From her vantage point on the wall she could see, through the window, the wide blue ocean. She liked to look at it. Her face was always smiling, but sometimes she felt the smile and sometimes she didn’t. In summers the boy would leave the window open all day. Sometimes an insect would fly in, or a bird, and the sound of its wings would lift up her heart. She had a special fondness for small or helpless things. Listening to a sparrow trill, she would pretend that she held her child tight, and the imagined sensation of pressure, of squeezing a firm, resisting body, made her even happier.
Of all the places she’d lived, and she was nearly 90 years old now, the boy’s quarters were her favorite. They were spare apartments, with rough wooden furniture and no ornament but a plain crucifix. She did not like the crucifix. The artist had given Him an expression of calm repose in the midst of suffering. This displeased her. She preferred His face gaunt, eyes liquid with pity. Also, the body was too lean. She hated that. It filled her with anger to think that her baby would turn ascetic, would shed like a snake the flesh she’d given him. At these moments she felt the terrible frustration of immobility. She could not, as she wanted, leap across the room to smash the crucifix.
The boy had lived with her for three years. She loved him. She held, but could not see, her baby. The boy took his place in her eyes. She thought his face — hesitant, thoughtful, soft — was the face her son should wear in his manhood. His willowy body was always covered with a long black cassock, but she knew it was perfect.
He would rise before the dawn and light a few tapers and say his prayers, first before the crucifix, then, bending down on the kneeler, to her. Afterward, one of the servants would announce breakfast, and the boy would leave until after compline. She had no idea what he did in the hours he was away. She accepted as cruel necessity that he had, for mysterious reasons, to be gone most of the day. If she resented him for it, she was only occasionally aware. Sometimes she had fantasies of his coming home injured, croaking out a final confession in which he bitterly lamented that he had not spent all his time in prayer, dying with confidence (tinged ever so slightly by an anxiety he could not wholly eliminate, fruit of a guilty conscience) in her power to save him. But usually she forgave his absences and greeted him joyfully. It didn’t really matter, whatever he did with his days. It was oily and insubstantial. His real life was with her.
She liked his elfin face. She liked the sound of his Latin, the poignancy he lent to the terse language of the prayer book. But she liked even better when, the office concluded, he would look up toward her with longing eyes and talk to her in his own tongue. Her Latin was good but she knew no Portuguese. His whispered petitions were only sounds to her, nasal, fluid, with a subdued recurring buzz like a hive’s at eventide. Without understanding, his words were something of the body rather than the mind: wetness of saliva, tongue forcing air through teeth cutting into the lips. It was a language of the heart with nothing social in it. In those hours he was animal and angel both. She would sit in the little swamp-pool of candlelight and listen as he poured out sins, fears, desires, face obscured, eyes gleaming, her heart aching with joy. It was the only intimacy she had ever known, she who was made for intimacy, but from whom it had been withheld, cruelly, all her life — for the corporate prayer of monks was not intimacy. For seventy-seven years she had been condemned to listen to their droning rituals in which there was not a trace of warmth or blood. The boy was different. His was a lacerated heart, and in the prayers she could not understand he held it out to her. He was hers, hers only.
* * *
One summer morning, as he knelt down, she noticed that his eyes were puffy. He seemed distracted. Careworn. This had happened often of late. He said his Office perfunctorily, but his personal prayers had never been more urgent. At night, she could see beads of sweat forming on his brow, red in the light of the tapers. His voice was choked, despairing. He spent more time with her than usual, and when he went into his room, she could hear him moving restlessly.
That morning, he seemed especially reluctant to leave. A barber came to shave him. After he left, the boy walked slowly here and there, his eyes downcast. He noticed the barber had left one of his razors behind. He picked it up, opened and shut it again, over and over, for some minutes. He put the razor down. Then he knelt, eyes closed, lips mumbling a soundless prayer. She wanted to hold him and could not. Instead, she imagined that her love was a blanket, which she wrapped about his shoulders. When his servant came to call him, he looked up at her plaintively for a long moment. Then he rose with a sigh.
He was gone a long time. The room had never felt so oppressively close. From across the room, He was mocking her with His serenity. “Woman, what is this to thee?” She had a vivid fantasy of tearing His head from its shoulders and kicking it like a football. Through the open window came an acrid burning smell. She thought she could hear shouting, music. Her son was heavy in her arms. When night fell, the servants came to lay fresh sheets and light the fire.
