by Anne Enright
A knocking announced Il Mariscal López – as ever formal when entering the house of Eliza Lynch.
‘Let him in,’ she said to the servant, who lifted the flap for the Dictator to walk through. After which theatre, he looked a little silly. He was always smaller than you remembered him to be.
López kissed the hand of his consort, then waved for them all to sit down. You could not oblige a soldier to wait, these days, when the smell of cooking was in the air. As the chairs were pushed in under them, a figure slipped into the place beside Stewart.
‘Late, Pancho,’ said Eliza. ‘You must always be late.’
‘Sorry, Mama.’
He was sitting beside the Little Colonel, and this made Stewart’s pleasure complete. They were all so fond of the boy. His eyes were the lightest green you might see this side of the Atlantic; so green as to look quite blind in strong light. The blankness of them was almost decadent. The lurking passivity of his youth and the slowly blinking lashes made a man think about women’s eyes; ask what they were doing – so modest and yet knowing – in the middle of a boy’s face.
But he was a boy – there was no doubt about that – as precious and wild. He was also a National Thing, being, one day, the reason why they had all fought this war. And as such he was already glowering at Alén who, quite wisely, examined his cutlery and did not look back.
There was quite a lot to examine. When Stewart caught Alén’s eye, he tapped the outermost of five forks, to the boy’s hidden relief. If the truth be told, Stewart only knew what three of them were for: meat, fish and pastry – even this act of identification made his mouth indecently water. He reached for a glass and faltered, at which Eliza’s manservant leaned out of the darkness and, with a whisper almost sexual in its tact and generosity, called the glasses out to him. ‘Water, Chambertin, Latour, champagne.’ Then he withdrew.
Stewart sought, and found, the Little Colonel’s eyes of mineral green.
‘Any good shooting, these days?’
He was about to weep. It was possible he was weeping already. He looked at the boy speaking to him and did not hear a word that came from his young mouth. Perhaps because she understood, Eliza served, almost at once, not a soup, but a camp stew such as they were used to of manioc and meat. A good one. There was a terrible silence as they fell to. After which incontinence, the meal proper was possible, in all its ritual loveliness: soup, salad, fish, game, meat. The salad was a little ‘Indian’, and the fish was the usual fish bombed out of the river, but it was fresher than Stewart was used to, being snatched from under the snouts of Brazilian guns, and it looked up at him from a sauce à l’estragon. All in all the food made him feel quite patriotic. The bird was local game, shot before it reached the enemy guns. The leg of pork was a gift, Eliza said, from someone grateful, and the chocolate mousse was particularly colonial and fine, being made straight from the cocoa bean. But as for the last dish – that last fork sitting so mysteriously on its silver rest – when the last dish came they all cheered. Sorbet de cassis. How did she do it?
It was a dream. Sometime during the fish Stewart woke briefly to see, rising above the glittering crowd of cruets and epergnes, a centrepiece of flowers and – could those be grapes? It looked as beautiful and familiar as another life – a life he might have led but had not. And he wondered where it had got to, and who was living it now – Stewart’s other life that was intimate with such flowers, strewn with them: purple, orange and blue, they gathered the shadows into their moist hearts, and he found himself sinking his face into the colours and the scent. And then, of course, he was doing no such thing. He was eating a whole fish, and the fish had an amused look in its dead eye and he was talking about Scotland, trying perhaps to claim for himself that piece of new tartan, with its overlapping squares of yellow and turquoise and grey.
Over the pork, he seemed to mention his aunt, but he must have forgotten to say that she was dead, or that she was his aunt, because Eliza was laughing. The pork had very hairy crackling, and it was most distracting – perhaps he had been witty, all unawares.
