The Devil on Her Tongue (59 page)

Bonifacio looked down at her, and then turned his gaze to Espirito, watching his brother until he climbed into his cart and was gone.

Olívia’s breathing took on a permanent rasping wheeze that winter, after we had celebrated Candelária’s second birthday.

Olívia was exhausted by struggling to draw air in, but more so to expel it, and there was no further remedy to relieve her pain. Eventually she was too weak to rise from her bed, and her mother stayed with her every day. It was hard on Luzia, and I often left Cristiano and Candelária with Binta and Nini and walked into Funchal to help her.

Olívia’s back and ribs ached when she coughed; although she was uncomplaining, she involuntarily moaned after each harsh bout. I made her endless poultices of heated mustard, flour and water.

As I placed the warm, damp flannel on her flat chest, I had to look away from the parchment of her skin, her tiny shrivelled nipples, the way her narrow rib cage strained against her skin.

Dr. McManus announced she had caught an infection that was putting even more stress on her weak lungs.

For those few weeks, as I sat on a chair beside her bed, I found myself growing breathless as her breathing became more and more laboured. It sounded as though each inhalation became trapped inside her ribs and remained there, rattling, until she was finally able to expel it in a terrible gasp. Even the small amounts of poppy paste I rubbed on her gums only allowed her to drift into a half-hour of restless twilight. Eventually she could barely swallow the warmed broth I held to her lips.

She was suffering horribly, not only from the struggle to breathe but from starvation. And yet I knew, by the way she looked at me as I sat holding her limp hand, that the disease hadn’t dulled her brain. She knew with terrible clarity what was happening.

O
ne morning, when both Binta and Nini were too busy to watch Candelária, I brought her with me to the house on Rua São Batista, walking into Funchal with Bonifacio.

Luzia held a handkerchief to her eyes, and turned away when I came into the salon with Candelária.

“Luzia?” I asked, touching her shoulder. “Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to bring Candelária. Would you rather I go home with her? Is it too much to have her here?”

She turned back to us and smiled shakily at Candelária. “No. A child is good at these times. A child reminds one of life. Come and sit with Avó, Candelária. Soon we will go into the kitchen and Ana will find you a biscuit.” She held out her arms, and my daughter went into them. She patted Luzia’s wet cheek, her little brow furrowed. At just past two, she understood tears.

When I went into Olívia’s room, Espirito was there. He had spent the last week sitting beside her through the long nights. He was unshaven, and pale with fatigue. Olívia was propped up on her pillows, and the muscles of her neck were corded in her attempt to breathe. Her eyelids and hands were puffy, and there was a bluish tinge to her skin.

Espirito and I spent the next few hours sitting with Olívia, trying to comfort her with our presence. As I read to her, she stopped me by lifting her fingers off the blanket. She opened her mouth, trying to speak.

I put my ear to her lips.

“Help me,” she whispered.

I straightened, pulling her blanket higher. “I’ll make you a poultice,” I said, and glanced at Espirito.

He looked away.

“Help me,” Olívia breathed again, and as her eyes stared into mine, I stopped breathing myself. I left the room.

Espirito followed me into the hall. He shut the door and took both my hands. “You heard her. Help her, Diamantina,” he said, his chin trembling. “Please. I can’t watch her like this any longer.”

I swallowed and swallowed, not wanting to cry, because I knew he was fighting to stay composed. “Espirito. You know I do all I can. There’s nothing more—”

“There is,” he said, his hands tighter on mine.

I looked down at them, then back to him.

“There is,” he repeated, so quietly I leaned closer to him. “Help her so she doesn’t suffer anymore.” He met my eyes, his own unblinking. “Do whatever you need to do, so she’s finally at peace. It’s what she wants. You know what to do. I don’t. Please. Do it for her.”

We stood in the hallway, listening to Olívia’s desperate wheezing through the door. From downstairs came the sound of Luzia weeping.

“Do it for all of us,” he begged.

“Mama,” Candelária said, and I jumped.

Bonifacio stood at the top of the stairs, holding her. His eyes were on our hands, Espirito’s and mine, still joined.

“I think you should take Candelária home,” he said as Espirito and I dropped our hands. “It’s not the atmosphere for a child. And it’s hard on Luzia to be expected to care for her, don’t you think?” He came closer. “How is she?” he asked Espirito.

Espirito shook his head.

I took Candelária from Bonifacio. “I’ll take her home,” I said, but to Espirito, not to Bonifacio.

“You’ll come back,” Espirito said, staring at me. “Tonight. You’ll come back tonight.”

“Yes,” I said, and went downstairs with Candelária and my husband.

“You should stay home tonight, with your child,” Bonifacio said
behind me on the stairs. “You’re letting others care for her while you run about as if you have no responsibility to her, first working in the
adega
, and now spending so much time with Olívia.”

I didn’t speak until we were on the street. I set Candelária down and tied her bonnet ribbons, then took her hand. “Olívia is dying, Bonifacio. You know that.”

He stared at me.

“You once loved her. Maybe you love her still. She’s dying, and yet all you speak of is my behaviour. You and I both know it’s not the child”—I glanced down at Candelária, eating a biscuit Luzia had given her as we left—“you’re concerned with. Are you so unfeeling? She’s dying,” I repeated.

