by Anne Enright
‘And that I grew from a cutting, sent over by Mme Lynch.’
Eliza spent her time these days crusading for the troops. She held grand soirées, at which she stood, taking the ladies’ jewellery personally, at the door. ‘Gold into guns,’ she said, ‘gold into guns’, and the women went into the ball as though on their way to bed, reaching in a somnolent way to undo the clasps at their wrists and ears and necks.
And still she had time to grow a few lavender bushes, it seemed. Stewart had heard of this slippings and samplers conversation she held with Whytehead across town; a traffic of chutneys and jams, umbrellas for the sun and galoshes for the rain; small comforts such as sisters might send, which were as intimate a sign as might be seen of a nation’s grateful solicitation. Eliza Lynch was Paraguay. She had produced, for the honour of the country, three living sons. She was also, since López had deeded his lands to her, one of the richest women alive. And she gave Whytehead dried seedpods she had cut with her own hands and laid in her own wicker basket. Which made it all worthwhile.
‘And how is Il Mariscal?’
‘In excellent health,’ said his doctor. ‘Excellent.’
‘Good. Good. His catarrh?’
‘Greatly improved.’
‘Thank God.’
They stared at Eliza’s lavender bush with gathering regret. The fact was that it was hard for a gentleman (or what passed for a gentleman in Paraguay) to apply himself to the wheel of History when the driver of the Juggernaut was a tyrant like López. Not to mention the slaves toiling at the ropes. Whytehead’s miners worked in chains and it disturbed him just to think about it. To use men so degraded, you needed finer blood – blood that flowed somewhere between blue and pitch-black; blood that was not particularly stirred by the sight of green velvet curtains, or even by a framed portrait of The Queen at Balmoral, seated on her horse Fairy.
At the side of the house, they leaned on a very British fence to admire Whytehead’s best horse; a big-hearted, gorgeous colorado who galloped at the sight of them, then stood, trembling, and would not approach.
‘The glory of his nostrils is terrible,’ said Whytehead and, when Stewart made no attempt to call the verse, he said, ‘The horse. Job: 39.’
‘Ah,’ said Stewart.
‘He saith among the trumpets Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.’
Feeling pursued, Stewart pushed back from the fence rail and turned to the house. Whytehead moved with him. He lapsed into an easy tone, as though talking to an intimate; as though talking to someone who quite liked him.
‘I had an idling idea of Israel somewhere hereabouts,’ he said. ‘When I was on that boat. That terrible journey by sea. I was thinking – well I was thinking of how many tons per mile of track, of course, but also, you know, of a lost tribe. Or some Arcadia.’
‘And all is Arcadian here,’ said Stewart, hopelessly charitable, pulled into it by the sudden knowledge that the man he was talking to was going to die. And what of that? he thought. So do we all.
‘Yes. It has everything,’ said Whytehead. ‘Except elephants.’
After Whytehead died the Arsenal would collapse and there would be no more guns. It occurred to Stewart, looking at this man’s nervous, disrupted face, that his own death had just moved a notch closer. How does that feel, Doctor? And because he knew they had come to the truth of it now, Whytehead stopped and turned.
‘I went to the office of the Minister of War, yesterday,’ he said. ‘When I got there, I was asked to wait at the gate. In the sun. Of course I did not wait. I have a hundred things to do. I am not a waiting man. But when I wrote to complain of the guard’s impudence, he sent me this.’
Stewart took the piece of paper and scanned it from ‘Your excessive sensitiveness’ to the scratchy signature at the end. Benigno López. The wretched brother. The only surprise was that he could write.
‘You must rise above it,’ he said.
‘I cannot rise above it. Any of it. I was not built to rise.’
‘Then for God’s sake sink. Flatter the man a little.’
‘I don’t know how.’
This was true. Whytehead could flatter neither rich nor poor. He thought it democratic. Stewart thought it merely small. Which is why he would survive this country, Stewart thought, and Whytehead would not. Skinner treated him for a looseness of the bowel, Fox for cervical rheumatism, and now, Stewart for a hole in the hand. No one however could cure him of his dignity.
