"The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Enright Anne)AsparagusDoctor Stewart liked Asuncion. It was the kind of town where a man could go to pieces in his own good time. He woke up to it slow. It was some months before he wrote to his aunt to describe this sleepy town of adobe and wood, of red-tiled roofs and secret courtyards. But he could not get it straight in his head. Outside his window, a group of urchins was burying an infant child up to the neck. They were smoking cigars – all of them, including the infant, though his was, of course, handed to his mouth by a factotum. None of them was older than five. They seemed entirely happy. On the rough desk in front of Stewart was a sheet of paper, stained already with his sweat. It would be handed by a wind-whipped postman into his aunt's Edinburgh fastness, a sort of distant cry. So he filled it full of flowers for her, the smoky blue jacaranda and the bridal orange blossom that would make her mouth purse, as though she were tasting the fruit. What else? In the distance, the cries of salesmen and the complaints of cattle – she had enough of those at home. He might say that the women sometimes wore just the skirts of their dresses, and let the empty bodies flop out behind. Or that they liked to dance with bottles balanced on their heads. Or perhaps not. 'It is all very foreign,' he wrote, then stopped and tried again to think of the distinctive thing to say. Outside, the urchins sat and watched the infant as the infant watched them, looking from one face to another with an expression that Stewart could not decipher. Perhaps it was quite comfortable, wrapped up like that in the earth. 'The men', he wrote, 'are in the habit of wearing hat brims, without the benefit of a hat, and so our local Indian fellow is jauntily crowned with a halo made of felt.' She would find this image a little Catholic, but it was better than telling her you could tell a prostitute by the gold comb in her hair. Respectable women wore tortoiseshell or wood. A new arrival might get confused (he did not write). 'There is such a lack of iron in the town' (commerce, good), 'that people leave nails to their children and, in their wills, specify how many each should get.' Outside, the chief urchin, in his hat brim and little else, sauntered up to the buried infant and pulled it clear. The child came up like a carrot and, as the red soil fell away, Stewart saw that it was a girl. 'But let us not belittle Asuncion,' he concluded, for his aunt was a clever woman, and he liked her. 'It is made, as every other town is made, of casual encounters and minor conspiracies; of friendliness to strangers and small, ancient irritations between friends. It is a frontier place, the gentlemen a little too rough and the ladies a little too "nice". But it is made, as every other town is made, out of talk.' The little girl had recovered her personal cigar and now squatted with the others, chewing the stub. Her position afforded Stewart a view of her genitals, flatly presented between her sweet little legs and feet. And indeed she was all sweet, from her toes to the same cigar's dangerously glowing tip. Stewart folded the letter and ran his hand heavily along the crease. He had not mentioned that the talk was of one thing only, and that one thing was his former patient, Eliza Lynch. Stewart listened to it all. He cultivated the trick of disappearing into the company, so as not to inhibit conversation about events he had personally witnessed (though only after a fashion). He wished, sometimes, that he could remember the way it really was, but mostly he gave in to the stories as they became skewed over the months and years into something high and fantastical, and ever more true. Mme Cochelet, the French envoy's wife, said that the grand entrance of the The boat glides up alongside the dock. The crowds that have been running along the bank fill the square. The gangplank is let down. Silence. A cart pulls into the Plaza de Palma with twenty bandsmen hanging off the sides, waving their instruments in the air. They jump off the cart and run to the quay and fall in. More silence. Picture it. The dirt. The sloping, cockeyed customhouse, the smell of the river and, in front of them all, a boat the size of a dream. Finally, the cavalry; all snorting and stamping. Three old barouches trundle to a halt – and there they all are. Carriage number one: fat old Lopez with his outrageous epaulettes, his sword across his lap. Carriage number two: fat old Dona Juana Lopez all swaddled up in black, with her ghastly daughters, Rafaela and Innocencia, equally fat, equally swaddled; their moustachios bristling, their bosoms heaving, and their armpits stained with sweat. Carriage number three: the younger sons, Benigno or, as we call him, Maligno, and with him the ridiculous Admiral (of what fleet, pray tell?) Venancio, tight and buttoned as the upholstery they sit upon, the springs of the carriage singing and sagging as they shift about. So, the people cheering now in the heat – thousands of them – the band striking up, there is a movement, a glimpse, a flutter of tulle; and there, at the top of the gangway, is a vision. A Juno. A woman of proportions, in a pale lilac gown and matching bonnet, with a stole of lace to hide -Mme Cochelet would bet good money on it – her shame. She would like to say that the bonnet was Up to this moment, Mme Cochelet had hoped against hope that – his satyriasis not withstanding – the young Lopez had somehow married, but it was not to be. When ' La Lincha' was presented to Dona Juana, the old woman (who treated the entire country like it was her own back kitchen) shrieked and struck her breast and ordered her carriage away. This shot off with such force that the now-dusty vision was spattered with excrement. At which, Maligno smiled his little smile, and followed his mother at a gentle trot, before more harm could be done. Mme Cochelet was fond of this story, which had grown so much in the telling that none of it (save, of course, the lilac dress) was in any way true. She told it for years, sometimes twice in the same week, but she only told it to those she could trust. Mme Cochelet was, after all, married to the French envoy and had to be careful what she said. She started telling it in 1856 after Eliza had a Every day, Eliza sallied forth in a carriage so beautifully sprung you could ride it across country without spilling a cup of tea. Every day, Stewart saw them spit as it passed: the old Spanish aristocrats, with more surnames trotting after them than they had horses; they crossed themselves and covered their daughters' virgin eyes. But why should the woman not take the air? Why should she not sometimes walk down the street, with her parasol gently twirling, to dare the men to bid her good day – to dare the men The mother, old Dona Juana, spent the day fingering her rosary beads and screeching, 'I will There was nothing like a good root around the Lopez ladies to remind Stewart of Eliza Lynch, who had a different order of flesh from the rest of us, who had the kind of flesh that might redeem a man. William Stewart was the only person in Asuncion who was banned from visiting La Lincha – for most people it was the other way around – and it was a sort of private joke with him. Still, he sometimes