Early Monday morning, I stood outside the kitchen door of the church, in a plain skirt and blouse. I had tightly braided my hair and tied a scarf around my head. I wore no jewellery except the fragment of caul encased in silver, hidden inside my blouse.
As I peered through the grille, I could discern a slight movement, dark and light. I knocked, and the door opened.
Sister Amélia wore the same heavy robe as Father da Chagos, although hers was brown, and a long black rosary was tied around her waist. Her head was covered in two layers: a tight white wrap that formed a band across her forehead and was caught up under her chin then fell in folds onto her shoulders, as well as a looser black veil that obscured her vision on either side. Her feet were bare, like mine.
Sister Amélia’s hands were covered in flour; a thin gold band glinted on one finger. There was a round of dough in a deep wooden oblong bowl on the table behind her.
I stepped in and handed her the empty charity basket. I was immediately too hot in the small kitchen, with the fire roaring and steam rising from a big pot.
“Are you useful with a knife?” Sister Amélia asked. Her voice was soft.
I put my hand on my waistband, where my blouse covered my gutting knife. I suddenly wondered if I should have brought it into the church kitchen. “Yes.”
“Good,” she said, and smiled. I realized she was young, much younger than my mother. “You can chop those onions and peel the sweet potatoes.” She pointed to a thick board and a big knife, and returned to kneading the dough.
We worked in silence. My stomach rumbled, and I slipped a piece of sweet potato into my mouth and tried to chew it without making a sound, glancing sideways at Sister Amélia. She was watching me. I stopped chewing, but she said nothing.
By the time she had set the dough to rise, I had finished with the vegetables. She filled a wooden bucket with boiling water from the pot over the fire and took a basket with rags and some small jars with stoppers from a cupboard. She held out a long white garment with loose sleeves. “Please wear this surplice.”
I put it on over my blouse and skirt. Sister Amélia then handed me the bucket of hot water and led me down a narrow, dim hallway to the church. The bucket was heavy, and I didn’t want to slop water onto the floor, so I walked carefully and slowly. Sister Amélia stopped at a wooden door, richly carved. “You enter the church through here. You’re to wash the floor, especially in the nave, all the way to the apse. Then, with a cloth dampened with a little olive oil,” she said, pointing to one of the jars, “wipe all the woodwork of the sanctuary and the sacristy. You must be careful when you polish the silver candle holders and chalices—use this.” She opened another jar and held it towards me. I smelled soda ash and salt. “Rub gently, to avoid scoring the silver. And you’re never to touch the monstrance or tabernacle.”
I set down the bucket before the closed door. “I don’t know what any of those things you talk about are, except for the candle holders.”
She looked at me for a long moment as I felt the steam from the bucket soft against my bare leg. Finally she said, “Is anyone in the church?”
I pulled open the heavy door and looked in. “No.”
“All right. I’ll come in with you and show you what you need to do. But I can’t be seen.”
I wanted to ask her why, but the hush of the empty church stopped me. For the next half-hour the nun explained it all. Then, as we stood looking up at the statues of the saints in their niches, the church was flooded with light as the front door opened to admit a parishioner.
In a whisper of cloth, Sister Amélia was gone.
I stood looking around me after she left, the bucket and mop at my feet. Ignoring the woman kneeling in prayer, I walked around the church, staring at the ceiling, which I now knew symbolized charity. The floor, Sister Amélia had said, represented the foundation of faith and the humility of the poor. I ran my hands over the columns, representing the Apostles. I studied the saints, imagining them whispering to each other from their niches in the empty church as I whispered to my absent father on the beach or on the cliffs.
I was happy to be surrounded by such beauty, and as I mopped and polished I hummed my father’s sailing tunes under my breath.
When I came into the kitchen a few days later, it was empty, and the fire out. I quietly called Sister Amélia’s name, and at her murmur, I went to the doorway beside the fireplace. Her room was tiny and steamy, little more than a closet, with a slit of a window covered with a wooden grille. Sister Amélia was curled on her side on a pallet on the floor. A large, rough wooden cross hung on the whitewashed wall over her.
“Are you ill, Sister?”
She slowly sat up. She wore a plain white dress with long sleeves and a high neckline. Her head was still covered by the white cap, but without the black veil. Her dark eyes glistened, perhaps from sadness or perhaps because they weren’t shadowed by the veil. By the way the wimple fit snugly on her head, I could tell that her hair was cut short; only a few dark wisps showed at the hairline. Her heavy crucifix hung on her chest, and I tried not to stare at the high mound of her breasts, which were unnoticeable under her robe. I hadn’t really thought of her as a woman before, with a woman’s body and a woman’s miseries.
“Is it your monthly time?” I asked. “I can run home and bring you back some dried chasteberries. They will ease your cramping.”
“No. It’s not that. I have a melancholia that comes some days. It will pass. It always does.” She tilted her head. “Why do you stare so, Diamantina?”
I smiled at her, wanting to heal her, to make her feel better. “You’re pretty, Sister Amélia,” I said.
She frowned as if my compliment had upset her further instead of pleasing her. “You mustn’t say that. I must not know any pride.” She rose and smoothed down the white dress.
“Where is your habit?”
“This is my sleeping gown.”
“Are sleeping gowns only for nuns?”
“No.”
It struck me as strange that someone would wear different clothing to sleep. “Does Father da Chagos wear a different gown for sleeping?” I asked.
Sister Amélia’s cheeks coloured. “Really, Diamantina. That is an unspiritual thought.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, but not sorry about my unspiritual thoughts about the fat priest. I was sorry for Sister Amélia’s state of mind.
“Please go to the kitchen and start preparing the fish you’ll find in the basket by the door,” she said, “while I rouse myself from my bout of self-pity. And later we’ll make banana flan. It’s Father da Chagos’s favourite.”
