‘He’s the handsome one, the thin one, they go upstairs, shut themselves in, they’re like dogs.’
The Canon’s eyes bulged.
‘But who is he? What’s his name? What did your father tell you?’
‘He’s the other one, the parish priest, Amaro,’ she said impatiently.
‘And they go up to the room, do they? And what do you hear? Tell me everything, little one!’
Totó told him, with a fury that lent sibilant tones to her hoarse voice, how they came into the house, looked in to see her, and how they would rub against each other and then rush off to the room upstairs, where they would spend an hour shut up together.
But the Canon, whose dull eyes flickered with lubricious curiosity, wanted to know all the awful details.
‘And what do you hear, Totozinha? Can you hear the bed creak?’
She nodded, very pale now, her teeth clenched.
‘And have you seen them kissing and embracing? Go on, tell me, I’ll give you some money.’
She kept her mouth shut, and to the Canon her contorted face looked almost savage.
‘You don’t like her, do you?’
She shook her head fiercely.
‘And you say you’ve seen them pinching each other?’
‘They’re like dogs!’ she said through gritted teeth.
The Canon sat up, again blew out his breath and scratched his head vigorously.
‘Right,’ he said, getting up. ‘Goodbye, then, little one. Wrap up warm. You don’t want to catch cold.’
He left and as he slammed the door, he said out loud:
‘This is the villainy to beat all villainies! I’ll kill him! I’ll murder him!’
He stood for a moment lost in thought, then bustled off to Rua das Sousas, parasol at the ready, his face apoplectic with rage. In the Cathedral square, however, he paused to think awhile, and turning on his heel, he went into the church. He was so enraged that, forgetting the habit of forty years, he forgot to genuflect to the Sacrament. He headed straight for the sacristy, just as Father Amaro was coming out, carefully drawing on the black leather gloves which he always wore now to please Amélia.
He was shocked by the Canon’s agitated state.
‘What’s wrong, Master?’
‘What’s wrong?’ exclaimed the Canon. ‘You villain! It’s your depraved behaviour that’s wrong!’
And he said nothing more, overcome by anger.
Amaro had turned very pale.
‘Wh-what are you saying, Master?’
The Canon drew breath:
‘Don’t you “Master” me! You have ruined the girl! These are the actions of an utter scoundrel.’
Father Amaro frowned, as if he had failed to understand a joke.
‘What girl? You’re having me on . . .’
He even smiled, affecting confidence, but his white lips trembled.
‘I saw you, man!’ bawled the Canon.
Then Amaro drew back, suddenly terrified:
‘You saw me?’
It flashed upon his mind that he had somehow been betrayed and the Canon had perhaps been hidden in some corner of Esguelhas’ house.
‘I didn’t actually see anything, but I might as well have,’ said the Canon in ominous tones. ‘I know everything. I’ve just come from there. Totó told me. You spend hours and hours shut up in that bedroom. She can even hear the bed creaking from downstairs. It’s disgusting!’
Finding himself caught, Amaro, like some pursued and cornered animal, made one last desperate effort at resistance.
‘And what has it got to do with you?’
The Canon started.
‘What has it got to do with me? How can you talk to me like that? I’ll tell you what it’s got to do with me, I’m going straight to the vicar general and report the whole matter to him.’
Father Amaro, deathly pale, went over to him, fists clenched:
‘You scoundrel!’
‘Steady on, now, steady on!’ exclaimed the Canon, brandishing his parasol. ‘You’re not going to hit me, are you?’
Father Amaro took a step back; he closed his eyes and drew one hand across his forehead, which was beaded with sweat; then, after a moment, and speaking with apparent calm, he said:
‘Look here, Canon. I saw you once in bed with São Joaneira.’
‘You’re lying!’ bellowed the Canon.
‘I did, I did!’ said Amaro fiercely. ‘When I came back one evening . . . You were in your shirtsleeves, and she had just got up and was fastening her stays. You even called out: “Who’s there?” I saw you as clearly as I can see you now. You say one word, and I’ll tell everyone that São Joaneira has been your mistress for the last ten years, right under the noses of the whole clergy. What do you say now?’
