by Anne Enright
She might look a while for men – there were few enough of them: there were families, and the scraps of families; widows and orphans. There were the remnants of men, who made up the army now. And every so often, it was true, there were men. They turned up. You saw them, squatting beside the morning fire, in their spurs and hat brims, the male contents of some village who had joined their quest – for it was hard to call it a war any more, or even a fight. And yet it was not nothing. It was the last battle, said Bernardino Caballero, a man who had seen enough last battles, you might think, to give him some inkling of when a war might end.
Or even, thought Stewart, of where the ending might have begun. At Angostura, perhaps, where the gallant Captain Thompson walked over to the enemy and handed up his sword. Or later, on the Azcurra heights, after yet another last battle: twenty thousand Brazilians against a battalion of women and children, with beards on their faces made of grass and wool; the new capital (a poor enough town) Peribibuí lost. After that, Acosta Nu, held to the last minute by Caballero, so that López might escape to San Estanislao – another ‘capital city’, this one lost without a bullet shot. Curuguatí, then eastwards to the heights of Panadero. All of these places boldly marked on a map that López had – though Stewart could point until his arm was sore at this far place or that, waiting for a Guaraní to lend him its name.
After the carts and wagons came certain prisoners who were never shot. They comprised the life story of Francisco López. Some woman he wanted. Some woman he did not want. A man who scorned him. The son of the sister of the man who betrayed them to the Brazilians at Curupaití, or Curuzú. They were given more food than the common soldiers, so that they should not die when they were flogged. Some of them were quite hale, and Stewart wondered why they did not escape. Though how could they, when everyone here was escaping? They had been escaping so long, it made a man think that this was what life was – a regrouping against forces that are large – yes, admittedly very large – but also clumsy and beneath his contempt.
‘Hah!’ said Stewart, to illustrate his point, and the small girl who walked now with her hand always on his stirrup looked up at him and smiled.
She was a Guaraní girl, of uncertain age.
They do not listen to words, Stewart noticed. These children only look, and it is always at the wrong place. They do not watch your eyes but your mouth. Or they do not watch your mouth but your hands. They make you feel not so much wrong-footed as wrong-faced. Or they might watch your eyes, but that is not the same thing as meeting them: a man might long for another human creature just to return his gaze. Perhaps that was what dogs were for. And he spent a while that day thinking about eyes – whether they were the door to the soul, or the soul’s mirror. Do they open, or reflect, and what was the anatomy of it all.
He thought of the blue and stupid eyes of George Thompson at Angostura, looking at him while he fingered the hilt of his soon-to-be-surrendered sword. The table where they sat, with a sheet of ants lapping up and over the edge of it, on their way across the room. The rest of the ants walking happily on the floor.
Thompson’s eyes of cerulean blue; a flare of white around the pupil, a matching outer ring of a darker smoky blue – there was a pattern to this dark rim, as it fell towards the pupil, a kind of gothic veining. Which blue came first? Stewart was a doctor. He should know about such things, about the previousness, or lateness, of colour, and how colour grows. He should have paid more attention, at the time, to the bruised, navy colour of his own children’s eyes, as they shifted into brown.
A British boat was waiting down river, Thompson said. It would take them to the Argentine, and then home. Stewart did not answer. He looked at the ruin of his hands, his cannibalised nails. He did not want to go.
And so his life was shaped by a kind of stickiness. He did not want to leave his family in Asunción – those little strangers his wife had reared for him. He did not want to leave his wife – herself a stranger to the woman he had once loved. Besides, he could not abide Thompson. And so he drifted along with the war, which was not so much a stream as a sequence of separate moments, each so vivid and different from the last it made him feel quite hilarious, the way that nothing now was connected to anything else.
Thompson gave Stewart his horse that day. How did he surrender? Stewart sometimes idly thought. Did he walk?
The languorous dip and buck of the creature’s back beneath him provoked thoughts of a slow, abrupt congress, but it was also conducive of other rhapsodies and regrets – that he had not made a contribution, for example. There were trees around him demanding botany, and birds their taxonomy. There were things his aunt would have admired, if you set them on her mantel in a glass jar. There was the fame of exhibition: ‘A series of glass eyes, blown and variously pigmented to the specifications of Dr Stewart, with a brief note of their metamorphosis and pathology. The eye of the diabetic patient, the eye of the bereaved woman, the eye of the blind.’
And there was a gorgeousness too, in not doing these things. In never having done anything, except go with the stream, which, although he cavilled, was not finally the stream of duty or obligation, but the flow of his own desire. The only time he went against his own inclination was when he stopped drinking: the rest – exile, marriage, the army, children – each an annoyance to him, and each the only thing he wanted to do at the time. He regretted the fact that he had lived a life of constant regret, and called an end to choice, with all its teasing grief. He looked instead at the life around him, from fungus to flower, and thought about eyes.
Sometimes he felt, as he rode, as though he were inside something; that he was looking out through the sockets of his eyes, as an antique soldier might look through a slit in his helmet. He felt that, between his skull and his self there was a gap, an area of darkness, across which he must peer.
