The Head of the Saint (5 page)

Mariinha was twenty-five when she met Manoel, who had come to Tauá for work. She was the youngest child of the family, condemned by a backlands tradition not to marry but to take care of her father, a widower, for the rest of his life.

Manoel stayed for two months to work on a new building for the town hall. It was long enough to notice Mariinha walking past the site every day and to win her heart with flowers and letters. His wooing was full of flourishes; the bouquets he improvised had flowers from the four corners of Tauá. He spoke beautiful words, he talked of love with sweet eyes and sweet kisses, and Mariinha could not resist his advances.

The urgency of their passion bore fruit. Mariinha became pregnant near the end of Manoel's time in Tauá. Before his two months were up, though, his mother notified him of a job in his hometown of Candeia. He had no time to do his duty to Mariinha and the baby, to return to Tauá and ask Mariinha's father for her hand in marriage, to get married in church and leave everything all tidy. Except for the unsigned letter Mariinha received with his mother's address on it, Manoel disappeared. Mariinha was too proud to chase after him. Having no money, nor any certainty that he was the one who had sent the letter, there was nothing to guarantee its veracity. She didn't even know where Candeia was. Going there was not part of her plan.

It was her older sister who noticed her belly growing, her bigger breasts, her swollen nose.

“That's the belly of a pregnant woman,” she said.

Their father had been eating his soup, his eyes fixed on the plate. He heard the words and continued sipping the spoonfuls noisily. Then he put the spoon down and—without raising his head—pronounced: “Tell your sister that if it is a pregnancy, she can leave this house tomorrow. I'm too old to put up with a daughter who's got a reputation.”

“It is a pregnancy, Father. It's my son, Samuel.”

Mariinha was able to rely on at least a shred of pity from her sister, who gave her a little money and an old leather suitcase to help her go.

She stopped at the little Tauá church before leaving, to ask forgiveness from God for her sin and pray that her son be healthy, strong and a friend to her.

The priest was in the sacristy, and Mariinha thought it would be a good idea to confess before going. She told him everything, of her sin and her passion, being thrown out by her father, the child in her belly, the loneliness she now had to face. It was this kind priest who told her that she who has faith is never alone, and suggested she go to live in the town of Juazeiro do Norte, under the eyes of Father Cicero. He gave Mariinha a blessed Mother of God rosary with blue and white beads. Mariinha noticed that there was a green bead in the place of one of the blue ones.

“Green is my lucky color,” the priest explained.

He wrote on a piece of paper the names of several people he knew from when he had lived in Juazeiro. But he underlined the name of Dona Glória, the blessed, as the single most important friend to seek out.

It was said that one day Dona Glória would become a saint. She had barely turned thirteen when she was in church and a man came up to one of the side windows and gestured for her to come over. He had a message from her mother, he said. It was serious: her father had had a heart attack and he was dying. Her mother had asked this man to fetch her by bicycle because that way she would get there more quickly. Glória didn't notice anything strange about it until the bicycle was flying along a road that was nowhere near her house. When she started asking questions, sitting on the crossbar, the man told her to shut up or he'd kill her. He almost did. He raped Glória and was at the point of killing her when two men happened, miraculously, to pass by. They saved her life.

The rapist managed to get away, but he had got the poor girl pregnant. It was a public disgrace, and the town agreed that she ought to have an abortion. The doctor of Juazeiro arranged the whole thing and warned the family that the procedure carried some risk of death. That was when Glória asked her mother to call Father Cicero to give her a final blessing. To Glória's amazement, he appeared right behind her mother even before she'd finished saying his name. And he was furious. Overcome with rage.

“Get up and go and wait for your child to be born. You're quite old enough to understand what courage is. Your son will help you in life.”

The father had such a presence—those black robes, those blue eyes. Glória did as she was told, running counter to everyone else, and there were many who turned their backs on her. It was a difficult birth, and she nearly died. The boy was born sick and spent his days in a hospital with Glória by his side. Nothing in their lives seemed to be as Father Cicero had predicted. They said the boy wouldn't live, that he was a testament to the sin, the memento of a crime. Only Glória, deep down, never doubted. And it was only when she was about thirty that things began to change. The boy studied, grew, became a doctor of law, went off to live in the capital and passed the examination to be a judge.

Glória never wanted to leave Juazeiro, and as the years went by her presence bore witness to a miracle. Her son, Dr. Marcelo, never set foot there again, but he sent money for the upkeep of the five-bedroom house he had bought her. Five bedrooms. She used the house to take in single mothers, and she took Mariinha in with a hug that was silent but filled with all the words the girl needed to hear. Glória looked after her in labor and taught her how to weave hats, and Mariinha looked after the older woman until the day she died. Glória the blessed.