He suffered, under Fox, a daily morphine injection, in the neck. Perhaps it was this that made him stop, or turn, or sit down without warning. Or, as he did now, lie down entirely on the grass. Stewart sat beside him, close by his head. He found the arrangement uncomfortably erotic.
‘But O for the touch of a vanished hand,’ said Whytehead. ‘And the sound of a voice that is still.’
For a while, one man watched the sky and the other the distant trees.
‘I used to hit my sisters,’ said Whytehead, dreamily. ‘Quite hard. I don’t regret it in the least. It is an odd thing for a man to worry about. Isn’t it? But I worry about it now, all the time. And who was that boy, anyway? I am not entirely sure if that boy was me.’
He pushed himself up on one arm, and turned to look at Stewart.
‘The boy on whose actions I will be judged.’
‘And you think we will be judged?’ said Stewart.
‘I am sure of it.’
‘Harshly? I mean.’
‘There is only one way.’
‘I am very taken, recently,’ Stewart ventured, ‘by the idea of a compassionate God.’
Whytehead laughed.
Stewart walked back along The Path Where My Kisses Eat Your Mouth. He wished he knew what joined him to this man. Race was the least of it. Every time the threads of their lives crossed, they snarled into a knot. No wonder they avoided each other. Or repelled each other, rather, like magnets – if one or the other turned, even slightly, they swung around and were stuck fast.
They were also rivals in business, of course. López, who liked a foreign bank account, afforded them the same easy deal, though Whytehead was doing rather better out of it than he was. Money, thought Stewart, it was always the money that smothered a man’s heart.
It was the money that maddened them now, the better sort of British man trapped in Asunción, or working down the railway line in the huge military camp at Léon. As the war trickled on, somewhere in the Mato Grosso to the north or Corrientes to the south, their pay was changed from gold to silver and then to paper, until it was hard to tell if they were paid at all. Still, they held on. If anyone were to funk, it would be late at night after too much to drink with something blurted and wrong – the chances a chap had of making it overland to Buenos Aires, for example, or whether López was ‘sound’, or who the war was against, anyway. And Stewart, being sober, would sit in a corner, silently answering each in disgust that, No, a chap had no chance of making it to Buenos Aires, since the Brazilians held the river, and, No, López was not ‘sound’, he went to the wrong sort of school, don’t you know, and finally that the war was against everyone. Of course it was – it was a war.
He made his way home from such gatherings shouting things out in his head. This is a man, he wanted to say loudly, who has no access to the sea. He is like a rat in a bag.
But more than that, this was a man who never read his Homer; he does not realise that wars are things you wage one at a time, so his war is gradually, inevitably, against everyone – if there is a problem in the Oriental Republic let us annex a bit of Brazil. Let us send our armies across Corrientes, which is now the Argentine. And so on, until the three of them, so recently a bundle of jostling provinces, sign a pact against you; three nations: Uruguay, The Argentine Republic, The Empire of Brazil – all sworn to the destruction of Francisco Solano López.
But more than that again – this is a war that is waged at home, where a man might be shot, for no reason you co
uld tell, right here in Asunción. A man might be shot as you made your way home for afternoon tea. This war was everywhere, like air. It was waged in the silent heart and the silent mouth of the Indian. It was fought for ‘Paraguay’. Which was to say, for nothing at all. By British standards, López was quite mad.
But Stewart liked the man; he thought he was quite perfectly himself. He liked his intelligence, which was considerable. And, as he walked home during those early nights of the war, he thought about feeding his animal López with this fact or that. What Cochelet said, for example, what Thompson inferred about the competency of his brother Benigno to construct a defence for the camp at Léon, what Benigno muttered about his friend Eliza Lynch. He might just get tired, some day, of all these drunks, and let slip a word or two in his Master’s furry ear.
