by Anne Enright
On the rough desk in front of Stewart was a sheet of paper, stained already with his sweat. It would be handed by a wind-whipped postman into his aunt’s Edinburgh fastness, a sort of distant cry. So he filled it full of flowers for her, the smoky blue jacaranda and the bridal orange blossom that would make her mouth purse, as though she were tasting the fruit. What else? In the distance, the cries of salesmen and the complaints of cattle – she had enough of those at home. He might say that the women sometimes wore just the skirts of their dresses, and let the empty bodies flop out behind. Or that they liked to dance with bottles balanced on their heads. Or perhaps not. ‘It is all very foreign,’ he wrote, then stopped and tried again to think of the distinctive thing to say.
Outside, the urchins sat and watched the infant as the infant watched them, looking from one face to another with an expression that Stewart could not decipher. Perhaps it was quite comfortable, wrapped up like that in the earth. ‘The men’, he wrote, ‘are in the habit of wearing hat brims, without the benefit of a hat, and so our local Indian fellow is jauntily crowned with a halo made of felt.’ She would find this image a little Catholic, but it was better than telling her you could tell a prostitute by the gold comb in her hair. Respectable women wore tortoiseshell or wood. A new arrival might get confused (he did not write).
‘There is such a lack of iron in the town’ (commerce, good), ‘that people leave nails to their children and, in their wills, specify how many each should get.’ Outside, the chief urchin, in his hat brim and little else, sauntered up to the buried infant and pulled it clear. The child came up like a carrot and, as the red soil fell away, Stewart saw that it was a girl.
‘But let us not belittle Asunción,’ he concluded, for his aunt was a clever woman, and he liked her. ‘It is made, as every other town is made, of casual encounters and minor conspiracies; of friendliness to strangers and small, ancient irritations between friends. It is a frontier place, the gentlemen a little too rough and the ladies a little too “nice”. But it is made, as every other town is made, out of talk.’
The little girl had recovered her personal cigar and now squatted with the others, chewing the stub. Her position afforded Stewart a view of her genitals, flatly presented between her sweet little legs and feet. And indeed she was all sweet, from her toes to the same cigar’s dangerously glowing tip. Stewart folded the letter and ran his hand heavily along the crease. He had not mentioned that the talk was of one thing only, and that one thing was his former patient, Eliza Lynch.
Stewart listened to it all. He cultivated the trick of disappearing into the company, so as not to inhibit conversation about events he had personally witnessed (though only after a fashion). He wished, sometimes, that he could remember the way it really was, but mostly he gave in to the stories as they became skewed over the months and years into something high and fantastical, and ever more true.
Mme Cochelet, the French envoy’s wife, said that the grand entrance of the Tacuarí into Asunción went thus (she told it, always, in a sort of mime):
The boat glides up alongside the dock. The crowds that have been running along the bank fill the square. The gangplank is let down. Silence. A cart pulls into the Plaza de Palma with twenty bandsmen hanging off the sides, waving their instruments in the air. They jump off the cart and run to the quay and fall in. More silence. Picture it. The dirt. The sloping, cockeyed customhouse, the smell of the river and, in front of them all, a boat the size of a dream.
Finally, the cavalry; all snorting and stamping. Three old barouches trundle to a halt – and there they all are. Carriage number one: fat old López with his outrageous epaulettes, his sword across his lap. Carriage number two: fat old Doña Juana López all swaddled up in black, with her ghastly daughters, Rafaela and Innocencia, equally fat, equally swaddled; their moustachios bristling, their bosoms heaving, and their armpits stained with sweat. Carriage number three: the younger sons, Benigno or, as we call him, Maligno, and with him the ridiculous Admiral (of what fleet, pray tell?) Venancio, tight and buttoned as the upholstery they sit upon, the springs of the carriage singing and sagging as they shift about.
