But I am no Papist, and though I am a God-fearing man I am not a Church-fearing man, if you take my meaning. I do not think souls can be lost by the thrusting of a few inches of firm flesh into some hot little slit, even if it be not the right and proper slit that one has sworn to use exclusively. Though I felt myself to have been pushed and prodded by her into doing something that was only partly of my desire, yet that in itself did not make her the Devil’s agent, did it? She had played with me, and had had something from me that doubtless she had sought for good reason, and had given something to me that met my need.
I felt no shame and no guilt neither, I must declare. For chastity is like an inflamed boil, which, once pricked, heals and subsides quickly, and does not recur, and when the inflammation is gone is lost to memory. I knew that I loved Anne Katherine no less for having coupled with this stranger-woman on the floor of an African dungeon. And I knew also that my hope of seeing England and Anne Katherine again was slight, so slight that it was little more than monkish madness to attempt to preserve myself chaste until my homecoming. Not even Ulysses had done that, dallying as he did with Circe and Nausicaa and I forget how many others on his long journey toward Ithaca.
(But of course his Penelope had remained chaste. Aye, but that’s another matter, is it not?)
After that first passionate hour Dona Teresa left me, and did not come to me again for two days. Which left me hungry for her company, and kept me busy in my mind replaying our sport. Each time I heard gates clanging, my sweat burst out and my loins came to life, but it was only some guard, bringing me gruel or porridge or other dreary mess. But in time she did come, and again, and again many times.
“How is it,” I asked, “that you can be so free now in this prison? You come and go as if you are the captain of guards.”
“Ah,” she answered, “that am I not, but the captain of guards is my friend. It was he granted me the right to come to you.”
Startling hot jealousy blazed in my flesh, for I thought I knew what she meant by “friend.”
“That dandy, you mean, with the fancy purple breeches?”
“That one, yes. You know him, then?”
“I met him once. It was he who took me from the hospice to the dungeon.”
“He is Fernão da Souza. He is young and ambitious, and he means to be a mighty man in Africa one day.”
“As do they all, these Portugals, eh? Your friend Mendoça, who you say will grant you my pardon, he also hopes to be great in this land.”
“Indeed. And Souza thinks by pleasing me to please Mendoça, who is more powerful. So he lets me use him, by coming here and visiting with you as often as I like. In return for which he uses me, by having me say good things of him to Mendoça” Mischief flickered like heat-lightning across her features. “D’ye see, Andres, how simple it is for me?”
“If one has such beauty as yours, anything is simple.”
“Beauty is not the secret. Cleverness is. I understand what I want, and therefore I seek it and get it.”
“And what is it you want from me, then?”
“Would I tell you outright, Andres, d’ye think?”
“Aye,” I said. “For you know me to be a bluff and open man, and deviousness is not the medicine to use on me. But I answer plainly and openly to a straight request.”
“So you do.”
“Then what part am I to play in the epic of your life, Dona Teresa?”
“Why, you will take me to Europe.”
“What?” I said, amazed.
“It is my great dream. I am an African woman, you know, who has seen only Kongo and Angola, and all the rest of the world is only a fable to me. Do I seem European to you, Andres?”
“Aye, very much.”
“I am not. Yet I study being European. I speak like a European and I wear Portuguese clothes and I carry myself in a Christian way. I hate this place. I am tired of heat and rain and drought and rivers full of beasts that devour. I drink fine wine and cover myself with powders and perfumes and imagine that I am a woman of the court, but all the while I know this is mere savagery, with Jaqqas in the jungle that would eat me if they could, and great elephantos smashing down the trees, and such. I want to hear music. I want to attend the plays. I would have my portrait painted, and enjoy flirting with dukes.”
“So, then, lady, I am to convey you to Lisbon? To Madrid?”
“Why not London?”
“Shall I spread my cloak and fly by it, with you clutching on? Ah, I cannot fly! And I have not even the cloak!”
“You will leave Africa one day, Andres.”
“It is my every prayer.”
