by Anne Enright
It was not far to her house. She talked, remarkably, of Southern England, the small town in Kent where she had been married. ‘For I am married, you know’, to a M. Xavier Quatrefages. A beast, but a very minor beast, she said. A horse doctor in the military. But Kent was beautiful, all the same. The Weald – was that Kent? Perhaps it was Surrey. And so they came to the gate of her quinta, where she turned and took his hand in hers, and he, like some village Romeo, pushed forward to kiss her on the mouth. Or on the cheek. Or he brushed his mouth against the skin of her face, as she turned away.
He did not even like the woman. It was a part he was obliged to play, and she, to complete the scene, turned and fled prettily into the house. The theatre of it annoyed him, but not as much as the riot in his blood that had been gathering ever since he tracked her in the dark. He felt trifled with. He felt tempted, and scorned. Even if this were true (and it was not true) – no matter. What mattered was the violence with which he had wanted her, a woman talking of Kent or was it Surrey, as though she did not want him too. Was this passion? This epilepsy? This urge to destroy, like a child in a fit, the room, the house, the entire world? And that anatomical thing, his member, foolishly forward, seeking a place he could no longer imagine, let alone name, until there, on his hand, an appalling, imagined wetness; poor forked animal that she was. Gone now, through the gates of her house. Gone to bed.
He shook it off like a dog and headed back to town, and like a dog, he felt he had been whipped. But the road was straight and he knew where he was going. He was going to his annoying wife Venancia for some love. Just that. The odorous cushion of her breast beneath his ear.
For a long time, the memory of that night’s encounter clung to Stewart like a dream you cannot wash off in the morning. It returned, in one detail or another – the sound of the insects in the dark; the turn in the road; and what might have happened if some different move had been made. If he had spoken more, or better. If he had stopped. If one or other thing had shifted even slightly and he had ravished, or been ravished by, a woman he did not even like, who walked out at night as he did, alone.
Nothing much, of course. The sexual act. A different way of looking at López. His own throat quietly slit perhaps (or perhaps not). A great passion, or no great passion. A mess. Any number of things, none of which would increase the sum of his pleasure in seeing Eliza secretly in the dark, as though she had invited him to this assignation, and him alone.
Of course she was not there for him. What Stewart knew – but did not realise for some time – was that Eliza’s stillborn daughter was buried in the graveyard along whose walls she walked that night. It came to him, seven years later, when he buried a child for Venancia, who could not attend, being not yet churched. It was their sixth, a meagre little daughter who died as soon as she was born. They scraped out some earth and put her in. Stewart looked up, and Venancia’s absence on the other side of the tiny grave made him think of other ghosts – the lilac paleness of Eliza that night, in the June of 1865, when the war was still something you might win or lose.
The graveyard was beautiful. It was one of those blessed days when you thought there could be no hardship in such a place and with such weather. The jacaranda trees were in smoky bloom, the birds sang into the stillness, and the whole world seemed to whisper ‘Afterwards. Afterwards’. It was all finished, now. The war. López. Any number of dead. Stewart found it hard to care, after so much slaughter, for his own tiny child, but of course he did care, and the animal sorrow he felt seemed so unfair – that you should never be free of it, that, like hunger, pain would always be new and hard. And as he turned away he remembered that Eliza’s daughter was buried here too. So that was what brought her out along the road that last night in Asunción. She had come to visit the bones of her baby – so light and tentative and barely formed. He thought of them as they lay in the earth now, open and loose; melted back from each other where the cartilage had not had a chance to harden into bone.
Stewart stepped back with a snort that surprised the gravedigger. He had remembered – but last of all – the kiss. And with the memory came the thought that the kiss, despite its opiate clarity, might not have been a kiss, after all. Also, and either way, that it did not matter now. Perhaps it had not mattered then. And Stewart felt a fierce nostalgia for the war. Standing alive, as he stood now, among the great sighing mass of the dead.
