The Devil on Her Tongue Page 9

  His cheek immediately reddened, thin lines of blood oozing in the scratches, and he grabbed my throat.

  “You are just like your father,” I said, fighting the pressure of his fingers around my neck.

  He swallowed and dropped his hand. Then he reached up to touch his cheek. He looked at his bloodied fingertips, and I saw that they trembled slightly.

  I went to the door, needing to hold the frame for a moment. I was still shaking, my legs weak. I didn’t look back as I made my way home. In front of my hut I waded out into the water and pounded the waves with my fists. I ducked under the water, opening my mouth in a bubbling scream. Then I rose, choking, and wrapped my arms around myself. I stayed in the ocean as long as I could, not wanting to face my mother. Finally, drenched and shivering, I went into the hut.

  She stared at me, but she did not speak. Neither did I.

  I lay awake that night looking up at the roof Abílio and I had repaired together, and thought of the way he ran his fingers over my eyebrow and along the side of my jaw as he looked down at me. I thought of the taste of his skin, and cried then, pressing my blanket over my mouth.

  My mother sighed. “Men make promises,” she said, as she had the first night I went to Abílio. I turned on my side and looked across the dark room, seeking the whites of her eyes. “At least he didn’t leave you with child. This I read in the smoke today. Even with the sponge and vinegar you know there is no assurance.”

  I felt something close to gratitude that she didn’t force me to speak of what had happened earlier.

  “A man’s promise,” she said. “That’s how I came to the island, so long ago. I believed in the man who took me away on a tall ship. Although I had once been a slave, I had bought my way out with my powers. But those same powers made me feared, and I was condemned to be burned alive. Even those who had once sought my help joined the crowd who came for me. And yet the man convinced me he was not like others. He said we would sail far away from Algeria, far away from the danger.”

  I sat up.

  “All went well for the first weeks at sea. But then a storm came up, and we were blown far off course, all the way to the Madeira archipelago. The wind and rains continued for a full eight days, and the crew, exhausted and fearing for their lives, looked for reasons for their bad luck. One, then another, and then more muttered that I was the cause. They said I controlled the moon with my spells, and was changing the tides. It was because of me that they would all die. They told the man I thought loved me that he must throw me overboard.”

  Outside, waves crashed on the beach. After a long while I said, “And he did.”

  “He had said he couldn’t live without me. I thought he would join me, and together we would perish. But he valued his own life too much.”

  “Then fishermen found you,” I said. Abílio’s father’s story.

  “I don’t know what happened. I only remember falling, down, down into the dark water, and then rushing through that water as if I had the body of a fish. Or maybe I was skimming the waves with the body of a bird.”

  I lay down, staring at the ceiling. There I saw the image of my mother floating on the air as a gull, the wind billowing her skirt and streaming through her hair.

  “When I awoke, I was on this beach. I was alone. And I stayed alone for a long time. Until Arie ten Brink came.”

  “Do you think about him?”

  “Your father?”

  “No. The other man. The man you thought would save you, but who damned you.”

  She was silent for so long I thought she had fallen asleep, but then she said, “Yes. As you will think of Abílio Perez for some time. But then you will think of another.”

  I turned to face the wall and allowed myself to weep without trying to hide my sorrow. After a while I felt my mother’s hand stroking my shoulder, light as the touch of a wing.

  “Promises are like smoke, Diamantina—strong and visible at first, but fading into nothingness. Don’t waste your tears on promises from another. Stay true to your own promises.”

  I fell asleep with her hand on my shoulder.

  The next day, I sat on the rock on the beach in front of our hut. The sun shone weakly. I dully watched a row of busy terns running along the sand, their feet leaving tidy rows of tracks. I turned to follow them as they rushed headlong up the beach.

  There was a man in the distance, walking towards Vila Baleira with something slung over one shoulder. It could have been a fisherman with his catch, taking it into town to sell. Or it could have been Abílio, on his way to the wharf.

  The old memory came back, the one that still haunted me: my father walking away.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Something shifted after Abílio left Porto Santo. Not just within me, but in how I was treated by the people of the island. As well as a witch and a heathen, I was now seen as the whore both Rodrigo and Abílio had called me.

  The women of the beach no longer came to our hut, suffering their ills rather than accept help from a woman such as I, or going to Teresa Trovão, if she would agree to their offerings.

  A few weeks after Abílio was gone, a boy of only nine or ten, made bold by his friends, grabbed my skirt when I was at the back door of the church. I slapped his hand and his grin faded as I hissed at him, muttering one of my mother’s incantations. He and his friends backed away. Entering the kitchen, I nodded at Sister Amélia, snatching my apron from its hook and tying it with swift, angry movements. I chopped an onion violently, the knife slamming against the board.

  I stared at the squares of onion and shook my head. “This place, Sister. I mind my own business and bother nobody. And yet …” I put down the knife and looked at her. “I wish …”

  She was standing in front of a mound of fragrant dough. She opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it. She scattered flour on the table and set the dough on it, but didn’t begin kneading. “What do you wish for?”

  To be away from here. To find my father. To change what happened with Abílio.

