I remember that prayer well, because I had many other occasions afterward to use it, as my African years lengthened and the dangers that menaced me grew ever more horrific. And I think it is a useful prayer. I do believe that if one turns directly to the Lord and speaks openly and plainly to Him, that it is a thousand thousand times more effective than any telling of beads and lighting of candles and muttering of Pater Nosters and Ave Marias and kneelings and grovelings before some priest in fine brilliant robes and majestic pomp.
When I had done praying I returned to my dark cell in the presidio; for, though I was no longer under guard, they had not given me any prettier quarters. A place in the town would be ready for me when I returned from my voyage, they said. (There was no need to guard me now. They knew I would not flee. Where could I go? How? I could not swim to England.)
Soon after, Dona Teresa came to me. She wore a dark cloak and a veil across her lovely face.
“You see I keep my word,” she said.
“I am most grateful.”
“Don João spoke of you warmly, and with great praise. He says you are a man of skill and strength and shrewdness, and that in your blunt way you have a kind of diplomacy, and that you are altogether commendable.”
“Aye, that I am.”
“And you are possessed of great modesty, too.”
“Aye, Dona Teresa! I am famous for it, and rightly so.”
“You have other gifts, too, for which you could be famous also, but Don João knows nothing of those.”
“Nay,” I said. “I told him, as we sat over our wine and our hog-fish stew, how many times I had enjoyed your body, and how admirably I had tupped you, and what sounds of extreme pleasure I was able to bring from your lips. And he gave me congratulation, saying that he had sweated like a Dutchman over you without achieving your ecstasy, and he wondered if I had any secret of it that I could impart to him. So thereupon I said—”
“Andres!”
“—that it was simple, that one need only put one’s mouth close to your left ear—”
“Andres!”
“—and speak to you in English, saying certain inflammatory words such as ‘cheese’ and ‘butter’ and ‘tankard’, and upon hearing those words you went into such frenzy that it took all of a man’s vigor to ride you without being thrown, and—”
“I pray you, stop this!” she cried, holding in her laughter but letting some giggles escape.
“—and straightaway you would reach your summit of pleasure, from merely the sound of some English. So Don João thanked me and commanded me to instruct him in my language, which I have done, and when he seeks your body next you will, I think, hear him speak some of the fine old words of English at intimate moments, whispering to you, ‘cobweb’ and ‘cutlery’ and such like. And I advise you, Dona Teresa, to respond with much movement of your hips and thrusting of your middle and gasping and moaning deep in your throat, or else it will give me the lie, and I will lose standing and prestige with your Don João.”
“You are a very foolish man,” she said fondly.
“I am set free after long months of prisonhood, and I think it has softened my brain with excitement.”
“Will you speak to me in English?”
“An’ it please you, I would speak to you in Polack, or in the language of the Turk.”
“Speak in English.”
“I am thy faithful servant and highest admirer,” I said in English, with a bow and a grand flourish.
“Nay,” she said, “not yet, not yet! Whisper these things in my ear, as you said, when we are intimates!”
“Ah. Surely.”
She unwound the veil and laid bare her elegant face, which more and more seemed to me to have some hidden blackamoor beauty in its features—that fullness of the lips, that breadth and height of the cheekbones. And then with a similar gesture she doffed her cloak, pivoting and whirling while unshipping the small catch that clasped it at her throat, and I saw that beneath the cloak was nothing at all except the supple nakedness of Teresa, her breasts swaying and tolling like bell-clappers in bells, her thighs glowing darkly in the dark shine of my cell. And at that sight so suddenly revealed I felt an access of joy that all but had me shouting out an hurrah. She came to me and I stroked and rubbed her with my eager hands and felt her beginning to writhe beneath my touch, most especially when I put my fingers to that plump tight-haired mound at her belly’s base. She made hissing sounds and spoke to me in words I did not know, but which I think must have been of the Kongo tongue that was native to her mother’s grandmother, and as I went into her her eyes rolled as those of one transported. The keenness and wildness of her passions were almost frightening. We went at it with right regal fury, and I could not help but give play to my wit, which hearkened back to our foolery with words, and at one moment of delight I put my lips beside her ear and murmured such English words as “stonemason” and “turnip-greens” and “scavenger,” the first that came to my mind.
Which made her shriek with crazy laughter and pound my back with her hand in a fair savage way, and down below I felt her squeeze me tight, in that style of having a little fist concealed in there that some very passionate women have, and she cried, “Ah, Andres, how I do love you, Andres!”
And with the using of that word “love” a chill passed over me in all my overheatedness. For I thought of Anne Katherine. I had taken care not to do that for quite some long time, but now she came rushing into my guilty soul. I told myself that these are deep waters indeed that I sail, if Teresa and I have taken up with the light sports of word-play, that are the mark of lovers, and that has carried us onward to talk of loving. For mere coupling like rutty cats in a foreign land is one thing, which may be forgivable when lust overtakes one’s chastity, but love is quite another, and perilous.
Then I told myself what I should have thought at the first: that oftentimes people speak of love when their bodies are entwined, and it is a human thing, a failing of the moment. One always loves the person who is giving one’s body extreme pleasure—at least at the instant such pleasure is being administered—but that is not the same thing as the love that bonds man and woman across the decades. Or so I told myself.
And put the question from my mind, and had my pleasure in good hard hot pulsing spurts, and fell gasping over Dona Teresa. And we lay quiet a long while, until she rose and recloaked herself and went from my cell, wishing me a bon voyage.
11
The next day we sailed. I thought my piloting would be put to the test at the very first, in the finding of our way out of the harbor of São Paulo de Loanda, through all the shoals and shallows. But there was no need. The crewmen knew the road across the Bay of Goats, and did it without my instruction, following the buoys and marks and taking us past the tip of the isle of Loanda and into the open sea.
Yet I marked well what they did; for another time I might have to find the way of my own.
There was some challenge soon after, as we beat our way northward. Not far north of São Paulo de Loanda a river reaches the sea that has several names, the Mbengu or the Nzenza, which the Portugals choose to call the Mondego. Under whatever name it roils the waters with its outflow, and had to be gone around with care, which we did, and then it was straight sailing.