“You were not my wife. Was I to sleep alone, the rest of my days, except when you chose to favor me?”
She did answer to that, “I would have favored you often. I could not bear you coupling with that animal.”
“No animal, milady, but a good Christian, better than some in this city, that pretend to Christianity but deal also with the Devil. And having a warm and kind heart, where there are some here that have none whatever.”
“Why did you buy her?”
“To spare her from evil, in being shipped into a fatal servitude.”
“And to make her your concubine?”
“That befell afterward, which was not my prime design for her. And I had thought you were dead, do you forget? They said you had been thrown overboard on your way to Portugal.”
“But that did not befall me. Why did you not put her aside, when I returned to São Paulo de Loanda?”
I drew my breath in deep, and released it slowly. “What value is there in discussing these matters, Dona Teresa? She was my servant and my companion. You had taken a husband. You and I had separate lives to live, and she was a part of mine. When I told you these things, you would not grant them, but flew at her with your claws like a wild beast, and then told a monstrous lie, that put me under sentence of death. But why poke and prod into this stuff? It was long ago.”
She came alongside the table, and moved closer to me, so that I smelled the perfume of her, and I imagined there was a throbbing heat coming from her, a warmth like that of the sun, radiating out of the twin points of her breasts and from that dark hot woolly place below, that I knew so well.
She said, “It was a shameful thing that I did, accusing you falsely that way. But I was enraged, Andres, I was maddened, I was not in my right mind. Afterward I relented within myself, and felt great guilt over my sin toward you, and went to Don João and did plead for you to be pardoned from the sentence of death.”
“Ah, then I owe you my life,” I said, half-mockingly.
“That overstates it some, for Don João had already relented. He could not find in his heart the will to hang you, and so he delayed, leaving you in the prison. When I spoke with him, that strengthened his hand, and he decided to alter your sentence to one of banishment for life to Masanganu.”
“A passing gentle place.”
“Gentler than the gallows, Andres, is it not?” She stretched forth a hand to me, but did not quite touch me. “As you say: it was long ago. My fury sprang altogether out of love for you. I did repent my falsehood, and I have done private penance for it within my soul. And I beg you now to forgive me.”
“What will become of me now?”
“You are again under the sentence of death, for that you have broken forth from your banishment unlawfully. But again Don João hesitates to hang you, out of an ancient fondness for you. And again I plead your case with him.”
“Don João is still governor, then?”
“He is old and sick, and I think will not hold his post much longer. But for the moment he does still rule. Don Fernão argues for your death, as does Caldeira de Rodrigues. But I am opposed and Don João is unwilling, and I think we will prevail.”
“Ah. Your husband still seeks vengeance for the rape that did not occur!”
“I have told him it did not occur.”
“Then why hang me? Does he not believe you?”
“He believes me. He holds no grievance privately against you. But the old accusation is still remembered here. For the sake of his position, he must make a public show of enmity toward you, for having dishonored his wife.”
“His position?” I asked. “And what is that?”
“He is second viceroy under Don João, and will, I think, succeed him in the governorship.”
I smiled at that. “So you have almost accomplished your plan, then. Soon you shall be the governor’s wife, and because he is a vain and silly man, you will in good sooth be the governor in fact, though he wear the chain of office. I applaud you, Dona Teresa! I salute you in greatest admiration!”
“Andres—”
“Why the soft word? Why the outstretched hand? Dona Teresa, you sent me into six years of terrible imprisonment.”
“And saved you from hanging, and will save you again, and will pledge to do all in my power to atone for my harming of you. I ask that you give over your hatred of me. I ask that you remember our love, that burned so brightly.”
I closed my eyes and looked away.
“You will not spurn me again!” she cried, and all the tenderness that had crept into her voice was gone from it again.
“Ah, do you command me to love you, then?”
“I command nothing!”
“What do you want from me, lady?”
“Nothing but what we had before.”
“We are not who we were before,” I said.
“I tell you, nothing has changed.”
