The Devil on Her Tongue (24 page)

We walked through winding streets. There were bakers with all manner of breads and pastries, and weavers with their dyes, and tanners in narrow stalls. We went into a shop where, as promised, Bonifacio bought me a pair of
bota
—soft and supple suede boots that rose to my ankle, with a red stripe around the top.

“We mainly barter between farms to obtain the food we need,” he said as we stood in a busy lane lined with shops.

“You’re a farmer?” My voice rose on the last word.

“I grow grapes.”

But he didn’t smell of grapes. I had a sudden thought of the good-looking man with his strong, sweet smell of grapes in the inn the evening before I first met Bonifacio.

“There is one small
venda
in the parish,” Bonifacio went on, “but its supplies are meagre, since everything must be carried in. Is there something else you will need?”

I thought for a moment. “Some cotton and thread. Embroidery floss. And I would like a set of dominoes.” I stared at him as I spoke, daring him to deny me these things.

Bonifacio’s brow wrinkled. “Dominoes?”

“I like to play dominoes. Do you? Or do you prefer cards?”

He was silent for a moment. “I am not a man for games.”

“I would like a set of dominoes,” I repeated.

He hesitated. “It will be a wedding gift.”

For the first time, I thought that perhaps he would soon not be as stiff and awkward with me. For whatever time I was forced to be with him, it would make it easier if he appeared more … human. I put my hand on his arm and squeezed it to show my gratitude, but he pulled away.

At another shop he bought me a small and simple wooden set of dominoes. It paled in comparison with the bone tiles my father had made, but I put my mind from that set, and what had happened to it.

We then stopped in an open market, where Bonifacio bought food for the journey: bread and a slab of pork, a gourd of wine. He saw me looking at a pile of sweet buns and bought me one. Something lifted in me as I walked beside him on the bustling streets. My feet were comfortable in the soft boots, I carried my set of dominoes under my arm, and the sweet pastry melted in my mouth. I had done it. I had left Porto Santo. I was in Funchal Town. The harbour was filled with boats, and one day soon I would be on one of them.

And then I saw Abílio Perez walking ahead of us. I knew that set of shoulders, the way he swung his arms, the hair curling over his
collar. I stopped abruptly on the crowded street, the bun halfway to my mouth.

A woman holding a child’s hand bumped into me, apologized and walked around me.

“What is it?” Bonifacio asked.

I watched the man disappear into the crowd. I was wrong: of course it wasn’t him. He would have sailed to Brazil by now. But for that instant I thought of Abílio turning and rushing to me, his face alight. He would tell me that he’d always known he’d made a mistake in leaving me, and that he would take me away with him after all. He would be a different Abílio, less cruel, less full of thoughts of himself only, and he would care about me.

“It’s nothing,” I said, and we continued walking.

I followed Bonifacio northwest into the hills.

“A horse or donkey can handle this part of the journey with ease,” he said, “but once we’re higher, human feet can navigate the narrow paths easier than pack animals.”

As we climbed upwards, away from the harbour, we passed high gates. Behind them I could see beautiful gardens and pine forests, and occasionally a house of a size and grandness I had never imagined. I stopped at one, to stare through the gates.

“Those are quintas, country houses owned by the wealthy merchants of Madeira,” Bonifacio said. “Mainly the wine merchants, and mainly English.”

A number of bullock carts loaded with wood passed us, heading down towards Funchal. As we walked farther, we passed the terraces hewn from the hillsides, where the island’s food was grown. Women and children were hauling baskets of soil to build up these
poios
. Water for the crops rushed down the hillside in trenches that Bonifacio called
levadas
, built by slaves a century earlier.

Sugar cane and bananas and grapes grew closer to Funchal, but as we climbed higher, the only crop was grapes, the trellised vines clinging dizzily to the
poios
on the sides of the mountains. It was
clear the harvest was over, but I breathed in the scent of rotting fruit lying on the ground beneath the gnarled vines. I thought of merchants such as Henry Duncan; the wines he brought to Rooi came from these very hills. A group of wiry, black-bearded, barefoot men came towards us on the narrow path. Their rough clothing was stained with sweat, their skin burnished deep brown by the sun, and they carried sloshing, bulging goatskins slung around their necks. I stood aside so they could make their way around us, and the smell of grape was overpowering.

“Borracheiros,”
Bonifacio said, “carrying the last of the
mosto
to be sold to the wine merchants. The grapes are pressed in the vineyards, and the juice carried down to Funchal to be made into the wine. The men are coming from higher in the mountains, where it’s cooler and the harvest a little later.”

The path twisted dizzily in and out of huge ravines. Each time I looked over my shoulder, the sea had grown more distant, and at a sharp curve it finally disappeared completely. I stopped a few more times as we wound along the path, looking behind me and hoping it would reappear, but it didn’t.

When we came to a small wooden cross beside the trail that ran along the cliffs, Bonifacio knelt. “We will pray for the soul of the person who lost his life here.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know. But it’s an act of respect. Come,” he said, looking up at me. I was weary, and it would feel good to rest for a moment, and so I knelt beside him. But I didn’t put my hands together or bow my head; I simply waited while he recited the Our Father. We passed seven more crosses on this most treacherous part of the journey to my new home. Seven more times Bonifacio stopped to pray.

