Invisible Country

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “How do you know this?”

  “My brother-in-law, the comandante.” He said the last two words with an irony bordering on hatred. “He wanted to frighten me.” He turned to go on with the planting. “And he did.”

  “Are you going to make babies as the padre advises?” she asked to his back after a few steps.

  He stopped but did not turn around. “You are beyond the age,” was all he said and moved along the row, jabbing the stick too hard into the soil and making the holes too deep.

  7

  Comandante Luis Menenez paced the faux French drawing room of his house, back and forth between the tall glazed windows overlooking the plaza and the fake fireplace beside the door to the central hall. His wife Gilda, her lacework in her lap, perched on the settee and babbled on about her idol, Eliza Lynch. Everything about this room was a poor imitation of the drawing room at La Lynch’s now-abandoned pink and white marble villa on the outskirts of Asunción. Eliza Lynch’s furnishings were by far the most elegant in Paraguay. Theirs were a pale, tawdry imitation. Her walls were covered with peach-colored silk. Theirs were whitewashed. There, the dictator’s consort had sat on chairs brought across the ocean from Paris. Here, the furniture had been carved—in a manner of speaking—by local men who had never seen a French chair in their lives. This clunky settee was upholstered in cotton embroidered by peasants in trite black and red. Eliza Lynch’s settee was of fine Neapolitan brocade. Her lace came from Venice. This lace was made by the inept hands of his wife. Like the room she sat in, Gilda was only a pale imitation. Unlike La Lynch, Gilda had no real style. No verve. No capacity for subtle thinking and strategizing about how to achieve one’s goals. No grand gestures. She was not the woman to help a man achieve greatness.

  Just now, she was going on and on about how La Lynch, whom she craved to imitate, had eaten cherries and held her napkin to her mouth to remove the stones. Gilda did not realize that that elegant spitter of pits had just threatened their future. Never truly secure, his path to glory had just become more uncertain. In fact, death awaited him around the corner if he lost the support of López before López won or lost the war once and for all.

  “Why did she come here and not call on us? She did not even tell us she was coming.”

  Gilda waved a dismissive hand. “I told you; she went directly to the Yotté house. Josefina said she went to give condolences to the Yotté sisters. I gave Josefina some yams and salt in exchange for which she told me Ricardo might have been holding some important documents when he died.”

  Apprehension chilled his scalp. “Important documents I did not know about? I tell you, Gilda, something is seriously amiss.”

  “Well, you will just have to find out what. If you ask me, Señora Lynch was just in a hurry. She and I are great friends. I was one of the only women from a good family who befriended her when she arrived.” She fingered the bobbins of lace, but did not attempt to weave them. “If she had time, she would not have missed visiting me.” She looked him in the eyes. She dropped the bobbins, and her hands went limp again. “With all that is happening in the country, do you really think this is so important?”

  “Yes,” he said emphatically. “She did not come to give her condolences. She came for those papers. And if they were that important and I did not know about them, then…” He let his voice trail off rather than speak his worst fears.

  Gilda put aside her lacework and stood. “Josefina said Señora Lynch did not find them.”

  “Mmm…” was all he answered. He took a cigar from his breast pocket and lit it from the candle on Gilda’s tea table. If he could find those precious documents, they would give him a great deal of leverage. From his point of view, López’s mistress had too much power over the mariscal. And she was loyal to no one but herself and her gaggle of bastards.

  Menenez stopped in front of the window and looked out over the sun-baked plaza. Gilda came to his side and put her small hand on his shoulder. “Do you remember the ball to celebrate Estigarribia’s victory at Riachuelo?” he asked her.

  She giggled. “The one where all the stuck-up ladies of Asunción were so outraged because Eliza invited the prostitutes. Oh, the looks on their pruny faces! Eliza and I laughed and laughed.”

