Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior

Author:Itamar Vieira Junior
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

11.

I knelt on the ground and closed Tobias’s eyes, then stood up and walked to the side of the road where his horse was cropping grass, head lowered, ears twitching to shoo away the flies. I caressed its belly as if that horse were the most important being in the world. I gave it a couple of light slaps on the rump, indicating it was time to move on. I held the reins and started walking with the others who were carrying Tobias’s body back to our house.

Maria Cabocla once told me that Tobias had upset a woman by the name of Valmira, a healer who lived in town. Tobias was drunk, as usual, and a bunch of Valmira’s followers decided to expel him from her house. The kerfuffle had something to do with Dona Miúda’s encantada, Santa Rita the Fisherwoman, who’d appeared at my father’s Jarê. Now manifesting herself at Valmira’s house, the encantada became the butt of Tobias’s invective. He publicly doubted her authenticity and demanded she demonstrate her powers; he went so far as to claim that Valmira herself was a fraud, that none of it was real. Several times the healer intervened, asking him to quit talking nonsense, but he wouldn’t stop or apologize. The encantada who’d mounted the body of Dona Miúda then focused her attention on Tobias and uttered a single sentence, which no one but Tobias could hear. “But he continued disrespecting the encantada,” Maria Cabocla concluded, “so don’t be surprised if some misfortune befalls your home.”

“Just like your grandmother, just like your grandmother,” my mother repeated, seizing me by the shoulders as I was wrapping a black kerchief around my head. My mother recalled the occasions, for there were more than one, when Grandma Donana found herself a widow, the several times she had to bury a husband. At Tobias’s wake, my eyes wouldn’t weep, the result, perhaps, of some enduring drought. Something in me had dried up ever since I agreed to our union, ever since I stepped into that trash-filled house and allowed Tobias to lift up my dress, ever since I absorbed those insults without retorting in the way I would have preferred. I stood by his coffin, not too close, but near the doorway, welcoming the many neighbors who were arriving to pay their respects. I felt unconcerned, empty of affliction, as I watched the mourners come and go. Domingas and my mother attended to them. Unable to fake any expression of sorrow, several times I felt obligated to send a mourner out of my presence. They were expecting me to play the inconsolable widow. They wanted my grief to be conspicuous: I should exhibit due respect for the man I’d been living with. More than once I had to restrain myself so as not to let slip a smile or gesture that would be deemed disrespectful by those present, particularly my father and mother. They’d better not expect me to start wailing and tearing my hair, I said to myself, observing the exaggerated sorrow and lamentations of neighbors and compadres.

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