The Devil on Her Tongue (25 page)

“I’m not from Madeira, Senhor Rivaldo. Papa. I’m from Porto Santo.” It was tiring to speak at such a pitch.

“Ah,” he said, looking at Bonifacio again, but I couldn’t read anything in either of their faces. “And you married there?”

Bonifacio nodded.

There was another moment’s silence.

“Do you wish to drink cherry liqueur to celebrate your wedding?” Papa asked.

I opened my mouth to say yes, pleased that my father-in-law wanted to mark our marriage, even with this simplest of rituals.

“Not right now,” Bonifacio said, and beckoned to the boy on the step.

The child slowly rose, clutching a piece of cloth, staring at his bare feet as he came towards us. Under his rough striped wool shirt, his small shoulders turned inwards as if to protect himself. His skin was dark—too dark even for an olive-skinned Portuguese child. He stopped a short distance from us.

“Come here,” Bonifacio said sternly. The child obeyed, still staring at the ground. “This is Cristiano. Cristiano, look at Diamantina.”

When his eyes met mine, I smiled. He was a beautiful child. His large green-brown eyes framed with curling lashes stood out in his dark face. His hair was the colour of ironwood bark with curling streaks of gold. But it was matted and filthy, as was the rest of him, and he smelled strongly of urine. Although he was small and slight, his face was too knowing. He was older than five.

He scratched his scalp as he stared at me blankly.

“Hello, Cristiano,” I said, perhaps a little too loudly, as if he, like Papa, couldn’t hear. But he had obeyed when Bonifacio told him to come closer. Was he simple?

“Cristiano,” Bonifacio said. “Remember what I’ve taught you.”

Cristiano limply put out his hand. I took it. His fingers felt boneless, lifeless and strangely cool, as if I held a small, dead bird. He immediately pulled away and ducked his head with what I suspected was a greeting. He glanced at Bonifacio in an uneasy, almost fearful way.

Bonifacio nodded at him, and the boy took a step back. “He doesn’t speak, and he prefers not to be touched. I’ve tried to instill some manners, but …”

I smiled at Cristiano again and, studying his eyes, realized he wasn’t at all simple.

“I’ll get on with my work, then,” Papa said. “I hope you will be happy in Curral das Freiras, daughter.” Still holding his sickle, he limped back to the garden.

“T
he kitchen is there,” Bonifacio said, pointing, “and the wash house and the toilet. We get our water from a stream a short distance from the garden.”

I followed him inside the house.

Cristiano, the dirty cloth pressed against his mouth and nose, had returned to his place on the step.

Dominating the sitting room was a long wooden table with benches on either side. There were two plates covered in chicken bones and eggshells. Two wooden chairs faced the fireplace, which had a thick layer of soot running up its stone front. An open-shelved cupboard holding dishes, glasses and cutlery sat against one wall. On the other wall was a large crucifix made of rough, bleached wood. The thatched ceiling was higher than I was used to, giving the room brightness, and the floor, littered with crumbs and ground dirt, was made of smooth wooden planks. The stone walls were peeling; they needed whitewashing. Tattered curtains hung over the two windows.

“That room is my father’s,” Bonifacio said, nodding at an open door. “And you can put your belongings in here.” He opened the second door and went in. I stood in the doorway.

This bedroom was divided from Papa’s by a wall that didn’t meet the ceiling. One narrow bed was against the partition wall and the other on the opposite wall under the window. Both were neatly made with thick wool blankets. Against the wall beside the door was a chair, a low pallet and a cupboard. Wooden pegs ran along the
upper portion of the wall, and a few were hung with Bonifacio’s breeches and shirts.

“You can hang your clothes on the pegs, and use the cupboard for anything else. The child sleeps there,” he said, pointing at the pallet. “You can have the bed under the window, to get the breeze.”

We both looked at the beds, and then Bonifacio turned away, as if they were something shameful.

I unpacked my books and took them and my domino set and my mother’s mortar and pestle out to the sitting room and placed them along the top of the dish cupboard. Back in the bedroom, I hung my skirts and blouses on the pegs. I opened the cupboard; on one shelf were extra sheets and blankets, on another a long blue striped cotton shirt and a similar red one, as well as a small pair of breeches—Cristiano’s clothes. I put my medicine sack, with its twists of ground powders and seeds and leaves and small pots of salves, onto the empty bottom of the cupboard. Then I sat on the bed, unsure what was expected next.

Bonifacio returned. He carried a length of rope, a hammer and nails. I watched as he hammered the big nails into two opposite walls. Then he tied the rope firmly to the nails and opened the cupboard and took out three heavy sheets. He hung them from the rope, dividing the room in half so that I couldn’t see his bed. He moved the chair beside my bed. “I’m going to help my father in the garden. You’ll find what you need to make dinner in the kitchen,” he said.

I looked at my cubicle, and thought of Sister Amélia and her cell.

The kitchen was in an even worse state than the sitting room. The simple fireplace, similar to the one in my old home, was fashioned from three large stones set in a rectangle with one side open to lay the wood. There was a chimney, so although the smell of grease hung over everything, at least the low ceiling and walls weren’t blackened by years of smoke, as my hut had been.

There was an oven like the one in the church kitchen, but when I looked inside, it was evident no baking had been done for some
time. A big cast iron pan sitting on the fireplace stones was filled with hardening fat, and a blackened kettle and smaller pots were piled on a table along with wooden spoons, earthen jars of oil and a large cistern of water. A big basket was filled with chestnuts. On a set of shelves draped with thin muslin to keep out flies were a slab of dried beef and more baskets of cabbages and sweet potatoes and various beans. There was a bowl of eggs and a salt tub and the remains of a loaf of bread.