  He stared unseeing out the window. Certainly Eliza would have laughed at the discomforted upper classes, especially the dictator’s mother and sisters who had snubbed her when she first arrived in Paraguay, pregnant and unmarried. The celebration of that victory ball had been false in every way. Estigarribia and his pitiful Paraguayan flotilla had actually lost the battle, badly. Yet, López and Lynch went on with the planned celebration as if Paraguay had just scored its greatest triumph. Menenez had thought them right to show only strength. An illusion of invincibility would spur the troops and keep the populace in fear of their lives. The government had to look powerful to be powerful.

  Though Paraguay’s prospects went steadily downhill after that, López never admitted defeat but clung to his iron illusion to the point of becoming unhinged. Now with López madly refusing to yield, Lynch had suddenly come all this way looking for government documents. But what would make such papers so precious?

  In total ignorance, Gilda prattled on. “Old Josefina says the snake god Moñái always steals things from villages. Foolish old idiot.”

  “Be quiet a moment, Gilda. You do not understand. I could be in danger.”

  “How?”

  “That night of the ball, López issued a terrible warning. All the men closest to him had to kiss his hands and swear fealty—like knights in some medieval court. There must have been a thousand candles burning in that room. López sat on a dais wearing his plumed military hat as if it were a crown. ‘Beware,’ he told us, ‘until now I have pardoned offenses, but from now on, I will pardon no one.’ The fear in that room was palpable. Faithful as we were, we all knew that if López took offense at any slight—real or imagined—we were dead men.” There had been a small, skinny boy at the window, perhaps seven years old, who had stuck his naked legs through the iron grillwork and hugged the bars. He eyed the sweets on the table across the room. That could have been Luis Menenez twenty years earlier. Inside the comandante’s chest, the poor boy he had been trembled.

  Gilda’s hand grasped his forearm. “What has this got to do with Señora Lynch’s visiting the Yotté girls?”

  “Whatever she came looking for, she trusted it to Yotté and not to me. That means she and López no longer trust me. I have to prove to them that I am not only faithful but also useful. I must find whatever it is and give it to her. Otherwise, she might accuse me of taking it.”

  “Oh, Luis, you—”

  He cut her off. “And if I am in danger, you are too. Do you know how many women have been imprisoned or shot because their husbands failed in battle? We could both die because those documents are missing.”

  At last she closed her mouth.

  “The only way to avoid danger,” he warned her, “is to become dangerous.”

  * * *

  The incessant bumping and rocking of the carriage made all thought impossible. The roads were a disgrace. Riding, even in as well-built a carriage as this, was bad enough in Europe, but in this backward wilderness rattling along tortured her back made weak by having birthed seven babies.

  “I feel like screaming,” Eliza Lynch said to von Wisner, who sat beside her twirling his luxuriant moustache between his thumb and forefinger and actually reading a book while riding in this rattletrap at a speed that would terrify a French coachman.

  He put a finger between the pages and reached for her gloved hand. “Ma chère,” he crooned, “You are overly concerned.” His aquiline profile was silhouetted against the afternoon light outside the window.

  She pushed away his hand, and with the lurching of the carriage, did so with more force than she intended. “Stop patronizing me, François. This is too serious.”

  He threw his book on the opposite seat and sighed. “What troubles you, chérie?”
He sounded more like a priest than a courtier.

  “You know very well.” Out the window in the woods beside the road, twisted vines choked the trees like the tangled web of deception that strangled her. “How can I tell the mariscal what I entrusted to Ricardo and why? He will see it as betrayal, and you know what he does to traitors.”

  Von Wisner moved to sit opposite her and leaned forward, taking her hands in his. “You cannot possibly think he would harm you.”

  “I do, actually,” she said, and her stomach quaked. She was used to staging little dramas to get what she wanted, but this was no act. “My only hope is to convince him I did it for his good. Letting him see I no longer share his insane hope of victory would be suicide, even for me.”

  “Then you must be clever, chérie. You are by far the cleverest person in Paraguay.”

  He meant it as a compliment, but it sparked her anger. “I know people think I control him, that I feed his madness to hold sway over him. They always say the same about men who do ill deeds, that a woman is using her sex to goad him. No woman’s influence can be so complete.” She wished it could.

