The Abyss

by Lara Blunte

  The scar across his throat had seemed almost like a line where a terrible story might have been written, though he would not tell a word of it.

  She had seen his eyes and the anger within them, the disillusionment, the mistrust. She had been outraged that he had believed a worthless cad rather than her, but she had once spurned him for having no money, and considering his cautious nature and the things he had been through, she had forgiven him and had waited for him to come to her.

  Now, as she stood staring at a perfect little girl, the threshold of the door served almost as a frame to her jealousy. She looked at Gabriel feeding the child sweet pieces of fruit and asking her questions in a low, tender voice.

  This was his daughter by another woman, a woman he had loved while she had been longing for him in Lisbon, and rejecting every man who courted her. The girl’s green eyes were almond-shaped, like his; she was beautiful, as he was.

  Clara asked, "Who is this girl?"

  Gabriel looked up at her and seemed almost surprised, as if he had not expected to have a wife at all. He looked at the bespectacled man sitting with a cup of coffee in front of him, then at the child. Standing up with the girl in his arms he took her to the man, "Keep her a moment."

  The kiss he gave the child was like a sword through Clara, but he showed no sign of noticing her distress, and only motioned politely for her to walk out with him. He kept walking through the path beyond the chapel, beyond the trees, until they stood in a clearing with only the hills as witnesses to their conversation.

  "Who is that child?" she asked again.

  His face was serious, almost solemn. "I am sorry I have not told you before; I should have asked your permission, but there was going to be no other way than to bring her here."

  "Who is she?" Clara insisted.

  "She is the daughter of a woman I knew. The mother has died, and the girl would be left in the hands of a very unscrupulous man who was no relation to her. I hope you forgive me, but I had to bring her. She must stay with us."

  "Who was her mother?" Clara asked, feeling a pulse beat on her throat like a drum. "What was she to you?"

  Gabriel looked at the ground and frowned. "A woman who was close to me for a while, when I was mining in Bahia."

  She did not want to start weeping, but her anger helped keep her eyes dry. "A woman who was your mistress?" she asked in a strangled voice.

  "Yes, Clara," he said quietly. "A woman who was my mistress some time ago."

  She had to try twice before she managed to say, "You had a child with a whore?"

  He scowled. "She was no whore, and the child isn't mine."

  She became even more incensed at his quick defense of a dead woman. He had loved her! He had loved a woman and had a child with her, and he had clearly been searching for both only to find the mother dead and the girl in someone else's possession.

  Clara felt her blood rising even while her soul sank like lead. He had loved another woman!

  Thoughts were running through her mind at such speed that she could not process them; she only felt the dread of knowing that he had loved someone else, that he had had a child with her, a beautiful little girl.

  "The child is not yours?" was all that she could say in disbelief. "She is your spitting image! She has your eyes!"

  "Her name is Iara, and she was already a baby when I met her mother."

  Clara's usual generosity had deserted her; she felt as though she were being torn apart. "A woman with a baby, sleeping with you, and not a whore?"

  "Stop calling her that! She was a cabocla, they don't think of marriage as we do..."

  "You are as quick to defend her as you were to condemn me!" Clara cried, flushing. "You loved a woman who slept with several men, and yet you forsook your wife because of a lie!”

  "I did not forsake you because of a lie, but because you would not confess to the truth!"

  "What truth, that I was untouched when we married? That a vile man spread gossip about me?"

  "You would not swear to put my mind at ease!”

  "Your mind seems to be very much at ease about a woman who was free with her body!" Clara said bitterly.

  "I have asked you to stop speaking of her that way, she suffered and lived as she might. She is dead and her little girl an orphan. You adopt every child and stray kitten you see, why would you not pity Iara and her unfortunate mother?"

  Clara now stood looking at him with accusing eyes. "I will," she said. "If you confess that she is yours. I will love her then."

  "I cannot confess to a falsehood."

  "Why not, when you think I must?"

  "She isn't mine, Clara, don't make that mistake!"

  "Why not," she repeated, "when we have been living in your mistake for months? I heard you with my own ears telling her you are her father."

  "She is not my child, but I cared for her mother and I care for her, and I mean to bring her up as if she were mine!"

  "You cared for her mother! You'd say this to my face?"

  "You have asked me for the truth!" he cried.

  Clara was shaking her head. "You cared for her mother while I was thinking of you, for years, but you have treated me like a whore and yourself like the very essence of honor!"

  He took a step towards her, his face softening a little, "I did not say I loved her, I have loved no one but ─ "

  Gabriel could not finish the sentence, he could not tell her that he loved her. And, in any case, she no longer believed it. He had been loving the mother of his child all along.

  "You lived with her, you were her lover..."

  "It's different for men, we can be with a woman for comfort and affection and still not love her ─ "

  She cut him short, "You loved a woman, you had a child with her and for months now you have been denying me love, denying me the possibility of having my own baby! Of course, you already had a little girl, it made much less difference to you if you had a child with me or not..."

  "I have told you again and again, she is not my child!" he told her in a loud voice.

  "You have brought the child of another woman into our home, though you will give me no child of my own. You are a terrible man!" she shouted back.

  "Don’t, Clara!"

  "You are a terrible, selfish man," she continued in a lower tone. "You think you do everything with the greatest integrity, but you lied to me, and you planned to let me rot without touching me. All the time you were searching for this woman to be your mistress again, for this child to love you, and you would deny me the most sacred connections in life..."

  "I will not keep telling you the same thing," he said almost through gritted teeth. “She is not my child, I did not love her mother and had no plans to live with her."

  "Why will you not keep repeating the same thing? Did you not expect me to?"

  "I have said what I needed to say," he went on. "The child is staying; she has no one but me."

  He moved past her on his way back to the house. Clara stood frozen for a moment, and then anger made her want to hurt him as much as he was hurting her. He would never forgive her for something that she had not done, yet he expected her now to live knowing that he had loved someone else, enough to have a child with her, and he would flaunt that child in her face every day of their lives. He had taken Guelo away, not because he wanted the boy to be strong, but because he wanted to leave nothing to her.

  Her heart was overwhelmed by the deep rage she felt. She did not at that moment pity the dead woman, whose life might have been hard, she did not pity a mother who, even while dying, must have felt anguish at abandoning her child; she did not think of a tiny girl who had been left adrift, as she would certainly have done were she anyone else's.

  She was racked with the pain of jealousy, because she did not only love Gabriel, she was in love with him to the marrow of her bones. She wanted to cause a wound as deep in him as the one he was inflicting on her.

  "Then, since you have longed so much for the truth, here it is," she said
.

  He had stopped, and she turned around to look at him, her face so transformed that she might have been an entirely different woman, "Yes, I loved the Baron. I was his mistress for months. I married you for your money, and to cover my sins, just as you thought. I am glad to have all your wealth, Gabriel, and I am glad you never touch me anymore because I only dream of being touched by Ramos!"

  He had not turned around, perhaps afraid of what he was about to hear, but now he did. He took a step towards her. His eyes might have turned her to stone if her wrath had not been greater than his.

  "I see," he said. "So you are the whore that all Lisbon says you are!"

  She smiled with scorn, "I am that whore, and your wife!"

  He nodded quietly a few times, and then he turned once more and kept walking.

  "Now you know why I married you!" she called out after him. There was no response and she added in a hoarse voice. "Why did you marry me? To have a queen for the hell that is your life?"

  He looked at her again, and now there was a disdainful smile on his face, "Did you not want a title?"

  After he disappeared among the trees, Clara finally felt the weight of the blow she had suffered, the weight of the long time she had waited, only to find that her husband had loved another woman, and already had a child.

  She fell to her knees as she took a deep, shuddering breath, and sat on the ground to sob as if she might never stop.

  Twenty-Nine: Teté's Plan

  In the heat of anger still, and without yet considering the consequences of the lies that she had told Gabriel, Clara only knew that she could not go back to the house. She felt as though she might never return to it.

  Reaching her studio, she locked herself inside so that she could sit on the ground and go on weeping.

  She had always believed, even in the dark moments when she thought that Gabriel no longer loved her, that he had always been thinking of her. He had told her so, and he was not a liar.

  That very day she had been smiling upon waking up, believing that they would be reconciled. She had spent hours thinking of the kiss he had given her the night before, and of what was to come next.

  Instead, now she had found out that all the time that she had been waiting for him, dreaming of him, he had been with a woman, in her arms, in her bed. The sobs increased until she might drown in sorrow as she thought that he had done with this woman what he did with her; that he had given some stranger pleasure, and taken it; that they had conceived a child.

  "No, no, no!" she cried out loud.

  They were the same to him, that woman or her.

  What had she been like? Had she been beautiful, the way that caboclas could be with their perfect copper skin, their oblique eyes, their high cheekbones? Had she been sweet, or mysterious, or strong? What had been her name?

  As she lay with her cheek on the floor Clara knew that a man was different than a woman, that Gabriel had not spent years without sleeping with someone, that she had not wanted to think about it, but that of course she had known. What she had not known was that he had a child, a girl so beautiful that she could only have been conceived with love.

  Judging by the little girl, the mother had been lovely indeed and Gabriel had been swift to protect her when she was called a whore.

  As swift to protect her as he was to condemn me: the thought made Clara stubbornly cling to what she had told him; she would let him believe that she had come to him soiled by some base passion, just so that he could feel the depths of the unhappiness she was feeling.

  She kept on tormenting herself with these thoughts until she heard a soft knocking at the window and looked up to see Teté's distressed face. The girl begged to be let in.

  Clara did not even mind anymore that everyone should know how she felt; she did not mind that she should be seen crying. She unlocked the door and Teté almost spilled into the room, immediately kneeling on the floor to put her arms around her mistress.

  "Não chore, Não chore," she said rocking Clara. Don't cry.

  Clara only sobbed more, at once comforted by Teté's affection and feeling her pain more keenly. "I won't stay here, Teté! I won't stay!"

