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By Root 1917 0

rock. Until one day Alexandrinha, speaking in a vehement rush of words, as though they were being dictated to her with barely enough time for her to get them out, interrupted her father’s crew to tell them that instead of digging where they were they should do so farther up, at the beginning of the trail leading to Massacará. No one paid any attention to her. But the little girl kept insisting, drumming her feet on the ground and waving her hands as though inspired. “All right then, we’ll dig just one more hole,” her father said. They went off to put her inspiration to the test, on the flat stretch of yellowish pebbles where the trails to Carnaíba and Massacará fork off. On the second day of digging, after they had brought up nothing but dry clods of earth and stones, the subsoil began to turn a darker color, to show signs of moisture, and finally, amid everyone’s excitement, drops of water appeared. Three more wells were found close by, thanks to which Cumbe was less hard hit than other towns by those two years of misery and wholesale death.

From that day on, Alexandrinha Correa became an object of reverence and curiosity. And in the eyes of her parents something else besides: a creature whose intuition they tried to profit from, charging the settlements and the inhabitants round about a fee for divining the place where they should dig to find water. Alexandrinha’s talents, however, did not lend themselves to being bought and sold. The little girl was wrong more often than she was right, and many times, after sniffling all about her with her little turned-up nose, she would say: “I don’t know; nothing comes to me.” But neither these blanks of hers nor her mistakes, which were always effaced by the memory of her successes, dimmed the reputation that surrounded her as she grew up. Her talents as a water divineress made her famous but not happy. Once it became known that she possessed this power, a wall went up round about her that isolated her from people. The other youngsters did not feel at ease with her and adults did not treat her as though she were just an ordinary little girl. They stared at her, they asked her strange questions about the future or life after death and brought her to kneel at the bedside of sick people to try to cure them with the powers of her mind. Her efforts to be simply a woman like all the others were of no avail. Men always respectfully kept their distance. They didn’t ask her to dance at fiestas or serenade her, and none of them would ever have dreamed of taking her for a wife. It was as though falling in love with her would have been a profanation.

Until the new parish priest arrived in town. Father Joaquim was not a man to allow himself to be intimidated by an aura of sanctity or sorcery when it came to women. Alexandrinha was now past twenty. She was tall and slender, with the same curious nose and restless eyes, and still lived with her parents, unlike her four older sisters, who already had husbands and homes of their own. Because of the religious respect that she inspired and was unable to banish despite her simple, straightforward behavior, her life was a lonely one. Since this spinster daughter of the Correas seldom went out except to attend Sunday Mass, and since she was invited to very few private celebrations (people were afraid that her presence, contaminated as it was by an aura of the supernatural, would put a damper on the festivities), it was a long time before the new parish priest made her acquaintance.

A romance must have begun very gradually, beneath the bushy-topped Malay apple trees of the church square, or in the narrow streets of Cumbe, where the little priest and the water divineress must necessarily have met and then continued on their way, as his impertinent, vivacious, provocative little eyes looked her up and down while at the same time the good-natured smile on his face made this inspection seem less rude. And he must have been the one who spoke first, perhaps asking her about the town festival, on the eighth of December, or why he hadn’t seen her at Rosaries