She came alongside the table, and moved closer to me, so that I smelled the perfume of her, and I imagined there was a throbbing heat coming from her, a warmth like that of the sun, radiating out of the twin points of her breasts and from that dark hot woolly place below, that I knew so well.
She said, “It was a shameful thing that I did, accusing you falsely that way. But I was enraged, Andres, I was maddened, I was not in my right mind. Afterward I relented within myself, and felt great guilt over my sin toward you, and went to Don João and did plead for you to be pardoned from the sentence of death.”
“Ah, then I owe you my life,” I said, half-mockingly.
“That overstates it some, for Don João had already relented. He could not find in his heart the will to hang you, and so he delayed, leaving you in the prison. When I spoke with him, that strengthened his hand, and he decided to alter your sentence to one of banishment for life to Masanganu.”
“A passing gentle place.”
“Gentler than the gallows, Andres, is it not?” She stretched forth a hand to me, but did not quite touch me. “As you say: it was long ago. My fury sprang altogether out of love for you. I did repent my falsehood, and I have done private penance for it within my soul. And I beg you now to forgive me.”
“What will become of me now?”
“You are again under the sentence of death, for that you have broken forth from your banishment unlawfully. But again Don João hesitates to hang you, out of an ancient fondness for you. And again I plead your case with him.”
“Don João is still governor, then?”
“He is old and sick, and I think will not hold his post much longer. But for the moment he does still rule. Don Fernão argues for your death, as does Caldeira de Rodrigues. But I am opposed and Don João is unwilling, and I think we will prevail.”
“Ah. Your husband still seeks vengeance for the rape that did not occur!”
“I have told him it did not occur.”
“Then why hang me? Does he not believe you?”
“He believes me. He holds no grievance privately against you. But the old accusation is still remembered here. For the sake of his position, he must make a public show of enmity toward you, for having dishonored his wife.”
“His position?” I asked. “And what is that?”
“He is second viceroy under Don João, and will, I think, succeed him in the governorship.”
I smiled at that. “So you have almost accomplished your plan, then. Soon you shall be the governor’s wife, and because he is a vain and silly man, you will in good sooth be the governor in fact, though he wear the chain of office. I applaud you, Dona Teresa! I salute you in greatest admiration!”
“Andres—”
“Why the soft word? Why the outstretched hand? Dona Teresa, you sent me into six years of terrible imprisonment.”
“And saved you from hanging, and will save you again, and will pledge to do all in my power to atone for my harming of you. I ask that you give over your hatred of me. I ask that you remember our love, that burned so brightly.”
I closed my eyes and looked away.
“You will not spurn me again!” she cried, and all the tenderness that had crept into her voice was gone from it again.
“Ah, do you command me to love you, then?”
“I command nothing!”
“What do you want from me, lady?”
“Nothing but what we had before.”
“We are not who we were before,” I said.
“I tell you, nothing has changed.”
With a nod did I say, “Aye, aye, you are right. Nothing has changed, but that I have had six years of prison on your account, whilst you dressed yourself in silks and pearls and lived in splendor by the sea. You have sipped on fine wines and I have been drinking bile. You have eaten rare fowl and I have smelled the reek of coccodrillos. But nothing has changed.”
“Andres—”
“O, to think I wept when I believed you dead, lady!”
“Andres,” she said again, and again her voice did make the journey from steel to velvet. “Listen to me, and put aside your fury for the moment. From the first time I saw you, I loved you. You were like the sun, I thought, you with your golden hair and your blue eyes—to look upon you gave me a warmth, a strong heat, even. And ever since have I prized you above all men. If I betrayed you—and, yea, I did betray you most shamefully—it was out of excess of love, it was from a superfluity of passion, that does turn to rage and foul sour juices when it is thwarted. But if you will only restore yourself to me, I will make full amends, I do vow it!”
“What is it, in sharp exactness, that you want from me, Dona Teresa?”
“I thought I had said it.”
“You have spoken of large vague things. Name the service you would have me do for you.”
Across the gloss of her eyes there slipped a veiling cloud of new wrath.
“Andres, please—”
“Name it!”
“Nay,” she said, and turned from me. “This is of no avail. Too much time has come between us.”
“Time, and other things, too.”
“Indeed. Go from me, Andres.”
“And am I your enemy?”
“Never again,” she said. “But go! Quickly!”
I could readily feel the hot waves of desire that still surged from her, and I knew that even now I had only to move toward her, to touch my fingertips to her bare shoulders, and she would be mine in a moment. I hesitated. Through my mind there blazed the image of Dona Teresa pressing some mysterious catch and causing her gown to fall away, so that she was naked before me but for her pearls and her emeralded ear-hoops, with the dark turrets rising hard out of her high round breasts, and the lust-musk perfuming her loins, and then I would kneel before her and she would stroke my thick tangled hair and draw my cheek against her smooth thighs, and I would press my face into her womanly delta, with my tongue seeking the little pink bud that was hidden within, and then—and then, and then, and then—
O! How easily I would yield myself up to her tender fleshly snare!
But I did not do it. God wot, I am no man of iron self-discipline in these matters of lust, as surely I have made quite plain by this time to you. But even so, there is a time when coupling with some certain woman becomes inappropriate, and that time had long ago arrived between Dona Teresa and me.
She was Dalila. She was Circe. She had had me in her spell, and she had used me as her plaything, and she had thrown me away when I no longer suited her needs. And in throwing me away, she had given me the strength to break from her. If I put myself back into her hands now, I might never escape again.
Ah, she was beautiful, and never more so than now, in the full ripeness of her womanhood! But I knew her so well! She was perilous, a woman-demon, a Lilith, an instrument of seduction and domination, who could pose at girlishness, or even at kittenishness, when it was to her advantage. I trembled, thinking how simple it would be to take her in my arms, and how great an error. I understood all that she was claiming, of having betrayed me simply out of wrath and jealousy. Nor were such motives unknown in the world before her time, since even Jove’s queen Juno had vilely enchanted many of her rivals and ensorcelled her unfortunate lovers, and many lesser women, I trow, had done that also. But I would not be deceived again. Rather would I couple at random with some whore of the streets, than give myself into the keeping of a shedevil that I had mistaken for a true woman. I must hold my distance from Dona Teresa, for wisdom’s sake, and for honor’s sake, and for safety’s. So I did not move toward her, as so easily I could.