by Lily Tuck
After seven months!—as he himself was later to write in his journal—Frederick Masterman was finally released from prison. He was as thin and as pale as a corpse. His hair, which had turned gray and had not been cut for all this time, hung to his shoulders, his beard was long and tangled. His eyes appeared unnaturally large, the pupils, used only to dark, were hugely dilated. Alone and barely able to walk by himself—his servant, Tomàs, had not been advised of his release—and squinting at the unaccustomed light of dusk, he slowly made his way to the home of the nearest Englishman he knew, Mr. Taylor, the stonemason.
Alonzo Taylor was at supper with his two daughters and his wife—since the war had begun, Mrs. Taylor had decided to leave her bedroom, comb her hair, and take more interest in life.
“More tea, dear?” Mrs. Taylor held up the teapot and was asking her husband when there was a knock on the door.
“Go and see who it is, Elizabeth,” she also told one of her daughters.
When Elizabeth opened the front door and saw Frederick Masterman, she started to scream and her father got up from the table so quickly he knocked over his teacup.
Standing protectively in front of his daughter and blocking the door, Alonzo Taylor did not recognize him either. “Que quiere usted, Señor?” he asked Frederick Masterman.
Inside Inocencia’s aviary, sitting at his table with the same little mean green parrot on top of his head, Dr. Eberhardt was listing the parrots according to their sex. Inocencia had insisted on this. More important to Dr. Eberhardt—he had tried to tell Inocencia but she did not listen to him, she claimed the parrots were molting—was the general state of the parrots’ health. The parrots were pulling out their breast feathers—the aviary floor was littered with red, blue, green, yellow feathers. A lot of parrots had abscesses on their mandibles and could not eat properly, others had scaly feet and diarrhea. One poor white-fronted parrot whose nails were bleeding could not perch properly and repeatedly fell down on to the aviary floor. When Dr. Eberhardt caught sight of his favorite parrot, the big hyacinth macaw, he wanted to weep. The big hyacinth macaw’s breast was plucked bald and the rest of his usually brilliant feathers were a dull faded blue.
Tea? Profesor, tea? one of the parrots screamed, mimicking his mistress, but Inocencia did not come in and ask, “Dulce, Profesor?” the way she usually did. The truth was that, this time, Dr. Eberhardt would have very much liked to have had some tea with plenty of sugar in it and perhaps something sweet to eat as well. He was old and lived alone in a small house in Asunción, with only one servant—he no longer owned a horse—and although he had managed to escape Franco’s notice and was left in peace, his life, now that Paraguay was at war, was hard. Like Inocencia’s parrots, Dr. Eberhardt did not have enough to eat.
Silly, selfish Inocencia! And what had she said? Male parrots were larger and had flat heads and females had round ones—bah! Dr. Eberhardt shook his own head and the mean little green parrot on top of it had to tighten his grip; and what else had the woman said to him?—males tended to sit up on their perches while females sat with their feet spread farther apart on account of the position of their hipbones—bah! What did Inocencia know about hipbones? Hers were hidden under layers of fat. And males, she also told him, were louder—she herself was nearly shouting when she said this—and females tended to bite more. He could hardly believe the ignorance of the woman! Old wives’ tales, Dr. Eberhardt wanted to tell her.
Holding a squawking yellow-naped Amazon upside down, Dr. Eberhardt counted the red feathers in the parrot’s speculum. Males, he knew, normally had five, females only four. This male—Dr. Eberhardt had good reason to believe the parrot was a male—however, had four, the reason perhaps the parrot had been unable to attract a mate. Shrugging his shoulders, Dr. Eberhardt wrote female in his notebook. Next he picked up a blue-fronted parrot and counted five red feathers in his speculum—the same theory applied to this species—and, in a pique, Dr. Eberhardt again wrote down female.
Tea? Profesor, tea? This time the parrot nearly fooled Dr. Eberhardt, making him swallow hard and making tears spring to his eyes—he could almost taste the sweetened tea. More than ever, Dr. Eberhardt was determined to speak to Inocencia. She had only to take one look at the hyacinth macaw to see for herself that the poor bird had lost half his lovely blue feathers and to see that the poor bird was starving to death.
Every evening before dinner, Ella looked in on her horse, Mathilde—she did not trust the stable boy. Speaking softly so as not to alarm the horse, she opened the stall door and slipped in. After making sure the straw on the floor was clean, the bucket filled with fresh water, Ella put her arms around the horse’s neck and rested her head against Mathilde’s broad gray shoulder. She stroked Mathilde’s head, running her hands down the slightly dished profile, the large flaring nostrils until she reached under the small velvety muzzle, letting the horse nuzzle her hand. “My darling,” Ella said to the horse, “my dear, my pretty.” One time, reaching into her pocket for sugar, she found an old letter from Princess Mathilde. “From your namesake,” she said to the horse, as smiling, she started to read the letter out loud: “Let me think what you have missed this season—Augier’s Le Mariage d’Olympe, the revival of Gautier’s Giselle, a mandolin concert by Velati—I have never heard anyone quite like him and to think that he is blind!” The crease in the paper made the writing illegible, Ella had to skip a line—“such a stream of people have come to visit me at the rue de Courcelles: the Duc de Brabant, the King of Portugal, the Prince of Orange and I don’t know who else. Of course the Goncourt brothers always come with their sharpened pencils. I am very fond of them both but I admit that sometimes I find their endless scribbling a little tiresome as well as not always accurate. The new faces are Hippolyte Taine and Louis Pasteur, a very pleasant and intelligent man who is a scientist….” Outside darkness was falling and Ella was vaguely aware of the noisy croaking of frogs—some nights the frogs sounded like hammers hitting anvils—but by now Ella was accustomed to all kinds of sounds, including the sound of gunfire. In the semidarkness of the stall, she folded Princess Mathide’s letter and put it back in her pocket. Then, pressing up against the warm and solid weight of Mathilde, she inhaled the smell of fresh grass and horse and breathed deeply. Before leaving, she found the lump of sugar—each day sugar was harder to find—and with a final caress, gave it to the horse.
Charles Washburn was the one responsible for Frederick Masterman’s release from prison. He had convinced the Paraguayan authorities for personal reasons. Frederick Masterman was the only European doctor left in Asunción and he had no choice (the truth was Charles Washburn did not much like Frederick Masterman, he thought him queer—he was single and always off on his own examining insects); he wanted him to deliver his wife’s child. Not only did Mrs. Washburn have difficulty conceiving, there were signs she would have difficulty giving birth. To make sure of Frederick Masterman’s presence, Charles Washburn invited him to live with him and his wife at the American Legation and, to legitimize his position, Charles Washburn officially made Frederick Masterman surgeon to the legation.
Located on Plaza Vieja, the American Legation in Asunción was an old Spanish-style house. It was so large it occupied one side of the square; it had a tiled roof and thick stucco walls decorated with pilasters; the rooms and doorways were so high and wide a horse and rider could easily ride through them. The house was built around a large courtyard with a fountain in the middle that was surrounded by flower beds, and it was there that Frederick Masterman spent most of his days recovering from his ordeal in prison. He was there examining a spider web that stretched between a Cape jasmine and a bunch of orange trees, a distance of nearly twenty feet, when Mrs. Washburn’s maid came to fetch him. Mrs. Washburn’s water had broken.
The birth of the baby took three days. On the third day, although in intense labor, Mrs. Washburn’s cervix was still not fully dilated and Frederick Masterman knew enough about childbirth to be afraid that if the situation co
ntinued, he would have to perform a cesarean. He was sweating profusely in the closed-up bedroom; the shutters were shut and the servants kept lighting candles and throwing sickeningly sweet rose water onto the floor. Mrs. Washburn’s screams, he guessed, despite the thick stucco walls, could be heard out in the street. (The first day of labor, Mrs. Washburn’s dog, at her request, had stayed in the room but, by the afternoon, the dog’s incessant barking had gotten on Frederick Masterman’s nerves and he had the dog sent out—the dog had had to be dragged out forcibly, snapping and biting.) And what was he to do? Ill equipped, he did not have obstetrical forceps and, except for spirits, he had no anesthetics. Also, he was used to taking care of men, most of them soldiers, and although he had learned to amputate arms and legs, remove bullets and shrapnel, stitch up wounds, he had never before in his life performed such an operation. The grim alternative, which he hardly dared to contemplate, was to perform a craniotomy—he had never done that either—which meant destroying the fetal skull with scissors and crochets, then extracting the fetus piecemeal, but he did not think he had the stomach for that. Better to cut Mrs. Washburn right above the pubic hair line, then cut the stomach muscles and wall, then the uterus. As Frederick Masterman was preparing for the task, the hand holding the scalpel began to shake so hard all of a sudden he was afraid he would drop it, and Mrs. Washburn, who may have caught sight of the scalpel or merely the metal flash of it—by then she was nearly delirious with exhaustion and pain—let out a tremendous scream and, at the same time, a tremendous push and out came her baby.
Ella was right, Lázaro Alcántara had lied, he was only fifteen years old. He had also lied about his family—his mother was not German but Guaraní and he did not know who his father was—and he may or may not have lied about his dream to go to Paris to study architecture and build the same kind of buildings in Paraguay that he had seen in books about France. He did not in fact lie but told the truth about having seen the books about France, along with books about Hungary, since Lázaro Alcántara was Colonel von Wisner’s lover.
The victory at Curupayty made General Diaz euphoric and imprudent. The commander in chief also felt he was impervious to danger and he rode around the camp at all hours of the day and night, often without an escort, often unarmed. On a clear moonlit night, against his aides-decamp’s advice, he insisted on getting into a canoe and going fishing in the river. The canoe was hit by a torpedo—probably one of the homemade glass capsules—and capsized. Wounded, General Diaz could not swim and his aides had to rescue him and bring him back to shore. Then Dr. Stewart had to amputate his leg. The leg—General Diaz had insisted on keeping it—once the cut on it was soldered shut, was placed in a little coffin of its own right next to his bed. Ella saw it when she went to the hospital to visit General Diaz; the leg was dressed in a black boot and in a bloodstained white trouser leg with a gold stripe down its side. But a few days later, General Diaz died.
Thirteen
GRAN CHACO
The day Ella and Padre Fidel Maiz rode to the village of Caacupé, the sky turned first purple, then black, before it began to hail. The wind drove a stand of acacia and mimosa trees along the road nearly to the ground. Dismounting, Ella and Padre Fidel Maiz sought shelter inside a small hut; outside streaks of lightning flashed almost continuously, lighting up the countryside.
“A sign,” Padre Fidel Maiz, who served as Franco’s chaplain, shouted over the noise of the thunder and hail hitting the hut roof. He crossed himself. He was sweating. “We should never have come,” he also said.
Earlier in the century, a woman from that village had made a vow that if her daughter who was sick got well, she would give the Virgin all her jewelry; the daughter did get well and the woman kept her promise. Word spread and soon mothers with sick children from all over Paraguay made the pilgrimage to Caacupé.
“Is it true, Father, that in the eyes of God, glass beads and precious stones have the same value?” Ella shouted back. She had not come to Caacupé on a pilgrimage but to replace the jewels with cheap beads. A statue in the village church known as the Virgin of Caacupé was said to be covered from head to toe in precious jewelry. The statue’s head was heavy with crowns and tiaras, her neck with pendants and pearl necklaces, her arms, from shoulders to wrists, with gold and silver bracelets, on each finger several rings. Once before the women of Paraguay had been forced to donate their jewelry to Franco as a means of carrying on the war, Ella wanted to get still more.
“The women sacrificed their jewelry to the Virgin of Caacupé as a symbol of faith,” Padre Fidel Maiz replied.
“Nevertheless, in the eyes of God, it is the spiritual, not the material, that matters,” Ella persisted.
14 JUNE 1867
What a joy to be back home in Obispo Cue, what a joy to have a bath, to sleep in a proper bed with clean linen sheets, and to see the children! Enrique has grown almost two inches since I last saw him. He is turning into quite a handsome little boy. All he can talk about is how he can hardly wait for the velocipede his father has ordered especially for him from Paris to arrive. Carlos Honorio announced that he plans to be a circus-animal trainer when he grows up and he refuses to be parted from a little chinchilla he carries around in his pocket. Leopoldo claims he knows how to read and write! Only Federico seems a little subdued—the boy is too sensitive but what am I to do? He asked me if I thought Maria Oliva was looking down at us from heaven. Certainly, I answered him, and she is holding Corinna Adelaida in her arms. He and I looked through the bag of jewelry I brought back from Caacupé—I was especially tempted by a black pearl ring which fit my finger perfectly but I know where my duty lies!
I found no letters, a huge disappointment, as I had hoped to hear from Princess Mathilde. When I questioned my mayor domo, he answered the standard: “Non sé nada”—it is hopeless to try to get these people to speak if they are afraid. I also heard the news that Mr. Masterman has been in prison; I sincerely hope he did not have to suffer too greatly, poor man. Ever since he pulled out Franco’s abscessed tooth, I have felt nothing but gratitude for him although I am well aware that he has a reputation for being a bit odd, a bit of an eccentric, but that is not a concern of mine. Apparently he is staying at the American Legation along with an American whose unreliable reputation precedes him, a Mr. Manlove. Rumor has it that he is a spy sent by the Brazilians and I was told by no other than Matias Sanabria himself that he is waiting for the moment when Mr. Manlove abandons the safe haven provided by the legation to arrest him. Under the circumstances, I agree, one cannot be too cautious. Mrs. Washburn, I was also told, finally gave birth to her baby, a girl. If I have a moment, I will pay her a call. I must not forget to go and thank Monsieur Lasserre, who kindly brought over a case of Château Issan. And bless her heart! Rosaria baked me a loaf of chipa. Poor Doña Isidora has not once stopped weeping since she heard the news of her husband’s death. I do not have the heart to tell her about the general’s leg.
One last thing, when I looked out of my window this morning, even though it is midwinter, I saw Doña Iñes, on her hands and knees in the garden, weeding. At first, I mistook her for one of my gardeners. I must speak to her. She could go back as far as Buenos Ayres with Mr. Gould on the H.M.S. Dotterel.
Grossly overweight, Mr. Gould, the secretary of the British Legation in Buenos Ayres, needed several hands to help him disembark from the H.M.S. Dotterel and proceed on foot to Franco’s headquarters at Humaitá. (One of the hands was Fulgencio’s, he had to push Mr. Gould up the steep path while another man pulled.) Mr. Gould’s mission was to investigate reports that some of his countrymen, their contracts having long ago expired, were being detained against their will and were desirous to leave Paraguay.
“On the contrary,” Franco denied Mr. Gould’s allegations at the same time as he offered him chocolates, “I have always shown particular partiality toward the Englishmen in my employ and have conferred great benefits on them—here, may I offer you some chocolate truffles that just now arrived from Franc
e. In my opinion, the very best.” Franco was lying, the chocolates were from Bolivia. “Secondly,” he continued, “as you must understand due to the circumstances, I cannot now dispense with the services of these gentlemen or allow any foreigners to leave the country—delicious, aren’t they? I admit I too have a terrible weakness for chocolates. Please, help yourself, there is plenty where these came from,” Franco said, passing Mr. Gould the box again. “Lastly, I assure you that none of your British subjects have the slightest cause for complaint. To the best of my knowledge and you have my word on this—by all means, Mr. Gould, don’t be bashful, have another chocolate truffle—all the Englishmen here are quite content and no one has ever voiced any desire to leave Paraguay.”
Mr. Gould was not convinced. Four days later, after he had recovered from an attack of vomiting and diarrhea so violent that Dr. Stewart, Franco’s personal physician, had to be called in to attend to him—had he been poisoned? Mr. Gould could not help but wonder—he was finally able to sit up without feeling dizzy and nauseated and write to Mr. Mathew Buckley, British minister plenipotentiary to the Argentine: “Paraguay has for many years past almost exclusively employed Englishmen. The medical service of its army is entrusted to four English surgeons and an English apothecary.”
Mr. Gould had to stop writing for a moment to again use the toilet. When he returned, he finished his letter: