THE SKY IS MADE OF TEETH
MADEIRA, 1843–1846
For a long time when he lived in jail with his mother, he ate nothing but the music of birds.
Serafina Alves was a thirty-five-year-old widow on the Portuguese island of Madeira, condemned to die for heresy, for chatting like friends with the Presbyterian God. John, screeching, had gripped her skirts when the soldiers seized her, and they decided to use him to break her. If she did not return to the communion of her youth, she and her son would starve to death.
The jail was in their village outside the capital city, and John stayed barnacled to her middle. Their cell dizzied him with its scent of lime and salt.
“Hungry?” asked Tónio Dutra, the guard. “Accept the true faith, Senhora Alves.” John lunged for the key dangling from Tónio’s belt but only smashed his face against the bars. Tónio pivoted away, laughing and devouring a mango.
“We’ll eat some songs, John,” she whispered.
Music would feed them; they would feast upon sounds. Seabirds squawked and chattered close by, and their melodies tasted sweet. Mother said that John and she were birds themselves. He was a hawk with talons, she was a rock dove, and at first, they both dined very nicely on quite the little orchestra of their fellow birds.
My boy has blue wings, sang Mother.
I fear no evil, my love is a sword.
* * *
John was only five years old, but he was to remember how the hunger went into him strongly enough to sprout vines in his stomach that were white, like soft, leached bones.
O for a thousand tongues to sing / He sets the pris’ner free.
“Listen to the Little Birds,” said Tónio. Os Passarinhos! His eyebrows were caterpillars, and his hair was ginger.
“Mama,” said John. He needed to help her escape. This was all his fault. She smelled of papayas; her black hair was parted precisely in the middle.
Tónio declared, “Repent for reading the wrong Bible, Senhora, and we won’t hang you.” His former job had been hauling guests at the Hotel Jardim up and down the hill in a rattling wicker sleigh; he was strong enough to break a horse’s neck; flowers wilted in his wake.
She said, “Maybe if the priest stopped wearing a skirt and got married, he wouldn’t be so angry all the time.”
When Tónio extended his arm through the grated door to wag a scolding finger at her, John bit the guard’s hand. Tónio bellowed, unlocked the door, and punched John so hard he flew backward, and Mother caught her soaring child.
* * *
On the fifth day of hunger, John fully learned the language of the birds. They tend to ask, “Where are you?” For every fifty notes about fright, eight are searching for beauty.
“Mama,” he said, “I want to go home.”
“I am your home. God is your home.”
Your eyes are windows, Mother. Your skin my walls. But I’m dreaming of our pine table, the blue ceramic bowl, my toy piglet, and Nikka gathering mint while Rui rocks in the striped hammock. As the hours expanded hot and large, John got mad at the Lord: What kind of “home” was He? God is hunger, God is baffling. John huddled on Mother’s lap, his nose denting her throat as he inhaled a remembrance of her gardenia powder.
Often he heard Nikka pleading in the distance, begging for their release.
John asked his mother why the Reverend Robert Kalley, the Scottish missionary who had converted many of them to the Protestant faith, was not coming to the rescue.
“He’s hiding in the valley,” she replied. “He’s no good to us dead.”
He almost shouted that her death would not be good for anyone, either.
Tónio grinned when he announced, “Senhora Alves, return to the Lord of your birth, and I’ll bring cake.”
The word “cake” poured over John.
Lemon and cocoa-nut were his favorites.
At night Tónio brought them water, and Mother gave most of it to John. The basin held his blurred face split into ribbons. A fragment of star streamed through the window and struck the back of his head, burning a hole as he bent to swallow his face.
Mother talked to God, sometimes aloud and sometimes in her head, and she seemed, always, very sure of what He told her. She believed that every sound—every sigh, groan, or murmur—got writ upon the human record, and so did every thought. Nothing—not one thing—in the universe is lost; each person at every second designs creation. No action is truly hidden, and no intention is merely scuttled into the ether. Every pin dropped, or kiss stolen, or furious reaction swallowed, every whisper of gossip or flicker of feeling, no matter how well it stayed concealed: Everything adds its beats to the lyrics within the ears of God, and He replies to the faithful.
But John could not hear any divine Voice, because he wanted jam on corn bread more than the Lord’s Supper.
* * *
Blackberries and nutmeg!… Toast so hot it sears the roof of his mouth. Banana fritters; swordfish in port; rosemary like black earth sugarcane paraffin on jelly jars hens’ eggs with salt and days long as longing and craving contracts into a white point that grows into a band. And you float in the band. Even after a feast when you’re old, you’ll put your hand below your heart and there is that white band, ravishing you. This is desire. This is love.
* * *
Ravenous, on his back with arms and legs spread, John watched the birdsong break apart as it sailed through the grate covering the window. The whole notes, and the circles of the half-notes, pressed onto him like Nikka’s tambour and held his skin taut while the stems of the notes pierced like needles.
Mother grabbed Tónio’s collar and hissed, “You’re killing a child.” He squeezed her hand until she let go; she refused to yelp in pain.
“Don’t worry, Mother, I’ll get us home,” said John, but she did not hear him because his words melted as they puffed from his mouth.
“What?” said Tónio. “Say that again, John.”
His birdcage rib cage was expanding. He spoke. He wanted to beg, “Let Mother take me home.”
With a victorious shout, Tónio dragged Mama away. John was knocked aside, a disgrace, because he had uttered, mumbled, one word, echoing now inside him, despite having first been released so softly.
