The Devil on Her Tongue Read online

  “Estra. We’ve spoken of this for too long. I have tried to make you understand—”

  “I understand,” my mother said. “You’re a bastard, and a deserter. First the ships, and then your family. Is that what you want her to understand?” Mama’s voice caught in her throat as she waved in my direction.

  And then there were only the cries of the gulls. My hands turned into fists, and I brought them to my mouth. My father held my shoulders and looked at me. His face became close and too large, and then small and far away, like the white face of the moon. My stomach hurt.

  “Meijn klein vos,” he said. “My little fox. I will take you if you want to come. I have waited until you were old enough. I’m going to the New World, to the city of São Paulo in the colony of Brazil. You can come with me or stay with your mother. Your choice.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. Then I opened them and looked at my mother, her face wet with tears.

  “Don’t leave me, Diamantina. Don’t go,” she said. “You’re all I have.” Surely her unfamiliar tears meant she loved me. She’d never told me she loved me, unlike my father, who whispered it to me every night as he blew out the candle beside my pallet. Now my mother fell to her knees. “Don’t leave me, Diamantina,” she said again. “It’s not written in the smoke that you leave yet. You know the smoke tells the truth.”

  The gulls were closer, screaming as my mother had moments earlier.

  “What will you choose, daughter?” my father asked quietly, against the soft, steady rush rush rush of each tiny wave to the shore. “Will you come with me, or stay with your mother?”

  A rottenness rose in my throat, the taste like fish that had sat in the grease of the pan too long. “I don’t know what to do,” I finally whispered.

  “You know what to do, Diamantina. Indecision is for the lazy.”

  I lifted my chin. “I want to go with you, but how can I leave Mama?”

  He stared at me, his lips tightening. Then he said, “Yes, she needs you more than I. It’s right. It’s right, Diamantina.”

  Was my decision made by my question? I couldn’t think. I swallowed and swallowed, and when I was finally able to speak, I said, “You’ll come back, won’t you? You’ll come back.”

  I saw my father’s throat move. “I will see you again, Diamantina,” he said, in a voice that was not his own. “I give you my promise that we will see each other again. I will write to you when I arrive in São Paulo.” He looked at my mother. “Go to the church when you are in need,” he said. “Father da Chagos will help you. I have already spoken to him. I will send word and money through him to you.”

  My mother made a sound as though she were drowning. The rising sun was behind her, and I could no longer see her face.

  My father held me then. I put my arms around him and wept against his chest, my cries similar to those of the circling gulls. I smelled his familiar scent, salt and tobacco. Then he pulled away from me and took off his talisman and put it over my head.

  I closed my hand around the soldered piece of silver. “No, Vader. If you’re going back to sea, you need this.”

  He almost smiled. “The caul saved me. It only works once for its wearer. Now you will be protected from the sea.”

  He slung his canvas sack over his shoulder and turned, walking briskly away from me on the hard, wet morning sand.

  I ran after him, something cutting into the bottom of my foot. “Vader,” I called, and he turned. “No, no. I want to come. I said the wrong thing—take me with you.”

  “You chose, Diamantina. Once you make a choice, you cannot go back. Stay with your mother.”

  I was crying, standing on one foot and pressing the big toe of the injured one into the sand for balance. “Please, Vader. Please.”

  He turned again and kept walking, farther and farther from me, until he became one of the stick figures I had drawn in the sand when I was a small child: two long thin legs, two long thin arms, a circle in the middle, and a smaller oval above.

  Turn and wave to me, I thought. Turn and wave, and then I’ll know you’re coming back.

  The leg holding my weight trembled violently, and then wouldn’t support me any longer. As I fell, it was as if the beach had opened its big, sandy mouth and swallowed my father whole.

  He was gone. He hadn’t waved.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I didn’t remember making my way back to the hut, but now I lay with my mother in her bed, both of us crying. The early morning light flickered through the cracks of the shuttered window, creating a dancing light that hurt my eyes.