By the time he reached his own door these thoughts of loyalty and betrayal had fused into the single desire for a drink. There was nothing so tedious as this reduction. Once or twice a month, Stewart suffered a craving. He craved the immoral act. He raged against the unfairness of his life; knew he deserved something by way of succour or revenge, something small and poisonous. Something filthy. Or harmless. A nip of brandy, perhaps.
He knew why he hated these men, Benigno López, Thompson and the rest. It was because he wanted to pull the glass they were drinking from away from their lips. But he did not touch the glass and he would not betray the men. He walked. From midnight till, say, three o’clock, he tramped the streets and on to the country roads. He knew that he would always be shut out, now, that this was the nature of it, and so he took pleasure in the darkness and solace from the sleepers he passed; animals or men. He stopped to look at them as they twitched and sighed; reaching, chasing, moving their lips – wanting and having, wanting and not having, wanting and finally getting, all night long.
It was on one of his ‘nocturnal peregrinations’ that he met, and kissed, Eliza Lynch. Or thought he kissed her. Or no, did actually kiss her. Did something, anyway, for which you might use the word ‘kiss’. He also felt – and he was convinced of this – a considerable wetness between her legs. At least, that is what he thought about, afterwards, though he did not, how could he? stoop and lift her skirt, there in the street. He touched her, yes. He touched her, but not so intimately. And it was not the leap his mind took that worried him so much as where it landed – this liquid shock; this symptom of disorder, whether genital or mental, that shamed the doctor in him – mocked as he already was by the desire this too-late encounter provoked, the years it had taken his hand to travel so far into the madness that was Eliza Lynch. He was rendered stupid by it – by a heat that started above his knees and trembled to a fluttering apex under his ribs. The feeling was not simply anatomical – although it was also overwhelmingly so. If it were just a question of the body, he thought later, then at least he would have known where to aim the thing, instead of this opening, heaving urge to be inside, outside, and all the way through: to be over, under and between Eliza Lynch.
But it was also a question of the body. It happened in the dark. But, whatever it was, it did happen. Let us call it a kiss. It was given, or taken, when the war was still just an idea that was being played out to the north and west of them. When Stewart’s hospital cots were occupied by broken legs and the occasional fever. It was early June. The brink of things. It was the night before the main army, and half the city with it, decamped down-river to the fort at Humaitá.
Stewart came back to Asunción that night to collect some things; among them, a last sight of his wife. He was not expected, and made his way from the new railway station on foot. After the camp, the walls of the houses were particularly blank, and female and domestic. It was hard to say if anyone slept. There was the sound of scrabbling as treasures were hidden under floorboards, the muffled sound, or so Stewart imagined, of children being conceived and tears shed. Also disappointment, the distant mewling of women who looked at what they were about to lose and cried that it was never that much, anyway. When Stewart faced his own door he knew exactly what lay behind it. He thought, with a shock, that he was in a war now, that he might be killed, and if he were killed it would be for this: his bickering wife, his senile father-in-law, his home, Paraguay.
And so he started to walk. He chose the straight road because the night was dark and he did not pause until he found himself beyond the gates of the cemetery at La Recoleta, where he saw a woman, palely dressed, walking, as he walked, along the side of the road.
They might have been fugitives. She had no horse, no servant that Stewart could see. And he thought that this is what ghosts were – figures who have nothing, who are always walking away. The moon was high and the smooth sheen of her hair awoke in him a kind of dread. He did not want her to turn around. He did not want to see whatever look was on her face, now: some mute and terrible appeal, or an entirely usual expression, made hideous and slow. Was Eliza dead? It was years since he had seen her like this – ever since she became a kind of national Thing, Eliza was never alone.