thought of her with regret. He would never get to palpate, nor suture, nor ease. He would never cool those limbs in the flush of influenza, nor brush from them the bloom of measles. Above all, he would never see them asplay in the blood and terror of childbirth – a scene that he had, in fact, missed, after coming thousands of miles to see it. This might seem a little remiss of him, but Stewart was absent for complicated reasons, in which drink played only a minor role. Quite simply, he could not get off that boat, with its horrors, quick enough. He walked off the gangplank and through the crowd and disappeared into a week he could not himself remember. William Stewart missed Eliza's lying-in because she made him shudder. That was all. He took whatever remnant of him was still decent, and walked it off the He could hardly recall what scruple it was he felt then. He did not name it, because it was impossible to name. Nor did he encourage it – he pickled it. He preserved it in alcohol, like some misshapen curiosity with the label gone. If he held it up to the light now, he would not be able to tell you what it was, or what class of creature it had once been. As for that other remnant of her river band – when he met Keld Whytehead, they did not speak of it; as if they had both been marked by something, about which there was nothing to say. And what of Eliza? Alone! said the gallant Captain Thompson. Completely alone. She poured coffee on the balcony, and talked of home. When the day was hot, or the political climate warm, she touched her hand to her breast and said, ' Paris, ah Paris!' in just that tone. Picking out a little melody on the fabulously real piano, taking up a book and putting it down again. There were things in her head, you could see that. Once he had explored one of these volumes and found it contained, not In which case, no one succeeded better than Francisco Solano Lopez. The city was a building site – he had an army of haggard, small boys pushing blocks of stone from the Arsenal to the Post Office; taking the roof off the Library and dumping it on the Shipyard steps. Lopez coming in after a hard day of pointing and striding, the little son crying Papa! Papa! to be nipped on his rosy cheek by his father's dirt-stained, ink-stained, ringer and thumb. There was, as yet, just one child. Mme Cochelet said that Eliza had ridden like the furies to purge herself of the second, but Thompson said she had laid the stillborn thing out in a white robe, with little gauze wings on the back, like an angel doll. Thompson had seen it himself, at the most tasteful wake possible, and you could not doubt the mother's grief. Now, there was an ornate little grave inside the gate of the cemetery at La Recoleta that said: Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade Death came with friendly care The lovely bird to Heaven conveyed And made it beossom there. And so we are finally humiliated, thought Stewart – by spelling. This is what it meant to be far from home. And he would sigh as he passed the bollixed stone on his way back to his house, where he would sit and get his boots pulled off and think about his own, terrible life. He wondered, from time to time, about the whereabouts of the maid, Francine – no one seemed to mention her, though they talked of everything else. Dona Cordai and her obscurely ruined daughter Carmencita said that Eliza kept her courtyard full of birds: parakeets, hummingbirds, macaws from Brazil and, tethered to a stick in the corner, a big, fat, Karakara vulture. Mme Cochelet said that Eliza kept a troop of raw Indians dressed to the nines and trained to pour wine like French footmen. She said that, apparently, the food out in La Recoleta was a miracle. Benigno Lopez mentioned over a bruised billiard table that Eliza Lynch did things in bed that a man could scarcely believe – he had it from his own brother – and he clicked the blue towards the centre pocket, and missed. Captain Thompson said, quite gallantly, that she had a pure soul. But they were all agreed that she was sleeping with someone behind Lopez's back – an Englishman, or that Indian, or a dog. No one said that she was sleeping with the maid, however, which was, in its own way, strange. Keld Whytehead did not listen to gossip: he built Lopez an arsenal and then he built Lopez some guns. He sent his money home. He went out to La Recoleta as necessary, and sometimes, he said, the beauty of it all made a man's eyes sting. At Christmas he sang carols (perhaps that French carol he sang on the On the other side of town, Lopez's abandoned mistress, Juana Pesoa, sifted the truth from the chaff. She said Eliza slept with Lopez and with no one but Lopez, because once a woman surrendered to Lopez there was nowhere else to go. Juana Pesoa had a son by Lopez – his first – and the boy now lived with Eliza. When he came to visit, he brought his mother stories from La Recoleta, as you might bring a caged animal meat. Stewart sat with her and ate. Eliza wants to christen her son in the cathedral – she wants to make him the prince, the heir, the most important son. But the boy is a bastard, and will always be a bastard, and the bishop forbids her the use, not just of the cathedral, but of any holy ground. Eliza screams. She raves. She gives Lopez no rest. She calls in a crooked priest who takes one look at the boy – two years old by now, with his mother's blazing green eyes – and declares that he cannot send this small soul to Limbo. If the churches are barred to them, then he will baptise the child there in the Juana Pesoa was a handsome, pinched woman. She had an illness which Stewart called 'knowing your place'. She did not rage against Eliza, who was rearing her son with every advantage, nor did she pine for Lopez, who still parked his carriage outside her door from time to time. She went very still and worked on a stomach cancer. Something she could call her own. Stewart left in a sorrowful frame of mind. He wouldn't mind a go at Juana Pesoa himself, just to cheer her up, just to knock against something that bitter. But as he made his way down the street he found himself wondering, not about the emotional little rictus that was Juana Pesoa's sexual part, but about Eliza Lynch. Were her eyes blue or were they green? he wondered. What was the exact colour of La Lincha's eyes? The colour of absinthe? Or the colour of curaçao? No matter. They were the colour of whatever was at the bottom of his glass, and he was going to look at them, right now. Mme Cochelet said that Eliza might invite anyone she liked to her unholy christening – no one would go. Old Lopez had put his foot down. And her voice rose with satisfied indignation as Stewart, working blind under her petticoats, tightened the patent truss (after five children, Mme Cochelet suffered from a painful separation of the pubic bone). 