The Head of the Saint (7 page)

Madeinusa and Adriano were the embodiment of people's hopes and prayers, and the women who had been at the wedding spread the word that there had indeed been a romantic miracle—a miracle that had joined this man and wife.

The details of the miracle got around, too: the head of the saint, the messenger, the consultation, the wedding, the honeymoon. The local girls pictured the newlyweds in a hotel on the beach in Fortaleza, running happily along the edge of the sea that Madeinusa would be seeing for the first time and swearing their eternal love. They imagined Adriano and Madeinusa concluding what they had begun when Dr. Adriano had first placed his icy stethoscope against Madeinusa's burning skin. There would be nothing to stop them: not the wrath of the mother of the bride, not the opposition from the groom's family—a trained doctor marrying a girl with practically no education. Their situation was all due to the saint.

The girls sighed. They yelled as though hysterical. They were in agonies of envy. They wanted to find love, too.

And each time they told the story, new details made the wedding a supernatural event. They said that St. Anthony had appeared to Samuel and whispered his messages, that the spirit of the saint had entered his body, acting through him. The story spread from woman to woman like wildfire, covering a bigger and bigger area, right into the middle of the pilgrimage to St. Francis in Canindé. The next-door town was full of people, and what should have been a period of faith and prayer was transformed into a carnival of frenzied women as they heard the message of hope from the wedding saint so close by. Their plans for faith, contrition and self-sacrifice drastically changed course.

Although Samuel had planned to leave his home in St. Anthony's head as soon as his leg was fixed, he found that it wasn't that easy. The voices kept him there, kept talking to him. They came not just in the morning and evenings now but at other times, too.

The day after the wedding, Samuel was woken before five in the morning, dazed with the clamor of women praying. There were six or seven that day. A dozen on the next. Another twenty on the third, and within a month there were more than he could count. It was no longer possible to differentiate one from another, nor to hear the voice of that one sweet singer as clearly as before. The women revealed that they'd tied the saint beneath their bed, buried him in the yard, dunked him in a bucket of water—and that they would only release him from his punishment after they had won the man they loved.

Samuel's habit on waking had been to move lazily up to the top of the head, where he could hear the Singing Voice. There he would stay, all day long, listening to the one voice that never prayed, never asked for anything. It just sang, sometimes at different times of day. Samuel had not realized, not yet, just how much listening to the singing had become an addiction, as vital as breathing, the only joy in his life, which had so little hope. But it was just when he most needed it—when he most wanted to spend the whole day thinking about recent events, listening to the Singing Voice and deciding when would be the best time to leave town, if he could force himself to do so—that things changed in the head of the saint.

Suddenly it was different. The voices weren't just coming from within the concrete, as he saw when he pulled back the curtain he'd put at the neck of his saint's-head house and looked outside. He didn't get a chance to count them, but he guessed there were already more than forty women there. Two of them were approaching on their knees, and some of them sped up when they saw that Samuel was at the makeshift door.

Within seconds the spinsters had invaded the head of the saint, kissed Samuel's hands, showed him the photos of the men they loved and asked all at once what they should do. Some of them knelt, a couple of them crying at the emotion of it all. Yet they kept coming into the home of St. Anthony's messenger, and when there were twelve of the desperate women trampling Samuel, touching the concrete, talking, shouting and crying, a strange vibration made the head of the saint begin to shudder. At first the women seemed to feel nothing and just kept on coming in. They looked at the scribbles, the names, the arrows, frowning in confusion; they talked and talked, and the head kept shuddering. Samuel felt as though the shaking was in his own body, that bit by bit the head was turning into a strange extension of himself, linked to him by that absurd ability to hear the prayers and music.

Meanwhile, in the little church of St. Anthony, Father Zacarias was about to ring the parish bell, which, having been silent for so many years, he had restored to once again wake the town. He had planned to do six peals of the bell; the crowds running toward the head of the saint stopped him.

Samuel was already desperate, hemmed in by women who trod on his mattress, knocked over his belongings, broke off bits of the head to take away as concrete relics (later, in some cases, even selling them) and kissed his hands. He was getting more and more alarmed at the trembling he had never felt in his house before. Father Zacarias arrived at just the right moment and, realizing the poor boy's alarm, ordered all the women out—out of a place he had not yet been inside himself.

The women did as the priest told them. All Catholics fear figures of religious authority. He told them to wait outside and say the rosary to St. Anthony.

Father Zacarias went into the head, which was still shuddering. He tried to talk to Samuel, but with each question the intensity of the shaking increased. It lessened slightly with silence, then increased again as he spoke, till it was possible to feel the ground near the head trembling, too.

Outside, all the women were kneeling and saying the rosary when yet another band arrived from Canindé, shouting and running toward the head. All Samuel wanted was to listen to the song—the song that he hadn't been able to hear since the women had arrived—and this seemed more important than his fear of another invasion.

