It happened on Christmas Eve. The brother, sister-in-law, and nieces and nephews had just left—she could still hear their cart creaking as it rounded the bend in the road—and Emília, after one last glance at the crib, leaned against the window to peer out at the night. It was the vast, deep night of the open countryside, with no moon and an entire vault of stars. In the distance, the bell on the village church rang out lightly, brightly, in celebration, breaking the silence. From the kitchen, where she was washing the wine glasses, came the weary, monotonous voice of Dores:
“João will miss the beginning of mass.”
Emília shivered. She made as if to answer her mother, to at least say something, but the silence of the night had wrapped about her, and she couldn’t utter a word. Nor could she think. It was as if she had dissolved into that calm atmosphere and completely ceased to exist. Then her mother coughed, and she remembered that she wouldn’t be there for another Christmas. She smiled contentedly at the thought of Joaquim. What was he doing at that moment, far away, lost in the city, without family, without friends, without her… He had sounded rather fed up in his last letter, more so than in his previous ones. He spoke of the barrack as if it were a prison where he was serving a sentence for murder. He asked wistfully about the land, if it had rained lately, if there had been a good olive harvest. He thought the city very ugly, said he couldn’t breathe there, and that as soon as he had done his military service, he would leave and never set foot in the city again. It would only be a few months now; next year she would be married, far from her father, her mother, and the lonely country life to which she had never become accustomed. Far away… She smiled again. When Joaquim came back…
“That man will be the death of me!” Dores said, standing in the doorway. “He won’t leave that wretched bar, not even tonight, not even on Christmas Eve. And he’s sure to make a scene when he gets in. That’s if he doesn’t fall over in the street like he did before.”
“Best not to say anything and just leave him be.”
“Oh, gladly. But he’ll kick up a huge fuss, don’t you worry. You can imagine the state he’ll be in. A couple of days ago, he received the money for the olive harvest, so he’s a wealthy man. I’m just afraid he might fall in the river.”
Emília looked away. The light from the oil lamp lit up Dores’ gaunt face, lending it the yellowish tinge of a dying woman, an impression confirmed by her black dress and bony hands. Her burning eyes were almost too deep-set to be seen.
“I’m going to bed,” said Emília, yawning. “At least he won’t bother me there. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
Emília lit a candle and closed her bedroom door. She paused for a moment before the plastic-framed mirror that Joaquim had given her when they had first started going out together, then very quickly got undressed because it was so cold. Next Christmas would be different. She imagined a very quiet night, with her and Joaquim sitting by the fire. They would definitely have cakes to eat, because he had a very sweet tooth. She would make filhoses like her mother always did… She stopped unbuttoning her top to ponder what it was that always prevented her from loving her mother. Did she really not love her mother? Of course she did, but… Her father was a drunk, and she had always felt afraid of him. As a child, she would tremble like a reed when he came home, his face all flushed, and start blubbering and kissing her. Even now, he would sometimes try and kiss her, but she always ran away from the horrible stink of wine on his breath. Her father would chase after her, determined to plant a kiss on her forehead and run his calloused hand over her head. Emília always avoided looking him in the eye and instead stared down at the floor. His eyes made her feel physically sick. Sometimes, they were so sad, like those of a stray dog, sad and bloodshot. They seemed to beg her to look at them, as if begging her for a little love. And Emília had finally come to realize that she despised him and that, even though he couldn’t give up the booze, he couldn’t bear to feel that his own daughter despised him. Emília shrugged. It came down to this: He was a hopeless drunk and no one took him seriously. But her mother…why did she not love her mother as she ought to? Was it because she’d never seen her fight back? Was it that waxen complexion; those moist, transparent hands; those dark, sunken, accusing eyes of hers? “I’m just afraid he might fall in the river.” The fool, the silly fool. If she had her way…
Emília drew the cold sheets up around her ears and blew out the candle. Outside the front door, the dogs barked, then began yelping cheerfully. A slurred voice sang:
When Maria da Graça passes by
How daintily she passes…
“Here he comes,” muttered Dores.
A key began to scratch at the door. The man was struggling to find the keyhole and was swearing angrily. Emília raised her head from the pillow to hear better. Just as long as there wasn’t a scene! Oh, how she hated shouting! And yet she pricked up her ears because she didn’t want to miss anything. If only he would just disappear. The stupid drunk!
The front door burst open, and her father’s booming voice filled the house with the next line of the song: But today when she goes passing by…
“Don’t make so much noise, the girl’s asleep,” Dores said.
“Oh, shut your mouth!” he yelled, slurring his words. “If I want to make noise, I will. Who earns the money around here, eh? Who spends all day laboring in the fields, eh?”
He fell silent for a moment, awaiting an answer. When no answer came (Dores must have been giving him one of those endless looks of hers), he yelled even more loudly:
“Shut your mouth!”
There was another brief silence, then he returned to the same subject:
“Yes, who is it who does all the work around here? You and your daughter, is it? Who’s the slave here, the drudge?”
He spoke in fits and starts, swallowing half his words; he was probably about to throw up, thought Emília in disgust.
