The Devil on Her Tongue Read online

  “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.

  For as long as I could remember, I would sit beside Rooi on the bench and he would hold his cup of wine under my nose and tell me to breathe it in deeply with my eyes closed. Then he would ask me what grape it was made from; he had told me many times about the different grapes grown on Madeira. I learned to identify the wines, from the sweetest, Malvasia, with its pungent aroma of prunes and soft richness of burned sugar, and the Boal, with its full flavour of raisins, both grown in the lower regions of Madeira, to those thriving at higher elevations. Verdelho was rich and golden with the scent of almonds, while the driest, Sercial, had the slight tartness of burnt coffee from being scorched by the sea air and southern sun. I would smell deeply and then, when I guessed correctly—because I usually did—Rooi would nod, and I would take a sip. He instructed me to hold the wine in my mouth and let it soak into my tongue and cheeks, and feel its texture as it slid down my throat. The wine sometimes burned, but I did as Rooi asked to please him, and to see my father smile.

  Rooi drank two cups of wine to every one of my father’s. While my father grew happier when he drank, Rooi grew sad, sometimes weeping as he spoke of faraway people and places he said he would never see again. At other times he had me read to him from the Gazeta de Lisboa. Although he had never learned to read, I had seen him cipher the inn’s expenditures and earnings in his head with astounding speed.

  On our slow walks home along the beach after my father had spent all his réis at Rooi’s, he would hold my shoulder for balance, and tell me my favourite stories. They were all of his life in the far-off land he had come from, the province of Zeeland in Nederland. He spoke of the air growing so cold the water in the canals and rivers froze into ice. I couldn’t imagine it. He described how he glided along on runners carved from animal bone strapped to his boots. He used long, thin poles to help him move more quickly down the frozen canals linking the villages; this was skating, he said. The wealthy of Zeeland had skates made of iron; he had always dreamed of owning such a pair. I tried to think what it would feel like to have bones or iron encasing my feet. Sometimes we pretended we were skating, pushing our feet along in the sand as we swung our arms. My father often fell in our make-believe skating, laughing, and I had to help him up.

  He told me of sneeuwen—snow, rain so cold it became solid. Surely it would hurt, hitting like stones. He told me he would one day take me back to his land, where I would play in the snow and skate on the ice and eat honingkoek his mother made.

  It was so easy for him to talk about his life before he was washed up on Porto Santo. But my mother’s past remained a mystery. I scoffed at her story of coming from the earth of Porto Santo, growing like a plant or a tree, knowing fully, from a young age, about the beginnings and birthing of all human and animal life.

  And my father wouldn’t answer my questions about my mother either, although once, just once, he said, “Your mother was brought here by the sea, like me.” His words were slow, tangling with each other because of the many cups of wine. “And her real name isn’t Estra. She’s just called that here. It’s shortened from estrangeira: what the islanders called her when she came.”

  “Stranger? But what’s her real name? And where did she come from?”

  He stopped, shaking his head as if annoyed with himself. “I’ve said too much. It’s your mother’s story, and not mine to tell. She will tell you when you’re ready.”

  On the second full moon after my father left, my woman’s time came. I had been sitting in the clear, shallow water at the edge of the beach, reading one of the books my father had left me, when the water around me bloomed pink and murky.

  My mother only nodded when I told her, but there was an expression on her face I didn’t recognize. I didn’t know whether she was sad or angry or simply surprised, even though I knew it was past due; I would turn fourteen at the time of the island’s fall harvest.

  That same night, I awakened in the dark, the flickering of flames drawing me to the open door. My mother, outlined by the light from a raging bonfire of laurel and tamarisk, was drawing in the hard sand with a stick. Sparks shot over her and ash fell on her hair. I walked out to her, and saw a pattern of symbols she was repeating in the sand.

  “Here, Diamantina. Here is your future,” she said. “I have been reading the smoke for many hours, and seen all of this for you. Trees for long life because of the roots—the leaves are knowledge. Look at the linked circles, like the chain that your father wore when I found him. I thought they were showing me his hold on you, because of the spilled potion, but now I believe they mean the strength you will always find. Here are eyes, to deflect evil back to the one sending it; you must never allow this evil in. These lines are water, and these are vines. Vines and more vines. Vines are important to your life.”

  “What’s that one? The starry sun with a cross inside?”

  My mother held her stick over the final symbol. “That one I don’t understand, but it will come to you when you need it. It is in my vision with persistence,” she said, “and so it must be part of your story. I will make the marks on you, so you will never forget your path.”

  “Marks?”

  “On your skin.” She held out a bowl, painting my face with dye made from lichens and berries with her index finger. Then she led me around the snapping, sweet-smelling blaze until I was dizzy. She gave me a potion, something tangy and unfamiliar, and my lips and fingertips tingled as I drank it down.

  “Sit with your back to the fire,” she said, and as I did, she sat behind me. She unlaced my blouse and smoothed her hands over my shoulders and then down my spine. Her palms were hard and calloused, but her touch was so rare. I closed my eyes with the pleasure of it. My whole body was slightly numb now, and I liked the feeling.

