‘I simply mean that, as a believer in the naturalist philosophy, I am pleased. I think you have made yourself useful to the general order of things. But let’s get down to what matters . . .’
And he gave her some advice on questions of health.
‘And if, when the time comes, you have any problems, just send for me.’
He started down the stairs. Amélia stopped him and in a tone of frightened supplication, said:
‘You won’t tell anyone in town . . .’
Dr Gouveia stopped.
‘Now you’re being silly. But it’s all right, I forgive you. It’s just your temperament. No, I won’t say anything, child. Why the devil didn’t you marry poor João Eduardo? He would have made you just as happy as the other man, and there would have been no need for secrecy. But that’s a purely secondary matter. I’ve told you what’s important. Be sure to send for me. And don’t put too much trust in your saints. I know more about all this than St Brigid or whoever. You’re a strong girl and you’ll present the State with a fine, sturdy baby.’
She did not understand everything he said, but she sensed in his words both a vague justification for her condition and the kindness of an indulgent grandfather, especially in those knowledgeable assurances as to her good health, to which the doctor’s grey beard, the beard of an Eternal Father, lent an air of infallibility, and his words comforted her and increased the serenity she had been enjoying now for some weeks, ever since her first desperate confession in the chapel in Poiais.
It had doubtless been Our Lady, taking pity at last on her tormented state, who had sent down to her from Heaven the idea of going and pouring out her heart to Father Ferrão. It seemed to her that she had left behind in his dark blue confessional all her sorrows and fears, the black ragbag of remorse that was suffocating her soul. With every consoling word he spoke she had felt the blackness covering the sky disappearing; now everything was blue again; and when she prayed, Our Lady did not angrily turn away. His way of confessing was so different. He did not behave like the rigid representative of an ill-tempered God; there was something feminine and maternal about him that passed over her soul like a caress; rather than laying before her eyes the sinister scene of the fires of Hell, he had shown her a vast merciful Heaven with the doors flung wide and with many roads leading to it, so easy and sweet to tread that only the stubborn and the rebellious would refuse to try. According to this gentle interpretation of the after-life, God was like a kindly, smiling great-grandfather, Our Lady was a sister of charity, and the saints were all hospitable comrades! It was a welcoming religion, bathed in grace, in which one pure tear was enough to redeem a life of sin. How different from the gloomy doctrine that had kept her terrified and trembling ever since she was a child – as different as that tiny village chapel was from the Cathedral’s vast mass of masonry! There, in the old Cathedral, the cubit-thick walls separated one off from natural, human life; it was all darkness, melancholy, penitence and the stern faces of images; none of the joyful things of the world entered there, no blue sky, no birds, no fresh air from the fields, no smiles from bright lips; the only flowers there were artificial ones; the doorkeeper was stationed at the door to keep out dogs and children; even the sun was exiled, and the only available light came from gloomy candelabra. In the little chapel in Poaias, on the other hand, nature was on familiar terms with the Good Lord! The scent of honeysuckle wafted in on the breeze through the open doors; the whitewashed walls echoed with the cries of little children; the altar was like a combination of garden and orchard; bold sparrows were even to be found perched chirruping on the pedestals of the crucifixes; occasionally a grave-faced ox would poke its snout through the door with all the old familiarity of the stable in Bethlehem, or a lost sheep would come in, overjoyed to see a member of its own race, the Paschal Lamb, sleeping comfortably at the back of the altar with its front legs wrapped around the holy cross.
