He rose—standing, he was so very short!—and gave me his hand, and I thanked him for all his mercies to me, and went out from there in a veritable daze of stupefaction. Dona Teresa married! And not to Don João, but to Fernão da Souza!
Well, and I had known she carried on some long intrigue with Souza. For when I had asked her how she had gained access to me so easily whilst I was imprisoned in the fortress, she had quite forthrightly explained that Souza was her friend, and that could only have meant her lover. But Souza surely had known that what went on between Dona Teresa and me in my prison cell was not merely a chaste discussion of geographical matters; and beyond any question he knew she was Don João’s mistress, for all the colony was aware of that. Why, then, would he want to marry her? Had he no pride? Could he take to wife a woman who had openly been had by the governor of the colony for some years, and one whom he knew furthermore to have been had by the English prisoner Battell? I think I might not have cared to marry Anne Katherine if all of England knew she was some cast-off mistress of Sir Walter Ralegh’s, say, and if I had helped pimp her as well to a Spaniard captured in the defeat of the Armada.
But the situations were not equal, I realized, upon giving the matter some further thought. This was not England or any other civilized place, but merely a remote colony at the edge of a pagan and barbaric land. There were many men here, and few women, at least few who might be taken for Europeans, as could Dona Teresa. Those rules of chastity and propriety that might apply at home were of no substance here, I supposed. Don João, for some reason I did not fathom, had not in fact married Dona Teresa when they were in Portugal; now she did see some merit in marrying Souza, who was ambitious and of a growing importance here, and doubtless Souza saw merit in it, too, perhaps because it would bring him the enhanced favor of Don João. Perhaps. I did not know how such matters were worked. But I was shaken by the surprise of it, I who had had no small passion for Dona Teresa myself. My own embroilment with her now must certainly be ended, for as a captain’s wife she could not sneak around, could she, and spread her legs secretly here and there for old lovers such as I? Or could she? Well, and I had Matamba now anyway; the cases were altered for us all.
As I moved through the town that day I found other surprises, namely, several women strolling about that seemed pure European, and protecting themselves from the sunlight by paper shades stuck to long handles. Each of these was young and handsome, and had her little following of the men of the town, who moved in close formation around her, like a cloud of gnats. I made inquiries and learned that upon Don João’s return from Portugal he had brought twelve such women with him, the first pure-blood European women ever seen in Angola, to provide a gentler touch in the life of the town.
“Do you mean they are whores?” I asked.
My informant, who was a merchant of grain, laughed broadly and said, “Nay, nay, they are respectable women! They are Jewesses, but they are respectable!” And he told me that there was in Portugal a place called the Casa Pia, founded by a former queen, where unfortunate women dwelled. Some of them were criminals that had been reformed, and some were Jewesses who had been converted to Christian ways; and it was twelve of those latter, all of them now rigged out with crucifixes at their breasts and other signs of high piety, that had been introduced into this rough and harsh frontier.
And indeed they did soften and beautify the place, for each was like a little sun, giving off a bright radiance in her perambulation through the streets of São Paulo de Loanda. At another time I might have sought a closer touch of that radiance myself; but other men were ahead of me in ample number, and I had no wish to struggle through such crowds. Moreover did I have Matamba to console my nights, and that night she and I took such a reunion of the flesh as allowed me no sleep, but provided us both the most intense of delights, with many a moaning and a gasping, and making of love in this position and that, she tickling me and clipping me until I thought I would go mad of it, and then turning and crouching to present her ebony buttocks to me whilst I did thrust my stiffened wand into the hot place below them, and afterward taking me the other way around, kneeling above me in her manner, and still later even granting me the rare favor of letting me have her in the European custom with her body beneath mine, and so on and so on all through the night, in a frenzy of quivering breasts and flashing thighs and moist slippery loins and bright laughing eyes and agile thrusting hips. Which made me weep from sheer gladness of it, that I was here alive in São Paulo de Loanda in the loving arms of this good-hearted Negress, and not lying dead with vulture-picked eyesockets on the field of Kafuche Kambara.
13
It was some days before I encountered Dona Teresa, for now that she was a married woman certain constraints were upon her, and I could not merely go to visit her, nor she come to me. But I did see her in the grand plaza of the city on the arm of Captain Fernão da Souza, she all elegant in veil with cap of black velvet, and chains of gold, and a silken robe, and he thrice as splendid as ever in crimson breeches and a brilliant yellow coat. The sight of her gave me a sharp pang and thrill, to remember how I had grieved for her rumored death. As I passed them she nodded to me and smiled through her veil, all with the greatest dignity, as if she were a lady of the court of Her Protestant Majesty Elizabeth, and Souza, too, gave me his most formal salutation. But we went on beyond one another without exchanging words.
Again the next day I saw them together, but from a greater distance, and as she went by I suddenly had a vision of myself in my prison-cell days, and Dona Teresa with me, both of us naked and she lying with her face against my thighs, and taking the tip of my yard into her mouth as she had several times done, and sliding it deep to the inner part of her throat, and moving back and forth along it until I was ready to cry out with ecstasy. That vision striking me in the public street all but smote me down. My heart began to pound and there was a dryness in my nostrils and my eyes did go bleary, and I craved her with all the craving in the world, and nothing else mattered. Then I caught my breath, and turned away, not willing to look upon her for fear of seeming a fool. The power of the moment released me and I turned again, and she was gone from my sight.
From that I learned how strongly Dona Teresa still held me in her grasp. Which I feared; for these Portugals take the chastity of their wives most serious, and I craved no quarrel with Captain Fernão da Souza, nor did I care to be drawn yet again into Dona Teresa’s mischievous spells, beautiful though she was. She was too sly and perilous for me: I would remain content with Matamba, I told myself, until I could quit this place forever.
The day after that, as I was setting forth to the harbor to inspect the pinnace, Dona Teresa came by without her husband, carried by a team of bearers in a corded hammock, and she did command her bearers to halt beside me, and spoke with me from aloft, as a great lady would have done. She said she was surprised to find me still in Angola, having thought I would have obtained my release by now. To which I replied that I appeared to be of value here, in that the several governors constantly found new tasks for me, and I much doubted I would ever go home. And she said, still in that same distant way, that she had heard good report of my valor in the battle with Kafuche Kambara; and she remarked somewhat on the changes in my appearance that those hardships had worked in me. We exchanged another some few pleasantries of this kind, at the end of which she invited me to attend her at her residence that afternoon: she would send bearers to fetch me.