Cathedral, laboriously composing a letter to Amélia. Impatient, as he put it, ‘with a relationship that never seemed to get anywhere, that never went beyond exchanging glances and squeezing hands’, he had, one night at the lotto table, managed to pass her a note written in blue ink in his best handwriting: ‘I want to see you alone. I have so much to tell you. Where would be a safe place? May God protect our love.’ She had not replied, and Amaro, much put out and concerned too because he had not seen her that morning at nine o’clock mass, had resolved to ‘set everything out clearly in a love letter’; and he paced about the house, strewing the floor with cigarette ends, poring over his Dictionary of Synonyms, as he set down the kind of deeply felt phrases that would touch her heart.
My dearest Amélia (he wrote), I cannot understand what possible reasons can have kept you from replying to the note I gave you at your mother’s house; for I gave it to you out of the great need I feel to talk to you alone, and my intentions were entirely pure and born out of the innocence of this soul that loves you so much and has no thought of sin.
You must know that I feel for you a fervent affection, and for your part (if I am not deceived by those eyes which are the beacons of my life, like the star by which the sailor steers his ship) it seems to me that you too, my Amélia, are fond of me, your adoring friend; for even the other day, when Libano won at lotto with his first six numbers and everyone made such a fuss, you squeezed my hand under the table so tenderly that it seemed to me that Heaven opened and I could hear the angels singing their Hosannas. Why, then, did you not reply? If you are worried that our affection might bring down upon us the disapproval of our guardian angels, then all I can say is that you commit a far greater sin by keeping me in this torment of uncertainty, because my thoughts are with you even when I celebrate mass, so that I cannot even lift up my soul during the divine sacrifice. If I believed that this mutual affect
ion was the work of the Tempter, I would say to you: dearly beloved child, let us make this sacrifice to Jesus to pay back part of the blood that he spilled for us! But I have looked into my soul and I see in it the whiteness of lilies. And your love too is as pure as your soul that will one day be joined with mine in happiness amidst celestial choirs. If you only knew how much I love you, Amélia; sometimes I feel as if I could eat you up a bite at a time! Please reply, and tell me what you think about meeting one afternoon at Morenal. I am longing to express to you the fire burning inside me, as well as to talk to you about important things, and to feel your hand in mine, that hand which I hope will lead me along the path of love, to the ecstasy of celestial joy. Farewell, my bewitching angel; receive herewith the heart of your lover and spiritual father,
Amaro.
After supper, he copied out the letter in blue ink, placed it neady folded in the pocket of his cassock and set off for Rua da Misericórdia. When he arrived, he could already hear from the stairs Natário’s shrill voice raised in argument.
‘Who else is here tonight?’ he asked Ruça, who came to light his way, her shawl pulled tight around her.
‘All the ladies are here, and Father Brito.’
‘Excellent!’
He bounded up the stairs and, at the door of the living room, with his cape still on, but raising high his hat, he said:
‘A very good evening to everyone, starting, of course, with the ladies.’
Natário immediately planted himself before him and exclaimed:
‘What do you think about it then?’
‘About what?’ asked Amaro. Then noticing that everyone was silent and had their eyes fixed on him, he said: ‘What’s wrong? Has something happened?’
‘Haven’t you read it, Father?’ they all exclaimed. ‘Haven’t you read The District Voice?’
He had never set eyes on it, he said. Then the indignant ladies burst out:
The Crime of Father Amaro Page 16