Her mother said softly, calmly:
“Don’t you know what day it is today? João and Maria and the little ones were here, then they went off to mass. João was sorry to miss you.”
The man swore.
“I know what he needs…and I’ll tell him when I see him. So he couldn’t wait for me, eh? He may be quite the gentleman, but I’ll tell him.”
“We ate filhoses,” said Dores. “The little ones loved them. I kept some for you in the pantry.”
There was a menacing silence.
“So they couldn’t even wait for me?” he said slowly, as if he couldn’t believe such an injustice. “They ate filhoses, but they couldn’t wait for me…”
Emília pulled the blankets up over her head. He had almost reached the blubbering stage, she thought. A few moments more and he’d be going on about how he was the unhappiest man in the world and how no one cared about him. But that isn’t what happened. Suddenly his furious voice filled the whole house; it must have been audible outside too, because the dogs started barking again.
“You bitch!” he shouted. “You great bitch! You shameless cow. So they filled their bellies, did they? I’m warning you… You won’t do that again, I swear you won’t do that again!”
Dores screamed:
“Emília! Emília!”
Emília jumped out of bed but couldn’t find the candle. She wasted a few seconds feeling her way along the wall in the dark, her heart pounding. Her mother kept screaming, clearly terrified now.
When Emília went into the kitchen, she met her father’s eyes, but he didn’t seem to see her. He was like a madman. He had his wife firmly in his grip with one hand and in the other he was holding the iron poker.
Dores’ eyes were very wide, and she was staring at the poker as if hypnotized. Emília felt her blood run cold. She was too terrified to think.
“Just you wait, you bitch! Just you wait!” And he laughed a smug, imbecilic laugh.
Emília went over to the hearth and picked up a small log that was lying there. With one short, sharp blow, she struck the drunkard on the head. And suddenly, the poker dropped, Dores staggered a little, and the man fell slowly to the floor and lay there full length. Emília couldn’t quite grasp what had happened. Dores was staring at her husband in a strange way. Emília then looked down and saw an open mouth and two motionless, glassy pupils. A shudder ran through her, and she realized she was still in her nightgown. This seemed very important, and she felt she really should put on something else because it wasn’t decent to stand like that next to her father’s body…
Dores murmured in a voice not her own:
“This is bad, very bad… What did you do?”
“I think I’ve killed him…”
And she started sobbing like a mad thing, resting her head on Dores’ cold bosom, and her mother, without a word, held her close.
When, much later, she managed to draw away from her mother, her head felt heavy, her thoughts confused. All she wanted was to go to sleep. She was falling asleep on her feet, her eyelids heavy as lead. Dores crossed the kitchen as if sleepwalking, then returned shortly afterward with a shawl that she placed around Emília’s shoulders. She had an anguished expression on her face. Twice she opened her mouth to speak, but gazed instead at Emília’s pale face. Emília wanted to speak too—indeed she felt she really must—but still she couldn’t open her mouth. Finally, in a faint voice, she said:
“Do you think I should go to the police tomorrow and tell them everything?”
She was standing very erect and didn’t want to start crying again. Her mother must decide; she would do whatever her mother told her to do. Dores didn’t even move. She was leaning on the table, her face in her hands.
“We haven’t checked,” she said. “We haven’t made sure yet… You’re talking as if…”
But neither of them dared to make sure. They stood there, transfixed, neither doing or thinking anything. Emília began to weep softly. Then her mother bent over the body and picked up one lifeless, almost cold hand.
“Is he…?”
“Yes,” said Dores with a weary sigh. “He is.”
She looked straight at her daughter, and it seemed to Emília that she was no longer the same weak, long-suffering creature she had been a second ago. Her eyes were different, her voice too. She seemed more alive.
“We must hide his body,” she said abruptly. “No one needs to know anything.”
Emília suddenly felt something opening up inside her. Hide him, yes, hide him. Why had she not thought of something so simple? And only now that she felt free did she comprehend the terror of those last few moments. No one needs to know anything, her mother had said. No one would know, and she would still see the morning sun and still marry Joaquim. It hadn’t been her fault; there was no reason to feel remorse. Suddenly everything was very easy and clear. And yet…
“What if someone passed him on the way here?” she asked fearfully, hoping against hope that her mother would convince her that no one had seen him.
Dores said slightly brusquely:
“It’s not very likely, but if someone did see him, too bad. We have to take that risk. The only thing we can do now is hide him in the barn. If they come and search the place and find him, too bad.”
Emília felt her eyes filling with tears and had a great desire to kiss her mother. She had said “we,” voluntarily throwing in her lot with hers, taking her side without anyone asking her to. And still she stood there stiff and motionless. She hadn’t kissed her mother for years. Dores herself would be surprised if she did. She didn’t like that kind of thing. Sappy, she would call it…
“You must put some clothes on,” said Dores. “Then we’ll go to the barn.”
“Now?”
Her mother gave her a hard stare.
“What? Do you think we should wait until tomorrow? You may not remember, but Bento’s coming to fix the netting on the chicken run tomorrow. We have to work quickly so that everything’s ready by sunrise.”
