by Anne Enright
But we took an early stroll in the dawn chill; the mist so thick and white, a solid wall that gave way before us. We might have been alone, on the boat, on the round earth. Sometimes, when we are moving, he leans out beyond the questing prow of the boat, as though to say, ‘Tomorrow, Asunción.’ And I think that he alone, he alone, could take this ghost ship and fly it home.
Our Spanish lessons commence and Francine is very apt. She sits to one side and sews as Mr Whytehead strolls about the room and occasionally bends to write at my little desk. He will not sit down. I do not think he stands to show his figure. He is neat but he is not vain. He is also quite stern, which looks silly. Truth be told, the lesson isn’t much use to her, conducted as it is through English, though we occasionally jump about in French, it being closer as languages go. But she sits and looks pretty enough, and lifts her head from time to time, as though to behold him. It is a very sweet, religious look and I am quite proud of her, in a way.
This afternoon there was an incident: Miltón held the swinging hamaca while Francine ladled me in to it, and he went to take his place at the bow. Then a sailor (Goggins, I think) came up behind him and kicked the back of his knees, very neatly, so that they gave from under him. He kicked him again on the floor, while Miltón curled up and made a soughing sound, which now I find odd, the silence of it – and all this in front of my very eyes. I shout for help. Whytehead comes running and then stands, inept. Finally, my dear friend, who pulls the men apart and fulminates. He turns to me where I lie, struggling out of my hamaca, like an insect flipped over that cannot right herself again. I am obliged to translate – it is all sullen mutterings, something to do with a native woman the sailor wanted for his own use, until Miltón interfered. I do not know how. He is such a slight boy, I guess he cannot be beyond fourteen. But interfere he did, and the woman, who came to look for tobacco, slipped back safe overboard.
After this translation is done, they turn away, as though ashamed. All of them ashamed; because every man on the boat is by now gathered in the bow. The child overwhelms me. It twists with such violence I must lie back down. My friend shouts for the doctor and for Francine, and the sailors disperse while I work my fan of stiffened lace, now turning to cloth again in the sun. Whytehead turns to bow, and thinks better of it, as I lift and let fall a swathe of muslin, and look him in the eye.
Señor López says he is a man of vision and tenacity. And so I must smile.
Tonight we keep our own company. I have Miltón sleep in front of our door. The captain – because they need it, he says – has trebled the sailors’ allowance of rum, and they dance off the native woman, and all women, and throw their flagons overboard.
Francine strains the river water through two thicknesses of clean linen, before I will let it touch my skin, and in the middle of the night I have a dreadful urge to drink it from the ewer, there is something necessary about the smell. Also the smell of Macassar. The only wine I can stomach is champagne, and this only because it tastes of biscuits. They haul it up on ropes from the river, so it is fleetingly cool. By the end of the bottle it is hot, practically. Hot biscuity champagne. It tastes wonderful. It tastes like Hell itself.
I do not know if it is the world, or me. I do not know if it is the wilderness or the boat or the baby that keeps me so far from myself. I drink hot champagne and eat with ferocity the dull porridge of the place. I know it is dull, but it is hugely interesting to me. And in the middle of the night I am crazed with hunger. Bewildered by it. I look at Francisco’s leg as it dangles out of his hamaca (he has abandoned the infested bed) and I think that what I need is meat. Perhaps even this meat, the meat of his thigh. I have a desire to bite into him, as you might into a melon.
And then, perhaps it is melon I need. I think about melon, am smitten by melon. I bite into the golden flesh, and feel the seeds slither in their luscious frill. Is there anywhere in this godforsaken place where a melon might be bought or got? Is there a garden somewhere, at the back of a shack, where a little old man has tied plants on to canes and watered them and shielded them from the sun? And what if he will not give it to me? What if the old man (I can see him in the darkness in front of me shaking his head) says that this particular melon is not ripe, or it is reserved for someone else. This melon is for his daughter, or his sick grandchild, or that this melon is grown in the soil where his wife lies, and that on no account can it be eaten, because the flesh of it is the same as the flesh of his wife. I tell him that I have no problem eating his dead wife. I swing a stone that is suddenly in my hand and hit his round, stupid skull, which splits with a melon-like sound. At first wooden, then thick and wet.
