The Devil on Her Tongue (4 page)

Today I went farther down the beach than usual, passing other huts, limping slightly on my sore foot. I saw Marco patching his roof with Abílio. Abílio had two older brothers, but they had left the island to escape their father’s fists when they were only a little older than I was now. As Abílio climbed down the ladder with his bucket, he waved to me, and at the same time my pole hit something under the sand. The next small wave exposed a gleaming corner. I knelt and dug with my hands, then pulled the object out of the sucking sand and wiped it with my skirt. It was a small gold snuff box. Clearly, it hadn’t been in the water long, as it hadn’t been ruined by salt or dulled and scratched by lengthy tossing against sand and rocks. There were no barnacles. It would bring in more réis than anything I had ever found.

“Can I see it?” Abílio had come to me. He stepped closer and held out his hand. “Please?” He smiled.

I put it in his hand. He opened the lid of the snuff box, let it close, opened it and let it close. He brushed off more of the wet sand, then smiled at me again. “A good find, little
bruxa
.”

I made a sound in my throat. “I told you not to call me that.” I held out my hand for the box.

“It was in front of my hut,” he said, still smiling.

“I found it. Give it to me.”

His smile hadn’t changed. “Of course.” He put it into my hand but still held on to it. “If you want me to, I could sell it and give you the réis. The shopkeepers will give me more for it than they would you. You know that. They’ll try to cheat you. They won’t cheat me. Nobody cheats me. Or maybe I’ll trade it for you, and get you something pretty. Something pretty for a pretty girl.”

I hesitated, both of us holding the box.

“I’ll take it into town right now and bring you something special later. Come on, pretty girl.” He was relaxed, his hold on the snuff box loose. I wanted him to keep saying I was pretty.

“Abílio! Get back here,” his father shouted, and as Abílio turned to look at him, I pulled the snuff box from his hand.

“I’ll sell it and buy myself something special,” I said.

He looked back at me, shrugging. “As you like.”

I walked back towards my own hut, my pole in one hand and the snuff box firmly gripped in the other.

When I went into Vila Baleira with the snuff box later that day, it was clear by the way everyone studied me that the whole town knew of my father’s departure.

It was the only town on Porto Santo, a quiet port where news of the outside world came in snatches and rumours. On three sides of the main square were fish and meat shops, with their dark smells of blood and bone. There were also the shops selling everything from cloth and thread to tin dishes and pots and pans, twine, spices, and presses for olive oil. The market, where the local women sold eggs, cheese, fruits and vegetables and all manner of seasonal items, was set up on sagging wooden tables and blankets under the shade of the palms and dragon trees that formed a canopy over the square. Nossa Senhora da Piedade, with its
piscina
for holy water at the entrance, dominated the fourth side of the square.

On scattered benches under the trees, farmers in their wide straw hats who crossed the island to bring their grain to market met with fishermen for wine and idle talk. As the shadows lengthened
and the day progressed, more men came. In the evening they played quoits or games of
sueca
with thick cards.

A wide street ran from the square down to the long, narrow wharf that led into the sea. Skiffs were used locally around the island or to row out to the ships dropping anchor in the deeper waters of the Atlantic, a safe distance from the shallows near the beach. There were always packet ships from Madeira, carrying mail and the
Gazeta de Lisboa
and foodstuffs and wine and an occasional passenger, as well as the bigger caravels and brigantines from afar. The sailors who came to Vila Baleira might have been at sea a few weeks or a few months. They always went to Rooi’s, the inn closest to the wharf.

The rest of the islanders lived scattered between the high cliffs and pebbly beaches of the north and my own flat southern beach. Although Porto Santo had a history of violence, attacked by the French, the Moors and Algerian pirates, the last major invasion had been long before I was born, and the island had relaxed into a sleepy routine, with only local gossip to stir the imagination.

As I crossed the square, Hermínia, the wife of a shopkeeper, took a loaf of bread from her basket and held it towards me. “Take it, dear,” she said, but in the next instant her friend Maria grabbed her arm.

“Don’t give her any charity,” she said, looking at me. “They’re heathens, the witch and the Dutchman living in sin, and this odd girl a creation of that immoral life.”

My father told me that he had his own God, and that it was not the same one those on Porto Santo worshipped. My mother believed in no god, and refused to enter a church for fear of diluting her powers. Since it had been impossible for Father da Chagos to marry them, the islanders considered that I was born of an unholy union. Did I care? No. When I was small, I had sometimes peeked through the doorway of the church. It was always dark, with a few candles burning here and there, and usually one or two old women on their knees, praying. I’d told myself it didn’t look like a place I would like to be on a brilliantly sunny day anyway. The only thing I liked about the church was its smell of incense, spicy and strong.