Besides, Father Ferrão was, as he put it, ‘not interested in impossibilities’. He knew that she could not simply extirpate in a moment that guilty love which had rooted itself in the very depths of her being. He asked only that whenever she was overwhelmed by the idea of Amaro, she should immediately seek sanctuary in the idea of Christ. A poor young girl cannot do mortal combat with the colossal force of Satan, who has the strength of a Hercules; when she feels him near, all she can do is to take shelter in prayer and let him wear himself out roaring and frothing beyond the walls of that impenetrable refuge. He himself, with all the solicitude of a nurse, assisted her every day in that repurification of her soul; he was the one who, like a theatre director, had told her what attitude to adopt on Amaro’s first visit to Ricoça; he would be there with a few consoling words, as restoring as a cordial, if he saw her falter in that slow reconquest of virtue; if she had spent a restless night remembering the warm pleasures of the past, then he would spend all morning talking to her, not as a teacher, but simply assuring her that Heaven would show her greater joys than any she had known in the sexton’s sordid bedroom. He had proven to her, with the subtlety of a theologian, that there was in Amaro’s love only brutality and bestial fury; that, however sweet the love of a man might be, the love of a priest could only be a momentary explosion of repressed desire; when Amaro had started sending her letters, Father Ferrão had analysed them sentence by sentence, revealing to her how much hypocrisy, egotism, rhetoric and crude desire they contained.
Thus he gradually weaned her away from Amaro. But he did not wean her away from the idea of a legitimate love, purified by the sacrament; he knew that she was all flesh and desire and that to launch her violently into mysticism might turn her for a moment from her natural instincts, but would never create in her a lasting peace. He did not try to tear her from human life; he did not want her to become a nun; he sensed in her a loving impulse and all he wanted was that it should serve the joy of a husband and the healthy harmony of a family rather than be squandered on casual affairs. Deep down in his priestly soul, Father Ferrão would doubtless have preferred her to leave behind the selfish interests of individual love and to give herself, as a sister of charity or as a nurse in some retreat, to the all-embracing love of humanity. But poor Amélia’s flesh was very lovely and very weak; it would not be wise to frighten her with such lofty sacrifices; she was all woman and so she should remain; to limit her activities would be to limit her usefulness. Christ, with his ideal limbs nailed to the cross, was not enough for her; she needed a man like other men, moustachioed and wearing a tall hat. Never mind! Just as long as he was a husband legitimised by the Sacrament.
Thus he gradually cured her of that morbid passion by guiding her through each day, with a missionary persistence born of sincere faith, placing the subtlety of the casuist at the service of the morality of a skilful, fatherly philosopher – a marvellous cure of which the good priest was secretly rather proud.
And great was his joy when it seemed to him that, at last, her passion for Amaro was no longer a living feeling in her soul, but was dead, embalmed, placed in the depths of her memory as in a tomb, hidden now beneath the delicate flowering of a new virtue. That at least is what Ferrão thought, seeing her allude to the past with a serene gaze, without the furious blushes that used to burn her cheeks at the mere mention of Amaro’s name.
Indeed, she no longer thought of Amaro with the old excitement: the dread of sin, Father Ferrão’s powerful influence, the abrupt separation from the devout environment in which her love had developed and the pleasure she took in a greater serenity, with no nocturnal terrors and without the enmity of Our Lady, all helped to reduce the crackling fire of her feelings to a dully glowing ember. Amaro had initially inhabited her soul as if he were a gold-painted idol, but, since she had become pregnant, in her moments of religious terror or of hysterical repentance, she had so often shaken that idol that all the gilt had come off on her hands, and the dark, trivial shape beneath the gold no longer dazzled her; thus, without weeping or struggling, she watched Father Ferrão t
ear the idol down. If she still thought of Amaro, it was because she could not help thinking about the sexton’s house, but what tempted her now was not Amaro but pleasure itself.
And with her natural good nature, she was genuinely grateful to Father Ferrão. As she had said to Amaro that evening, she owed him everything. That is how she felt now about Dr Gouveia as well, who came to see Dona Josefa every few days. They were her good friends, like two fathers sent to her by Heaven, one promising her health and the other grace.
Sheltered by those two protecting forces, she enjoyed a wonderful sense of peace during the last weeks of October. The days passed by, calm and warm. It was good to sit out on the terrace in the evenings, surrounded by the autumnal calm of the fields. Dr Gouveia would sometimes coincide with Father Ferrão; the two men shared a mutual respect, and once they had paid their visit to Dona Josefa, they would join her on the terrace and launch immediately into one of their endless discussions about Religion and Morality.
