Álamo Oliveira: Marta de Jesus (a verdadeira)

Excerpts from Chapter 1, translated by Katharine F. Baker

In those days, Marta de Jesus sensed approaching death in perhaps the same way the scheduled delivery of an express mail order arrives on its appointed day and is brought to the door. So before going to bed, she bathed as carefully as if it were for the last time, and spritzed herself with American cologne. She grunted as she scooped her breasts into bra cups. She put on panties with embroidered leg trim and a matching slip, pulled up her sheer nylons and stepped into a pair of black patent leather shoes. Then she slid on a dress of georgette crepe, cut in the forgotten turn-of-the-20th-century belle époque style (except modest), and over it a matching half-length coat, also black.

She lay down on her back on her pine-needle bed and waited for the sleep of death, and for someone to find her in this state — including God, in whom she had always believed, even by onomastic influence. It was Three Kings Day 2001, and all morning it rained on the island of Flores (so named for its great abundance of flowers and inherent beauty). Marta de Jesus herself was sixty-five years old, five-foot-three, one-hundred-thirty pounds, an unmarried virgin who had never suffered any disgrace. But if someone asked her if it had been worthwhile to live like that, she would have responded with the widest of smiles, “I know no other way of life. And this one suits me.”

The de Jesus family flourished on Flores as if the island were the most blessed field of crops on earth. Before long there were de Jesuses all over the place, to the point of populating a significant portion of the village of Cuada by the spring of 1955. However, they were inconspicuous by any standard — once they got through their routine chores, the men busied themselves with several enclosed pastures, field crops and a half dozen head of cattle; and the women with housework, laundry, cooking and cleaning. There were also those engaged in very seasonal and barely profitable service trades — like barber, grocer, gravedigger, cobbler and seamstress — one of each. Weather permitting, they would go out in small open boats to catch a few fish in order to vary their diet. They had little cash, but did not need much. If they sold one head of cattle a year, that sufficed.

So the island of Flores was a tiny niche of beauty, despite the conventional wisdom that beauty does not produce bread but only helps to sustain poverty. In that mid-twentieth century year, the populace still had dreams to realize, even when they knew that a migrant adventure would not solve the desperation in their bellies — enhanced by news that arrived without need for proof, since it was brought by its own protagonists. Whaling continued to serve as a means of escape. People closed their eyes to authorities who pretended to be blind, fulfilling their pleasant duty of willful ignorance. In fact, immigration permission letters called cartas de chamada were at that time the legal way for immediate family to reach anywhere in North America, with Canada now said to be the new gateway of choice.

The island seemed to be hemorrhaging, unconcerned by moderation. Its beauty looked ugly, and farewells (clandestine or otherwise) brought grief to every family, house by house. Vieiras, Mesquitas, Salvadors, Silvas, Luízes, Laureanos and Silveiras all left in a hurry with no alternative, relying entirely on letters that arrived telling of successes, frightening incidents, new customs, people speaking foreign languages — and even some hateful and murderous savages from whom lands were stolen under the pretext of lack of agriculture or infrastructure, as Indians do not know God exists in the European sense and only He reigns supreme.

At nineteen years of age, Marta de Jesus was a strong young woman, not fat, but with a firm and generous chest of the type capable of nursing three or four infants at once. She had very feminine charms. When she smiled, she flashed two rows of bright white teeth whose brilliance owed nothing to toothpaste. Her eyes were green and huge, although overpowered by dark, thick brows. (The combination of green eyes and dark wavy hair was uncommon, but every so often Nature was obliged to display them while doing no harm to the world). She wore home-woven clothes, while not rejecting other garments that family and friends would bring from America. Marta was regarded by those who did not let themselves be scared off as a hard-working woman around her little house — sometimes with hoe in hand, other times an embroidery needle, or potatoes and cured pork shanks. Young men would cast over-long gazes at her, but they were always intimidated by how she kept them at the proper distance.

Marta looked nothing like her sister Maria de Jesus, who possessed a frail constitution, sallow face, dull expressionless eyes, a lack of grace even on level surfaces, and an invisible beatific aura. She was like a smooth surface with nothing to grab onto. Near-useless at anything, she was valued for her silent goodness, plopping onto the house’s center platform where she would read biographies of saints, and sometimes crochet lace from incredibly fine linen thread. She was the youngest of the three siblings, which exempted her from household chores in a family ruled by the eldest, Lázaro de Jesus by name. His patriarchal authority was legally accorded him by virtue of his age and maleness, as well as being the orphaned only son.

Lázaro was manly in the fullest sense of that word. Well-built, with a nearly hairless broad chest, he had a tempting body enhanced by a proper musculature developed from his labors, with no need for a gym workout. His twenty-five years endowed him with great physical stamina. Work had helped him become a man in every sense. That allowed him to coexist peacefully with his sisters, taking them under his wing while not submitting to the use of chastity belts or other means of more or less neutralizing their social freedom without great shame. He swore to his mother on her deathbed that his sisters would have all the protection necessary for a healthy physical and moral upbringing, lacking neither bread nor the example she had set while alive.