'Good’ said Stewart. Ever since Eliza's invitations went out, he had spent his time waving smelling salts under the noses of the Lopez ladies; going from one to the other, from hysteric to phlegmatic, and each of them had a separate and very He did so on his own. The town was so silent and shuttered that Stewart felt like a ghost, roaming the streets. Everyone stayed indoors: the women sewing perhaps, the men mending their boots or reading the broadsheets, the children all subdued. And all of them thinking about the deserted rooms of La Recoleta, the impossible food spoiling on the plates, the splendid wines all untouched; a few household Indians, perhaps, gathered around the specially wrought silver font, while thousands of cut flowers wilted in the heat. They were thinking about Eliza in a dress unthinkably fine, a quiver in her cheek, a tic in her lovely whore's eye, as she looked around the empty rooms and faced, and knew, and ate, and got rightly sodomised by, her shame. And Stewart hated the lot of them – so smug and delicious with revenge that when the guns opened fire they ran into the streets crying that the demon mistress of Francisco Lopez was coming to kill them all. Of course it was just a gun salute. It was just a reminder that old Lopez may have the country, but young Lopez had the army (as well as something else, a lover sent from Hell and a voice that came from the sky, like Tupa, the thunder god of the Guarani, rolling out over the town. Boom. Boom. Boom). A boy pulled Stewart, by now half-cut, through the thunder to fetch up at the house of Dona Cordai. The matron opened the door herself and pushed him upstairs, where her incarcerated daughter, the madwoman Carmencita Cordai, was shouting at her dead lover. Carmencita Cordai told her dead lover that the boy who was christened that day was called Juan Francisco, as their son would have been called, if they'd had a son: that his mother called him Pancho, as she would have called her own, sweet boy. She told him that she had seen the child in the street stumbling after a hoop, and that he was very beautiful. Stewart patted his pockets for laudanum. The guns stopped. In the shebeen where he found himself, late that night, Milton (or some Indian) said nothing. They never do. Even so, Stewart's hangover was pounded not only by the memory of the guns, but by some knowledge that he had now, but could not remember: Milton talking about a land without evil. Stewart agreeing with this place, this idea, quite loudly. They are wonderfully chiming. Milton says that Lopez is not his father's son. Undoubtedly, says Stewart, he is more European than his father, fresher, with more High up in the Cordillera, the scrubby hills to the east and north of Asuncion, there is a town called Piano. It was named for the fact that Eliza was obliged to abandon her piano there, a hundred miles from nowhere, and another hundred miles from anywhere at all. For all we know, the piano still survives. Perhaps a wooden panel shores up a chicken coop, or the wires are tangled into a fence and sing a little, when the wind is high. The hammers and their moss of green felt must be long decayed, but perhaps a few keys remain scattered in a broken smile, to choke the cattle or confuse the plough. Better still, the piano might grace a parlour, or what passes for a parlour in the Cordillera, with a paper taped to the front, Έ1 piano del Piano'. Perhaps it still holds the memory of the last fingers to touch it, the doctor's tender hands picking out ' La Palomita', as it stood bravely upright, surrounded by grass and by dead men, a long way from home. But all this is unseeably distant, as Stewart stumbles around in a haze of scrofulisms and alcohol. He imagines Eliza sitting out in La Recoleta doing bad needlepoint, with the back all knots and the front full of holes. She rearranges the story of her life, 'My mother Adelaide Schnock came from a family that included forty-two magistrates and a captain of the fleet.' She orders patterns from Paris. She keeps house magnificently, and it is said that the servants love her. Servants and men – any number of them – that is all she has. You could say she has everything, except the satisfaction of having it. Also, perhaps, that she cannot relax, because she is not real. It must be hard, to be just a story the matrons of Asuncion told each other between the hours of three and four. Everything Eliza does to silence them just makes them talk the more. No, the only way she can become real is by getting married, and she cannot get married until old Lopez dies. But nothing she did could kill him: no amount of soirées or Italian poets or diamonds or new colours for a shawl. Nothing, that is, until the theatre. That was the trigger, thought Stewart; though the bullet was slow. He dreamed of the actor Bermejo, with a revolver. Bang! The gun springs a flag from out of its long muzzle. The old Dictator laughs. He clutches his chest. He falls endlessly towards the floor. And where does the actor come from? The actor slithers, wet and fragrant, out from under the skirts of Eliza Lynch. A whore needs a theatre and Eliza was a very great whore, so the building was a miniature version of Teatro alia Scala in Milan (no less), though it lacked a roof – also an orchestra, scenery, gas lamps, and women of dubious reputation in very good clothes. Eliza talked to the architect over little glasses of The news that a real actor was making his way across the Atlantic flung the virgins and matrons into reverie. When he finally arrived, a little redhead with a pretty wife, the blankness of their afternoons was subtly different from the usual blankness of their afternoons. The evenings he spent with Eliza, of course, but during the day they could stroll past the veranda of the Frenchman's hotel where he sat drinking coffee, ignoring them all, and suddenly writing. The excitement of it! He wrote as though pricked all over, as though attacked by bees. Sometimes, he waved his arms to clear the buzz of thought from about his head. He feigned, he ducked, he went very still: then mysteriously the swarm would settle, and he covered page after fluid page, sheathed in a drowsy, dangerous calm. It was there on the page. It was growing. It was the first ever Paraguayan play. Dangerous indeed. When a closed carriage stopped beside the veranda one afternoon Bermejo had instinct enough to run out and kiss the hand that appeared on the sill; also the small female fingers that fluttered out of one window or another, obliging him to run around the carriage, and back again. After which kissing, there was a more official In the theatre, vast and roofless, dried leaves stirred and eddied as Bermejo 's ghosts took to the stage. And as they thickened and moved, old Lopez began to fail. The maiden woke, and his pain turned into a lump: she started to speak, and the lump became a boil. By Act Three the boil had blossomed into an ulcer, livid from ankle to calf and quite likeable in its way. At least, that is what Stewart thought as he dressed it and wrapped it, and bled the old man a little because he asked to be bled. The Dictator made an unexpectedly sweet invalid. He propped his leg up on a chair, and had the shutters closed and let the nonsense that was the theatre, with its actors ordered in from Madrid and its dresses ordered in from Paris, wash turbulently by. And it was because of the theatre that no one noticed how he failed to appear in the streets any more, or how his personal butcher had stopped bringing shoulders of meat to the back door. 'Chops!' he said. 