Invisible Country

by Annamaria Alfieri

  The American with the twinkly eyes came and showed them to a cabin. He bowed to Maria Claudia. “I apologize for giving you no choice,” he said. “The French ambassador said it would not be safe for you to stay.” Though he spoke sincerely, Maria Claudia knew the French ambassador was worried, not about her, but about La Lynch’s trunks. At the door of their cabin, he said, “Get yourselves gussied up, ladies. We will dine with the captain this evening.”

  After he left, Maria Claudia went back out to stand alone at the white railing and watch Paraguay slip away from her. The trees and the water lapping at the bank took on a golden hue as the sun sank behind her.

  When she was a child, she had thought, as those around her did, of Paraguay as the center of the world—the way the ancients had seen the earth as the center of the universe. Only Gregorio, her personal Galileo, opened her mind to the world he knew outside her country. She was going into that world, though she had no idea what would happen to her. Her heart twisted, fearing that she would never see her once benign and always beautiful country again. Martita and Estella could seek out relatives. She had no one in Buenos Aires, but many Paraguayans had fled there. She could make herself known to them. She had been married. Those who had left the country as the war started would never know that any baby she carried did not belong to Fidel Robles. She was a war widow. That would be all they needed to know.

  The last rays of the sun turned the water crimson and the pink flowering trees along the shore to flame. “Good-bye,” she said to them and returned to the cabin, where a man was delivering three boxes that contained Martita and Estella’s things, including a yellow muslin dress that Maria Claudia wore to dinner that evening, where she ate roast beef and soft, delicious bread and thought about how it would nourish her and make her baby strong.

  None of the young women ever saw the four trunks again.

  23

  In the next year, while the sun still baked the red roads and the sweet perfume of tropical flowers hung in the air, the Allies occupied the capital. The duke of Caxias put a Paraguayan, Cirilo Antonio Rivarola at the head of a provisional government. Solano López fought on in the mountains of the north. Thousands more Paraguayans died. The last to go down fighting was the mariscal himself, who took a spear, or some say a bullet, in the chest. “Muero por mi patria,” he is said to have uttered before he expired. Some people said López died not for, but with his country. His son Juan Francisco also died in vain. Several chroniclers claim Eliza Lynch buried them with her own hands before she took her remaining children to Europe.

  War had destroyed the lives of tens, some say hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who had wanted nothing more than their families and friends, enough to eat, music, and a bit of laughter to help them survive the trials that life on Earth entails. In the end there were not enough left of the living to properly count the dead.

  Rumors circulated that in desperation, López and Lynch had thrown four trunks of treasure over a cliff in the north and forced the men who had carried them to jump after them, so that no one else would know the place. Hundreds of Paraguayans and foreigners set out to find it. They discovered many likely precipices, but there were only rocks beneath. Not one precious jewel or golden ingot was ever found.

  It is documented, however, that Eliza Lynch undertook a long and arduous lawsuit in Scotland against the brothers of Dr. Stewart for the return of her fortune. Her efforts were fruitless.

  Paraguay might have disappeared entirely, taken over by its neighbors, had it not been for the bitter rivalry between Brazil and Argentina. Fortunately, neither of them was strong enough to claim the whole of the devastated country. Though diminished by 25 percent of its territory, Paraguay was allowed to survive. But barely. The future was as dark as the depths of the forest on a moonless night.

  Though it would take more than a century for the country to recover, in the immediate aftermath of the war, in small groups and in little pockets, the Paraguayan people outlived the devastation, among them the citizens of Santa Caterina, who were aided in their survival by the presence among them, whenever his duties allowed, of Tomás Pereira da Graça. He protected the women and children of the village from the barbarous behavior of the Allied soldiers, which was inflicted on the defenseless elsewhere. He and the padre sought to bring as much normalcy and joy to Santa Caterina as possible. The villagers struggled to survive the want left by their country’s defeat but considered themselves more fortunate than the vast majority of their countrymen. Late that following summer, they had a good harvest of maize and manioc to nurture the tight knot of neighbors who remained.

  When Xandra and Tomás were married, his father in Brazil disowned him and his brothers mocked him in condemning letters, but his sister sent him, at great expense, one hundred heifers and a prize bull. A herd grazed again at the estancia León. In their small island of sanity amid the chaos, Alivia was very busy. During the next June alone, eight children were born. Padre Gregorio baptized nearly thirty babies within the year, one of them Claudia, the daughter of Xandra and Tomás. Josefina saw it as a great good omen that on the day after Xandra’s confinement, Tomás and Aleixo killed a carpincho and provided a feast for the whole village. With peace, the women of Santa Caterina also had the luxury of growing and weaving cotton to make clothes for the newborns.

  One day in late June, the girl Fidelia came to the estancia at siesta time to call Alivia to Manuela, who was in labor.