Another shelf held a row of jugs—I counted fourteen of them. I took the stopper out of one and smelled it: the aroma of cherry and brandy and a touch of cinnamon wafted out.

I cleaned the ashes from the fireplace and went out to the woodpile. As I stacked kindling and wood in my arms, Cristiano came from the step and followed me into the kitchen. I started a fire, then filled the big kettle with water from the cistern.

Cristiano watched me, sitting on a stool at the table. I smiled at him a few times, but his expression never changed as he followed my movements. He scratched his head vigorously, clearly tormented by lice. Eventually he put his elbow on the table and wearily rested his cheek on his hand, as though he carried burdens too heavy for such a young boy.

“How old are you, Cristiano?” I asked.

He shrugged.

When the kettle boiled, I took it off the hook and hung the pot filled with vegetables and the dried beef and water and salt and spices in its place.

I went back to the house and took my scissors from my sewing pouch. I could smell the pallet: like Cristiano, it stank of urine, and I knew there would be lice in it. I dragged the little stuffed mattress and blankets through the sitting room and threw them off the step, then went back to the bedroom and fashioned a temporary bed for him out of clean blankets on the floor at the foot of my bed.

I took the long blue shirt from the cupboard and went back to the kitchen. Cristiano still sat where I had left him. “Come to the wash house with me,” I told him firmly, taking the kettle, and he did as I asked.

As he stood beside a rough bench holding different-sized pieces of flannel and a small dish with a soap mixture, I filled one of the tubs with water from the cistern and warmed it with the boiled water. Cristiano held his cloth to his nose and mouth, unmoving, as I cut off his beautiful curls. The lice had bitten him severely, and I had to cut the hair right to the skull to get rid of all the nits. His tender scalp was criss-crossed with scratches from his own fingernails. I wrapped the curls in a piece of flannel to be burned.

When I motioned for him to come to the tub, he laid the cloth on the bench, stroking it tenderly for a moment, then pulled off his shirt. As he started to undo his breeches, he stopped, staring at me, and I turned away.

As Cristiano sat down in the tub, I looked over my shoulder at him. “Do you want me to help you?” I asked, rubbing soap onto a flannel. As he looked up at me, I was startled to see the letter
T
burned into the front of his right shoulder. Under it was a second mark, a cross, this one newer. I had seen similar marks on the shoulders and arms of blackamoors on the wharf in Vila Baleira as they unloaded cargo. Shirtless, their dark skin glistening in the heat, I had studied the variety of letters that identified their owners. I assumed the cross signified they had been baptized.

I handed the soapy, wet cloth to Cristiano, watching as he rubbed it over his face and chest and arms. He was a slave child, then, but by the colour of his eyes and the lighter shade and looser texture of his hair, he was a mulatto or perhaps a quadroon. His little body was perfect, his neck long and graceful, but he was too thin, his ribs and collarbones sharp.

He rubbed the cloth over his head. “Close your eyes,” I said, and poured warm water over him. He wiped his eyes with his fists, and I held out a large flannel and wrapped it around him as he stepped out of the tub.

I gave him the clean shirt and he turned his back and let the flannel drop, pulling the shirt over his head as he pushed his arms into the sleeves. The shirt fell below his knees. He turned and walked towards the house. After I had thrown out the dirty water and wiped the tub clean, I left the filthy clothes to be washed and went back to the
house. Cristiano was lying on the blankets at the foot of my bed, his eyes open. I took a few powders from my medicine bag and mixed them with one of my salves. I sat on the floor beside him. “I’m going to rub some of this on your head. It will soothe the scratches,” I told him.

He didn’t move as I gently massaged the mixture onto his scalp, but he closed his eyes.

Poor, strange little thing, I thought, looking at his shorn head. “You don’t have to go to sleep yet, Cristiano,” I said. “You haven’t had your dinner.”

He kept his eyes shut.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

He didn’t move.

I went out and quietly closed the door.

While I waited for Bonifacio and Papa to come in for dinner, I peeked into Papa’s room. It was empty but for a bed and a low stool and a few chests along one wall. The room smelled of unwashed bedding and clothing soiled by grease and sweat. I would need a full day to wash Papa’s and Cristiano’s bedding and clothes, and work through the sitting room as well, cleaning all the cobwebs from the walls and the dirt and dust from the floors and furniture. I didn’t want to live any length of time in such filth.

When I heard the men at the wash house, I set the table with plates and spoons, the steaming pot of stew and the half loaf of bread. They came inside and Bonifacio knelt at the bench, his hands folded in prayer. Papa set down one of his earthenware jugs of the cherry alcohol and grunted slightly as he knelt. Bonifacio looked up at me.

“Kneel to pray,” he said, and although I was angered at his command, I didn’t want to create a fuss in front of Papa on my first evening in his home.

“Thank you, Lord, for our food and all your other blessings,” Bonifacio said, and as I was about to rise, he continued in Latin. I
stayed where I was. He spoke for so long that when he finally stopped I was further annoyed that the stew had grown tepid, oil swimming on the top.

We ate in silence in the flickering candlelight. I was exhausted from the day’s walk, and the smell of the cooking stew had been tempting as I stirred it earlier. Now it was hard to swallow, and sat like a leaden lump in my stomach. I wasn’t comfortable being in the small house with Bonifacio Rivaldo.