At other times he felt that his eyes were as big as his face, and as open; his face itself was wide as the sky. But then the helmet was back again, and his eyes were darting through the gaps. Like bullets. He shot his gaze at a tree, at a bird. He never missed.
He wished he had a pen, or even that Venancia were here so he could share his observations with her. He was grown most chatty, and so he told the girl with her hand on his stirrup that the eye was not a door or a mirror, but a weapon, at war with the world. And she looked at him.
Some days later she surrendered. She met his eye, and then she did something with her own eyes. A kind of swoon, but without looking away. She made her eyes flat and unjudging, so they looked, he thought, quite gelid. Then – did they open? They became inviting, somehow, like water. The tiniest shift. A liquefaction. Just enough to say, ‘Yes.’ Or even, ‘Please.’
Stewart’s pleasure was not what it had once been. It was thin and weak and he did not know what to do with the body of this girl under him, which was very small. It seemed more like a bundle than a body, though hot inside – which struck him as sad. His desire was a meagre, hard blade with which he stabbed himself, not her, where once desire had been (he could hardly remember what it had been) – oceans, rivers, forests, God help us: everything. The girl was younger than he had thought and he did not take her again.
The last time Stewart slept with Venancia there was nothing to be done. Perhaps there had been some physical exchange, but he could not remember it as a carnal event. If, for example, he were to die, and in his dying try to remember the last time he had been inside his wife and the last time she had been about him, he would not be able to do so. As the journey went on, as the landscape unfolded in front of him and unravelled behind, he wondered if the people he had left in the past still existed. He wondered if there was any way to stitch the path back up, and make his way home to them. And he regretted the night he had lain in the dark at Venancia’s side talking about warehouses, licences, a lawyer in Buenos Aires they both knew. They had a chance, and they did not take it. A chance for what, he was not sure. Desire was the least of it. But it was also, perhaps, a chance for desire.
He did not think of it during the day – there was always some other irritation to occupy his mind; a man’s skin that was designed as a penance and not a protection; the changing vista, the clouds hanging in the branches of some forest, the feeling of legend from the landscape, and also of unfairness when you looked at such wide beauty from the narrow torment of your body; a chafed heel, an ulcerated shoulder, or the sense of your life gone astray. And then, around noon, there was the daily despair. It was a physical thing, like a drench of rain; you were dripping with it. It burdened every part and compartment of Stewart with a liquid grief, so that he wasn’t so much riding as carrying his tears, brimming in some slopping leather bag, with gaps spouting in the seams.
And with the sadness came a decision. He would put his burden down. Every day, around noon, Stewart resolved to kill himself by the nearest means. He loved the force of the resolution; relished the relief. He craved death as much as water, more than food, and he fingered the handle of his knife at his side.
But he would have to pull away into the trees – and where was the right path among them, the most forgiving glade? The wound would have to be just so. The pistol in his saddlebag lacked shot. He might reach into his saddlebag, or fondle the leather plaiting on the handle of the knife. He might remember to put the leather in his mouth, because the doctor in him knew that this moment would pass, if he would only eat.
And yet, his throat was so dry. He might suck a little on the knife. Or he might nick the inside of his cheek to feel something sharp and taste the blood. Then it would come to him in a rush and he would stuff whatever handful he had been given into his mouth. After a moment, he would feel the prayer of it sweep through him and he was always glad, then, that he had stayed alive. There was always something to make him glad – the sharpness of grass, or a rock exquisitely veined with red, or pollen touching the child’s skin and leaving its stain.
Story time. He looked at the green sward, the medieval crags, the black brooding carriage, and he held his little girl by the hand. His Lily. His Rose.
By mid-afternoon words had left him again. He was not sure what remained in the pan of his skull, but the last thing to go was the mechanism whereby a man counted things. He could feel himself tick with each passing tree trunk, fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two – as though counting was the last tenacity. And then the numbers, too, were gone, and his thoughts were made of nameless rocks and trees, the nameless eyes of the child at his side, and the wide, nameless sky.
Dusk.
The evening, like the morning, was full of business, as he tended to López. After which, there might be food, or even music. As he turned to sleep, his mind would snag on some domestic thing the girl had arranged for him, a hot stone against the mountain cold, or the girl’s own body bundled beside him: he would feel his own smallness under the stars, and there, on the side of the cold hill, he would long for something that was the exact temperature of Venancia Báez. His fingers twitched as he fell asleep, fumbling for the gaps in her imaginary clothes, and the feel of her skin was intimate as oblivion to him, and as large, and kind.
He thought about the last night he spent with her in San Fernando, at the mouth of the Tebicuarí. He could see her eyes in the dark. She was very clever, his wife. She had not come to the camp in secret – nor did she come openly. She came like a woman covered in dust, limping on bark shoes, and so she walked in past the sentries and then walked out again, back to the captured city of Asunción.
She slipped into his hut after sunset, and looked at him.
Later he saw her body. Or some of it.