After which hallucination, I groan again with nameless hunger and start to pace the room. I put on a wrap and slip out through the door and into the air, as if there might be something, somewhere, that will assuage me, a piece of rope to suck, skin of tar to pick, frozen in the bottom of a pail. As if there might be a melon, indeed, magically lying there. The moon has risen. The deck is humpy with the bodies of drunken, sleeping sailors seeking refuge from the heat. The scene is catastrophic and still. There is nothing to eat. I lean back against the door, put my hands flat on the wood, and breathe.
The sailors have covered themselves with cloth against the mosquitoes. They look like furniture in a house that has been shut up. Or dead men, pinned by cobwebs to the floor. One of them starts to mutter, I think in his sleep, but when I listen to the words I hear the Lord’s Prayer. I can not tell which sailor this is. He says the lines in a gulping whisper. ‘And deliver us from evil.’ He is near the end of it when I spot him, stretched out on the deck. He arches his back into the night, as though presenting his stomach to the moon.
*
This morning, I tell my dear friend that I am turning cannibal. He looks at me in a considered way, and then decides to laugh. For the rest of the day, he taunts me with food. He talks of meals remembered in Buenos Aires, in London; meals we ate together in Rome. Valera is sent down to the hold and he returns with a menu from that place in Rome. And freely, within earshot of sailors, engineers and natives, the whole busy ignorance of the boat, Francisco reads it out to me. Hors d’oeuvres: delicious prawns, strongly spiced. A Rhine carp à la Chambord. Quails stuffed thick with truffles on buttered toast flavoured with basil. Asparagus with sauce hollandaise. A pheasant with Russian salad. Pontet-Canet with the first course. Chilled champagne from the second course to the coffee. So cool!
To shame him, I tell him it is the baby who is hungry, not me. He moves to the rail and looks over the side. Then he strides off to talk about boilers.
All afternoon I lie in a torpor. More swamp. In the distance clumps of pampas grass and farther still low, black trees. The channel is ever more difficult to find. The paddles slap the water and the sails snap, and the child moves under my hand. I feel a shoulder surface, or a tiny elbow. My little eel. My only thing.
On our right, forest gives way to savannah and back again. There are hills, far away, green and homely, but with no homes on them. I see cattle, but even they are scrawny and wild and strange. Then a landing stage, where the campesinos stand amazed. The reek of hundreds of hides drifts towards us, stretched out on racks and drying in the sun. Tonight, we will have fresh meat.
Doctor Stewart grows eloquent. He says that any country is beautiful when reflected through ‘the lovely prism of my laughing Irish eyes’. (God help me.)
Dresses for today:
The Muchacho: a riding habit of serge in bergandine red.
The Irish: that green dress, with the puffings of tulle. To be worn with a shawl.
I have not the wit for more. I lie here and think that I am the boat. I am the boat and I am the sky and the baby sails inside me, safe. Despite which romantic notion, I am sad.
*
They must hear me at night. I am disturbed in my sleep by such dreams that I wake and must have him. Like food. Now. It is my condition. What if I were an innocent? What if I were a girl just married, waking in
the night in the aftershadows of such dreams, with half the world waiting their turn, husbands, friends, a stranger with eyes like the lumbering animal I saw on the bank, capybara, a man whose face I cannot see, and Misha who is always there, standing by the bed, whether in delectation or grief he will not say. I wake and know that he is dead. And careless, all aflame, I rouse my dear friend, to straddle him unsuccessfully in his hamaca, to end by rearranging ourselves on the floor, as he props himself up on his arms to keep back from my belly, and we make a noise that all the ship must hear.
The child, says my dear friend, is low (he has no shame), the child is filling me up down there. It is a boy! he says. It is a boy. I am glad. I pity poor womankind. I had not thought to pity them, but I do now. I think about my mother – all guts and softness, made stupid by something. Perhaps by this. Perhaps she was made stupid by this.
I am woken this morning by the worst noise I have ever heard. It is the sound of the world ending, the sound of all animals eating all men. I rise in terror and run, and wrench open the door to a wall of white. I cannot tell if the attack comes from the bowels of the boat or the water or the forest – the noise is all around. The air itself is roaring. My only thought is to hide the baby from the danger, which means hiding my own body too. Francisco catches me at the rail, and turns me around in the mist. Monkeys, he says. It is only monkeys.
Mr Whytehead calls them Howlers. They roll their voices around in a special reverberating gourd in their chests, he says, also, perhaps, the mist amplifies the noise as clouds do thunder. He appears out of the mist, to say all this. He is standing at the rail beside us all of a sudden, talking about thoracic cavities, with me still frantic in my night attire. I don’t think the stupid man ever sleeps.
But I think they are an omen, whatever about their cavities. I find myself in tears, and cry all morning. My dear friend is bored with me, lump that I am. I cry so much I am thirsty. Even this liquid I must conserve, in the heat. At eleven o’clock, Francine glues me together for our Spanish lesson, with rice powder and eau de lavande, but when Mr Whytehead comes into the room my dear friend says that his time is better spent this morning on matters of state. And so he bows and retreats, and I want to cry some more, even though I do not like the man much. And because I cannot abide the cabin longer, I take a turn on deck.
But they were an omen. I was right – and it is no use keeping an omen to yourself. Because at noon, after a hard morning pushing towards home, one of the boilers bursts, though not badly. There was an unimportant sound, as though of two pieces of wood clacking together. It seemed to come from the shore. Then, after a brief silence, the frightful screams of one of the sailors; scalded in the blast of water and steam. He clambered up to the deck and rolled out of the hatch, tearing at his clothes, which were stuck to his body and burning him still. An attempt to free him of them proved ill-advised (Doctor Stewart came late), and now he lies, half-flayed and moaning, while the ship and all on it are horribly becalmed. I have made a visit. He lies shivering in his cot, loosely bandaged in fat, his lips sweet with morphia. He calls me ‘Dora, my Dora’ and says yes, he is quite comfortable, thank you. But still the moans seep out of him, until every man on the boat mutters a guilty prayer that he may die between this breath and the next. But the next breath comes, laden with pain.
And so I sit. I wear a dress of extreme simplicity in shades of pink and cream and favour his good side, praying a little that he will not turn to look at me out of his other, boiled eye. I am his Dora still, and hold his hand. I wait for secrets, but there are none. The dying have very little to say, I fear, as we lean over to gather their last whispers in our ear.
He pulls me to him and starts a paternoster for me to finish, and with the sound of the first line, I know who it is – it is the sailor who was praying the night they all got drunk. The sailor who lay pinned to the deck, as though pressed there by the beauty and the weight of the sky. Is it possible that he knew that this journey would be his last? How can we know? But he did know. I am sure, he did.
Now, as the evening wears on, I look for my death. I hunt it out. I prise open the blank future and try to smell it – When and How. When and How. If I were to die by water, surely I would know it, or by fire. If I were to be murdered then I would be afraid of people’s hands. But I am not afraid of anything, I think, or was not, until now. Now, I am afraid for the child, the inscrutable span and course of his life, all shut out from me. All the years I face for him; the not-knowing and ever-watching, the fact that there is a part of me now that can be truly hurt, after I had left hurt behind.
The last time I said the Lord’s Prayer was on my marriage day. I do not want to sleep. It is a good day, a long one, a clear one. The child is easy, and my mind runs free.
Or perhaps it is the orange blossom that makes me think of weddings; it grows wild on the bank and the scent drifts towards us, across the water. I was married in a dress of ordinary blue, with a posy of violets in my hands – no orange blossom there, though M. Raspail did send a butter-coloured straw bonnet trimmed with some cheap-looking berries. It arrived in our room in Dover and Quatrefages laughed quite unkindly when I tried it on. So I took it off and hit him with it. Despite which it was, you know, quite a tender moment, and makes me think now that we could have been friends.
I think it is liquorice that I crave. I will have a little black child.
I remember playing the piano in Mallow. I must have been very young, the keys looked so huge and Papa stacked books on the seat to help me reach. There was a crowd of people in the room and I wore a sprigged muslin dress. They all clapped and kissed me, and my father was most pleased. Some kind gentleman gave me a bag of liquorice, after. I wonder which gentleman it was.
