by Anne Enright
‘“So?”’ he laughs. ‘It was my first truly dead thing. And it changed the whole world.’
We lie there for some time, watching, each of us, the sun-splattered water as it dances on the ceiling, and I want to touch him with the bare tips of my fingers, or with my lips that are all alive, now, with the thought of touching him. I want to touch him where the skin is thinnest so I might drink it out of him, lick it like sweat – a prickling that comes to my mouth from the thought of what lies inside this man.
If I had killed the sailor, say, instead of mopping his brow, would I be so much the stronger? Would I walk upright? Instead of creeping about at midnight to get my fill of him? I might, instead, just live. Just breathe. Because my chest is tighter and tighter, now. It is closing up as my belly balloons, and I cannot fill myself any more, not with food nor even with air. These dainty, quick breaths I must take. This prison.
López stands at the end of the bed and, taking my foot, he lifts it high to place it flat against his heart.
‘So, ask.’
‘Ask what?’
‘Carmencita. “Was she pretty?” or “Do you love her still?”’
I turn my face away.
‘What way did the world change?’ I say. ‘Was the sky more blue?’
‘Yes.’
‘More full of birds?’
‘Definitely.’
‘Was the grass sweeter?’
‘And so on. And so forth.’
I do not know what we are talking about, now. But it is enormous good fun, of a sudden, and not about death at all.
My sister in Mallow would bring me to things that she was too squeamish to kill; childish things; a frog or a daddy-long-legs, and I would dispatch them, and it would make her cry. And then later, of course, some blurted telltale, and the horrified face of my Mama, the two of them clinging to each other as they watch me walk towards Hell-fire. She always was a silly thing, my sister. She ran off with a visiting piano player and decided to call it ‘marriage’. Let her call it what she likes.
But I dream, this afternoon, of daddy-long-legs, and I am the beastie with my belly huge and my limbs all feeble and waving, and bits gone, and so on.
It is very hot.
I think of the time I went for a fitting to the dressmaker on the Rue de Rougemont. The dress was so delicate that two women stood on chairs to lift it over my head. They used two long sticks apiece to make a canopy of the skirt, and I walked in under it. Then they settled it down over me, and it was like the sky falling, in a rush of silk.
What is it about soft things that makes us want to weep? I stroked, once, the foot of a statue, its marble underside so cold and tender it made my eyes shut. But my hands were not soft enough to stroke this silk, which was such a shade of blue. My hands were too numb and rough: I must feel it with my cheek, with my lips, almost, and be rendered by it disbelieving. I tell you, it was the difference between soft and impossibly so, as if there were a degree of fineness beyond which the world melts.
And I knew, at that moment, what money was for. It was so you could have things that were impossible. And around me there appeared a whole country of things that have crossed this line into the wonderful. Things hard to believe, that are for so long hidden, until that time when you spot the first. After which, they all beckon and clamour and call you by name. The most beautiful cloth for blue; the most beautiful shape to be wrought from a gold stitch on a pink field; the most beautiful black marble to set against the white. All absolute. All at a price.
I stood under that dress and it was like lowering my life down over my head. And the soft blue skin of it was armour to me, and transcendence. I swear I did not so much walk in it as float. I looked in the mirror and knew there is something about beauty that can never be touched, that can never be bad, no matter what the price.
I think he knew when he walked into the room: when he gave his little bow and looked up from under it with glittering eyes, I think he knew he was looking at something quite other. Though the look he allowed me was the look a man might afford not a work of art so much as a good dinner before he eats it – the happy thing being that with Francisco Solano López the eating is never done; there is always another course, and then another, which is why I have so many dresses, is it not? – so that the pleasure of removing them will never be repeated, but always new.
I am so nostalgic for him – even though he is here on the boat; even though he is but sixteen or twenty feet away – that I call Francine to sit beside me like some sweet and dutiful daughter, while I talk and sigh.
I ask if she had any intimation, when she opened the door to him that evening, of the journey we were about to embark upon – because it is her journey too. And she says that, No. How could she tell him from any of the others?
