"The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Enright Anne)

A Melon

December 1854, Rio Parana

Today, I asked the name of the bird again, but Milton shrugged. The Alma Perdita I was told by Captain Thompson, one of the over-gallant English who has spent some time in the wilderness here or here about. Alma Perdita means a lost soul. There are sudden flurries in the branches, but when I look, nothing is there. In the forest, if you hear something, it is already gone. Still, we are followed everywhere by its liquid, ever-falling cry.

We are two days out of Buenos Aires, and no one knows how many days from Asuncion. Such a mongrel ship, half-gunboat, half-packet, and massive – the Tacuari, it tossed us on its shallow draught across the ocean from Bordeaux, and is now too deep to find the river channel. Milton stands in the bow as though it were a canoe. He slings his line into the water and draws it up again, turning now and then to whistle at the pilot. He knows the river, but who along these banks has ever seen a ship like ours? He must think he is guiding some kind of cathedral home.

Though, when I look into those mineral eyes, I do not know what these people might believe; whether they even have souls like ours – lost or otherwise. Everywhere, there is such growth. I think that if these people believe anything it would be that the Devil is a vegetable, and God a wonderful big tree.

The air is so thick and warm, I do not know if I am breathing or drowning. I lie and drink it in, in wonderful lassitude. The river is as broad as an open-ended lake. When we approach the bank, the trees crane towards us, madly still; all festooned and crawling: the immense, busy, shifting silence of the forest. I take in the smell of it and think I may well sprout, or rot: some plant will root in my brain. It will flower better than a hat.

My own smell too, has indelicately changed. It is light, and difficult to match; the smell of grass in the sun; of something green and growing, as my belly grows. And under my arms – because of the heat I think – a hint of mould.

My belly is huge. They have strung me up in the bow, like a giant tick. I am all caught up in the skeins of muslin they drape around me. The breeze is cooling when we move, which is not often. Milton stands on one foot, leaning on a pole, his free hand lifted to shield his eyes from the glare. He ignores me well. The light plays with his bones, eats at his silhouette, until he is just some narrow lines, loosely jointed and standing against a sea of glitter.

One of the sailors is like to go blind from the light. The water, so cheap and nothing up close, is, from afar, a tangle of brilliants. A dangerous cloth. I can see it, even with my eyes closed. Milton sits with the dazed sailor and tears some slits in the length of a broad reed, then he wraps the reed around the man's eyes and ties it at the back of his head. The sailor peers through the slits. He cannot speak with the pain. Something about it pleases me. His homely, lewd face, his waxed tail of hair, and this blindfold of green. It seems he has become something else; a thing of random parts. Human, animal, vegetable.

Milton smokes. And in the small rafts that float by they hand up chickens and take tobacco. They stay to smoke; all of them, drifting in the shade of the Tacuariand rolling the leaves palm to palm. The women hand their impromptu cigarros to the children's mouths, while the men stretch back, and leave them to it. All of them healthy and quiet, sometimes laughing in the shade.

This evening I have all the candles straightened in the candelabra. They have softened in the heat and bow slowly towards the floor, until the whole effect is of some kind of splayed flower. When they are lit, I try a little conversation. River manners; easy and unaffected. We sit as travellers anywhere – forgetful of our places in the world. Senor Lopez has cognac. Mr Whytehead, the Scottish engineer, has taken to yerba maté, a foul brew they suck out from a gourd here, but which he says is quite as good as tea. Doctor Stewart, my physician-accoucheur, goes native with some rough alcohol. And because Mr Whytehead, from some religious scruple, will not play cards, the maid Francine makes up the numbers for some harmless rummy. She takes her chance and downs some of my champagne, river-cooled – which is to say, warm.

I ask Senor Lopez about the natives, and what they believe. He says that he himself is a native, and, yes, it is true, he believes in nothing. At which, I feel obliged to laugh. He does not swallow his brandy tonight, but spits it into a bowl, which I have placed for him on a side table. For his teeth, he says. The small room is full of the fumes. 'Nothing?' I say. 'Not even love?' Gallantly, he takes my hand and kisses it. And suddenly Paris is a long, long way away.

Mr Whytehead tells a forest tale of a Frenchwoman who was miraculously found, after she and her companions got lost among the trees. A Mme Godin des Odonez, whose husband was engaged in a great measuring project somewhere to the north or the west of us. His wife set out to join him, along one of the tributaries of the mighty Amazon, in a company of eight, two of them also female. On the third day out, the natives deserted their canoe and left them to make their own way. They chanced upon another guide lying sick in a hovel on the bank, but he fell into the river and drowned while trying to retrieve a hat; after which the canoe quickly capsized, with the loss of all their provisions. Three of the men struck out for some place they thought to be nearby, and never returned. The rest: Mme Godin, her two brothers, and two female companions lashed together a raft, which broke up on the rocks and, when the tangled growth prevented them from walking along the bank, they struck off into the forest. Here they lost their way and became demented and one by one they died. Mme Godin, by some miracle waking out of a swoon, took the shoes off her dead brother's feet and stumbled on, she knew not where. Her clothes in tatters, her body half-naked and lacerated (at this he can not help but glance at me) by creepers and thorns, she chanced upon a river – perhaps the same river – and two Divinely Providential Indians, with a canoe.