As I turned, she added, “Take a banana for yourself before you start.” I smiled at her again, grateful for her kindness.
When she came out a few minutes later, dressed in her habit, I said, “I delivered a baby to Ana de Mendonça yesterday.” I wanted to cheer Sister Amélia with an interesting story. “It was an easy birth—her ninth, so the little girl almost slid out. She’s a sweet baby, pink and healthy. Ana thanked God that she didn’t have the split upper lip, like two of her others.” Again I smiled at Sister Amélia as I filleted the long black scabbardfish, but she was silent, her lips trembling.
I had said the wrong thing. “I’m sorry, Sister Amélia. I shouldn’t have spoken.”
She took a deep breath and her lips grew firm. “No,” she said, swallowing and then briskly rubbing her eyes, as if annoyed by her own tears. “I must be thankful for the path God has chosen for me. There are two paths for a woman: wife or nun. I am a nun.”
I was silent for a moment. “I will never be a wife either, Sister Amélia.”
She frowned. “Why not?”
“Who would marry me? I’m an outcast, looked down on as my mother is.”
“But … Father da Chagos said your mother was a healer. And that you carry on her role.”
“Teresa Trovão is the island’s curandeira. We perform the same duties as her, but we’re called witches, because we’re heathen.”
She shook her head and made a sound with her lips. “People are afraid of what they don’t understand. You strike me as a clever and resourceful girl,” she said. This was the first compliment I had heard since my father had left, and it filled me with a soaring pride. “I’m sure your future will unfold in ways you never imagined.” She put her head to one side. “It appears to me that a young woman like you will not be without a man.”
I wasn’t sure how she meant this. The glow I felt from her earlier comment faded.
The few réis Father da Chagos gave me every week were enough to survive on. I always looked into the shops as I walked home, imagining the pleasure of cloth for a new skirt or blouse, or a new book, or even the smallest of sugar loaves, but I had no means for anything more.
I came to clean early on Mondays, before Mass, so later I could listen to the service at the opening in the carved doors. I also peeked at the congregation in the pale light falling through the windows, at the altar boys with their candles, and at the pious saints in their niches, looking down on the kneeling figures. I breathed in the fragrance of the incense from the censer and waited for the chime of the Sanctus bell. From my position I couldn’t see Father da Chagos, but I felt as though the Latin words intoned by him were like my mother’s magical incantations. As I’d memorized hers, I memorized what the small congregation repeated after him. I wondered if the words themselves contained some healing power, something to help the women who wept as they prayed, poor things.
Sister Amélia and I slowly learned about each other. She had never seen my father, but she knew of his work on the bells. I told her about his leaving, and about the life my mother and I now lived.
She had come from the convent of Catarina of the Cross in Funchal Town, and was a discalced Carmelite, meaning she was barefoot; part of the penance of her order was to be unshod. The Carmelites, she said, were enclosed nuns, freed of all attachments by separation from the world. “My order dictates that we do not see anyone from the outside world, and speak only for specific purposes. That’s why I can’t be seen by anyone, or have any communication, apart from Father da Chagos. And he only speaks to me once a day, to give me instruction. I’m not allowed to speak to him, except when he hears my confession.”
She was beating eggs, her habit tied out of the way by a piece of twine. I tried to imagine never seeing or speaking to anyone. I said, after a moment, my hands in a tub of water as I scrubbed the dirt off whiskery carrots, “But you can see and speak to me.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “It’s because … Father da Chagos thought … as you are …”
“An unholy bastard?” I offered helpfully.
Her face flushed. “It’s very sad that you’re not a child of God. But I sense that Father da Chagos, in spite of his gruff demeanour, has allowed you in the kitchen to help me as well as you.” She stopped beating and took a deep breath. “I miss the cloisters in Funchal,” she said, “and the other Sisters. Once a year I was allowed to see my family through the grille.” She stared down at the eggs. “But I will never see them again. I have been affected by sadness, and my work suffers. I think the Father saw your presence as a way to … to perhaps encourage me. To remind me of my purpose.”
The carrots were clean, but I kept my hands in the cool water. I tried to think of a potion my mother used to treat melancholia. “Why are you here, if you were expected to remain cloistered for life?”
“I was sent to Porto Santo as punishment.” She set aside the bowl and untied the twine from her waist. As had become her custom, she put a few pastels de nata in the charity basket she gave me each week. They were special convent pastries, filled with heavy cream, sugar and egg yolks, with more sugar caramelized on top. She had told me the pastries originated when nuns searched for a way to make use of all the egg yolks left after the whites were used to starch their wimples. I could smell the warm, fragrant pastry with its rich filling. The tarts were kept only for Father da Chagos and any special guests he might have—definitely not for the charity baskets. She also put a few altar candles in the basket today. From the furtive way she always hid the small extras, I knew she did not want the priest to find out.
“What did you do?” I thought of broken plates and burned bread, perhaps falling asleep during prayers.
“I used to have a daily struggle with obedience and humility. I found it difficult not to question,” she replied, still looking down into the basket. “Perhaps in that way—needing to question what we hear, and see—we are a little alike, Diamantina.” She finally looked up at me. “I tried to help a novice escape from the convent to run away to the man she loved.”
I didn’t move.
“I knew what she felt like. I wasn’t brave enough to do it myself, but I helped her. She was caught, as was I.”
“You were in love with someone?”
She waited a moment before speaking. “I was much younger when I imagined myself in love. I didn’t fully understand what was best for me. I wasn’t able to see the dangers, and wasn’t ready, then, to accept the path God had chosen for me.”
“And now you do?”
“And now I do,” she said firmly, once more busying herself with arranging the contents of the basket. “And I will be here, serving out my penance, for the rest of my life.”