The Devil on Her Tongue (73 page)

I was sleepless through much of the night. Before dawn I rose and went for a walk along the quiet streets. I passed a chapel and heard the low voices of monks or friars or priests intoning their prayers.

When the day broke with a serene sky and a gentle breeze, I went back to the inn, imagining Cristiano to still be asleep. But he was standing outside, his hair damp. He came towards me, relief on his face. “I was worried when I found your room empty,” he said.

“I just went for a walk. We’ll have to wait until after Mass, and then return to the home of the man we saw last night. I’m sure the inn serves breakfast. You must be hungry.”

“Avó told me about a church with her name in Lisboa: Santa Luzia. I asked the innkeeper about it while I waited for you. It’s here, in Alfama. We could go to it and light a candle for Espirito after breakfast. It’s his birthday today.” He gave me a half smile. He looked like a young man, but was still a boy. “Espirito, named as all boys born on this day of saints.”

I knew Espirito’s birthday was the first of November but hadn’t thought of it today; all I could think about was Candelária. There were a number of empty hours before I once more stood at Plácido Lajes’s door. Going to the church would fill some of them.

“As long as we are at Senhor Lajes’s home by noon,” I said, and we went back into the inn.

I watched Cristiano eat, still unable to think of putting food in my mouth and chewing and swallowing. And then we set off again, climbing the stone steps, which Cristiano, with his new knowledge from the innkeeper, told me led all the way to the highest point, where Castel de São Jorge sat above the city.

We trailed a row of pilgrims, and eventually arrived at Santa Luzia. Standing on the large open terrace outside the church, we surveyed the vista of Lisboa and the Tagus spread below us. Murmurs came through the open doors. “The Mass has begun,” Cristiano said.

Just as I opened my mouth to respond, there came a noise like the hollow, distant rumbling of thunder. It grew louder and louder, terrible in its intensity. The great thudding seemed inside me, and I thought, for that instant, that my time had come: that this is what it was when the heart lurched and tore and then stopped.

And yet in the next instant, I realized I had no pain, and that it wasn’t
my
heart but the heart of the earth that pounded and shook.

T
he earth shuddered, jerking upwards, and I saw the church behind Cristiano sway. I grabbed him; everything trembled as if caught in a convulsive fit. Cristiano and I held on to each other, trying to stay upright as the rumbling and shaking grew fainter, and then stopped. But before we could speak, the terrible quaking beneath our feet began again, as if that first shock had been only a test, and the second one would carry the true horror.

We were thrown to one side and then the other, as if back on the
Bom Jesus
during a storm. Below us, the buildings of Lisboa swayed like saplings in the wind and, clutching Cristiano, I watched them crumbling in vast clouds of dust and debris.

Screams came from all around as people were crushed by falling walls, and I tore my gaze from the hell below to look at Santa Luzia. Some rushed from the church as it caved in, pushing, scrambling, screeching as the ground rocked. Through a gaping hole in its front wall I saw statues tumbling from their niches. The candle holders hanging from the ceiling, lit with hundreds of candles, swung wildly and then were wrenched loose and fell onto the heads and shoulders of those still trapped inside.

Cristiano and I were carried along in the frenzied crowd as the ground continued to shake. We rose and fell with the movement of the earth. I was pushed violently from behind and went down, trying to put my hand over my head as I was trampled.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the shaking stopped.

I don’t know how long I lay where I had fallen, something heavy across my back and legs. But finally I lifted my cheek. A piece of shutter was in front of my face, and I looked through the broken slats. It was a vision only the worst nightmare could conjure.

Lying everywhere were bodies. Not just whole, bleeding bodies, but parts of bodies. Limbs. A torso. A hand clutching a rosary lay on a block of stone in front of the shutter. I knew from the fingernails that it was a female hand. I watched it as though waiting for the fingers to begin praying the decades of the rosary. With strange calmness I likened that hand to the one of Our Lady of the Grapes, broken and resting, pale and unmoving, on the chapel floor.

I felt as though I had cotton in my ears; the shrieks and wails of the injured and those calling for others in the thick dust from the fallen stone were strangely muted. I didn’t know whether I was hurt or not: I felt nothing. After some time I moved my head enough to see that the weight on me was the sprawled body of a man. He was covered with broken stone, and part of his head was caved in. His body had protected me.

It took an interminable length of time to manoeuvre myself out from under him. I slowly got to my knees and then shakily to my feet. At that moment my hearing unblocked, and the world came back with a terrible, shocking clarity, so loudly I put my hands over my ears. The screams of the dead and dying were unlike anything I’d ever imagined. Others wept, praying, “Most Holy Mary, Virgin and Mother of God, save us, save us.”

I added my voice to the cacophony, screaming Cristiano’s name. I stumbled in a circle, stretching my hands in front of me as if I were blind, as if reaching for him, even though I couldn’t see him.

And then I realized I was looking at him. He stood a short distance from me, so coated in dust I hadn’t recognized him. It was as if he was in his old nightmare, unmoving, his eyes wide. Weeping, I climbed over stones and bodies. I grabbed him and said, “Are you hurt? Cristiano, are you hurt?” but he didn’t answer me. And then a third rumble came, and now all around us was a different cry—
“Terremoto! Terremoto!”
—and we braced ourselves for the next quaking of the earth.