‘Oh, the English,’ said Eliza. ‘The English have no mothers. They grow like cabbages in a garden: they are entirely self-generated. Or if they have such a thing as a mother, it is always a matter of furniture. “I am expecting my mother’s furniture” or “This armoire, do you like it? It belonged to my mother.” Behind every Englishman there is a woman in a mob-cap surrounded by lumps of walnut and mahogany, and completely beside the point. Frenchmen – now their mothers write novels, or burn novels in their drawing room grate, their mothers are distinguished lovers, or know how to mend a clock that has not ticked since 1693. A Spanish mother is an object of terror, an Italian’s mother an object of piety absolute, but an Englishman’s mother … mob-cap, a little needlework, and a Queen Anne writing table of oak inlaid with yew.’
Stewart was comfortable with none of this. He was not English. He was about to remonstrate – he was quite strongly moved to it – when he remembered that he was not wearing any linen, so instead of banging the table and shouting, he brought his clenched hand up to his mouth, and cleared his throat,
‘You are too harsh, Madame Lynch,’ he said.
‘I am delighted to hear it,’ said Eliza. ‘We Celts have enough reason for harshness, we must not renegue.’
It was becoming clear to Stewart that he had missed some essential link in the conversation. Or perhaps it was not just this conversation, but all conversations. Perhaps he would not be fit for society, ever again. Something about this prospect seemed disastrous to him. So,
‘And what of the Irish mother?’ he bravely said.
‘The Irish? Oh we eat them,’ said Eliza. ‘You should see it. We start at the toes and leave nothing out.’
They all looked at the pork, and there was a small silence, into which Pancho, for some reason, cheered.
‘Diabolito,’ said his mother, while Stewart’s mind nibbled along the legs of some poor woman to arrive at a most unthinkable place. The woman was, of course, Eliza, but it was also, a little, his poor rotten aunt, or the clean bones of his long-dead mother, and Stewart felt the violence of it so keenly he wanted to shout ‘Whore!’ or some other desecration. ‘Irish bitch!’ was the phrase that sprang to mind. How strange, he thought. And useless. How could he explain to Paulino Alén, or to any of them, that this woman came of an irksome race?
Then the sorbet appeared, and Stewart tried not to groan aloud as he ate. Through all the meal, not one word had been uttered about the war or their current situation, and the dull splashes of shot landing in faraway mud were, when you remembered to listen out for them, almost pleasant to the ear.
Then López pushed back his chair.
‘Señor,’ he said to the boy Alén, with mock formality, and Eliza stood to allow them retire. They went to a table in the corner, where a map was unrolled while Pancho’s eyes grew wide with rage and pleading.
‘You must come with me, Doctor,’ Eliza said. ‘While Pancho has his war. You must keep me company and pretend to listen to my pulse.’
‘A pleasure,’ he said. He offered his arm, hinging it stiffly from the shoulder like an old man. As they left they paused for López to kiss his mistress’s hand. And it really was like being in bed with the two of them, the way they looked each other in the eye. The galvanic charge of madness from López (for he was quite mad) made Stewart feel quite dizzy. But Eliza seemed to like it, or soothe it, or take it in – at any rate she looked straight at it, as though she would quite like to bed it, by and by.
‘Coffee!’ she said into the air in front of her, and she walked on – dragging Stewart a little, who had some difficulty getting past the pathetic piece of tartan under the bird cage, his desire for it still shamed him so.
For a moment, in the small space that was Eliza’s reception room, Stewart felt the burden of future conversation. What could he say to this woman? She was too large and he was too tired.
She walked a little away from him
, and begged him to sit. Then she paused. Then she walked back to join him, and turned her head a little away as she sank into the matching chair. There was a silence; it seemed easy enough, but a bubble of misery rose quickly to the surface, and broke with,
‘You know, Doctor, I am immensely weary of it all.’
‘Of the war?’
‘No. Of this, my dear Doctor. Of all this.’ She turned and indicated, it seemed, her own skirts – unless it was the floor she was pointing to; the Aubusson blue of the rug that toned so strangely well with the beige of the mud floor. She swept her hands wide and then let them fall into her lap. Then she lifted her face to his with a gaze that might well have been called ‘radiant and sad’.
‘I am immensely weary, Doctor, of being Eliza Lynch.’
