Free Barnacle Love by Anthony de Sa Page B

one—snaked its way along the coast, hugging the cliffs so closely that if Manuel held his arm out the window he could scrape his fingertips across the damp rock wall. Large balls of pink and blue hydrangeas lined the road like weeds. Manuel remembered going out early in the morning during the
Festa de Nossa Senhora do Rosário
, histown’s patron saint, to cull their large heads and pluck their flake-like petals into linen potato sacks. The streets needed to be decorated.
    Manuel smiled when every so often the children were startled by the sudden pounding on the roof of the taxi—the gush of natural spring water falling from fissures in the rock above. He watched as Antonio pressed his face into a red balloon and squished it against the car window to make the world outside turn pink. Manuel couldn’t drag his eyes away from his son as he practiced the few Portuguese phrases he had been taught—
bom dia, obrigado
, and
olá!
—repeated them over and over into the balloon. The droning sound made Manuel’s ears itch and he was reminded of his own anxiety.
    As if sensing Manuel’s irritation, Antonio, dressed in his new blue suit, moved to his mother’s lap and rode her knee’s nervous bounce. Manuel knew that his mother, if she was still well enough, would see her grandson and recognize his greatness. He looked at Terezinha, a cotton ball in her First Communion dress. Just before leaving, her mother had cut her fine hair short, trimmed neatly around the lip of a bowl. Manuel had been angry but his wife had responded, “She’s my daughter, she needed a haircut.” Terezinha sat up front with the taxi driver. She wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything. Every once in a while Georgina would reach over the seat to tug at Terezinha’s ear when she was asking the driver too many questions.
    Georgina wasn’t the one his mother would have chosen for her son. Before the wedding, blood had been shed and hateful words exchanged, words that evenManuel had never dared to ask about. Manuel knew when it was best to stand back and leave things alone.
    “Okay?” Manuel asked.
    Georgina didn’t answer for a while. Only when he turned away did she respond. “She better not bring up the past. Or else—”
    Manuel reached over and folded her hand into his.
    He felt like a boy again as he gulped in the air that rushed past his face through the open window. Antonio mimicked his father by sticking his face out the window, but his mother pulled him back in by the scruff of his neck, careful not to crumple the crease in his collar, and tried to straighten his unruly hair. Every so often Terezinha would turn around and roll her eyes; she couldn’t sit still and began to tap her doll’s head rhythmically against the window. Manuel tried to reach over and hold her in place. She wriggled for a while. Manuel knew that the rolling green hills against the azure sea held nothing for his daughter; she wanted people with names—she had heard about them all and she wanted to see if they were as real in person.
    Not much had changed in the past ten years. It struck Manuel that he had thought of Lomba da Maia as a town frozen in time, its people fixed and unchanged. Only now, upon his return, did he feel their lives were set in motion once again.
    The taxi drove slowly past the steps leading up to the church,
Nossa Senhora do Rosário.
Manuel tried hard not to look at the worn steps that led to its large wooden doors. So much of his life had been affected by what had happened within the cold walls of that church. He tried to think ofpractical things, to get his mind away from his troubled thoughts. They rounded the corner onto a dirt road, the taxi windows now covered with a thin layer of dust that swarmed around the car. There were the same small houses in bright white. Some old women leaned out of their windows with rosaries dangling from their gnarled fists. Manuel felt compelled to fight his recognition of these people. He saw angry dogs, tied