Invisible Country

by Annamaria Alfieri

  * * *

  It was dusk by the time Maria Claudia and Padre Gregorio started back to the village from the estancia León. Ordinarily they would have walked along the road toward their houses, but to avoid the comandante and his spies, they took a path through the forest and across a field toward the priest’s back door. “Pretend we are foraging. Maybe we will actually find something we can eat,” the padre said.

  Maria Claudia walked before him into the woods. The heat of the day was dissipating, but she felt as testy as if it were the muggiest noon of the year. She was ashamed of the resentment she harbored against him. She had agreed to start this project “to save an innocent,” as he called it. But it could be dangerous. To him. To Alivia and her family. She was willing to do it for him, yet he rejected every idea she had offered. She finally spoke up after they had walked along in silence for several minutes. “What does it mean ‘render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s’?”

  “You ask the oddest questions.”

  She ignored this latest barb. “You are so determined about this, as if you were a magistrate in charge of justice in this world instead of a priest saving souls for the next.”

  “Do you presume to tell me what my role as a priest should be?”

  She stopped in her tracks. “Certainly you would interpret what I said in the worst possible way.” She did not care anymore if she offended him. “No matter if I am right or wrong, no matter what I say, you find fault. What is wrong with me? You are so respectful of everyone else. When Xandra offered to see the comandante, which clearly she should not be the one to do, you defended her, acted as if there was value in her every thought, but you never see any value in my opinion.” She was whining. She hated herself. She was insulting him, but he deserved it. He always hurt her feelings. Why should she worry about hurting his? She walked on faster and caught her skirt on a thorny tacuara bush and wound up tearing it as she pulled it loose. Seeing the rip brought tears to her eyes that had nothing to do with this silly skirt.

  He hung back for a minute and then caught up to her again. “I am sorry if I was rude. I am distraught about everything these days.”

  She did not want to forgive him. “What makes you think you should take that out on me?” She plowed ahead and nearly tripped on the root of a cedron tree. As if to purposely add to her torture, a swarm of mosquitoes attacked her. She slapped at them and ran ahead to get away.

  “Stop,” the padre called. “Look here. I told you we might get lucky.” He took a knife from his pocket and cut a wild pineapple and handed it to her. It was not ripe. A person who knew better would have marked the spot, left it to grow a bit more, and come back for it. She took it from him. “What have you got against me?” she demanded.

  “Nothing. I have become a cranky man.” He looked at her through the gloom of the woods. “The world seems so very evil to me these days. This used to be such a benign place. People committed their sins. They confessed, and I gave them God’s forgiveness. But generally speaking, what they did was nothing so very horrible. Now. Now? How can I give God’s forgiveness? How can I, when I cannot see myself how God could forgive them?” He could not feel God’s presence anymore. But he would not say that to her.

  She could not bear hearing his doubts, no more than she could stand his rejection.

  He drew near her. “Priests are not supposed to be afraid of worldly pain.”

  “Priests are men,” she said. The look on his face told her this was the greatest insult she could have given him.

  He walked along for a few steps and said nothing. An urutau, the shyest of birds, called its melancholy complaint from a tree off to their left.

  What she had said was only the truth. Anger bubbled up in her throat and wanted to fly out of her mouth. She pursed her lips to keep it in but she failed. “And all this doubt you have, is it why you reject everything I say?”

  He turned in front of her, blocking her way. “You see things more clearly than I do, and I hate it when you say things I should have thought of.”

  “I would never—”

  He held up his hand. “I know what you would never do.”

  She wept and hoped the light was too dim for him to see her tears. But it was not.

  He reached out and touched her wet face. “I am afraid of losing my faith in God. I am afraid chaos will descend and order will never return. Before this war, I was certain of God, of the rectitude of my own thinking. Every bone and fiber of my body was sure. Now nothing is clear to me. I am afraid of being arrested and tortured. I am afraid of everything.”

