ON THE MORNING OF MY CRISMA my mother braided my hair with moringa from the garden. She stood back after plaiting the buds into my hair and, congratulating herself on the work of art which I, lace dress, lace veil, and wearer of her well-tended blossoms had become, said see what a pretty girl I could be. The more often she said such things, the more I resented my sex and the awkward complications of my body. I looked with envy at boys my age, kicking footballs, able to go out late and return whenever they pleased, and swearing in the street. If I were a boy, I believed, I might escape all that those blossoms and my mother’s words seemed to prefigure…In her bedroom, my mother opened the lid of her old jewellery box. With its evocative scent of sandal and patchouli, it had once held such a charm, yet now I looked upon the contents with a heavy sense of duty, as a dowry I wished to forsake. She presented me with a gold crucifix; her own mother had given the same to her on the day of her Crisma, she told me, and turned the pendant over to show me the devanagari signature of the old goldsmith from Goa, before fastening the chain round my neck…We took polaroids in the garden and Ifigênia gifted me a scapular that had a picture of Santa Teresa of Avila on one side and the Virgin Mary on the other. At the last moment, we found Crio unable to stand properly. In the months before, we had begun to see him bringing up his food. We carried him to his favourite spot – some old, fragrant coffee sacks in the kitchen – and he keened plaintively. Papá said he would soon have to be put down and my mother and I both cried. Then she reapplied her kohl and composed herself, creating a face to present to the world. On the way to the cathedral, the hair pins with which the stems of the moringa had been affixed to my hair came loose. When I put my hand to my head to secure them, the blossoms fell out. The Crisma dress was too tight; I had grown a lot since the time I had been measured for it, and my feet hurt in the taut leather of the new shoes, though they were one size larger than I needed when we bought them. My arms and legs, suddenly ungainly and long – and nearly as obstreperous as my senses – seemed to pull me in all directions. I had not eaten anything that morning and, during the prayers that were said and the long reading from the Acts of the Apostles, I grew impatient. The priest read: ‘And when the day of the Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place… And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.’ I was sweating profusely. When I looked up, I saw the old fan rotating at its ancient pace; threads of cobwebs lifted lightly from the beams and dust motes danced before the amber-coloured lozenges of the stained-glass windows. I looked at Susana who was sitting with her family in the opposite row, praying in earnest. Just a few weeks earlier I had been sitting in much the same position, practising for this moment; then as now I had felt nothing at all; then as now, about to accept the blessing of the Holy Spirit, all I felt was a kind of numbness, a fraudulence. I fixed my gaze on the sixth station of the cross in which Veronica, wearing a red velvet gown, skin cherubic, held up her veil for Christ to wipe his brow. I looked closely at the muslin of the veil which contained a ghostly imprint of Christ’s face…Who was the artist, a native presumably, who had painted Veronica in this pose, I wondered and my eye traversed the entire Way of Sorrows: Jesus meeting his mother; Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus carry the cross; Jesus falling the second time; Jesus meeting the women of Jerusalem. How such a story, the terrible spectacle of a man’s torture and suffering, could be said to be redemptive, I failed to understand. ‘Our Father who art in Heaven’, the congregation now faithfully recited, and I wondered how a god, said to also be among us in spirit, and of whose flesh we were apparently to partake too, might really have accepted that the cathedral itself was built in his name with the labour of so many enslaved natives. Or that the musseques of the homeless were only a stone’s throw from the cathedral. My mother had told me to look away but it was precisely in that direction, to what was unseemly rather than sanctified, that I was drawn. My own name, Maria-Cristina, in fact said everything and nothing about who I was or my origins; I could have been given any other name – Isabel, Elisabete, Fernanda – it now occurred to me…and how different my fate might have been had my ancestors fled into the hills with their gods. There was a children’s book by which I was enchanted when I was small and which I had recently uncovered in my bookshelf. It was a book of stories from the Mahabharata. My favourite was that of Shakuntala, born among birds, who, when abandoned by her husband, Dashuntya, takes her young son and rears him in a wild part of the forest. I loved the part of the story that told how Shakuntala’s son Bharata was so astute with the animals he would coax the wild tigers and lions to open their mouths so he could count their teeth. I would ask my mother to stop and reread this passage to me. I thought, I should like to take that name, Shakuntala, rather than that of Saint Teresa, whose story I had been learning by heart in preparation for my Crisma. For I should feel more kinship with such a woman, born among birds, who escaped to a forest to raise her child alone in the wild, than one who had spent her life cloistered in a cell of a convent, meditating on mortal sin and subjecting herself to deliberate tortures – even if the result was