The Devil on Her Tongue (3 page)

“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.

W
hen 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 father 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.

I went to the mantel and took my father’s pipe and the box of dominoes he’d made and put them on my pallet. “The books and charts, and these things of
Vader
’s, are mine now,” I told my mother. “You can’t take them away from me.” I was still angry with her because I had chosen to stay with her.

“Come here,” she said. The bowl no longer smoked, but a heavy, unfamiliar odour permeated the air. It was a sad smell, a smell of disappointment and decay, of the mealy fungi that grows under the ground. She dipped two fingers into the dark black-red mixture and rubbed it across her forehead, down the bridge of her nose and across her lips.

“Now I will do the same to you,” she said, picking up the bowl. “Come.”

“No,” I said, and brusquely shoved away her hand. The bowl crashed onto the floor, breaking into shards.

My mother cried out. I thought she was upset about the bowl, her favourite, used to burn all her mixtures, but she was staring at my feet. The dark substance was spattered over them.

She dropped to her knees. “Diamantina,” she said, her voice low, trembling. “Not the feet. The spell is for the head.” Her hands were shaking as well as her voice. “You’ve changed it. It’s all changed now.”

Frightened anew by her reaction, I took a step back. “Changed what?”

She slowly pushed herself up, then sat at the table, her face in her hands. “Your future,” she whispered. “You’ve changed your future.” She looked up then, and there was a hollowness in her eyes I recognized as grief. “The spell was to free you of your father’s hold on you. But now … on your feet … now you will never be free of him. He will hold you down. He will haunt you forever.”

I stood as if made of wood. “Your spell isn’t powerful enough to drive my father from me anyway. I will always be the Dutchman’s daughter. Always.” I went to the fireplace and took out the shoes
my mother had thrown there. I put them on, smearing the paste on my feet into my flesh. The shoes were too loose and hurt the bottom of my cut foot. I clomped around the hut nonetheless, staring at my mother until she rose and came to me.

She slapped my face. She had never before struck me. Although my cheek stung, I didn’t move or make a sound. I simply stared back at her. She turned and went outside.

After a while, I removed the uncomfortable shoes; the pressure of the leather on the black paste had stained my skin with whorls and prints like the little plovers made as they ran along the sand. I took a rag and scrubbed at the marks, but they remained. I smelled the rag, and realized that she’d burned the sticky red blood from the dragon tree with the rest of her ingredients. She normally didn’t use the dragon tree; she said it contained its own power, and needed to be treated with great care and respect.

She didn’t return that night. In the past she had regularly left the hut for days, searching the island for herbs and roots and berries. I had never cared; I had my father then.

This night I was alone for the first time. Our small hut was like others on the beach: the walls and even the roof were made of the clay and sand and soil of Porto Santo, with a tiny wash house and
latrina
to one side. From a distance it became part of the island, undetectable where it backed into the dunes. It was at the very end of Porto Santo’s southern beach, Ponta da Calheta. Here the sand came to an abrupt halt in a semicircle of craggy rocks and crashing, white-crested waves. It was close to where my mother had found my father. And it was here, in the past, that pirates from Algiers had landed and taken many inhabitants of Porto Santo to sell as slaves. From there, on a clear day, I could see the misty outline of Madeira, the biggest island of our archipelago.

My home was bright and hot when the door and shutters were open, dim and cool when shut against that light and heat. My mother gathered baskets of needles from the pines and tamarisks on the hills and sprinkled them over the dirt floor, replacing them every few weeks so that there was always a fresh earthy smell, mingled with the bitter and yet fragrant aroma of wormwood and the fainter
scents of the herbs hanging from the ceiling on lengths of rope. On a long table against one wall she kept her collection of bowls and glass jars and vials filled with knobby brown roots and bright pods and petals and tiny seeds waiting to be crushed in her stone mortar. There were dried twists of kelp, holding ground powders that couldn’t abide the light. And rosemary, always sweet rosemary. My mother made herself a perfume of it, and anointed her hair and neck.

I breathed in the fragrances my mother brought to our home as I fell asleep each night. It was like sleeping in a forest, on a beach, in a meadow: all of these sensations usually combined to bring me a sense of peace. But tonight there was no peace. I cried for my father, but I had made my choice, and as he had told me, once a decision is made, you cannot go back. Just before the flame sputtered out in its dish of tallow, I stared again at the marks on my feet.

If you do not come home to me, I will go to you, Vader. I will find you
. I had never known a prayer, but this was to become the last thing I whispered to myself every night for a long, long time.

I
woke frequently through the night, staring at my parents’ empty pallet, willing them both to be there, willing yesterday to have been a terrible dream. Before day broke, I got out of bed, angry with both my mother and my father. I took my wracking pole and started up the beach, jabbing my stick between the rocks where the curling foam broke on the beach. It felt good to thrust and stab.

As soon as I was old enough to walk, my mother had tied a long piece of braided twine around my waist and attached it to her own, so I wouldn’t stray into the sea while her attention was turned to the shore. She encouraged me to dig with a short stick. When I was small, it was only a game. As I grew old enough to wander the beach alone, I found rusted cauldrons and broken belt buckles, barnacle-encrusted brass pins, the bases of thick, broken green goblets, tin pans, and misshapen lead shot. I ran my fingers over their surfaces, trying to imagine where they’d come from. I made necklaces of strange, wonderful coins with holes in their centres, stringing them on tough seagrass, and wove broken bits of colourful glass and the tear-shaped, dimpled lead shot into more seagrass to create my own crown. I always wore my flowered shawl around my waist. I had found it tangled in a nest of seaweed; the colours brightened my dull brown skirt, and I loved watching the fringes dance in the warm breeze.

The waves and tide tossed up the detritus of sea life: twirled whelks, fish skeletons, dead sea urchins smelling of rot, whorled tritons, carcasses of monk seals from the Ilhas Desertas, and
graceful lengths of seaweed and kelp fanned out on the sand like a mermaid’s hair. Occasionally I found something of value, and gave it to my father to sell in Vila Baleira. I always accompanied him as he set my found objects on the counter of the shop. He told me that gold or silver artifacts not too corroded by time in the salt water—a bracelet or necklace, an urn, a goblet, a jewel box—would be purchased by the few wealthier families living in Vila Baleira, or by sailors stopping in port looking for a gift for a sweetheart. Occasionally a merchant from Madeira came to buy items to sell to the wealthy English who had settled in the capital, Funchal Town, to prosper in the growing wine trade. The English, he said, loved unique old artifacts and collectibles from foreign pirate ships to decorate the fancy quintas they had built on the verdant hills around Funchal.