  This made her sob aloud. Not even chicarra crickets singing in the undergrowth drowned her out.

  At that moment, Hector Mompó appeared under a cape jasmine tree a few feet away. She nearly screamed when she saw him. He carried a machete and burlap sack and wore a pair of Ricardo Yotté’s expensive pants, tied at the waist with a silk cravat. His bony chest was bare. “Good evening, Pai Gregorio, señora,” he said with a too-knowing smile.

  She held up the pineapple to show him they were foraging. She hoped his rheumy eyes could not see her teary face. She wanted to be invisible.

  “I am looking for food for my ladies. Expectant mothers need to eat well. Thanks to you, I am going to be a father at my age.” He bowed to the priest. “I hope you are taking your own advice too, Padre. You don’t want to be the blessed virgin father forever.” His voice cracked when he laughed.

  Maria Claudia wanted to slap him for his impertinence, but the padre put his hand on her shoulder and pressed her forward.

  “It would be a shame to waste an opportunity to bring new souls to Paraguay,” Mompó called after them. “The old Pai Sebastian we had before you sure knew that.”

  * * *

  Salvador sat on the bed and unbuckled the leather straps that bound his false foot to his left leg. He left his nightshirt on the bedpost and lay down in only his underdrawers. In days gone by, this would have signaled to Alivia that he wanted to make love to her. He had thought about loving her all these months since he had come home, but until now he had been sure he would fail if he tried. He wondered if he could tonight.

  Naked, she took her place beside him and put her head on his shoulder and her hand on his bare chest. She was so much thinner than she had been the last time they made love, before he left for the war. Not his soft wife anymore. He took her hand, kissed it, and held on to it. “I am sure it will be me Luis will arrest.”

  She pulled her hand away and sat up. “Why?”

  “He needs someone to blame.”

  The candle, still lit, flickered on the bedside table. They had always made love in the light.

  “How could he risk having the murderer of Ricardo Yotté in his family?” She stretched out again and put her head back on his shoulder.

  Salvador stared up at the old wooden ceiling beams. “He is a toad, my brother-in-law.” And he was; a fat cucuru. If you let one of them close its jaws on you, you had to kill it to get it off. “I want to find the courage to kill Luis before he can hurt anyone.”

  “That would only lead to more killing. I have spent my life trying to stop death. Promise me you will never attempt it. You would be the one to die.”

  He did not answer because he did not want to lie.

  “I cannot take care of Aleixo without you,” she said. “Promise me.”

  “I promise,” he said, though he knew it was false.

  They fell silent. She began to caress his genitals. Desire he had not felt in years suffused him. He kissed her as if her mouth could satisfy every hunger of his body and soul. She moved to straddle him.

  “I did not want to bring you this maimed body.”

  She smiled into his eyes. “I love you; I want you more than ever.”

  “Do you want to put out the candle?”

  “No,” she said.

  * * *

  Under the white tent on the outskirts of Peribebuy, Francisco Solano Lópe
z held out a brandy snifter to Eliza Lynch. She refilled it with golden brown liquor from a cut crystal decanter. He stared into the glass as if he were trying to read leaves in a teacup. She wondered what her mariscal was thinking.

  It had been another day of setbacks. A rider had come at noon to report they had lost the battle for the railroad. Soon, she expected, they would have to move camp again. Though defeat after defeat paraded before him, López never considered capitulating. Because as a child she had desperately needed to believe that dreams could come true, she would have preferred their illusions. But the fear in the eyes of their children obliterated all but desperation for escape.

  She sat on his lap. The increased size of his stomach and the widening of her hips after birthing seven babies left less room for her than the first time she had approached him thus, in her bedroom in Paris when she was but nineteen and he twenty-eight. After fourteen years, desire still clouded his eyes.