  “I will mark you now,” she said.

  I opened my eyes with effort, looking over my shoulder, and saw another bowl, not the berry juice. It held something dark and sticky-looking. Beside it was my mother’s knife with its narrow, whetted blade, and a long sharp needle of bone, its duller end stuck into a small piece of wood. As I watched, she held both knife and needle over a flame.

  “Didn’t you already mark my face with the symbols?”

  “Those will wash away. I must mark you forever,” she said, lifting the knife. “Don’t move. It will hurt, but you are brave, and the potion takes away some of the pain.”

  The potion also made me loose and uncaring, for in spite of the knife and needle I didn’t feel any apprehension.

  I was aware of pressure against my skin, and then pain, even though my body was heavy and limp. My mother murmured as she worked, and each time I thought I would cry out, she stopped cutting, dabbing at the stinging with something damp and cool.

  And then she was blowing on my back, blowing with long, steady breaths. “Take in my breath. Take it in—I come into you,” she said, and I breathed deeply as she exhaled.

  She gently laced up my blouse, and I got to my feet.

  “You did well,” she said, standing in front of me. “Try not to sleep on your back, and don’t go into the sea for the next few days. The scabs need to form fully before they’re washed away.”

  The cloth she held was coloured by the dye and my blood. She went to the edge of the water and washed it out, stepping back each time a wave threatened to wash over her feet.

  I usually went in and out of the water all day to cool myself during the blistering tropical heat of summer, my wet clothing drying on me withi
n half an hour, but my mother only went to the very edge of the sea to bathe, and regardless of the heat she wore many layers of clothing. Her neck and arms were ever more laden with the jewellery she fashioned from what she found. I had never seen my mother unclothed; like everyone on the beach, we slept in our clothing.

  And yet in spite of her aversion to water, her skin—dusky and darker than the other women of the island—was clear and smooth. She brushed the ashes of burned laurel branches through her hair daily, and always gave off the light fragrance of smoke and sweet rosemary. I knew she was close by her scent even when I didn’t hear her coming.

  I watched her walk back to me with the wet cloth. She was beautiful at that moment, staring at me with such a strange, sad and yet pleased expression. She held my face in her hands and said, “I have passed my power to you, Diamantina. It is time for me to free myself of it. Part of what I give you is your free will, the will that can deflect evil and choose the good. Hold on to this power—never let it be taken—so that one day you can pass it, whole, on to your own daughter, as I do to you today.”

  I looked into her eyes, and in the glow of the fire saw my tiny reflection. But my image changed, and suddenly there was too much light, too much colour, and I was gone, lost. A surge of panic rose in me as she held my face more tightly and whispered unknown words.

  She blinked, and in her eyes I was myself again. “Where did you come from, Mama?” I asked, my speech slow because of the potion.

  “I will tell you one day,” she said, and now it was not me but she who had changed. There was a new softness in her face. And as we faced each other, I realized that I was taller than she. How long had this been so?

  CHAPTER SIX

  After that, my mother spent more time sitting quietly, watching me as I took over the preparing of the remedies and potions. It seemed she had grown older after our night around the fire: as if passing her power to me had diminished her.

  The women who came to our hut searching for cures for themselves or their children when their men were out on the water sometimes spoke of their problems in loud, annoyed tones. At other times they wept as they whispered why they had come. My mother stood beside me, her hand on my shoulder as she told each woman that I had taken on the healing.

  They all looked surprised. I was too young, how could I know enough?

  “My knowledge was passed on to her as she lay curled inside me,” my mother said. “When she became a woman and her blood quickened, my knowledge was awakened in her.” She still listened, nodding or softly adding information as I instructed the youngest of the good wives on ways to stop a child before it started with a bit of sea sponge soaked in vinegar. If the woman knew a child had already begun, and wanted to rid herself of it, I gave her a potion of rue to bring on cramping and her bleeding. I understood how desperately the poor yet pious women of Porto Santo struggled to view each child as a blessing from God, even though they could not feed those they had. I saw the tearing and destruction of back-to-back pregnancies: the lost teeth, legs covered with veins thick as ropes, ruined bladders and wombs so dropped they emerged from the body. I’d witnessed the pain and sometimes death that childbed brought.

  If one had contracted a painful discharge or a miserable irritation from her husband’s philandering, I cured her with herbal infusions and soothing poultices. I lanced boils with a small, sharp knife I held over a flame, and made mixtures of powdered milk thistle for the worms that created wretchedness. My hands perpetually burned and itched from washing with lye soap before and after attending to the women and children.

  Sometimes I tied a strip of linen around my nose and mouth and went to visit one woman, thin and hollow-eyed, who was dying of the bloody cough. I took a tea of nettle and eucalyptus to hold back the cough and balls of poppy seed, which I fed her to send her into a dark sleep and ease the worst of her pain. For illnesses such as this and certain hard growths there was no potion or spell for cure, my mother told me; they always ended in death. We could only make the waiting less painful.

