She laughed, a light and tinkling laughter, and ran her hand through the golden fur of my chest.
“So eager, Englishman, so hurried! But I forgive you. It has been a very long time, has it not?”
“A thousand years.”
“The next time will not be so far away.”
“Nay. Hardly another three moments, I trow.”
She cradled me against her breasts. My fingers roved her skin. In the aftermath of lovemaking it had the look of finely burnished bronze, and her hair below was crisp and closely coiled, another secret sign of the Africa in her veins. In the touching of her I felt my manhood return almost at once to life.
I rolled free and embraced her again.
“This time more slowly, for your impatience will not be as great, eh, Englishman?”
“Aye,” I answered. And gave the devil her due.
8
So with those first thrustings of flesh into flesh, commenced what I must now recognize to be one of the greatest adventures of passion that I have known, possibly the most grand of all, that transformed and wholly altered my life. I did not suspect such a thing at the time. I had no sense of anything of significance having its beginning, but merely that I was a lonely sufferer far from home who had tumbled into the snares of the Fiend. Dona Teresa, having cozened and dangled me until I was little more than a cunny-thumbed fool, had pried my much-vaunted chastity from me and in so doing had demonstrated—probably not for the first time—the power of her wiles over a helpless man. If I had been a Papist, I think I would have feared for my immortal soul, and gone bleating to the confessional the moment she left my cell.
But I am no Papist, and though I am a God-fearing man I am not a Church-fearing man, if you take my meaning. I do not think souls can be lost by the thrusting of a few inches of firm flesh into some hot little slit, even if it be not the right and proper slit that one has sworn to use exclusively. Though I felt myself to have been pushed and prodded by her into doing something that was only partly of my desire, yet that in itself did not make her the Devil’s agent, did it? She had played with me, and had had something from me that doubtless she had sought for good reason, and had given something to me that met my need.
I felt no shame and no guilt neither, I must declare. For chastity is like an inflamed boil, which, once pricked, heals and subsides quickly, and does not recur, and when the inflammation is gone is lost to memory. I knew that I loved Anne Katherine no less for having coupled with this stranger-woman on the floor of an African dungeon. And I knew also that my hope of seeing England and Anne Katherine again was slight, so slight that it was little more than monkish madness to attempt to preserve myself chaste until my homecoming. Not even Ulysses had done that, dallying as he did with Circe and Nausicaa and I forget how many others on his long journey toward Ithaca.
(But of course his Penelope had remained chaste. Aye, but that’s another matter, is it not?)
After that first passionate hour Dona Teresa left me, and did not come to me again for two days. Which left me hungry for her company, and kept me busy in my mind replaying our sport. Each time I heard gates clanging, my sweat burst out and my loins came to life, but it was only some guard, bringing me gruel or porridge or other dreary mess. But in time she did come, and again, and again many times.
“How is it,” I asked, “that you can be so free now in this prison? You come and go as if you are the captain of guards.”
“Ah,” she answered, “that am I not, but the captain of guards is my friend. It was he granted me the right to come to you.”
Startling hot jealousy blazed in my flesh, for I thought I knew what she meant by “friend.”
“That dandy, you mean, with the fancy purple breeches?”
“That one, yes. You know him, then?”
“I met him once. It was he who took me from the hospice to the dungeon.”
“He is Fernão da Souza. He is young and ambitious, and he means to be a mighty man in Africa one day.”
“As do they all, these Portugals, eh? Your friend Mendoça, who you say will grant you my pardon, he also hopes to be great in this land.”
“Indeed. And Souza thinks by pleasing me to please Mendoça, who is more powerful. So he lets me use him, by coming here and visiting with you as often as I like. In return for which he uses me, by having me say good things of him to Mendoça” Mischief flickered like heat-lightning across her features. “D’ye see, Andres, how simple it is for me?”
“If one has such beauty as yours, anything is simple.”
“Beauty is not the secret. Cleverness is. I understand what I want, and therefore I seek it and get it.”
“And what is it you want from me, then?”
“Would I tell you outright, Andres, d’ye think?”
“Aye,” I said. “For you know me to be a bluff and open man, and deviousness is not the medicine to use on me. But I answer plainly and openly to a straight request.”
“So you do.”
“Then what part am I to play in the epic of your life, Dona Teresa?”
“Why, you will take me to Europe.”
“What?” I said, amazed.
“It is my great dream. I am an African woman, you know, who has seen only Kongo and Angola, and all the rest of the world is only a fable to me. Do I seem European to you, Andres?”
“Aye, very much.”
“I am not. Yet I study being European. I speak like a European and I wear Portuguese clothes and I carry myself in a Christian way. I hate this place. I am tired of heat and rain and drought and rivers full of beasts that devour. I drink fine wine and cover myself with powders and perfumes and imagine that I am a woman of the court, but all the while I know this is mere savagery, with Jaqqas in the jungle that would eat me if they could, and great elephantos smashing down the trees, and such. I want to hear music. I want to attend the plays. I would have my portrait painted, and enjoy flirting with dukes.”
“So, then, lady, I am to convey you to Lisbon? To Madrid?”
“Why not London?”
“Shall I spread my cloak and fly by it, with you clutching on? Ah, I cannot fly! And I have not even the cloak!”
“You will leave Africa one day, Andres.”
“It is my every prayer.”
“And you will take me. Yes? You will bring me before the Queen Elizabeth, and say, Here is a woman of the court of Kongo, who desires now to be your lady-in-waiting.”
I smiled and said, “You much mistake me, Teresa, if you think the Queen and I are playfellows. But this much I promise you: aid me to escape, and I will seek to bring you out with me when I flee this land.”
Ah, such lies we tell, when smooth thighs and hard-tipped breasts are close at hand!
Was it a lie? I think that at that moment it was God’s own truth, and I saw the two of us in the eye of my mind escaping Africa together, settling out in some sturdy little craft along the coast and upwards to the Canary Isles and the threshold of Europe. But how could I do such a thing? Escaping of my own would be taxing enough; taking a woman would more than treble my risks and difficulties. And then, even if I did—to march into England with a woman of this sort on my arm? Easier to carry in a brace of elephantos, or a little herd of fleet zevveras. Introduce her to the Queen? Aye, and introduce her to Anne Katherine, too, and then have the three of us married by the Archbishop of Canterbury, shall I? But those were all second and third thoughts of a later hour. Just then I took my promise half-seriously, in the way we take cheering fantasies. That I would escape Africa one day seemed altogether possible, for it was my great goal. That I would take Dona Teresa with me was at least worth allowing in hypothesis.