The Abyss

by Lara Blunte

  A boy, about eight years old, came over to Teté and stood next to her, his head against her arm. "This is Guelo. That's what we understand of his name, because his parents died on the way here from Angola. I am teaching him Portuguese. Guelo!"

  The boy looked up. Teté asked, "How old are you?"

  "Não sei," the boy said. I don't know.

  "Most of his answers are like that," Teté said, shaking her head.

  "He looks sad," Clara remarked tenderly, trying to control her expression so as not to show the horror she felt at his story.

  "He likes to be around me, but I am at the house all the time. Sinhá, you should accept him as a houseboy, I would take care of him and teach him."

  "We will see," Clara smiled. "I will ask Lucia what she thinks."

  "Sinhá, do you want to meet Pai Bernardo?"

  Clara knew that the older slaves or servants were always called father or mother─ pai or mãe─ by the younger ones as a sign of respect. The landowners would often follow suit and address them in the same way.

  "Who is he?"

  "He's old and he makes anything, he can make you boots! You'll need boots, especially when the summer rains begin!"

  Teté led her down a path and they arrived at a wooden cottage set amidst trees. Bernardo was sitting outside on a stool, carving wood. He had appeared at the farm two years before, and Gabriel had immediately given him a house and some land where he could plant things. He was almost sixty years old, and had understood that he could not keep riding his mule between towns in the mountains anymore.

  Teté approached him, clapping her hands to announce their presence.

  "Pai Bernardo, this is Dona Clarinha."

  The man straightened his back and looked at her with intelligent eyes. He stood up politely, took his pipe out of his mouth and nodded, "Sinhá."

  He had a deep, pleasant voice, and spoke slowly. He also moved slowly as he carved, holding the different instruments in a firm grip. He seemed to be carving a saint, and the face that was emerging was beautiful. Clara decided not to ask about it.

  "Sinhá would like to know if you can make her boots like mine!" Teté was saying. "She can't always walk around in dainty shoes here."

  Teté lifted Clara’s skirt and showed her feet. Pai Bernardo looked, pulled on his pipe and said, "Hmmm."

  He moved away and Teté smiled at Clara. He came back with some sort of thick paper and put it on the ground, motioning Clara to step on it. She did, and he drew around each of her feet with a piece of coal.

  "Come back three days from now, to try it on," he said.

  "All right, I will. Thank you."

  "You're welcome."

  As they walked back towards the house Teté explained, "He makes almost anything. He is very clever."

  "Why does he live apart?"

  "He likes the silence. And sinhô often goes there to sit with Pai. He says Pai is a phisolopher."

  "Philosopher."

  "Phisolopher."

  Clara gave up, smiling. "I need a seamstress too," she said. "It's absurd for me to wear these house dresses, if I mean to walk around and ride. Even a riding habit seems absurd here. I need sturdy clothes, but where will I get the fabric?"

  "Oh!" Teté cried, and pulled on her hand.

  The maid led Clara into the house, toward a wardrobe in one of the drawing rooms. It was filled with fabric from top to bottom, from the simplest cotton and muslin to the most elaborate hand painted silk.

  "This is for you!" Teté said. "I almost forgot."

  "For me?" Clara wondered.

  "Sinhô thought of everything!"

  Clara turned around to see that Lucia had joined them. "If you want things made, I can get seamstresses to come," Lucia added. "We send for them and house them while they make your clothes."

  "That would be very helpful," Clara said.

  Lucia nodded. "It will be done."

  Clara was looking around the room, and remembering all the crystal, linen and china she had seen at dinner the night before. She thought she knew the answer to the question that she, in any case, asked, "All these...things in the house ─ all the beautiful things: did Gabriel buy them from the previous owner?"

  Lucia smiled, "No, he had all of it brought for you. He lived very simply beforehand, the only thing he had then were books. But when you became betrothed, he said that the sinhá had very good taste, that nothing would be too good for you. Most of what you see, even the beds upstairs, are all new. He had them all brought here, even from Europe."

