Marianna (25 page)

‘You speak rubbish, child! Rosaria hopes, that is all, because she yearns in her heart for her lost Clever One.’

Marianna stood up and stepped nearer to the window.

‘He is safe, Linguareira,’ she whispered. ‘Jacinto is safe. They have received some money, through the
senhor pároco.
But you must not say anything, you understand — nothing to anyone.’

‘As if I would!’ Then, anxiously, ‘You’ll not try to get in touch with him?’

‘Of course, if I can. I shall go to see Father Baptisto.’

‘But
menina
...’

‘I
must.
If the priest knows anything, I shall make him tell me.’ She thrust young Dick at Linguareira through the open window. ‘I’m going now, this instant.’

‘You cannot go as you are,’ Linguareira objected. ‘There’s a chill coming down.’

‘I have this shawl, it is enough.’

Marianna was suddenly filled with a wild impatience, as if every second was vital. It was quite dark by now and moonless, so she had only starlight to guide her in finding her way down the stony, zigzag path that plunged deeper into the valley. All around her in the scented night was the whispering of leaves, the chirping of crickets, the croaking of frogs. And from somewhere, faintly, came the wistful lilting strains of a tune played on a
machete.

After several minutes half-running, half-walking, she saw the pale outline of the little whitewashed church on its knoll, and a glimmer of candlelight in the priest’s thatched cottage close by. When, panting for breath, she knocked upon the door, it was opened at once. Father Baptisto, who had been parish priest ever since Marianna could remember, who knew everyone in the locality and everything that went on (even perhaps the secrets not brought to the confessional), lifted his candlestick to peer shortsightedly at her face. He did not look at all surprised to see who it was.

‘Dona Marianna ... enter if you please.’

She stepped directly into his one small room, its drab wallpaper enlivened by highly-coloured prints of the saints. On the table, which was draped with a fringed chenille cloth, stood a bottle of banana liqueur and two glasses.

‘Be seated, I beg you.’ Father Baptisto indicated the best chair, of carved til wood. ‘Can I persuade you to take a little refreshment?’

‘Thank you. It ... it is almost as if you expected me,’ Marianna said nervously.

He poured a measure into each glass and carefully recorked the bottle. ‘I knew,
senhora,
that you would have to come.’

‘Then you know why. You know what it is that I want you to tell me.’

The priest sat down on a rush-seated chair, placing his black biretta on the table. Bareheaded, his hair sparse on top, he became more like any other man. The folds of his long soutane had lifted a little to reveal, incongruously, a pair of shabby red carpet slippers.

‘I have nothing to tell you, Dona Marianna.’

‘But you must have. I want to know where the money came from, how it reached you.’

His glance gently reproached her for her imperious tone as he repeated, ‘I have nothing to tell you,
senhora.’’

‘Because I am not of your faith?’ she flared at him.

‘What I may know, if anything, what I may conjecture is not to be disclosed. Beyond the fact that I have no means of making contact with the sender of this money, I can tell you nothing. Whether to one of my flock or not, it would make no difference. You should know that, honoured lady.’

Marianna bowed her head. ‘Yes, Father, forgive me!’

‘Do not be resentful, my child. Instead, you should let your heart rejoice.’

She made herself meet Father Baptisto’s eyes. He was a simple priest in a mountain backwater, as poor and humble as any of his parishioners, yet he possessed a depth of wisdom and tolerance in his tranquil faith.

‘As long as I know that he is alive,’ she faltered, ‘I must try to be content.’

Father Baptisto laid his hand on Marianna’s — a hand that was hard and calloused from wielding an
enchada,
for the priest grew vegetables on his scrap of land to eke out the meagre stipend he received.

‘You are a good woman, Dona Marianna. You have brought prosperity back to this valley and your people love and respect you for it. That is a great blessing in this world. You also have a fine healthy son. Let those things be sufficient for your happiness.’

‘Perhaps I lack humility, Father. Perhaps I have no faith. Sometimes I feel a terrible anger towards God for what He has allowed to happen to me.’