With her sewing in her lap, with her two good friends beside her, those two colossi of knowledge and sanctity, Amélia would abandon herself to the charm of that sweet hour, looking out at the orchard where the leaves on the trees were already growing pale. She was thinking about the future; it seemed easy and safe to her now; she was strong and, with the doctor there, the birth would involve only an hour or so of pain; then, free from that complication, she would return to the town and to her mother . . . And then, born of Father Ferrão’s constant conversations about João Eduardo, another hope would shine and dance in her imagination. Why not? If the poor man still loved and forgave her . . . She had never found him repugnant as a man, and it would be a splendid marriage now that he enjoyed the friendship of the Morgado. It was said that João Eduardo was to be made administrator. And she could see herself living in Poiais, going out in the Morgado’s carriage, being summoned to supper by a bell, being served by a liveried valet . . . For long moments, she would sit very still, immersed in the sweetness of that prospect, while, at the far end of the terrace, Father Ferrão and Dr Gouveia did battle over the doctrine of Grace and of Conscience, accompanied by the monotonous murmur of the water in the irrigation ditches in the orchard. It was at this time that Dona Josefa, concerned that Father Amaro had ceased his visits, sent the tenant to Leiria to ask him expressly to favour her with a visit. The man came back with the astonishing news that Father Amaro had left for Vieira and would not be back for two weeks. The old woman wept with vexation. And that night in her room, Amélia could not sleep out of sheer irritation at the thought of Father Amaro enjoying himself in Vieira, chatting to the ladies on the beach and flitting from party to party, doubtless without a thought for her . . .
With the first week of November came the rains. Ricoça seemed far more depressing during those short days of drenching rain and stormy skies. Father Ferrão, crippled with rheumatism, no longer came to visit. Dr Gouveia would shoot off in his old cabriolet after only half an hour. Amélia’s one distraction was to stand at the window: on three occasions she had seen João Eduardo pass by on the road, but he had immediately looked away or taken refuge beneath his umbrella.
Dionísia was another frequent visitor: she was to be the midwife, despite Dr Gouveia’s advice that Amélia should use Micaela, a respectable woman with thirty years’ experience. But Amélia did not want more people in on the secret, and besides, Dionísia brought her news of Amaro, which she found out from his cook. Amaro was enjoying himself so much in Vieira that he planned to stay until December. This ‘infamous behaviour’ outraged her: she was sure that he wanted to be well out of the way when the birthpangs began, along with all the perils of childbirth. He had also determined a long time ago that the child would be handed over to a wetnurse near Ourém who would bring it up in the village, but the time was almost upon her, and no wetnurse had been arranged, and there he was gathering seashells on the seashore.
‘It’s not right, Dionísia!’ Amélia would cry.
‘Well, no, it doesn’t seem right to me either. Of course, I could speak to the wetnurse, but these are serious matters. And Father Amaro said he would take care of everything.’
‘It’s outrageous!’
Added to that, she had neglected the baby’s layette – the child was nearly due and she had no clothes for it and no money with which to buy them. Dionísia had even offered her a few items left in pawn with her by a woman who had been staying at her house. But Amélia could not bear the thought of her child wearing another child’s nappies, which might perhaps bring with them illness or misfortune.
And, out of pride, she did not want to write to Amaro.
Added to that, Dona Josefa’s rudeness was becoming intolerable. Deprived of the devout aid of a priest, a real priest (not Father Ferrão), poor Dona Josefa felt that her defenceless old soul was left exposed to all Satan’s audacities: the strange vision she had had of St Francis Xavier in the nude was repeated now with frightening insistence along with all the other saints: the whole of Heaven’s court were throwing off their tunics and their habits and dancing imaginary sarabands stark naked; these spectacles laid on by the Devil were killing her. She called for Father Silvério, but it seemed that a plague of rheumatism was crippling the whole diocesan clergy; Father Silvério had been in bed since the onset of winter. The parish priest from Cortegaça responded to her urgent call, but only to tell her the new recipe he had discovered for making salt cod Vizcaya-style. This lack of a virtuous priest plunged her into the blackest of moods, which fell on Amélia in the form of a rain of insults.
The good lady was seriously thinking of sending for Father Brito in Amor, when one evening, after supper, Amaro unexpectedly appeared.
