and bushland simply to get here, to this wee cove with Francisca and the children. I was so confused. I seemed to be in two places at once.
When my wife finally looked back at me, her eyes were moist. “Is that all it is, John — the weight of having a family? Is that truly all that has been troubling you these past months?”
“That’s enough, I should think — a father who doubts his capacity to care for his family, who does not know where he is or what he is doing, who fears that death may come for him at any moment. I feel as though I’ve lost my way.”
“Nothing more, are you sure?”
“What more could there be, Francisca? Isn’t that enough for you?”
She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed with relief, tears rolling down her cheeks. “There could be much more, John. You could have given your heart to someone else.”
I realized with knife-edged clarity what a silent monster I’d been. I’d thought nothing of her welfare. “Oh, God, where have I been?” I kissed my apologies over her brow and cheeks. “Francisca, I’m sorry. It’s just that I do not understand how a man can be both in love and still feel the things I feel. I never expected it. Can you forgive me for being such a fool? There are still so many things I do not understand — about myself most of all.”
I wiped away her tears with my thumbs, a gesture that triggered a memory of Midnight doing the same for me. I felt his strength inside me, deep down, drumming in my gut.
Neither of us spoke for a time. Francisca studied me closely, then said, “We saw you from afar and we are dying of hunger.”
“What … what was that?” I stammered in astonishment.
“We saw you from afar, John, and we are dying of hunger.”
“Why do you say that? How did you know I was thinking of him?”
“John,” she explained, “there is a certain look you get when you are remembering Midnight, as if you are gazing far off toward a darkening horizon. When you spot him there, your eyes open wide, perhaps in response to the great light in him that you have always told me about. I thought that hearing his greeting now might reassure you that I mean you no harm. I wanted to remind you that I am not so different from him. Our affection for you makes us almost brother and sister, in a sense.”
I saw that she and I were growing closer than ever before. It seemed to me now that it was precisely this closeness of spirit that I had been resisting of late, perhaps fearing it as a betrayal of Midnight, Daniel, and Violeta — of all my past.
“John,” she said, “I understand you better than you think. You see, I share some of the same feelings. Can a woman’s spirit not suffer from strain? Can a mother not wonder about the worth of how she passes her days? Am I so different from you, John Stewart?” She laughed at my surprise. “There are times when I cannot breathe either, you know, as though you and they” — she gestured toward the girls, who were drawing with sticks in the sand — “were a corset being pulled tighter and tighter around me.”
“You feel such things?”
She sighed, plainly irritated that the thought had never occurred to me. “John, I have two tiny children who need me all the time, and a husband for whom my fondness knows no bounds but who might have been finding consolation in the arms of another. And I could say nothing, for fear of driving him away from me. Think of the hunger in that.”
I took her in my arms again and kissed her with a desperate intensity. In our renewed ardor I recognized all I had been withholding from her, all I had failed to do for her.
“Forgive me,” I said. “I am not so strong as I thought, and I worry that I may fail you when you most need me.”
This fear was one I’d never contemplated before, but I now realized it had existed in me ever since my father’s death. I have reflected on this period of my life at length in recent years and have concluded that the legacy of my parents’ unhappiness had just caught up with me — and terrified me.
I explained everything to Francisca, searching desperately for the right words, suggesting hesitantly that we might very well suffer the same fate as my father and mother. They had loved each other once like playful children, after all, and had ended as strangers. They were surely no different from Francisca and myself, and yet their friendship had shattered into recriminations and regrets. “What is to prevent us from becoming like them?” I asked her.
“John, I do not know if love will stay with us throughout our lives, though I hope and pray it will. So all I can expect of you, and you of me, is honesty. From what you told me of your dear parents, that seems to be the one quality that was missing at times from their marriage. Forgive me if it hurts you to hear that.”
“Francisca,” I sighed, “it’s not as simple as that. Anything might happen to us, even if we are honest with each other. We cannot know what plans the world has for us.”
“Yes, that’s true, John. But since we cannot know those plans, we have only our faith in each other to rely on. John, what I think you need to know is this….” She scooped up some sand in her hand. “I shall go with you wherever you wish. And I shall help you accomplish whatever you choose. Or …” She paused. “Or stay behind.” As she sprinkled the warm sand on my toes, she repeated something I had once written to her in a letter: “Just do not soar so high that I cannot catch sight of you. That is not so much to ask, is it?”
“No, it is more than fair,” I agreed, smiling as best I could to hide how moved I was; by now, the children, sensing something was wrong, were watching us suspiciously. When I saw Graca’s worried face, I covered my eyes with my hands, so that neither of the girls would see my tears.
Francisca kissed me on the cheek, saying to Graca and Esther, “Everything is fine. Your father and mother are well. They are simply in love, and people who are very fond of each other occasionally go slightly mad.”
With the girls now clamoring for our attention, we could not wrap the quilt around us and make love, as we wished. But perhaps that was not what we truly needed at that moment. It was, in fact, reassuring and comforting for the four of us to sit together and speak of the ocean and other things beyond our own lives.
We fetched water for Lidia and Filipa and hitched them to a lamppost — I would pay their owner to retrieve them later. As we started home, I lifted Graca into my arms. She fell asleep immediately, her head on my shoulder, her croquet ball safely stowed in my bag. Francisca cradled Esther, who was carrying a white scallop shell, determined to ask as many questions about it as she could think of.
When we finally reached home, totally exhausted, Francisca said, “John, know this — should you wish to steal all the goldfinches, jays, and wrens still kept in Porto’s bird market, I shall help you. Plan any escapade you wish — with or without me. I will love you whatever you become and whatever miracles you might make.”
Gilberto and I were now full partners. I had long since given up hope of selling works based on Goya’s drawings or my own fanciful imaginings. The good citizens of Porto wanted tilework in the old styles — depictions of saints and idyllic landscapes. The Portuguese will probably always be happy to place either St. Anthony or a cow on their walls — it makes little difference to them which.
For Francisca, I glazed wainscots of my own design and paneled the wall leading to our garden with scenes from Exodus. Animals played all the parts, including that of Moses, who was a lion with eyes glazed in silver and black. I believe Midnight would have admired my work, though most visitors considered it perfectly obscene.
I was always experimenting with colors and brushes, and I never tired of painting narratives for my family based on Torah stories and Midnight’s animal tales.
In the children’s room, I plastered tiles of chimeras, dragons, and sphinxes all over the walls. When they were tiny things, they would feign grabbing these creatures in their hands, shake them, then spring their fingers open and allow the winged beasts to fly free. It made them giddy with laughter.
The girls proved to have very different characters.
Esther, the youngest, was like Daniel: She always lived an arm’s length from peril and would have it no other way. When she ran it was with perfect abandon, her thick auburn hair flying behind her. She was composed of sprightly things — of butterflies, tops, twigs, and bells. Her mind was a fugue. She could exhaust you by simply sitting on your lap and making requests.