  "I must thank him, then," Clara said slowly.

  She saw in Lucia's eyes that the older woman knew something was amiss, but she only said, "I believe he liked doing all this for you." Lucia addressed Teté. "Have you shown her the pianoforte?"

  "Ah!" Teté cried, and started leading Clara to the end of the corridor. She opened the door to the last room, and there was a beautifully decorated piano inside.

  "These are hard to find even in Europe!" Clara cried.

  "Sinhô had to tune it himself," Lucia said. "Some of the chords broke on the trip here, over those terrible roads. It's also for you, as Dom Gabriel doesn't play it. He has a guitar instead."

  Clara caressed the smooth surface of the piano, which depicted scenes of genteel living in Europe. There were music sheets lying on it, and she started looking through them.

  Grande sonata Pathetique opus 13, number 8.

  Clara took the sheet and placed it above the keyboard as she sat down. She opened it at the second movement and read the music, humming to herself.

  "Try the keys," Teté asked.

  Clara's finger touched one key, and another; then her fingers lost their inhibition and started to play.

  As the notes filled the air, she got lost in the beauty of the music, in the hope mixed with sadness that it expressed. She didn't see that Teté had sat on the floor at her feet, or that Lucia had turned to look out the window with eyes full of tears, or that other servants started arriving at the threshold to listen.

  They all stood around her, united by the music. They stood dreaming or longing: some for lands far away, some for people they would never see again, some thankful that their lives were better than they might have been.

  And Clara also dreamed that the misunderstanding that had separated Gabriel from her would disappear, that there would be joy in their life. A man who had thought of all those things for her was a man worth loving, and she believed he might still love her.

  It was only when she was done that she saw how many people were around, moving away in embarrassment. Teté was kneeling on the floor, using the corner of her apron to wipe her eyes.

  "I don't know what that makes me feel!" Teté said. "I feel very happy and very sad at the same time!"

  Clara smiled at her and at Lucia, who had turned back into the room, visibly controlling her emotions. The sinhá could only think, again, how all people in the world felt the same things; how they all feared suffering, and how they all longed for happiness.

  Twenty. A Joy That Eluded Him

  Gabriel did not begrudge Clara the freedom to do as she pleased, or the affection that most of the servants were developing for her.

  When he rode home from the fields in the afternoon, he would hear laughter in the house, and he would go in to find that she had arranged things more tastefully ─ that there were fresh flowers in almost every room, that she had draped a fringed shawl here, or left a fan there.

  Sometimes he would approach slowly because there would be music, and he wanted to listen to it; he caught himself smiling because she was using the piano, then frowned the smile away. He could still not think of Clara without seeing the Baron next to her, kissing her neck and pawing her breasts. He did not like to remember the night at the prince's, when she had crossed a room to greet him with the glow of false love on her face; he could still hear her laugh as she said: there will be money for everything now.

  At dinner they would speak in English or French so the
servants would not understand, but they did not speak much. She asked him for permission to make a small change to something, or to bring Guelo to the house, or to go to mass in town. He told her that she was the mistress of the estate, and must do as she liked.

  On Sunday morning she was taken to mass by the coachman, accompanied by Lucia and Teté, and Gabriel found himself wandering into her room. The windows were open and the air was fragrant. The bed still bore the imprint of her body, though a maid would soon come to fix it. He moved to the table where there were sheets of paper, and sifted through them.

  She had never, in the past, let him see what she was drawing, claiming to be ashamed. He remembered that in one occasion his insistence was the source of a sweet struggle between them. She had held her notebook behind her, and he had pretended that he was trying to get it. That had been as close as they ever got to each other until he kissed her on the veranda of the house in Rio ─ and the moment hadn't lasted long, since her father had walked back into the drawing room after a brief absence.