So, the people cheering now in the heat – thousands of them – the band striking up, there is a movement, a glimpse, a flutter of tulle; and there, at the top of the gangway, is a vision. A Juno. A woman of proportions, in a pale lilac gown and matching bonnet, with a stole of lace to hide – Mme Cochelet would bet good money on it – her shame. She would like to say that the bonnet was de trop, or the lilac vulgar, but they were neither, and her first impulse, she could not gainsay it, was to cheer or swoon – this shard of Paris ice that had fallen out of the sky to land on the Plaza de Palma; full now of hushed Paraguayans, who had never seen skin so fair, nor eyes so blue, nor a woman so gloriously large, who had never seen that shade of lilac, except perhaps on a deep forest orchid – the colour of a flower that grows in the dark. Stepping up beside her: the young López in an endless stovepipe hat, too-tight frock coat and excruciating pastel trousers. The apparition takes his proffered arm and floats down to the quay, smiling regally to her right and her left. The crowds part as she drifts through to the first carriage and old López. The son bows and speaks. The vision smiles her visionary smile and lifts a languid hand. It hangs in the air. The old Dictator grunts – at her perhaps, or perhaps at the coachman – and the carriage pulls away at speed, followed at speed by the presidential escort whose polished hooves kick up enough dust to turn the silk lilac ice to soot grey. Eliza Lynch looks down at her dress. So much for Paris.
Up to this moment, Mme Cochelet had hoped against hope that – his satyriasis not withstanding – the young López had somehow married, but it was not to be. When ‘La Lincha’ was presented to Doña Juana, the old woman (who treated the entire country like it was her own back kitchen) shrieked and struck her breast and ordered her carriage away. This shot off with such force that the now-dusty vision was spattered with excrement. At which, Maligno smiled his little smile, and followed his mother at a gentle trot, before more harm could be done.
Mme Cochelet was fond of this story, which had grown so much in the telling that none of it (save, of course, the lilac dress) was in any way true. She told it for years, sometimes twice in the same week, but she only told it to those she could trust. Mme Cochelet was, after all, married to the French envoy and had to be careful what she said. She started telling it in 1856 after Eliza had a quinta built for her in record time; a simple, easy house of pink marble. She added the dust from the horse’s hoofs in 1857, after the young López built a road from Government House straight to its gates in the suburb of La Recoleta. She added the excrement in 1858, after her husband went out there for the first time. They were, you could say, political details. And, much as Stewart admired Mme Cochelet, her defiance of the heat in home-knit stockings, her Norman rectitude when it came to things like covering the milk and sacking the servants, still he thought it unwise of her to disdain La Lincha so freely. To say so often, and so openly, that she ‘would rather break bread with a nigger than eat at the house of the Irish whore.’ It was entertaining, but possibly unwise. It was true, but it was not pretty.
Every day, Eliza sallied forth in a carriage so beautifully sprung you could ride it across country without spilling a cup of tea. Every day, Stewart saw them spit as it passed: the old Spanish aristocrats, with more surnames trotting after them than they had horses; they crossed themselves and covered their daughters’ virgin eyes. But why should the woman not take the air? Why should she not sometimes walk down the street, with her parasol gently twirling, to dare the men to bid her good day – to dare the men not to bid her good day? Because they all went. There was not a man for a hundred miles who had not ventured out to the quinta at La Recoleta to see for himself the little oriental carpets, the French tapestries hung in the tasteful rooms, and to drink the political cup of café au lait that was handed to them, in person, by the mistress of Francisco Solano López.
The mother, old
Doña Juana, spent the day fingering her rosary beads and screeching, ‘I will never accept that woman. I will never accept that woman!’ in the tearful company of her daughters; the hirsute Rafaela, the glandular Innocencia. Stewart prescribed laudanum. He did not say that there was no cure for the facts of the case – that the old woman had been outfoxed somehow by her own son; that every time she thought of La Lincha now she saw her own future, and old López dead.
There was nothing like a good root around the López ladies to remind Stewart of Eliza Lynch, who had a different order of flesh from the rest of us, who had the kind of flesh that might redeem a man. William Stewart was the only person in Asunción who was banned from visiting La Lincha – for most people it was the other way around – and it was a sort of private joke with him. Still, he sometimes thought of her with regret. He would never get to palpate, nor suture, nor ease. He would never cool those limbs in the flush of influenza, nor brush from them the bloom of measles. Above all, he would never see them asplay in the blood and terror of childbirth – a scene that he had, in fact, missed, after coming thousands of miles to see it. This might seem a little remiss of him, but Stewart was absent for complicated reasons, in which drink played only a minor role. Quite simply, he could not get off that boat, with its horrors, quick enough. He walked off the gangplank and through the crowd and disappeared into a week he could not himself remember. William Stewart missed Eliza’s lying-in because she made him shudder. That was all. He took whatever remnant of him was still decent, and walked it off the Tacuarí, and got it drunk as a lord.
He could hardly recall what scruple it was he felt then. He did not name it, because it was impossible to name. Nor did he encourage it – he pickled it. He preserved it in alcohol, like some misshapen curiosity with the label gone. If he held it up to the light now, he would not be able to tell you what it was, or what class of creature it had once been.
As for that other remnant of her river band – when he met Keld Whytehead, they did not speak of it; as if they had both been marked by something, about which there was nothing to say.
And what of Eliza? Alone! said the gallant Captain Thompson. Completely alone. She poured coffee on the balcony, and talked of home. When the day was hot, or the political climate warm, she touched her hand to her breast and said, ‘Paris, ah Paris!’ in just that tone. Picking out a little melody on the fabulously real piano, taking up a book and putting it down again. There were things in her head, you could see that. Once he had explored one of these volumes and found it contained, not Geneviève de Brabant but Voltaire’s Candide. She laid her hand on his arm, and gently took the book and said, ‘Ah. That, it is the story of my life, you know. And you, Captain Thompson, are my own Doctor Pangloss.’ No, there was no doubt about it, Eliza Lynch was delectable. To love her was to succeed, the Captain said, to hate her was, quite simply, to fail.
In which case, no one succeeded better than Francisco Solano López. The city was a building site – he had an army of haggard, small boys pushing blocks of stone from the Arsenal to the Post Office; taking the roof off the Library and dumping it on the Shipyard steps. López coming in after a hard day of pointing and striding, the little son crying Papa! Papa! to be nipped on his rosy cheek by his father’s dirt-stained, ink-stained, finger and thumb. There was, as yet, just one child. Mme Cochelet said that Eliza had ridden like the furies to purge herself of the second, but Thompson said she had laid the stillborn thing out in a white robe, with little gauze wings on the back, like an angel doll. Thompson had seen it himself, at the most tasteful wake possible, and you could not doubt the mother’s grief. Now, there was an ornate little grave inside the gate of the cemetery at La Recoleta that said:
Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade
Death came with friendly care
The lovely bird to Heaven conveyed
And made it beossom there
And so we are finally humiliated, thought Stewart – by spelling. This is what it meant to be far from home. And he would sigh as he passed the bollixed stone on his way back to his house, where he would sit and get his boots pulled off and think about his own, terrible life.
He wondered, from time to time, about the whereabouts of the maid, Francine – no one seemed to mention her, though they talked of everything else.
Doña Cordal and her obscurely ruined daughter Carmencita said that Eliza kept her courtyard full of birds: parakeets, hummingbirds, macaws from Brazil and, tethered to a stick in the corner, a big, fat, Karakara vulture. Mme Cochelet said that Eliza kept a troop of raw Indians dressed to the nines and trained to pour wine like French footmen. She said that, apparently, the food out in La Recoleta was a miracle.
Benigno López mentioned over a bruised billiard table that Eliza Lynch did things in bed that a man could scarcely believe – he had it from his own brother – and he clicked the blue towards the centre pocket, and missed. Captain Thompson said, quite gallantly, that she had a pure soul. But they were all agreed that she was sleeping with someone behind López’s back – an Englishman, or that Indian, or a dog. No one said that she was sleeping with the maid, however, which was, in its own way, strange.
Keld Whytehead did not listen to gossip: he built López an arsenal and then he built López some guns. He sent his money home. He went out to La Recoleta as necessary, and sometimes, he said, the beauty of it all made a man’s eyes sting. At Christmas he sang carols (perhaps that French carol he sang on the Tacuarí), while Eliza accompanied him on the piano. That was all.