He looked magnificent, tanned by the sun and the sea breezes, wearing a new overcoat and patent-leather shoes. As he spoke at length about Vieira, about mutual acquaintances he had seen there, about the fishing he had done, the wonderful lotto games they had played, he brought into the sad room of the sick old lady a vivifying breath of jolly seaside life. Dona Josefa’s eyes filled with tears to see Father Amaro and to hear him.
‘And your mother is well,’ he said to Amélia. ‘She’s taken thirty sea baths already. The other day she won fifteen tostões at cards. But what have you two been up to here?’
Dona Josefa unleashed a torrent of bitter complaints. It was so lonely there! And the rain! The lack of friends! She was losing her soul in that ghastly place . . .
‘Well,’ said Father Amaro, crossing his legs, ‘I had such a good time in Vieira that I’m thinking of going back next week.’
Unable to control herself, Amélia burst out:
‘Not again!’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If the precentor will give me a month’s leave, I’m going to spend it there. They’ll make up a bed for me in the Canon’s dining room, I can take a few sea baths and . . .’
He was sick of sitting bored in Leiria.
Dona Josefa looked bereft. Go back and leave them there to die of sadness!
He laughed.
‘You don’t need me here. You’re in good company . . .’
‘I don’t know about that,’ said the old woman sourly. ‘The others,’ and she placed rancorous emphasis on that word, ‘the others may not need you, but I am not in “good company”, my soul is going to wrack and ruin here. The kind of company we receive here brings neither honour nor advantage.’
Amélia broke in to contradict Dona Josefa:
‘To make matters worse, Father Ferrão has been ill. He’s got rheumatism. Without him the house is like a prison.’
Dona Josefa gave a scornful laugh. And Father Amaro, getting up to leave, said regretfully:
‘Poor thing. And such a saintly man too. I’ll go and see him if I have time. Anyway, I’ll come by tomorrow, Dona Josefa, and lay that soul of yours to rest. No, don’t get up, Miss Amélia, I know the way out.’
But she insisted on accompanying him to the door. They crossed the salon without a word. Amaro drew on his fine,
new, black leather gloves. And at the top of the stairs, he ceremoniously doffed his hat:
‘Goodnight, Senhora.’
And Amélia stood there frozen, watching him go serenely down the stairs, as if she were of as little importance to him as the two stone lions who were sleeping down below with their chins on their paws.
She went into her room and threw herself down on her bed, weeping with rage and humiliation. The scoundrel! And not a word about the child, about the wetnurse or the baby’s layette! He had not even cast an interested glance at her pregnant body, a pregnancy he had caused! Not a single complaint about her scornful response to him! Nothing! He had merely put on his gloves and set his hat at a jaunty angle. It was outrageous!
The next day, Amaro arrived earlier. He spent a long time shut up with Dona Josefa in her room.
Amélia impatiently paced up and down the salon, her eyes like coals. He finally emerged, drawing on his gloves with the same prosperous air as he had on the previous evening.
‘You’re leaving, then?’ she said in a tremulous voice.
‘I am, yes, Senhora. I was just having a little chat with Dona Josefa.’
He took off his hat, bowed very low and said:
‘Goodnight, Senhora.’
Deathly pale, Amélia muttered:
‘You scoundrel!’
He looked at her, as if startled, and said again:
‘Goodnight, Senhora.’
And, just as he had the night before, he went slowly down the stone stairs.
Amélia’s first thought was to denounce him to the vicar general. Then she spent the night writing him a letter, three pages of accusations and complaints. But the only response from Amaro the next day, sent verbally by little João from the farm, was that ‘he might drop in on Thursday’.
She spent another night in tears, while in Rua das Sousas, Father Amaro was rubbing his hands with glee over his ‘brilliant stratagem’. He had not thought it up himself; he had got the idea in Vieira, where he had gone to vent his feelings to the Canon and to dissipate his sorrows in the sea air; that is where he had discovered the ‘brilliant stratagem’ at a party, listening to Pinheiro – a wealthy and witty lawyer who was the glory of Alcobaça – speak about love.
The Crime of Father Amaro Page 44