  François grinned as if he read her last thought, but then his eyes turned sympathetic. “It might be better if you could. As it is, you must use what wiles you have.”

  She pulled away her gloved hands. “It is too much for me.”

  Von Wisner sat back. “You will find a way. Practice with me. Pretend I am him.” He wrinkled his big hooked nose in that way he had when she knew he was thinking of how inelegant the squat, bandy-legged mariscal looked compared to his aristocratic self.

  She fell easily into playing the role. “I did it for both of us, my mariscal,” she said to von Wisner’s cravat, which was at the level where López’s head would have been. “I was sure it was safe, because no one would suspect Ricardo had the treasure.” Her voice shook from the bouncing of the carriage and from her terror. “There was no time to discuss it. We were abandoning Asunción. I had to see to the safety of the children.” She looked into von Wisner’s sympathetic green eyes. “In fact, that is true, François. The mariscal was so distracted he did not notice what was missing among all our belongings. He regretted only that we had to abandon my piano.”

  “I regret that too,” von Wisner said. “You see. You will convince him you were relieving him of a burden.”

  “So he could concentrate on commanding the army and saving Paraguay.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How could I know that someone would kill Ricardo?”

  Von Wisner knit his busy eyebrows. “Do you think the one had something to do with the other?”

  The idea had, of course, occurred to her, but who could have known? Ricardo had sworn he would tell absolutely no one, and he would never have betrayed her. Suddenly an idea presented itself. “Yes,” she said, more to the thought in her head than to von Wisner. “I will direct the mariscal’s anger against whoever killed Ricardo. I will convince him that only by finding Ricardo’s murderer will we recover our treasure.”

  * * *

  The scent of the horse. Of the blooming wild orange. Something else. Xandra was suddenly awake. The rain had not come. The clouds had passed. Her head was in shade, but the sunlight outside the lean-to was strong. She had fallen asleep. What was that other smell? Leathery, something like fresh-cut wood. She blinked and lifted her head and screamed before she knew what she was screaming at. But before the scream faded, she was sure she was dreaming. Tomás! He was sitting on the ground beside the lean-to, smiling at her. She rubbed her eyes. “Are you real?”

  He laughed. “Yes.”

  She sat up. She had fantasized so often about what she would say if she saw him again, but she did nothing but stare in disbelief. Her thoughts in a tumult like the plants in the forest, twisted together, each trying to dominate, none succeeding.

  “I am happy to see you,” he said.

  “Did you come back for the horse?” A stupid question. If he had, he would have taken César and gone.

  His shining eyes turned serious. “The day I left, I heard people moving through the forest. I heard a voice, but not yours. I thought I was about to be discovered. Then I realized that if they found me and saw your father’s horse, they would know you had harbored me. They could kill you for helping the enemy. I picked up everything and ran into the bush.”

  “Did someone come?”

  “No, but then I thought, what if someone had? Staying here could endanger you after all you have done for me.”

  She could not read the sincerity of his words. She had seen that look in his eyes before, as if he were having a joke all to himself. He was like the ocean, something she, a girl from the center of a continent, wanted to touch and feel but did not really know. Her thoughts collapsed into confusion again. “So you went away without saying good-bye.” She sounded petulant, even to herself. She was doing this all wrong.

  He moved toward her and as if he read her mind, he took her in his arms and kissed her with his soft lips, held her, tasted her mouth with his tongue. His breathing quickened as it had when the fever was strongest on him. He put his hands on her back and drew them down over the curve of her buttocks. A melting heat ran through her, and she pressed him hard against her body. But he suddenly stopped, held her away from him and laughed again, but this time his eyes did not dance. They were dark. She had done something wrong. They had taught her how to protect herself from seduction. How was she supposed to know how to seduce?

  She dropped her hands. The thought of trying again terrified her. She was foolish in his eyes, pathetic. He was angry. All she wanted was for him to want her, and she had no idea how to make him.

