The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

by Anne Enright

  As the personal doctor of Il Mariscal López, Stewart lived close to the abrupt gesture; a wave of the hand that could kill a man. He tried not to fawn. He opened his medical bag with decisiveness and closed it with a satisfying click. Then he became too careful about his bag. Then he became too casual about his bag. He left the bag behind, as he squatted in a manly, companionable way and daily checked the presidential feet, the calluses and the many small joints. He rubbed López down like a horse, feeling the tendons where they joined the bone. He enquired after his digestion and went behind a tree to check his stools, which were always a matter for congratulation. He lifted his member and rubbed it with a chalk mixture, to give a more cosmetic consistency to the gonorrhoeal drip. He treated the body of López with cheerful hands. Not to do so endangered not only his personal health, but also the health of every man there, not to mention the well-being of the entire region of the Río del Plata.

  And sometimes, when he sat with López talking about the need for heroes or the mechanising tendency in modern life (his foot idly tapping his doctor’s bag), Stewart thought him the sanest man in the world.

  In Tacuatí, the straggling army bunched up to a halt, and they stayed for a week. There was an estancia there: a horseshoe of sheds around an open courtyard where López sat at a table, and wrote. Then he sat back and looked at his notes. He talked to a queue of men and seemed to hand down judgment. Then he waved them away. He arranged the papers in front of him. He placed them in particular patterns. From time to time, he burned one.

  There was no other madness.

  Eliza encouraged the feeling of respite. She managed to give the place the atmosphere of a small spa. There was a little spring in the courtyard, and she drew wooden beakers of water from it, which she handed to the men herself; saying how restorative it was and extolling the pure heights from which it came. There was food, too, from the barns. And though they lived in uncertainty, there were things a man had not had, or heard, in some time, such as the sound of rain on his roof, for example, that lulled Stewart into an afternoon ecstasy of remembrance.

  He was housed, for the duration, next to Eliza’s quarters – a sympathetic billet: ever since they stopped, Stewart was fighting a sharp fever that followed its own clock; he could never tell what time he would be weak or clear-headed, and what time he would be stretched. It was a small, pungent room with no window and one rotting door. Where the dividing wall reached for the roof, there was a blessed, blunt triangle of open space; a dark gap through which the sounds of Eliza’s ‘drawing room’ came to him as he lay on the floor. What a Babel! He would wake or drift to the sounds of her sons, speaking French to their Mama, or Spanish to each other, or Guaraní to the men. Once, Stewart thought he heard German or something like it – Swedish perhaps – something guttural and rational and quite gorgeous that was telling him to lie down and keep his clothes on. And once, a whole sentence in English, ‘The book is on the windowsill’, that was the most beautiful thing he had heard in a long time.

  The girl lit a cleansing fire in his doorway and it flamed in the daylight, weakly orange, while the yard beyond buckled in the heat. Stewart saw things in the flawed air that he decided to tell no one about: not the girl, not Venancia, not his aunt, not his mother, not Eliza on the other side of the wall. He would tell no woman about these things that he saw. And he longed to rest his eyes on Eliza’s boys, who stayed constant, all of them, and easy, through the haze.

  Stewart could tell that they were fine young men, and very proud. Eliza had a certain way of sitting or being that could halt them at the mere sight of her – because of course they worshipped her, as boys do, and she adored them in return. Their father scattered them when he came into the room, but he too was indulgent and patient and kind. There was nothing degraded about this household. There was nothing that Stewart could sense of darkness, even when all was dark around him and his own death seemed as close to him as the family on the other side of the wall. Then closer. His own death scrabbled in the high triangular gap – he could smell the coming rot, he could see the long, black fingernails sneak in over the stone.

  ‘Will you take a cup of coffee, my dear?’

  It was hard to tell how sick or well he was when sentences like this fluttered down to him. Coffee? He must be dying. He looked at the girl as she dipped a rag into some water and wiped his chest. The rag, the water, the girl: these things were real. The coffee could not be real. He must be careful about coffee. He must stay alive.