  Gabriel had believed her protests and was therefore utterly surprised to be looking at drawings that showed more than skill. He picked up the likeness she had made of Teté and saw that not only was the girl rendered in lines and strokes almost worthy of an Italian master, but somehow Clara had captured her very spirit: the lips ever ready to laugh or smile, the eyes that held curiosity and hope but a little sorrow as well, the hands that were expressive even when they were still, the half lazy and half alert body.

  He looked at the other drawings and there were Sebastião and Celso, the one eager to please, prone to laughter, the other with the anger of a man who had been enslaved still lurking in his gaze. There was Guelo frowning in sleep on a little mat, Maninha smiling with generous pride in her food, Lucia with her straight back and muscular shoulders, her capable hands and bright eyes.

  She had captured them all.

  There was the house too, and the great tree that had survived the clearing of the jungle, the palms at the back, and he did not know how, but she had managed to give a character even to the inanimate building.

  Clara had talent; more than talent, because to artistry she added understanding, and that was a rare thing. She saw people and things, and somehow was able to convey deep truths where a lesser artist would only have shown forms.

  He saw the pencil she had been using inside an open box on the table. It was one of his writing pencils, not fit for drawing, and there was only a stub left.

  What a crime if she cannot keep drawing, he thought. She was proud, as she had warned him, and she would not ask him for anything. Would she take something he offered? He remembered her commenting on paintings she had seen at Queluz Palace in Lisbon, and now he wondered what she would be able to do with oils and color.

  He didn't realize, since the pain that ate at him was rooted in remembrance, that he had not thought of the Baron the whole time that he had been looking at her work. He turned from the table and saw her delicate satin slippers next to the divan, and her robe draped over it.

  Hardly knowing what he was doing, he walked to the robe and took it, raising it to his face, but then his eyes fell on the glass box next to her bed, and he saw the bracelet inside it. The thought returned like the lash of a whip: A virgin who smelled exquisitely sweet.

  He dropped the robe and cursed himself, then he strode out.

  Today was a day of rest, and Lucia had instituted a rotation in the house so that two of the kitchen maids cooked them luncheon on Sunday, and rested the next day when Maninha returned, a little jealous if the sinhô and sinhá had liked the food in her absence. Monday luncheon and dinner were always spectacular because of this fault of Maninha's, that she loved what she did and wanted to be the best at it.

  Sebastião served them at table and would rest the next day, when Celso returned.

  Gabriel looked at Clara more closely than he had of late. She was eating heartily, and her skin was a bit flushed from the sun. She seemed to be thriving without him, and finding her element somehow.

  Could a woman who had so quickly won the hearts of the household, who never displayed any affectation, who seemed content to amble around the grounds in a plain dress, with her hair hastily pinned up, be the monster who wanted slaves at the farm, just so that there would be more profit?

  Could she be the liar bent on marrying him to become rich, and hide her sins?

  He watched her later as she and Teté sat with Guelo: Clara had made drawings on small rectangles of paper to teach him Portuguese. Gabriel observed how the boy responded to her, his eyes shining. Children knew who was kind, and who was not; Guelo had lost both his parents inside the belly of a slave ship, and now he was smiling. She was healing him.

  Could all this still be theater, a pantomime to convince him that she was not the conniving woman he thought her? Or might she have made a terrible mistake, prodded into lasciviousness by her mother, and now be ashamed to admit it? Might she not deserve forgiveness, if she had lost her virtue to the Baron?

  As he walked toward Bernardo's cottage, he looked behind and saw a house that was alive, with open windows, with voices and laughter, with children running on the grounds.

  He had dreamt of just such a house when he had married Clara. His own reserve and mistrust always seemed greater than his kindness and sense of justice, and under him the house had been a silent, well run, tidy construction without a soul. It had been the place where he had his breakfast, where he washed and changed and had his supper, where he laid his head and went to sleep ─and not much more

  It was different now. It was a home, it had character ─ there were in it the joy and the generosity that she had brought, and which still eluded him.