It was the first time I had indicated that I knew what had happened between him and Olívia.

Candelária tugged on my hand. “Go, Mama, let’s go.”

“It is up to God to decide whether she lives or dies,” Bonifacio finally said. “My feelings have nothing to do with it.”

I awoke to the unfamiliar sound of birds twittering on the roof outside the open window. I was on a chair beside Olívia, resting my head on my folded arms on her bed. I blinked in the first rays of morning light. Realization came slow. I hadn’t heard the birds these last weeks because Olívia’s laboured breathing had been the only sound in the room.

The previous evening, I had tipped a fatal mixture of the crushed leaves of purple monkshood, infused in warm water, tiny drop by tiny drop, down Olívia’s throat. I had long applied the leaves of the plant to the skin of those who came to me with open sores, or deeper aches of the muscles. The leaves first caused tingling and then numbed the afflicted area. But ingesting any part of the plant was poisonous, and the plant was always pulled out if found in areas used for grazing by domestic animals.

Taken internally, a tiny amount caused the pulse to slow, gradually, and I’d used it sparingly to calm a racing, painful heartbeat.
Because Olívia was already so weakened, and her body so frail, the small amount of monkshood I gave her would simply make her heart beat slower and slower, until it finally stopped.

She would not know pain.

As I mixed the tincture in Olívia’s bedroom, I remembered my mother’s words:
The only difference between a medicine and a poison is in the dose
.

When I went to her with the first drop on the end of a spoon, she knew what I was doing, and parted her lips, her eyes wide and searching mine. She tried to help me, tried to swallow. Sometimes I had to massage her neck and often she choked, but after the first few hours I saw that the gentle poison was making its way through her body by the contraction and then dilation of her pupils, and by the slight sheen of perspiration on her face and chest.

Through that long night, her face little more than a pale oval in the dim candlelight each time I bent over her with the spoon, Espirito watched. When the candle sputtered in the breeze from the window, he and I looked at it as if it would tell us something important. Suddenly it blew out with a tiny whoosh, and neither of us lit another. When Olívia was no longer capable of opening her lips, we sat on either side of her bed in the warm darkness and waited, each of us holding one of her hands.

I hadn’t expected to fall asleep.

In death, Olívia’s face was calm, the swelling and blueness gone. In spite of the tightness of her skin stretched over her bones, she looked more like she had once. Espirito still held her hand, his face ashen.

I rose and went to him and leaned down to put my arm around him and press my head against his. Then I brushed Olívia’s hair and arranged it over the shoulders of her nightdress. I put salve on her lips, and touched her neck, smooth and no longer distended, with her favourite scent of camellia from the bottle on her dressing table.

Finally, Espirito stood. He put his arms around me, but he didn’t weep. Perhaps he had nothing left in him. I felt the stubble of his cheek against my temple, and the length of his body against mine.

“Thank you,” he whispered against my hair, and I tightened my arms around him.

T
he following months were long and quiet. Every week, I went to the cemetery in Funchal to place flowers from the quinta on Olívia’s grave.

The da Silvas, seeming to have grown older overnight, invited Espirito to live with them. He did, saying the home over the Counting House was now too big for him. It was, I knew, also filled with memories of Olívia’s life and death. Luzia still wished to see Candelária, and I took her to visit, but the air felt thick with grief.

Through the emptiness of those first few months after Olívia’s death, with little to take me to the
adega
between harvests, I worked in my herb garden and still welcomed the local women, dispensing potions and salves and tisanes. I read both the Portuguese and the English books in the Kiplings’ library, and enjoyed my daughter.

I tried to keep her away from Bonifacio. Too often he would take Candelária onto his lap and look into her face, as if searching for something. Was he hoping to find evidence of Espirito in her features, or was it something darker he wanted to see, some imagined malevolence?

The first few times I observed this, Candelária obviously expected him to speak, and smiled at him. But after a few episodes she came to understand it was something else, something that made her uncomfortable. She would turn her head, pulling away, sometimes saying, “Don’t, Papa,” and then jump from his lap and come to me.

As I watched Candelária busily play on her own, chattering to herself in both Portuguese and English, I too studied her, but I
looked for anything that reminded me of Abílio. I saw nothing of him in her physical features or in her mannerisms, and for this I was thankful. She didn’t resemble me outwardly either. Her hair was black and shiny as a swallow’s wing, and her eyes were also black, long and slightly tilting up at the outer corners.

She reminded me more and more of my mother in the way she lowered her head and looked up at me from under her little brows. I noticed that she sometimes abruptly stopped what she was doing and fixed her gaze on something I couldn’t see.

Did she have the gift of sight, as my mother had? She was mature and somehow solemn, although easily coaxed into a bubbly laugh. Even now I saw her fearlessness and spirit. I thought of her as only
my
child, through and through, as though she had grown within me without Abílio’s seed. I almost let myself believe this.

And although I would never forget my old sins, they grew less troublesome as time passed. Apart from Bonifacio’s strange behaviours, I could gaze at my daughter and think that the past was forever finished, and held no threat.

But the past is indelible. It isn’t like the unwritten future. The past may grow shadowy, but it never leaves.