  Then he smelled it.

  And Stewart decided that it was all real, in a way. Because the gods can make for themselves all kinds of felicity. The ease with which they run around, and chat and shout. The freedom they have. The lovely, ordinary nature of it all.

  ‘Take your shoes off, my dear, and put your feet on this,’ said Eliza, the cannibal. Eliza the evil one. Eliza who rushed, pregnant, into Humaitá to fling herself at Il Mariscal’s feet and say, ‘Why does your brother Benigno hate me? Why does he insult and humiliate me like this? Why?’

  But Stewart was delirious, and death crouched between the thatch and the wall. Death was a nest of insects; a thick, seething, black triangle, all shiny and heaving and trickling down the wall to crawl over him. And he itched and whined in the straw while from next door came the sound of a stool being set down.

  ‘Is that better?’

  No. He was delirious and Eliza was just like any other wife. She must nag a little, and provoke; she must never be quite satisfied. Because this was the way of wives, it was their destiny: women must always be thwarted, and so men must always fail.

  They had conjugal relations, Stewart thought, no more than twice the week of his fever, and this in a farther room. He heard much more than this, of course, but the actual events he distinguished from the less real by the whimpering, puppy-like sound that López made. At least Stewart thought it was López. If it was not, then it was a peculiar mewling for Eliza to make. But you never knew.

  And so the week stretched into one long, golden afternoon, where they were, for the most part, as happy as anyone might be, the Devil and his whore. And Stewart was happy with them, on the other side of the wall, as they arranged their lives by rules both tender and aesthetic; as Eliza brought out one shawl or another to drape on the chair, or changed the lamp for a candle, because he preferred it so.

  And Stewart allowed them a life like any other couple: a shared past shot through, as it may have been, by moments of great frankness; embarrassed, sometimes, by emotions it seemed their joined bodies were too frail to bear – López after the death of his father, say, or Eliza some ordinary Sunday afternoon, when it seemed to her she might drown in her own life and clung to him as a woman wrecked.

  And so the fever waned.

  Pancho called him. He grabbed the door frame with both hands and leaned into the small room saying,

  ‘I think there is something wrong with Mama.’

  Stewart peered into the boy’s looming silhouette.

  ‘One moment,’ he said. And so, at last, he went next door.

  He was right. It was lovely. She had covered the rough furniture with drapes of sage-green and grey. There was a pier-glass on the wall, a preternatural clock; there was the scent of lilac, and also a fusty magical smell that seemed to say ‘Home’. In the middle of all this cluttered ease, Eliza sat with a distracted, strained attitude. She did not turn; but she answered the doctor’s greeting, when he gave it, with,

  ‘Yes, a very good evening.’

  And still, she did not look at him. She spoke from the side of her face, so as not to disturb some forming thought that seemed to be gathering on the far wall. She squinted a little, as though trying to understand the shape of some stain; the lack of whitewash perhaps; an accident of light and shadow, or a horror of moss spreading in a corner by the door.

  Stewart thought his delirium had spread, but there was no fever. He lifted her wrist and felt her pulse. Then he palpated, briefly, the flesh under her chin, by her
ears, and along the base of her skull where it met her spine. Eliza’s face, her grey brain, balanced there for a moment in his hands.

  After which benediction, he sat down.

  The creak of the rush seat seemed to catch her attention, at last. She looked at him; her head slightly cocked, like a bird’s. It was a long look, and it was deeply estranged, both from him and from the world he was sitting in.

  Stewart sought and found the phrase ‘hysterical paralysis’. This is what happened to women in Edinburgh, he seemed to remember, from time to time.

  Then she put her head straight and snapped to.

  ‘Doctor Stewart,’ she said, ‘I felt the need of some arrowroot tea.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘Pancho obliged. You know I hate him running errands for his poor Mama, but there is no better boy.’

  ‘Mama,’ said Pancho.

  ‘Or I should say “young man”. Come here to me, my darling.’ And Pancho strode gallantly forward, and dropped on one knee. He looked at his mother as she looked at him. She put her hand on his shoulder and, when he felt her touch, he fell forward to lie in her lap.