“Cake.”
* * *
The grate over the window chopped the sky into the shape of teeth.
The cake had been a wedge of rough-ground corn and olive oil that stabbed his stomach. Mother would tell the priest he was a fool, and they would burn her at a stake. She would die before denying God as she had come to know Him—all Spirit, everywhere.
* * *
Insects throbbed in the holes of the walls until John felt watched by blinking black eyes.
* * *
How many hours was he alone, ignored even by Tónio? The stillness reverberated, and inside deepest silence was a mermaid’s chanting. He wanted Nikka, large-eyed as a lamb. She liked to wash their clothing in the creek and lay it over lavender to dry, a chore that prompted her to hum. He longed to be cast down upon the grave of Father in their yard, where Mother planted a morning glory that twined through the kitchen window so that plum-toned flowers sent from Father’s body laid their aching heads on the cutting board, under the pots blackened by meals, twisting slightly, clacking with pleasure despite hanging from hooks. John listened to his house, to the living and the dead. If he stayed quiet, God might speak to him as He did with Mother and describe how to rescue her.
But then he erupted in squalling, hurtling against the bars, calling for her, for Nikka and Rui, and for the Reverend Robert Kalley, and his shrieking rumbled toward the city of Funchal and skimmed over the hardened lava like sinew shouldering its way out of the buckled ground and carried onward, to tilt the hypnotized boats in the harbor.
He gasped when his throat offered nothing more, not even raw bleating. Awash over him came music. People were singing the hymn “Pouring Out Our Rapture Sweet,” the sounds traveling, he guessed, from the hillock between the dolphin-flecked sea and the jail, men and women and children funneling words to heaven that heaven in turn was raining upon him.
The tunny-fish in the tides swished and salted the wind that blew the melodies of these unseen souls to him.
Someone was splitting pineapples with a machete, commanding the breezes to carry the juice’s spray.
O Happy Home, Where Thou Art Loved.
Light of Light, Enlighten Me.
The songs commanded him to abide by Mama’s anthem: If you live through one minute, you can survive the next, drink us up, eat us up, the world is a musical instrument. The banana trees sway like tall, jeweled women with violent hair who are mad to dance but only in one spot, such a racket, and someone, somewhere, is splitting a guava or beating egg whites until they form castles. Listen! Someone is opening a fish, lifting the spine by its tail to get to the meat still printed with the memory of its bones.
Nikka was unlocking the door and giving him bread. She begged him to stop crying. People heard you, John. You’re free.
The protesters, Catholics, too—their leader was a Catholic—demanded your freedom. Mother must stay in another prison, but they’ll feed her. Kalley got arrested, and they are praying in the same place. You were brave.
* * *
Forever John would hold a vision of his older brother, Rui, weeping in relief and of Nikka in a cloud-colored dress, her necklace of volcanic glass swaying like a child’s swing as she lifted the cauldron of kale soup off the fire. She was old enough to become a second mother and took in laundry to earn money. From a secret new Bible, they read Genesis. The Reverend Kalley believed in the education of everyone, including women and girls. How else to obtain God’s words?
They absorbed English. Wait. Watch. Year. Yearn. Sleep.
John learned to dive and excelled at holding his breath for inhuman lengths as he collected shellfish, scraping limpets in their tiny-volcanoed homes off rocks. An onslaught of needlefish once wrapped him in a silver bow. When the salt stung his nostrils, he kicked to the surface, where the air sighed like a church organ’s coda. He wanted to write that down in a way that allowed him to hear it over and over, his breath marrying that organ’s moan.
Whenever he set out to reclaim Mother, he usually got no farther than the ravine marking the border of their village of Santa Cruz, where Nikka nabbed him, assuring him that Kalley was struggling to get her released. But one morning John eluded his sister and hurried toward Funchal. People had been whispering that Mother was in a filthy dungeon, where men and women, godless criminals, seethed together. If Tónio was the guard, John would kill him with the knife in his pocket.
His legs ached because Madeira was full of pumice crags, jagged gaps, vertical hanging gardens, and pillars of vegetation, and he paused at a trail into the interior. Rui warned that its one inhabited spot—Curral das Freiras—was still littered with the skeletons of pirates pierced by swords thrust into them by nuns. God had split the earth with an axe to discover what was fermenting below, but then He speared laurel trees toward the fissures to stop the groaning devil-bodies of nuns and pirates from crawling out. Dwelling there now was a colony of humans like knotty saplings who ate flaming wood and bared charcoal teeth at intruders, and John drove himself onward.
Madeirans used a language of whistling to cover expanses, and John stopped because a harvester tending grapevines and a man hoeing fava beans were rolling up whistles and sticking them into make-believe bottles to pitch to each other across an abyss. They spoke in his direction, too, and he offered the yodel he used to announce suppertime to the pigs. The men volleyed back something John could not decipher, but he felt rocked in the netting of the sounds.
Funchal churned with people as he hur`ed crimson or Chinese blue. He asked a shopkeeper selling wicker dolls where the prison was and got pointed down the avenue overlooked by the bluffs with the mansions of the British who built the embroidery factories and molasses-works.
Two young guards held bayonets outside a fortress, and when John demanded to see his mother, they were polite in apologizing that they needed to keep her locked up.
John said, “Where is Tónio Dutra? I need to kill him.”
Copyright © 2023 by Katharine Vaz