  Without waking Salvador, Alivia took her satchel to the forge and with Fidelia’s help, made up the birthing bed with thick sheets and blankets. She held her heart calm by saying the prayers her mother and grandmother had taught her, asking God to bless her hands and the mother and baby she was about to help. The prayers had always been a way to keep her nerves steady for whatever happened during a birth. On the day the comandante had taken Salvador, she had promised God she would be a forgiving woman today. She prayed she would be able to keep her vow.

  She took the heavy linen sheet, the same on which she had lain to give birth to her children and on which the infant Claudia had been born only three weeks before, and put it on Manuela’s bed.

  When she and the girl helped Manuela from her hammock to the bed, she forced away the little black thought brought by the soft, smooth skin she felt when she took Manuela’s arm. The water broke between the hammock and the bed. Like all first-time mothers, Manuela gasped when the fluid ran out of her body. “Do not worry, my dear,” Alivia said. “This just means your child is very near.”

  “Get a mop,” she ordered the girl, who ran out and returned to clean the worn brick floor.

  Alivia prayed her grandmother’s prayers. Manuela became to her, not her husband’s lover, but a mother whom she was privileged to help with the miracle of birth. When the little head, covered with black hair appeared, Alivia made the sign of the cross on its crown, and with Manuela’s last push, wept to see that Salvador had a new son. Then another miracle took place. Seeing the child’s face, so like her Juan at the moment of his birth somehow, because the boy was Salvador’s, he seemed also to be hers.

  To celebrate the harvest the following fall, the padre, Tomás, and the soldiers erected a platform in the plaza and on the night of the full moon, with torches lit, the village women thanked the soldiers for their protection by performing the bottle dance, in which they placed a bottle filled with water on their heads and twirled and danced intricate patterns of steps without spilling a drop. In their turn, the Brazilians staged hilarious, gaudy amateur theatricals with men dressed as women wearing pineapples for breasts and their heads piled high with garlands of flowers from the forest. When Tomás joined them as the most glamorous of the “women” and waltzed with the shortest of the men, the audience roared so loud that all the babies sleeping in their mothers’ laps woke and howled, which only made everyone laugh the more. The mothers gave their babies their breasts to comfort them and Salvador and Aleixo took the stage to sing a plaintive, sweet father and son duet.
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br />   As the old Guarani believed they could, the souls of those who had perished during the war did not immediately fly off to the heavens, but they stayed near and when Salvador and Aleixo sang a lullaby to the babies, they smiled.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  What you have just read is fiction based on historical fact. When it comes to the truth about the causes of and the enormous toll taken by the War of the Triple Alliance, also known as the Paraguayan War, reports that purport to be factual differ wildly. This is especially true as it relates to whether Francisco Solano López undertook a defensive or offensive position in engaging in the war and about the role Eliza Lynch may have played in spurring him on. The best source in English I have found to make sense of it all is the balanced and masterful To the Bitter End by Chris Leuchars. No matter what source one consults, however, one fact is universally clear: the war devastated the Paraguayan nation and caused unspeakable hardship among its generally docile and peaceable people.

  Seldom has aught more impressive been presented to the gaze of the world than this tragedy; this unflinching struggle maintained for so long a period against overwhelming odds, and to the very verge of racial annihilation.

  —Captain Richard F. Burton, Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay, London 1870

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you with all my heart to:

  David Clark, love of my life, huckleberry friend, intrepid fellow traveler, who drove a rented car all over Paraguay alone with a woman who couldn’t speak Spanish. Kerry Ann King, my beautiful daughter, who inspires me always with a clear image of what a strong woman looks like. Steve Strobach, who first told me about the War of the Triple Alliance and its aftermath and stunned me with the story. I owe my interest in South American history to him and his lovely wife, Naty Reyes. Toni Plummer, sensitive, supportive editor, par excellence, who treats my work with such respect that she inspires me to do better. Adrienne Rosado, my astute agent and champion of my work. Robert Knightly and Kaylie Jones, fellow writers who are always generous with tremendously helpful advice. Jay Barksdale and the staff of the New York Public Library Research Division, the most amazing and beautiful place to research and write. Support your local library!

  ALSO BY ANNAMARIA ALFIERI

  City of Silver

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Annamaria Alfieri’s first novel, City of Silver, was named one of the best debut mysteries of the year by Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. She is president of the New York chapter of Mystery Writers of America and lives in New York City.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  INVISIBLE COUNTRY. Copyright © 2012 by Annamaria Alfieri. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Cover design and illustration by Joel Nakamura

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Alfieri, Annamaria.

  Invisible country: a mystery / Annamaria Alfieri.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Thomas Dunne book.”

  ISBN 978-1-250-00453-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-01496-2 (e-book)

  1. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 2. Paraguay—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3601.L3597I58 2012

  813'.6—dc23

  2012005479

  eISBN 9781250014962

  First Edition: July 2012