Hunting Midnight (3 page)

II

S
ometimes 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 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.”