  The women were grateful. They gave whatever they could, a few eggs or a plate of fish cakes, announcing they would pray for us at Mass for the next month. But these same women, when I encountered them in the company of their husbands, ignored me. Sometimes they made the sign of the cross when I came into view. I knew they did this to protect themselves from the wrath of their husbands. Their men didn’t care who helped deliver their sons or daughters, or cured their children of worms, but for woman problems they told their wives that it was God who would help them, and that they should spend more time on their knees, praying for relief.

  I was glad I had no one to tell me to go on my knees. I was glad I had a mother who taught me to help myself. Some days when she was outside, I took off my blouse and picked up my mirror. I positioned it over one shoulder and then the other, and admired the images across my shoulder blades and down my spine. I especially loved the woven gracefulness of the vines with their dots for fruit, and thought them beautiful. I wished for someone to gaze upon them, and trace them with gentle fingers.

  I thought of Abílio Perez touching them.

  The shopkeepers wouldn’t let me put any food or supplies on what was once my father’s rol. They would accept nothing from me but coins, and after four months the réis my father had left were gone. But I was able to keep us from going hungry.

  As well as the food I was given by the women I helped, I could throw a net and gather the creatures from the sea, and I could trap. Long ago I had learned to walk as silently as my mother. I could sit without moving for an endless time, even slowing my breath so that my chest did not rise and fall as I inhaled or exhaled, and in this way I became invisible to the creatures of Porto Santo.

  I knew where the seabirds built their nests in the pebbles and scrub at the base of the cliffs and sat, patiently, for hours. I become a gnarled tree, a rock, a petrified sand sculpture. Sometimes my hair was ruffled by the beat of wings as a bird descended to her nest. And then in one deft movement I threw my net over her just as she was settling, and picked up the fluttering, panicked creature, holding her wings through the netting, my thumbs against her warm head, calming her. I stroked that small knob of skull and then broke the neck with one quick twist.

  I sat beside the aromatic shrubs and brambles on Pico do Facho where rabbits hid from the circling buzzards and kestrels. When I detected one of the creatures, I reached through the thorns with a single quick movement. Pulling out the wriggling animal, holding it tightly with one hand, I sliced the slender beating throat with my gutting knife so quickly the rabbit had little time for fear.

  I always felt sorrow for the death of the innocent creature and, holding the limp body of the bird or rabbit aloft, I thanked it for feeding my mother and me.

  I also sometimes crept along the high dunes and settled myself into the grasses and sand, wearing my invisibility, and watched Abílio help his father with their nets or cutting up the catch.

  One afternoon as I searched along the bottom of a high, towering cliff for nests, looking to snare a bird for our supper, I heard plaintive cries from above. I shaded my eyes and squinted into the brilliant sun, but could see nothing. I climbed up on my hands and knees to find a nanny goat stranded on a narrow ledge. She must have slipped down from the rocks above. On my knees, I was able to tie my sling around her neck and tug and coax her down the slippery rock. My own bare feet slid in the scree as I pulled her, her front hooves wide apart, her head up, bleating in fear. When we were at the bottom, I recognized the marking on her back: she belonged to the Fontinhas, who lived at the far northeast end of the island, Pico Branco. They were a prosperous family with a large herd of goats, and Senhora Fontinha sold her milk and butter and cream in the market every Tuesday. This nanny must have broken from the pen and come all the way across the island. I reasoned that one goat would not make a difference to the Fontinhas, but she would to my mother and to me. I cut away the painted fur with my gutting knife and then, using
my sling as a halter, led her down to the beach. Abílio rose from the bench outside his hut, putting down the net he was repairing to walk with me.

  “You’ve bought a goat, Diamantina? Where did you get that much money?”

  I said nothing.

  He ran his hand over the newly cut patch on her back. “Did you steal her?”

  “I don’t steal.”

  “Really? But you couldn’t have bought her,” he repeated.

  I tugged harder on the sling, and the goat’s feet scrambled in the sand.

  “You do what you like, don’t you, Diamantina?” He crossed his arms over his chest and tipped his head to one side. “Being a heathen, and with no fear of either the confessional or God’s wrath, it appears you have no sense of right and wrong.”

  I stopped, looking into his face. “I know the difference between right and wrong. Do you, Abílio?” He both angered and intrigued me. “Keep your thoughts to yourself.”

  “Enjoy your fresh milk, then,” he called after me as I broke into a run, pulling the goat behind me, bleating and complaining.

  At our hut, I tied her securely to a rock with a length of tarred rope.

  My mother came out of the hut and held the goat’s head in her hands.

  “I found her,” I said.

  My mother stared into the goat’s face as it tossed its head, trying to pull away from her grip. But after a few moments it grew very still, and finally the wide-set, ochre eyes closed. “She tells me she called you to her,” she said, raising her eyes to mine. “As you were a blessing to her, now she will be a blessing to us.” She stroked the goat’s nose, and the yellow eyes opened again.

  “Then we will call her Benedita,” I said.

  I still talked to my father as I wandered the hills or the beach, telling him whatever was on my mind, thinking of small stories that would amuse him. Grief sat heavily in me. Although my mother was not unkind, it was not her nature to speak of frivolous matters, or smile fondly at me, as my father had.