Richard Zimler: Hunting Midnight

Daniel rushed to her, but she waved a trembling hand to halt his advance. “Go home,” she said, wiping her mouth. “We’ll talk later. Leave before there’s more trouble. Please.”

He shook his head. “I will not. At least, not until that shit gets swept into a dung heap,” he said, pointing to the villain.

Daniel’s accent gave him away as a resident of one of the crumbling riverfront neighborhoods. I was jealous of the way he seemed made for Porto, a city that had its share of gentlemen’s clubs and formal gardens but had at its heart a labyrinth of dark alleyways patrolled by peddlers, waifs, and petty thieves.

“Daniel, pay attention to me,” Senhora Beatriz replied, drawing determined breaths. “You must leave the city. Two days from now we will meet at your home. Please, before there’s trouble …”

The senhora would have pleaded further, but neighbors were beginning to gather. Very shortly, a group of men — some still in their night clothes, a few of them bare-chested — had formed a circle around the fallen driver.

“Is he dead?” Senhor Tomás asked his brother-in-law Tiago the roofer, who was holding the back of his hand to the man’s nose to see if he could detect breathing.

Various neighborwomen were now rushing to the aid of Senhora Beatriz, lifting her to her feet and making inquiries about the man and what had so incensed him.

I moved closer to the group of men. “No, he’s still alive,” said Tiago disappointedly — a perfect start to a new day of gossip would have required a murder, of course.

Senhora Maria Mendes, who was built like a bull, pushed her way through the men and spat in the insensible villain’s face.

“Pig!” she yelled.

“And you there, son!” shouted Tiago the roofer at Daniel. “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing throwing stones at people?”

“Now wait a minute,” came Senhor Paulo the tinsmith to the lad’s defense, “he was only helping Senhora Beatriz.”

“But with a stone the size of an orange?” cried Senhor Alberto.

“Had I a knife, I’d have slit the driver’s throat!” exclaimed a man hidden from me.

“Gouged his eye out!” declared another.

The men trumpeted their bravery by telling what they would have done to the evil brute had they arrived in time. The women scoffed at what precious little use any of them were in times of real need. Alas, none of this was of any help to Senhora Beatriz or Daniel, who were looking at each other as though they were the only two people on the street. She was being led limping into her home, clearly more concerned for the lad’s sake than her own. That sight made a solemn impression on me and I wondered how they knew each other.

The men now began demanding that Daniel leave their neighborhood. “You’re going to end up flogged if you don’t get out of here before I count to five! You don’t belong here, son,” Tiago the roofer shouted.

This struck me as unjust. As a lad of nine, I did not know that Daniel might have been in real danger. In those days, even a young boy could have his head impaled on an oakwood stake if the villainous driver were to die and if Senhora Beatriz’s testimony failed to justify his courage. I was also unaware that a count whose royal-blue damask breeches had not been soaped, scrubbed, ironed, and perfumed in a timely manner, whose wine-stained brocade doublet was still hanging like a rain-drenched bat from a cord in Senhora Beatriz’s back garden, was entitled to have his coachman beat the offending laundress near senseless. Anyone dissatisfied with this sort of justice could send his written protest to the Bishop, our mad Queen Maria, or even Pope Pius VII, who, even if he sympathized, would have been far too busy evading capture by Napoleon to open any communiqués from overseas. In short, one could send a letter of indignation to whomever one chose because it would make no difference.

No, I was not aware of these things, and so as I watched Tiago the roofer confronting Daniel, I was outraged.

The lad gazed down at his feet, confused. He had expected praise no less than I.

“Christ, I only wanted to help,” he finally said. “I had to. She’d have been deader than a drum otherwise.”

Daniel covered his eyes with his hand, unwilling to cry in front of the men, then rubbed his temples with his thumb and forefingers, as though to banish unwanted thoughts — a gesture of distress that I would come to know only too well over the next years. With maturity that I found extraordinary, he then said, “I guess I’ll be going now. Good day to you all.” Before parting, he went to retrieve his stone.

“Son, leave that be,” Tiago advised, pointing a finger of warning. “You’ve done enough damage for one day.”

Daniel picked up his stone nevertheless, eliciting reproaches from Tiago and the others. What added depth to my solidarity with him at that moment was his shorn scalp, plainly an attempt to rid him of head lice. This style was unfortunate, for it made him look ill and poor and might have inspired these men to act more harshly than was appropriate. If he had had blond ringlets of hair falling to the crimson collar of an expensive silken coat, this confrontation might have instead ended with pats on the back.

I ran forward. “Senhor Tiago,” I cried. “Senhor Tiago, Senhora Beatriz was being beaten. The lout was kicking her!”

“John, go home immediately,” he said, furrowing his brow in displeasure.

“She was hurt,” I cried, “and her eye was nearly closed. It was big and puffy. Couldn’t you see it? It was wrong to have done that to her. The man, he was … he was a bloody poltroon .” I said these last words in English; it was my father’s term for a dastardly wretch, and I could think of nothing in Portuguese to equal it.

Sensing in Tiago’s glare that he had not understood me, I frantically sought a worthy translation. He had other plans and grabbed my arm.

“Come, son, I’m taking you back to your mother,” he said, his eyes glinting with righteousness.

“If you don’t let me go …” I shouted.

“Then what?” he laughed.

I considered kicking him where the fabric in his tattered trousers hung suggestively forward, but sensed that this would only get me into deeper trouble.

“Make fun of me if you like,” I declared, trembling, trying to imitate my father’s voice, “but if you don’t leave this lad alone …”

Pity my youth, I couldn’t for the life of me think of a way to boldly conclude this exciting start to a sentence. And I still had not freed my arm from Tiago’s hairy grip.

Daniel, however, made an end to my threatening sentence unnecessary. Rearing back, he hurled his stone right at Tiago’s tyrannical face, but at half speed, so to speak, giving the man ample chance to duck.

The roofer dove to the ground, relinquishing his hold on me.

“Go on!” Daniel shouted at me, waving furiously. “Close your goddamned snout and run, you little mole! You’re free!”

Sometimes I think that hope is not all individual in nature, that it exists as an ether that suffuses into us at the moment of birth. Of late, I have even come to the unlikely conclusion that nature bestows upon us hands and feet, eyes and ears, so that we may work as loyal servants to this boundless mist of hope, performing when we can the delicate alchemy of turning it into tangible reality — giving it form and influence, so to speak. So when I found myself free from Tiago’s grasp, I served hope as well as my young heart knew how and bolted up the street, full of wild joy, paying no heed to the shouted commands behind me, wishing only to befriend the defiant lad who had helped me.