a kind of spiritual ecstasy. These thoughts swirled round and, with each new one, I kept sweating some more. I felt faint as the priest held the host aloft and broke it; as he took it into his mouth and feverishly swallowed it; as he gulped the wine from the chalice. Soon the initiates began to pour into the aisles and I knew I should go ahead. As I did, I began to worry that blood had overflowed and stained my dress. I had been keeping the secret from my mother for some time and now could not do other than whisper what I feared. She frowned, dismayed that I should wait for such an occasion to say so…It was not so bad though, as I saw after the ceremony when we arrived at one of the large mansions on the Praia do Bispo where there was a party. I went to the bathroom. The blood was there, like sticky black tar, but there was not so much of it as I had imagined. Susana was standing away, under a large palm tree. She invited me to Cape Town, where she would soon be going to join her uncle’s family. I felt I was making a false promise when I said yes, for I knew I would probably never see her again and had already begun to distance myself from the pain of this knowledge by pretending not to care. This did not have the desired effect, for she misted up and embraced me. The truth was that I had abandoned Susana for the friendship of another girl, Andrea, whose party it was. Her father was a senior official in the Consulate General of the Union of South Africa and went on one diplomatic mission after another. Her mother spent her days throwing parties and having treatment in a clinic in Amsterdam for the terrible depressions which coincided with her father’s absence. Andrea was very beautiful, with dark hair, pale freckled skin and piercing blue eyes. She played piano virtuosically and invariably came first in class, yet needed constant reassurance. Now she asked me to come swim in the pool. I told Andrea I was bleeding. She laughed, Oh, the curse, and said to come in anyway. I followed her into the pool but I became self-conscious and then got out again…She stretched her legs in front of her and told me how she had started to shave them without her mother knowing; later she would show me how. She bit the split ends from her hair and said there were a lot of things she did not tell her mother. She was in love with an older boy, Miguel, a friend of her brother’s, who managed a shipwright’s factory and now she pointed Miguel out to me and speculated about her prospects with him. As she kept talking, I looked up and saw the clouds; they moved ever so slowly but if I slowed my mind too I could observe them moving infinitesimally…We got up and went inside and, as we neared the top of the stairs, we met Andrea’s mother on her way down. Her halter top hung low, her makeup was smudged and she appeared to trip a little on the stairs. Bangles jangled on her nervous wrists. She was smoking and the ash from her cigarette tumbled lightly to the carpeted floor. I noticed her teeth were stained yellow from tobacco and she had a slight gap between them. As she started to speak she slurred her speech and I realised she was drunk. What a lovely complexion, she said, touching my cheek. Your family are from Goa? she asked, then before I could answer that I had never been there, she went on to say she would like to go one day. Are there coconut groves and do the Hindu women commit ritual suicide on the funeral pyres of their husbands? Is it true there are sacred cows that chew their cud in the middle of the road? I said there were no roads as far as I knew…Anyway, go and have some cake, she cut me off, it’s simply delicious. We balanced plates of the Crisma cake on our knees in the front room where the other guests had gathered, eating quitaba and watching footage of Benfica scoring a goal. The television did not give a perfect picture but everyone looked on in silence, captivated by the sight of Jaime Graça soaring through the air and making an unexpected comeback for the side. Someone changed the channel; General Kaúlza was being interviewed, talking about battlelines being drawn, and another guest shouted to change it back to the football. The mood changed from merriment and a fight soon broke out, with two drunks lunging at each other and the crowd scattering. It was humid; lights glittered about the pool. Andrea told me to telephone to ask if I could stay overnight, but when I called my mother I asked her to take me home. I said that Andrea was a flirt, only interested in boys and that her mother let her have too much liberty. My mother said there were plenty of such girls in this world. She said girls with self-respect were nowadays hard to come by. I returned and sat next to Andrea, hung my head and said, My mother is a real monster! Well, Andrea said, linking arms with me, Never mind, maybe next time. We turned back to the television screen and she said, You think your mother’s a monster? and then started to catalogue her own mother’s flaws and vices. I was not quite listening; my mind had begun wandering again, for out of the corner of my eye I had noticed the man after Andrea’s heart, Miguel, sitting on a cushion on the opposite side of the room. He kept sipping from his bottle of Cuca and licking the chilli of the quitaba from his lips. Now when he stood up to get a beer he smiled and I looked away, indignant, before breaking into a smile too. I was still smiling when my mother came with Caetano to collect me, but this smile disappeared as we entered the house because I realised Crio was gone. While we were gone, my father had taken him outside, shot him and buried him in the garden.