  With a little wiggle, she increased the pressure of the cheek of her behind on his privates. She twisted a bit to make sure her décolleté was positioned for his greatest enjoyment and reached behind her neck to undo the clasp of her pearls. He put his hands on the small of her back and behind her head and pulled her near for a kiss. She turned her cheek, received a peck, pulled away, and stood up with her back to him. “Do you want to undo my dress?” she asked. He reached up and started on the buttons. There were a lot, even for his expert hands.

  “You certainly made a conquest of the new French ambassador at dinner this evening,” he said.

  “He is much more charming than that other fool.” Monsieur Laurent-Cochelet, the former envoy of France, and his prudish wife had snubbed her. This new Frenchman seemed altogether more malleable. “I think Monsieur Cuberville will be very helpful. I thought to invite him for lunch tomorrow. Along with François von Wisner, of course. What do you think?”

  His fingers were reaching the bottom of the long row of mother-of-pearl. “Excellent idea. If we can get the emperor of France to come in on our side, we might convince the Americans to help us too. You must recruit Monsieur Cuberville to our cause.” He undid the last button and stepped back.

  She held the front of the dress to her and turned to him. “I will do my best,” she said, though she intended to entreat the Frenchman not to help Paraguay to win the war, but to get the Yotté sisters out of the country.

  She let the dress drop and stepped out of it, into his arms.

  * * *

  That same midnight, Xandra arrived at the camp in the woods where fireflies winked all around her. The moonlight reflected off dewy leaves and gave a silver cast to César’s shiny coat. She reassured the neighing horse with a pat between his ears and threw herself in the arms of a half-awake Tomás. Almost an hour passed before they untangled themselves from each other.

  “Xandra,” he said, still a bit breathless, “why have you come out at this hour when the jaguars hunt and the forest is full of boa constrictors. You could have walked into the web of a spider whose bite could kill you.”

  She laughed. “You were not thinking of all that when you kissed me hello.”

  “Still, you cannot leave now until it is light.”

  “I have no intention of leaving. I came to apologize for this morning. I was afraid you were angry at me for the way I spoke to you.”

  “More afraid than of the teeth of yaguareté?” He didn’t seem to be joking.

  She told him the truth. “I thought you might leave me for talking in such a nasty way.”

  He held her face between his hands. It was too dark for her to see his face clearly, but his voice was determined. “Listen, Xandra. I am not going to leave you. In these past days, I saw that you were not confident of my love. It made you anxious in our lovemaking, and I enjoyed that urgency. But now—I am sorry I did not make you sure of me. I love you. Please do not doubt me. I will never leave you.”

  She ran her finger along the beard that framed his face. “What would the Brazilians do if they found you?” She had not thought about it while he was sick. But now he was well. “In our army, they shoot deserters.”

  He put his arm around her waist and hugged her to him. “All armies do that.”

  She pushed back. The moonlight made his hair look like silver. “Then if they came…” She could not complete the thought.

  “I doubt they will look. So many died the day I took sick; they probably think I was among them. I would never go back anyway. The war disgusts me. The endless slaughter. My country marches slaves here in chains and then offers them their freedom if they fight. As if they had a choice. So they fight. And for over a year now most of the Paraguayans they have killed have been already maimed soldiers or little boys and old men. Where is the glory in that? I will never go back to the war or to Brazil.”

  She looked at him in disbelief. “But you have family there.”

  “Three brothers, much older, who have never taken much of an interest in me. My mother died having me, and my father blamed me. My sister was always nice, but she has her own children now. There is nothing there for me. No. When this is over, I am going to be with you.”

  She kissed him and held him close. He had said everything she wanted to hear. It quieted her heart.

  She told him about how she and her parents and the padre and Maria Claudia were going to try to find the murderer of Ricardo. She toyed with the idea of asking him if he had done it, but she feared what he would say. If he did and she saw an innocent person accused, what would she do? Instead, she told him about La Lynch’s missing valuables. “The padre said they are important government documents.”

  “Mmm,” he said. “Señora Lynch cannot be looking for papers. Once Asunción fell, my uncle shipped Paraguay’s documents to Rio de Janeiro.”

