Hunting Midnight

I caught up to Daniel outside the city gates. “What are you following me for, caralho!” he snapped.

Caralho was a rude reference to the male member. Many residents of Porto commonly ended their sentences with such swear words.

At a loss for words, I trudged forlornly behind him. Finally, I piped up that I wished to thank him for freeing me from Tiago the roofer.

“You’re a strange little mole,” he said.

“No, I’m not,” I replied, wounded, because I was not yet aware that he was right.

In a singsong voice, he then said, “Esquisito e pequenito, corajoso e faladoso…”

It was a rhyme describing me, I was sure, and it meant, “strange and small, courageous and talkacious.” This last word, faladoso in Portuguese, was plainly an invention of his own.

I began to believe in that moment that he might be clever. He gave me a wily smile, his tongue darting out. One of his canine teeth was missing and made him look a bit daft. I knew nothing of Shakespeare then, but I can easily imagine now that Puck was penned with an actor of Daniel’s temperament in mind.

He then told me of his fisherman father, who was away in Newfoundland. The lad was going to join him at sea in two years, after his fourteenth birthday. He said that his mother was a seamstress at a dressmaking shop on the Rua dos Ingleses, one of our most elegant streets.

“She makes things for all the wives of the wealthiest merchants,” he boasted. Sensing my suspicion that this was rather far-fetched given the state of his clothing, he added with assurance, “Ma sewed a dress for Queen Maria once. Long and purple, with lace everywhere. You never saw so much fabric. Shit, you could have clothed two or three cows in it.”

I would have wished to learn more about the similarities between dressing Queen Maria and a small herd of cattle, but he forestalled my questions by pointing to his house just ahead — a moss-covered hovel on a narrow dark street by the river. A straggle of honeysuckle snaked up the facade and peaked over the rooftop, bees zooming through the perfumed flowers.

Daniel took a key from his pocket. We entered a tiny square room, no larger than five paces of a man from side to side. The ceiling sagged at its center and was covered by a fuzzy black mold that gave off a sour smell. I worried about being buried alive, but he pushed me inside.

A faded floral rug was spread over the chipped tile floor to the fireplace at the back wall. Fuzzy brown cabbage leaves floated in the water of a wooden basin sitting before it. A granite crucifix above the hearth caught my attention. The Savior’s visage was painted over in a ghastly array of colors. I never asked Daniel who did it, but it occurs to me now that he was the likely culprit. We kept neither cross nor rosary at our house, my father dismissing any and all objects of Christianity as tokens of superstition.

Raising his eyebrows mischievously, Daniel led me into a slightly larger room, where a cracked window at the back wall allowed a gloomy light to filter through. Two rude mattresses were wedged into the outside corners.

Daniel hopped around the sprawling mess on the floor with deft little leaps and succeeded in reaching a chest fashioned of old planks. Opening it, he pulled out a roughly carved wooden mask with a bulbous snout and hollows for eyes. Two V-shaped sticks had been inserted in holes in its prominent brow, creating spiky antlers. The mouth was a somber slit.

He placed it over his face and was transformed into a creature of the forest. My heart sank. I said, “You ought to be careful. Changing into animals can be dangerous.”

“It’s just a mask, silly.” He offered it to me.

I took it and stared through the eyes. He told me he’d made it himself. When I asked how, he pulled an iron chisel, two short knives, and mallets of varying sizes from the chest.

“Where’d you get all that?”

“I bought some of them with what I get collecting clothes for Senhora Beatriz to wash. I begged the others from a cooper I know. He gives me what he doesn’t need.”

“You work for Senhora Beatriz?”

“I do.”

I hoisted myself up onto the rim of his chest. A score of masks nestled in among the old clothes. Some had antlers, others horns. A few had serrated mouths, like the teeth of a wolf, and one had the pointed snout of a mosquito.

We decided to bring the masks of a frog and a deer with us to my tarn outside Porto. Daniel also took from beneath his straw pillow a tiny canvas pouch with a drawstring opening. He slipped it over his neck. “There’s a charm inside,” he explained to me. “A monk wrote it out for Ma to give to me. She says I have to wear it to protect me when I leave the city, because there are lots of witches hiding in the countryside. She says they have hair like horse manes and smell like leeks.”

Daniel opened the pouch and lifted out a piece of old brown paper, folded in four. “I can’t read nothing — you read it to me,” he said, opening it up.

The talisman was written in a rough scrawl and said:

Divine Son of the Virgin Mary, who was born in Bethlehem, a Nazarene,and who was crucified so that we might live, I beseech thee, OLord,that the body of me be not caught, norput to death by the hands of destiny. If anyevil should wish to track me or watch me, in order to take me or robme, mayits eyes not see me, mayits mouth not speak to me, mayits ears not hear me, may its hands not seize me, may its feet not overtake me. MayI be armed with the sword of St.George,covered with the cloak of Abraham,and sailin the arkof Noah.

I was most impressed and reread it while he slipped on his mildewed leather shoes and grabbed a threadbare quilt in case it got chilly in the woods, since he was planning on spending the night.

Our path out of town took us past the market of wild birds by the Sao Bento Convent. So moving were the peeps of distress coming from the larks and thrushes caged inside this ramshackle row of wooden stalls that my hands formed fists.

“I’d like to destroy this all!” I declared.

Daniel summoned me ahead with a swear word, and I thought, mistakenly, that he hadn’t noticed my anger. By the cattle pens we saw a wiry, long-haired man in a ratty fur-collared cape, a most impractical covering in the June heat. Overturning a wicker basket, the man climbed on top. The skin of his hands and face was bone-white. Crouching as though to do battle with a dragon, he began to shriek that the body of Christ was the only way toward redemption. We stopped to listen and heard him announce that all Jews, Protestants, and pagans would be expelled from Porto. We who were left would come to live in a City of God through the drinking of the Savior’s blood.

“Filth, vermin, excrement of the devil!” he shouted. “We must fling all the Marranos into the dung heaps and be done with them once and for all!”

There was that word again — Marranos. It rankled me that I did not know its meaning. And twice in one day I had heard it.

Daniel shook his head when I asked him what it might mean, and he dragged me away. Just then, the preacher ceased his rant. Made curious by the silence, I turned and found him staring directly at me. Grinning, he motioned for me to come closer to him — or so it seemed at the time. My heart was thumping a warning.

A squat man with a feather in his cap then led a goat at the end of a tether, a noose around its neck, to the preacher.

“In the guise of a goat comes the devil!” the preacher told the crowd. “And in the guise of the devil comes the Jew!”

Taking a blackened knife from his coat, he jumped down from the basket. When he thrust it into the poor creature’s side, it shrieked and shuddered, then fell to its knees. Blood sluiced from its wound like water from a spigot. Holding his hands to this living fountain, the preacher smeared his face and hair with blood, raised his arms, and called on the Lord to witness this sacrifice. Cries of terror pierced the air as onlookers scattered in all directions.

Noting my fear, Daniel said, “John, any old bugger with a rusted blade can kill a goat. Come on — let’s