The Canon’s fury had long since waned and, at those words, he stood stock still like a bewildered ox. After a while, he managed to say in a faint voice:
‘What a rogue you’ve turned out to be!’
Father Amaro, almost calm now, and assured of the Canon’s silence, said cheerily:
‘What do you mean “a rogue”? Why? We’ve both blotted our copybooks, that’s all. And I didn’t go snooping around or try to bribe Totó . . . I just happened to come home at the wrong time. And don’t talk to me about morality – don’t make me laugh. Morality is for school and for sermons. This is what I choose to do, you do something else, and the others do what they can. You’re getting on a bit now and so you grab yourself an old lady; I’m still young and so I choose Amélia. It’s a sad state of affairs, but that’s the way things are. It’s Nature! We’re men. And as priests, and out of respect for our class, what we have to do is to back each other up.’
The Canon was listening, nodding in dumb acceptance of these truths. He had slumped down in a chair, resting from all that pointless rage; then, looking up at Amaro, he said:
‘But you’re only at the beginning of your career!’
‘And you’re at the end of yours!’
They both laughed and immediately withdrew the offensive words they had said one to the other and gravely shook each other’s hand. Then they talked.
What enraged the Canon was that he should have chosen Amélia. If it had been some other girl, he would have been almost pleased for him, but Amélia! If her poor mother found out, she would die of grief.
‘But there’s no reason why her mother should find out,’ said Amaro. ‘This is between you and me, Father. This is a secret between you and me. Her mother must know nothing, and I won’t say a word to Amélia about what has passed between us today. Things will remain as they were, and the world will continue to turn. But remember, Master, not a word to São Joaneira. No treachery now.’
The Canon, with his hand on his breast, gravely gave his word of honour as a gentleman and a priest that the secret would remain forever buried in his heart.
Then they affectionately shook hands again.
The tower clock struck three. It was nearly time for the Canon’s high tea.
As they left, he clapped Amaro on the back and gave him a knowing look:
‘You clever young rascal!’
‘Well, what do you expect? It all just started as a bit of fun . . .’
‘Young man,’ said the Canon sententiously, ‘these are precisely the things that count in life.’
‘You’re quite right, Master, they are.’
From that day on, Amaro enjoyed almost complete tranquillity of soul. Up until then, he had occasionally been troubled by the thought that this was cruel repayment for all the trust and kindness that had been lavished on him in Rua da Misericórdia. But the Canon’s tacit approval had, as he put it, removed that thorn from his conscience. After all, the Canon was the head of the household, a respectable gentleman, the boss. São Joaneira was merely his mistress. And Amaro even sometimes jokingly addressed Dias as ‘his dear father-in-law’.
Something else happened to cheer him up. Totó suddenly fell ill; the day after the Canon’s v
isit she had started vomiting blood; Dr Cardoso was called in and spoke of galloping consumption, a matter of weeks, a hopeless case . . .
‘The sort of thing, my friend,’ he had said, ‘which is over in a trice,’ and he had made a whistling noise with his lips. This was his way of depicting death, which, when in a hurry, concludes its work with a swift scything movement.
The mornings spent at Esguelhas’ house were peaceful now. Amélia and Amaro no longer tiptoed in, trying to slink by to their pleasures upstairs, unnoticed by Totó. They slammed the doors and talked loudly, knowing that Totó was downstairs prostrated by fever, in sheets wet from her constant sweating. Amélia still guiltily said a Hail Mary every night for Totó to get better. And sometimes, when she was undressing upstairs in the sexton’s bedroom, she would stop suddenly and pull a sad face.
‘Oh, my love, it does seem wrong for us to be up here enjoying ourselves while the poor creature is down there battling with death.’
Amaro would shrug. What could they do about it if it was the will of God?
And Amélia, resigning herself entirely to God’s will, would step out of her petticoats.