He smiled sadly, with compassion. ‘Oh, my poor child, never once to have railed against our Lord’s implacable will, never once to have raged against His supreme authority, is not to
believe
in Him. You have faced with courage what life has brought you. Continue with that same courage and may God in His infinite mercy give you peace of mind.’

From that time on, the money had arrived regularly; and each year it was larger in amount. Father Baptisto had grown older and feebler, his thin hair turning white, and sometimes his mind would wander a little. But always he remained faithful in the performance of his trust. Each year in the weeks before Christmas, Rosaria would come to Marianna to whisper the news that her Clever One was still alive and well, still prospering. And straightway the peasant woman would fulfil the vow she had made to God in dutiful thanksgiving. At first flush of dawn next day, whatever the weather, she would mount the thirty-two hard, rocky steps to the church door on her bare knees, holding a long wax taper in each hand. Marianna would gladly have made the painful climb with her, but that would raise too many questions in people’s minds. Instead she offered heartfelt thanks in her own way, swearing a bounden duty upon herself to see that none of her people should go in need.

Year by year, too, Marianna had fought the encroaching wilderness that had been her inheritance when she arrived back in Madeira. With the vines all destroyed by the
phylloxera.,
and no
fidalgo
to give a lead, the tenants had neglected their land, not troubling to maintain the terrace walls so that the winter storms had washed away the precious soil. They and their families had not starved, because they had still grown vegetables on the more easily cultivated plots. But there had been no surplus, and the rents traditionally due to the landlord in the form of half the produce had remained unpaid. No thought was spared for the future beyond the next harvest. Marianna had been faced with the task of coaxing and cajoling the reluctant
caseiros
to mend their terraces, manure the soil and then plant vines once again, using a new rootstock from America that seemed to be immune to
phylloxera.

They had been hard years, unbelievably hard at first, and she had been forced to cast aside her womanly gentleness and battle as ruthlessly as any man would battle. She had
used
men, too, without scruple — throwing feminine tactics into the balance in order to secure the expert advice and financial help she so desperately needed. And why should she not, Marianna had argued fiercely. Did men not make use of women?

She had accepted by now the bitter truth that her father had virtually sold her into marriage to save himself from ruination, while William Penfold had purchased her as a child-bride to gratify the twisted nature of his sexuality. Even Jacinto, the man she loved — had he not made use of her? All these years he had been prospering somewhere, and never a word to her after that one message to announce that he was safe...

Marianna dragged herself back from her long reverie to see the line of
borracheiros
disappearing down a steep, narrow path into the ravine. The picking was well under way again, the singing and laughter and chitchat a little subdued in the sleepy heat of the afternoon. Her
feitor
remained standing patiently at her side, though he had much work to do, almost as if he sensed her need of him at this moment. Eduardo Teixeiro was a simple man of few words, but there was a strength about him that Marianna could feel flowing through to her. And he was Jacinto’s father.

Smiling at him through a mist of tears, she said, ‘I am having bread baked at the
quinta
for tonight, Eduardo, a whole loaf each for everyone. Make sure there is plenty of
agua pe
for them to drink.’

‘Sim, senhora.
They are good people. They labour hard and uncomplaining all through the year. They earn the right to make merry a little at vintage time.’

It was a long speech for Eduardo.

In the hushed atmosphere of Marianna’s office a fly buzzed and bumped against the window panes as though it were tipsy. Even she herself, accustomed from earliest childhood to the sweet, heady aroma of Madeira wine, was conscious of a special languor this afternoon. The fumes of the tumultuously fermenting new
mosto
seemed to penetrate into every crevice and corner of the wine lodge. Seated at the big roll top desk of
vinhatico
wood which had served her father, and his father before him, she shook herself awake and rechecked the tally of yesterday’s deliveries by the
borracheiros.

At a tap on the door Marianna called a languid
‘Entre!’
, and Roderigo Gomez sidled in apologetically. He was a short and balding old man, quiet and slow in his movements. Once her father’s store clerk, Roderigo had been almost destitute when she returned to the island, reduced to hawking bundles of oven-kindling from door to door. Marianna had felt obliged to reinstate him at once, even though his wages were a strain on her purse in those first troubled years.