The siblings’ parents had died in each other’s arms during an outbreak of bubonic plague when Lázaro was fourteen, Marta eleven and Maria just seven. However, on an island like that it was easy to subsist on practically nothing — or, more accurately, with little more than a small single-story house and roadside garden plus a couple acres. It was room enough to raise potatoes, corn, kale, beans, even several rows of yams in a corner next to the pigsty. On the day of a ritual hog-slaughter [matança] such abundance created a festive air, so nothing more was needed than the determination to spend only what was absolutely necessary. 

Despite this system’s fragility, there was always a small nest-egg on hand to cover any unforeseen illness, or financial shortfall due to meteorological reasons. In fact, more frequent than epidemics of plague or influenza were storms rolling in from the open western sea, storms that raged for weeks and went beyond indiscriminate destruction of houses and crops. The de Jesus siblings could well claim to live on a martyred island, one that clearly feels its beauty is being abused relentlessly, as if it were a sin to sit there in the middle of the ocean with the perverse fate of taking a beating from the climate’s foul moods. It was a shame that things were this way, but it was at the same time how the island protected itself from foreigners’ stares, above all from those who cannot stand beauty as a natural thing and revel in ruining what is ultimately more than perfect.

The de Jesus siblings and all the rest of the population knew they belonged to a mythical island created by God as an earthly refuge — and everything that happened to them, no matter how bad, was nothing other than the Divinity’s way of reminding them to suffer all their lack of comforts, as well as food shortages, with patience. A harsher winter could add up to months with no oil, sugar or flour — and, worse than that, months of not knowing if the rest of the world still existed, since it was impossible to contact anyone, even by telephone, who lived on any of the other islands — so near, yet as enshrouded as the island of Flores. Corvo, off in the distance, was a pile of rabbit droppings that could not serve as a compass even on days with clearer visibility. On the rest of the islands people lived in a closer, more supportive proximity, although everything could be demolished in a single series of earthquakes. […]

The de Jesus siblings too had thought about leaving the same day that Alfredo Luíz departed from his parents’ home for America. Lázaro, however, reached down into his conscience and his pockets, and remembered that it was not realistic to show up at the home of their de Jesus aunts and uncles and announce, “Here we are, your two nieces and a nephew, hoping very much to stay with you. Please welcome us into your home and give us something to eat.”

To which their aunts and uncles would likely reply, “Kids, be patient, this is not the Santa Casa poorhouse here. If you want room and board you’ll have to pay for it, because that’s how we do things here, by working…”

Lázaro realized it would not be easy. Plus, he did not know if his aunts and uncles were even well off, because the only indication he ever received from them was a Christmas card with a dollar enclosed. It was true that, just like Alfredo Luíz, he had learned to read and write, and had seen the immensity of the world on a map. But this was not enough to reach America, see and conquer it. […]

Life there was understood in terms of a botanical model. It was as if they were weeds or garden crops: they were born, they lived, they died. Period. Of course there were renegades from this system, but those were the ones who hopped onto any available boat and went off in search of a land that was surely promised. Padre Vieira was right. But it had also been in order to vent such spleen that Roberto Mesquita wrote his poetry — he who got out of bed with a universal laziness like Fernando Pessoa’s, and filled his days looking toward the line of the horizon of possibility, while forgetting that the boats that went far away had goals considerably loftier to fulfill than learning the reasons that compelled a poet to languish in a deadly spleen, shrouded in a mantle of impenetrable fog.

Life on Flores was not easy. Marta de Jesus realized this soon after her parents’ death. It was not a matter of embracing the sensation of being an orphan. It was the certainty that nothing would ever be exactly as it had been before, although everything seemed the same: the beauty of their island continued to follow the seasons, people survived without thinking about it, they observed the cycles of planting and the harvest, and even the animals seemed to know their fate was inevitable before God and man.

Marta did not share this knowledge with anyone, not even Lázaro when they spoke in private on winter evenings. To her, fleeing the island was not a betrayal but a sign of cowardice. Alfredo Luíz, Lázaro’s friend who ran off to America, had surely repented having abandoned his island in exchange for a novel that accorded him money and fame. In any case, he was not sending poems to the island saying he missed Sunday mass, matanças, eating linguiça sausage with yams, drinking barley coffee, or the stench of cattle corrals. Marta also liked many of the things Alfredo left behind, the reason it had never crossed her mind to abandon Flores, nor even take a short hop to the Holy Ghost festival over on neighboring Corvo.

The de Jesus siblings got along well with everyone in the village, so it never occurred to them that one day a type of prophet would come to shatter their routine of daily life. Everything happened in such an unforeseen manner, but without bitterness or rancor. To the contrary. […]