The sailor talks about pies. It makes me hungry. I should leave him – it is not good for my belly to be where dead things are. The words dribble from his blasted mouth, and now and then, clarity. His shirt is left out in the rain. Dora (myself) did not believe him when he said … what? This is important; he really must say this. But the pie is distracting. He sinks back into the pie. I don’t know what kind of pie it is, but it is very good. Mmm mnn, he says, like a child. Mmm mmm mnn.
And so he dies. It is four a.m., the hour when the world turns over. It occurs to me that I do not know his name. I place his crocked hands upon his chest – so still – and take my leave of him. Outside, the sailors, when I pass, take off their caps. Who cares whose wife I am, now?
*
This morning they set to repairing the boiler, with a little furnace set up on deck for the soldering pans. We sit on the water, and burn.
I settle myself into my toilette and I want to cry again, not because my face is so lumpy but because of the cheap cake of rouge I am using – a little tin box, with a picture of the tower at Glendalough on the lid. It belonged to my sister once, but did not suit her. I think it is the only thing I have about me from Ireland. There is also a little brush and some maschara from Algeria. My bag of paints is a sad museum. The right lip colour, the absolute shade of blush, these are the only things that persist in my life. I think that some potion here will follow me to the grave. And then I think that this is literally true – some stuff here will be applied to my dead face. So I leave the brush down and stare, while Francine bustles behind me. All flesh and blood.
I am the daughter of a doctor. My mother came from a naval family, and her brother fought with Nelson’s fleet. There are certificates for all this, and letters, in three or four different countries. I was married in Kent at the age of fifteen to a man called M. Quatrefages who served with the French forces in Algeria. This marriage was illegal under French law, because of my tender age, but legal in England.
I am the daughter of a doctor who specialised in rheumatic disorders at the spa town of Mallow in the Co. Cork. My mother suffered herself from bad health, and took the waters there, and we lived nearby for some years. My sister, Corinne, caught the fancy of that famous Italian musician Tamburini, and lives wi
th him, is married to him now in Paris. Where I joined her, after leaving a cruel husband, a certain M. Quatrefages, who took advantage of my tender years to spirit me away to Kent and marry me there. This marriage is still valid in England, much to my consternation. I have met in my time the musician Berlioz, who much admired my playing, also the Princesse Mathilde, who received me kindly, also several members of the Russian nobility, from whom I became estranged on the occasion of the Eastern War.
I was born in Ireland and lived there, near the spa town of Mallow, until the age of ten, when the hunger then raging in the countryside obliged us to leave from the harbour at Queenstown. My father is a doctor and my mother is a Schnock (one of the naval Schnocks). After a brief spell in England, I was educated in Bordeaux at Mme Hubert’s school for young girls. I was married in Kent, at a very young age, to the chief veterinarian surgeon of the French forces in Algiers. While there I was much patronised by the Chief of the French Commissariat, M. Raspail, also the Fez of Tunis, who both much admired my playing. My marriage was illegal under the Napoleonic Code, and when this became clear to me I left the deserts of Africa for Paris, where I studied at the conservatoire, and applied for my decree nisi, which was delayed by the complications of English law. When we get to Paraguay I will have Señor López draft a new law. Because I am carrying, or so he tells me, the future of Paraguay.
The baby kicks like a boy. It kicks like it cannot wait to get out of me. Francine cools my temples with eau de lavande. She whispers, ‘Not long. Not long now.’ But I do not know how long it will be. I do not know if we will make it to Asunción. I do not know if it will ever be born, or if I will stay here for ever – for ever on this river, with this water flowing by.
Asparagus
1857, Asunción
DOCTOR STEWART LIKED Asunción. It was the kind of town where a man could go to pieces in his own good time.
He woke up to it slow. It was some months before he wrote to his aunt to describe this sleepy town of adobe and wood, of red-tiled roofs and secret courtyards. But he could not get it straight in his head. Outside his window, a group of urchins was burying an infant child up to the neck. They were smoking cigars – all of them, including the infant, though his was, of course, handed to his mouth by a factotum. None of them was older than five. They seemed entirely happy.
