Now that we were united some urgency went from her, and slyly she said, holding her hands to my hips to keep me from movement, “Had you many black maidens whilst you were north?”
“Nay, not a one.”
“Ah, perfectly chaste, Andres!”
“I was not allured by what I did see.”
“Swear it by God’s Mother!”
“I will swear by God Himself, I entered no woman’s body.”
“You lie,” said she coolly and pleasantly, beginning now to pump her hips in a slow, steady, maddening way. “You had a dozen of them, little ebony wenches with sweet hard breasts, and you never thought once of me. I can still smell the smell of them upon you. I can see the marks of their little bites on your shoulders.”
“Then you see with witch-eyes, for there are no marks.”
“What are these?” she asked, and touched me in a place where I had scraped my arm on barnacles when scrambling upon the rocks of the shoal that had wrecked us.
“I fought with a coccodrillo last week,” I told her, “and it nipped me once or twice before I split his jaws in twain.”
“Ah,” she said. “I am relieved of all my fears. Better you hug a coccodrillo than a wench of Loango, eh?” And she laughed, and I laughed with her, though this pretended jealousy of hers seemed something more than mere pretense to me, beneath its outward playfulness, and that was discomfortable to me. But she moved her body in a changing rhythm now, ever swifter, and I ceased thinking of anything at all save the conjunction of our flesh. I drove deep to the center of her and the little quivering motions of her ecstasy did begin within her and a new scent arose from her, a sea-scent, musky and tangy, as the discharge of her pleasure commenced. Though it had been many weeks since I had known such discharge myself, I held myself in check, waiting her out until the highest moment of her ascent, and then, releasing all control, shouting out into the low strange bestial growl of her delight, I did give myself up to the completion of our loving, which went through me like the force of a hammer’s blows. And I fell athwart her, panting, sweaty, laughing giddily, and we held one another, and rolled from side to side, and lightly slapped each other and kissed and pinched. The world seemed calm and full on her course now. For when man and woman love, and pass together through the fulfillment of that loving by the flesh, they enter out of the world of turbulence into a new and silent realm of tranquility that might almost be of a higher sphere of existence, so I do think. Would that we could remain there forever, as the angels do in their crystalline abode! But then, I suppose, we would never know the joy of the ascent, if we dwelled always above the clouds.
After a time we slipped our bodies apart and Teresa, rising from the bed, stepped naked outside the house to douse herself in the rain. She returned clean and glistening and said, “I must leave now. When Don João sends for me tonight, I must be in my own bed as his messenger comes.”
“This conference you spoke of—”
“It is about the Jesuits,” she said. “You heard this afternoon’s proclamation?”
“Very little of it. Don João told me there is strife between the governor and the Jesuits.”
“Indeed. D’Almeida has decreed that any Jesuit who meets with a soba must die.”
“So was I told.”
“There is more. When the decree was read, and nailed to the door of the priests’ residence, the Jesuit Prefect Affonso Gomes did tear it off, and burn it. And sent word that he would excommunicate the governor, if he persevered at this.” She frowned and said, “Is that painful, to be excommunicated ?”
“It means only to be cut off from the sacraments of the Church,” I said.
“Yes, that I do know. Forbidden to take the Mass, and no confession, no absolution, none of the rites of birth or marriage or death. But is that all? I have heard of this excommunication, but I have never seen the thing done. Is it done with whips?”
“It is done with words alone,” I said.
“Ah,” said she, and peradventure she was a trifle disappointed. “Then there is no peril in it?”
“But there is,” said I. “It is not only that one is deprived of the whole rigmarole of piety that the Catholic faith does adhere to. But all Christians must scorn the excommunicated one, and turn away, and give him no aid, even if he lie bleeding and broken in a ditch. Did you not know that?”
“I have been taught these things, but when I was a girl. We have had no excommunication here, Andres. Why, even if there be no whips, still it sounds like a very grave thing!”
“So I do suppose. But much depends on the effectuality of the powers of the excommunicator. When our King Henry denied the authority of the Pope, in the matter of putting aside his first wife Catherine, the King was indeed excommunicated, but we in England paid no heed to that. And again another Pope did excommunicate our good Elizabeth, when I was a boy, for issuing us a prayer-book and giving us Protestant bishops. But once more it was like the mere blowing of the wind to us, and had neither meaning nor substance.”
This bewildered Dona Teresa, who after all was a Catholic if she was any sort of Christian, and knew nothing of our heretical ways, excepting that we had contempt for the Pope. I suppose she could not rightly be called a pagan, for she had been reared truly in her Church and had received its sacraments and all of that, but yet I knew, from her faith in idols and witchcraft, that it was only skin-deep to her, as it is to all these converted folk of tropic lands. She knew which was the Virgin Mary and which the Savior, and other grand things of the creed, but I suspect that the nice points of doctrine were cloudy and murky to her, and had no real essence, other than that her mother and father had told her to hold God in awe. Perhaps I do her an injustice: perhaps the priests of the Kongo had made a true and deep Catholic of her. I know not. Could she hold that faith and the pagan one of her black grandmothers with equal force? I think she was capable of that: nay, I do know it! I think she had as much doubt of my faith as I did have of hers, and admitted me to be a Christian only because she did not know what else I might be deemed. For I appeared to believe in God and His Son in a right Christian manner, yet the Pope, that was her grand mokisso, was only the blowing of the wind to me.
At my door she said, “They tell me there is a quarrel between you and Gaspar Caldeira de Rodrigues.”
“So it appears.”
“And is it true, that you slew his younger brother?”
“I caused his death, that I admit.” And I told her how it had befallen. “But I accept no blame for it. Do you know this Gaspar?”
“A little,” said she.
“Is he as cowardly as his dead brother?”
“Of that I know nothing. He is a clever man, and ambitious. Walk carefully until this matter is resolved, for I think he would harm you.”
“Then pray for my welfare, as though I were in peril on the sea.”
Her eyes glistened. “I will do more than pray. I will use all the unseen forces at my command, against his malevolence.”
“Ah, then you admit to witching!”
She put her finger to my lips. “Not a word of that! But I will guard you.” Then most shamelessly did she caress my manhood with her wanton hand, so that I would have drawn her back to the bed, but she would not let it. “Until next time, my love!” And she was gone.
I thought for some while of all these troubled matters, the inquest, and Don João’s struggle with the new governor, and the doings of the Jesuits. But then it all fell from my mind, this squabbling among tricksome and quarrelsome Portugals, this Papist tug-of-war for power over the pitiful blacks whom they had so cozened and gulled and enslaved and exploited. I dropped into a sound sleep, and was gone from the world well into the morning. And when I awoke I did know at once, from the uncommon silence of the city, that something notable had occurred.