They first had to move the cow, then sweep away the layer of straw on the floor. They dug for two hours, until they were completely exhausted. Emília was eager for it all to be over, but she worked slowly because the thought of going to fetch him and pick him up filled her with horror. When the moment came, she almost fainted. Dores went over to her and slapped her.
“We have to finish this,” she said bluntly. “Then you can faint as much as you like.”
Since Emília was the stronger of the two, she picked the dead man up by his armpits, and her mother by his feet. Together they dragged him over to the barn, as if he were a scarecrow. They dropped him into the hole and, still without saying a word, refilled the hole with earth and smoothed it over. It was almost dawn by the time they had covered the spot with straw again and put the cow back. Then they went into the house and lay down in bed together, their arms about each other, eyes wide open.
Bento turned up at eight o’clock, and Dores told him she was very worried, because her husband hadn’t come home that night, so she was going into the village to find out what had happened. She wrapped her shawl around her and set off.
That same day, the search began, although they didn’t waste much time on it. Various witnesses, the owner of the bar among others, said that Dores’ husband had walked through the village drunk as a skunk and singing loudly. Many of them thought he must have fallen in the river, and two policemen spent an afternoon patrolling the banks. Then the matter was forgotten.
Emília lived through several nightmarish days. She didn’t eat and could barely sleep. She looked like death, and everyone was surprised at the depth of her grief. Then, when she learned that the police had dropped the case, she fell into a deep melancholy. She spent hours and hours sitting in a chair, staring into space, with some sewing forgotten in her lap. Dores would sometimes shake her out of this torpor with her newly acquired sharpness of tone. Emília would then get up and go to finish making supper or fetch water from the well. They never again talked about it. Both women knew, though, that they thought of nothing else. João and Maria came every Sunday. They talked about him, recalled things he had done or said. Once, Emília jumped to her feet, her lips trembling. Her mother said quickly:
“She gets like this whenever anyone talks about her father. She’s still very upset…” And she said nothing more until the visitors had left.
João began to visit less frequently, and his wife, Maria, was glad because she had never liked her sister-in-law or her mother-in-law. In the village, people were starting to say that the two women weren’t “quite right in the head.” The only time they left the farm was on a Sunday to attend seven o’clock mass, but they never lingered. They now looked more alike too, and no one could say if it was because the mother seemed less downtrodden or because the daughter had lost her youthful freshness. “Joaquim’s in for a shock when he comes back!” said the local gossips with a snicker. Emília was also keenly aware of Joaquim’s imminent return, and the thought filled her with anxiety.
One day, she sat down at the table, her eyes red from crying. Dores looked at her attentively but said nothing. For a long time, they hadn’t felt the need to say anything to each other. At the end of the meal, Emília said in a voice that struggled to sound natural:
“I wrote to him today breaking off our engagement.”
Her mother replied simply:
“Quite right. I don’t think you had any choice.”
And for the first time since that other night, they embraced each other and wept together.
Emília then experienced a few days of great calm. Without the threat of Joaquim’s return hanging over her, she felt that her life belonged to her entirely. She stopped doing anything. She would sometimes wander around the farm or sit down on a stone or a bale of hay to think. She almost stopped washing, and her hair was greasy and tangled.
One afternoon, her mother said:
“I’m going to sell the cow.”
Emília did not respond. She understood. Dores could not bear going into the barn any more. God knows how she must have suffered during the last months whenever she went in to give the cow its feed.
They sold the cow and closed the barn door. At around that time, they also stopped attending Sunday mass. For lunch they ate boiled potatoes and for supper whatever their very neglected vegetable patch continued to provide. They had both grown very thin, and in the village it was said that they were going hungry so as not to spend any money. Joaquim, fully recovered now from his disappointment, was courting the grocer’s daughter and telling his friends that God had clearly been on his side because Emília had turned into a real old crone. He had seen her one day leaving mass with her mother, both of them with their heads swathed in black shawls, and he had barely recognized her. She was thin as a rake, he said. Emília had seen him too. And after that, she never went back to the village.
The year was passing. Dores and her daughter slept in the same bed now. Sometimes, at night, Emília would wake up terrified and shake her mother awake too, then lie staring into the darkness unable to rest until Dores, all atremble, lit the candle. Sometimes, Dores would wake Emília up:
“Did you hear? Someone’s at the door…can’t you hear it? Can’t you hear?”
Emília would break out in a cold sweat and listen tensely, intently. And the two of them, mad with terror, their wide eyes trying to penetrate the blackness, would wait, expecting that, at any moment, the door would open and something would enter the room and touch them with its cold, clammy hands. They would only calm down as day began to dawn. Then they would sleep until late and often even forget to eat lunch. They would get up in the late afternoon, always looking at the clock, already thinking about the fast-approaching night.
One day, the two women had a long conversation, as perhaps they never had before. The daughter began by suggesting something to her mother that had long been germinating in her mother’s mind too. It was, therefore, easy to reach an agreement, and that night they both slept more easily.
When, many days later, João came to visit the farm, he found it deserted. He called out, but no one answered. He searched the whole house, but found nothing and no one. Noticing that one of the dogs was sitting outside the barn, whining, he put his shoulder to the door and burst in. The two women had hanged themselves.