‘With your permission, Dona Marianna, there is a gentleman to see you.’

‘Who is it, Roderigo?’

‘A stranger,
senhora.’
He held up a visiting card and squinted at it over the rims of his steel spectacles. ‘Senhor Joao Carreiro, it says.’

Marianna took the card from him and pondered. The printed address was Georgetown in British Guiana, but overwritten in ink was that of a
quinta
at Monte, the resort village in the heights above Funchal.

‘Shall I send him away,
senhora?
suggested Roderigo hopefully, disliking anything that interrupted the ordered routine of life.

‘Certainly not. Bring the gentleman in and I’ll see what it is he wants.’

Muttering to himself, Roderigo withdrew, and was back again in a moment. Like a major-domo at a ball, he announced formally, ‘His Excellency Senhor Dom Joao Carreiro.’

The dark-bearded man shown into the room was well-built and of upright bearing, and Marianna placed him at around forty. He wore a pale grey, short-jacketed lounge suit and carried in his hand a panama hat and a malacca walking cane. For a moment he hesitated in the shadows of the threshold, looking at her; then as he came forward, the light from the window fell slanting across his face.

Marianna recognized him instantly, and the waves of shock echoed and re-echoed through her body. Stunned, speechless, she waved Roderigo away.

Jacinto said, when the old man had taken himself off, ‘So you knew me at once.’

‘Of course! But ... but how? Oh God ... is it
really
you, Jacinto? Is this true?’

‘Yes, it is true.’ He took another step forward, stopped again. He cleared his throat. ‘Marianna, you look wonderful — exactly as I have always pictured you in my mind.’

Somehow that loosed her tongue and she said on a harsh, bitter note, ‘I wonder how often in all these years you have spared me a thought?’

‘How often?’ She had not remembered the dense darkness of his eyes, the way they could turn molten with reproach. ‘Only every day,
querida.
Every hour of every day,’

‘Then why....?’ Marianna choked back the accusation. What did questions and answers matter when her burning need was to go to him, to feel his arms about her? She said with cool formality, ‘You had better sit down.’

But Jacinto remained standing, watching her, searching her face, gauging her inner thoughts. Marianna could not hold his gaze and she turned away, moving to the window and staring blindly at the inner courtyard where a couple of long-bloused
trabalhadores
were trundling casks from a storeroom.

‘My mother told me that you received the message I sent,’ he said at length, when the silence had grown. ‘You knew that I made a safe escape from England.’

She spun about. ‘You have seen your parents?’

‘Yesterday. Until then I was unaware that you were here, Marianna. I had no idea that you had ever returned to this island.’

So he had not come to Madeira for
her,
to seek her out. After all these years it was a mere stroke of chance that brought them face to face.

‘
Querida
,’ he said softly, ‘must we be like strangers?’

‘What else are we?’ she demanded. ‘Almost eighteen years, Jacinto, without a word. What else are we now but two strangers?’

‘Should I have got in touch with you?’ he asked, shaking his head in bewilderment. ‘If I had known that you were here in Madeira ... perhaps. But to my knowledge you were still in England, the widow of William Penfold, the mother of his posthumously-born child. I dared not try to communicate with you again, Marianna, and risk destroying the whole fabric of your life.’

‘You knew about Dick?’ she cried, on a gasp of breath.

He nodded, ‘I read the announcement of your son’s birth in an English newspaper.’ Then, seeing her incomprehension, Jacinto went on, ‘I had better explain what happened to me after we parted that evening in London.’

Marianna listened, dazed, while he told her how the bosun of the sailing barque
Algarve
had smuggled him aboard as unofficial crew; how twenty-eight days out of London they had made landfall at Georgetown, The money she had provided was almost exhausted before at last he found work, labouring at a sugar plantation on the banks of the Demarara River, using the false identity he had assumed.