'It's all chops and broth.' And so the realisation spread. The women, rifling through the bales of georgette and On the opening night, there is still no roof. The Guarani stand on the floor of the theatre, ghostlike in their white smocks while around them the walls rise sheer to the stars; a giant dovecote, each nook rustling with velvet and plush. Old Lopez stiffly enters his box and the audience sighs to its feet. He sits. He does not turn or speak. Beside him, the stolidly staring face of his wife and his overexcited daughters in their crinolines; all bands and zigzags, fat and festive as Bavarian eggs. The box where they sit is strangely off-centre. The middle box – the biggest one – is empty. It is like a tic in the corner of your eye, but no matter. The play begins. At first, Stewart cannot tell what the audience makes of it, or even if they know what they are watching. The moments trundle by – a maiden lost in the forest. A tender scene with the injured lion (Bermejo, with a tail), a gallant scene with her rescuing Guarani Prince (the Englishman Captain Thompson, very white). The Indians are enormously silent. Do they like it? Perhaps they have no opinion, as such, or as yet. Perhaps the play is simply as interesting to them as a new kind of animal, one with three legs, or five. But, no – there is a murmuring in the stalls. The Spanish maiden confronts her Conquistador father. He is too cruel, she says, and someone shouts. A boot, an actual and expensive boot, is thrown on stage. Then a general shushing, then more shouting, women's voices too. The maiden weeps for the plight of the Indian and her father spurns her – the stalls hiss. She defies him – they cheer and hulloo. He strides off to battle – the crowd roars their contempt. They like it. After which, the interval. No one in the stalls knows what this is, quite. They look a little foolish while, in the boxes, the better class of people pass their maté and preen. Then a shiver gathers in the crowd. At one distinct moment, everyone turns to the central box, as the most remarkable thing they have ever seen walks in and smiles. Oh. In the long silence, M. Cochelet, the French envoy, stands to his feet, and bows. It is not a question of diplomacy, but of the soul. All the foreigners rise, one by one. If Eliza were a horse they would be tempted to salute an animal so fine. But she is not a horse – she has made herself, and it is to the woman who created this, as well as to the woman who Her dress, it seems, is spun gold. Her underskirts are lapis lazuli, the colour of the night sky when it glows. Five diamond clusters knuckle around her throat, and a deep sapphire pendant hangs over her bodice, so low that, when she sits, it nestles in her lap. So much money. Stewart finds himself on his feet with the rest, leaning forward to catch her eye. A woman whose hand he has kissed. She belongs to them all. So tender she is, to the poor, the crippled, the ailing, you might think her touch enough to make them whole. But no, that is why the smile is sad, her eyes so wise. Others must suffer, while she can only bless, and offer her beauty for their consolation. Stewart feels all this as a thrill in his blood, and he knows that he is a fool. But he is not the only one. The crowd watches, rapt, as she picks up the sapphire and opens it. What can be inside? It is the very nexus, as though the entire theatre had been pulled into the world, like the finest shawl, through its pure blue doors. She glances inside – a figuring look. It is a watch, impossibly small. What use is the hour to anyone here, or the minute? Eliza leaves it carelessly open, hinged like an oyster on the blue-gold bed of her skirts, and Time spreads through the theatre, expensive and minutely ticking. Time for the interval to end. Time for the play to recommence. Time for the battle scene. Ά riot,' they said afterwards. Ά complete riot.' In the stalls the white-clad Indians press forward and lift their faces to the stage, all at the same terrible angle, while men hack at each other with wooden swords and 'Gadzooks!' 'Have at thee!' they cry. At first, it comes from nowhere, a low groan, the rough keening of someone trapped by the action on stage (where they are losing – the Indians of 1750) and then it is all around, it is everywhere – the crowd is growling. Few people here have seen the sea, the great mournful mass of it, so who could describe the waves of sound that helplessly break against the proscenium's retaining wall? Some of the rich have travelled but as they watch the stage they feel the rough utterance enter through their boots, to lodge in the base of their own throats. As for the foreign diplomats, the engineers and railwaymen, they do not even hear it – transfixed as they are by the thought that the people on stage manifestly cannot act, and so must be killing each other for real. And when the stage is filled with bodies and pig's blood, the tide ebbs. Thank God for plot, thinks Stewart, as the maiden walks out into that open, astonishing space to unmask her (very white) lover for the Guarani Prince he is. And so, the play proceeds, in all its lovely irrelevance. The prison scene, the duet through the bars, the firing squad, the huge roar of the rescuing lion, the cameo appearance of the King of Spain (old Lopez in his box deader than ever), forgiveness, penitence, tears and… Actually, no applause. Silence. Why do they not clap? The truth is that most of them do not know that they should and the rest check with old Lopez. But old Lopez sits unmoving while, in her central box, the heavenly Eliza Lynch looks merely smug, as though she had created this too. The Dictator rises to leave. Perhaps he knows that the play has killed him. Or perhaps not – at the time it is neither rebuff nor disdain; it is simply a man turning, painfully, to go. It takes a foreigner, the young poet Hector Varela, who has come all the way from Buenos Aires for this night, to start a snide and rebellious act of applause that crackles briefly through the crowd and then stops. Just before dawn, the crisis came. It hit him in the chest. And with it, he told Stewart (who was still in his evening clothes), a preternatural flush of horror. When Stewart looked at the paper that Milton (or was it another Indian?) handed him the next day, his first thought was that Eliza wanted to know when the old man would die. Tlease come.' He read the note and stalled. He took a glass of Madeira. Then he shouted for his horse and fumbled his foot into the spinning stirrup (he was a fool, she was dying!). He tried to pace the ride to La Recoleta but it was the only straight road in the country, after all, and the horse galloped the length of it to haul him up, sweating, at her door. He was shown up to the drawing room – which was, indeed, a glorious sight: it was some moments before his eyes got used to it, and yet another before he saw that Eliza was already there, sumptuously seated among her things. At first he mistook her for another The doctor thought with a shock that she was lost, or drowning, that perhaps she would sink under the weight of it all. He stepped forward. She offered her hand, as though it were yesterday. 'Whatever I can do,' he said, and kissed it. 