But the third shock was not as strong as the second. And when the earth was once more still, and Cristiano and I had not died, had not been crushed beneath the tumbling walls of stone as we crouched, covered in debris, in the open space of the small square, my only thought was of Candelária.

Cristiano helped a man pull his limp wife from beneath a pile of stone, and I picked up a child with a bloodied head while its mother stood looking around her in shock, whimpering, “João, João,” until I put the child into her arms. She looked at him as though she didn’t know him, and continued to repeat his name.

“We have to go,” I said to Cristiano. “Come. Down into the Terreiro do Paço, where we will be safe should there be another earthquake. Look,” I told him, pointing over a broken wall. “Look at all those on the open quay, where nothing can fall on them. Let’s go.”

Others, thinking the same, were pushing ahead of us. The narrow lanes were blocked with stones and with bodies, with furniture and burning timber. We fell over and over, crying out as we pushed forward and were pushed from behind, stumbling downwards.

“Come this way,” I panted, pulling Cristiano from the crowd towards a cracked-apart building. “Through here, away from the others.”

As we clambered over a fallen wall, I straightened and looked below. The quay was filled with people rushing towards the water, many dragging others. Hundreds were crowding onto the ships docked there, wishing to be on the water should another quake occur, and to escape the fires that were burning everywhere. I was about to continue downwards when I saw something I couldn’t understand. I stopped, staring in disbelief. Cristiano had continued ahead of me, and now I screamed to get his attention. “Cristiano, no! Stop! Don’t go down. Come back up!” I kept shouting, until finally he heard me over the calls and cries and looked back at me.

“Come, come up here,” I shouted, beckoning, and he climbed to join me, and then he saw what I had seen: the river disappearing,
rolling back from the harbour as if it were a carpet peeled from a floor. Within minutes we could see the sandbars far out at the mouth of the Tagus. In front of the marble quay was the exposed riverbed, filled with half-submerged barrels and crates and all manner of objects caught in the sludge. Some people climbed down from the boats and off the quay into that mire, tugging at found treasures.

And as we watched this unbelievable emptying of the harbour and the river beyond, I was filled with the most terrible premonition. “Higher. Higher, Cristiano!” I turned and started back up the way we’d come, holding my skirt above my knees.

“Why are we going back up?” he called behind me, as we fought against the masses heading down.

“The water,” I said over my shoulder. “The Tagus leads to the ocean. The ocean is taking it, but something is wrong. It can’t be pulled away without coming back. It will have to come back.”

Cristiano climbed beside me then, and we held each other’s arms, and moved slowly past the burning rubble of Santa Luzia. When I couldn’t go any farther, I stopped, panting, leaning against a section of ancient wall. I pressed my hand against my side, and Cristiano climbed onto the wall and looked out over the debris of the broken city and the departed river.

And then he breathed, “
Salva nos. Doce Jesus
, save us,” and I climbed up beside him and saw a vast body of water, rising like a mountain, heaving and swelling and rolling towards Lisboa, towards the wharves and the ships, laden with people looking for salvation from the destruction of earth and fire. It came roaring and foaming, rushing at the quay, and although we were too far away to hear the screams, I saw the people running, running away from the quay as they’d run towards it, running back into the burning city. Those foraging on the bottom of the river struggled to climb out as the water returned with ferocious speed. The ships were ripped from their anchors, and tumbled and tossed, crashing into each other. Some turned keel upwards as if caught in the grip of a violent storm, and bodies were thrown from them and sank under the water. As Cristiano and I watched, the wave swept away the buildings on the riverbank, and then the entire quay and its people. All
was swallowed up and disappeared, as if into the depths of a whirlpool, and did not reappear.

We stayed where we were for some time, until I grew aware of the pain of my torn and bruised flesh. I saw, beneath the dust, all of Cristiano’s cuts, some still trickling blood. The earth’s tremors continued, but eventually the flooding water stilled.

I felt exhaustion unlike any I’d ever known, and thought I might not be able to move. But I had to find my daughter. Cristiano and I slowly, slowly started the descent through Alfama a second time. The danger lay not only in the sudden falling of buildings shaken off their foundations but also in the fires raging everywhere. Every cathedral and church and chapel had been ablaze for All Saints’ Day. With the falling walls and columns, the candles had lit all the curtains and altar cloths and then spread to the woodwork.

“We must get to Alcántara,” I told Cristiano. I couldn’t bear to say her name, couldn’t bear to think of my daughter as we passed the ruined, broken bodies of infants and children everywhere, some in their dead parent’s arms, others alone in the rubble, limbs askew, like tossed-aside dolls.

Survivors were attempting either to save those who could be saved or to leave the city, moving away from the centre towards higher ground and open air. In all the narrow streets Cristiano and I stumbled through there were bodies, half buried and half burned, three, four, five or six in a heap, of those who had been crushed by the collapsing buildings as they tried to flee. The hardest to bear were those people still alive and crying out for help, the weight of the stone upon them too great for those trying to lift it off. People tore at timbers and stones with bleeding hands, crying
misericórdia, mercy, charity, the world is at an end, misericórdia
. We clambered over or went around fissures in the buckled stone streets, some wide enough for bodies to have been caught within. Coaches and carriages and carts lay atop dead horses and mules, and riders were crushed under their dead mounts.