“And you will take me. Yes? You will bring me before the Queen Elizabeth, and say, Here is a woman of the court of Kongo, who desires now to be your lady-in-waiting.”
I smiled and said, “You much mistake me, Teresa, if you think the Queen and I are playfellows. But this much I promise you: aid me to escape, and I will seek to bring you out with me when I flee this land.”
Ah, such lies we tell, when smooth thighs and hard-tipped breasts are close at hand!
Was it a lie? I think that at that moment it was God’s own truth, and I saw the two of us in the eye of my mind escaping Africa together, settling out in some sturdy little craft along the coast and upwards to the Canary Isles and the threshold of Europe. But how could I do such a thing? Escaping of my own would be taxing enough; taking a woman would more than treble my risks and difficulties. And then, even if I did—to march into England with a woman of this sort on my arm? Easier to carry in a brace of elephantos, or a little herd of fleet zevveras. Introduce her to the Queen? Aye, and introduce her to Anne Katherine, too, and then have the three of us married by the Archbishop of Canterbury, shall I? But those were all second and third thoughts of a later hour. Just then I took my promise half-seriously, in the way we take cheering fantasies. That I would escape Africa one day seemed altogether possible, for it was my great goal. That I would take Dona Teresa with me was at least worth allowing in hypothesis.
Meanwhile I was a prisoner, and she had found a way to visit with me, and we now were constant lovers, with a rich and powerful lodestone force pulling our bodies together in a vehement and most ecstatic way. It seemed more than natural, that ceaseless yearning of the flesh.
And indeed it was, for she said one day, “Do you still have by you the little talisman I gave you?”
“I do. I keep it on a cord, around my waist, sometimes, to remind me of you, and when I sleep it is against me, or beneath my head.”
“And you had such scorn for it, when I gave it!”
“Well, but it is from you, and so I have grown fond of it.”
“I did lie to you concerning it,” said she, with a wanton grin.
“In what way?”
“That it was an amulet of protection. It is not that.”
“What is it, then?”
She laughed playfully. “An amulet of love,” said she. “To bind you to me, to make you crave me. For I did crave you, but you never looked upon me with desire, so that I thought I must have recourse to some greater power. Was that not wicked of me?”
“Ah,” said I, amused and uneasy both at once: for this was witchcraft, and I feared witchcraft. Yet did I tell myself that it was not the amulet that inspired this lust, but simply her beauty; although I felt some doubt of that in the depth of my soul, and some fear, that in keeping it close I was exposing myself to deviltry.
She brought me wine. She brought me little cakes. She bathed me with her sponge when prison filth grew too deep on me. She opened her body to me joyously and freely, and we developed vast skills at the sport of love, so that prison was less of a torment to me than prison is generally thought to be. Yet was I still a prisoner.
“The new governor will be here in a few weeks’ time,” she told me. “Then shall I intercede with him, by means of Don João de Mendoça, and have you set free from this hole.”
“And shall I still see you, when I
am free?”
“We shall have to go about it secretly. But we shall go about it, I pledge you that!”
“And if your fine Portugal friends discover us, what shall become of me? Back to the dungeon? Or worse?”
“They shall not discover us.”
“Aye, you are practiced in these crafts, I know. If you were a man, I think you would be governor of this place before you were thirty.”
“If I were a man,” she said. “But I shall be the governor’s governor instead, and have the rewards without the burdens. Is that not better? Considering that I am not a man, and am by that disqualified from holding office. Why is that, d’ye think, that women may not hold office?”
“In England they may,” I pointed out.
“In England, aye! But these Portugals think otherwise. They think a woman good for only two things, both of them done in bed, and the second one being childbearing.”
“The other is not done in bed, Dona Teresa.”
“Not by you and me in this bedless cell, perhaps. But customarily—”
“Nay, I mean cookery,” I said, “for is that not the other thing women do, when they are not with child?”
She laughed heartily at that, and gave me a broad nudge.
Then, more serious, she said, “What offices may women hold in England?”