'Can you keep a secret?' she said. And then she smiled. It all happened, he thought later, so quickly. As though they had both foreseen it, this room, his lurch forward, her hand under his lips. There was an understanding, but he could not tell what it was. And so he followed her down the corridor to a distant door with no sense of what might be behind it, except that it would be everything, and his head was almost spinning as they stood outside. She turned to him with a grave look. And then she opened it. Stewart had no idea when she left. There was a shudder of grey beside him and, when he looked, she was gone. In front of him, sitting on a chair, was a woman in a good dress. Perhaps it was one of Eliza's. A silk dress, in pink, with the skirts arranged somehow to resemble a rose. The pink, he thought, was wrong. It brought out the redness in the woman's face, which was to say the redness of the flesh where her mouth should have been. Also where her nose should have been, but was not. He thought he knew the eyes. Of course, they were the eyes of every woman who sees death come in the door. Or perhaps it is life they see. The desperate eyes of the dying, that long for something – and it might be you, Doctor Stewart. 'Francine,' he said. The woman's tears were a torment to the open meat of her face and he told her to stop crying, please, if she could. He tilted her by the chin towards the light and got her to open the remains of her mouth so he could assess the state of her throat. It was a classic presentation, with ulcerations of the nasal and buccal cavity, disfiguration of the vocal chords. He put his fingers to his lips, in case she should try to speak. 'You had a lesion on your skin, some years ago,' he said, and she nodded. And so he proceeded to tell her what she already knew. Eliza was not outside when he left the room. There was an Indian in the corridor – almost definitely Milton -who took his script and, rather brazenly, read it aloud. To counter which unlikely erudition, Stewart said, 'Lutzomyia, you know,' and Milton said, 'Sandfly. They like white meat.' Stewart wished he would stop being a vulgar, clever man, and start being an Indian again, and this irritation kept him busy all the way back to the bottle of raw cane alcohol at home. He had Scotch, but this was not a Scotch occasion. Scotch would make him weep. And the next day, from Eliza, a gift – a basket of cherries, red as an old wound, their delicate stalks and their thick, dark skins no more miraculous than the ice in which they came. When Stewart next called to La Recoleta, he found Eliza playing diabolo in the courtyard with the only son of Juana Pesoa, the abandoned mistress of Francisco Lopez. The doctor looked at the dazed, ardent eyes of the boy (who was far too old for such games), and faltered. 'Go on, now. Run along!' said Eliza, and the young man, in a clumsy imitation of childhood, dashed into the house. 'Poor child,' she said, when he was gone. 'His mother is dying, you know.' She said it so perfectly – perhaps she meant well. And to fill the doctor's silence she took his arm and said, 'You know, Doctor Stewart, I am the most fortunate woman in Paraguay. So it is a sort of motto with me – one must always Stewart looked at her birds. There was, indeed, a vulture, chained to a stake in the corner, and it was very beautiful. He did not want to touch the woman at his side. He did not want her hand on his arm. She enquired after his lodgings – did he have a garden? And his aunt, was she well? When all this failed she signed to a servant, 'You must meet Pancho,' she said. Her son. Whose heart he had heard fluttering through this woman's thick skin. He must be four or five by now. The stories told of a little animal, who bit his nurse and would not learn to read, but when Stewart saw him appear in the doorway he thought him pure beyond the normal purity of children, he thought him pure like a flame. And so his mother played out her scene. She ran forward and embraced him; her lovely knee bent, her lovely silk in the dust. The child fought to be clear, and started to talk, and the angle their faces held was so perfect, the distance between them so radiant and careful, that Stewart forgave her – of what crime he did not yet know. This was the antidote. This was what he wanted. This. He wanted to possess, not the body of a woman, but the still air between her downturned face and the upturned face of her child. Air that is shaped by cheek and eyelash, by smiling lips and hopeful, reassuring eyes. He did not want to have a woman – not even this woman, Eliza Lynch – what he wanted was to give some woman, or to take from some woman, his son. After which sentimental ambush, Francine seemed to him to be treated well enough; to be properly fed and tended in a room that was small but clean – to be a normally melancholic set of problems, symptoms, assuagements; a tropical illness; a usual, hopeless attempt at dying. On the other side of town, old Lopez was taking his time. Never a thin man, now he was fat-seeming in peculiar places. The lids of his eyes grew tight and heavy, the lobes of his ears plumped up. Stewart does him with diuretics, with dandelion powder and digitalis, and his piss filled buckets. He swelled, pissed himself smaller, swelled again, and Stewart, no stranger to liquid pleasures and liquid pain, found himself going through a dry time. He was seen, when drunk, to slop his In fact, rumours of his sobriety had been mistimed. He stopped drinking during the first illness; the ulcer that made the Dictator's flesh become, as it were, runny. He stopped once, and then he stopped again. He stopped six or seven times in all. But he did not actually stop (for the last time, for the first actual time) until that night at the theatre when, turning to go, he brushed against the virgin, Venancia Báez. Or perhaps this was just the story he told himself at the time – that the two reasons he became sober were the two brown eyes of Venancia Báez, brown as oblivion, brown as black is brown (or brown, as he said after they were married, as a monkey's; playful and wise). Because the story changed when they were in the middle of the war and the lovely Venancia became querulous and small, because the war did not suit her, and she saw no reason why it should. The war made her hoard things and grow fat, and she could not make love when the war was on, she could not be pleasant, even to her own children. When this happened, Stewart decided it was the Dictator's illness that made him give up drink after all, because this carnage, the waste of it, the pile of limbs he harvested from wounded men growing beside him on the floor, all this made him feel alive and undiluted. The early days of war made him so simple he thought he had found his true self; that all wrong turnings and seemingly blind alleys of his life had led him here, and so they must have been the right turnings after all. Another story might simply be that Stewart was more sick of drinking than he was sick of himself – always a delicate equation. One night he woke up to his dead mother's touch and found it was a dog licking at the vomit in his hair – and what lingered, what won out you might say, was his mother and not the dog. This was a story for his old age when his mother – so long forgotten – was back with him again, all the time. But no matter how he told it or lied about it as the years went by, the fact was that Stewart took to English tea and constant attendance on the bloated form of old Lopez. And when he was not by the bedside he