The candles droop as he speaks and lean slowly sideways. The flames keep their easy, hopeful stance – and then, the crisis – I watch them shrink to a point and then recover to lick back up the tallow, now upside down. The engineer sucks the dregs of his maté and we listen to the night.

Of course, it all happened years ago – he gives the date, being by temperament exact. I say that it is hard to imagine these great trees having weeks and fortnights, as we do: all they know is another day, and another day, and another day after that. Indeed, he says. For eight of these primeval days and nights, she wandered alone in the howling wilderness; surviving on berries and bird's eggs; shouting and singing to keep the jaguar at bay. She went in a young woman and, when she came out again, her hair was turned quite, quite grey.

He pauses in some satisfaction, and surveys the room. I say that she probably ate the brother. She didn't just take his shoes; she took a bit of leg as well. She lopped off a nice big ham and slung it over her shoulder, to help her along the way. Senor Lopez gives a great shout of laughter, and hits the engineer between the shoulder blades, and we have another round of cards.

I like the way he glanced at me when he said the word 'naked'. He is full of slips and blunders. He leaks. He cannot help it. He seems such an unbending, abstemious little man, but I sense the longing in him to give in and live as other people might. The doctor too, rolls his watery eye, and heaves, and sighs. He is very big, when we are so confined in the cabin. Still, in the middle of so much awkwardness – his mouth; small and nice.

Francine says, apropos of nothing, that a mother has only to look into the eyes of her newborn to believe -believe what she could not say. Only that we are ancient, that we come of an ancient race. Senor Lopez looks down at the table and his eyes film over with tears. She lifts her face to the light and says that we spend our first weeks forgetting who we are, and then the rest of our lives trying to remember it again.

This is very pretty of her. Francine started this journey as a maid and will end it as a lady's companion. And so we go. 'And what would you know of newborn babies?' I say, with a sporting glance at the assembled men. At which, quite wisely, she declares rummy, and we continue with the game.

So, she has had a child. It is surprising what a journey will throw up. Poor Francine.

But now, in the river dark, my mind turns to the luckless Indian dying in his hovel – only to be plucked out by these travellers (these angels of death) with their exotic clothes. And so he does die, but marvellously, for a hat.

Of course the hat was important – a white man would die without one. A white man did die without one.

This morning I do not move, and the boat does not move. I wake to a clanging sound, then the abrupt hiss of coals hitting the river as they clear the boilers out. Pht. Phht. Pht. I lie in the oven of the stateroom all morning. Through the open door, I see Senor Lopez busy, frantic, intent. He does not notice me. He unrolls plans on the table and calls for his engineer, Mr Whytehead, so I must have the door closed and dress in the airless dark. Outside, the light hits like a brick. My dress instantly wilts. The starch gives way in the wet air and my skirts limp altogether along the floor. So I trail around the deck and look at no one, as no one looks at me; then I lie in my gauzy tent and swing.

At noon they raise sail to catch a whisper, and so we veer from one side of the vast river to the other, at which point, the whisper dies.

Everyone sits about. The English – all sorts of railway-men, fitters, miners – fill the boat with dull delirium. Their voices drift on the hot air, and then stop.

I ask Milton for the name of a tree on the bank -a handsome tree with red and peeling bark. He laughs and gleefully rubs his forearm, saying, I think, 'White Man's Skin/

In the afternoon, I have Francine put all my white veils away. They increase the power of the sun's light and the danger of sunburn and freckles. They are also, I think, very injurious to the eyes. Green is the only colour that should be worn as a summer veil.

Freckle wash – take one dram of muriatic acid, half a pint of rainwater, half a teaspoonful of spirits of lavender: mix, and apply it two or three times a day to the freckles with a camel's-hair pencil.

When Doctor Stewart joins us after dinner, I take him aside to ask for muriatic acid. He says that my complexion is probably subject to my condition, but that lemons may do just as well. He has little French and no Spanish, and so I am forced to speak English to him. Mr Whytehead has everything, of course, up to and including Swedish.

And so we assemble – my little band. It is too hot for cards. It seems that, apart from my freckles, there is nothing to talk about. I try Sebastopol. I recall Buenos Aires. I wonder at the possibility of a garden in Asuncion, and what might grow there. But Senor Lopez turns always to the state of the unmoving boat, her inner workings, her boilers, vertical or horizontal, her trunnions, whatever they may be. I have no words for these things, and leave it all to Mr Whytehead.

I long for my piano, but it is deep in the hold. Sometimes, lurching across the Atlantic, I would hear a tinny discord; a distant twang that felt like one of my own heartstrings snapping.

But we must have music, the boat is so still now, and the night gathers about us as though there might never be another day. I have the captain order in a musical seaman, in order to push back the darkness. The man holds his cap in his hands and gives a humble, swelling account of 'Barbara Allen'.

Ο mother, mother, make my bed To lay me down in sorrow. My Love has died for me to-day, I'll die for him to-morrow.

Senor Lopez trumps him with something astonishing in Spanish and Mr Whytehead, prevailed upon by myself, finally opens his mouth – out of which floats, to our amazement, an easy, soaring tenor. The room is all tenderness. He sings a carol, 'Quelle est cette odeur agréable, bergères, qui ravit tous nos sens? and all uninvited, pro patria, you might say, Francine supplies the descant.

After which, everything is easy. Senor Lopez wants Whytehead to bet with him on our arrival date in Asuncion, and he demurs. Everything he does makes us laugh, now. No one can pronounce his name, and this fusses him. Francine enquires, by way of general mirth, what his Christian name might be and, with some hesitation, he brings out the pearl, 'Keld'.

Doctor Stewart clears his throat – to smother a laugh, I think; but then he fills our little cabin with his sudden baritone. Tuneless enough – but large, quite large.

The night has gathered in again.

This afternoon, Francine said that her mother has a friend – whose generous attention she still enjoys, at the age, she must be, of almost forty-five. A pleasant enough man, Francine says. He makes a visit every afternoon at five-thirty by the clock. Her mother calls him always 'my dear friend' – the use of his Christian name being less than respectable, and his patronymic an intimate, formal pleasure that must be reserved only for his wife.

'But Senor Lopez is not married,' I say, quite pointedly, and Francine keeps her head down. Still, I find the conceit quite pretty. I tried it on Senor Lopez, this evening, I said,

'My dear friend.' And he said,

'Yes?'

What was that thing I wanted to say about butterflies? There was a group of them, anchored to the sand, their wings flicking this way and that in the heat and the breeze. One was the most astonishing blue. I have not seen such a blue since leaving Paris. And with it, as though in colloquy, fifty more of every variety. They all sat and stirred like ladies in a garden, their skirts parting to show underskirts of more beautiful hue, a flash of violet, a swish of peony edged with black. They spread them to sit, and played with their fans, and flicked open their parasols in the sun.

I asked Milton why they gathered together like that, on certain spots on the bank. He shrugged, and looked, I thought, quite comical. He said that they go where an animal has pissed, or a man has pissed. At least I think this is what he said. Then he rolled out his tongue, as though to lick.

And now I do not know what I wanted to say about butterflies. I have been laughing all day, but it makes me sad. I recall the salon of the Princess Mathilde, the richest room I was ever in. And yes, women like myself, newly arrived in town, all clustered and fluttering, when a rich man speaks. And when he leaves the room, a general business with fans, as we settle on his words and eat.

'At least they do not fight,' I say.

'Which?'

'The butterflies. At least they are beautiful, and they do not fight.'

'Enough piss, for everyone,' he says.

The silence, again, is deafening. The baby flutters inside me, and settles. Doctor Stewart's red hair is fading to sand in the sun. He has switched from cane alcohol to a more respectable rum.

Today, from the swamp, a new crawling thing. Senor Lopez leapt away from the mattress and swore. Vinchucas.Like cockroaches. Evil-smelling. I pull up my nightdress in fright and find more bites. Hundreds of bites. They like white meat, he says, and then he chews on me himself. Also my blood is richer now. Every crawling, flying thing can smell my belly from miles around. They fly in under my skirts and eat. Francine is set to get them out before I put my bloomers on, and gets comically, horribly, buried in the layers of cloth. My dear friend shouts as he watches, and slaps his leg. It is the thing that he enjoys most, in the day.

I have ordered Milton for my own use, to keep the mosquitoes from inside my shanty pavilion in the bow. Also jejenes, which are tiny, infernal things. Their bite does not last unless scratched, but is the most exquisite torture. for the first while. Milton 's legs are covered with faded welts, but I have never seen him scratch, except in an idle way. They don't seem to bother him. My very fingernails itch. I want to jump into the river until the water closes over my head. But there are things in the water too (not to mention the English animals on deck) that stop me, the flesh-eating pirhanafish, which makes for a great splashing and shouting when the sailors take to the river, and worse – the rana, with a barb, Senor Lopez tells me, so long, the wound astonishingly painful and slow to heal.

Still becalmed.

I get Milton to name the birds for me. He does it in his own language first, a guttural mess that makes me think of Gaelic, and then, after some thought, in Spanish. The Membei: a tiny blue-winged parrot. The Mainumby(in Spanish El Picaflor): a tiny whirring gem of a bird, with iridescent feathers. The Tuca: a strong, clever bird, the one I saw was carrying a huge banana, lengthways, in its beak. A handsome vulture, or perhaps a falcon, with no Spanish name at all, the Karakara. Why? It goes karakarakarakara and then rrrrrrrrrrrp!

We have assembled quite a list, when I spot two birds of my own, of a particular feather: Francine strolling on deck and chatting quite amiably to our own Mr Whytehead. Francine all in green like a little parakeet – the engineer in his frock coat and stovepipe hat; quite the magpie (or gull!).

My hands are swollen. I cannot wear a ring that Senor Lopez bought me in Madrid and all day I am itching with the thought that I have somehow let it slip overboard, or even that I threw it over the side. I almost remember doing it; the tiny splash. I send Francine to check my travelling jewellery case and it is there, safe, as I know it must be, but still I see it dropping through the water to the amazement of the fishes. I see it tilt and sink into the grey sludge of the river bottom. I think I may have done it in my sleep, that I may have wandered at night and, against my own knowing, lost the ring overboard.

This afternoon, I call Francine inside. I have her unpack all my trunks and take pen and paper. There is to be no more rummaging when we get to Asuncion. She must know which gloves-boots-parasol, and have them close to hand. I am worn out with describing and so have settled on a method, which is to give each toilette a title, such as:

The Diana: a hunting costume of ribbed velvet in two shades of copper, tablier of dull gold plush, kidskin gilet to match, bonnet of fancy straw with bunch of autumn leaves and berries, though I think all of it too heavy to wear here in this heat, and suspect I have brought all the wrong things. It is sometimes cool, though, in the morning, when there is a mist.

The Chère Amie: a visiting toilette, in lilac baregewith three deep flounces bordered with quilled ribbon in blue, gloves of grey with the same ribbon at the wrist, elastic-sided grey satin boots: society may be limited, but Senor Lopez has two sisters and a mother living, to whom, at least, respects must be paid. He says they look like him. I cannot imagine it.

The Impératrice: a ballgown in the style of Eugénie, underskirt of rose-coloured satin, looped overskirt in chameleon silk, being raspberry shot with blue. Gloves, boots, sortie de bal, in blue, though I think perhaps white would do. This to be worn with opals, for lesser occasions, or my sapphires, if Senor Lopez allows. He threatened to throw them in the sea and replace them with diamonds, which he can come by more cheaply over here, though looking at the forest, I can not imagine diamonds in there nor gold – only mushrooms.

While I am at tea, Senor Lopez comes in and throws things around the little cabin. He is followed about by his valet de chambre who flaps his hands and then starts to cry. The man actually cries. A thin little fellow with too much oil in his hair, he leaves the cabin and goes to the rail and almost howls. I think the oil attracts the insects, and suggest to Francine she tell him so. She looks at me, quite boldly, as if to say 'Me, talk to a valet?'

But something must be done. Senor Lopez is blithered by waistcoats. He goes out in the morning pleased with his reflection, then thinks the men laugh at him and shrugs the damn things off, to wit: a rust-coloured silk jacquard complete with fob and chain, tangled under some maritime divot or pivot or dah-dee-doo. Then he is angry all over again because of course he is very proud of this rust-coloured silk jacquard and it is spoiled, now, so I have Francine rescue it, and smooth it out myself, I say that there is no point in being rich if you do not know what money is. Which makes him laugh. He says that if you know what money is, then you are not rich.

But it is not so simple, and to make it simple I take the sticky valet aside myself and tell him he is to lay out only caramel and blue and leave the flattery to me. Also wash his hair in vinegar. He quivers a little, as we talk.

It occurs to me that Francine would like to be a wife. I have been puzzling over her since we left France. Sometimes, during the carnage of the Atlantic, she could not cross the cabin to tend to me, except by crawling on the floor and hanging on to the fixed legs of the table and then the bed. I looked at her and wondered what on earth she was doing here. What she might seek across the ocean. What she had left behind.

Perhaps she has dreams. Yes, Francine, I have decided, has soul. Of course she is also fond of me, as I am terribly fond of her. And besides, she knows all about me and so I must be kind. The girl learned her tricks at her mother's knee; she kept secrets and carried billets-doux from the age of five: you would think she had fallen off the stage of the Bouffes, if it were not for her face, which is very simple and staid and enjoys an air of genteel sorrow.

So, behind her she has left a baby, alive or dead. And ahead of her she sees… a husband – a proper one. Such respectability.

She was sent to me by Dolores the Spanish girl, who found her too pretty, but said she was clean and clever and at home in the world. I decided to call her Francine, for my French adventures. Perhaps I should call her something else now; Speranza or Mercedes.

I have her sit by me. I tell her these are the things she must know to be a wife, as taught to me by Miss Miller, the English teacher at Mme Hubert's school for young girls in Bordeaux; culled from her little book, which she inscribed, as I see on the fly: Tor Eliza – who would do well in the world.' (The pages are rotting a little, in the heat.)

She must not! Look steadily at any one, especially if they are a gentleman; not turn her head from side to side during a more general conversation; nor shift in her chair, nor hold on to any part of herself while conversing, such as an ear or an elbow; nor place her hand on any part of the person she is talking to, such as their collar or one of their buttons; she is not to cross her legs, nor extend her feet to view her slippers; nor admire herself with complacency in a glass; nor adjust, in any way, her jewels, hair, handkerchief; she must throw her shawl with graceful negligence upon a table and not fret about a hat which she has just left off amp;c. amp;c. Neither is she to laugh immoderately or play continually with her fan.

And the reverse, I tell her, if she would be a whore. But the reverse again, which is to say the same, if she would be a grande horizontale. We do some preliminary work with a fan, with much hilarity.

I close the book.

The same Miss Miller who, as I left that wretched school, said, 'You will end up with a disease,' and slammed the door. Goodbye, Miss Miller.

Francine says that Mr Whytehead is the son of a ship's chandler, which is to say he is the son of no one at all. And besides, his father is dead. Which fact seems to us to be quite hilarious. I tell her that I do not know what openings there would be in Asuncion, but she may do as well to stick by me.

The boat moved. All day it moved! The trees have given way, on our left, to an endless swamp of green and grey. And the thump and slap of the great paddles is thin and distant in its echoless wastes.

Tonight we keep no company. My dear friend tells me ghost stories, where all the ghosts are animals. A thing called the ow-owthat looks like a sheep and hunts in a pack. Ow! Ow!' he says. A water serpent with the head of a dog – also lascivious – and he yelps and pants like a pup.