“Forsooth, Dona Teresa, the very highest! Surely you know we have a Queen, and had another Queen before her!”
That did not awe her. “So I am aware,” she said. “Your Elizabeth, and your Mary that was half a Spaniard. But queening is only an accident of birth. If there is no son, then the daughter must have the throne, or the power will be lost to the royal family, is that not so? Even the Spaniards, to whom a woman is nothing, have had queens, I think.”
“Aye, Isabella of Castile, for one, and mayhap others.”
“But what other offices in England do women hold? Do they sit in your courts and go to your councils?”
I thought a moment. “Nay, it is impossible.”
“Impossible, or only unthinkable?”
“There are no women in our Parliament. We choose none for our Judiciary.”
“And as your priests? Any women?”
“Nay, not that, either.”
“But you have a Queen. She is supreme, and has heads stricken off as it pleases her, and looses the forces of war. Below her, nothing. Eh, Andres?”
“It is so. Save for the Queen, our women are subject to their fathers and husbands in all things.”
“So it is the same for all you Europeans. A clever woman must rule by ruling her rulers, unless she be a queen. Do you regard me as clever, Andres?”
“You are the most clever woman that ever I knew, though it may be that our Elizabeth is more than your match. But perhaps no one else.”
“Then I shall gain what I crave,” she said, “which is majesty and might, or at the very least some strength of place. Fie, a woman has more privilege among the blackamoors of Kongo than they grant her in Europe. The blacks have had queens, too. And their women may own property. Yours are property.”
“You speak of the Kongo folk as ‘they’ and ‘blackamoors.’ You speak of the Portugals as ‘these Portugals.’ Do you stand outside both peoples, then, and look upon them all as strangers?”
Her face grew downcast. “In some degree I do.”
“Outside both, a member of neither? Is that not painful to you, to have no true nation, Teresa?”
“That was not of my choosing.”
“Who were your parents?”
“My father was a Portugal in the court of Don Alvaro, the Manikongo, that is, the black king. He was an adviser on military matters, and served the Manikongo bravely when the Jaqqas invaded his kingdom and drove the king into sanctuary on the Hippopotamus Island. He was Don Rodrigo da Costa, a very great man. He is dead now, of a fever taken while in battle.”
“And your mother?”
“Dona Beatriz, whose father was Duarte Mendes, the viceroy at São Tomé. They say that she was beautiful, that she resembled me much, but was darker, having more African blood than I. I never knew her. She died when I was a babe.”
“That grieves me. I also lost my mother early.”
“The Jaqqas took her, and I suppose used her in their feasts.” For a moment her eyes showed pain, and anger. Then she looked to me and said, “If she had lived, she would have been a great woman. I will be great in her stead. I will find the place where power is in this land, and I will seize possession of it. Unless”—and she smiled wantonly—“unless you bring me forth from here when you escape, and take me to England. In England I would also be famous and great. Tell me of England, Andres.”
“What would you know?”
“Is it cold there?”
“Nay, not very. The land is green. The rain falls all the year long, and the grass is thick.”
“I hear of a thing called snow.”
“There is not much of that,” I said.
“Tell me what it is.”
“Snow is rain, that freezes in the winter and falls from the sky, and covers the countryside like a white blanket, but not often for very long.”
“Freezes? That word is unknown to me.”
I groped and fumbled for explanations. “On the highest mountains of Africa the air is cold, is it not?”
“Yes.”
“And are those mountains not covered at their crests by a whiteness?”
“So I have heard. But I have not seen it.”
“The whiteness is water, that has been turned hard by the coldness, and made into snow, and also into ice, which is snow pressed tight. But why talk so much of snow? England has little snow. It is a mild cool land with sweet air, and fine fleecy clouds, and sometimes the sky is gray with dampness and fog, but we have come to love even that.”
“You scorn the Pope there.”
“Aye, that we do!” I stared at her. “You know of the Pope? What is the Pope to you?”
