by Lara Blunte
Clara left the church without the courage to insist on knowing whether it were normal and decent that she should enjoy what had happened. She rather thought the priest would think her a hopeless sinner, the whore of Babylon, and that she might be consumed by flames the next time she entered church.
She found Gabriel outside, contemplating the sea below with eyes that seemed to be lost. He was scowling as if thinking terrible things.
"What is it, my darling?" she asked, taking his arm.
He looked down at her, still serious, then his face opened in a smile. "Nothing."
"Your head does take you away sometimes..."
He put his hand on her cheek, "Less and less," he said.
Clara was reduced to praying at home, before going to bed, and asking that she should know whether what she was feeling were natural or an abomination. Gabriel seemed to think it was natural, but he would not even step into a church! If she followed his ideas she might end up in the eternal fire of hell.
But then it was evening and she was in his arms again, in her nightgown now, and again he was kissing her and touching her breasts, and she was writhing half in shame and half in pleasure at the new sensation, until she felt his hand move underneath the gown. This time she shut her eyes hard and did not resist.
His hand had closed over her buttocks and she was again caught between a feeling of wrongdoing and pleasure.
She only protested when he moved towards the place between her legs, "No, no!"
He lay back again, and again he held up his hands. "I will stop!"
She did not allow him to go where he wanted for three nights, and on the third everything else that he was doing became so pleasurable that he went where he willed. Clara felt that her whole body was beating to the tune of the blood pounding in her ears.
He threw the pillow that always divided them out of the bed and brought her close to him. She felt something hard against her body.
"What is it?"
Her hand went down to investigate and she sat up screaming.
Gabriel lay back and began to laugh very hard, covering himself with the sheet. He fell asleep still laughing.
The next morning she walked into the breakfast room with a determined face, and after a cup of coffee she said, "I must know what is meant to happen."
He considered her. "Will you have me give you an anatomical lesson?"
"I have to know!" she insisted.
"True. We may have less than seventy years together." He leaned forward, "Why don't you trust me a little?"
"My mother said... that no decent woman enjoys it."
"Do you find that your mother has always been right?"
Clara shook her head, "She is very often wrong."
"Well?"
"But she knows the womanly side of things!"
"Does she?" he wondered.
Gabriel suddenly made a terrible grimace and Clara understood that, for a moment, he had not been able to help seeing her mother in bed. She started to laugh.
He was shaking his head at her with a smile, "I can say this, my love, that some feelings would not exist if they were not natural."
She played with her spoon, "I think even a husband...even a husband who might desire his wife might feel that she is a loose creature if she behaves a certain way."
"Not this husband. Of that you can be certain,” he said adamantly. “You are not a prude by nature, Clara, you have been taught to be one by nuns who still follow the Inquisition. A belief in God does not necessarily mean that you can’t enjoy your body, and mine."
That night she was only in her nightgown and her hair fell over her shoulders as she lay in bed waiting for him. He got in by her side.
"Blow out the candles," she asked.
He did, and then did everything she liked to her again, and this time she didn't stop him as he raised her nightgown, parted her legs and entered her. It hurt, though he was careful. Then he moved inside her, but she could feel nothing but the pain, and the dread that this was the something terrible that would haunt her all her life.
Clara slept against his shoulder, but she now knew that the conjugal act hurt and made her bleed, and that such would be her life.
He had seen her disappointment, though she tried to hide it, and the next night he only kissed her for a long time, and again she felt that something else was needed, but it could not be what had happened the night before.
Two nights later they kissed and touched for so long that when he lifted her nightgown and opened her legs she didn't resist, and when he entered her it didn't hurt. He kissed her while inside her, and then began to move, and she realized that this was what had been missing all the while. She hardly realized that she was putting her legs around him, and there was something in her like a wave rising, rising, rising so much that she felt it had nowhere to go and screamed, feeling as though she would burst.
She then lay so spent that she could not even move. Gabriel still kissed her, and she felt as if everything that he did brought her a terrible pleasure.
"He made me like it! He forced me!" she told Paula after many starts and stops two days later.
Paula threw her head back and gave a high trilling laugh, then managed to say, "Thank God!"
"How can I thank God for such a thing?" Clara asked, horrified.
"Because He is the one who created this feeling, it's a present to us, to feel connected to our husbands!" Paula said happily. "But not all women are fortunate enough to be married to a man who makes them feel it! If I weren't so happy with my husband, I would be dying of envy of yours!"
"But do you feel..." Clara began.
"I do feel!" Paula laughed. "How can you listen to your mother? You and Gabriel were made for love! Enjoy, Clara! Enjoy with all your heart, all your soul and the whole of your body!"
Clara went home musing on what Paula, whom she knew to be a good Catholic, had said. Would God give them such a feeling it they were not meant to enjoy it? Did she not feel boundlessly connected to Gabriel now? Was she not full of desire for him?