was under the window of Venancia Báez, in the Latin style, courting her father like a woman – getting his love letters written by one of the elderly spinster Cordais, who poured all her dreams into them, and knew the form. It was two years from that first sighting in the theatre before he would see the naked breast of Venancia Báez again, two years before he laid eyes upon her bare throat or the skin of her lovely arms. Every Sunday, he looked at her on the way to Mass, hidden under a mantilla of black lace, with her heavy velvet dress creeping over her like moss, and sometimes he wondered if, under it, her body had not changed. He gave her diseases in his head; a goitre pushing at the pearls she wore that night, a spreading psoriasis, a phthisical rattle souring her sweet and easy lungs. Besides, he had fallen in love with a child and she was turning into a woman. There was nothing he could do to hold or stop it – he was caught between his desire for what he had lost already and his desire for what he might gain, and this maddened him, as though he was in love with the future and in love with the past, and his days moved with vegetable slowness, while somewhere inside her deep, cool house, Venancia Báez bloomed. Meanwhile the theatre was shut. The place was a brothel, after all, and who could think of such pleasures while they waited for the death of old Lopez? He must be dying – the doctor was sober, he grew more sober from day to day, and everywhere there was a frenzy of calm. Outside his shuttered window the country seemed to stall, but surged ahead at the same time. Railway lines snaked out into the countryside, the rails slapped down one after the other; gathering speed, like a woman who knits faster to finish before she runs out of wool. The orders issued one after the other – or were they imagined? – from the dark room where old Lopez lay dropsical. It was as though his weakness made him omnipotent. His wife Dona Paula took her true place as Cerberus at his iron-studded door, and sometimes forbade admission to her own sons, who sloped about like whipped pups and cut each other in the street. Everywhere in Asuncion, people rode this current wave, not realising that the whole vast tide was about to turn. They said the next president would be a Cordai, they said that Francisco was finished, and they gloated over the humiliation of Eliza Lynch. It was coming any day now. It was here. She was seen leaving at night with a wooden crate full of gold. She was seen with the marks of a beating. She was seen diseased. When Stewart went out to La Recoleta these days, he found Eliza frozen with panic. Francisco sat in the upstairs drawing room with a distant look, as though listening to his father's breath labouring on the other side of town. One afternoon, she did not serve him herself, but sent their son across the room with the delicate burden of a glass of brandy for his father's teeth. Eliza pushed him in the small of his back, as though sending a toy boat on to the water, and the luminous child wavered and set out on the long journey to his father's chair. He stood in front of the old bull and the brandy flared in the light, and his father looked at him, and the child returned the look with a serious, sweet smile. For a moment, thought the doctor, it all hung in the balance, whether Lopez would take the offered glass, or strike it from the boy's hand. He shifted massively and pushed against the arm of the chair, as though bracing himself to stand. And then he subsided. 'On the table,' he said, meaning the small console at his side. The child set the glass carefully down and Lopez booted him back to his Mama, with a languid kick to the backside. 'Time we cut your hair,' he said. 'Eh, Pancho?' He showed Stewart a piece of paper – the first ever railway ticket for the first railway in the Southern Americas. He was so proud of it, he did not want to let it out of his hands. He fingered it and flattened it out on the round of his thigh; until he was surprised to see that he had rolled it altogether into a tight little cigarro, which he popped, as the doctor took his leave, into Eliza's And: He loves her, thought Stewart. He loves her after all. Because there – beyond the conspiracy of their drawing room and the conspiracy of their bed – was a look passed between them that might well be called 'love', being gentle and fierce and completely empty. Stewart thought of the stories that were current now – that Eliza procured the daughters of distant landowners for him; that she checked with their own fathers whether they were virgins, like buying heifers – and they did not give him the usual satisfaction. In fact they made him sad. Her 'dear friend' loved her. What else was there to say? The maid, Francine, died gurgling. The cancer that belonged to Francisco's former mistress, Juana Pesoa, broke through the wall of her belly, and she died terribly. And old Lopez revived, to die some more. His daughters cleaned the body of the Dictator down to the waist, his wife tended below. The cloths they used were buried in an unmarked spot, and the priests fought at his door. Then – it might have been the incessant irritation of the cathedral bells, it might have been the first railway train that ran so enthusiastically past the end of the first railway track – but somewhere along the way the people got tired of the Dictator's dying, and with their boredom came hatred and a need to be released from his terrible grasp. It was time to separate the quick from the dead. It was time to sing again, and dance with a bottle balanced on your head. It was time for Eliza's picnic. She held it onboard the When Stewart made his afternoon visit to his (now, finally, fiancée) Venancia Báez, he was surprised to see the card that she held out, trembling, for his approval. It was a thick board, gilt-edged, such as Stewart had seen many times – though not, he realised with a pang, since he arrived in Asuncion. 'And what is it to do with me?' he said, annoyed by his nostalgia for the life he had left behind – one in which there were many such wonderful, ordinary objects. Venancia's aunt, napping in the corner of the room, opened one cold eye. 'You must go if you like,' he said, and knew, even as he spoke, that liking had nothing to do with it. Venancia pushed the card against her chest and gave him a brown look. The invitation had been issued in the name of Eliza Lynch. Fifty Basque peasants had lately arrived in Asuncion and they sat at the docks, waiting to be shipped upriver to a clearing in the forest. The clearing would be christened Nueva Bordeaux. There would be a fiesta. The men would travel overland, while the ladies made their way to the new town by river, and on the river there would be held a grand picnic. By now, the laboured breath of old Lopez had turned to a milky pink foam. At the docks, the Basques swiped at the air in front of their faces, their eyes hard with disbelief, as the virgins and matrons picked their way through to the newly arrived bales of cloth. Another dress. Another shroud to be stitched for the corpse of their virtue. A strange, elegiac act of choosing between Stewart told Venancia to wear blue. He told her to smile. He said that they must think of the future now, they must take their chance. His ambition surprised him. Of course, he was doing it for her – the lovely Venancia who must be fed and housed and dressed in the finest – and so he blamed her too; because the price of Venancia, the price of his future, was to show himself in such a way in front of the clever eyes of Eliza Lynch. 