Sometimes the path rose almost vertically through heavy woodlands of scented laurel trees. I had never seen such a thick forest, with soft bracken and ferns growing underfoot. Lichen and moss dangled eerily from the high branches. As I reached up to touch the hanging wisps, Bonifacio said, “Witches’ hair,” and I stopped, looking at him sharply. But he only wanted to explain. “That’s what it’s called. The air is so pure and the branches so high that vegetation grows from them.”

When we stopped by a mountain stream, I took off my shawl, too warm from the constant climbing, and splashed icy water on my hands and face. We sat by the tumbling water and ate the bread and pork and shared the flask of wine, and then Bonifacio refilled the flask from the stream.

“You can see the difficulty of this journey,” he said as I took off my boots and put my feet into the cold water. My ankle, sprained months ago when I’d first met Bonifacio, throbbed in the old way, and I rubbed it firmly, trying to ease away the slight swelling.

We finally emerged from the forest, with the mountains high and craggy all around us. My head ached and my legs were strangely wobbly. It was hard to catch my breath. Bonifacio handed me the water flask. “We’re on the
miradouro
, the highest peak. Being so high above the level of the sea can cause you to feel light-headed. As soon as we start the descent, you’ll feel better.” He pointed downwards. “Curral das Freiras.”

The flask halfway to my mouth, I stared at the incredible sight below. We were on the edge of a deep, yawning valley where, at the very bottom, a church steeple stood like a tiny needle. Wisps of smoke were the only indication that houses rose up into the terraced mountainsides. A precipitous, snaking path, hardly more than a goat track, wound down. Staring at what was to be my home, with the dramatic cliffs rising all around us, I was struck by the fact that tomorrow would be the first day of my life that I hadn’t gazed upon the water. “Why do people choose to live here?”

“This is the richest growing area on the whole island. The volcanic soil creates harvests like no other. It’s said that originally this valley was a place of refuge for nuns from Funchal, hiding from corsair attacks. Other stories say the land was granted to the first Sisters who arrived on Madeira. That’s how it came to be named Valley of the Nuns.”

A pair of unseen birds called back and forth above us, their voices ragged in the thin air, an echoing, lonely sound.

I followed Bonifacio slowly, thinking about waking each morning without looking out at the ocean that was as familiar as my own skin, without hearing the water’s gentle kiss or wild crash. I wouldn’t
be able to stay here long. I couldn’t live like this. A soft wind wrapped the smells of the trees and vegetation around me. Plants nodded in the breeze.

“Chestnuts,” Bonifacio said as we walked through a thick glade of trees filled with brown clusters.

Past the forest, another odour, pungent and spicy, surrounded me. “What’s that smell?”

“Eucalyptus,” Bonifacio said without turning.

“Did you grow up here?”

“Yes.”

“Your father owns the vineyard then,” I stated.

He looked over his shoulder at me. “He doesn’t own it. None of the small farmers on Madeira own their land. My father is a
caseiro
. He leases the land from a landlord in Funchal. The landlords are descended from the first settlers to whom the Portuguese crown gave large tracts of land. Every year the
caseiro
must pay his landlord part of the proceeds of the grape harvest.”

At the sound of distant bleating, I gazed up at the cottages and byres scattered on the mountainsides.

“Do you have a goat?” I asked.

He faced forward again. “No.”

“I had a goat once.”

He didn’t respond. The mountains felt like high walls, imprisoning me, hiding everything but a piece of the sky.

We stopped at last outside a small house made of whitewashed stone. Olive trees grew along one side of it. It had a thatched roof, and green shutters on the windows on either side of the door. Beside it was a smaller, similar building without shutters on its one window: the kitchen. Chickens high-stepped about the yard, pecking at the ground; a low enclosure for them backed into a thick tangle of ferns. There was an open wash house with two big covered cisterns. A large and smaller tub hung from the outside wall, as well as a collection of woven baskets and axes and shovels. Nearby, a tiny
latrina
was half hidden in the trees. There was a woodpile and a garden surrounded by a fence of gnarled sticks. Inside the garden a man swung a long-handled tool.

A child sat on the low step to the front door. Cristiano. I glanced at Bonifacio, expecting him to wave, or the child to run to us.

The man in the garden straightened and looked in our direction, then opened the gate and came out. He carried a toothed sickle caught with weedy growth. Age and work had bent him like one of the grapevines, making him shorter than both my husband and me. He wore simple baize breeches and a stained shirt and tasselled woollen hat with earflaps. Like Bonifacio and me, loose cowhide boots were on his feet. He walked as if each step pained him.

“This is my father, Senhor Vitorino Rivaldo,” Bonifacio said to me when the old man stood in front of us. “And this is …” He stopped. The silence stretched. “This is my wife, Diamantina,” he said, his voice louder than usual, leaning close to his father.

Senhor Rivaldo frowned. He lifted one of the earflaps of his hat and cupped his ear. “Did you say wife?” he repeated, in a loud, uneven timbre. He looked at my hair, my face and down my body to my feet. “A wife?” he said, staring at Bonifacio.

When he looked back at me, I dipped my head. “I am pleased to meet you, Senhor Rivaldo.”

“He’s a bit deaf,” Bonifacio said, so I repeated myself, speaking loudly as Bonifacio had, directing my words at the old man’s uncovered ear.

Seconds passed. “Welcome, daughter,” Senhor Rivaldo finally said, and I took a quick, sharp breath. Nobody had called me daughter since my father had left. “You will call me Papa.” He again studied my eyes, my hair. My shawl was around my shoulders. “Which parish do you come from?” Under his smell of sweat and dung I detected a fermented odour that told me he had an internal problem, something in the stomach and bowels.