She was throwing off her bonnet as she ran into his study. He stood up from his chair and she rushed to him, and began kissing him with passion.
"You won't hear no from me anymore," she promised.
He laughed and then he lifted her, and took her to their room, locking the door. She helped him undress her, but when he started taking off her chemise she crossed her arms over her breasts, "My mother said not to be naked..."
"Your mother needs to get out of our bedroom," he said, and feeling no more need to be patient, he ripped the chemise off her body.
His eyes were burning at the sight of her as he placed her on the bed. This time she would not have been able to say no anymore, he was like strength itself taking her, and his body felt hot and hard against hers.
He made her want him. It was his fault.
Fifteen. Doubt
There followed a week during which the newly married couple could hardly be found out of each other’s arms. Clara had discovered, safely with her husband, an entire world that she had not even suspected could exist, and Gabriel had finally found love where he also sought pleasure.
When, after ten days, Clara felt comfortable enough to be naked in front of him, Gabriel put two fists in front of his lips in the form of a trumpet and blew triumphant music, then waved to invisible crowds like a conqueror.
"You are determined to be proud of yourself," she laughed.
He rolled over to look down at her, and smiled as he combed locks of her hair with his fingers. “No, I am just very happy to be married,” he said in a low voice.
She smiled, “I am very happy to be married to you! I thought…”
A cloud passed over her face and she held him to her as if afraid that he might disappear. Now that she knew what took place in a marriage bed, she also knew how different it would have been if her husband had not been Gabriel.
“It will never happen,” he said.
“What?”
/> “What you are thinking. We will never lose each other now.”
“I loved you before,” she said. “But now it feels…complete. I understand when they say that husband and wife are one flesh.”
He laughed,” I like your flesh better than mine, but I am glad you have been converted.”
“I could see by your secret smiles that you had something to teach me!”
“Hardly anything!”
She threw him a threatening look, “Do not say anything about an ‘eager pupil’!”
He only raised his eyebrows at her, which led to some wrestling, a great deal of laughter, and more lovemaking.
"We will leave tomorrow to our land,” he told her afterwards. “It won't be a very comfortable trip, the roads are disgraceful. But I hope you like it when you get there."
"I shall like any place where you are!"
"I hope you will always remember what you are saying now," he told her with a half smile.
"I shall. Though..." she bit her lip, sighed, then continued, "Though Gabriel, I do have a worry!"
"What is it, my sweet?"
"Well...it is that something bad must have happened to you that you will not talk about. That scar, and the fact that you refuse to even step into church…”
“I did step into one, to marry you.”
“Meu amor, you know what I mean…” She crept closer to him and looked into his eyes. “I know that it cannot have been easy, to be thrown out by your father…”
There was a silence and then he said, "I was glad.”
“No, Gabriel,” she said, shaking her head. “No one is ever glad of such a thing! Mother, father, brother, sister, these are not just words!”
“I like husband and wife better,” he replied. “They mean something to me.”
“That makes me happy, my darling, but you must not forget your family. You cannot tell me it doesn’t hurt…”
“I always knew there was such a possibility,” he interrupted her. “That I would one day leave because of a strong disagreement with my father. We did not see eye to eye very often, and I knew that if I defied him on a point important to him, such as my marriage, I would have to leave. I consider that it has been for the best. I am my own person now, and have made my own way. If I did it for anyone, it was for you. I always hoped we would meet again.”
Clara could not help smiling, because she knew that he felt as she did, that they had always been meant to be together. But his broken nose, which made his face more attractive and yet more difficult to know, the scar on his neck and his physical strength spoke of hardship and effort, and of something else that still darkened his eyes. She knew that he would not speak of it because he wanted to protect her from some terrible truth, though she had seen harsh realities as well, since they had known each other in Lisbon. Yet she did not believe, as he seemed to, that the terrible things were greater than the good ones.
"I understand that you think badly of the world,” she said tenderly. “And I understand there must be reasons for it. You told me you could not act with an open heart anymore, but I hope─"
He turned on his side, and now they were face to face, "Mine is open to you," he said. "And that's all I want. When we have children, it will be open to them too. If they aren't awful."
She started to giggle, he started to kiss her, and the subject was abandoned, though not forgotten.
In the afternoon, as Clara was getting ready to go to her parents' house to say goodbye, Gabriel received Assis, who cared for the financial side of his business in Rio. He was a mulatto clerk of about thirty-five; he had studied in Lisbon, sent there by his Portuguese father, and had come to Gabriel with unimpeachable credentials.
They sat looking at the accounts together, how much money had been made that month, how much the crops and animals should yield that quarter, how much was to be reinvested in the land, and how much needed to be put aside. Gabriel gave instructions for him to prepare the same sum he monthly contributed to Prince John's expenses, and for the purchase of ten slaves who must be set free and then offered paid work in his farm. Any mothers with children should be the first to be bought, with their husbands if they were alive.