Ambushed again, thought Stewart, as the urge to free her came over him, not from the mud or the bullets – though these played their part, as he threw her over the pommel of an imaginary horse and rode her out of there. No, he would grab her and kiss her and take her most violently, and in so doing release her, not from the war, nor the world, but from the terrible prison of herself. This hair, these clothes, this high and graceful look. Come with me and we will simply live. There will be butterflies in the meadow, and so on. Christ, he was tired.
She picked herself off the chair to trail a little across the room. Her dress was the most beautiful thing he had seen for a long time – if you did not count the sunset that daily broke his half-mended heart. It was green. What kind of green Stewart could not say. Green that bristled with a silvery light, there in the dark room. She picked up a photograph of López, then set it down again and drifted on. She had sunk, Stewart realised, at least three bottles of champagne. Eliza always was a hearty girl.
‘I work quite hard you know,’ she said.
‘I know that,’ he said.
‘At table for example, I work quite hard to keep it smooth, and I am not looking for admiration, Doctor, not so much – but these bitter little looks and the sentences that creep out of people’s faces, these Ungenerosities, when I have waded through hail and fire to put an acceptable something on the table in front of them. The centrepiece – those careless flowers in their urn – I copied from an oil by Jensen, the Dane. The work, Doctor. The work! And why do I do it? I do it for love. And high endeavour. I do it so that we should not always be so small, and it is vulgar of me to say so, Doctor, but pearls before swine is one thing, at least the swine don’t despise the pearls, the way these men despise me.’
‘My dear lady,’ said Stewart, surprised by her nonsense. ‘You are beginning to sound like …’ He was going to say ‘my wife’, but he skipped, quite quickly, to, ‘a quite ordinary woman’.
For one gaping moment Stewart thought he was drunk. Then he remembered that it was the war that made him feel like this; the war and this room within the war; this house – a bowl of light like a diamond in mud, or a diamond, even, in some man’s turd – and he had some memory of a man with his belly slit – or was it the entire length of his intestine? – he had a memory of a man, at any rate, with a jewel inside him at Curupaití, or Tuiutí, or Curuzú, or in a dream he had right here in Humaitá, a dream of difficulty and kidney stones and something astonishingly beautiful, precious and hard, that was deep inside a man. Which was when he lurched awake to find Eliza still talking; the murmur of her husband’s voice in the next room a hushed counterpoint. No time had passed at all.
‘Why should I not sound ordinary, Doctor,’ Eliza was saying. ‘I am ordinary. I am ordinary as well.’
‘As well as what?’ he rudely asked. Well, she had woken him, after all.
‘As well as a whore?’ he might have said – but who cared these days? They were all meat. (Though could ‘meat’ be said to sleep, as he now needed to sleep, and was it not the blissful thing about Eliza, after all, that she was absolutely meat, and absolutely not meat at the same time, which is to say, a woman, as opposed to a potential corpse? This whirligig of philosophy taking no time at all in his head, or just exactly the time a man needed to shut his eyes and open them again, which is an eternity, or about as long as a blink.)
‘As well as being the First Lady of Paraguay,’ said Eliza, her voice a little hurt, and proud.
‘Of course,’ he said.
‘But they would hate me anyway, I think. Honestly. You might as well be in Ireland. You might as well be in Mallow – where I grew up you know – a bitter town, it made my mother weep – but we all come from bitter towns, do we not, Doctor? Every unfortunate on the surface of this earth comes from some or other bitter little town.’
He could not but agree.
And as he slept and woke for the next while (sometimes while looking straight at her) she continued to speak. She was most eloquent, though she had the disconcerting habit of suddenly appearing in a different place in the room.
‘My dear friend’s greatness is a burden to him,’ she might say.
Or,
‘All I want is to be with my family at this terrible time.’
The surprising thing was that she meant it. Here in the middle of everything, she was talking about nothing at all.
‘You know that I came to Humaitá to escape his brother’s contempt, and the contempt of his mother and sisters in Asunción. That is why I came to the field of battle, even though I was with child at the time. Because real bullets are as nothing to me when compared to the slights I suffer at the hands of those women. I came to tell him as much. I found him and flung myself at his feet.’