“The Pope is the King of Christendom,” said Dona Teresa. “The Pope is the right hand of God, and King Philip and all his subjects are subject to him.”
“You are a Christian, then?”
“My father was Don Rodrigo da Costa, and I am no savage, Andres,” said she with much show of dignity. “Why do the English mock and defy the Pope?”
“Why, because it is madness to be governed by a religious authority that is seated a thousand miles beyond seas and mountains, and that judges questions of English law by the standards of Italy and Spain and sometimes France, but never by those of England. The Pope conspires to dethrone our Queen. The Pope would deliver us into the power of our enemies of Spain. The Pope has strived always to tell us what we might do, and sometimes he has succeeded; but at last Great Harry overthrew him—”
“Great Harry?”
“King Henry that was the eighth of his name, the father of Queen Elizabeth.”
“Overthrew the Pope? Nay, how was that possible? The Pope still reigns in Rome.”
“In Rome, aye. But we have broken free. And spared ourselves from greedy monks who bleed the people of their wealth, and spared ourselves from ignorant mummery and mumpsimus nonsense, that chanted at us in an ancient language and smothered us in the reek of incense and the crying out to idols.”
“Why, then, you are not Christians!”
“Christians we are,” I said, “but we are English, and that makes a difference in all things.”
“Aye,” she said. “English have yellow hair and hate the Pope. Those are the chiefest differences. You must tell me more of England another time. And of yourself: you must tell me of your boyhood, and of your schooling and how you came to go to sea, and if there be anyone you love in England, and how you fell prisoner into the hands of the Portugal, and many other such things. But we will talk of those things later.”
“Later, aye.”
“And now let us talk no more,” she said.
To which I concurred, for she moved against me and
drew her satin-smooth skin across my chest, and once more she magicked me in that brazen way of hers, engulfing, devouring, that starfish mouth drawing me in. She had no shame: that was the essence of her. Dona Teresa lay at the center of her world and all other things pivoted about her, and that which she desired was that which she took, be it jewels or fine clothes or the bodies of men. Yet there was an ease and an openness about this which made it not at all unseemly: it was as if she were a man, merely following her star, as we do. Why is it that ambition in a man is a virtue, and in a woman is shrewish discordance? Why is it that lustiness in a man is a mark of strength, and in a woman a stigma of wickedness? Aye, there are fallen women aplenty, but never a fallen man, except only those who have had high positions and let themselves foolishly tumble from it.
I learned much about the world from Dona Teresa da Costa in our feverish couplings on the floor of that murky stinking prison cell. I learned that a woman could be much like a man in certain aspects of character without giving up anything of her womanhood, if she be clever enough. I learned that an entire sex has been left to waste in idleness and chatter, for that we suppress them to our own advantage. I learned that in the darkest heart of Africa could blossom grace and intelligence and vigor that would give honor to any kingdom.
All these things I might have learned, I wager, from close study of my own Queen. For surely Bess is a prince among princes, a woman with all man’s attributes and those of woman, too, and she gives the lie to those who say that the sex is simple and weak. But it has not been my privilege, nor shall it ever be, to strut like a Leicester or Ralegh in the halls of Her Majesty: but Dona Teresa has afforded me close instruction indeed, her eyes glistening near to mine, her tongue-tip tickling the tip of mine, her hardened paps burning like fiery coals against my breast, and, moreover, her dark and mercurial mind open to my inspection, so that I could see her intentions and projects as clearly as, I think, anyone ever did. I would not compare her to my fair pink-and-gold Anne Katherine, for they were as unlike as one planet is to another, as orange Mars to dazzling Venus; but yet I sometimes found myself putting Dona Teresa’s forwardness against Anne Katherine’s timidity and shy uncertain way, and Dona Teresa’s snorting fury of lust against Anne Katherine’s tender and sweet embrace, and in such comparisons I felt ashamed and guilty of making them, for the olive-hued woman of Africa emerged far the more brilliant in the matching. Which is why, I hazard, we should not stray from our own beds to those of strange women, lest we discover things we are better not knowing.