  Her eyes then were an evening blue. They were the colour of the light, when it goes.

  ‘She has put me in charge of sleep,’ said Pancho. Stewart nodded. He had come to talk to the boy. Or he had come to sit by the courtyard fire, where they might happen upon the subject of his mother, who did not, after all, drink her arrowroot tea, but fussed serenely around López when he arrived and called a soldier in to sing.

  Then much bother about the piano, which must be unloaded at once and brought to her quarters. The evening made unbearable by music; a song called ‘Barbara Allen’; notes that coated a man, and fingered every crevice. When the silence was finally clean, Stewart walked out to spit and look at the stars, and talk to the heir apparent.

  The boy must be sixteen or so. His skin in the firelight was an uneven and glowing brown and he looked altogether romantic as he squatted there; though also a little glum, as he stared into the tangle of flame. He was thinking, no doubt, of The War.

  He had the clearest gaze. Stewart took comfort from his green eyes, which were a window of light in the middle of his face. He took comfort from the fact that, in this whole travelling circus, there was one freak who might be called ‘the beautiful boy’. The boy who simply looks. And he was not the only one who felt it. Belief in Pancho was a general pleasure. The men looked at his eyes as you might look at the sky, for the solace of colour, and they indulged the boy and his jewel-like stare.

  Behind him, his half-brother, the bastard son of Juana Pesoa, kept fierce guard, as always, in the shadows.

  They were talking man-to-man.

  ‘I am also in charge of the piano. I have my own brigade. We lift it in the evening, if it needs to be lifted. We keep the damp away. I have a man sleep under it, just in case. Not tonight though, as it is with my mother, indoors.’

  Stewart did not ask who might want to attack the piano, but still the boy said, ‘Just in case. And besides music is a noble business, is it not? This is what I tell the men, that music is just as mighty a business as killing is, and just as useful, in its way. I set them to care for “the beast”, as they call it. Or, “his Mama’s beast”, sometimes, if they want me to hit them.’

  And then, as though reciting and forgetting a list, he started again.

  ‘Night-time security. What she calls “Sleep”. I see to the bedding, personally. I make up the bed myself. It is a tender duty, you know.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  There was something the boy wanted to say.

  ‘But sometimes in the morning, Doctor, the bed is just as I left it, the sheets not even turned down. Other times it is so screwed and wrinkled I feel like scolding her. I say, ‘Mama, what is the point? When I have four men outside your door, keeping their eyes open so that you can shut yours. You should become our night watchman, you would walk in our dreams.’

  ‘She does not sleep,’ said Stewart, carefully.

  ‘She sleeps in the carriage for ten minutes at a time, I think. But at night she does not sleep.’

  ‘She looks quite well.’

  Pancho seemed to think about this for a while.

  ‘She always looks clean, that is the thing of it. Whether or not she has slept, or in what tent or room. She always looks clean.’

  ‘Perhaps it is because she is beautiful,’ said Stewart, and the boy looked relieved. It was indeed a burden he carried – the unmentionable beauty of his dear Mama.

  ‘Do you think so? It is hard for a son to tell. But yes I think she is beautiful, even though she is old, now. I think a boy might say that without compromise, about his mother.’

  Stewart stood up. He was hugely tired.

  ‘You must get her to take some air, when we move again,’ he said. ‘The coach is so enclosed.’ And the boy prodded the fire a little miserably, and agreed.

  It would all keep going, thought Stewart. After I am dead, and after López is dead. The son would keep going, while Woman – lovely Woman – kept turning the handle on the world’s dreadful machine.

  We really would be better off without them, he thought; as a breed. Apart from all the fuss. And it saddened him that a woman’s needs should be so monstrously met, if not by her lovers then by her sons. That Eve should kiss not just Adam but also Cain. That it all keeps trundling on. It leaves her, and then it comes back to her again.

  As he fell asleep, he heard her talking to the boy, through the wall.

