by Anne Enright
Venancia paused to swallow. And as she began to describe the dishes that were set in front of them, Stewart remembered another girl on the Tacuarí, dreaming of food. He remembered Eliza at nineteen, whining for melons. He remembered her at table, trying to eat in a casual way; and how she looked at the birds on the water and the animals on the bank. ‘Cooked,’ said her eyes to a snowy breasted egret. ‘Roasted,’ to a sleeping tapir. And to a leaping fish, ‘Grilled, with a sauce meunière.’
‘Truffled turkey,’ said Venancia. ‘Eggs à la neige, pepper-cured ham, smoked eels.’ As each was set down, a major-domo murmured the name and origin of the dish. The eels were from Russia, the ham from Xeriga, the foie gras from Strasbourg. There were also things that pretended to be from Europe but probably weren’t – a stuffed and larded ‘pike’, whose face had a more benign and local cast, patridge wings that looked just like tinamu, though the sauce of chestnut cream smelled real. There were sweetbreads with crayfish sauce, a fresh tunny, plates of roe. There was champagne and claret and, for the fainter-hearted, syllabub, negus and punch. There were leather buckets lined with ice, which held canteens of strawberry juice and pineapple juice, there were bottles of Montbello water for the more dyspeptic. The dishes kept coming, veal cooked with fat bacon in its own gravy, miraculous early peas, all kinds of pastry, Poulet Marengo, a suckling pig. One enormous platter contained a heap of asparagus, sown, so the major-domo said, on the deck of a ship in a French port and nurtured on the voyage out (they like salted earth, as Mme Cochelet later explained), through the forced spring of the Atlantic passage, so that when they arrived in the high summer of Asunción the spears showed white at the roots. Ripe. The effect on Mme Cochelet of this green mound was so marked that the ladies on either side of her held her arms. Whether to contain a faint, or contain her greed – either way, it was clear to all of them that Mme Cochelet must hold her resolve, or they would all be exposed – to what they could not say, but Mme Lynch was approaching the table now to preside over what was, after all, her picnic, and those closest to her shrank, quite naturally, away. Fortunately (at least it seemed fortunate at the time), at the head of the table was a mixed contingent of Cochelet-Cordals, and they showed their mettle by closing ranks seconds before La Lincha reached the ‘groaning board’.
Mme Lynch made an attempt to get through, but her adversaries shifted quite easily to prevent her. So she stood and watched their backs as the women, flushed with excitement, faced their next big challenge – how would they get the dishes served? Mme Cochelet decided for all of them. She picked up a plate in her own hands and gestured to the ‘major-domo’ who held a trembling spoon.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
The asparagus was about to touch her plate, the hollandaise, indeed, was dripping on to the cool Sèvres glaze, when Mme Lynch spoke. She did not raise her voice, but her tone was so clean and clear that everyone heard.
‘Miltón,’ she said (meaning the man with the spoon), ‘throw it overboard.’ Quick as a flash, the wild little Indian flipped the implement over his shoulder; the asparagus flew in a wide arc through the air, separating into six slowly turning (or so it seemed) succulent spears, which disappeared one by one over the side. A second later, they heard the splish-splish-splash. The Indian cocked his head in a way that was almost amused and looked to La Lincha, who returned his look with perfect understanding and said,
‘All of it.’
And he clapped his hands. Slap-slap.
‘All right you sons of bitches,’ he said (in Guaraní, of course – which no lady ever affected to understand), ‘let’s get this stuff into the river.’ They elbowed their way through the circle of gasping women, one serving man to each dish – they bore the plates high over the guests’ heads, then swung them low as they ran, quite eagerly, to the side. Some threw the porcelain in for good measure and brushed their hands as though after a job well done. And then, to a man, they tumbled down a hatch. It was all gone, even the tablecloth. There was a slight scum on the river, of hollandaise sauce and sauce à la Soubise, but even that sank, in time.