Francine has painted my bites with camomile, so I flake and itch. It is very close and still. The boat is full of shiftings, small noises, groans. And in my belly, the child does not so much kick as knock. Does not so much knock as scrabble.

Still, if we attempt, say, three ensembles a day, it will pass the time nicely to Paraguay.

In a sort of revenge for the jacquard waistcoat, Senor Lopez complains of my tight lacing and Francine is set to cutting side vents in my corsets. She threads the new eyelets with pink and blue ribbon, to please me. But they are ruined. I should not have to dress. I should be confined, and I would stay so, but that Doctor Stewart orders me out, to perspire.

He has not examined me yet. Not once. He is supposed to kneel at my feet and put his hand up my skirts and do things. But he has not. Every time I look at him I think of it, and he thinks of it, and sometimes, in expiation, he says,

'Still kicking?'

'Yes, Doctor.'

'Very good.'

My dear friend is impatient. He gargles brandy and spits over the side. They are all impatient, and give me a wide berth. I am unlucky and I am slow. I remind them of too much – of women. Of the act that made me swell. I remind them of hopes that do not come to fruit and lowered voices and things that go wrong in the middle of the night.

When I was sixteen, I think I was beautiful. But that was three years ago. Something has happened to my face now. I cannot say exactly what – but colours that should flatter do not flatter, and everything I do to it is wrong. I am waiting for my hair to fall out, but I cannot remember if this happens before or after the baby is born.

Senor Lopez says I must turn into a slack old Dona in black, with a mouth like a chicken's arsehole. I must go bald except for my upper lip, and order people, especially important people, around. And he must grow cheerful, I say, and round, with a baby pulling at his nose and another wetting his knee. But he is already thinking of something else, and leaves the room.

I will have a parrot in Asuncion, like the one the Clarke sisters had in Mallow. A green one that said Erin Abu! Erin Abu!

But this afternoon: a peculiar advance. Milton motions to me as I lie in my hamaca. He is hunched over a bowl of porridge, and he takes a lump of it and smears it on his britches. I have no idea why he should want me to witness this, but it is certainly done for me. He applies it carefully to the bottom of his drawers; then he approaches, lifts the muslin and tries to assault my person, or, in hindsight, my petticoats, his hands still covered in slop. Senor Lopez comes running at my cry and there is such a ruckus, I am afraid I may lose my new friend to the river. He gabbles ferociously and whines, and suddenly Senor Lopez starts to laugh. He laughs until he has to sit down, which he does, with a thump on the deck, and then he drums his heels on the floor. (I, meanwhile, rearranging my dignity, as best I can.)

Half an hour later, the porridge is dry and his britches stiff as a board. The women of the region use it for starch, and it works wonderfully well. Francine has an order from the cook and by evening my skirts again are five feet wide.

We sit and play cards – for no money still, which is not what I call cards at all. The lugubrious Doctor Stewart and the religious Mr Whytehead, who leans now over the shoulder of the simple maid Francine to point at a three of spades. Senor spits brandy. I sweep and whisper and duck and swish about in my marron moiré and make them all sweat beneath their collars, and I do not care. I commission Mr Whytehead (who learns his languages from a book) to settle my Spanish into verbs and participles, and I flirt terribly, and,

'Are you jealous, my Love?' I say, when they are all gone. Ί think you are jealous of me, and where I look.'

'Am I?' He seems quite surprised. The idea of betrayal is strange to him. It is not what a woman is for. (Or perhaps he will have me simply shot!) He approves the Spanish lessons with Whytehead, and so I take courage and tell him of my secret plan – which is nothing less than a match between the engineer and Francine.

'The maid?' he says.

'When we get to Paraguay,' I say. 'She can be whatever she likes.'

But I have miscalculated. There is something uncomfortable between us. He has gone outside to smoke, though I have no objection, I tell him, to his cigar.

Dresses for tomorrow:

The Bluebottle: a pelisse in that colour called fly's wing, a grey so dark it is black. Tablier of dull peacock sheen. To be matched with my black lace parasol and, I think, green gloves.

The Medea: dinner toilette of blood-red velvet, underskirt pink moiré antique. To be worn with diamonds, when I get them.

The Housey Housey: at-home toilette, in otter-coloured taffeta trimmed with black silk moss, with chemisette of organdie in dusty pink. All very dull.

Doctor Stewart, drunk, tells me that he is an orphan. Double consumption. It happened when he was six. He says he remembers nothing of his mother, not even the smell of her skirts as he knelt to say his prayers.

It seems a peculiar way not to remember your mother. I say nothing, except, 'You must check on the baby, Doctor Stewart. When you have time.'

I will write English, but I will not speak it any more. If I speak in their own language they will see fit to despise me. Not the doctor or the railwaymen, who know how the world goes, but the men. There are fourteen of them, most out of London – one out of Galway, and he is the worst – all the scrapings of some wharfside inn the captain knows.

The captain allows them rum, and tonight they are dancing. Like wild men. The ship shudders to their thumping feet, things fall into the water, and the words of their songs are unspeakable. I know they are singing about me. I would have my dear friend flog all of them – or at least one of them – in the morning. I would have him sail this ship, magically, alone. And marry me! Marry me, my love. I must say it once. I must say it when no one can hear.