Which is pure impudence, of course.
Oh, but now she considers, yes, there was that look he had about him, of a man who will not be thwarted.
I say that when he walked into my room first, I cannot deny it, I wanted him to be taller and perhaps a little more pale; but she was right about the look he had – it made you feel all squirming, but pleasantly so. And she said,
‘Yes.’
I say I enjoyed him at cards, because he played properly, and for high stakes. He looked at me over his hand and tried to seem indifferent, not because he wanted to bed me, but because he had two aces and a king. And I won. I would have carried on winning (it was, after all, my deck) but I stopped and said, ‘If I win, you will not like me.’ It was important, of course, not to drive him away. But also, you know, I wanted him to like me – this man who played a serious game. And I wanted to keep playing, too. And so we were locked into it; whatever amorous battle we are still fighting now.
And he put his cards down.
‘Do you remember?’ I say, but Francine does not like this break in form. She is a servant. She did not pretend to be in the room at the time, so how can she pretend to remember? To agree would be indiscreet of her, and she wants me to stop talking, now.
And I want to stop talking too, because I realise, as I ramble on, that my dear friend wants to have Francine and that I am bruising her a little, as you might bruise veal, the more tender to have it when the time comes to throw it on the pan.
He bows, and walks on for another round of the deck. Or trots. He is never still. There is always shouting and planning. There is always a huddle in a corner, a call across the room or the deck, a different gathering of men in another cabin for more or different conversation. He gets them one-to-one, and the talk is low and hard, it is all of railway sleepers and branch lines, of wagons and mines and supplies of saltpetre.
I look at him as he recedes. He disappears around the stern and the boat is still. Then he comes back. He is talking to Whytehead, as usual, about the melting temperature of – is it charcoal? – the bulk of it anyway, and wagons. I keep hearing the English word ‘wagons’. They are, apparently, the key.
I am swinging in my hamaca, talking to Francine about the first time I set eyes on this man. And the fact we all know – except perhaps the wagon-headed Whytehead – the fact that is generally available to everyone who sails on this boat, is that Francisco López, my dear friend, would like to have a certain amount of time, privately, with my maid Francine. And this fix he has makes us back away from them, as though he held a gun and she was a bird. And indeed, her eye is very like a bird’s eye, as she does not watch him and yet does watch him, from out of the side of her head.
I want to slap her for a hussy, but I do not.
I say, ‘We must bring some needlework out here, and sew where the light is good.’ The girl looks at me; knowing I would rather pick hemp than stitch silk; my fingers so swollen now I can not feel the needle. But go she does, which gives me a moment to breathe.
My dear friend closes in, and bows, Whytehead raises his stovepipe, and they turn to walk the starboard side. We understand each other perfectly, it seems.
When Francine arrives back with
the basket, her face is flushed, as though the thing were already effected in the brief time it took for her to fetch it and return. There is a giddiness in her that reminds me – like a blow – of the times I came back from that room to the school in Bordeaux. Miss Miller opening the door. Mme Hubert standing in the hall. I look at her with the same level eyes. Half-hate, half-hopelessness. And it amazes me, the power men have. How we make way for their desire.
And now we sit and sew. Or I swing and pretend to sew, while Francine stitches neatly at my side, and the negotiations begin.
But before they do, there are a few things I want, urgently, to say.
I want to say that I love my husband. I want to shout it out as though I were in some courtroom dock. But he is not my husband, and such love is not mine to declare. Such love is not even mine to have. Which is all to the good, because such love holds for me no fascination.
But it is nice, sometimes, to pretend. To heave a sigh and say,
‘When did it begin?’
And a knock on the door is as good a place to start as any. My dear friend walked into my drawing room on the rue St-Sulpice and my life changed utterly. It might have been as banal an entrance as any other – there was no way to tell; so many beginnings are false or aborted. A pair of warm eyes is held a moment too long, and in that moment you think, I could fall, I could spend a long time falling, into that man’s arms. Or he stays for one night, maybe three. Or he leaves. Or you do not like him, after all.
No, Francisco Solano López played cards with me and I said, ‘If I win, you will not like me.’ And he put down his cards, because he wanted to like me too, before he had me. And with such an ordinary civility – a sort of weariness you might call it – was my future decided. A tenderness, a consideration, from a man who is neither tender, nor considerate, as a rule. But how was I to know that? I had entered on to my future. It could have been a short future, or a lousy one. But then, also, we were so very happy in bed. And that’s not fate: it is a question of the nose. Or so my tutor in these matters, M. Raspail, once said. It is a question of how they smell.
So you were led here by the nose, said Francine, and we both laugh.
I was led here by the nose. To lie, and swing, and dream of dresses on sticks, and of insects with their legs missing. To lie and caress the son of the man who walks the deck in a careful frenzy while I talk to my maid – almost, by now, a ladies companion – who has become the object of that acquisitive lust that men so often enjoy between themselves. Stewart, Whytehead, López. Who is to have her, if not The Buck?
It could be worse.
He knocked, and Francine opened the door. It seems he brought a future for her too. Not a bad one, either. If she has him – who is to say? It might lead to marriage – a settlement of sorts, perhaps even with Whytehead, as I was once settled on Quatrefages. Because dreadful things, I want to whisper (she is so much younger than me), are never the end. They are just the way through.
But tonight, for all my equanimity, I bite his shoulder until it bleeds and beat him about the head. He clouts me, too, across the neck and then, ringingly, an ear, and neither of us makes a sound. There is nothing for anyone to hear except a scrabbling, or the sound of cushions plumped up, or laboured breath, as López keeps my face at arm’s length with the flat of his hand: feints, once, twice, then catches one and then the other of my hands. He holds them by the wrist, dragging them strongly down so my face is leaning into his. We are very close. He looks me in the eye, and there is a word he wants to say, or hiss, into my face.
I wait for it to be said. It is in the air, this word. I want it manifest. But he does not utter it. Instead, he squeezes my wrists, and looks at me, while the child in my belly turns and, lazily, turns again.
Truffles
1865, Asunción
STEWART CALLED ON Whytehead to tend to an injury that he did not want to share with whatever doctors – Fox or Skinner – he had to dinner. Or so Stewart assumed as he made his way to Whytehead’s quinta along the gentle cut in the hillside the locals called Tapé taú nde yurú, ‘The path where my kisses eat your mouth’. It looked the same as any other path, except perhaps a little more beautiful. He wondered did Whytehead know where he lived.
Apart from Fox and Skinner, Whytehead had Cochelet to dinner. Also Captain Thompson. Sometimes a lady came to dinner at Whytehead’s and left thinner than she had arrived, stunned by the mutton and by the dessert of spun sugar in the shape of some recently opened suspension bridge. Whytehead had perfect dinners, where the talk was all of cannon bore and the world stage and whether pelargoniums would mildew in the heat. A six-course, living death. Or would be, thought Stewart, if he were ever invited, as he made his way up Whytehead’s driveway. Crunch. Crunch. Crunch. Gravel. Imagine that. A sound to make your very boots weep.
Great Britain inside the door in the shape of Eames, an actual manservant from actual Yorkshire. Great Britain ticking gently in the hall. Great Britain in the drawing room and the way Whytehead sat in the upholstered chair, gazing into the middle distance from behind his florid, solid moustache. The flock, the horsehair, and the incredible curtains of plush: the room was a remarkable achievement. Stewart looked around and saw the Mile End Road, swimming in a mirage of heat.
The injury, said Whytehead, was to his hand – the kind of thing his barber might have attended to, Stewart thought, unless the Chief State Engineer had something more to say to the Surgeon General than ‘It hurts’. And indeed, there was enough to talk about. There was the war, after all. There was any number of conspiracies to be entered upon, or unmasked. There was money to be rescued, or even made. What his aunt would call ‘tradesman’s talk’. What López might call ‘treachery’.
Stewart uncurled Whytehead’s fingers to find the wound. It was an ugly, complex thing of scars both old and fresh. Not so much a cut as a hole – something, or someone, had been digging into Whytehead’s hand, then waiting, then digging again. It had been doing so for some time and Stewart feared a parasite, some strangely fixated fungus whose patience was about to be rewarded – being, after months of hurt and healing, nearly through to the other side.
‘I seem to have hit it on a nail,’ said Whytehead, when Stewart offered an enquiring look. And in the interests of precision, he picked up the thing from a side table and lifted it for the doctor to see.
‘Iron,’ he said.
‘Ah,’ said Stewart.
They both looked at the tip as Whytehead turned the nail between finger and thumb, scoring an imaginary curve on the air of the room.
Well, iron was the man’s business after all. Scratching it out of the earth, ounce by painful ounce; smelting, pouring, casting. Sacrificing half a ton of shot because the Minister of War wanted fancy railings around his house, which might have cost the country less if they had been made of solid gold. You can’t sink a Brazilian monitor with golden shot. As Whytehead might say at one of his dull dinners, where all the dull men sat, pondering the burdensome fact that they were alive.
Stewart eyed the nail. Perhaps he wanted to say that the colour at the tip was rust, and not blood; or that these two things were the same colour, after a time. Stewart knew better than to touch the thing. Let the man have his comfort, his suck, his gouger. His own little crucifixion.
‘Precious stuff,’ he said.
The Brazilians were on the river. They were far to the south, but they were there – around a bend somewhere, or the bend after that. Nothing came in and nothing went out. No one could leave Asunción.
Whytehead put the nail down. Stewart sat in the matching horsehair wing chair. The clock (another clock!) ticked Britishly on. They were both so terribly tired.
It was a pleasant room. The curtains on the windows were moss-green, with little tassels all down the side. There was a framed engraving on the wall of The Queen at Balmoral, seated on her horse Fairy. He would like to marry Whytehead, Stewart thought. There would be enormous comfort in it. No need for speech. Everything ordered and on
time. A little woman who works a hole in her hand, when you are away.
And, ‘Would you like to see the garden?’ said Whytehead.
‘That would be lovely,’ said Stewart.
They walked out through French windows on to a granite terrace. A row of stone pots held the skeletons of bushes that had been cut into the shape of singing birds. Ordinary birds: sparrows or finches or wrens.
‘The ants got to them,’ said Whytehead and he stood for a while, looking at the wreck.
Stewart’s aunt was of the opinion that all gardeners were insane people masquerading as gardeners. She said the same of men who liked to fish, and she humoured such types in a deliberate, loud voice, so,
‘Even in the pot?’ Stewart enquired, unflinching.
‘Oh they get everywhere,’ said Whytehead, and he led the way across the patchy lawn, and on through a gap in the hedge.
The sky was low and kind as they made their way through Whytehead’s working garden towards a jumble of sheds. They walked so beautifully together; Stewart could feel the way his own thighs moved as they swung their sticks and paced the land. Beans, manioc, maize: Whytehead pointed them out, with notes of botanical interest, also the decorative rose bushes, carnations and dahlias that were planted between the vegetable rows. They paused at his pigsty. They patted the impossible Jersey cow kept for her milk (made thick as butter, it must be, by this heat).
Stewart was walking the country estate of the Chief State Engineer – Keld Whytehead, thirty-nine years old, half-crucified: whose father was nothing you could mention, whose grandfather had been, at a guess, an Orkney fisherman, which is to say a peasant with three words of English, being ‘pence’ and ‘bailiff’ and ‘Sir’.
‘My goodness,’ said Stewart. ‘Yours?’ A tobacco field stretched ahead of them, all alive with the wind and with the shifting backs of peons labouring among the leaves.
‘A good year for it,’ said Whytehead. He could not use a word so vulgar as ‘mine’. Oh bliss.
They would not talk of the war – like tradesmen, like traitors – they would talk of the weather, like gentlemen, and they would do their jobs, which were to kill and to save on a large scale; to build cannon and hospitals and put their shoulders to the wheel, which was the wheel of History itself.