  She wriggled out of his arms. “Wait a minute. Your uncle?” He tried to embrace her again, but she would not allow it. “Just who is your uncle?”

  He let his hands drop into this lap. “The duke of Caxias,” he said apologetically.

  She leapt to her feet. “The leader of the invaders?” She was incredulous. “How could you not have told me who you were?” This gave her a thousand reasons not to trust him, but why would the nephew of such an important nobleman want a country village girl like her?

  He reached for her, but she slapped his hands away. No man from such a family could love her. She had risked coming out in the middle of the night. She was an idiot.

  He faced her in the darkness. “I love you. I do.”

  She took his hand and put it to her lips. It smelled of her sex. She asked him the questions she should have asked as soon as his fever passed, but by then she was already in love with him. “Tell me how you got here. Tell me who you are really, Tomás, who told me only that his name is Pereira.”

  He kissed her hand then, and breathed in the scent of them from both their hands. “My whole name is Tomás Pereira da Graça. My mother was the youngest sister of the Marshal Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, duke of Caxias. He saw to my commission in the cavalry. I came to Paraguay on October tenth of 1866 when my uncle took command of the allied forces. The Argentineans had been in charge. They are hopeless cowards, indecisive, disorganized. They could have captured López by now, if they had any brains or guts.”

  She did not want to hear about the war. “Tell me about you. How you came to this place.”

  “I am not sure exactly. I was at Tuyutí, the greatest battle of the war—it was immense. We had more than thirty-five thousand troops in the action—all under that incompetent Mitre—who could not fight his way out of a convent of aged nuns.”

  She squeezed his hand. “You. Tell me about you.”

  He stroked her hair and sighed. “Before that battle, a lot of our men had a very bad fever and a terrible flux after months in that miserable swamp around Humaitá. I was to carry messages between General Osorio, the Brazilian commander, and Mitre. I woke that morning feeling feverish, but there was nothing for it; I had to do my dut
y. All was quiet when Osorio handed me a message to deliver. Then, suddenly, the Paraguayans attacked our entrenched position. When I mounted my horse to take the communiqué to Mitre, I had to circle the battlefield. Howitzer shells were exploding everywhere, men yelling battle cries, screaming in pain, smoke. So much smoke that the soldiers could hardly see what they were firing at. I was riding blind and burning up with fever by then, so weak I could hardly keep my mount. I hung on to my horse’s neck not to fall off. I remember taking off my sash and binding myself to the animal. Then, I must have fainted. The horse must have run from the battle. I drifted in and out of consciousness. My horse walked on, maybe for days. In my stupor, I must have loosened the sash. All I know is I woke up when I fell from the horse. He trotted off. I tried to catch him. Then I heard a neigh, and I thought it must be him. I followed the animal’s voice until I came here. I stumbled into the shade of your lean-to and collapsed. I thought I would die. Then you found me. I do not know who won that battle.”

  “The Allies,” she said. “An old soldier who brought a wounded boy home told us about Tuyutí—that many, many had died.” She wanted to feel sorrier for the dead, but her happiness was enormous—she had found Tomás, and her period was overdue, and if it did not come her loyalty as well as her love would always belong to this golden father of her child.

  He stroked her hair. “I cannot understand how López ever imagined in his wildest dreams that he could win this war. He is a canny and sly opponent, but he was deluded. He should never have tried. Once the Allies united against him, what chance did he have?”

  She put her head on his chest. “Some people say La Lynch goaded him into it.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “I have heard that, but I think it is more his blind ambition than her wiles. I saw the Paraguayan fighting forces, Xandra—cavalry without horses, naked troops fighting with knives and rocks, all heart and no weapons, naval battalions in canoes attacking battleships with machetes. And in each battle, López orders them to fight to the last man, and they do. It is madness.”

  “They have no choice,” she said. “Die fighting or be executed for not trying. They fight on the chance they will survive.” It broke her heart that her brothers had died in such desperation.