'But it is I who will be shamed,' said Venancia. In which case, Stewart told her, she would not be alone. Venancia cheered up a little. It was true: every woman she knew would be on that boat. They would talk about it for months. But, in the event, no one talked of Eliza's picnic on the river, once it was done. In 'Nueva Bordeaux' the men speechified and drank and did something Basque with a live duck while they waited for the ladies to arrive. But the ladies did not arrive and, some time before dark, the men left the new colonists in their clearing with a heap of provisions (a few precious iron spades, sacks of seed corn that would turn to mould, sacks of manioc that they would plant at the wrong time), and they rode home. There was talk of a collision on the river, of shifting sandbars, but around a curve of the bank, they spotted the The men waited on their womenfolk at the dock. They watched them disembark, in single file. They handed the ladies into carriages, or sat them on their horses, or if the horses were worn-out, they took the bridle in one hand and their wife's hand in the other. And if their wife was exhausted they held her about the waist, and in this wanton way the streets filled with couples and their trailing animals and trailing servants; the men silent, the women stumbling and quietly weeping – or laughing, some of them – until the sad bacchanal was fully dispersed and the doors of their houses shut, one by one. And no one spoke about it, at all. Of course, the women still gossiped after the picnic, the men still murmured and spat, but a silence crept into the cracks between their words, until the words themselves became inconsequential. Everything sounded like a joke, now, spoken to an empty room. Stewart, making his move, requested and was granted a meeting with the coming Dictator Francisco Solano Lopez. On the appointed day he was shown into a large whitewashed room that contained nothing but a large table. On the table, draped to the floor, was a thick cloth woven with a twining abundance of dull gold. He faced Lopez over this expanse and the same weary joke was in the look they gave each other. 'Who would have thought?' When Lopez spoke, these days, things happened; when he moved, the world drew out of his way. There was no distance now between seeing, knowing, doing. Francisco Solano Lopez had become simple and Stewart found that he was talking to an animal of sorts, as dangerous and easy. He regretted the two fools of the When Venancia asked him how the meeting had gone, he said that he had secured, as he had wished to do, the post of Surgeon General of the army. He had discussed the export of some yerba maté and had received a licence at exceptionally fine rates. He said that their future was secure. He did not say she had ruined his life. But he knew that, once the thought had entered his head, it would wriggle its own way out, in time. He asked instead for the true story of Eliza's picnic -this would be the extent of his cruelty to her, for now. They were walking in the walled orange grove behind her house, between trees heady with blossom. Her aunt sat a distance apart and Stewart thought it might be possible to kiss her now, quickly in the dappled shade. It might even be expected, and looking at her lips so intently distracted him from the words that came from between them, for the first while. Venancia looked at the ground. When she spoke it was in an indifferent, lilting way, and she did not meet his eye. It was Mme Cochelet who rallied the ladies, she said, frozen as they were in the face of the humiliation that waited for them on board the And so on the appointed day, at an early hour, with their gilt-edged cards in their beaded reticules, they walked up the gangway to the They filed past, she said, and kept their nerve: blank girls and nervously grinning women; the spinster Cordai with the sudden, hooting giggle, and lesser fools who ducked, or bolted over to the other rail. La Lincha turned to follow each profile as it walked by, now a high Cordai nose, now a pair of bulbous, white-trimmed eyes that announced a daughter of Mme Cochelet. Even her own 'sisters-in-law' Rafaela and Innocencia (well, you could not call them 'sisters-in-sin') she stared at brazenly, as they looked quickly past her to admire, in loud voices, the bunting strung from the masts. She stood her ground, you had to give her that, and, all the time, her face twitched with pride, as if to say It was horrible, said Venancia, and difficult. It was the most difficult thing she had ever done. Some of the girls had to use smelling salts just to get to the top of the gangplank. But they all did it and, their hearts beating, their eyes glittering, they sat and chitchatted in quite the normal way; enjoying the water and the feel of the breeze as the boat pulled away from the quay. There was no person on the deck so unwatched as Eliza. Fifty pairs of eyes refused to see her. Fifty smooth brows regarded the place where she stood as containing only air. And so they travelled, admiring the two great paddle wheels, the stateroom with its bolted, slightly mouldy, furniture – that was yet so delicate you might think the boat would bring you all the way to Paris, or discover Paris around the next bend. They sat on the sunny side because La Lincha took the shade, and they waited for the picnic. Venancia paused to swallow. And as she began to describe the dishes that were set in front of them, Stewart remembered another girl on the 'Truffled turkey,' said Venancia. 'Eggs Mme Lynch made an attempt to get through, but her adversaries shifted quite easily to prevent her. So she stood and watched their backs as the women, flushed with excitement, faced their next big challenge – how would they get the dishes served? Mme Cochelet decided for all of them. She picked up a plate in her own hands and gestured to the 'major-domo' who held a trembling spoon. 'Thank you,' she said. The asparagus was about to touch her plate, the hollandaise, indeed, was dripping on to the cool Sèvres glaze, when Mme Lynch spoke. She did not raise her voice, but her tone was so clean and clear that everyone heard. ' Milton,' she said (meaning the man with the spoon), 'throw it overboard.' Quick as a flash, the wild little Indian flipped the implement over his shoulder; the asparagus flew in a wide arc through the air, separating into six slowly turning (or so it seemed) succulent spears, which disappeared one by one over the side. A second later, they heard the splish-splish-splash. The Indian cocked his head in a way that was almost amused and looked to La Lincha, who returned his look with perfect understanding and said, 'All of it.' And he clapped his hands. Slap-slap. 