But we took an early stroll in the dawn chill; the mist so thick and white, a solid wall that gave way before us. We might have been alone, on the boat, on the round earth. Sometimes, when we are moving, he leans out beyond the questing prow of the boat, as though to say, 'Tomorrow, Asuncion.' And I think that he alone, he alone, could take this ghost ship and fly it home.

Our Spanish lessons commence and Francine is very apt. She sits to one side and sews as Mr Whytehead strolls about the room and occasionally bends to write at my little desk. He will not sit down. I do not think he stands to show his figure. He is neat but he is not vain. He is also quite stern, which looks silly. Truth be told, the lesson isn't much use to her, conducted as it is through English, though we occasionally jump about in French, it being closer as languages go. But she sits and looks pretty enough, and lifts her head from time to time, as though to behold him. It is a very sweet, religious look and I am quite proud of her, in a way.

This afternoon there was an incident: Milton held the swinging hamacawhile Francine ladled me in to it, and he went to take his place at the bow. Then a sailor (Goggins, I think) came up behind him and kicked the back of his knees, very neatly, so that they gave from under him. He kicked him again on the floor, while Milton curled up and made a soughing sound, which now I find odd, the silence of it – and all this in front of my very eyes. I shout for help. Whytehead comes running and then stands, inept. Finally, my dear friend, who pulls the men apart and fulminates. He turns to me where I lie, struggling out of my hamaca, like an insect flipped over that cannot right herself again. I am obliged to translate – it is all sullen mutterings, something to do with a native woman the sailor wanted for his own use, until Milton interfered. I do not know how. He is such a slight boy, I guess he cannot be beyond fourteen. But interfere he did, and the woman, who came to look for tobacco, slipped back safe overboard.

After this translation is done, they turn away, as though ashamed. All of them ashamed; because every man on the boat is by now gathered in the bow. The child overwhelms me. It twists with such violence I must lie back down. My friend shouts for the doctor and for Francine, and the sailors disperse while I work my fan of stiffened lace, now turning to cloth again in the sun. Whytehead turns to bow, and thinks better of it, as I lift and let fall a swathe of muslin, and look him in the eye.

Senor Lopez says he is a man of vision and tenacity. And so I must smile.

Tonight we keep our own company. I have Milton sleep in front of our door. The captain – because they need it, he says – has trebled the sailors' allowance of rum, and they dance off the native woman, and all women, and throw their flagons overboard.

Francine strains the river water through two thicknesses of clean linen, before I will let it touch my skin, and in the middle of the night I have a dreadful urge to drink it from the ewer, there is something necessary about the smell. Also the smell of Macassar. The only wine I can stomach is champagne, and this only because it tastes of biscuits. They haul it up on ropes from the river, so it is fleetingly cool. By the end of the bottle it is hot, practically. Hot biscuity champagne. It tastes wonderful. It tastes like Hell itself.

I do not know if it is the world, or me. I do not know if it is the wilderness or the boat or the baby that keeps me so far from myself. I drink hot champagne and eat with ferocity the dull porridge of the place. I know it is dull, but it is hugely interesting to me. And in the middle of the night I am crazed with hunger. Bewildered by it. I look at Francisco's leg as it dangles out of his hamaca(he has abandoned the infested bed) and I think that what I need is meat. Perhaps even this meat, the meat of his thigh. I have a desire to bite into him, as you might into a melon.

And then, perhaps it is melon I need. I think about melon, am smitten by melon. I bite into the golden flesh, and feel the seeds slither in their luscious frill. Is there anywhere in this godforsaken place where a melon might be bought or got? Is there a garden somewhere, at the back of a shack, where a little old man has tied plants on to canes and watered them and shielded them from the sun? And what if he will not give it to me? What if the old man (I can see him in the darkness in front of me shaking his head) says that this particular melon is not ripe, or it is reserved for someone else. This melon is for his daughter, or his sick grandchild, or that this melon is grown in the soil where his wife lies, and that on no account can it be eaten, because the flesh of it is the same as the flesh of his wife. I tell him that I have no problem eating his dead wife. I swing a stone that is suddenly in my hand and hit his round, stupid skull, which splits with a melon-like sound. At first wooden, then thick and wet.

After which hallucination, I groan again with nameless hunger and start to pace the room. I put on a wrap and slip out through the door and into the air, as if there might be something, somewhere, that will assuage me, a piece of rope to suck, skin of tar to pick, frozen in the bottom of a pail. As if there might be a melon, indeed, magically lying there. The moon has risen. The deck is humpy with the bodies of drunken, sleeping sailors seeking refuge from the heat. The scene is catastrophic and still. There is nothing to eat. I lean back against the door, put my hands flat on the wood, and breathe.

The sailors have covered themselves with cloth against the mosquitoes. They look like furniture in a house that has been shut up. Or dead men, pinned by cobwebs to the floor. One of them starts to mutter, I think in his sleep, but when I listen to the words I hear the Lord's Prayer. I can not tell which sailor this is. He says the lines in a gulping whisper. 'And deliver us from evil.' He is near the end of it when I spot him, stretched out on the deck. He arches his back into the night, as though presenting his stomach to the moon.

This morning, I tell my dear friend that I am turning cannibal. He looks at me in a considered way, and then decides to laugh. For the rest of the day, he taunts me with food. He talks of meals remembered in Buenos Aires, in London; meals we ate together in Rome. Valera is sent down to the hold and he returns with a menu from that place in Rome.