  ‘Pancho,’ she said. ‘Where did we get this thing?’

  ‘I think we got it in the cathedral in Asunción.’

  ‘Well it is a very ugly thing.’

  And Stewart spent his dreams wondering what the thing might be.

  The next evening, Stewart sought out the boy again. He could not help it. He wanted to talk to the future. He wanted to see those eyes.

  ‘For all her nonsense, you know, mine is an important position. If we lose her we are absolutely lost.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stewart.

  Although it was the boy he believed in now, and not the mother. The boy’s mother was a whore. It was never a word that made sense to Stewart, but it made sense to him now. It was the prickle on his skin of hatred or disgust – the unbearable tenderness where his skin met the night sky. The sensation of falling. Stewart thought that he might fly apart with it. It was a rage and a yearning, and the only word he could put on it was ‘whore’. Everything was dirty and dark, now, and his waking dreams stank of Eliza, until he had to seek out her son and rest his eyes on him.

  Pancho, as though he sensed his need, tried to put the older man at ease – but of course it was hard for a boy who had been reared as he had been reared to find the right tone. He settled on a story.

  ‘I bet my boys they would not take the witch Cordal,’ he said. ‘It was in Humaitá, when she was still caged. Did you see her? If you threw her a bone she would twist it in front of her face like she had never seen a bone before, and my lads were all frightened – she would fling it back at them and they would scatter and shout – or she would gnaw at it, all leering, and once she put it into her private self, whatever you call it, her cunt, though not far. So I knew she was daring us, and I threw a belt buckle I had into the cage for the first man to take the witch Cordal.

  ‘You should have heard my father laugh. He said he would write it in his “Maxims” that a dare is a mirror, because once I said it, of course, I was obliged to enter the cage myself, and attempt the deed. But I did it. Just about – the place being so confined, and the witch, as you may imagine, none too pleased.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Stewart.

  ‘She bucked so much and spat. I swear it – I saw burn marks on the floor.’

  ‘Really?’ said Stewart, who was beginning to hear nothing now.

  ‘She hexed my father, once, you know, but it did not work.’

  Thompson’s horse died. Stewart sucked its hands
ome tendons. He chewed them for days at a time. And, once he had eaten the inside of them, he wore the horse’s shins pulled up his own legs, with the fetlocks stitched together, for leather socks or hairy boots.

  One day, he looked down from the mountains back to the gently folding Cordillera, and noticed that the girl was gone. She had been getting smaller and smaller. It had been hard, for a while, to realise the lack of her. Stewart looked around him, over and again, wondering what was missing – was it his knife? The three bullets he had found to load into his pistol, if the powder ever came his way? When he saw that it was the girl, Stewart’s mind went back along the trail looking, not for her, but for the man he had been when he had the girl by his side. Days back. Perhaps a week. When he found him – this past version of Doctor Stewart – he pulled him into himself for a fierce, short embrace.

  Yes, the man told him, she was gone. She had been slipping into the bushes more and more often. Her looseness was turning to cholera, even though the air was now so clear. Yes, even when the cholera was leaving them, it was taking her with it. And at night her body had leaked in his easy embrace. And, sometime that morning, she had fallen down and Stewart had not picked her up. And why should he pick her up? There was no time. The Brazilians were hours away. There was no turpentine, nor any emetic to treat her with, and what little he had was kept for the exclusive use of Señor López.

  At which, Stewart let his old self go again, and turned back to the black carriage that was creeping like a beetle up the flank of the hill.

  By the banks of the Aquidabánmi, the ox that pulled the piano cart died, as did many of the men. They were on the brink of the high meadow lands, where the forest began to thin, a place blessed by hummingbirds and friendly breezes, also circled by the Karakara vulture, who must have known something about the stream there, because three hours after drinking the water they were seized, both animal and human, by griping pains. They could barely pitch camp, and that night you could hear López raving in the darkness, though maybe it was some other man – a strong man – bellowing at death. But despite the roaring, death had taken, as they saw when the morning came, the weakest oxen, and many infants, and considerable numbers of women and men.