With a nod did I say, “Aye, aye, you are right. Nothing has changed, but that I have had six years of prison on your account, whilst you dressed yourself in silks and pearls and lived in splendor by the sea. You have sipped on fine wines and I have been drinking bile. You have eaten rare fowl and I have smelled the reek of coccodrillos. But nothing has changed.”
“Andres—”
“O, to think I wept when I believed you dead, lady!”
“Andres,” she said again, and again her voice did make the journey from steel to velvet. “Listen to me, and put aside your fury for the moment. From the first time I saw you, I loved you. You were like the sun, I thought, you with your golden hair and your blue eyes—to look upon you gave me a warmth, a strong heat, even. And ever since have I prized you above all men. If I betrayed you—and, yea, I did betray you most shamefully—it was out of excess of love, it was from a superfluity of passion, that does turn to rage and foul sour juices when it is thwarted. But if you will only restore yourself to me, I will make full amends, I do vow it!”
“What is it, in sharp exactness, that you want from me, Dona Teresa?”
“I thought I had said it.”
“You have spoken of large vague things. Name the service you would have me do for you.”
Across the gloss of her eyes there slipped a veiling cloud of new wrath.
“Andres, please—”
“Name it!”
“Nay,” she said, and turned from me. “This is of no avail. Too much time has come between us.”
“Time, and other things, too.”
“Indeed. Go from me, Andres.”
“And am I your enemy?”
“Never again,” she said. “But go! Quickly!”
I could readily feel the hot waves of desire that still surged from her, and I knew that even now I had only to move toward her, to touch my fingertips to her bare shoulders, and she would be mine in a moment. I hesitated. Through my mind there blazed the image of Dona Teresa pressing some mysterious catch and causing her gown to fall away, so that she was naked before me but for her pearls and her emeralded ear-hoops, with the dark turrets rising hard out of her high round breasts, and the lust-musk perfuming her loins, and then I would kneel before her and she would stroke my thick tangled hair and draw my cheek against her smooth thighs, and I would press my face into her womanly delta, with my tongue seeking the little pink bud that was hidden within, and then—and then, and then, and then—
O! How easily I would yield myself up to her tender fleshly snare!
But I did not do it. God wot, I am no man of iron self-discipline in these matters of lust, as surely I have made quite plain by this time to you. But even so, there is a time when coupling with some certain woman becomes inappropriate, and that time had long ago arrived between Dona Teresa and me.
She was Dalila. She was Circe. She had had me in her spell, and she had used me as her plaything, and she had thrown me away when I no longer suited her needs. And in throwing me away, she had given me the strength to break from her. If I put myself back into her hands now, I might n
ever escape again.
Ah, she was beautiful, and never more so than now, in the full ripeness of her womanhood! But I knew her so well! She was perilous, a woman-demon, a Lilith, an instrument of seduction and domination, who could pose at girlishness, or even at kittenishness, when it was to her advantage. I trembled, thinking how simple it would be to take her in my arms, and how great an error. I understood all that she was claiming, of having betrayed me simply out of wrath and jealousy. Nor were such motives unknown in the world before her time, since even Jove’s queen Juno had vilely enchanted many of her rivals and ensorcelled her unfortunate lovers, and many lesser women, I trow, had done that also. But I would not be deceived again. Rather would I couple at random with some whore of the streets, than give myself into the keeping of a shedevil that I had mistaken for a true woman. I must hold my distance from Dona Teresa, for wisdom’s sake, and for honor’s sake, and for safety’s. So I did not move toward her, as so easily I could.
I said instead, with a great distance in my voice, and a light frost, “Well, and we shall not be enemies, then. I wish you all comfort and blessing, Dona Teresa.”
FOUR
THOUGH I would not submit to her, nevertheless by Dona Teresa’s good offices I was once again made a free man. But it was a limited sort of freedom, nothing like that which I enjoyed in the old days when I was pilot of the governor’s pinnace. There still lay over me the double charge of treason and rape, for which I had been banished to Masanganu, and there was on top of that the crime of escaping from that fort; and I was given to understand that I still would have to undergo some penalty for those offenses. Yet I would not have to bide my time longer in the dungeon here, nor was I was going to be returned to Masanganu. So my condition had improved somewhat over its former state.