It was not just Venancia’s body that Stewart had slept with in the early days of their marriage, but it was her body that was beside him now, as they lay and faced each other and talked – close, so as not to be overheard. The swell of her hip and the angle of her shoulder, her breasts falling out towards him in a line; it certainly was her body, or a swollen version of the same. But it seemed to him too lush, and hypocritical, now. Venancia’s flesh, once so intoxicating, just irritated him: it made all the bites on his skin sit up. The whole pudding of it – his own starved, mortal shanks shivering beside her with something that might have been desire but felt more like tears.
‘How do you live?’ he had whispered, and she just smiled. Venancia grew things in the forest, or under the floorboards; she grew things in the dark. And even as he talked to her about a bank in Scotland, a broker in Buenos Aires, he was deciding not to touch her. She had given herself to some military fool, he decided, some Brazilian, saying, ‘I have children to feed.’ And how could he blame her? They were his children, after all.
Venancia’s body. It filled the hut where they lay with accusation. It was not her fault. Stewart looked into her eyes (their brown plea) and knew that she might give her favours where she liked, but her life belonged to him. And all her cleverness, only to him. She had taken this journey, not to talk about money, but for love of him. Even so, the words that came to him were something like ‘I do not’, and then ‘I do not’, over and over again. A scrap of a phrase that begged many endings, one of them being – there was no doubt about it – ‘I do not want you any more, Venancia Báez.’
High in the Amambai mountains, Stewart fingered the cold hair of the girl who slept beside him. It was brown. There was a white man back there somewhere, in her line. Some Jesuit.
‘Poor William,’ he wanted to say. ‘Poor William Stewart.’ Such scruples as he used to have. Now all he wanted was to hear the rasp and sigh of the girl’s breath. All he wanted was to fling his life, one more time, into the body of Venancia (as was) Báez.
Later, he woke the girl to look at a low star which had gathered about it a light of great delicacy in the bone-coloured dawn. He was not sure she understood, but she sat easily on his legs and, after he had pointed and she had looked up, they stayed like that for a while, waiting for the day to begin.
She was younger, now. The farther they went in the northern hills the smaller and more helpless she seemed to him. So perhaps it was true. They were going to a more innocent place, after all.
In the morning, Eliza would climb on to the back of a cart and play the captive piano, still tied where it stood. She played ‘La Palomita’ while López, as often as not, shot someone. He did it personally – there were so few men left to do it for him; but also, it must be admitted, he needed to do it himself these days, like a morning expectoration or a fart.
When the time came to shoot his brother, however, the massively incompetent Benigno López, he spared the man no honour. He called upon the services of Bernardino Caballero, the highest-ranking officer he had left. Also he had everyone stand as though on parade. He signalled Stewart forward to check the condemned man’s health and the comfort of his bonds. He pulled their weeping mother towards the stake, and shook her shoulder and cast her down, as if to say, ‘See! See, what you have done to this woman your mother.’ And Eliza, for the occasion, played ‘La Palomita’ standing up. She wore red.
Benigno was stripped down to his underdrawers, and the mound of his belly was immensely comical and afraid. It quivered and heaved, and was so inviting that López could not help but cut him loose one last time, to send him careening around in a circle, snorting like a pig. Everyone roared. They kicked or spat, while Benigno squealed. He seemed to enjoy it, in a bitter sort of way. He squealed fantastically well, and then he squealed even better. Then López gave a brief nod to Caballero, who had the man-pig pulled back to the stake and shot.
Eliza finished the last verse of the last round of ‘La Palomita’ and was helped down from the cart by Pancho, her son. She had not missed a single note.
After Benigno, López forbade the use of bullets, because they had not enough, and men were lanced where they stood. Particularly the men who had conspired with Benigno, but also, and sadly, the boy Paulino Alén, who came to the camp at San Fernando with a hole in his throat after the fall of Humaitá. He had tried to kill himself, and failed, so López made
a gift of it and finished the job for him. Stewart might have balked at this particular death or at another, but there was always the general truth of the war, and the honour of their cause. Benigno had conspired – there was no doubt about that. He had plotted to slip a knife between his brother’s ribs, to hand over the country to the enemy, to hoard supplies, to deny marching men meat, to divert from the front line all kinds of fat bacon and shoulders of lamb, lard and cutlets and blood sausage and tripes. It gave Stewart satisfaction to see the man die, because there was justice in it. It gave him pleasure to see Mother López caterwaul, the attitude she struck like The Virgin at the bottom of some savage cross. Also to see the tear seep out of the Little Colonel’s green eye, before he turned to help his mother down from her cart.
Somewhere on the road Stewart had become a creature of López. They all had. They could feel him in their blood. The terrible rapine that might seize a man, the frenzy of hacking and slashing – that was López – the terrible urge to shit that might swell inside him when he had killed, so that soldiers dropped their kecks in the view of enemy fire there on the battlefield. It was not fear that made them so incontinent, but a madness of the body that filled them to bursting and demanded egress – of any kind: also carnal; the men being endlessly urgent and ignoble in that way.
Stewart, not being in the thick of it for the most part, kept his pants in order back and front. He confined himself to indifference – a narrow, whining sort of madness that might let a man die because he did not like the look of his ugly face. A civilised, smirking sort of thing, which stepped through the heap of enemy wounded and slit this, or that, throat. These were all pleasures. And he knew that once they slipped out of him, he could never call them back.