  And then I must have slept, for when I next opened my eyes I was damp from the heat of my mother’s body, but she no longer held me trapped against her. As I sat up, she moaned and spoke in her secret language, and then turned to face the wall.

  I limped outside and sat on the flat rock outside our hut. I looked at the bottom of my foot, and seeing the thick smear of dried blood across the pad of flesh just under my toes, went into the warm, lapping waves. The cut burned with the salt. I shaded my eyes and stared towards Vila Baleira; I would go there and find my father before he sailed away. I had made a mistake: I didn’t want to stay with my mother.

  Vila Baleira was too far to walk with my throbbing foot, so I went to my boat. On the bottom lay two packages, wrapped in stained canvas and tied with hairy twine. My name was written in charcoal on one of the packages, and my mother’s on the other. I pushed my boat into the water and climbed in.

  We had our fishing boat, with its woven bait basket floating behind. But this was my own boat, the one my father had made for me when I was six years old. It was shorter and narrow, with a set of oars a child could manage.

  When he finished the last of the tarring late one summer evening, we lay on the sand, looking up at the sky. He told me about wanting to sail to the land called Brazil to search for the diamonds in great abundance there. “A diamond is like a star, hard and bright, sparkling and beautiful, but small enough to hold in your hand. Unlike stars, which are of the air, diamonds are of the earth. They grow in the dark, under the soil, waiting for someone to uncover them, so that they can show their beauty. That’s how I came to choose your name. You are my own diamond. My Diamantina.”

  He flexed his hands, black and sticky, showing me the patterns of the stars. He explained how he had once weighed the sun with an astrolabe, and had guided a caravel through the night by measuring the height of the stars with a cross-staff and pointing his quadrant at the North Star and the Great Dog.

  “Let’s name my boat Dog Star,” I said.

  “All boats are female, Diamantina. You should choose a female name for your boat.”

  “No. I want it to be Dog Star,” I argued, and he laughed and said, “All right, my girl.”

  The next day, as he stitched the sail from the heavy cloth he called zeildoek, he told me that with a sail Dog Star could go much faster, farther out into the ocean, and it would feel as though I were running with the wind. When he spoke of the snap and billow of the sail filling with air, and the freedom of being on the sea, something like regret was on his face. “The sea contains both terrors and marvels,” he said. “I love the sea, and I know you do too, Diamantina,” he told me, holding up his cutting knife so I could see my reflection. “But you also love the land—look at your eyes. They’re the colour of both. Not green like your mother’s, and not blue like mine, some days your eyes are the slate of the basalt of the island, and other days the silver of the fish.”

  I stared into my distorted image in the wide, glinting blade: my eyes framed by dark lashes, the tangle of my white-blond hair, my skin darkened further by the sun and wind. “With the sail, Mama and you and I can sail to Brazil, and find beautiful diamonds.”

  He put down the knife and smiled, pushing the heavy needle in and out of the thick cloth. “I will be a fine gentleman in a waistcoat with a watch chain, Diamantina, and you and your mother will wear shoes that click and clack along the paving stones of the city. A
nd you shall also have hats with feathers and strings of diamonds around your necks.”

  I was too young to understand the distance between the islands of the Madeira archipelago and the New World. It was a fanciful tale about my little boat out on the open water, and it was our story, and I loved it.

  But the sail had long ago fallen into tatters; it hadn’t seemed important to make another. As I grew older, my father had made longer oars for me. Now I struggled to slice through the waves with them, as a difficult wind had blown up. The gulls and terns overhead seemed motionless, their wings spread as they battled to stay in place. I was one of them; as hard as I rowed, I made no progress. The wind was telling me I couldn’t follow my father. Finally I dropped the oars and let Dog Star rock on the waves. Surely a caravel or brigantine would pass. I saw them regularly, passing Porto Santo, coming from far-off places like Nederland or England, setting their compasses to pass through our archipelago to the Canary Islands. After that, they would call in at Cape Verde and from there set a course, southeasterly, around the tip of Africa to Macao or Goa or all the way to Batavia, or southwesterly to Brazil. My father spoke of his many sea voyages, all easterly, saying that Brazil still awaited him.