She was alone now. She walked the road ahead of him on the same side, reaching and passing each in a row of young cypress trees. For a while he did not approach, but matched his pace to her dreamy tread; and although she did not speed or slacken, he knew that she sensed him behind her in the night. She was alive, then. She was more than alive. He could feel her thoughts seeking him out, as his thoughts played at her back. He would have called out to reassure her but there was, he found, a keen, and unexpected, pleasure in keeping silent. And so he matched her, step for step, shortening his stride by so much to keep the gap precise – his pace ever more mincing and predatory, until the moment lapsed and she was no longer afraid.
She turned. Stewart had expected a girl to turn, but it was a woman who faced him, and the greeting she gave might have been offered in any drawing room: it built walls around her and ignored the night.
‘Doctor Stewart,’ she said.
‘My dear Madame Lynch.’
The distance between them made him feel foolish, now that he had to cross it.
‘You will see me home?’ she said.
‘Indeed, it is very late.’
‘Thank you.’
She turned and took his elbow – so neatly, they might have been stepping out to dance. But Stewart found that he could not accompany her and there was a little, frightful awkwardness as she pulled at his arm, like a mother might drag at a schoolboy who balks on the road.
He had, he discovered, something to tell her.
‘Eliza,’ he said.
He wanted to tell her how she was seen, these days. He wanted to warn her of what she might become.
She was, in the first instance, more beautiful. Stewart was at the age when men become addicted to youth, so Eliza’s increasing, and increasingly new, beauty was a mystery to him. She was, by general standards, old. She was also fussy. She came into his medical tents with a great show of entourage and ladies, and you might think the men would find it an irritation, but the truth was that her face was a solace to them, her smile a balm, and the few words she uttered (to Stewart’s sometime annoyance) a cure in themselves. And it was not just the gullible and the forgotten who felt the force of it. When she entered a room – it might be some bare room in the camp at Léon – when the men scraped their chairs back and stood, it was more than courtesy that moved them, it was the knowledge that, unlike the wives-daughters-sisters-camp girls, she understood the gravity of their great enterprise, and that, in some lovely, easy way, she belonged to them all. The most beautiful woman in the world.
So this was the first thing that Stewart had to tell Eliza, in the incongruous dark, by the side of the road – that she was beautiful. The second thing he had to tell her was that she was evil, too.
It was not a word he might casually use, but the war was exciting as religion to him now, and it was vital to keep López pure. Il Mariscal slapped his crop against his boots, he stalked, he was everywhere; and when the band played ‘La Palom
ita’, he looked twice as large and very fine. And in his stalking, slapping way, he might have a man whipped, or a man shot. He might have late dinners, which a woman would be wise not to attend. This is what Stewart wanted to say: that Eliza must strike with her Great Friend an attitude – such a one as you would find, indeed, on an old vase. She might fall on her knees. She might soothe. She might plead. But she must stay away from early whippings and late dinners. And she must never, ever whisper in his ear.
As he had seen her do, quite recently, as they stood on the dais at Cerro Léon. It was during a grand parade. She whispered, he laughed; then they both turned back to watch as men marched past on their way to the grave. Eliza’s face, without changing at all, had become implacable, somehow, or greedy. Or hideously serene. She had gone from Angel of Mercy to Angel of Death, without a blink of her lovely eye.
Was it too late to turn back? Was there any other way for her to go? Stewart wished that López would marry her – he almost longed for it. He felt, in the most foolish part of himself, that there might be something this woman could do – a bedroom something that their beautiful Eliza might say to their impetuous Mariscal that would stop it all, the torment and horror that was about to descend on them. Because it was the fate of angels, was it not, to intercede?
And now here she was, her ordinary flesh beside him on the roadside, and Stewart her protector. She was smiling at him, after pulling at his arm and letting it drop. He had just said her name.
‘Eliza.’
‘Yes?’ she said, and took his elbow again, quite patient and sisterly.
‘Be careful,’ he said. And this time he walked on with her, because, pathetically, he did not know what else to say.
‘I am always careful,’ she said (evil, quite evil) and the toes of her satin shoes slipped, one after the other, out from under her dress and on to the grit of the road.