And freely, within earshot of sailors, engineers and natives, the whole busy ignorance of the boat, Francisco reads it out to me. Hors d'oeuvres: delicious prawns, strongly spiced. A Rhine carp à la Chambord. Quails stuffed thick with truffles on buttered toast flavoured with basil. Asparagus with sauce hollandaise.A pheasant with Russian salad. Pontet-Canet with the first course. Chilled champagne from the second course to the coffee. So cool!

To shame him, I tell him it is the baby who is hungry, not me. He moves to the rail and looks over the side. Then he strides off to talk about boilers.

All afternoon I lie in a torpor. More swamp. In the distance clumps of pampas grass and farther still low, black trees. The channel is ever more difficult to find. The paddles slap the water and the sails snap, and the child moves under my hand. I feel a shoulder surface, or a tiny elbow. My little eel. My only thing.

On our right, forest gives way to savannah and back again. There are hills, far away, green and homely, but with no homes on them. I see cattle, but even they are scrawny and wild and strange. Then a landing stage, where the campesinosstand amazed. The reek of hundreds of hides drifts towards us, stretched out on racks and drying in the sun. Tonight, we will have fresh meat.

Doctor Stewart grows eloquent. He says that any country is beautiful when reflected through 'the lovely prism of my laughing Irish eyes'. (God help me.)

Dresses for today:

The Much ach o\ a riding habit of serge in bergandine red.

The Irish: that green dress, with the puffings of tulle. To be worn with a shawl.

I have not the wit for more. I lie here and think that I am the boat. I am the boat and I am the sky and the baby sails inside me, safe. Despite which romantic notion, I am sad.

They must hear me at night. I am disturbed in my sleep by such dreams that I wake and must have him. Like food. Now. It is my condition. What if I were an innocent? What if I were a girl just married, waking in the night in the aftershadows of such dreams, with half the world waiting their turn, husbands, friends, a stranger with eyes like the lumbering animal I saw on the bank, capybara, a man whose face I cannot see, and Misha who is always there, standing by the bed, whether in delectation or grief he will not say. I wake and know that he is dead. And careless, all aflame, I rouse my dear friend, to straddle him unsuccessfully in his hamaca, to end by rearranging ourselves on the floor, as he props himself up on his arms to keep back from my belly, and we make a noise that all the ship must hear.

The child, says my dear friend, is low (he has no shame), the child is filling me up down there. It is a boy! he says. It is a boy. I am glad. I pity poor womankind. I had not thought to pity them, but I do now. I think about my mother – all guts and softness, made stupid by something. Perhaps by this. Perhaps she was made stupid by this.

I am woken this morning by the worst noise I have ever heard. It is the sound of the world ending, the sound of all animals eating all men. I rise in terror and run, and wrench open the door to a wall of white. I cannot tell if the attack comes from the bowels of the boat or the water or the forest – the noise is all around. The air itself is roaring. My only thought is to hide the baby from the danger, which means hiding my own body too. Francisco catches me at the rail, and turns me around in the mist. Monkeys, he says. It is only monkeys.

Mr Whytehead calls them Howlers. They roll their voices around in a special reverberating gourd in their chests, he says, also, perhaps, the mist amplifies the noise as clouds do thunder. He appears out of the mist, to say all this. He is standing at the rail beside us all of a sudden, talking about thoracic cavities, with me still frantic in my night attire. I don't think the stupid man ever sleeps.

But I think they are an omen, whatever about their cavities. I find myself in tears, and cry all morning. My dear friend is bored with me, lump that I am. I cry so much I am thirsty. Even this liquid I must conserve, in the heat. At eleven o'clock, Francine glues me together for our Spanish lesson, with rice powder and eau de lavande, but when Mr Whytehead comes into the room my dear friend says that his time is better spent this morning on matters of state. And so he bows and retreats, and I want to cry some more, even though I do not like the man much. And because I cannot abide the cabin longer, I take a turn on deck.

But they were an omen. I was right – and it is no use keeping an omen to yourself. Because at noon, after a hard morning pushing towards home, one of the boilers bursts, though not badly. There was an unimportant sound, as though of two pieces of wood clacking together. It seemed to come from the shore. Then, after a brief silence, the frightful screams of one of the sailors; scalded in the blast of water and steam. He clambered up to the deck and rolled out of the hatch, tearing at his clothes, which were stuck to his body and burning him still. An attempt to free him of them proved ill-advised (Doctor Stewart came late), and now he lies, half-flayed and moaning, while the ship and all on it are horribly becalmed. I have made a visit. He lies shivering in his cot, loosely bandaged in fat, his lips sweet with morphia. He calls me 'Dora, my Dora' and says yes, he is quite comfortable, thank you. But still the moans seep out of him, until every man on the boat mutters a guilty prayer that he may die between this breath and the next. But the next breath comes, laden with pain.

And so I sit. I wear a dress of extreme simplicity in shades of pink and cream and favour his good side, praying a little that he will not turn to look at me out of his other, boiled eye. I am his Dora still, and hold his hand. I wait for secrets, but there are none. The dying have very little to say, I fear, as we lean over to gather their last whispers in our ear.