'All right you sons of bitches,' he said (in Guarani, of course – which no lady ever affected to understand), 'let's get this stuff into the river.' They elbowed their way through the circle of gasping women, one serving man to each dish – they bore the plates high over the guests' heads, then swung them low as they ran, quite eagerly, to the side. Some threw the porcelain in for good measure and brushed their hands as though after a job well done. And then, to a man, they tumbled down a hatch. It was all gone, even the tablecloth. There was a slight scum on the river, of hollandaise sauce and It was funny, said Venancia, but on the plates the food looked so delicious – sinking through the water, it looked just like vomit. Not of course that she had run to the rail, to chase after it like a fool – though that was where Mme Cochelet found herself; shouting after a stupid vegetable, bawling at it, in full view. No, Venancia had stayed silent, and simply turned away. And that, she said, was the true story of the picnic. If he must be told. Stewart knew it was anything but – the week after the women came home was one of the busiest he had known. He badgered her with tales of sunstroke, fits, the two miscarriages he had personally attended, and finally she admitted that the rest of the day had been… difficult. After her grand gesture, Eliza had retired to the shady side of the boat. She stood for a while and looked out over the water. Then she gave the captain orders not to move, and sat down. She stayed sitting for ten hours. On the other side of the For a while, said Venancia, she did not know who she was. If Stewart had looked into her eyes then, he would have seen that this girl knew more about herself now than she had ever wanted to. But the doctor in him needed to examine the scene – the different stages of the ladies' distress: when did they realise this might not end? Did the women sit alone, or did they help each other as needs be? Did they fear for their lives? Did none of them seek to share Eliza's shade? None, said Venancia, very firmly. As for the rest, she did not remember. It was exciting at first, and then boring, and then dreadful. At some stage, Mme Cochelet sang hymns, but they were in French, so no one joined in. It seemed that family members stuck together, though she could not be sure, there were some family fights, too. And what of Eliza, did she eat, in order to taunt them more? No, said Venancia, she sat and did not move. But she was in a certain condition, said Stewart, Venancia must think hard, she must remember. Ί remember she did not eat,' said Venancia. Ί am not a complete fool.' And then she started to weep. When Stewart went to comfort her she hit him away, and a terrible deep wail fetched up out of her as she clutched where (he could not help but note) her womb might one day swell. 'And I will never eat asparagus now. I will never even taste it. Never! Never!' At which, her ancient aunt appeared all at once and, with a black look, caught her by the waist and wheeled her, like a dancer, away. After this, of course, the Dictator finally finished with all that dying, and simply died instead. And, of course, young Lopez took one cursory look at the corpse before opening the old man's will and declaring himself the heir. And, of course, no one else saw the will – there was no need for them to see it, as young Lopez was, of course, not a liar. And so it rolled onwards, the convened congress, the unanimous vote, the inauguration ball. And the invitations to the ball were issued in the name of Eliza Lynch. Stewart could not interest himself in the general female humiliation – he had a particular, private one of his own to inflict. He was to be wed. One week after young Lopez became the only Lopez, Stewart was made Surgeon General of the army, and the arrangements were made for the transfer, from her father's house to his house, of the lovely Venancia Báez. Perhaps the engagement had been too long. Stewart did not relish the idea of deflowering his pretty wife, much as he desired to so do. It occurred to him that she annoyed him a little. He thought already that the happiest time in his life was after he saw her for the first time, when he was caught between the child and the woman, neither of whom was in his arms. And indeed he never wavered from this version of the story of his life. The happiest he had ever been was when he was drunk with love, and her name was everything. Venancia Báez. Venancia Báez. On the morning when she would become Venancia Stewart (a name she could not even pronounce), the doctor took a medicinal shot of fine Speyside Scotch, specially imported for the marriage breakfast. By the time he married her, he was so drunk he looked sober again; and by early afternoon he was roaring. Venancia did not cry. She smiled. She clapped her hands in childish delight when he fell over his own chair. And so, with all the considerable grace she could muster, she went, one more time, to her doom. Of all people to accost, Stewart accosted Whytehead. He got him in a corner. He told him he was a machine, an automaton, a thing of levers and pulleys, and where, he asked, was the lever for his heart? Was it here? Or here? And he poked his fellow countryman in the chest and (nearly) in the crotch. He said, What of women, Whytehead? He said he had no appetite for them either, Whytehead was right, the whole business was enough to make you spew. Whytehead had the right idea, work hard and sleep on your front. Send the money home. The money, the money. Stewart had an aunt. Whytehead had three sisters and a mother still living, did he not? Thank God. Thank God they were all alive these women, so a man had something to do with his Whytehead sat and did not move. He listened. He seemed to welcome Stewart's words; he almost bathed in them. And the wedding guests, who had seen worse things in their time, slipped some whiskey into Venancia's glass of punch and let the two 'We have not been friends,' said Stewart, and he took Whytehead's dry hand in his own. 'We have not been friends as we should.' They sat for a while in silence. 'There will be a war,' said Whytehead. Stewart slumped. His eyeballs rolled bloodily up to view his new wife mingling bravely with the guests on the other side of the room. Ί like them when they're sick,' he said. 'Doctor Stewart,' Whytehead murmured, to indicate that he need not say what was on his mind; he need not go on. But they both wanted him to continue. They looked away from each other, Stewart with a lurch of the head, Whytehead with a calm so intense it might have been a swoon. He liked a woman with a good disease, Stewart said. Because they broke a man's heart. And not only that – he liked his women as he liked his men, raw, pushed to their limit. In the body, that was where the truth of it was. Whytehead did not demur. He was waiting now, his face horribly blank. 'That girl was sick enough. The maid. Did you know?' Stewart finally said, and then he told Whytehead that she had died quietly in the end. But before the end was atrocious, he said, and before that again she had clung to him. For which Whytehead should be grateful, to have another man do his dirty work for him. And his little surge of rage ebbed into love for the human being on the other side of the table. Tears came to his eyes and he stared fixedly for a while at a posy of flowers abandoned on the cloth. 'Are you asking me to thank you?' said Whytehead. At which he stood, collected his hat and gloves, wished Stewart the best of marriages, and left the room. |
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