On the other side of town, López’s abandoned mistress, Juana Pesoa, sifted the truth from the chaff. She said Eliza slept with López and with no one but López, because once a woman surrendered to López there was nowhere else to go. Juana Pesoa had a son by López – his first – and the boy now lived with Eliza. When he came to visit, he brought his mother stories from La Recoleta, as you might bring a caged animal meat.
Stewart sat with her and ate.
Eliza wants to christen her son in the cathedral – she wants to make him the prince, the heir, the most important son. But the boy is a bastard, and will always be a bastard, and the bishop forbids her the use, not just of the cathedral, but of any holy ground. Eliza screams. She raves. She gives López no rest. She calls in a crooked priest who takes one look at the boy – two years old by now, with his mother’s blazing green eyes – and declares that he cannot send this small soul to Limbo. If the churches are barred to them, then he will baptise the child there in the quinta. For which promise he receives a fat bag of gold.
Juana Pesoa was a handsome, pinched woman. She had an illness which Stewart called ‘knowing your place’. She did not rage against Eliza, who was rearing her son with every advantage, nor did she pine for López, who still parked his carriage outside her door from time to time. She went very still and worked on a stomach cancer. Something she could call her own.
Stewart left in a sorrowful frame of mind. He wouldn’t mind a go at Juana Pesoa himself, just to cheer her up, just to knock against something that bitter. But as he made his way down the street he found himself wondering, not about the emotional little rictus that was Juana Pesoa’s sexual part, but about Eliza Lynch. Were her eyes blue or were they green? he wondered. What was the exact colour of La Lincha’s eyes? The colour of absinthe? Or the colour of curaçao? No matter. They were the colour of whatever was at the bottom of his glass, and he was going to look at them, right now.
Mme Cochelet said that Eliza might invite anyone she liked to her unholy christening – no one would go. Old López had put his foot down. And her voice rose with satisfied indignation as Stewart, working blind under her petticoats, tightened the patent truss (after five children, Mme Cochelet suffered from a painful separation of the pubic bone).
‘Good,’ said Stewart. Ever since Eliza’s invitations went out, he had spent his time waving smelling salts under the noses of the López ladies; going from one to the other, from hysteric to phlegmatic, and each of them had a separate and very
mobile pain. Finally, some respite. On the day of the baptism itself, he decided, he would get nicely soaked.
He did so on his own. The town was so silent and shuttered that Stewart felt like a ghost, roaming the streets. Everyone stayed indoors: the women sewing perhaps, the men mending their boots or reading the broadsheets, the children all subdued. And all of them thinking about the deserted rooms of La Recoleta, the impossible food spoiling on the plates, the splendid wines all untouched; a few household Indians, perhaps, gathered around the specially wrought silver font, while thousands of cut flowers wilted in the heat. They were thinking about Eliza in a dress unthinkably fine, a quiver in her cheek, a tic in her lovely whore’s eye, as she looked around the empty rooms and faced, and knew, and ate, and got rightly sodomised by, her shame.
And Stewart hated the lot of them – so smug and delicious with revenge that when the guns opened fire they ran into the streets crying that the demon mistress of Francisco López was coming to kill them all. Of course it was just a gun salute. It was just a reminder that old López may have the country, but young López had the army (as well as something else, a lover sent from Hell and a voice that came from the sky, like Tupa, the thunder god of the Guaraní, rolling out over the town. Boom. Boom. Boom).
A boy pulled Stewart, by now half-cut, through the thunder to fetch up at the house of Doña Cordal. The matron opened the door herself and pushed him upstairs, where her incarcerated daughter, the madwoman Carmencita Cordal, was shouting at her dead lover. Carmencita Cordal told her dead lover that the boy who was christened that day was called Juan Francisco, as their son would have been called, if they’d had a son: that his mother called him Pancho, as she would have called her own, sweet boy. She told him that she had seen the child in the street stumbling after a hoop, and that he was very beautiful. Stewart patted his pockets for laudanum. The guns stopped.
