The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (24 page)

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

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

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

They were talking man-to-man.

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

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

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

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

‘Indeed.’

There was something the boy wanted to say.

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

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

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

‘She looks quite well.’

Pancho seemed to think about this for a while.

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

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

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

Stewart stood up. He was hugely tired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well it is a very ugly thing.’

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

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

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

‘Yes,’ said Stewart.

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

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

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

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

‘I can imagine,’ said Stewart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

López ordered the piano abandoned there, and he had to give the order twice. His own son looked at him, and then jumped to. And when they had it down off the cart, two of his boy brigade folded the huge cloth with that folding dance you see women make, shepherds coming to kiss shepherdesses, over and back, over and across, and over again.

Eliza was in her carriage for this. She did not pretend to watch, but the horses started away just as soon as the piano was left on the grass. Stewart, who stayed to tend the survivors, was left looking at the thing, standing proud in a field full of bodies, silent or groaning. The temptation was too much for him. He lifted the lid and played her out. As the line of fleeing Paraguayans trickled over the far hills, Stewart let his ruined hands wander over the notes. He found he was playing ‘La Palomita’, as though there was no other tune the piano knew, so he drummed the same note for a while, to admonish it. And when he looked away for long enough – at the beautiful birds, for example, or the beautiful hills – he found an old tune wandering out of his hands. Something Scottish, he thought, although he could not remember the name.

When he caught up with them that night, López was impatient at the delay. His stools were yellow he said. They smelled of smoke. Stewart prescribed charcoal. He said, with a laugh, that at least there was plenty of that about – then realised, as he looked at López, that he had just very nearly died.

But he had not died. He had been given something to eat, and he had lain down. He watched the stars while his back sought and swooned into the hard Paraguayan earth, and he listened, as they all did, to the fight in the presidential tent.

They fought in French. There was an occasional shadow-play of bodies on the canvas, but the figures loomed or receded hopelessly; or ate themselves, as they flicked from one to the other wall. It was hard to tell what was going on. Eliza was keening for her piano, of course. But she would not say it: she wouldn’t mention it by name. Instead there was a litany of things she had to put up with: incessant travel and bad food and no help and badly washed clothes. Her throat was so full that she choked on the words, she
had
to squeeze them out of her, until her voice broke in a thin shriek, a wail.

‘And when will we be married, you son of a bitch? When will you
marry
me?’

By the sound of it, she was up close to him. Stewart imagined that he held her by the wrists. She was trying to hit him, or bite him. Those handsome teeth. Of course, López could take out a pistol and shoot her. He could push her out of the tent and have her lanced before she stumbled to the ground. He could put her in with the prisoners and have her daily flogged. And then – and this was the greatest comfort to them in these last, terrible days – he could do none of these things, because he loved Eliza Lynch.

Silence. The president’s doctor held his breath. Il Mariscal might be hit. He might be nursing a hurt lip, or crotch. The silence went on so long, he might be dead. Or she might be dead. Or nothing might be happening at all; they might be each reading their separate books. Then the sound of tears – Eliza crying in a rush, and slapping him (or could he be slapping her? He was a brute, but not that much of a brute), or were they slaps, after all? They had a rhythm – and the rhythm thickened and gathered into a dull hammering, and then, with a high, puppyish whimper, it was done.

‘Yay!’ said the bright face of the boy who was sitting on the other side of Stewart’s fire.

‘Yay!’ said Stewart back to him, because children made the worst spies. And he waved the little stick he was chewing, briefly in the air.

When a man is inside a woman, he rules the world.

The River

Part 4

Flowers

January 1855, Río Paraná

AT LAST, A
town of some size. I see it in a smoky distance, all flat and loose on the landscape, like something spilled out that no one has bothered to wipe up. The houses are jumbled and tiny, so far away; then clearer – a flag, a washing line. The red tiles I have seen along the river, which were always a sign, in their fat corrugations, of a rich man’s
estancia
, now gathering so thick as we approach I wonder how they got so many. Red tiles. Hundreds of red tiles. Thousands of them!

This is how long I have been on the river.

I stand in the prow, face forward, belly forward. The boat thumps behind and under me, through my fat, hot feet. It is a lullaby sung in my bones. Still, the sleeping baby wakes to the sight of his city on the horizon; the blind baby delights in what I see. My blood paints him a picture of the future that approaches, and he beats out his answer on my tender hide drum.

And he does not stop. As my eye lingers and proceeds – on the rooftops, and the boats and the docks now coming into view – as I clasp my hands and wring them, almost, with relief and expectation, the child twists and bangs and hammers on. Is it a message or is it a dance? It is a wrestling
with
himself, an urgency to be free. I feel his impatience – but what can I do?

Look, look!

The baby not seeing but demanding, What is it? What is it?

Home. Where you came from.

Though this child has already come from everywhere: Paris, Rome, Madrid, Bordeaux. The only home he has had is me. And if you are to tell from the thumps and the kicks, the strength and meanness of his intent, he has difficulty in staying even there. My travelling boy. My man who would be on his way.

‘They hit you hard, your children,’ says my mother’s wan voice in my head. ‘They hit you hard and they start early.’ It makes me weary to think she may be right. But I also know now, as she once knew, the pleasures of such submission – to the uncaring fists and the uncaring smile of your own heart’s child. I will let you out of my womb, but not out of my arms. I will let you out of my arms, but not out of my head.