Gabriel hardly thought he would free all the slaves in Brazil, when ships full of them arrived almost every day, but a few lives rescued each month from an unthinkable yoke might yet make some sort of difference.
"On that subject..." Assis took out a letter from his leather folder and sat looking at it, clearing his throat as if he found it hard to continue.
"What is it? Say it!" Gabriel ordered, frowning.
Assis cleared his throat again, and pushed his glasses back with one finger, then managed to raise his eyes to Gabriel.
"I have not known what to do with this," he said, indicating the letter. "But I feel that there has been a great breach of your privacy, and that you should know."
He handed the envelope to Gabriel and added, "I found out yesterday that my assistant had been approached by a third party, and was selling information about you. He had left this letter under his blotting paper."
Gabriel took the envelope, scowling, "From whom?"
Assis motioned toward the letter, "I think it best if you read it. If you allow me, I shall walk outside."
The clerk stood up, nodded politely and walked out toward the garden. Gabriel opened the letter, expecting some rival to be after details of what he did or what he would do next.
He read,
"Dear Mr. Simões,
You must understand the position in which my daughter finds herself..."
Gabriel had begun to go pale, looking at the uneven handwriting. He hardly had to see the signature to realize it was from Juliana. He kept reading, his face more drained of color at every word.
"She can hardly ask these things, which we must know. An alliance was already attempted by Dom Gabriel when he knew himself to be a penniless man, and we cannot risk falling for a trick twice!
Since Dom Gabriel himself will not freely inform us of the exact nature of his wealth, my daughter must know all amounts to the last coin. She can only truly agree to this marriage when we know that she can enjoy the comfort to which she is used.
She has several proposals before her, and can only decide when we have a detailed list of Dom Gabriel's holdings. He is in a rented house in Rio de Janeiro! He might well be using what money he has to create the fiction of wealth, and lure us into a regrettable union.
Furthermore my daughter would know if he has slaves, and how many?
If he does not have slaves, as some Europeans refuse to, then what is the quantity that he is paying his freed servants, and how many servants are there?
All these things will influence the well-being and happiness of a tender girl, and all must be known. We also require proof. My daughter will not betroth herself before she knows!..."
The letter went on in the same detestable vein, repeating accusations against his character, his possible bad intentions, the lies he was supposed to have told in Lisbon. There were questions probing into his business and private life: "Are you paying any woman's expenses on his behalf?"
He felt as if a hole had been made in him, and he were being emptied of all life. When Assis returned he only asked, "Did the man give the information that was requested?"
"I am afraid so. To the last coin. I must apologize..."
Gabriel shook his head, "There is no need. I am glad he did."
"I...I am sorry that ─ "
"You don't have to be sorry."
"Perhaps your wife did not know..."
"We will talk no more of it. I think you know that in future any such correspondence or any attempted contact by my wife's family must also be immediately reported to me."
Assis nodded, "Of course."
He took his hat, nodded again and left.
The thoughts in Gabriel's head were many, and followed upon each other's heels without order. Clara could not have known what Juliana was doing. That woman was imp
ossible to repress, and her suspiciousness, vulgarity and greed difficult to control.
Clara had crossed a room to him with such joy and love in her face; she could not know what her mother had done.
But then, Juliana's manner had become obsequious and servile after she had found out exactly how rich he was. Could Clara have had something to do with it? After going through privation, had she become greedier?
He believed that she would have asked him if he could afford to be married now, and she would have believed whatever he said. She would not deal in subterfuge. She could not be a person so different than she seemed.
But then that sentence, My daughter must know...
Would Clara worry about how much money he lost by not exploiting miserable human beings? She could not, she would not.
It had been that terrible mother!
He was a different man when he walked into the drawing room, and Clara saw it at once; it had always been difficult for him to dissemble.
"What it is, my love? Is there bad news?"
Gabriel realized that he was clutching the letter, and put it in his pocket.
"Nothing very serious," he said.
He stopped to look at her so closely that she asked again, her face showing distress, "But Gabriel, what is it?"
He managed a smile and kissed her hand. He did not want to kiss her lips or her cheek at that moment.
"It is truly nothing!" he assured her.
She must have thought it was some business matter, and that it was better not to insist. He went to get dressed so that they could go to her parents' house.
I shall have to look at that woman, Gabriel thought on the way.
When they arrived and Juliana came forward, her arms extended theatrically, for the first time he saw something of her daughter in her. It was not in the shape of the eyes or mouth, which in Clara were so lovely and in Juliana so badly drawn and harsh, but there was a look behind the eyes, or their color, or a gesture around the mouth and chin. They were mother and daughter.
Pedro was taking him by the arm toward the study so they could talk and the two women could say their goodbyes.