The Conjurer and Other Azorean Tales by Darrell Kastin

Author:Darrell Kastin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth

THE WOMAN SAT IN HER BED, PROPPED UP BY HUGE HEAPS OF HEAVY pillows. Blankets lay scattered every which way. She looked, to her husband, like a large, plucked bird tangled in a messy nest.

“What’s that horrible smell?” her husband said.

“What smell?”

“That smell. Like . . . I don’t know what.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” the woman said, as she returned to the careful examination of her wounds.

The husband threw his hands up in disgust and turned away. He had developed a method of refusing to see what he did not wish to see. His wife, on the other hand, did not live outside of her fascination for the wounds, which for months now had broken out and spread upon her body. They had appeared one day and had stayed with her ever since. From the very first she could not leave them alone. Her husband awoke at night and found the woman bent over, poking the sores with inquisitive fingers, lifting them to her nose and sniffing at them suspiciously.

“What do you hope to find there?” he asked.

She merely huffed, or shook her head, or ignored him and remained silent, as though to speak was beneath the dignity of the fate she suffered.

The husband tried his best to avoid these unpleasant spots. It was inevitable that he should brush up against them, or forgetting, reach to touch his wife, who would scream, cringing at his touch, not from any pain she suffered but because she felt that her wounds were hers and hers alone. For the longest time he was only permitted the barest, most fleeting of contacts. And then not even that. In any event, they were horrible to look upon.

The husband suspected that his wife was causing the wounds to worsen, enlarging them with her constant attention.

“Where will this end?” he asked. “Why do you do this to yourself?”

The woman burst into tears, crying without a break for an entire day and night. Now she began to complain of the accompanying pain, whereas until then the wounds had been painless. Night after night she howled, and her screams invaded the nearby streets, filling the empty silence.

Advice flooded in from the neighborhood: pray, bathe twice a day in the natural baths at Veradouro, spread the infected areas with the pulped bodies of banana slugs, boil this root, take these herbs, burn these leaves. Meanwhile, her husband spent more hours in the cafés and elsewhere.

“I don’t have a wife anymore,” he commented sadly. “I have an open wound chained to her holy bed of agonies.”

His friends drank with him in solace.

“What’s wrong with her?” he asked. “Why does she carry on so?”

The others could give no answer, except those few who were inclined to agree that God in his wisdom had chosen her as a martyr.

“It’s a mystery,” they said with a shrug.

He went home to find her lying on the bed, moaning, and looking at her various wounds with a handheld mirror. The house was in terrible shape, and the children wandered half-clothed and filthy.

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