It was funny, said Venancia, but on the plates the food looked so delicious – sinking through the water, it looked just like vomit. Not of course that she had run to the rail, to chase after it like a fool – though that was where Mme Cochelet found herself; shouting after a stupid vegetable, bawling at it, in full view. No, Venancia had stayed silent, and simply turned away. And that, she said, was the true story of the picnic. If he must be told.
Stewart knew it was anything but – the week after the women came home was one of the busiest he had known. He badgered her with tales of sunstroke, fits, the two miscarriages he had personally attended, and finally she admitted that the rest of the day had been … difficult.
After her grand gesture, Eliza had retired to the shady side of the boat. She stood for a while and looked out over the water. Then she gave the captain orders not to move, and sat down. She stayed sitting for ten hours. On the other side of the Tacuarí, women swooned at the excitement and were revived – to swoon again in the afternoon sun. Their dresses were stained, first by sweat, then by the fretful carelessness of heatstroke, and finally, sometimes, deliriously torn.
For a while, said Venancia, she did not know who she was.
If Stewart had looked into her eyes then, he would have seen that this girl knew more about herself now than she had ever wanted to. But the doctor in him needed to examine the scene – the different stages of the ladies’ distress: when did they realise this might not end? Did the women sit alone, or did they help each other as needs be? Did they fear for their lives? Did none of them seek to share Eliza’s shade? None, said Venancia, very firmly. As for the rest, she did not remember. It was exciting at first, and then boring, and then dreadful. At some stage, Mme Cochelet sang hymns, but they were in French, so no one joined in. It seemed that family members stuck together, though she could not be sure, there were some family fights, too. And what of Eliza, did she eat, in order to taunt them more? No, said Venancia, she sat and did not move. But she was in a certain condition, said Stewart, Venancia must think hard, she must remember.
‘I remember she did not eat,’ said Venancia. ‘I am not a complete fool.’ And then she started to weep. When Stewart went to comfort her she hit him away, and a terrible deep wail fetched up out of her as she clutched where (he could not help but note) her womb might one day swell.
‘And I will never eat asparagus now. I will never even taste it. Never! Never!’
At which, her ancient aunt appeared all at once and, with a black look, caught her by the waist and wheeled her, like a dancer, away.
After this, of course, the Dictator finally finished with all that dying, and simply died instead. And, of course, young López took one cursory look at the corpse before opening the old man’s will and declaring himself the heir. And, of course, no one else saw the will – there was no need for them to see it, as young López was, of course, not a liar. And so it rolled onwards, the convened congress, the unanimous vote, the inauguration ball. And the invitations to the ball were issued in the name of Eliza Lynch.
Stewart could not interest himself in the general female humiliation – he had a particular, private one of his own to inflict. He was to be wed. One week after young López became the only López, Stewart was made Surgeon General of the army, and the arrangements were made for the transfer, from her father’s house to his house, of the lovely Venancia Báez.
Perhaps the engagement had been too long. Stewart did not relish the idea of deflowering his pretty wife, much as he desired to so do. It occurred to him that she annoyed him a little. He thought already that the happiest time in his life was after he saw her for the first time, when he was caught between the child and the woman, neither of whom was in his arms. And indeed he never wavered from this version of the story of his life. The happiest he had ever been was when he was drunk with love, and her name was everything. Venancia Báez. Venancia Báez.
&
nbsp; On the morning when she would become Venancia Stewart (a name she could not even pronounce), the doctor took a medicinal shot of fine Speyside Scotch, specially imported for the marriage breakfast. By the time he married her, he was so drunk he looked sober again; and by early afternoon he was roaring.
Venancia did not cry. She smiled. She clapped her hands in childish delight when he fell over his own chair. And so, with all the considerable grace she could muster, she went, one more time, to her doom.
Of all people to accost, Stewart accosted Whytehead. He got him in a corner. He told him he was a machine, an automaton, a thing of levers and pulleys, and where, he asked, was the lever for his heart? Was it here? Or here? And he poked his fellow countryman in the chest and (nearly) in the crotch. He said, What of women, Whytehead? He said he had no appetite for them either, Whytehead was right, the whole business was enough to make you spew. Whytehead had the right idea, work hard and sleep on your front. Send the money home. The money, the money. Stewart had an aunt. Whytehead had three sisters and a mother still living, did he not? Thank God. Thank God they were all alive these women, so a man had something to do with his money.