It is possible they all saw themselves as standing on a magnificent canvas, one that might run the length of an old hall. It would be filled with smoke. There would be hills with men toiling up the slopes, other men firing down from above. A gorge. A swamp. Far embrasures and redoubts – strategic details compressed into a tea-coloured distance before the Paraguayans run out of wall. In the centre, the river, shallow and lazy, flows or dallies past the story of the war fought along its bank: the battles of Riachuelo, Tuiutí, Curupaití, the trenches at Curuzú and, looming above it all, the besieged fort of Humaitá; its builder, the gallant Captain Thompson, unrolling his plans high up there on the mud wall.
Below him, Brazilian ironclads squat on the river while, from ship and shore, the mouths of cannon spit primitive flame. The river is spattered with shot that falls just shy of the ships: the walls of the fort, though vaguely pocked and dented, are never breached. It seems a pleasant enough stalemate – an expensive way to fish. Along the wicker battlements, men point into the middle distance or click out a telescope to glint in the sun. Their names might be written on ribbon unfurling below them. In the centre, López; with an unlikely white stallion rearing under him on the high wall. Pedro Inácio Meza, the ruined hero of Riachuelo dying of his wound, stiffly, on the church steps. Colonel José Díaz charging, and taking, a battery of La Hitte cannons from the Uruguayans at Estero Bellaco. Huzzah! General Francisco Isidoro Resquin running up the left flank at Tuiutí, General Vicente Barrios on the right, the fierce Guaraní soldiers wading through swamp and thicket under close enemy fire to face the sixty thousand Brazilians, Uruguayans and Argentines, housed in that vast city of cloth. How could one man paint them all? And though we see men throw up their arms and roll their eyes, although we see the bullet even as it enters; the stricken faces of comrades who reach but can not save (‘oh, no!’ the picture might be called. ‘Oh, No!’): although we see plenty of dying, we do not see one corpse – so quickly are bodies emptied and then discarded, even by their own stories – nor do we see the vast heaps of the dead. We might miss the vast heaps of the dead: we have come to relish them; the unexpected anatomy lesson of a man’s neck open to the spine; the way a group of bodies tangle and subside; the way we must follow the line of a leg to see whose foot that is, so strong is our impulse to unite the body and give each man his proper parts. Also the horror, of course, when the leg stops short. Ten thousand men died at Tuiutí, and as their skin leathers in the open air, the hill of the dead settles and grows horribly flat (who would have thought there could be so many elbows in the world?). A lone photographer stands on the field of death, and there is no one to paint them: the painters are all fled. What happened at Tuiutí? A battle, that is all. Nothing but swamp was lost and nothing but swamp was gained. But the man who lost the swamp was López.
Still, you must never underestimate the Guaraní soldier. He is there in the picture too, in dull-eyed ranks and rows, ever-advancing. Again and again, facing superior forces and overwhelming odds, the Paraguayan Indian outfoxes, outfights, outdies the combined enemy. His pants are blue and his coat is red. And he takes both off to fight in the swamp, which he knows and calls home.
He is sickened by the meat, though, as Miltón tells it many years later. Not because the meat is rotten, though it is often rotten, but because these men are not used to eating such stuff – they only make it, or become it. In which case, there is plenty meat made in the five and a half years of the war. As the battles slowly creak into place, and one strategy slowly crunches into another, the Guaraní Indian fights on; bilious, gripe-ridden, suffering from meaty breath an
d meaty wind; and there is no surrender. Ever.
Despite which, the story of the war is a story of retreat. Curupaití held and lost. The cunningly double line of trenches at Curuzú, then back to the fort of Humaitá: three hundred and eighty guns, a mess of defences out front, the ground seething with twenty thousand boys and old men, because only boys and old men are left, now. The stranglehold tightens around them and the names keep unscrolling in the painterly wind: on the river, the fearless Díaz floats in his fatal canoe; General Barrios makes a sortie, Paulino Alén shoots himself, in the face of defeat; Bernardino Caballero holds Acosta Nu – these are names that must be said out loud. As too must the names of the staunch ships who sailed in this war, the Tacuarí, the Paraguarí, the captured Brazilian steamship Marquês de Olinda, the Ygureí, the Salto Oriental and the Pirabebé. Ships where men fought, and in which they burned; ships from which they drowned.