I was not restored to my former cottage by the sea-breezes. Instead was I given a much humbler place, a room on the ground floor of the barracks where the common Portugal soldiers dwelled, nor did I have any servants this time. Yet I could hardly have expected anything better than that, and even the barracks was a goodly step upward from the vileness of the dungeon or the malign vapors of Masanganu. So there I resided without complaint, and took my meals with the soldiery, dining as they did on humble gruels and porridges and the stringy stewed meat of unknown beasts, and washing it down with the stale beer and flat palm-wine they were supplied.
Among these troops I formed no friendships, for they were all half my age, having come out from Portugal or its other colonies in the last few years. They looked upon me, I trow, as some sort of phantom, and found me frightening: a gaunt tall Englishman, with wild eyes, who was said to have committed terrible crimes, and who had done hard years of service in the interior of the country, a place that they dreaded. They did not understand why I was come to be in Angola at all, nor could they begin to approach me as a companion, I being so alien from their minds. There were times when I came nigh to saying, “Nay, I am only good-natured Andy Battell, who means you no harm,” but I did not. For already I was beginning to see that good-natured Andy Battell, that amiable young man who had set forth from England to win a little gold with which to marry his sweetheart, was long since dead and buried within the husk of the man who now bore that same name. I had been innocent and cheerful, sweet-souled, even; and for all my sweetness God had seen fit to let me pass from captivity to captivity, from torment to torment, and it had altered me greatly, very little remaining of the original save a certain stubborn persistence and, I hope, a certain measure of honor.
Other alterations had taken place around me in this land. The most obvious was the growth of São Paulo de Loanda, which had been but a place of mud streets and thatched dwellings when Thomas Torner and I were dumped down into it in the June of 1590, and now, after ten years and some, was becoming a true city, which had fair palaces and churches and governmental halls everywhere about. That did tell me that the Portugals must be pumping heavy profits out of this place, and had made it their great headquarters along the Atlantic side of Africa, shifting themselves almost entirely from their former domain within the kingdom of the Kongo.
There had been changes among people. I have already spoken of the changing of Dona Teresa from handsome girl to formidable and awesome woman, virtually the queen of this place. A few others whom I had formerly known were yet in evidence, much enhanced. Pedro Faleiro, my shipmate in the coastal voyages, now was the high admiral here, with my other sailing-fellow Pinto Cabral as his lieutenant. Mendes Oliveira was dead; Manoel de Andrade was in the south, commanding the harbor at Benguela; Manoel Fonseca, who had had authority at Masanganu when I was brought there after the Kafuche Kambara massacre, now was the captain of the presidio at São Paulo de Loanda. His predecessor in that role, Fernão da Souza, I saw occasionally being borne to and fro in a hammock by native slaves that were arrayed in the most pompous of costumes. Souza still inclined himself toward ornate dress of wondrous color, but looked softer, less gallant, for he was beginning now to slide into the sort of middle age that overcomes some of these dashing Portugals when they rise too high and are given overmuch to wine and sloth. I had no encounters with Souza and desired none. As for my other enemy of old, Gaspar Caldeira de Rodrigues, he had lately taken himself off, to my great relief, to the Portuguese lands in India.
Another whom I saw only from afar was Don João de Mendoça, and the look of him greatly saddened me. He had gone puffy and liverish, his face almost green of hue and much bloated, and his eyes, hidden within folds of unhealthful flesh, were barely to be noticed. He walked slowly and with a painful limp, and it was plain that the hand of death was closing about him in a gradual but inexorable way. I had no direct dealings with Don João. Gone were the days when he would summon me to his palace for a feast of many meats and wines, and speak with me about his dreams and hopes for this colony. I had fallen now far beneath the notice of all these great men of Angola.