Whytehead sat and did not move. He listened. He seemed to welcome Stewart’s words; he almost bathed in them. And the wedding guests, who had seen worse things in their time, slipped some whiskey into Venancia’s glass of punch and let the two ‘Inglese’ be.
‘We have not been friends,’ said Stewart, and he took Whytehead’s dry hand in his own. ‘We have not been friends as we should.’
They sat for a while in silence. ‘There will be a war,’ said Whytehead.
Stewart slumped. His eyeballs rolled bloodily up to view his new wife mingling bravely with the guests on the other side of the room.
‘I like them when they’re sick,’ he said.
‘Doctor Stewart,’ Whytehead murmured, to indicate that he need not say what was on his mind; he need not go on. But they both wanted him to continue. They looked away from each other, Stewart with a lurch of the head, Whytehead with a calm so intense it might have been a swoon.
He liked a woman with a good disease, Stewart said. Because they broke a man’s heart. And not only that – he liked his women as he liked his men, raw, pushed to their limit. In the body, that was where the truth of it was. Whytehead did not demur. He was waiting now, his face horribly blank.
‘That girl was sick enough. The maid. Did you know?’ Stewart finally said, and then he told Whytehead that she had died quietly in the end. But before the end was atrocious, he said, and before that again she had clung to him. For which Whytehead should be grateful, to have another man do his dirty work for him.
And his little surge of rage ebbed into love for the human being on the other side of the table. Tears came to his eyes and he stared fixedly for a while at a posy of flowers abandoned on the cloth.
‘Are you asking me to thank you?’ said Whytehead. At which he stood, collected his hat and gloves, wished Stewart the best of marriages, and left the room.
The River
Part 2
Veal
December 1854, Río Paraná
OUR DEAD SAILOR has begun to stink sweetly – so soon, in the heat. There are problems about the disposal, and so his remains lie on the doctor’s cot, where he died, while the doctor sleeps outside.
The boat was quiet all through his dying as the men were loath to wake him (from what?) with their fixing and banging, so the boiler is not yet mended. Now there is another stillness – the one that opens into the world from the mouth of a dead man. A widening in our hearts. The men are all restless, and large. They lumber about or sit, and every slight noise makes them turn and glare.
We do not move, as though to mark this spot in the midst of the flow. Perhaps his soul is still anchored here. Far beyond us – a mile, maybe more – the green fringe of the bank. Now and then there drifts over the water the vegetable smell of things slick and wet. Sometimes, a distant, settling whisper, as some tree gives way and falls, long dead.
They say the silence of the forest is a waiting silence, but I say these trees wait for nothing, neither do they mourn. They grow, that is all. And I feel myself growing with them. There is a pulse in my fingertips, and when I brush my dress, each line and whorl of them tells the silk and reads the pattern woven into its sheen.
Silence. The air moves and the smell of the sailor drifts until we are maddened by it. Francine soaks a cloth for me to hold over my mouth and nose, and my skin is raw from it. Foolish girl.
Señor López wanted to slide the dead man into the river this morning, naval fashion – but he suggested it in such a doubtful manner that no one felt obliged to obey. He faltered, and the men smiled as they turned away. Another day lost. Now, he is in a studied rage. The captain looks carefully blank. The work on the boiler goes on.
The doctor, slung outside his own cabin, dulls his nose with a medicinal flask and finally sleeps – but the smell must creep into his afternoon dreams, as it wafts into mine. Nothing happens except rot and bloat. I imagine the man’s stomach swelling, as mine swells. I imagine it might burst and dreadful things come slithering out.
It cannot be so bad. I should look into the cabin to see his calm, dead face: I would get comfort from the realness of it. I am tempted to sneak there just to see how ordinary he is; this man who enters us all now, we breathe him in, and gag.