Now more than fifteen women ran into the head as though they were entering the Pearly Gates. The head's shuddering increased significantly, and the priest finally understood what was going on.

“Oh, sacrilege! St. Anthony has a migraine!”

There was a great commotion. The saint's head was pulsing more strongly on the left side. That was it; all that trembling made sense now.

Francisco arrived at the same time, and he couldn't believe his eyes. He saw a sea of women surrounding the head of the saint, a bewildered Samuel, the priest trying to calm everyone down, women fainting. It was the hot sun, the heightened emotion. And there was no point in Francisco asking them to leave, because they had no intention of budging. On the contrary, there were more and more of them arriving, showing not the slightest intention of leaving the miracle worker's side until something happened.

Francisco was flabbergasted. It was too ridiculous to be true: Candeia, once again, was full of people. He fetched his father, who returned with him to the head. (As a gravedigger he didn't have much to do, since the few people in the town died slowly.)

“These people are going to need places to sleep,” said Chico the Gravedigger, as kind as ever.

They improvised some tents with twisted tree trunks and old sheets from the abandoned houses. They found water coolers, jugs and pans and filled them with water for all the pilgrims.

The saint's head hadn't stopped trembling. In the crowd was a medicine woman, and she made the region's most effective herb syrups. It was said she had even cured a minister in Brasília of cancer. The priest asked her to help the saint get better. “If only we had a little fire to make him some tea, the poor thing…”

Samuel had an improvised stove, so he began to boil water.

Seemingly from nowhere, the medicine woman found the cinnamon and other ingredients that were now smoking in the pan. She climbed up onto the saint's chin and threw the foul-tasting liquid into his gigantic mouth.

“Isn't there a big cloth we can use to cover his eyes? In this hot sun a migraine will only get worse,” she called from her perch on his nose, where she was now massaging pork fat between his two huge eyes.

Francisco and his father arranged four sheets and blankets, also taken from the abandoned houses, to cover his eyes. Samuel gave him another dose of tea, and bit by bit the vibrations began to abate. It was already nearly noon when the women asked whether there was somewhere nearby that served food. Only Helenice's place, Francisco replied. The women went there, but their journey was in vain.

“I'm not serving anyone who's come here to trouble Candeia. That there's the work of The Enemy, and God protect me from being any part of it,” said Helenice.

“But we've got nothing to eat!”

“You can starve to death as far as I'm concerned. You're not getting a grain of rice out of me.”

Only later did Samuel let out a little laugh when Francisco told him about this bit of defiance on Helenice's part.

“Leave it to me. I know how to persuade that poisonous snake.”

The news that these women were surrounding the saint's head in search of a love miracle attracted the Canindé radioman again, who went over to record interviews for his show.

Seeing Aécio Diniz's big car with the trunk open gave Francisco an idea. Francisco persuaded the driver to take him and his father to buy food in Canindé. There would be rice, green beans, onions, coriander, curd cheese, dried beef. A good stew would assuage everyone's hunger nicely.

They soon returned with the ingredients and asked Francisco's mother to take charge of the catering. They took over the kitchen of the old Candeia school, which had been out of action for many years. Father Zacarias had kept the key. It was the door he had been sorriest to close. The few children who'd stayed behind had gone to school in Canindé. But now the men took turns at repairing and cleaning the place to get rid of all the bugs and plants that had invaded. They fetched firewood and set everything up in the kitchen as best they could—at least enough to prepare a meal.

“Resurrection,” the priest was saying.

Around four in the afternoon, two huge steaming pans of stew were carried out to the front of the school and served on the plastic plates they had found inside.

“It's one
real
for each plate of stew!” said Francisco with confidence.

“You're going to charge these people for food?” complained the priest.

“If I don't charge them, how am I expected to pay for what I bought in Canindé, Father? The man let us have it on credit, but we agreed that I'd return with the money tomorrow.”

What Francisco managed to get from the women who ate the St. Anthony stew, as he called it, was enough to pay off the debt and buy more food for the following day. He and his father also bought two tanks for storing water to sell at ten cents a cup, and they used plates, cups and cutlery from the abandoned homes of Candeia.

Francisco and the radioman formed a partnership. Bit by bit the area surrounding St. Anthony's head became a small pilgrim village. Samuel, confused and disturbed, remained in the head, trying to hear the Singing Voice that had disappeared in all the commotion. He had lost his music, the sweet singing, and he couldn't bring himself to leave before he knew who had made it.

Whilst supervising the reopening of the school kitchens and ministering spiritual support to the faithful, Father Zacarias sensed that Samuel was in great need of his guidance. While the women respected his orders not to invade the head of the migraine-prone saint, the parish priest talked to Samuel about the miracles, trying to understand what was going on. He wanted to know more about Samuel's life, to understand where his gift had come from, but as he started to listen for the first time, Francisco appeared.

“You're a genius!” Francisco said to Samuel. “Look what we've done!”

“I didn't know it would all happen so quickly.”

“But it did, and I've already made a tidy profit today.”