  Was she lulling him into a sense of security, as she had done before, to then show her true self?

  It could not be, he thought as he walked through the trees toward Bernardo's cottage. What if he had misjudged her? What if he were doing her an injustice, denying a true and amorous wife the love that she deserved?

  But then there was the Baron, kissing her, climbing on top of her naked body.

  Don’t! Gabriel told himself, shaking his head.

  Yet his admonition was not enough to dispel the sight that was almost always inseparable from his thoughts of Clara ─ or to make his mind believe what his heart was beginning to understand.

  It was a good thing to be with Bernardo. There was an understanding between the two men: they liked each other and they were both grateful, one for having been saved, the other for finding a pleasant home; but they did not need to say things, and could spend hours in silent companionship.

  Bernardo had been teaching Gabriel to carve wood and he liked it. His thoughts ran right out of his head when he took a piece of jacaranda and began to fashion it into something.

  He looked over at what Bernardo was doing, the carving of a saint about half a meter high. He had been working on it for a while. Gabriel frowned, "Is it my impression of has the face changed?"

  Bernardo only chuckled deep in his chest. Gabriel recognized the smile on the saint's face, the eyes and the eyebrows.

  "That saint is looking like Dona Clara," he remarked dryly. Had she gotten to Bernardo as well?

  The older man chuckled again. "You asked for a statue of Saint Claire," he said. "Why shouldn't it look like Dona Clara?"

  Gabriel considered Bernardo for a moment, then went back to carving his own piece of wood. He preferred carving shapes, leaves or birds, not faces. He concentrated on what he was doing, on the sound of the tool as it scraped the wood, on the form that was emerging.

  By four o'clock Bernardo brought out a bottle of cachaça, sugar cane alcohol made at the farm, and tobacco. Gabriel rolled himself a cigarette as Bernardo drew on his pipe, and they sat smoking and drinking from two tiny glasses. One of Bernardo’s dogs lay next to Gabriel’s stool and he caressed its head and ears. Neither of the men liked being drunk, but this afternoon cachaça on Sundays was a ritual they e
njoyed.

  Pai built a fire and they sat back looking at it, watching the embers, smelling the night that was about to come and listening to the cicadas. Life was simple like that, Gabriel thought. A man worked hard, exhausted himself all week, produced things that were necessary, gave employment, treated people justly, made their lives better. They returned his fairness with honesty and hard work, or they were thrown out. Then a man did something like he was doing now, he just let an afternoon and evening go by pleasantly with a friend, until it was time to work again.

  He had wanted more than this. He had wanted love, and instead he had brought confusion to his life. Love was a very ambitious, and yet a very deep wish. Gabriel stared at the fire, at the embers changing shape and turning red, beating as if they were hearts, and he thought, as a man once did in a play, “Why did I marry?”

  Twenty-One. Spirits

  Clara did not regret her marriage.

  It had ushered her into a different life than she had imagined, and yet it still was the life of an adult woman with her own household, a woman building a life for herself and for those around her.

  The constant voice that had been in her ear since she could remember, her mother's voice ─ finding fault with everything, asking questions to then challenge the answers, giving unwanted advice, constantly pointing out the foibles of others, trying to frighten her into seeking material ease and honors ─that voice spoke much more softly now.

  Instead, there was an almost total silence from the new person in her life, her husband.

  Perhaps she was foolish, but she believed that Gabriel would come round eventually. She wanted to think that no one could live in error forever, and she sometimes saw his eyes soften, or she caught him staring at her with an almost pensive look, as if he were seeing something different than a woman who might have lied to him.

  Whoever he was, he had awakened a new feeling in her, and desire was not a tame beast. She considered it almost a sin that she should watch him as he took the candles to light the way to her room at night, that she should wish, half closing her eyes, that instead of moving away he would put his arm around her waist at the door and that he would begin kissing her, to then throw her on the bed and ravish her.