  “Where have you been all these days?”

  “Looking for food in the forest.”

  “You could have taken our chickens.”

  “I would never do such a thing to you.” He was indignant. “I stayed away. I told you I was afraid to be found, to endanger you.”

  “But you came back today.”

  “I checked almost every day to see if you were here. One day I saw you here with your father. You seemed so sad. But I ran away. I knew I must not let him see me. Then today the horse was gone, so I waited nearby and came back to find you. I have been watching you sleep.”

  She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. “I want you to make love to me. Now.”

  He took her forearms in his hands as if he were going to push her off him but she clung to him. He kissed her and without taking his lips off hers, undressed her. And he did what she asked.

  Afterwards he seemed sad. She clung to him and breathed in the spicy, smoky scent of his neck and tried to feel happy. She was sure he was sad because she made love badly. It had hurt—the way the girls in school said it would but she did not care about that. He had expected her do something she had not done. She could not figure out what, but she wanted to try again. “Tell me how to do it right.”

  He shook his head. “I did not want to take your virginity. I have done a terrible thing.” He pulled her chemise back over her head.

  She hugged herself across the chest. “You think I made you commit a sin. Well, I did not.” She told him what the padre had said at mass.

  He laughed again, and though she did not understand why it was funny, she laughed too. “Good God,” was all he said. Then he put his hand under her chemise and caressed her breast, and this time she did not have to ask him and he did not have to tell her how. He showed her, slowly, with his hands and his mouth and his tongue. And afterward she thought she understood why the Bible called making love “knowing.”

  * * *

  Her back to Salvador, Alivia sorted a bundle of weeds, separating inedible leaves from a small harvest of herbs that would taste bitter and nasty—like the times they were living through. She pretended to ignore him, but she was never unaware of him—had not been since she first saw him all those years ago. Not even when he was far away in battle. When the news dribbled in that this or that
woman’s husband had been killed or died of cholera or measles, she always knew he was alive. In the depths of her grief over their boys, she had found moments of comfort remembering the suffusing pleasures of their passion for each other, and the quality of the man who loved her. She had confessed to the padre her guilty fantasies of sex with Salvador as she mourned the loss of their sons. The padre had told her in the confessional of the belief of the Greeks in the gods of Eros and Thanatos and said that it was natural for people to turn to thoughts of that which brought new life when a dear one died. It had seemed a pagan thing, but the padre said that the pagan beliefs were an attempt by primitive people to explain the secrets of the human heart. She, pure Indian woman that she was, felt she must still be part pagan.

  Salvador puttered, as if he could hide from her that he was taking bits of food and hiding them in his pockets. He insisted he ate it himself. But she knew better. The surface of her skin read his thoughts. He took food to someone dear to him, someone kept secret. A pang of regret swept over her. He had always been most aroused when she was ready to get pregnant or when she already had a baby inside her. Perhaps someone else was doing for him what she could no longer do. Manuela, the blacksmith. He would choose her.

  She waited for him to mumble his excuses and leave. Then she made a bundle of the rejected grasses to carry on her head, as if she were taking some remedy to a sick villager. She waited out of sight, watching as he went slowly, laboriously between the rows of trees that lined the red road to the village, patiently bearing the agony of walking toward what he loved. Every step he took away from her made a painful pressure in her heart.

  When he turned the first curve, she followed, walking as slowly as he did, difficult as it was to hold back. What would she do when he reached the smithy? Should she wait outside for them to begin their lovemaking and then barge in? She knew how he made love. Did he do it the same way with Manuela? Though she could picture them in her mind, she did not want to see it with her eyes. What would she say? If she went right in and surprised them before they began it, how could she accuse them? She should turn back and let it be. But she could not. Her body had become barren with age, but the force of her desire for him was as great as ever. Greater. Had intensified as time went by. She had imagined that when he returned from the war he would not be able to keep his hands off her. But he came back sick and weak. So she nursed him, confident that when his strength returned so would his desire. It had, evidently, but not for her.