  My father would be on a ship that would sail by if I waited long enough. When it was within view, I would stand in Dog Star and wave my arms over my head. My father would see me, and know he didn’t want to leave me. He would jump over the side and swim back to me, his arms making great arcs as he sliced through the water. I will see you again, he had said. He would see me now.

  I sat in Dog Star a long time, clutching my father’s amulet, looking at the packages he’d left us. The boat, rocking, drifted back to the beach. The wind and the water grew calmer. Nothing sailed by, either far out at sea or closer to shore. My foot hurt and I was hungry. I rowed the short distance home and tied the boat to its rock. I took the packages and went inside our hut.

  My mother sat at the table in the centre of the room in a shaft of sunlight that fell through the open doorway, her earthenware bowl on the table in front of her. Smoke swirled around her and then rose in a fine, straight line towards the low, blackened ceiling. The scent of wormwood was light and comforting, and yet there was a darker undertone, an odour I didn’t recognize. I thought I knew all the herbs and roots my mother burned.

  In spite of the unknown smell, seeing her reassured me. “Are you making a potion to bring him back?” I asked, and she looked up. The sun cut her face in two, and she bared her teeth. The woman at the table was no longer my mother, but the witch everyone called her. Her thick black hair writhed around her head like snakes, and her green eyes, narrow and slanted, glinted and sparked. Startled, I drew a deep breath, and it was as if I’d called the unknown dark smoke into me. I dropped the packages and clapped my hand over my nose and mouth to prevent it from entering me. I stepped backwards and blocked the sun, and the light on her face changed, and she was my mother again.

  “No,” she said. “There is no such potion.”

  The image of the witch was too fresh. Not looking at her, I picked up the packages and went to my pallet. I untied the twine on mine. “Vader left us something.”

  My mother came and took the opened package from me. “It’s the least he could do. Hopefully enough réis to support us for a while.”

  Books and passage charts fell to the floor. I knelt beside them: volumes in Portuguese and in Dutch, an atlas of the Iberian Peninsula, a map of Portugal, a bound collection of sea charts, vellum diagrams of the coast, written instructions for navigation and the location of ports.

  “Books? Books and maps?” my mother said, her voice flat.

  “That one’s for you.” I pointed at the second package on my pallet.

  She opened it. There were the réis she hoped for. To me it appeared to be all the money in the world, a big pile of silver and copper coins. And there was also a pair of shoes such as the ladies of Vila Baleira wore when they went to church on Sunday: black leather with a silver buckle and low, solid heels. Neither my mother nor I owned shoes. Nor did we go to Nossa Senhora da Piedade, the church in the town square.

  There was a scrap of paper tucked into one of the shoes. I pulled it out. My mother couldn’t read, so I read it aloud to her.

  Estra, I remember you once telling me that you had never worn shoes.

  “Shoes,” she finally said. “Shoes,” she repeated, then hurled them into the cold fireplace. They hit the rectangle of stones and ash flew into the air, and I heard my father’s voice saying that my mother and I would one day be fine ladies, our shoes tapping across city streets. She picked up my books and rolled maps and charts, holding them against her chest as she went towards the door.

  “Mama, please. They’re mine.” I ran after her, pulling at the back of her blouse.

  Gripping everything firmly, she strode from the house towards the sea, the afternoon sun glinting on the water. “This is what I think of what he left,” she said, wading into the water up to her calves and tossing a book into the slight swell. “This and this,” she said, throwing all of them into the sea before I could stop her.

  Furious, I waded past her. I picked up the closest floating book and unfurling map, pushing against the water to get to the next book. I managed to retrieve three of them as well as the biggest vellum chart as others floated away. I waded back and dumped the books and map and chart into Dog Star and pushed the boat out as my mother went back to the hut.

