The Abyss (24 page)

Thirty-Five: A Thing

The unease that Clara felt at meeting Moema, and at what the woman had said to her persisted through the afternoon. By evening, a heavy, almost malignant rain had begun to fall.

She tried to put her finger on what it was about Moema that had filled her with a foreboding that only kept increasing, until she sat at dinner pressing a fist over her stomach.

"Do you feel ill?" Gabriel asked her.

Clara realized that he had been watching her, though Iara was sitting on his lap again, and he was feeding her. She wanted to say that he needed to rest, or he might still develop an infection. However, she knew that he would pay no heed to her.

"No, I am fine," she said, dropping her hand onto her lap.

Yet when Teté was helping her undress she told her, "Teté, I need someone to watch Moema's house."

Poor Teté's eyes were immediately full of anxiety. She had never recovered from her participation in Clara's escape, and very much blamed herself for everything that had happened. If she had never thought it a good idea to involve Tarcisio he would not be in jail, perhaps forever, and his children would not be fatherless; 
sinhô 
would not have almost died. She had lost her lively manner, and looked sad and haunted.

"Why, 
sinhá?"
 she asked, one hand hiding her trembling lip.

Clara took her hand and pressed it, "We must think how to remedy things, little by little, but not torment ourselves with the silly mistakes we made. We never meant any harm. But I am afraid of that woman, there was something about her. I can't say what it was, but I keep feeling as though she is not finished with us, or with Tarcisio."

Teté was nodding, her eyes wide, "
Sinhá
, she is a very strange woman. She always goes to the Africans for the 
macumba
, you know? I feel sorry for her children..."

"Does she mistreat them?" Clara asked sharply.

Teté shook her head, "No, it's not that. But it was
Seu
Tarcisio that was sweet to them, he loves them very much..."

Clara went to sleep with a feeling of dread, and had incoherent dreams full of darkness as the rain pelted the roof with such force that it sounded as though horses were running on it. She woke up with a start and immediately remembered Moema's words: 
There is a place for them.

She sat up in bed, her heart beating so wildly that her throat hurt.

There is a place for all of us.

No!
 Clara thought. She flew out of her bed, picked up the dress that she had worn to dinner the night before and put it on, then she ran down the stairs to find Gabriel in his study, "She is going to kill them!"

Gabriel ran his eyes over his wife, who looked wild in a crumpled dress, her hair loose.

"What do you mean, Clara?"

"Moema is going to kill those children!"

He frowned, "Don't be preposterous, they are her children. She isn't some sort of Medea!"

"She is, she is!" Clara cried. "That's exactly what she is, a woman who loves her pride more than her children. She wants to do something so awful that none of us will recover from it! She wants to punish her husband!"

Gabriel stood up so quickly that she took a step back. "I have told you before, that subject is closed! I will not have you trying to save that man!"

"I am not speaking of him, but of his children!" she insisted.

"I don't care," Gabriel said harshly. "Leave me alone about the one and the other. You have created this situation, in your need to have men do whatever you want!"

He would have walked out, but she moved and now stood in his way. Her face had gone pale, but her eyes were suddenly furious, "I have borne this long enough!" she said in a strong voice that was very unlike her usual tone.

"What is it that 
you 
mean now?" he asked with cold anger.

But for once she was angrier than him. "I have listened to you call me all sorts of horrible things for months," she said. "I have tolerated you speaking of me, who have never told a lie in my life, as if I were a liar. I have been called a whore by you, when no man had ever touched me before our wedding night! I have sat across a table from you night after night, and slept across a corridor, I have made a life among strangers because you, who are my husband, made yourself a stranger to me!"

Gabriel's jaw was tightening, “I almost died and a man is now in jail because of you!” he spat at her.

"No!” she spat back. “Not because of me, not only because of me! It was you who made me want to run away, and you who beat a man without stopping to find out why he was accompanying me. It was you who believed anyone but me, so how can you think that you are innocent?"

"I asked you to swear..." he started, taking a step toward her.

"Enough!” she shouted. "I would not break a commandment of my faith! And if you had been the husband you should be you would not have asked me to!"

He moved to the door and slammed it. "You tried to run away with a man not ten days ago!"

"I was not running away with him, I was running away from 
you
! I told you I would not live like this anymore, and I will not! I am tired of your doubts and your suspicions, I am tired of being blown one way and then another! All of this I have withstood because of one thing only: because I loved you." Her voice had not softened and now her finger came up to point at him, "But you, you lied! You told me that you would open your heart, and you never did! You believed the first lie that was said about me, when we had been married three weeks!”

“I gave you every chance to disprove it!” he bellowed at her.

“How can I disprove something that never happened?” she demanded. “What would you have had me do, when my mother had conspired with that man to meet me, when I have no brothers to defend me? Would you have had me tell my poor father? What could he have done to protect me?”

Her distress at the mention of her father and of the shame she had suffered at the Baron’s hands was keen, and tears had risen to her eyes. Gabriel’s natural sense of  chivalry was aroused by her obvious sincerity, but he was still rooted to the spot, unable to comfort her.

“I had to undergo the humiliation of being pawed by a scoundrel, I had to defend myself, and you should have been outraged that any man should have behaved like that, and instead you believed him! You believed him because of a bracelet!" She stopped to let out an incredulous laugh. "I lost a bracelet and for that you left me alone in a new land, among servants who were kinder and more loving to me than you were. You told me that I would rot here, untouched, for the rest of my life when in my life I had never done a thing that I should be ashamed of, not a thing except one!"

She stood softly shaking her head, "I refused to marry you, years ago. That was all I ever did, Gabriel. I said no to you because I was frightened, I was so frightened of hardship. My mother had spoken so much of it that she managed to scare me. And when we were on that ship going through cold, and heat, and hunger, and thirst there was a part of me that was glad! I was glad that I was going through such things, and surviving them, because they made me understand that there was no reason for me to be scared! There was no reason for me to have said no to you. All that time, all these years I might have been by you, building a life, because I found out that I had the strength to do it! I found out that there was no land wild and dangerous enough to keep me from your side!"

Tears were now running down her face, and she wiped them with her fingers as if she did not mind them being there. Gabriel could not speak as she went on; there was a realization dawning in him which he could not, for the moment, acknowledge.

"You told me here, on the day you condemned me, that a true love looked in the face of ugliness and did not waver,” she continued. “I looked at you in all the ugliness of your pride, your vindictiveness, your suspicion and I didn't waver. You looked at me when I was a silly girl with a silly mother in Lisbon and you didn't love me, you hated me. All you have done has been to revenge yourself on me for being young and foolish!"

"No, no," he muttered, and added in a stronger voice. "That's not true!"

"All I dreamt about," she continued as if he had not spoken, "when I was in Lisbon with those men coming after me was that I would meet you again somewhere. Sometimes I ran after someone in the street, thinking he was you. I wanted to tell you that I had not ever met anyone else I could love!" She started shaking her head more quickly. "But you have done nothing but torment me with how I betrayed you, and all the while I was innocent, and I was loving you. Yes, loving you through all the hardship, all the hatred, all the loneliness, your disdain, your frowns, your silences."

He took her by the shoulders, "I only wanted to hear you swear it, I needed to hear it! Why could you not do that for me?”

She took a deep, shuddering breath and let out a sob. "It doesn't matter now. I don't think I can love you anymore!”

Gabriel felt cold at her words, as if a gelid winter had in the space of a moment come to that hot place. She was telling him that she could not love him anymore, just as he understood with blinding clarity that she had always told the truth.

“I know that love ought to survive all things,” Clara said, “but there is nothing of the man I once loved in you, not his face, not his name, not his sweetness ─ and none of his generosity, none of his heart. If I found out that you were an impostor, I don't think I would be surprised!"

"I have never denied that I loved you!" he said, his hands falling to her arms to hold her more firmly. "You can't accuse me of that!"

"What is love without tenderness? Without trust, without laughter? It's only a terrible prison, the burden you talked about! You lied, you won't open your heart to me. You would sooner and with much less fear face a bullet. This is no life, Gabriel," she added as she backed away from him. The tears were gone, and she looked calm, and strong. "I am done with it!"

She started moving to the door, and he again held her back, this time by the wrist, feeling oddly ashamed to touch her.

"Don't say that, Clara," he begged in a low voice.

She stopped at the door and turned back to look at him. "I will go make sure those children are safe," she said. "And then I am going to leave you."

"Clara, don't!" His face had gone pale. "Not in the worst moments did I think we should ever be apart. You never heard me say it! You cannot mean it!"

"There is a difference between us, then," she said. "You want to be right, and I want to be happy. Come after me if you must, pull me by the hair, throw me from the horse, lock me up and kill me. But I need happiness, and you don't know how to have it!"

She pulled her wrist free, opened the door and walked out─ and he knew that she meant what she had said, every word. She was leaving, and only his violence could keep her there, now that her love for him was gone.

He walked the opposite way from her, knowing that he could no longer try to keep her with him by force. It was only because she had loved him that she had stayed, he realized now, not because she feared him. He felt his chest constrict as if all the air had left his lungs even as he walked outside to the warm wind.

If she had never done anything at all, then he, who so craved justice, who for justice's sake had left a whole world behind, had done an unspeakable wrong to the woman he loved, and for love of him she had borne it.

He kept walking in turmoil, pushing branches and leaves aside, his eyes on the ground: she had always told the truth, and he had exhausted her love for him with his accusations. He had tormented her with questions, with doubts about her virtue that would have been intolerable to an honorable woman, with anger that she had never deserved.

When he raised his eyes, he saw that he was standing before her studio, as if he had meant to end up there. He looked at the sheets covering the windows, at the door: what had she been doing inside for so many days?
 Painting,
 Teté had said.

The door was locked, so he put a hand over his stitches as he raised his foot and kicked it open. He walked into the darkness and started pulling the sheets from the windows. He saw the canvasses of some of her work on the ground; there was one of him, and he picked it up. It was his face as she had known it in Lisbon: his eyes were full of tenderness and humor, his nose was still straight, there was some arrogance in his bearing, and his mouth, he could see, was smiling yet ready to change into an expression of disapproval. The painting had been abandoned, as if she could not find that young man in her memory anymore.

He turned to look at the large canvas on the easel, which was also covered with a sheet. It was as if Clara had been hiding what she had seen even from herself. This must have been what she had been painting on the days after he had thrown her on the ground in front of the servants, threatening to kill her in the heat of his passion: 
a woman who had never done anything wrong
.

It was difficult for him to approach the easel, but his hand hesitated only a moment before he reached out and pulled the sheet.