  Teté thought that she understood everything. She and the other servants knew that sinhô and sinhá not only slept in separate rooms, which was not unusual in a couple, but that they did not ever make love. They also observed that they desired each other, though there was some sort of rift between them, which had made everything more puzzling.

  The arrival of the child and the fact that Sebastião had heard Gabriel tell the little girl that he was her father had solved the mystery: Dom Gabriel had a mistress, who had apparently just died, and he had a child whom he was going to bring up in the house, under sinhá's nose.

  That was also not completely unprecedented. A lot of men brought up their bastard children in or near their house, even the children they had with slaves and caboclas. Yet Teté and the other servants understood Dona Clarinha's heartache and felt for her. Such a beautiful young woman, untouched by her husband, and now forced to live with the fruit of his sin under her own roof.

  Teté rocked Clara back and forth and caressed her hair: she knew even better than the others how much sinhá loved her husband. It was all over her face when she spoke of him, or when she heard him mentioned, or when she looked at him and he could not see.

  "I won't go to that house anymore! Teté, I will run away!"

  "Sinhá, where would you go?"

  "I will go to my parents! You will help me!" Clara pulled back from Teté's embrace to look at her. "You must help me, Teté. I need to get to Rio. I won't live like this, I won't! I will run away on Sugar, I will pretend I am going for a ride and I will go through the river to Paraty!"

  Teté's eyes were horrified as she looked at Clara. "But sinhá, it's so dangerous! For a woman alone, it's dangerous anyway ─ but through the river! There might be an accident, or you might fall into someone's hands! There might be Indians!"

  Shrugging and shaking her head, her face disfigured by grief, Clara seemed more determined at every word. "I will go, I will leave! I shan't live like this anymore. He doesn't love me, he will always hurt me!"

  After a long while Clara calmed down enough to go back to the house, but she ran up the stairs and into her room, locking the door. She would not eat or drink anything; she wanted to be left alone.

  But her determination to leave had set a plan in motion in Teté's head: the girl knew that Dom Gabriel loved his wife, she had seen it in his face as well ─ and he was not a man who loved lightly. She clearly saw that they were mad for each other, but that something was keeping them apart. She now knew that something to have been a mistress of sinhô's, and a child.

  Teté knew that Clara would not believe how much she was loved, unless she went away and sinhô went after her. His passion would demolish all the obstacles between them, and they would be happy.

  She practically got on her toes in ecstasy as she developed her plan to make two people who were kind and generous understand how much they loved each other. As she walked out of the house that evening, Teté was a little moved by the desire to save the day, to be the wise person who had devised the solution to a terrible problem; but her main motivation was the great affection, and even love that she felt for sinhô and sinhá. They had been made to be happy together.

  Sinhá would run away because she had been wounded past bearing, and sinhô would understand that he could not lose the most beautiful, the kindest woman in the world. He would go after her, they would stand embracing on some road, kissing each other and vowing eternal love, and they would be happy ever after at Caprichosa. Teté would one day marry a man who would understand that she needed to stay with them and their children until she died.

  Teté walked with great energy, knowing that her plan would work. It was just very important that sinhá should not try to go through the river by herself, as she might be eaten by a jaguar, or kidnapped, or she might suffer an accident. She must
have protection on her way, and there really was only one person who could help her, who might go where he pleased on his day of rest, and who would dare to take sinhá with him safely.

  She was standing before his house now, and she clapped her hands and called, "Seu Tarcisio! Seu Tarcisio!"

  Thirty: A Woman Wounded

  "Are you sure, Dona Clara, that you wish to go like this, without Dom Gabriel’s permission?"

  Tarcisio looked closely at Clara. She took a deep breath. "I don't need his permission. If I tell him that I am going he will keep me here.” She stopped and shook her head. “And I cannot stay.”

  It shamed her that a man should have been told her story, even partly, but Clara had realized that everyone in the estate knew what there was to know about her marriage. They might not have heard the lie that had made Gabriel forsake her, but it was known that they slept apart. Servants changed and cleaned linen, and they could see their master and mistress were never in each other's bed.

  She looked at the slope before her, which connected the big house to the servants’ quarters: information traveled quickly there, and was probably exaggerated even without malice.

  Now she withstood the fresh humiliation of having Tarcisio know that she had been spurned; she had not cared about what anyone thought during all the months she had lived at Caprichosa, because she had been sure that Gabriel would see the truth, and they would yet be happy in their love.

  But she no longer felt so; his hypocrisy had made it impossible for her to bear the insult of being disbelieved, or the loneliness he had imposed on her. His passion for a dead woman made her doubt his love.

  "I am sure," she repeated. "And yet you have a good position here, I would not want you to be involved. Teté made a mistake in asking you."

  "It's my own business what I do with my time," he said. "And I have a free morning this Tuesday. I cannot let you try and get to Paraty alone, and it would be worse for any other servant who tried to help you. I can at least reason with Dom Gabriel, should he find out that I helped you."