There is some comfort in listing the brave men of other wars: history is a litany, and all we are doing, here on this earth, is making lists of the dead.
So busy intoning, indeed, that we miss the three Brazilian boats as they cut the chains that have been slung across the river, then run the battery at Humaitá. They are the Barrosso, the Tamandaré and the Brasil: all monitors; blind-looking things of unnatural iron – even the deck is closed over, so that the men inside it are either safe or dead: there is no middle way and no romance to them either. Monstrous modernity, which chugs past the open mouths of two hundred and four guns – from the Curupaití battery to the final array at Humaitá – as though they were going on a picnic. Then moves upriver to pound Asunción.
And so there it is. The city is burning. Somewhere in the background, the ghost of Whytehead lays his hand on the bulge of a cold smelter, looking sad yet proud. So much for the remnants of the maiden Tacuarí – they pale in comparison to the great names of this war, Spanish Creole and Guaraní. At the very end of the canvas it is the gallant Captain Thompson who surrenders, finally, the fort at Angostura, because no Paraguayan knows how.
And where is Stewart? Was he brave? Low down, on a nameless piece of ground, he lifts some dying man by the shoulders, as though to help him face out of the picture. The man rolls his eyes. His last, trembling gesture is back towards Humaitá and the unlikely stallion on the high wall – my captain, López. (Or is that López himself, impossibly dying in Stewart’s arms? With more beard, perhaps, and a different look in his eye?)
And where is Eliza in his hour of need? She is out of the picture. Her portrait would be hung on the opposite wall, endlessly looking. Trying to discover where it all went wrong.
She will not find it here. This is a heroic painting – one of the last such – and tenderly naïve. It is full of errors, of course, but that is a different thing. Stewart might have pointed out that the chains slung across the river were, for the duration of the siege, most beautifully clogged with water hyacinth. Every morning he wondered at the line becoming sharper – the water downstream becoming smooth as glass, as the river behind grew solid with vegetation. One morning the whole thing flowered and he had the greatest urge to walk the floating path from the near bank to the freedom of the other side.
He might, either, have complained about the lack of red – that most distracting colour. He might say the painter had failed to capture the various and romantic colours of blood, for example, from the dry rust first pointed out to him by Whytehead, to the liquid red of the river, soaked with light as the sun went down. It might be bougainvillaea shooting, from one day to the next, out of the rich mud beside his hut at Humaitá, or a man’s shirt in full bloom just before he died, but Stewart’s eye was punctured by red during the war, as his heart was sometimes pierced by the peculiar blue of the sky.
Most important, there would be nothing in such a picture of miasma, or of mud. There would be no mud-covered carrion, or living men covered in mud. Above all, there would be no women slathered with the stuff, or even women who, like Eliza, remained amazingly mud-free.
In fact, the fort at Humaitá was crawling with women. They detached themselves from the mud of the walls to approach in their mud-coloured dresses, and they opened their mud-coloured faces to show the wonderful, clean, inner red of their mouths, livid with teeth of yellow. And whatever they had to say, it was always a bother – a plea of some sort, for news of some man, for intercession over a scrap of cloth, or a scrap of roof to put over their heads, or, later, for food. They offered nothing in return, some of them, except the sight of their winning, female faces, or the prospect of leaving your sleeve alone. They might, either, offer some sexual service of great frankness, but their bargaining powers were in general poor, and they might switch from nothing to everything without seeming to tell between the two.
In the universal muddiness that pertained after that first action at Riachuelo (no one dared to call it a defeat), the merest wipe of a rag was enough to make you advance. The woman who fared best – at least the one whose sleeve Stewart would end up tugging before the war was out – started out with a clean face and a stand of rushes she cut from the swamp to repair your roof. She ended up supplying all kinds of things, from a bottle of French wine to woven baskets for the wall of the fort. She could be seen tramping them like a dumpy skirted engineer in increasingly good boots, with gold chains around her neck and other, dangling things hidden under the cloth of her shirt.
