It pained me to watch her those early days as she hobbled about my room, sighing much, pausing often to mutter a prayer and to cross herself, and always struggling to find the strength to go on. For she was a wreck, a beached hull, that had endured the worst of the elemental furies and showed all the signs of it. She did weep often, and tremble with some inner chill, or maybe the memory of an ague. But each day she was less ruined than on the day before, for the which I gave deep thanks to Him who is our preservation.
In a slow and very gradual way did she make her recovery, regaining some strength, and finding once more her command of Portuguese as her body offered sustenance to her mind. Within a week or so, months of suffering had dropped away from her, so that she was not near so frightsome to behold. But beyond doubt she never again would be that girlish black goddess I had bought in São Tomé, but at best only a shadow of her.
She told me the tale of her hardships, which chilled my blood like a wintry northern gale.
She said that after my arrest she was taken by my other servants and beaten severely, and hurled naked from my cottage and left to crawl away. Some Portugal soldiers found her and merrily had her behind a bush that very hour, one after another until she was bloodied and raw, and then they abandoned her. Later she was seized by order of Dona Teresa, and was scourged with whips—the marks still remained faint along her back and buttocks, and I think will never fade—and afterward was she given over into slavery to one of Dona Teresa’s grooms.
“But this is vile!” I cried. “None of this was deserving unto you!”
“It was not the worst of it,” said she very quietly.
For then was she used badly by all who came upon her, she declared: for to the men of the city it was considered a way of showing regard for Dona Teresa, to abuse the Englishman’s former paramour, and Matamba was raped and maltreated more than she could tally. All this she did tell me in a soft low voice, with no fire in it, as though she were relating some events that had happened to another person in the reign of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, far away. Yet her tales made my own blood run hot and my heart to pound for wrath, and I marched up and down the room like some caged beast as she spoke, and I wished for an hundred hands, that I might punish all those malefactors at once—as if I could do the slightest thing, I that had no privilege left to me in this land.
“The groom my master wearied of me and gave me to a fisherman,” she said. “And he was as rough and scaly as any fish he ever caught, and his breath stank of fish, and his hair also, and his whole skin. He lost me by wager to an innkeeper, who hired me out as whore to his guests.”
“It is not so!”
She shrugged. “In that time I bore three children. One lived two weeks, and one lived four, and one for a month and a half. My breasts were ever aching with milk. When they came to use my body, I did beg them to suckle at me, to ease the pain. And some did, and some would not.”
She fell ill, too, of some colic that brought her close to death. For which release she said she prayed daily to the Madonna: her Christian faith still remained strong with her, God alone knowing why. But not even death was granted her. And upon her recovery, she said, she was subjected to whoring in the whore-market that had sprung up. Owing to the ravages of disease and childbirth and overmuch other suffering, she had grown ugly and aged too early, and only rarely did men choose her, so that she was hard pressed to pay for her food, and endured long sieges of bitter famine. And so it went for my poor Matamba, from bad to worse in year upon year, and often she thought she would simply set out into the interior one morning, hoping to be fallen upon by a lion and released from her woes. But she could not, since that self-destruction was forbidded to her by her creed.
All this, and only because I had bought her out of slavery!
I think I had done her no service by that, after all. No one can say what would have befallen her if she had gone to the New World as she had been destined to do, but perhaps it would have been no worse than this, and might even have been somewhat better, if only it had been a swift death of some killing pestilence. For I suppose there are times when death is preferable to life, if it be life of the sort Matamba had been made to swallow these years just past.
Yet was she still alive, and had hope of better things in time to come, which the dead do not have. I did what I could to atone for the cruelties she had had at the hands of others by feeding her and nursing her until some proper color returned to her skin and she began to hold her shoulders erect again and show some little semblance of vitality. Even so, she went about my room as though expecting to be whipped for any small failing, and constantly did she jump at the slightest sound like a wary cat, and cringe, and crouch; but some of that timidity passed from her, in time.
We slept each night in the same narrow bed. But I did not make any approach to her, knowing how often she had been taken by cruelty, and thinking that the act of carnal pleasure must have lost all its savor for her, being so intermixed with brutality and pain. So I would not add to her woes with yet another penetration. But one night her hand did steal shyly down my belly until it grasped my yard, and stroked it up and down to make it grow to its fullest size at once.
“Nay,” said I softly. “You need not, Matamba.”
“Do you not desire me, Andres?”
“You have suffered so much that I would not ask of you any such—”
“But I desire you,” she said, “as in the old days. Even though I am ugly now, will you not grant me that pleasure?”
“You are not ugly.”
“Yet you have no desire for me?”
“Never did I say such a thing.”