  It was only then that I saw she was troubled. Her skin, untouched by the sun, was as creamy as the finest linen, but, like linen, it also showed a very faint map-work of wrinkles fanning from the corners of her eyes. “Is something wrong, Sister?”

  She wiped her hands down her apron and reached up to remove the heavy veil that covered her coif, then unfastened the tight wimple and pulled it off. She threw it down on the bench. She had short, dark hair, wavy and soft. “Father da Chagos is away for the afternoon, ministering last rites to one of his flock. I’m unbearably warm. Tonight I will confess this sin.” She waved her fingers at the heap of her veil and wimple. “Leave the onion. I have to talk to you.”

  I set down the knife.

  “I see who you are, Diamantina. Do you think that I didn’t have a life before I was put into the convent by my father?” She lifted the edge of her apron and dabbed at the perspiration on her temples. “He condemned me, against my will, to seclusion in the convent to protect my purity. Twice he had arranged my betrothal, but both men were unsuitable to me. And then, unexpectedly, I met a man I gave my heart to and wished to marry. My father found him unacceptable. I threatened to run off and marry without my father’s permission, and it was then he decided that the only way to save me from an unfortunate future was for me to live a cloistered life. I was about the same age as you, coming sixteen,” she said. “I argued and pleaded with him—I tried to run from him. My mother could not stand up to him, although I entreated her as well. But she also felt they had to force a righteous path on me. In the end I had no choice.” She sighed heavily. “And so I tried to be a good nun. I forgave my parents, after much contemplation and prayer, and understood their concern for me. But I did not hear the calling, either as a novice or when I took the veil.”

  She looked down at the mound of dough. “Every time I took Communion, I kept His body on my tongue as long as possible, certain that He was with me. I kept my heart open. I was always waiting, and listening, but
not once did He come to me. I have never known a rapture or an ecstasy, as I witnessed with so many of the other Sisters. I longed to know what brought God into their bodies but not into mine.”

  She looked back at me. “Once a week, for one hour, we could break our silence and converse, and I did ask the others how they had achieved this miracle. But none could give an answer that satisfied me. And those one-hour conversations once a week weren’t enough for me. Over and over I broke the vow of silence. I entered into a friendship with one of the other Sisters. Friendship is frowned upon within the convent walls. We are to devote ourselves only to God. There is no room for personal feelings other than love for Him.” She ran her rosary beads through her fingers.

  “The nun I befriended was the one I eventually tried to help flee the convent. She was even less suited than I to a life of silence and contemplation. I don’t know what happened to her, as she was taken from the convent and her name never again mentioned. And I was sent here, into exile.”

  I put my hand on hers.

  “Another sin,” she said, nodding at our hands, and then she looked into my face. “Some people are born with a pure nature, and others must try to find that pureness. For me it was a struggle, as I know it is for you. I know, Diamantina.”

  My face was hot. She couldn’t know what I’d done with Abílio, could she? She couldn’t know that even though I now hated him, hated how he’d made me feel when he left, only last night I had dreamed of his hands on me, his mouth on mine. I was full of both sorrow and anger when I awoke.

  She gently pulled her hand from under mine and ran her fingertips along the flour on the table. Did she have the same lustful thoughts as I? Did she never awaken in the night, restless and desiring? How did she ignore the body’s heat?

  Without the heavy wimple, her head was so vulnerable. “Even when temptation arises, you do have choice,” she said.

  I thought of my father telling me I had to choose, and felt a surge of displaced anger. I picked up the knife and chopped again, violently. “What choice do I have here, on Porto Santo? Choice, Sister Amélia?” I shoved the onion to one side with the outside of my hand. A few pieces fell onto the floor.

  “I didn’t say one choice or another made for an easier life. But certain choices make it easier to live with dignity.”

  She was telling me to be a clean, upstanding woman. I only hoped she couldn’t see the images in my head as she spoke of dignity, the images of me under Abílio, my knees gripping his hips, my hands clutching his back.

  “And there is fate,” she said. “Although Father da Chagos—and all those men and women of the Church I have knelt before—believe God has predetermined our lives, I sometimes wonder. I question it, especially when I see how some are born into an unfair situation. All the babies who die, the innocent children who suffer. Those people afflicted with a lifetime of pain, or those who lose their minds and are chained like animals in straw for the rest of their time on earth. I know that mistakes are made. There are accidents. There is …” She paused. “There is passion.”

  My face must have reflected my discomfort, for she said, so quietly I had to hold my breath to hear her, “I speak to you in this way because I do not judge you.”

  I imagined the depth of her loneliness in her narrow cell every night, with only her Heavenly Husband on the cross over her pallet, who had so far been no company.

  “Sometimes others can see your fate more clearly that you can,” she went on. “It’s as though you’re walking blind, your hands outstretched, trying to feel your way, but you’re going in the wrong direction. And at those times you need someone who is watching, who has vision, to help you. To take your hand and lead you to that path.”

  “You mean God,” I said, my voice sharper than I’d intended.

  She stared at me with an unfamiliar look that might have been impatience, or maybe it was just that she didn’t look like a nun without her veil and wimple. “God sees all, yes. But He has many lambs to care for. Sometimes He asks a shepherd on earth to do His work for him.”