She was never hit. When the water rose, the Brazilian boats drew closer and the thick cushions of earth that were the walls became fatter and dangerously low, like hills. It was hard to tell if they were falling under the pounding or reverting to some more natural state and Stewart could not help feeling that they were quite happy subsiding like that, back into the easeful flat, or slipping off into the river again, as mud. He could not help the feeling that even the earth was betraying them now.
Still, it was fun. Every morning, they cheered a little paddle wheeler that steamed down to lob a few twelve pounders into the Brazilian fleet, making them scurry a bit, whip up a bit of foam. When it was sunk they sent Jaime Corbalan down instead – one man in a canoe full of torpedoes, with a ribbon presented by Eliza fluttering at his throat.
‘We’ll put a hole in them yet,’ said López as they waited for dawn and the sound of the first explosion, the plump ball of water bursting in the air. But there was nothing. There was an uneasy silence, which filled up slowly with the different kinds of misadventure and funk and betrayal, so by the time the first jeering whistle broke, they knew what had happened. The Brazilians had swallowed him up. Corbalan was a rich boy and this was the trouble, said López, who, in his cheerful way, had the man’s brother shot.
Then new boats appeared, and the shells flew high over the walls, churning an arc of mud where huts and shanties once stood. Every morning, the women went out to collect the unexploded canisters, then brought them to the gunners to be better primed and shot back. They cheered as they ran towards them, and jostled each other out of the way to keep their courage up, because although the shells looked like nothing at all lying there – just lumps of metal lodged in the muck – sometimes one would, under a woman’s gentle touch, revive, and so explode.
Stewart faced the problem of the women whenever their anatomy ambushed him in the operating hut – every time he panicked that a man’s member had been blown away and grubbed through blood and hair looking for the non-existent wound. Every time he unbuttoned a shirt and found a breast, or two, beneath, he would sigh at the problem of the women. If Venancia were here, would she scavenge for shot? (Venancia becoming, as the weeks and months went by, as beautiful in his head as a glass of water, a plate of fresh food.)
Why, he asked himself, did the women do such a thing? There was a pot of corn for each shell, but there were other ways and other places where a woman might find food. ‘I had a man who died,’ said one, ‘and then I had another man who died.’ When life was so cheap, she seemed to say, love became general. So they might do it for a general love. Or for love of
the General – López. Or because they were told to – as simple as that; the love of discipline. Or because they loved the risk, as some of them undoubtedly seemed to do. They might do it, finally, because no one likes to lose – which is nothing but the love of victory, with her laurels and her wings.
Stewart was much exercised, philosophically, in his cholera tent and in his typhoid tent, by the problem of love. He thought about it obsessively. Perhaps it had always been thus, he thought, as he lifted a mustard plaster from a cholera victim’s chest, or paused to examine the gassy, bulging ground over the pits where they buried the dead. ‘My aunt always said I was a worrier.’
‘But all love is a worried love,’ he said, inadvertently aloud, and more than once. ‘All love is fuss.’
He thought that he was beginning to love Eliza Lynch, for example. But properly, this time. This did not bother him much: it was a spiritual, even androgyne love – it was not a yearning thing. He did not wait for her to appear. But when she did walk out – her dress bouncing on its hoops, just clear of the mud, and her parasol glowing like a living membrane in the sun – her eyes were so kind, her whole air so simple and redeeming, that it was impossible to call her a woman at all. She was like a sister when she moved and like a dream when she was still. She was what they were all fighting for.
Of course, he was also in love with her in a dashing sort of way – they all were, it was the accepted thing to be. ‘We have died and gone to Eliza’s’, was the joking toast they gave, in the little place she kept beyond the church at Humaitá – meaning no disrespect in this use of her Christian name, but on the contrary, a kind of bantering beatification.
Eliza’s house was a haven – partly because it was so well back from the arc of bloody muck that was the ballistic limit of the Brazilian ships. Which is not to say that Eliza was a coward; she walked freely out; a distinctive sight – you might even say a target – a swirl of colour with two boys, fore and aft, to lift and lay boards for her feet. They got so adept, it became a kind of game with them all; Eliza walking faster and faster as they ran around her, forming an impromtu wheel on whose inside rim she walked safe.
