“SIX DECADES?” Alfonso Rosario asked in disbelief.
“Yes. You heard me the first time. Six decades.”
Alfonso shifted his knees on the hard wooden kneeler in the confessional box. The bloody Padre was out of his mind! Six decades was crazy. All he did was to think of her tits. He knew it was wrong and that’s why he had confessed to God about his carnal thoughts. Christ! The bloody Padre thinks he raped her!
It was the worst penance he had ever had. He had gone through his whole life of seventeen years with crises of five Our Fathers, or ten Hail Marys. But six decades!
“My son, it is a terrible sin against the Ninth Commandment.”
Alfonso knew the Ninth Commandment. “Thou shall not covet thy neighbour’s wife.” But she was nobody’s wife. The bloody Padre had got it all wrong. It was only Philippa de Brito. Not Mrs de Brito. Now she had …
Christ! Six decades was a whole five decades of rosary beads and another one. Six decades!
“My son, I am only asking you, on behalf of the Almighty, to recite one of the most beautiful things in this world. The rosary. And for you, it must surely have a special meaning.”
The Padre cleared his old throat.
Alfonso recognised the sound. Pa cleared his throat like that in the mornings after he had sat around with the other fishermen talking and smoking his cheroots, or when he was going to make an important family pronouncement after dinner.
“You are a Rosario.”
Alfonso knew what he meant. Rosario, his family name, meant rosary.
“You should be happy to spend the time in the church reciting the rosary to Our Lord. It is a beautiful thing.”
The old fellow was repeating himself. In his funny Portuguese accent which was so different to theirs.
“And to me, my son, Rosario has a deeper meaning than just the chain of beads. I think of it as Rosa and Rio. Roses and river. It is a river of roses flowing out to our dear and compassionate Lord.”
Alfonso had known the words rosa and rio and rosario in the Portuguese language of his upbringing. He had thought of many, many things as he had walked in the sea with his shrimp-nets. Why the good God allowed such violent storms to turn the sea into a dark fury of froth and racing currents now and then, why the rains poured down washing out their whole lives every year before Christmas, why ugly men like Pedro Rodrigues had such beautiful daughters, why Joao Fernandez who was totally evil always had the best catch. Why the male king-crab was so much smaller than the female. But it had never occurred to him that there was more meaning in words beyond their sounds and what everyone knew they meant.
He said his act of contrition dutifully and bowed his head as absolution was given to him and stood up and walked away from the carved wooden confessional, crushed, dejected. “Six bloody decades,” he muttered silently to himself.
He walked out of the church a little dazed. He could not stay there kneeling and saying six decades of the rosary. Everyone would notice him. Besides, he had to gather his thoughts first. It had been a terrible shock to him.
He went to the beach where he had found solace in the unceasing soft sounds of the waves breaking on the shore almost since he was a toddler. He sat on the sand frowning.
Decada siexta! The usual penance for him was decada uma. Had the Padre gone mad? Was it really such a terrible sin? Or was the Padre annoyed with him about something else? He dismissed the last thought as soon as it had risen.
Yes, sure it must be one of the first thoughts of rapists, fornicators and adulterers. But God knows that he wasn’t one of them. Hell! He wasn’t going to throw away his whole life for a woman.
And he wasn’t the least bit interested in her. Not Philippa de Brito! Good heavens. She wouldn’t look at him if he had the finest voice in the village, or played the guitar better than anyone else, or danced even more beautifully than Ignacio Gomez, or had found a fabulous treasure of gold in the old sunken ship in the bay. She was three years older than he was.
He pulled his baju off over his head and slipped off his sarong and walked to the water in his loose underwear, as all the other fishermen would do if they were going into the sea. He crossed himself and dived into the water. He would swim till his arms and legs were tired and the confusion and anger in him died out. He did not see that what had hurt him most was that the Padre’s severe penance had stabbed deeply at his pride, his image of himself.
PADRE ROCHA stepped out of the church through the sacristy door into the cold morning air. He pulled out a cheroot from the depths of his black cossack and lit it. His lower lip curled down as his stomach twisted into a knot with a strange pain. He decided to walk along the beach until the confusion and anger in him died out.
He turned right when he got past the periwinkles on the edge of the beach. He knew Fonso would be sitting on the beach to his left. He was the last person Padre Rocha wanted to meet.
His anger boiled up in him. He had not lost his head like that for years. The wretched wine and that dirt the oaf Fonso Rosario had thrown at him. He was fuming with rage at himself.
Six bottles. Six bottles of one of the finest wines he had had for years. He knew that his bedroom was too hot. Especially now in July. It was his stupid fear of Vellupillai picking up the bottles to dust them that had made him move them to his bedroom almeira. He’d been out in the tropics long enough to know better.
What a shock it had been after he lifted the chalice in prayer during the consecration and then put it to his lips. It was close to pure acid. But by then it was the blood of Our Lord and he drank it with a grimace. He was already chastising himself when that oaf Fonso whispered almost inaudibly about Philippa de Brito. The stupid boy. All that hunk of muscle and no brain. He could not see that the devil himself was in Philippa trying to seduce him. Oh God! Almighty God! Why have you made these Mesticos, these half-Portuguese, half-Malay children of yours with empty skulls?
He had lost his head and lashed out at Fonso, sentencing him to a whole six decades. It was not him. Not the cool Padre Rocha who had settled so many differences and fights in his flock.