Stewart woke. He sensed a conclusion in the air.
‘For every enemy that he has, I have two, because for every man that hates him there is another who says that whatever he does it is at my urging; because a woman’s ambition is a fathomless thing – as though I was some witch who hexed him into my bed, and whispered, “You must, my darling, invade the Mato Grosso before the spring.” And so we suffer, Doctor. A woman has no limits, because she may not act. She is all reputation, because she may not act. So, even as we do nothing, our reputations grow more impossible, and fragile, and large.’
This seemed to him partly true, though a little bit dull. To say that women were beside the point always struck him as being – well, beside the point, somehow.
‘My dear Eliza,’ he said.
She paused. She had let herself down. And feeling it keenly, she tried to make him hers again. Stewart was entirely awake as she turned to him with ardent, very female eyes.
‘We have come a long way together, William Stewart – you and I. Sometimes I wonder how we got here, at all.’
There was a lot to disagree with in what she had said. He might start with the word ‘we’. He might point out that, though they were together in this room, they had ‘arrived’, each of them, in very different places. And he had a huge yearning for the life he might have led – a life that was familiar with flowers and unfamiliar with Eliza Lynch. But as he tried to enter it, and imagine it, he found he could not. Whatever life he was living now, it was the only one he had got, and it was bound, however loosely, to this irritating woman. He could not conjure one without her.
‘At least I have a friend, in you, Doctor. At least I have that.’
He stood rather smartly, and bowed and sat back down again. Perhaps she meant it. Their silence was so profound it drew López at last – he snatched back the door hanging and put his mad face into the room. For a second, Stewart was afraid, but López was not jealous in the least. Such was Stewart’s smallness, in the scheme of things. And indeed, Eliza stood and walked towards him as a Great Woman might walk towards a Great Man. At which, Stewart’s stomach notified him, of a sudden, that he had eaten more in the last few hours than in all the previous week.
On the way back to his hut, Stewart tried to remember that he was in love with this woman, in a dashing sort of way. He tried to relive the high, more spiritual love he felt when Eliza walked out on her big wheel, with a boy laying a plank in front of her, and another boy sn
atching one up from behind.
‘All love is fuss,’ he said, not for the first time, and perhaps out loud. He sought a sight of the moon. And it was there. The moon was white, and he loved Eliza Lynch. Of course, a spiritual love is a question of faith. You say ‘I love’ and it is as true as mutton. And so we survive.
At the edge of the compound he passed some of the mud-coloured women scrabbling under the door of a shed. It might have been a privy but, from the human whine that came from it, Stewart realised that it was some sort of lock-up or oubliette. The women – there were two of them – were scraping a hole under the door. It looked as though they were trying to feed the person inside. Such generosity, he thought. Such love.
‘Goodnight,’ he cheerfully said, to the cheerfully saluting sentry. López had his own private prison; another hole where rumour might breed – that he locked up men for Eliza to eat, or that Eliza locked up women for López to ravish, such was the love they had for each other – and with the genderless whine of the prisoner teasing his back, Stewart made his way back downhill and into his bed. And as he fell asleep in his broadcloth – even as he pulled away the rag at his throat – he thought that if he had his war again he would not tear up his last linen to save a dying man. If he had his war again he would treasure his linen – of which there was so little – and leave the dying, of which there were far too many.
A few weeks later, word came that the Ygureí was sunk and the Tacuarí scuttled by its own crew. Stewart escaped with López across the river into the swamplands, leaving Paulino Alén with a small force to defend Humaitá. The boy had got his promotion. Eliza must have liked him, at dinner.
The River
Part 3
Champagne
December 1854, Río Paraná
WE HAVE ENTERED Paraguay!
Sometime in the afternoon, after long hours spent slapping about this vast puddle, we found the channel. The tan of the water began to grow thin. I did not notice until Whytehead pointed it out to me, but the general muck that we have lived upon for so many days was splitting, by liquid degrees, into the red of the Río Paraná and the clearer grey of the Río Paraguay.