He is mottled a little under the skin, purple and black, nothing worse I am sure. Or perhaps there is no colour yet, just a slight puffing; a sponginess where the flesh has started to rise. Of course, the doctor should have embalmed him a little, but the wretched man is too busy embalming himself.
This evening, Señor López wants distraction so I try to make up a table for bezique. Mr Whytehead still refuses to make four. I have seen him watching, and I know he loves the way the cards turn, but he cannot play with money, and the maid has none. Stewart flicks up his skirt tails to split them over a tiny chair, and gravely sits; the cards like little sweetie papers, fanned out in his big hands.
‘What is it to be?’ he says.
To spite Whytehead I say that instead of money we will bet stories, loser tells all.
‘Stories?’ he says; like this was a worse thing to lose even, than money. And I tell him to be very quiet and give Francine whatever assistance she might require. So we progress. He leans over the maid’s shoulder, very judicious and nice, while Stewart breathes a lot, at my side.
In the event it is the maid who loses. I would spare her the embarrassment of it, but my dear friend is in an expansive mood. So she settles herself quite prettily on the edge of her chair, and half-turns her face away. Her story is kept to a modest length, but it is not a woman’s tale, at least not the way I would measure such things. If she wants to be loved, she has misjudged. Or perhaps she has judged too well. In this hot room she talks about the cold and I smell the dead sailor on her breath, though I have drenched all our cushions with eau de lilas.
The story is about her grandfather who served with Buonaparte. By the time Francine knew him, she says, he had already lost his fingers’ ends and the nose he carried over his dear smiling mouth was lacking by a full centimetre, maybe more. And so on, and in a similar vein, until we reach the Russian Campaign.
‘Somewhere in the middle of that vast land,’ she says (in a formal singsong tone), ‘he sat down on ground that was so cold it seemed warm again. He wanted to lean back and look at the sky, because those winter stars were more beautiful than any he had seen. And then, it seemed that he was lying down, with the shuffling feet of men passing him by. It was so delicious. “Remember this,” he used to say. “That death can be delicious too.” And the stars came lower until he thought that they were shining only on him.
‘He would have died there, quite happy, if a carriage had not stopped beside him. The man who got out was small, and he wore a cockade in his black hat. Can you guess it? He opened my grandfather’s coat and worked his hand inside, and “Why ar
e you robbing me?” said my grandfather, “when I have already given you my life?” Le Petit Caporal said nothing, but looked at the papers my grandfather had placed, for warmth, next to his heart. Then he said, “Estella. She has a pretty hand, don’t you think? And, see here, the violet she pressed for you, still blue against the page.” And the thought of his daughter, who is my mother, brought my grandfather to his feet – numb and blackened as they were, and wrapped in the skins of two Russian chickens. He stumbled on, leaving his trail of feathers on the snow and, when he thought to look for it, the carriage was already disappeared.’
Chickens, no less. I find the shoes as painful and mortifying as the story itself.
‘Do you think it is true?’ I say. ‘Or was it all a trick of the poor man’s mind?’
‘Well, yes,’ says Francine. ‘After a fashion.’ Certainly, when she was a child, she had looked at her grandfather with awe. The great Napoleon had saved him; what could be more true than that? Though perhaps he was just giving them all courage for the bitter future they faced, once Napoleon was gone.
My dear friend shifts in his chair. He is very moved.
‘So … Francine,’ he says. ‘I hope, after this, that you will always lose at cards,’ and he toasts her, and her mutilated grandfather, and le Petit Caporal, with his glass of Madeira. After which, none of us has the heart to return to the game.
*
The dead sailor turns over in my dreams and seems to call to me. ‘Dora! Dora!’ I wake in the middle of the night sick with him.
It is bright. There is a moon, and watery reflections dance on the walls until it is all about me, a river of broken light, rippling and breaking on the ceiling and on the bed and on my skin. I can not bear it, this flickering tide on my arms, the way my body disappears under it so that I am just another surface in the dark.