She seemed to tremble, and closed her eyes a moment, as if reaching into some great depth of memory, out of which at length she fetched, saying the words in a weak quavering voice, “Essex—Sussex— Somerset—York—”
I was fair close upon weeping.
Instantly did I sweep her out of that whore-market and to my barracks, where I ordered a meal for her, some palm-wine, some boiled grain and meat. She ate hastily and in desperate greed, with both her hands, as if she had not had food a long while, and feared it might be taken from her before she was done. I watched her with pity and dismay. She was then no more than two-and-twenty years of age, and looked close upon forty, and a much-used forty at that. Her breasts, that once had stood out before her like two firm globes, now were sagging and shrunken. Her face was haggard, her nose showed the mark of some injury, her rich brown skin had grown ashen-dull in its color, her woolly hair was flecked with bits of gray. She was thin and slack-muscled, who I remembered as sturdy, a joyous athlete. There was a tremor to her hands, not a great one but unceasing.
When she had done with her meal I took her by the chin and lifted her head, and said, “We are both much less pretty now, eh, Matamba? But at least we have both survived. Tell me your tale of these six years, and then I’ll tell you mine.”
“The words—too fast—”
“Forgotten your Portugee, is that it?”
“I speak—little—”
“Ah. Yes. We can talk in your Kikongo tongue, if you like. I have some words of that lingo now.”
“No—Portugal—”
Aye. She wanted the language back.
So I was gentle and slow with her, and we talked a little, and she rested, and we rehearsed some words anew, and I ordered more food for her. Then she was tired, and lay down, and later I joined her in the bed; but I had forgotten all lust by this time, and merely held her in my arms until morning. Her naked body was a sorry sight, with the lines of childbearing making a map across her belly, and her thighs that had been so taut and vigorous now puckered and loose, and so on, a terrible ruination of all her beauty. Yet already, in just a day and a night, she seemed to be brightening and returning to herself. God’s wounds, how she must have suffered from want and misery, before I found her among the whores!
It pained me to watch her those early days as she hobbled about my room, sighing much, pausing often to mutter a prayer and to cross herself, and always struggling to find the strength to go on. For she was a wreck, a beached hull, that had endured the worst of the elemental furies and showed all the signs of it. She did weep often, and tremble with some inner chill, or maybe the memory of an ague. But each day she was less ruined than on the day before, for the which I gave deep thanks to Him who is our preservation.
In a slow and very gradual way did she make her recovery, regaining some strength, and finding once more her command of Portuguese as her body offered sustenance to her mind. Within a week or so, months of suffering had dropped away from her, so that she was not near so frightsome to behold. But beyond doubt she never again would be that girlish black goddess I had bought in São Tomé, but at best only a shadow of her.
She told me the tale of her hardships, which chilled my blood like a wintry northern gale.
She said that after my arrest she was taken by my other servants and beaten severely, and hurled naked from my cottage and left to crawl away. Some Portugal soldiers found her and merrily had her behind a bush that very hour, one after another until she was bloodied and raw, and then they abandoned her. Later she was seized by order of Dona Teresa, and was scourged with whips—the marks still remained faint along her back and buttocks, and I think will never fade—and afterward was she given over into slavery to one of Dona Teresa’s grooms.
“But this is vile!” I cried. “None of this was deserving unto you!”
“It was not the worst of it,” said she very quietly.
For then was she used badly by all who came upon her, she declared: for to the men of the city it was considered a way of showing regard for Dona Teresa, to abuse the Englishman’s former paramour, and Matamba was raped and maltreated more than she could tally. All this she did tell me in a soft low voice, with no fire in it, as though she were relating some events that had happened to another person in the reign of Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, far away. Yet her tales made my own blood run hot and my heart to pound for wrath, and I marched up and down the room like some caged beast as she spoke, and I wished for an hundred hands, that I might punish all those malefactors at once—as if I could do the slightest thing, I that had no privilege left to me in this land.
“The groom my master wearied of me and gave me to a fisherman,” she said. “And he was as rough and scaly as any fish he ever caught, and his breath stank of fish, and his hair also, and his whole skin. He lost me by wager to an innkeeper, who hired me out as whore to his guests.”
“It is not so!”
She shrugged. “In that time I bore three children. One lived two weeks, and one lived four, and one for a month and a half. My breasts were ever aching with milk. When they came to use my body, I did beg them to suckle at me, to ease the pain. And some did, and some would not.”
She fell ill, too, of some colic that brought her close to death. For which release she said she prayed daily to the Madonna: her Christian faith still remained strong with her, God alone knowing why. But not even death was granted her. And upon her recovery, she said, she was subjected to whoring in the whore-market that had sprung up. Owing to the ravages of disease and childbirth and overmuch other suffering, she had grown ugly and aged too early, and only rarely did men choose her, so that she was hard pressed to pay for her food, and endured long sieges of bitter famine. And so it went for my poor Matamba, from bad to worse in year upon year, and often she thought she would simply set out into the interior one morning, hoping to be fallen upon by a lion and released from her woes. But she could not, since that self-destruction was forbidded to her by her creed.
All this, and only because I had bought her out of slavery!
I think I had done her no service by that, after all. No one can say what would have befallen her if she had gone to the New World as she had been destined to do, but perhaps it would have been no worse than this, and might even have been somewhat better, if only it had been a swift death of some killing pestilence. For I suppose there are times when death is preferable to life, if it be life of the sort Matamba had been made to swallow these years just past.
Yet was she still alive, and had hope of better things in time to come, which the dead do not have. I did what I could to atone for the cruelties she had had at the hands of others by feeding her and nursing her until some proper color returned to her skin and she began to hold her shoulders erect again and show some little semblance of vitality. Even so, she went about my room as though expecting to be whipped for any small failing, and constantly did she jump at the slightest sound like a wary cat, and cringe, and crouch; but some of that timidity passed from her, in time.
We slept each night in the same narrow bed. But I did not make any approach to her, knowing how often she had been taken by cruelty, and thinking that the act of carnal pleasure must have lost all its savor for her, being so intermixed with brutality and pain. So I would not add to her woes with yet another penetration. But one night her hand did steal shyly down my belly until it grasped my yard, and stroked it up and down to make it grow to its fullest size at once.
“Nay,” said I softly. “You need not, Matamba.”
“Do you not desire me, Andres?”
“You have suffered so much that I would not ask of you any such—”