It frightened him. He knew that one either got more irascible and intolerant, or more calm, more understanding and benign as one passed through middle age. Nobody continued along the way they were. It was one direction or the other. His loss of self-control had startled him.
He had to pull himself together. Almighty God had put this motley flock of parishioners into his hands. He had to keep himself whole in body and soul to honour the responsibility that sat heavily on his ageing shoulders.
He had started greying. He was already forty-three. His father had died in his village near Braga in Portugal at fifty-two and his mother two years later. He didn’t have many years left.
He thought of himself at Fonso’s age. Walking into the seminary with the bundle of clothes his mother had so carefully put together. He had never seen them again after that day.
No. He was younger than Alfonso Rosario. Three years younger. He was fourteen when they took him in. Yes. That’s right. He was ordained at twenty. Six years later.
His mind turned to Fonso. The big oaf was in his prime now.
When he stood up in the pulpit every Sunday and surveyed his congregation, adjusting his robes deliberately to keep them waiting and trying to read their degree of impatience that day, his eyes invariably found Fonso sitting erect with his uncombed shock of blonde hair rising above the heads around him and his arms, browned dark in the sun and sea-salt, thick and muscular, folded across his chest, waiting. Like an animal. A lion. He had seen him grow up from the pink-faced baby he had baptised a few days after he arrived in Malacca. Seventeen years ago.
Padre Rocha sighed and dusted the ash off his cassock. He was such a beautiful baby. Nine pounds eleven ounces. He only remembered it because Mrs Rosario repeated it at every christening she went to. Ah, the old dear, with her sins of stealing two chillies from the Foos’ shop, the kedai.
At twelve Fonso was a lovely boy. How beautiful he had looked holding up the cross in front of the procession every Good Friday. His face a picture of innocence and devotion. His bright blue eyes shining with pride underneath that mass of blonde hair.
Padre Rocha had worried about Fonso then. Because he knew everything about every imaginable kind of sin. It had fascinated him at the seminary when he was taught about the ghastly acts that were then inconceivable to him. He had studied the subject with a fervour that made Father do Douro frown ominously. But he had redeemed himself the morning he had stood up and expounded his concept that out of the Seven Deadly Sins, images arise like gleaming forms in the silver of a mirror, like soft liquid shapes in the reflection of a lake, as the left hand is to the right, as good is to evil, Seven Attributes of the image of God in man. He had gone on and talked of the humility of Jesus versus the sin of Pride, the sublimation of the saints versus the sin of Lust, the calm of the Blessed Virgin Mary versus the sin of Anger. The whole class went silent, listening, as he went through every one of the Seven Deadly Sins, painting pictures with the radiance of every colour of the rainbow on the divine complimentary virtues of the Seven Deadly Sins.
Monsignor de Resende had grabbed Father do Douro’s arm that evening as they walked out of the chapel after the Angelus and whispered in his ear, “That boy Rocha. God has sent him to us. We must mark him for a missionary posting to the heathen Orient.”
Padre Rocha, with his engrossment about sin, had tossed in his bed many a night, concerned about the beautiful Fonso Rosario, with the sin of sodomy slithering in and out of his body and mind like a Satanic serpent.
Sin had stopped his hand many a morning as he sat at his desk sipping the sweet morning tea Vellupillai had brought in while he put down the points he wanted to raise in his sermon on Sunday.
The sin of Lust had loomed up like a storm cloud when he arrived in Malacca in 1870. He had never known that the sensuousness of woman could penetrate a man’s heart so swiftly and deeply with the faintest glance, the subtlest sudden jerk of the female body with which the native Malay women drew men to them like honey-birds to the ripe fruit of a palm tree.
From his knowledge of sin he knew that the men of his flock coming in from the sea to their women would meet the bloodstreams of their sun-soaked Malay ancestry surging through them.
He had planned to grapple with the dragon and preach a total onslaught against onanism when he first arrived, but had thought the better of it and had desisted. They will learn, he consoled himself, that it does not bring the results they expect.
Despite his fears and his mental torment, Alfonso Rosario grew into his teenage pure and beautiful. Only his pride tainted him.
He stopped and turned round to walk back towards the church. Vellupillai would be getting worried by now. His breakfast would be cold. He cast the thought aside and walked on. It was not just the problem of Fonso, the lion-haired lad. There was also that vixen Philippa to think about.
And so many problems with his stupid, stupid flock. Stupid fishermen speaking a three hundred-year-old Portuguese that was quaint but still understandable to him. When his Holiness, the Bishop of Macau, had visited his parish he was surprised how easily His Holiness had slipped into their dialect. His Holiness had laughed when Rocha commented on how quickly he’d adapted to their archaic tongue. He had once been in Brazil, he said, where they also spoke a dead variety of Portuguese.
“But not three hundred years old, Your Holiness,” Rocha had added and had the last say.
It annoyed him that they did not have the slightest desire to improve themselves. They were still not trying hard enough to speak the English of the present rulers of the land. They had not learnt Dutch when the Dutch captured Malacca, but perhaps in their wisdom they saw that the Dutch who treated the natives like dirt would not stay for long. Besides, it was a coarse sounding language so different to the lilt of Portuguese.
He raised his head for a moment and was surprised to see that he was already near the church. He turned inland, thinking of his breakfast.
The anger and disgust at himself had seeped away somewhere into the sands of the beach.