I narrowed my eyes at Maria and leaned closer, sniffing. She smelled of a rotting tooth, and I knew she was in pain. I could have told her to boil the bark of the ironwood tree and drink the resulting tea, but I had no intention of helping her. “You call my mother a witch, but you use her as a healer,” I said. “Didn’t you send your servant to our door for a remedy for the itch under your skirt?”

Maria had the decency to flush and look away from me. She made the sign of the cross and pulled on Hermínia’s arm.

“How is that nasty itch, Maria?” I called after them, but they didn’t turn back.

My mother knew about the powers of everything that grew under and above the earth, and how roots and seeds and bark and leaves and flower petals could be pounded and ground or cooked and mashed to heal the body and to influence the mind. Her potions gave off a rich, feral smell, like the fur of an animal, or the earth when upturned.

We had a garden, partially shaded by the outcropping of a cliff and protected from the sea wind that coated everything with salt; my father had carted soil down from the highland pastures. My mother grew herbs procured from Madeira: caraway and licorice root, camomile and rue, cardoon and rosemary, sweet yarrow and stock. She had me trudge daily with two goatskins to fetch fresh water to keep the garden moist in the heat of summer.

She taught me about the smells emitting from the body through the skin itself, and what those odours predicted. I learned how to tell what a person had last eaten, or if they had an upset stomach or a fever, but also if they were angry or upset, hiding it with a smile.

You’re like a little animal
, my father had told me,
a fox, always sniffing the air
. There were no foxes on Porto Santo, but my father described them to me. Little fox, he called me, patting my cheek.
Klein vos
.

My earliest memories were of watching my mother make her medicines, and of seeing her pull babies—pink, blue, chalky,
bloody—from the hidden part of a woman’s body. She taught me how to bring down the swelling of sprains and relieve the pain of bruises, how to set a broken bone, soothe a fever, or rid the body of the venom from a spider bite. She also studied the smoke of the wormwood and the small blaze of candles she dipped into a powder she made from sea water and herbs so that their flames flickered blue and green. She spoke Portuguese with a heavy tongue, but the secret language she chanted while the fragrant smoke whirled about our heads flowed from her lips in a beautiful, lilting melody. I learned these chants even though I didn’t understand what they meant. Sometimes she would stop in mid-sentence, gazing at something I could never see, and I knew she was having a vision, or listening to the voices that surrounded her. The smoke and the visions and voices told her the future.

While other girls were playing with bits of yarn and little wooden figures made by their grandfathers, I was learning my mother’s secrets. I felt her recipes and spells sewing themselves under my skin with tiny, careful stitches.

I
sold the snuff box and bought myself a square hand mirror edged in bone, and a little book of poetry. I knew I should have used the réis for food, but I still burned from Maria’s insult. I stared into the glass, willing myself to be the pretty girl Abílio had seen.

I hoped my mother would scold me for spending the money recklessly, so that I could fight back. I would berate her for not being an ordinary woman like the others on Porto Santo. Maybe then my father would have stayed.

But before I went back to my hut on the beach, I went to Rooi’s inn. Rooi Eikenboom was Dutch, like my father, and also like my father, he had once had a life at sea. Now he served sailors the local rum made with sugar cane, or wine delivered from Funchal every week during the good weather. In the storm season, when wild, howling winds blew the ships off course, away from the Madeira archipelago, Rooi closed his inn and went to the Canary Islands, returning when the winds calmed. My father said he had a family there, but I didn’t understand why they didn’t come live with him in Vila Baleira.

The inn was empty, but Rooi had already drunk a number of cups of wine. I could smell the sourness on his breath as soon as I drew near him. He looked at me sadly, holding his cup towards me.

“What am I drinking, Diamantina?” he asked. “Where on Madeira do these grapes grow?”

I didn’t have the heart for our game today. “Did my father say anything to you about coming back?”

“Poor
meisje
,” he murmured—“little girl” in Dutch—which made me miss my father all the more. “Ach, it’s a hard life for us all,” he said, setting his cup on the table. “Your father stayed on Porto Santo because he couldn’t show his face at the docks in Madeira or Lisboa. He was supposed to be dead.” His florid face, surrounded by long, thick white hair, was wide and flat. “I was the one who cut him from his chains after your mother found him. She came to me because she recognized that Arie and I shared a language. He stayed with me at first, waiting, he said, until it was safe for him to go to the ships again. But before that time came, he found that he was pulled by your mother’s beauty, and her spells. And so he stayed.”

“I know all this,” I said. My father had many times told me what had happened aboard the
Slot ter Hooge
, and how the barrel had saved his life. That my mother had found him washed ashore. Rooi often told me his part in the story. I had heard the same story so many times it bored me, and I had no patience for it today. “But he’s gone now. He did leave.”

Rooi stared deep into his cup, as if searching for answers. He gave me one more sorrowing look, his eyes stopping on the talisman around my neck, then left me sitting alone on the splintered bench.