  I watched her.

  “Man, every man, is tempted by his urges. If that flicker of desire didn’t arise in him, he wouldn’t be a man,” she said. I was hot with shame. She knew that I had sinned. “A woman, while also having the desire, has to learn not to act on it. You are bigger than the island, Diamantina. Don’t sink to its size.”

  Her words hit me so strongly that for a moment her face swam in front of me, a pale disc. “Sister Amélia,” I finally said, my voice as quiet as hers, as though we might be overheard and punished, even though the priest never came into the kitchen, and today wasn’t even in the church. “I do want to be bigger. I want to leave, and go to my father.”

  She nodded.

  “And I’m waiting to hear from him, waiting to know where he is, and how to get there. He said that he would send us money to live, and then enough for me to go to him if the time was right. I’m willing to stay with my mother as long as necessary, knowing I can go to him. But right now I have nothing, not even the réis it would take to get as far as Madeira.”

  We sat without speaking for a few moments. Then she replied, carefully choosing her words. “To anyone else I would say confess all to Father da Chagos, and ask for absolution, and do your penance, and then pray for the answer. To anyone else I would say God will give you the answer. But I know that you don’t have the training to look for answers from God. And so I tell you this: it’s up to you to find the answers. Watch and listen for signs. Pay attention to what presents itself. You will find that there is reason in everything.”

  Was there no end to the ways Sister Amélia would surprise me today? “Reason in everything? Don’t you mean there is God in everything?”

  “Take my words as you will,” she said, and then put one floury hand on her breast, leaving a dusty white print. “I was once a young woman like you. Like you.”

  I leaned over and touched my cheek to hers. “Thank you, Sister Amélia,” I said. “Thank you for being my friend. You are the only one.”

  At that, she stood abruptly, looking down at me. “I cannot be your friend.” She put her hands on the table as if to support herself, as if she had grown suddenly weak. “Diamantina, you are no longer allowed to work here. I wanted to tell you as soon as you arrived, but you were so distraught.”

  I stared at her.

  “It was the confession of Abílio Perez, before he left. He confessed his relationship with you to the Father, and … the Father sees you as a fallen woman. He can no longer have you working in the church.” She gestured to a small pile of coins on a shelf near the door. “He left your last payment there.”

  When I didn’t respond, she said, “I’m sorry, Diamantina. Father da Chagos didn’t want to speak to you of this. He gave me the task of letting his wishes be known.”

  I tried to think of my life without Sister Amélia in it. “When will I see you again?”

  “You will not see me,” she said, “but some days I commit the sin of stepping outside the kitchen and watching the square, hidden behind the gate. Some days, as you cross the square, know that I’m watching you. Walk with your head high, and know that I’m smiling at you. And that you will always be in my heart.”

  My eyes burning, I stood and untied my apron and hung it on its hook. I took her hand, and she allowed it for a moment. Then she gently pulled away, picking up her veil and wimple. Her bare feet gliding unseen under her long robe in their usual way, she went to her room. The swirl of her robe as she softly shut the door was the last I saw of her.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The next day, I tried to find other work in Vila Baleira. With no healing to do, no help from Abílio, and now no more réis from the church, our situation would soon be dire. I was willing to take on the lowest job, from emptying and scrubbing the chamber pots of the few wealthier families to swabbing the blood and entrails from the wooden cutting tables of the fishmongers. But I was turned away.

  And th
en I noticed Rooi, sitting on a bench in the sunshine outside his inn. Although I often saw him there, and waved to him, I hadn’t visited him for a long while. With my father gone, it seemed we had little to say to each other.

  I stopped now in front of him. “Hello, Rooi.”

  “How have you been, Diamantina? How’s your mother?”

  “She’s not well, after the rains. And I need a job.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “I could clean the inn.”

  He shook his head. “The inn isn’t a place for a girl.”

  “I’m not a girl. I’m a woman, Rooi, and I can handle myself.”

  His shirt was stained and his hair long and unwashed, his pipe stuck behind one ear.

  “Your customers will come more willingly if the cups are clean and the tables not so sticky.” I glanced in the open door. “And the floor, Rooi. The floor.” I clicked my tongue, looking at the mess.

  He shrugged, taking his pipe and pressing his thumb into the tobacco still there. “My customers are sailors. They’ll come no matter what. There’s no other place in Vila Baleira where they’re welcome to drink as much as they like.”

  “Please, Rooi,” I said. “For only a few réis a week I’ll keep it spotless.”

  He studied me.

  “For my father,” I said, refusing to move. “Help me, Rooi. He would want you to help me.”

  He sighed heavily, and then was silent for a long moment. “Ja, you’re right. I give you the job for Arie ten Brink.”

  After I’d finished the cleaning in the afternoon, I started staying on to pour drinks behind the counter. Rooi soon realized his take was greater when I looked after things. He was often drunk along with his customers, and it was clear to me he lost a great deal of income in this way. I collected the price of each drink before handing over the tankard, and when I presented him with a full purse at the end of the evening, Rooi was happy to give me some of it. I would only leave when the last sailor had staggered back to the wharf to be rowed to his ship for the night.