Chapter 1 #2
Her grim prediction catches me off guard a second time. I find myself repeating the same words over and over again to decreasing effect: He will know the baby is his, he will be happy about it, he would never deny it.
Mother watches me with a somber expression. “How can you be so foolish?”
“Because he loves me. I know it.”
She turns away, muttering under her breath: “Only a mother could love you.”
I shrink inside myself. The line is the telltale sign of her fury, and stings more than a beating.
I am nine or ten years old. I’m in the crowded market, surrounded by loud, sweaty adults.
The shopkeeper hands me the bag of yucca and stretches out his hand for the coins.
I reach into my pocket but feel only loose fabric.
I seek the cold, hard feel of the metal on my fingertips. Panic rises to my throat.
Back home I confess to Mother, in between hiccups, that I lost the copper coins she gave me for the yucca. Mother sits in her rocking chair, gazing out the window. Dreadful child…only a mother could love you.
“How could you allow this disgrace?” she barks, jerking me back into the present. “Have you no fear of God?”
I press my palm to my forehead and squeeze my eyes shut as a wave of dizziness rolls through me. In my mind I see the souls in the second circle, rolling and clashing in that furious whirlwind. I have asked myself this, too: How could I have fallen prey to temptation?
It was, as Dante says, a wind. We were on our way home from the circus, my fingers sticky with molasses-coated popcorn, my mind buzzing with laughter.
He proposed a detour: Mere minutes off the main road, there was a secret spot with a marvelous sunset stretching over the river valley.
A spot only he knew. The detour turned out to be half an hour’s walk off the main path, and the dirt road was deserted—not a single soul there or back.
But he wasn’t wrong about the views. The secret spot was completely secluded, partly encircled by rocky hillside and dense woods.
A narrow gap in the trees framed a view of rolling hills and fields amid swaths of pink-and-orange sky.
I drew a breath in wonder. We sat together at the cliff edge and watched the sun’s rays deepen as day turned to dusk.
When Leandro kissed me, he drew me into his arms and I floated into the clouds with the macaws. The clouds tasted like sweet apples with caramel sauce. Could the apple of knowledge have tasted this good to Eve? Euphoria laid waste to my mind, and an air lighter than light filled my body.
I did not care about God then.
Like the tormented souls in the second circle of Hell, I did not stop what came next.
But the wind was extinguished almost as soon as the sin began.
Somewhere between the unbuttoning of my dress and the merging of our bodies, a little seed of fear bloomed into dread.
I found myself silently begging for God’s forgiveness, then I remembered that such a thing was not allowed—you cannot repent before the act.
I cannot tell Mother any of that.
“Arrangements shall have to be made…” Mother says, “if he does not propose.”
“Arrangements?” I manage, swallowing the lump in my throat.
I think of Santa Casa da Misericórdia’s overcrowded, disease-ridden yellow fortress, where the nuns have far more orphaned children to care for than they can manage.
Death abounds there, though perhaps death would be better than growing up in such a place.
When he wakes up in the middle of the night with a nightmare or a fright, who will comfort him?
Who will remember to buy him presents on his birthday, or even remember his birthday at all?
There’s no possible arrangement because wherever he ends up he will still exist somewhere in the world, in a physical space, thinking and breathing and interacting, and I will not be there.
Mother starts fixing the sleeve of my dress. “Adriana and Caio may take the baby. I will pay them a visit this weekend. She’s been having trouble conceiving, so perhaps God has sent us a solution for both your troubles.”
Mother continues talking but I cannot hear her.
Tia Adriana, Mother’s sister, and her much-older husband, Tio Caio, the preacher who taught Bible class when we were kids.
You never knew when he would call your name—it was always when you were least expecting it.
The first time you got an answer wrong he’d cane you with a rod.
The second time, he’d lock you in the utility closet until the end of the school day.
This is even worse than Santa Casa da Misericórdia.
“My baby is not a trouble.”
“It will be if Leandro does not propose.”
“He will. And it’s Leandro’s baby, too, and until he says otherwise, no one will take it from us.”
By God, I found the angle she can’t argue with. I close my fingers around the cross that I always wear around my neck, even to sleep, and straighten my spine.
Doubt flickers in her eyes. Could it be true, she’s thinking—could there truly be hope for this union?
Despite all her plans for the worst, what she really wants is the same as what I want: a proposal.
“Even if he proposes”—her voice lowers—“the child was still conceived in sin.”
“I’ll see him at S?o Jo?o next weekend,” I say. I’ve learned that whenever Mother gets like that, it’s best to keep my responses practical. “I’ll speak to him then and you’ll see.”
She silently deliberates for a moment, lips pursed tightly. I school my features into a mask of confidence, look her in the eye, and clutch my cross. As long as I have my cross in hand, God won’t let me down. Please, my angels.
“Eloisa will chaperone you,” Mother finally says. “You shall not spend a moment alone with him from now on.”