“We did have one moment, when I think back. It must have been a year or two earlier. I was running an errand and I came upon him on a path. He was fixing a gate. He asked me to hold something. I bent down and so brought my head close to his. Just then a gust of wind lifted a mass of my hair and threw it in his face. I felt it, the gentle lashing, and I pulled my head back, catching the last strands as they flowed off his face. He was smiling and looking straight at me.
“I remember too that he played the sweet flute, a little wooden thing. I liked the sound of it, its springtime bird-like tweeting.
“So the suggestion of marriage was made and I thought, Why not? I had to marry at some point. You don’t want to live your whole life alone. He would no doubt be useful to me and I would try my best to be useful to him. I looked at him in a new light and the idea of being married to him pleased me.
“His father had died when he was young, so it was his mother who was consulted. She thought the same thing and he presumably thought the same thing. Everyone thought, Why not? So we married under the banner of Why not? Everything happened swiftly. The ceremony was businesslike. The priest went through his pieties. No money was wasted on any celebration. We were moved into a shack of a house that Rafael’s uncle Valerio gave us until we found better.
“We were alone for the first time since the ceremony. The door had barely closed when Rafael turned to me and said, ‘Take your clothes off.’ I looked at him askance and said, ‘No, you take yours off.’ ‘All right,’ he replied, and he stripped down quickly and completely. It was impressive. I had never seen a naked man before. He came up to me and put his hand on my breast and squeezed. ‘Is this nice?’ he asked. I shrugged and said, ‘It’s all right.’ ‘How about this?’ he asked, squeezing again in a softer way, pinching the nipple. ‘It’s all right,’ I replied, but this time I didn’t shrug.
“Next, he was very forward. He came round behind me and pressed me to him. I could feel his cucumber against me. He ran his hand under my dress, all the way under, until it rested there. I didn’t fight him off. I guessed that this was what it meant to be married, that I had to put up with this.
“ ‘Is this nice?’ he asked.
“ ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied.
“ ‘And this?’ he asked as he prodded around some more.
“ ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied.
“ ‘And this?’
“ ‘Not…sure.’
“ ‘And this?’
“Suddenly I couldn’t answer. A feeling began to overcome me. He had touched a spot that shrivelled my tongue. Oh, it was so good. What was it?
“ ‘And this?’ he asked again.
“I nodded. He kept at it. I bent forward and he bent with me. I lost my balance and we stumbled around the room, overturning a chair, hitting a wall, shoving the table. Rafael held on to me firmly and brought us to the ground, onto the small carpet from his brother Batista. All the while he kept it up with his hand, and I stayed with the feeling. I had no idea what it was, but it rumbled through me like a train, and then there was an explosion of sorts, as if the train had suddenly come out of a tunnel into the light. I let it rumble through me. I was left breathless. I turned to Rafael. ‘I’ll take my clothes off now,’ I said.
“He was twenty-one, I was seventeen. Desire was a discovery. Where would I have found it earlier? My parents expressed desire like a desert. I was the one hardy plant they had produced. Otherwise, theirs was a sour and hardworking life. Did the Church teach me desire? The thought would be worth a laugh, if I had time to waste. The Church taught me to shame something I didn’t even know. As for those around me, young and old, perhaps there were innuendos, hints, slippages when I was growing up — but I missed their meaning.
“So there you have it: I had never desired. I had a body ready for it and a mind willing to learn, but it all lay asleep, unused, unsuspected. Then Rafael and I came together. Beneath plain clothing and shy manners we discovered our beautiful bodies, like gold hidden under the land. We were entirely ignorant in these matters. I didn’t know what a cucumber was or what it was for. I didn’t know what it could do for me or what I could do for it. And he was as ignorant about my nest. He stared at it, astonished. What a strange thing, his eyes said. Have you seen your thing? my eyes replied. Yes, yes, his eyes panted back, it’s all so very strange.
“Strangest of all, we knew what to do. It all fell into place. We touched, we asked, we did, all in one go. What pleased him pleased me, what pleased me pleased him. It works out like that in life sometimes, doesn’t it? A stamp takes pleasure in being licked and stuck to an envelope, and an envelope takes pleasure in the stick of that stamp. Each takes to the other without ever having suspected that the other existed. So Rafael and I were stamp and envelope.
“And to our astonishment, under the cover of marriage, our deportment was all good and proper. I had never imagined it could feel so good to be Portuguese.
“I used to hurry home along the crest of the hill from the neighbouring village, where I assisted the schoolteacher. There was no path to speak of, but it was the quickest route to get to our small house. I scrambled over large rocks, I plunged through hedges. There were stone walls, but they had gates. From the third-to-last gate, I often caught sight of him, down below in our second field, where the sheep grazed. It happened regularly that he noticed me too, just as I reached this particular gate. Every time I thought, What an extraordinary coincidence! I have just crossed this gate and he has seen me. He couldn’t hear me — too far — but sensing the deepening colour of the sky, aware of the time of day, he knew I would be coming along soon, and constantly he turned and looked up, creating the conditions for the coincidence. He would see me and redouble his efforts in the field, hustling and pushing the sheep into their pen, to the yapping delight of the dog, who saw his master taking over his job.
“Often, before he had even properly finished the task, he started to run, as did I. He was ahead of me, but he had much to do. He charged into the yard and screamed after the chickens. As I got closer, I could hear their frantic clucking. They were hurled into the coop. Then there were the pigs, who needed their slop for the night. And more. The endless tasks of a farm. From the top of the hill, I raced down to the back of the house. I would laugh and shout, ‘I’ll get there first!’ The front door would be the closest for him, the back door for me. When I was metres away, he would give up — to hell with the farm — and make a break for it. The doors would be torn open, sometimes his first, sometimes mine. Either way, they were slammed shut, shaking our hovel to its foundations, and we would be face to face, breathless, giddy, drunk with happiness. And why this rush? Why this unseemly race across the countryside? Why this neglect of farm duties? Because we were so eager to be naked with each other. We tore our clothes off as if they were on fire.
“One day my mother and I were working on preserves, a few months after my marriage. She asked me if Rafael and I had been ‘intimate’ yet. That was her language. She wasn’t touched by her husband, my father, for eighteen months after they got married. I don’t know what they did for those eighteen months. Lie in bed, back to back, waiting to fall asleep in dead silence, their eyes wide open? My mother’s concern was grandchildren. Her lineage was not a richly reproductive lot. She herself was an only child, and fifty-four years of marriage resulted in a single daughter. She was worried that I would be afflicted with the family’s barrenness. I told my mother that Rafael and I were intimate every night, and sometimes during the day too, if we happened both to be at home, on a Sunday, for example. Sometimes in the morning also, before we had to rush off to work. Sometimes we were intimate two times in a row.