The Abyss (18 page)

Twenty-Five: Wooing

"I am so lazy today, Teté!"

"It's the heat, 
sinhá!
 Everyone feels lazy..."

Teté gently pushed the hammock where Clara lay in a morning gown, her loose hair held back from her face with a blue ribbon.

"Guelo, give some 
cafuné 
to 
sinhá!"

The boy, who had been sitting on the floor, approached the hammock and reached out to touch Clara's head.

"Like I do it to you," Teté instructed.

The boy smiled as he stroked Clara's head. It made her happy to feel his little hand on her hair, and she closed her eyes.

"
Nice cafuné..."
 she said sleepily.

Leaning his chin on the border of the hammock, Guelo kept stroking Clara's head and smiling, and Teté kept rocking her.

"Five days until
sinhô
returns," Clara said, her eyes still closed. Teté had taken a large fan and was waving it above her.

"Yes, and the cane cutting will start two days after!" Teté got on the tip of her toes, "And then the 
Botada
."

Clara opened one eye, "And why are you so very excited about the 
Botada
, Missy?"

Teté said nothing, just moved the fan, but she was looking away and biting her lip, as if trying not to laugh.

"I think you want some boy I don't know about to dance with you."

Teté actually liked two boys, one more than the other, but she didn't want to confess and be teased. She was saved from having to say more by Celso, who walked in to announce, "Two men are here on royal business, 
sinhá!"

"What?" Clara asked, raising her head.

"They say they are bringing gifts from the prince," Celso insisted.

Leaping out of the hammock, Clara cried, "Teté, try to pin my hair up!"

The maid rushed forward, taking the pins out of her own hair to put them in Clara’s.

Five minutes later the lady of the house greeted two men who, hats in hand, explained that His Royal Highness had wanted her to have the contents of the crate that lay at their feet. They accepted the offer of refreshments and were taken out towards the kitchen by Teté, as Clara sent Celso in search of a crowbar.

He returned with Sebastião and they opened the box. Inside, amidst the straw, was a roll of canvas, brushes of different sizes, three palettes and bottles with oil paint and pigment powder of many different colors.

Clara was delighted; no gift could have pleased her more.

There was a note inside, from her father. She started to smile at seeing his handwriting; she missed him, and even Juliana.

"
Minha filha querida
,

I have been so happy to see Gabriel, and to learn that you are well in your new life with the husband you love, even if your poor father cries for his angel. We also receive your letters, and we hope you receive ours?

I am writing this in a hurry, for HRH asks that I should send this box to you, as he remembers how much you like to draw and paint. He hopes that these gifts will keep you happy and busy, and he wishes that you will come to Rio soon, and visit him at the Quinta.

With much love from your Papá."

Clara looked at the colors in all the bottles, at all the brushes and then at the roll of canvas. "Well, I will need this to be stretched over wood,” she explained to the footmen. “You might be able to get the wood from Pai Bernardo?"

She stood up and went to get a painting in the next room, to show them the back, "Like this, you see?"

"Look, here are the nails," Sebastião showed Celso.

Celso was nodding, "It's easy to do. I can go talk to Pai. But what size would you like them to be?"

"Just surprise me. Give me different sizes, and I will think of the subject."

The next person she had to find was Lucia.

"I need a place of my own, Lucia," Clara said in a businesslike tone. "I can't have anyone looking at what I am doing, because I will make too many mistakes at first. It must be a place where no one goes, and which I can get quite dirty and full of paint."

Lucia took her to an outhouse at the end of the garden, behind the palm trees. She opened it with a rusty key and let Clara look inside. It was a large room, surrounded by windows that allowed a lot of light in. She thought, as she looked at the view of the valley and the river that she could be happy painting there.

At the moment the room served as a deposit for broken furniture, but Lucia quickly ordered it cleared and cleaned, then handed over the key to Dona Clara. Celso came back in the afternoon with the canvas already stretched and nailed to the wood frames that Pai Bernardo had made. Clara laid out the bottles of paint, the pigment and all the brushes on a table, and the same day she locked herself inside and began to paint.

First she tried the view outside, but as she suspected she had much to learn in terms of how to use oils,  and no one there to teach her. She had to put that canvas aside, its face to the wall. But she was a stubborn woman, and so happy that she had been given these new materials that she was determined to learn, no matter how many days or weeks it took. She started to make experiments by mixing colors and by using the different tools she had been given, until she thought she understood what effect they could produce.

Those days she would get up, put on an apron that she had taken from the kitchen and go to her studio.

Guelo came to stand, all forlorn, at the window, putting his cheek on the windowsill to watch what she was doing. She ended up relenting and let him in, but convinced him to sit for a portrait. She had already sent four canvases back to be painted white so that she could start over, and Celso had made her new ones in the meantime.

The painting of Guelo was her first successful one: everyone found it very lifelike, though Clara had purposely left some blurring at the edges of his eyes, lips and hands as well as in the background. She thought it conveyed the perplexity of the poor little boy, who had been wrenched from his country and his family only to find himself in a place he did not know, being addressed in a language that he did not understand.

As the servants were so busy, and she preferred to paint people rather than things, Clara sat in her studio remembering her parents and trying to reproduce their faces. The final result had the same quality of Guelo's, it was soft and sharp at the same time, in a way fitting to the subjects.

Clara was happy enough with it to hang it in a drawing room downstairs. She could not help laughing mischievously when she thought that it would give Gabriel a turn to see Juliana in his house.

But when he returned and saw it, he only realized once more how talented she was. She had almost mastered a difficult technique in a few days, and produced a very good likeness of her parents from memory. Above all, she had once more managed to convey the inner workings of two people: there was Pedro with his placid smile, his gentle eyes seeking love; and there was Juliana with her thin mouth, her curious and greedy expression, her alert body. Clara had noticed something else in her mother as well, something he had never seen: a fear deep in her hard eyes. It was the dread of failing.

How remarkable that she can make me understand her mother,
Gabriel thought.
A woman I have despised for years has suddenly become human to me. What a gift, to be able to see and make others see.

Perhaps, with her understanding she was able to give others a greater justice than the one he sought all the time. Yet he could not believe it to be a good thing altogether, not when the world was full of people trying to get what they wanted with little concern for whom they hurt.

In any case, he felt ashamed that she should be so effortlessly generous, while he found it difficult not to condemn others for their weaknesses.

That night at dinner, he watched her more closely than he had in a long time, not bothering to look away when she glanced at him. When she caught his eyes on her a second time she blushed, and looked down at her dish. A while later she glanced up again, and this time she let her eyes linger in his, as if she knew that he was truly looking at her for the first time in a while.

A few days later Pai Bernardo took the statue of Saint Claire he had been carving to the house and left it with Lucia.

"For 
sinhá
," he said curtly, and walked away slowly over the lawn, smoking his pipe.

The saint was heavy, so once more Celso was called to take the wooden statue to Clara in her studio.

"Oh, but it's perfect!" she exclaimed. "I wonder why he thought of making it for me?"

"It's massive wood," Celso said, setting it down on the table. "Does 
sinhá 
want it in the chapel?"

Clara touched the smooth surface of the saint, and Guelo put his hand on it as well.

"I think I want it in my room, at home," she said. "But I shall paint it first!"

She loved the saint so much that she went to thank Pai Bernardo with Teté and Guelo. But as they approached the cottage she heard the sound of a guitar, and she knew it was Gabriel, though she had never heard him play before. She made a motion for the others to be silent and leaned against a tree to listen.

He played skillfully, and Portuguese guitar music was a sound like no other: so beautiful and full of longing that it made her think of the country they had to abandon, and of the man playing, who had stopped loving her.

Clara's eyes filled with tears. She felt as if she had caught Gabriel off guard, since he had never chosen to play for her, and retreated back to the house. Guelo took her hand and kept looking up, as if to make sure that she was all right, and Teté, who had broken a thin leafy branch from a tree, used it to swat the mosquitoes away as they walked. She did not say anything, understanding that
sinhá
was sad, but that it would pass.

Clara only managed to thank Pai the next day, and he nodded, saying calmly, "You're welcome."

After that the estate got busy with the cane cutting. Clara had decided not to go and watch it, as everyone said it was very hard work and she felt she would get in the way. Gabriel went out before sunrise and came back after sunset, looking exhausted. She made sure that he had every comfort, that his bath water was perfumed, his food plentiful and fresh, and his wine uncorked.

She sent luncheon to the workers as well, so that when they paused to eat, they would have a hearty fare, and cold water. There was nothing she could do about the heat, which still made everyone in the house sigh as they moved around; she could only imagine what the men outside were feeling.

The gifts she had been receiving, however, did not seem to stop with the cutting of the cane. She found frames for her paintings at the door of her studio one Monday: there were intricately carved birds, flowers and fruit on smooth wood. When she tried to put them around the paintings she had already finished, they fit perfectly.

But of course
, she thought, smiling,
 Pai Bernardo knows the sizes of my paintings!

"Thank you, " she would say whenever she passed him. "The frames are so beautiful!"

He would nod slowly, take the pipe out of his mouth and say, "You are welcome!"

It was Gabriel, however, who was carving the frames and leaving them to her. Even after a day of hard toil he would go to Bernardo's and sit making frames for Clara's paintings.

"She thanks me for them," Pai said dryly.

"Good," Gabriel said. "Just say '
You're welcome.'"

There was a moment of silence, then Pai said, "Never saw a man wooing his own wife like that, and in secret too."

Gabriel kept carving and shrugged, "Well, now you see one."

"Brancos doidos,"
 Bernardo muttered. 
Mad white people...

Gabriel liked to woo Clara in secret. He felt that they had gone back to a time when everything was innocent, when he could watch her and think about her without having to say anything. But now he was watching a different Clara, not a girl he had found delightful and mischievous, but a woman full of secret depths. He liked to see her move around the house, trying to make everything beautiful and harmonious. He liked to peek at what she had painted through the window of her studio at sunrise. He liked the remains of paint on her fingers or arms when she went down to dinner; it showed how much she appreciated the gift he had sent her through the prince.

She had her own life in her studio, and he liked that as well. He would cut flowers he found on the way there in the early morning, white begonias, hot pink orchids and purple Passiflora. He would arrange them with thin branches and small, colorful fruit on her windowsill. It became a habit for him to leave her flowers every day.

He fancied that she might suspect that it was him, and that she enjoyed their secret affair as much as he did. He knew it would not stay secret for long; he knew that she was about to become so irresistible to him that he would forget anything he had been told, anything that anyone had ever said about her and she would just be, again, the woman he loved.