Of all the transformations I observed, though, the most somber was that of one who had been closest of all to me, that is, my former slave Matamba. I found her again by accident only, and so changed was she that I nearly passed her by, unknowing.
There was now in São Paulo de Loanda a kind of whoring district, behind the main market, where soldiers who did not regularly consort with some black or mulatto woman could go, and find natives who would lie with them for a handful of cowrie-shell money. Sometimes in the early days of my return to the city I passed this place and looked in with idle curiosity, but I did no more than that, for I have never greatly favored hiring the bodies of strangers in that way, except when need is extreme. Yet from time to time the itch does become so strong in me that I fain must scratch it. It happened that an errand took me down to the harbor one day, and there I saw a few Angolan girls of thirteen or fourteen years splashing naked in the warm surf, and the sight of their firm outthrusting breasts and rounded plump buttocks, all gleaming with sea-water and sunlight, did reawaken in me the desires of the flesh. So I went next to the quarter where whores did consort, and looked about to find me some reasonably clean and unpoxed black lass on whom I could ease this sudden pressing want.
There were several young and likely ones, among whom I stood choosing, when an old beggar-woman—as I thought—plucked at my sleeve and said in a low downcast way, “Por favor—”
I would have handed her a shell without glancing at her, and continued about my business, but some familiar note in her voice did strike a deep level of my soul, and, not knowing why, I turned to her. I beheld a woman in tattered and flimsy cloth of a faded orange color, with stooped shoulders and a broken, defeated look about her: yet her eyes still retained a glow, a spark, of some finer nature, and to my great horror I came after a moment to understand that this was no old beggar woman but one I knew full well; in sooth it was my Matamba, aged more than I could easily credit in these six years. For I might just as easily have believed this to be the mother of Matamba, as the person herself.
“Is that you?” I asked.
“I am—I forget the words—”
“You know who I am, Matamba?”
“The English—Andres—”
“Yes! But I can scarce believe this change, Matamba. Can it truly be you?”
She seemed to tremble, and closed her eyes a moment, as if reaching into some great depth of memory, out of which at length she fetched, saying the words in a weak quavering voice, “Essex—Sussex—Somerset—York—”
I was fair close upon weeping.
Instantly did I sweep her out of that whore-market and to my barracks, where I ordered a meal for her, some palm-wine, some boiled grain and meat. She ate hastily and in desperate greed, with both her hands, as if she had not had food a long while, and feared it might be taken from her before she was done. I watched her with pity and dismay. She was then no more than two-and-twenty years of age, and looked close upon forty, and a much-used forty at that. Her breasts, that once had stood out before her like two firm globes, now were sagging and shrunken. Her face was haggard, her nose showed the mark of some injury, her rich brown skin had grown ashen-dull in its color, her woolly hair was flecked with bits of gray. She was thin and slack-muscled, who I remembered as sturdy, a joyous athlete. There was a tremor to her hands, not a great one but unceasing.
When she had done with her meal I took her by the chin and lifted her head, and said, “We are both much less pretty now, eh, Matamba? But at least we have both survived. Tell me your tale of these six years, and then I’ll tell you mine.”
“The words—too fast—”
“Forgotten your Portugee, is that it?”
“I speak—little—”
“Ah. Yes. We can talk in your Kikongo tongue, if you like. I have some words of that lingo now.”
“No—Portugal—”
Aye. She wanted the language back.
So I was gentle and slow with her, and we talked a little, and she rested, and we rehearsed some words anew, and I ordered more food for her. Then she was tired, and lay down, and later I joined her in the bed; but I had forgotten all lust by this time, and merely held her in my arms until morning. Her naked body was a sorry sight, with the lines of childbearing making a map across her belly, and her thighs that had been so taut and vigorous now puckered and loose, and so on, a terrible ruination of all her beauty. Yet already, in just a day and a night, she seemed to be brightening and returning to herself. God’s wounds, how she must have suffered from want and misery, before I found her among the whores!
Lord of Darkness Page 40