She was now often subject to such bouts of sentiment, which annoyed Father Amaro. She often seemed cast down; she always had some awful dream to tell him about, one that had tormented her all night, and in which she saw warnings of impending doom.
Sometimes she would say to him:
‘If I were to die, would you be very sad?’
Amaro would get angry. It was ridiculous! They only had one hour to spend together, so why spoil it with gloomy thoughts?
‘You don’t know what it’s like,’ she would say, ‘my heart is as black as the night.’
Her mother’s friends had noticed the change in her. Sometimes, she would not say a word all evening, bent over her sewing, desultorily plying her needle; or else, too tired to sew, she would sit by the table twirling the green shade on the oil lamp, her eyes vacant, her soul far away.
‘Leave that lampshade alone!’ the ladies would say to her irritably.
She would smile, give a weary sigh and slowly take up the white petticoat she had been hemming for weeks now. Her mother, seeing how pale she always was, thought of calling in Dr Gouveia.
‘It’s nothing, Mama, just my nerves, it will pass.’
Proof to everyone that her nerves were on edge was the way in which the slightest thing made her jump; she would even scream out, almost faint, if a door suddenly banged. On some nights, she would ask her mother to sleep in her room, for fear of nightmares and visions.
‘It’s just as Dr Gouveia always said,’ São Joaneira remarked to the Canon, ‘she’s one of those girls who needs to get married.’
The Canon cleared his throat.
‘She’s got everything she needs,’ he muttered. ‘Absolutely everything. More than enough it would seem.’
The Canon believed that the girl was (as he put it to himself) ‘brimming with happiness’. On the days when he knew she had visited Totó, he would look at her all the time, peering at her from the depths of his armchair with his lewd, heavy-lidded eyes. He showered her with displays of paternal affection. Whenever he met her on the stairs, he would always stop her and tickle her or pat her cheek. He repeatedly asked her over to his house in the mornings, and while Amélia was chatting to Dona Josefa, he would shuffle around her in his slippers like an old cockerel. Amélia and her mother talked endlessly about the Canon’s sudden friendly interest in her, convinced that he would leave her a good dowry.
When the Canon was alone with Amaro, he would roll his eyes and say: ‘You lucky devil. She’s a dish fit for a king that one!’
Amaro would reply arrogantly:
‘And a very tasty one, Master, very tasty indeed!’
That was one of Amaro’s great pleasures – to hear his colleagues praise Amélia, who was known amongst the clergy as ‘the flower of the devotees’. Everyone envied him his confessant. He always insisted that she dress up in her best clothes for mass on Sunday; he had even got annoyed with her lately because she always wore the same dark woollen dress which made her look like an old penitent.
Amélia, however, no longer felt a lover’s need to please Amaro in everything. She had awoken almost completely from that foolish sleep into which Amaro’s first embrace had thrown her. She was becoming painfully aware of her guilt. A dawn of reason was breaking over the darkness of that devout, slavish spirit. What was she after all? The parish priest’s mistress. And that idea, put bluntly, was terrible to her. Not that she regretted the loss of her virginity, her honour or her good name. She would sacrifice far more than that for him and for the delirious pleasures he gave her. But there was something more frightening than the disapproval of the world, and that was the vengeance of the Lord. What she quietly wept for was the possible loss of Paradise or, worse still, some punishment from God, not a transcendent punishment that would torture her soul beyond the grave, but some torment in life that would afflict her health, her well-being, her body. She had a vague fear of illness, leprosy, paralysis, poverty or hunger or any of the other penalties in which she believed the God of the catechism to be prodigal. When she was a little girl and forgot to pay the Virgin her regular tribute of Hail Marys, she would be afraid that the Virgin would make her fall down the stairs or get slapped by the teacher; now she went cold with fear at the idea that God, to punish her for going to bed with a priest, would send her some disease that would disfigure her or reduce her to begging for alms in the alleyways. She had been unable to rid herself of these ideas ever since the day in the sacristy when she had committed the sin of lust while wearing Our Lady’s cloak. She was sure that the Holy Virgin hated her and ceaselessly complained about her; in vain did she try to win her round with an endless flow of humble prayers; she could sense that Our Lady, inaccessible and disdainful, had turned her back on her. That divine face had never again smiled on her; those hands had never again opened gratefully to receive her prayers as if they were congratulatory bouquets. There was only a cutting silence, the icy hostility of a divinity offended. She knew how powerful Our Lady’s influence was in the councils of Heaven; she had been taught this as a child; everything she wants she gets, as a recompense for the tears she shed on Calvary; her Son sits smiling on her right hand side, God the Father speaks into her left ear. And Amélia understood that there was no hope for her, and that some terrible thing was being prepared for her up above, in Paradise, that would one day fall upon her body and upon her soul, crushing her in its calamitous collapse. What would it be?
She would have ended her relationship with Amaro if she dared, but she feared his wrath almost as much as God’s. What would become of her if she had both Our Lady and the parish priest against her? Besides, she loved him. In his arms, all terror of Heaven, even the idea of Heaven, vanished; safe in his arms, she felt no fear of divine anger; like a strong wine, desire and the fury of the flesh filled her with fierce courage; it was like a brutal challenge to Heaven coiling furiously about her body. The terror came later, when she was alone in her room. It was that struggle that drained the colour from her face, traced hard lines at the corners of her dry, parched lips, and gave her the faded air of weariness that so irritated Father Amaro.
‘What’s wrong with you? It’s as if someone had squeezed all the juice out of you,’ Father Amaro would say when she lay cold and inert beneath his first kisses.
‘I didn’t sleep well. It’s my nerves.’
‘Damn your nerves!’ Amaro would grumble impatiently.
Then she would ask him strange questions that would drive him to despair, the same questions every day. Had he said mass that morning with real fervour? Had he read his breviary? Had he said his prayers?
‘Stop it!’ he would say angrily. ‘Damnation! Anyone would think I was still a seminarian and you were the examining father, making sure I had kept the Rule. Don’t be so ridiculous!’
‘It’s important to be at peace with God,’ she would murm
ur.
She was genuinely concerned now that Amaro should be ‘a good priest’. In order to be saved and to be exempted from Our Lady’s wrath, she was relying now on Amaro’s influence at the court of God, and she feared that if he neglected his devotions, he would ruin her, and that any diminishment of his fervour would diminish her in the eyes of the Lord. She wanted him to remain a holy favourite in Heaven, in order to reap the benefits of his mystical protection.
Amaro referred to this as ‘the obsessions of an old nun’. He hated it because he thought it frivolous and because it took up precious time during those mornings at the sexton’s house.
‘Look, we haven’t come here to be miserable,’ he would say sharply. ‘Close the door, will you.’
She would obey and then, when he kissed her in the darkness of the closed room, he would at last recognise his Amélia, the Amélia of their first encounters, the delicious body that trembled passionately in his arms.
He desired her more each day with a continuous, tyrannical desire which those few hours could not satisfy. There really was no other woman like her. He was sure that not even in Lisbon, not even amongst the nobility, was there another woman like her. She had her moments of silliness, it was true, but they weren’t to be taken seriously, it was a matter of enjoying things while he was young.
Oh, and he did enjoy himself. His life was furnished on every side with sweet comforts, as if it were a room of cushioned walls, where there were no sharp corners to the furniture, where the body found only pillowy softnesses wherever it alighted.
The mornings spent in Esguelhas’ house were, of course, the best part, but there were other pleasures too. He ate well; he smoked good cigarettes and used a cigarette-holder; his underwear was all new and all made of linen; he had bought some furniture; and he no longer had to worry about money because Dona Maria da Assunção, his best confessant, was always ready to open her purse. And recently, he had had a piece of luck: one night at the house of São Joaneira, the excellent Dona Maria had expressed the view, regarding an English family whom she had seen pass by in a char-à-banc en route to Batalha, that the English were all heretics.
The Crime of Father Amaro Page 36