Before leaving the town in which he had been born, Samuel walked to the statue of Father Cicero for the last time. He found it funny, this fantasy that the white statue, huge and motionless, should be able to see anything or care whether anyone lived or died in Juazeiro do Norte. His mother had believed that fantasy right up until her death.

Beside the statue there was a house for the votive offerings from those who had asked Father Cicero to bestow his graces upon them. Wooden legs and arms, bridal dresses, photographs of cars, hearts; miracles to suit every taste. Samuel lit the candle his mother had asked for with contempt for the stupid act, which as far as he was concerned had no purpose but to fill the pockets of the candle sellers—bad company whom he knew well. He watched the candle flame tremble, trying to turn into fire—that was beautiful, at least. He remembered his mother, her thin hands covered in loose, dry skin, trembling while lighting a candle. The nimble hands that had woven hats for so many years, dead now and under the earth. The hands of his mother.

He ran. He ran down Horto Hill with his suitcase in his hand. His luggage wasn't heavy, he'd never had many possessions. He walked, panting, on the road out of Juazeiro do Norte and felt a little less pain in his chest once he had left, passing over the stones that Mariinha's fragile feet would never tread again.

There was a moment on the road when he looked back and realized that he could no longer see the giant white man, Father Cicero, who had not been strong enough to save his mother from a life of sorrows and a wretched death.

He believed that all saints were merely an invention of people who were desperate, and nothing that Mariinha had said his whole life had convinced him otherwise. Saints were stone, and only stone. That was Samuel's law.

As he recovered, Samuel's first days in Candeia were a time of some comfort compared to the wretchedness of the journey. He had a place to sleep and something to eat, by the good grace and efforts of Francisco and the blackmail about the silly secret of the porn magazines. The dogs never came back. It really did only rain on Niceia's orders, and after this one downpour the clouds seemed happy, never releasing rain again but remaining dry as cotton wool, high, like smoke in the sky. Samuel was a bit cleaner but still dressed in rags, and his hair had grown. Francisco showed him a large lake nearby where he could take a bath every now and then. It would have been ideal were the lake not the drinking place for the dogs. He saw the animals on the far bank one day and tried to leave without them spotting him. The dogs looked up at his arrival but did nothing, perhaps because it was daytime, perhaps because they only undertook to guard the hill during the night. They didn't bark when they were off duty.

The head became his house, and he set up everything more or less like a home. An old mattress with a pillow, a woolen blanket, candles, a little three-legged table, a few bottles, two glasses, a plate, cutlery—gifts from Francisco, neither bought nor stolen.

In Candeia more houses were abandoned than lived in, and after the head of the saint brought misfortune to the town, a lot of people had left without taking all of their belongings with them. The rumor that the town was cursed scared off any impressionable souls overnight.

The family in the green house, which was almost immediately facing the church, abandoned their home, leaving all their furniture: tables, sofas and beds and, on top of one of the beds, the grandmother of the family, Sara. She was the first woman to die from the curse of the head of the saint. The town only discovered her death when her cat began to meow day and night on the roof of the house. There had to be something strange going on—this cat wasn't the kind of creature to give the time of day to anyone. Dr. Adriano had gone into the abandoned house with the police chief and found poor Sara dead on the bed, her eyes open. She had died more than a week earlier, he said. She had already started to stink. Dona Sara had been married to the previous mayor—she'd been Candeia's richest woman in the good times. In the end she was buried in the family tomb by Francisco's father, the gravedigger.

It was from the green house that Francisco got the mattress, the cutlery, the pillow. It was all there because nobody went into the house. They said that it held Dona Sara's breath and that only curses could ever come out of it. They said Dona Sara still walked around the kitchen, watched television at six o'clock and said the rosary at her window on Mass day. And if someone were to go into the house, she would whisper a premonition of death. They said a lot about Sara's ghost, back when there were enough people in Candeia to spread rumors.

Francisco wasn't scared; he was the son of Chico the Gravedigger and he'd seen more dead bodies in his life than anything else. He held death in sufficiently high esteem not to be afraid of it. Every life lost was a few more coins for his father, who, besides his salary from the town hall, also earned the affection and gratitude of the families for taking care of the graves of their loved ones. Chico the Gravedigger swept the graves, washed the plastic flowers and cleaned the glass that protected the photographs on the better-off graves. The cemetery was his stone garden, his plantation of kindliness. Francisco was a regular helper. He grew up knowing that even death was something you could miss when it took its time coming.

They chatted a lot, Francisco and Samuel. They told each other the stories of their lives, from up on Horto Hill to down in the grave pits. Bit by bit they began to confide in each other. They tried to understand how it was that the prayers of the women came to be trapped within the concrete of the decapitated saint—but it was impossible. They went carefully over their plans, plotting to earn money by exploiting the carelessness of the saint who had allowed Samuel access to the prayers of his followers. They were going to make a serious impact in Candeia. They laughed at their own misfortunes and at other people's. Misfortunes were all there to be laughed at.