  I rowed towards one of the open, floating maps and used the oar to bring it closer. When it was within reach, I hung over the side as far as I could and closed my fingers around it. In this way I managed to retrieve two more books. Another small book kept floating just out of reach. I slid over the side of the boat and swam to it, putting it between my teeth and swimming back. I thought of my father taking me out into the warm, shallow water when I was small, my skirt floating up around me as he held me safe. I kicked my legs and put my face in and out of the water and moved my arms in the arcs he showed me.

  By the time I hauled myself into the boat, the last book had gone. As my boat drifted to sea, I lay on the bottom, shivering in my wet skirt and blouse. I gathered the books to me and closed my burning eyes, the sun warming me. I thought of my father teaching me to read and write, first in Dutch and then in Portuguese, using a sharpened stick to write on the wet sand near the water. Every day when I went with him to bring in the nets or search for seabird eggs, I spent a long time using the pointed stick to write the words I had learned the day before.

  Then, as I watched, the words were washed away by the tireless sea.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When I heard my name, I blinked and sat up, realizing I’d been asleep, dreaming that my father had come back to me. But it was Marco Perez, our neighbour from down the beach. He held Dog Star’s gunnel, his own small boat gently rocking against it. His son Abílio was with him.

  Marco had a broad chest and thick neck, and was known for his violence. His wife, Lía, had sometimes come to my mother for help with her injuries. She had died the year before. Abílio, older than me by four years, was as fine-featured and slender as his mother had been. He moved with a confident grace, his hands quick and restless, his laugh easy. Today he had a bloodshot eye and a slightly swollen bruise on his left cheekbone. His father had broken his nose when he was a boy, and it had a slight lean to the right.

  “What are you doing, Diamantina?” Abílio asked. “We saw your boat drifting so far out, and thought it had come loose.”

  I got up onto the seat and picked up the oars. My teeth were chattering, and I clenched my jaw, but that only made it worse.

  “Come on,” Marco said to his son. “She can get back to shore on her own.” He started to push away from Dog Star, but Abílio grabbed my boat again.

  “The wind is coming up,” he said, and in one swift movement he climbed into my boat. He sat beside me on the bench and, taking the oars, said, “I’ll row you back.”

  His fath
er pushed away from us. Abílio effortlessly turned the boat towards the shore.

  “I could have rowed myself,” I said, sitting on the floor again and picking up the saturated books and charts.

  He kept rowing. As we approached the beach, he jumped out and pulled the boat up on the sand and secured Dog Star’s rope to a rock.

  I clambered out with my arms full.

  “What have you got there?” he asked, coming closer and taking one of the small wet books from me.

  “My father left them for me,” I said. “Gave them to me,” I corrected, not wanting Abílio—not wanting anyone—to know that my father was gone.

  Abílio tried to turn the pages, but they were stuck together.

  I stepped up to him. “Give it back.”

  He moved away from me, smiling, holding the book over his head with one hand as if I were a small child.

  “Give it to me, or—”

  “Or what?”

  I narrowed my eyes and hissed some of my mother’s words—words that had no meaning to me but that I knew carried weight.

  He still smiled. “You think I’m afraid of your curses, little bruxa?” Nevertheless, he made the sign of the cross.

  “Don’t call me a witch,” I said.

  “Then don’t act like one.” He tossed the book onto the sand. He stared at me, and I stared back. He wasn’t afraid of me like some of the island people, whom I frightened with my fair hair and odd eyes that changed from silver to slate with the reflection of the sky or the sea. My father had said that in his homeland my hair and my height—I was taller than every other girl my age on the island—would not be strange. Here people had seen little of the world, and to them we were an odd pair, with skin darkened by the sun, our light eyes and bleached hair. He also told me I should not upset anyone by staring at them for too long: the superstitious already believed I was of another world, like my mother.

  I picked up the book and turned my back on Abílio. Inside the hut, I ignored my mother, who again sat at the table with the smoking bowl. I spread the books and maps on the floor in a patch of sunlight, pinning them open to dry with some of my mother’s heavy bowls and earthenware containers. The calfskin and morocco covers were warped and I knew the pages would always be wrinkled, smelling of salt and mildew.