He pulls me to him and starts a paternoster for me to finish, and with the sound of the first line, I know who it is – it is the sailor who was praying the night they all got drunk. The sailor who lay pinned to the deck, as though pressed there by the beauty and the weight of the sky. Is it possible that he knew that this journey would be his last? How can we know? But he did know. I am sure, he did.

Now, as the evening wears on, I look for my death. I hunt it out. I prise open the blank future and try to smell it – When and How. When and How. If I were to die by water, surely I would know it, or by fire. If I were to be murdered then I would be afraid of people's hands. But I am not afraid of anything, I think, or was not, until now. Now, I am afraid for the child, the inscrutable span and course of his life, all shut out from me. All the years I face for him; the not-knowing and ever-watching, the fact that there is a part of me now that can be truly hurt, after I had left hurt behind.

The last time I said the Lord's Prayer was on my marriage day. I do not want to sleep. It is a good day, a long one, a clear one. The child is easy, and my mind runs free.

Or perhaps it is the orange blossom that makes me think of weddings; it grows wild on the bank and the scent drifts towards us, across the water. I was married in a dress of ordinary blue, with a posy of violets in my hands – no orange blossom there, though M. Raspail did send a butter-coloured straw bonnet trimmed with some cheap-looking berries. It arrived in our room in Dover and Quatrefages laughed quite unkindly when I tried it on. So I took it off and hit him with it. Despite which it was, you know, quite a tender moment, and makes me think now that we could have been friends.

I think it is liquorice that I crave. I will have a little black child.

I remember playing the piano in Mallow. I must have been very young, the keys looked so huge and Papa stacked books on the seat to help me reach. There was a crowd of people in the room and I wore a sprigged muslin dress. They all clapped and kissed me, and my father was most pleased. Some kind gentleman gave me a bag of liquorice, after. I wonder which gentleman it was.

The sailor talks about pies. It makes me hungry. I should leave him – it is not good for my belly to be where dead things are. The words dribble from his blasted mouth, and now and then, clarity. His shirt is left out in the rain. Dora (myself) did not believe him when he said… what? This is important; he really must say this. But the pie is distracting. He sinks back into the pie. I don't know what kind of pie it is, but it is very good. Mmm mnn, he says, like a child. Mmm mmm mnn.

And so he dies. It is four a.m., the hour when the world turns over. It occurs to me that I do not know his name. I place his crocked hands upon his chest – so still – and take my leave of him. Outside, the sailors, when I pass, take off their caps. Who cares whose wife I am, now?

This morning they set to repairing the boiler, with a little furnace set up on deck for the soldering pans. We sit on the water, and burn.

I settle myself into my toilette and I want to cry again, not because my face is so lumpy but because of the cheap cake of rouge I am using – a little tin box, with a picture of the tower at Glendalough on the lid. It belonged to my sister once, but did not suit her. I think it is the only thing I have about me from Ireland. There is also a little brush and some mascharafrom Algeria. My bag of paints is a sad museum. The right lip colour, the absolute shade of blush, these are the only things that persist in my life. I think that some potion here will follow me to the grave. And then I think that this is literally true – some stuff here will be applied to my dead face. So I leave the brush down and stare, while Francine bustles behind me. All flesh and blood.

I am the daughter of a doctor. My mother came from a naval family, and her brother fought with Nelson's fleet. There are certificates for all this, and letters, in three or four different countries. I was married in Kent at the age of fifteen to a man called M. Quatrefages who served with the French forces in Algeria. This marriage was illegal under French law, because of my tender age, but legal in England.

I am the daughter of a doctor who specialised in rheumatic disorders at the spa town of Mallow in the Co. Cork. My mother suffered herself from bad health, and took the waters there, and we lived nearby for some years. My sister, Corinne, caught the fancy of that famous Italian musician Tamburini, and lives with him, is married to him now in Paris. Where I joined her, after leaving a cruel husband, a certain M. Quatrefages, who took advantage of my tender years to spirit me away to Kent and marry me there. This marriage is still valid in England, much to my consternation. I have met in my time the musician Berlioz, who much admired my playing, also the Princesse Mathilde, who received me kindly, also several members of the Russian nobility, from whom I became estranged on the occasion of the Eastern War.

I was born in Ireland and lived there, near the spa town of Mallow, until the age of ten, when the hunger then raging in the countryside obliged us to leave from the harbour at Queenstown. My father is a doctor and my mother is a Schnock (one of the naval Schnocks). After a brief spell in England, I was educated in Bordeaux at Mme Hubert's school for young girls. I was married in Kent, at a very young age, to the chief veterinarian surgeon of the French forces in Algiers. While there I was much patronised by the Chief of the French Commissariat, M. Raspail, also the Fez of Tunis, who both much admired my playing. My marriage was illegal under the Napoleonic Code, and when this became clear to me I left the deserts of Africa for Paris, where I studied at the conservatoire, and applied for my decree nisi, which was delayed by the complications of English law. When we get to Paraguay I will have Senor Lopez draft a new law. Because I am carrying, or so he tells me, the future of Paraguay.

The baby kicks like a boy. It kicks like it cannot wait to get out of me. Francine cools my temples with eau de lavande. She whispers, 'Not long. Not long now.' But I do not know how long it will be. I do not know if we will make it to Asuncion. I do not know if it will ever be born, or if I will stay here for ever – for ever on this river, with this water flowing by.