“Then let us not hold back,” she replied, and eased one leg across my body and did straddle me and slide me quickly into her, so that we were at last reunited in the innermost of ways, and she did tickle me in that strange African way of hers, and bite me lightly here and there and scratch me some also, and pump her loins against me with steady and increasing vigor. Then was she gasping and breathing hot against my neck, and coming to her pleasure twice or thrice or even more, peradventure the first pleasure she had known out of this act since my banishing, and in the wildest moment of her delight did she bring me to mine. And after our coupling we did both cry and laugh together, but mainly did we laugh.
Thus did I restore Matamba to herself, and to me. It gave me great keen joy to see her flourishing again, howbeit never would her early beauty be regained. One cannot pump new tautness into fallen breasts, one cannot put a cosmetic of miracles to scars and skin-gullies. I think even if she had not suffered so in those six dark years, it would have been much the same for her, since that the girlhood does go swiftly and mercilessly from these Africans: they are all black Venuses at fourteen and mere shriveled hags and crones at thirty or thirty-five, and there seems to be no help for it. I did often long for the tender and bright-eyed lass that I had bought out of slavery on São Tomé, but I knew that hope to be as idle as it would be to long for my own youthful unlined face and resilient body: folly it is to bid time return.
In that same season I discovered what punishment I was to have for my escaping from Masanganu, and for other offenses both real and alleged. The governor now proposed to send four hundred men, that had been banished out of Portugal for high crimes, up into the country of Lamba to subdue a rebellion, and from there to any other district in need of pacifying. When these criminals arrived from Lisbon I would be joined to them, and dismissed forever into these border wars, marching endlessly here and there to keep the frontier of Angola safe against Jaqqa incursion and native uprising.
I sought Don João out to appeal against this sentence, but he would not see me, I suppose out of guilt and shame at using me this crass way. So I made ready to take up my life as a soldier. It was something better than hanging, at any rate, and I think also a better fate than further duty at Masanganu, where I might die of boredom if one of the plagues did not take me first.
Yet many weeks passed before m
y departure from the city. I was at that time largely left to my own devices, and spent my hours with Matamba, or wandering by myself along the shore of the perplexing ocean, looking longingly off toward invisible Europe, and England shining beyond.
England! Would ever I see England again? Had such a place as England ever existed, or was it only my dream, and had I indeed been born full-grown in Africa?
Matamba said, “Speak to me in English, Andres.”
“Aye, that I will! If I can remember any, lass!”
And I did speak to her, but the words were snailish slow in curling their way around my tongue, so used had I become to the Portugal way of framing speech. Yet did I persevere, and fiercely fight my way back to reclaiming my native Englishness, that has ever been so precious to me. I wondered, if I were to be dropped by angels into Essex this day, would anyone there recognize me as being of English blood, or would they run screaming, thinking me some new yellow-haired kind of Saracen, or some species of demon out of the nether? For surely I was mightily transformed, within and without, by my years in this tropic sun under such dire servitudes. But I made myself to remember my lost former life.
“These are the kings of England,” I said to Matamba. “At the first there was William, who did come from Normandy to lord it over the old Saxons. And then was his son William, who was slain in the forest, and then his other son Henry, and then Stephen of Plantagenet did seize the throne, and then another Henry, and after him Richard of the Lion Heart, and John—” and so I went, telling her all the kings, the Edwards and the Henrys and the Richards, up until my Elizabeth’s glorious time. And I made the black woman repeat the names after me, until she knew them as well as I, and put the second Richard in his rightful place between Edward and Henry Bolingbroke, and knew that the fourth Edward and the sixth Henry did change the kingship back and forth some several times during the wars of York and Lancaster, and could tell me how Henry Tudor did come out of Wales to defeat the crookback tyrant Richard, and so forth: all the names that had been dinned into me when I was a boy training for a clerkship. It did me great good to recite all that again, by way of reminding me that there once had been an England, and it existed yet. What sense it all made to Matamba, God alone can say; but often as we lay entwined at night, my yard deep in her and slowly moving, she would murmur to me, “Henry, Henry, Henry, Edward, Edward, Richard, Henry, Henry, Edward, Mary, Elizabeth,” like unto a kind of litany, saying the names in a wondrous foreign way, “Ay-leesh-a-bate,” with an outrush of whooshing breath, “Ainree,” “Reezhard.”
And I told her about our poetry, that was the great pride and wonder of our race, our special music. She asked me to chant her some verse, but when I reached into my mind all was void and dark, a dry empty well, until suddenly some scraps and shards came into view in the dusty corners of my spirit, and I did speak her some lines from Marlowe’s play of Faustus, that was the newest thing upon the boards when last I was in England:
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
Oh, I’ll leap up to my God: who pulls me down?
See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.
One drop would save my soul, half a drop, ah my Christ.
I thought I had all that speech by heart, but the rest was gone from me except the striking of the clock, and the last smallest bit:
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me.
Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while:
Ugly hell gape not, come not Lucifer,
I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistopheles!
She listened all agape to those words, thinking them a magical music from the sound alone, as in sooth I think they are. But then she did pray to have the meaning from me, and when I translated it into her understanding, speaking part Portuguese and part Kikongo, it so terrified her that she clutched herself away from me, into a frightened quivering ball, and I had to comfort her with the laying on of my hands. Methinks she thought I was conjuring up Satan in our very chamber.
So I eased her with gentler songs:
Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again.
And also:
There were three ravens sat on a tree
Down a down, hay down, hay down
There were three ravens sat on a tree
They were as black as they might be
With a down derrie, derrie, derrie, down down.
And then:
Come away, come sweet love,
The golden morning breaks:
All the earth, all the air
Of love and pleasure speaks.
And all these she loved, and had me recite many times, even though on most my memory failed me, and I could but give her stray nips and fragments, and hardly ever the complete verse. Yet did the sound of them delight her, and the sense, and her eyes did gleam, and she put her hands to mine and held me while I magicked her with these incantations of my homeland. She asked me had I composed any of these, and I told her sadly nay, I was no poet but only a frequenter of poetry, and that other men with finer and more far-ranging souls had set down those words, which led her ask me how anyone could have a soul more far-ranging than mine, which had carried me so far. “There is a difference,” said I. To which she shrugged, and called for more poems. Any that I said gave her pleasure, even Tom O’Bedlam’s song, though when I thought close upon its meanings it made me melancholy, and I would not say it twice:
With an host of furious fancies,
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear, and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end
Methinks it is no journey.
And that was all of England that remained to me, a list of kings and some jingling rhyming lines, a burning spear and a horse of air, as I lay in the black woman’s arms ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end. Yet did I not abandon hope of home. Yet did that hope not leave me never.
FIVE
THEN IT came time for me to take up my musket and go to the wars for the Portugals, I being by then half a Portugal myself, I suppose, by the mere contagion of living among them so long. So off I went with all that rampscallery roguey army of cutpurses and rackrents and dandiprat costermongers, the dregs of Lisbon, that had been sent out by the government of old King Philip to defend Angola against the forces of darkness.
I said my farewells to Matamba, most long and lovingly and tearfully, doubting I would ever see her again, and marched off with my new companions to Sowonso, which is a town ruled by a lord that obeys the Duke of Mbamba, and from thence to Saminabansa, and then to Namba Calamba, which is under a great lord, who did resist us. But we burned his town, and then he obeyed us, and brought three thousand warlike Negroes to join our force. From thence we marched to the town of Sollancango, a little lord, that fought very desperately with us, but was forced to obey; and then to Kumbia ria Kiangu, where we remained many months. From this place we gave a large number of assaults and brought many lords to subjection. We were fifteen thousand strong, counting our blacks, and marched to the mountain known as Ngombe. But first we burned all Ngazi, which is a country along the north of the River Mbengu well eastward of São Paulo de Loanda, and then we came to the lord who ruled at Ngombe, at his chief town.
This lord of Ngombe did come upon us with more than twenty thousand archers, and spoiled many of our men. But with our shot we made a great spoil among them, whereupon he retired up into the mountain, and sent one of his captains to our general João de Velloria, signifying that the next day he would obey him. In the morning the lord of Ngombe entered our camp with great pomp, with drums and fifes and great ivory trumpets, and was royally received; and he gave g
reat presents, and greatly enriched General de Velloria and his officers. We went into his town upon the top of the mountain, where there is a great plain, well farmed, full of palm-trees, sugar-canes, potatoes, and other roots, and great store of oranges and lemons. Here is a tree called the ogheghe, that beareth a fruit much like a yellow plum that is very good to eat, and has a very sweet smell, and is a remedy against bile and the wind-colic. Here, too, is a river of fresh water, that springs out of the mountains and runs all along the town.
We were here five days, and then we marched up into the country, and burned and spoiled for the space of six weeks, and then returned to Ngombe again, with great store of the cowrie-shells which are current money in that land. Here we pitched our camp a league from this pleasant mountain, and remained there for months.
In telling you of these adventures, and our burnings and sackings and conquerings, I am aware that I have told you nothing of what passed through my own mind, in those several years of marching up and down the inner provinces. That is because very little passed through my mind in those years. I had taught myself the trick of shutting off my mind, and concerning myself only with my private safety, and my three meals a day, and doing as I was told. For by now I had arrived to the central philosophy of my African life; which was, to resist nothing, to glide along uncomplainingly, obeying all my orders, serving whoever my master of the moment might be, and biding my time until I could seize some opportunity of quitting this land forever. To resist, to think for mine own self, to show independence of the spirit—I had learned that all these things led only to the dungeon, and, on the field of battle, might very well bring me a summary execution.
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