rhyme:
He reached deep into his pocket and tossed me the coin that the raven-haired lout in the tavern had offered him to walk on his hands. “You are the owner of all that is mine, including my masks,” he said.
I assumed he meant that I would inherit his things when he went to sea with his father. I wanted to beg him to come home with me. My parents and I would find a way to help him. But without warning he reached to his chest as though pierced by a bullet. “I’ve been shot,” he said.
At first I was stunned, my senses dulled by wine. Then I understood that he was acting, pretending to have been wounded in battle.
Daniel limped along the edge of the slick stones, his hands clutched over his heart. Then he teetered, tilting away from land. Squeezing his eyes tight, as though resigned to the inevitable, he fell into the muddy water.
What was he thinking as he tumbled down? I cannot say for sure. I only know that when I imagine myself in his place, I sometimes feel the seamless wash of relief flowing through me as I enter the water.
I waited, expecting him to surface wearing an exuberant smile. I recalled the kingfisher we’d seen on our first day at the tarn, who had disappeared under the water only to emerge with wings flapping, a tiny fish caught in its beak. I shouted his name, then ran to where he had toppled off the edge. I thought I saw his hands reaching toward me, then receding and disappearing altogether, like a dream withdrawing beyond the recall of memory. Two sailors were standing nearby, pointing toward the water where he had fallen.
“Help me!” I shouted to them. “Please help me.”
They didn’t move or call back to me, so I slipped out of my shoes and dived in after him.
I was a strong swimmer. My father had made sure of that. I pierced the water with the arrow of my hands and swam down. The water was freezing, and fish jostled around me, battering against my face. Yet all I could think of was finding Daniel and getting him to the surface. I had to apologize — to tell him that the only thing I knew with certainty about Violeta was that she loved him.
The water was surprisingly shallow — no more than ten feet. When I came close to the bottom, I twisted in a circle. I could make out what looked like an iron wheel planted in the riverbed, but the water was thick with mud from upriver and the current was fierce. It was tugging me away. It must have already carried Daniel a good ways downriver.
I surfaced for breath and heard a man shout, “What do you think you’re doing?” but I paid him no heed. Other people called out to me, but since none of them had Daniel’s voice, I swam twenty strokes to the west, then flipped my legs up and dived down, reaching forward with my hands and pulling the water behind me with the most powerful strokes I had ever managed. Then I saw him, his hair swirling above his head like seaweed, his arms floating limply. I darted down for him and grabbed an arm. I tugged once, but he seemed to pull back. I tugged again and felt the weight of his resistance. He was alive! Yet his eyes, open, were staring neither at me nor at anything else. I was fully empty of air by now and was forced to surface. I took two quick breaths, then gulped a third deep down into my lungs, positive that I could rescue him. This time I threw my arms around his waist and locked my hands behind his back.
I have no idea how long I stayed underwater trying to pull Daniel up, but I vowed not to surface until I got his head above the waterline. I closed my eyes and kicked madly with my feet, but may Daniel, Senhora Beatriz, and Violeta forgive me, I soon grew dizzy. About three feet from the surface, my arms gave out. He fell away from me, swallowed whole by the greedy river. Now I was forced to struggle for my own life. The water was very dark and I could no longer tell which way was up and which was down.
Then I heard my father’s voice shouting my name. I closed my eyes again so that I might hear him better. But he spoke no more. I felt myself being pulled down.
After a few moments of complete blackness, I felt something brush against my hand. An instant later, light flooded my eyes. I was above the water. I heard jangling voices like scattered coins. “Good lad!” a man shouted.
There was a rope in my hands and I was gulping down air. A man reached for me and lifted me out of the water.
I was unable to catch my breath. My chest felt as though it had been scraped with rusty metal. “He’s down there,” I said between gasps. “My friend, Daniel. Please help him. It may not be too late.”
A sailor took a rope in his hands and dived off the landing. He was under a short while, then surfaced. “Pull!” he shouted.
Daniel, the rope tied around his waist, was soon tugged to the surface.
“Help him!” I begged.
The men lay him on his back. The sailor who had rescued Daniel and whose dark, alarmed face I will always remember pressed his hands into my friend’s chest at short intervals. Then he leaned his ear down to hear the lad’s heartbeat. After a few more attempts, the sailor shook his head. He reached for me in kindness, to take my hand, but by then I was unable to feel the touch of anything in this world. Though I was shivering, I was not cold. I was listening to the throbbing in my ears, and it was telling me that the impossible had happened and that I was partly to blame. That now I would have to grope forward into a future that was never meant to be.
Later that afternoon, before news of Daniel’s death had reached her, Violeta trudged home from the marketplace and discovered — leaning against her house, directly below her window — the tabletop he had carved with the faces of children. Though I was placed at the center, peeking out from behind a small sweeping frond of fern, it was the lass herself who had the only face executed in exacting detail. Indeed, her eyes were so accurately rendered that, as she knelt to touch his gift for the first time, it occurred to her that Daniel had seen further into her than even she had imagined. He had understood her loneliness as no one else ever would.
X
Imagine the naivete of a lad born inside the soot-blackened warren of Porto’s crumbling streets, who still believed that he would walk a straight path toward happiness. But after the events of the Twenty-Seventh of April, 1802, the knowledge that life would never be fair blossomed black inside me.
That first day, I refused to leave my room, too exhausted and bewildered to cry anymore. Sometimes I would close my eyes and try to find solace in sleep. When I was able to talk about what had happened to Daniel, Papa held me in his powerful arms. I told him the story from the beginning, even the part about my gulping down wine in the Cucumber Tavern, so I would never have to tell the story to anyone else ever again.
When I had finished, he said, “Goodness, John, you are only a young lad. Do not take the responsibility of the world on yourself.”
Sound advice, but those first few days I stayed in the dark of my room with the curtains drawn, for I could not risk seeing either the lad’s father or Senhora Beatriz — not to mention Violeta.
I believed that I would see accusations of my weakness in everyone’s eyes. We all knew that Daniel could not keep himself away from danger. I had been on watch that day, and I had not fulfilled my duty. Even worse, by telling him about Violeta, had I not pushed him to his death?
More than two decades later, I no longer think every day of the unfairness of his death and my guilt. Even so, it is nearly impossible for me to accept that I am now thirty-three years of age and he will forever be only fourteen.
It comforts me to think sometimes that, more than his masks, I inherited something of his daring and courage. I would guess that I imitated these qualities at first and, by so doing, succeeded in incorporating a small portion of them into my being.
The funeral was held three days after his death. My parents attended the brief ceremony, but I screamed and flailed when they suggested I go. In the end, Grandmother Rosa stayed with me. While I lay in bed, she said something to me I shall never forget: “It may be a good thing, you know, this lad’s death. His adoptive mother was nothing but a cheap prostitute. That’s why he never saw her. That stray dog was having a deplorable influence over you, my child.”
Her words so infuriated me that I grew feverish. By the time my parents came home, my forehead was