It must have been midnight when the door to their rooms crashed open. The boy staggered in. The shoulder of his cassock was torn, his hair matted. A thin trickle of dried blood ran down his face from a cut on his forehead. At the sight of it her spleen burned hot. She wanted to touch him. Then he turned toward her. His eyes were filled with — disgust? — contempt? She couldn’t tell. But they were manic.
He stared at her for a long time. She noticed he had something in his left hand. A bottle. He took a long swig, stumbled, let it fall to the floor.
He looked at her again. There was something in his look that made her feel the heat of the room. A bead of resin trickled down her face. Her gown oppressed her. It was thick with ceremony. She stared intently at the boy. He stared back. The moments passed, painfully slow. With shaking hands, he undid the first button of his cassock, then the second, the third, until it was loose enough for him to pull over his head. He shed the rest of his clothes. He was naked. Her eyes dismembered him, piece by piece. He was beautiful. The flat stomach with its little tuft of hair, the long, slender arms, the white chest, the surprising muscles of his thighs. And there, where they came together. . . .
She could have hissed when he touched it. Never had she fixed her whole being so unreservedly on a single point. His eyes did not leave hers. Not for his first, hesitant strokes, nor when he pressed harder, longer, faster. They were bound together, though they had not touched. She had slipped the confines of her frame as he had abandoned through its pleasure the flesh that encased him. They had stretched out toward one another. They were walking together in a long unlit passage. Something waited for them at the end. They were reaching.
The boy stepped closer. She could smell him now, the musk of his sweat, the liquor on his breath. He came closer still. They were face-to-face. A hand’s breadth apart. She could see, across the room, barely visible, the crucifix hanging lonely in the dark. It filled her with delight. A thunderhead was gathering in her chest. She was conscious of a great pressure, building, building. She turned her attention back to the boy. Through her eyes she poured out the terrible ferocity of her love, her pierced maternal heart. He stiffened. Shuddered. She smelled salt wet and heavy. Heard him gasp for air. Heard his moan, rich with satisfaction and despair.
But it was not the end. She had still to reach it. One more step was required. She knew what it was and all her strength was now bent on the boy, willing him to understand. He found his breath, looked up at her. Still staring, he stumbled backward, his hand thrust out behind him, until it found the edge of the table, until it had traced its way across the surface. Until it closed on the razor.
He was panting. His hair was dark with sweat, his eyes wide with the derangement of ecstasy. Yet his movements were deliberate. With even steps, he walked back to the fireplace. He was not so close as he had been, but she felt that they were separated now by thinnest gauze. He had only to brush it aside. The boy knelt. In his right hand was the razor; in his left, he took up his testicles.
The razor flashed. He cried out in agony. The razor fell with a clatter. His left hand still held his penis, dripping blood. He lifted it up to her, then tossed it into the fire at her feet. It sizzled in the flames. The room was filled with the smell of charcoal, of sulfur, of roasting meat running with grease, of blood. Above all, of blood. The storm burst in her chest. She lost herself in perfect happiness — in the consummation of a mother’s love — in triumph over that scarecrow on His cross — in a heat that threatened to engulf her loins — in a freezing chill that ran up her spine — in union infinite, ineffable, indissoluble.
She clutched herself as her pleasure overtook her. Beneath her, the boy was sinking to the ground, his life’s-blood deserting him in spurts. Filled with tenderness, her spirit went out to him. She gathered him into her arms and held him as he died.
* * *
Father Joao had noticed how wan, how nervous Martim had looked during the auto-da-fé and intended to remonstrate with him early that morning, not harshly, but with fatherly concern. It was not proper for a young cleric to hesitate at the meting out of the judgments of God. Especially when that cleric was secretary to a member of the Holy Office.
The sun had not yet risen when he reached Martim’s apartment. He knocked. There was no reply. He knocked again. He called Martim’s name. Finally, he summoned one of the domestics and had him unlock the door. They stepped inside together.
The room was hot. He tasted metal on the humid air. The fading fire had an evil smell that made his gorge rise, and he fought hard to keep it down. When he had mastered himself, he looked around the room, his eyes adjusting to the firelight. There, before the fireplace, was Martim, prostrate. The flickering light glinted off the stones around his body. They were wet with blood.
Horror twisted Joao’s heart. He backed away and vomited. Then, short of breath, shivering in spite of the heat, he looked back into the room.
Poor Martim had not moved. Above him, illuminated from below by the red uncertain light, her black eyes flashing, was his portrait of the holy Mother of God. She was smiling.