“But I desire you,” she said, “as in the old days. Even though I am ugly now, will you not grant me that pleasure?”
“You are not ugly.”
“Yet you have no desire for me?”
“Never did I say such a thing.”
“Then let us not hold back,” she replied, and eased one leg across my body and did straddle me and slide me quickly into her, so that we were at last reunited in the innermost of ways, and she did tickle me in that strange African way of hers, and bite me lightly here and there and scratch me some also, and pump her loins against me with steady and increasing vigor. Then was she gasping and breathing hot against my neck, and coming to her pleasure twice or thrice or even more, peradventure the first pleasure she had known out of this act since my banishing, and in the wildest moment of her delight did she bring me to mine. And after our coupling we did both cry and laugh together, but mainly did we laugh.
Thus did I restore Matamba to herself, and to me. It gave me great keen joy to see her flourishing again, howbeit never would her early beauty be regained. One cannot pump new tautness into fallen breasts, one cannot put a cosmetic of miracles to scars and skin-gullies. I think even if she had not suffered so in those six dark years, it would have been much the same for her, since that the girlhood does go swiftly and mercilessly from these Africans: they are all black Venuses at fourteen and mere shriveled hags and crones at thirty or thirty-five, and there seems to be no help for it. I did often long for the tender and bright-eyed lass that I had bought out of slavery on São Tomé, but I knew that hope to be as idle as it would be to long for my own youthful unlined face and resilient body: folly it is to bid time return.
In that same season I discovered what punishment I was to have for my escaping from Masanganu, and for other offenses both real and alleged. The governor now proposed to send four hundred men, that had been banished out of Portugal for high crimes, up into the country of Lamba to subdue a rebellion, and from there to any other district in need of pacifying. When these criminals arrived from Lisbon I would be joined to them, and dismissed forever into these border wars, marching endlessly here and there to keep the frontier of Angola safe against Jaqqa incursion and native uprising.
I sought Don João out to appeal against this sentence, but he would not see me, I suppose out of guilt and shame at using me this crass way. So I made ready to take up my life as a soldier. It was something better than hanging, at any rate, and I think also a better fate than further duty at Masanganu, where I might die of boredom if one of the plagues did not take me first.
Yet many weeks passed before my departure from the city. I was at that time largely left to my own devices, and spent my hours with Matamba, or wandering by myself along the shore of the perplexing ocean, looking longingly off toward invisible Europe, and England shining beyond.
England! Would ever I see England again? Had such a place as England ever existed, or was it only my dream, and had I indeed been born full-grown in Africa?
Matamba said, “Speak to me in English, Andres.”
“Aye, that I will! If I can remember any, lass!”
And I did speak to her, but the words were snailish slow in curling their way around my tongue, so used had I become to the Portugal way of framing speech. Yet did I persevere, and fiercely fight my way back to reclaiming my native Englishness, that has ever been so precious to me. I wondered, if I were to be dropped by angels into Essex this day, would anyone there recognize me as being of English blood, or would they run screaming, thinking me some new yellow-haired kind of Saracen, or some species of demon out of the nether? For surely I was mightily transformed, within and without, by my years in this tropic sun under such dire servitudes. But I made myself to remember my lost former life.
“These are the kings of England,” I said to Matamba. “At the first there was William, who did come from Normandy to lord it over the old Saxons. And then was his son William, who was slain in the forest, and then his other son Henry, and then Stephen of Plantagenet did seize the throne, and then another Henry, and after him Richard of the Lion Heart, and John—” and so I went, telling her all the kings, the Edwards and the Henrys and the Richards, up until my Elizabeth’s glorious time. And I made the black woman repeat the names after me, until she knew them as well as I, and put the second Richard in his rightful place between Edward and Henry Bolingbroke, and knew that the fourth Edward and the sixth Henry did change the kingship back and forth some several times during the wars of York and Lancaster, and could tell me how Henry Tudor did come out of Wales to defeat the crookback tyrant Richard, and so forth: all the names that had been dinned into me when I was a boy training for a clerkship. It did me great good to recite all that again, by way of reminding me that there once had been an England, and it existed yet. What sense it all made to Matamba, God alone can say; but often as we lay entwined at night, my yard deep in her and slowly moving, she would murmur to me, “Henry, Henry, Henry, Edward, Edward, Richard, Henry, Henry, Edward, Mary, Elizabeth,” like unto a kind of litany, saying the names in a wondrous foreign way, “Ay-leesh-a-bate,” with an outrush of whooshing breath, “Ainree,” “Reezhard.”
And I told her about our poetry, that was the great pride and wonder of our race, our special music. She asked me to chant her some verse, but when I reached into my mind all was void and dark, a dry empty well, until suddenly some scraps and shards came into view in the dusty corners of my spirit, and I did speak her some lines from Marlowe’s play of Faustus, that was the newest thing upon the boards when last I was in England:
I thought I had all that speech by heart, but the rest was gone from me except the striking of the clock, and the last smallest bit:
She listened all agape to those words, thinking them a magical music from the sound alone, as in sooth I think they are. But then she did pray to have the meaning from me, and when I translated it into her understanding, speaking part Portuguese and part Kikongo, it so terrified her that she clutched herself away from me, into a frightened quivering ball, and I had to comfort her with the laying on of my hands. Methinks she thought I was conjuring up Satan in our very chamber.
So I eased her with gentler songs:
And also:
And then:
And all these she loved, and had me recite many times, even though on most my memory failed me, and I could but give her stray nips and fragments, and hardly ever the complete verse. Yet did the sound of them delight her, and the sense, and her eyes did gleam, and she put her hands to mine and held me while I magicked her with these incantations of my homeland. She asked me had I composed any of these, and I told her sadly nay, I was no poet but only a frequenter of poetry, and that other men with finer and more far-ranging souls had set down those words, which led her ask me how anyone could have a soul more far-ranging than mine, which had carried me so far. “There is a difference,” said I. To which she shrugged, and called for more poems. Any that I said gave her pleasure, even Tom O’Bedlam’s song, though when I thought close upon its meanings it made me melancholy, and I would not say it twice: