by Anne Enright
López ordered the piano abandoned there, and he had to give the order twice. His own son looked at him, and then jumped to. And when they had it down off the cart, two of his boy brigade folded the huge cloth with that folding dance you see women make, shepherds coming to kiss shepherdesses, over and back, over and across, and over again.
Eliza was in her carriage for this. She did not pretend to watch, but the horses started away just as soon as the piano was left on the grass. Stewart, who stayed to tend the survivors, was left looking at the thing, standing proud in a field full of bodies, silent or groaning. The temptation was too much for him. He lifted the lid and played her out. As the line of fleeing Paraguayans trickled over the far hills, Stewart let his ruined hands wander over the notes. He found he was playing ‘La Palomita’, as though there was no other tune the piano knew, so he drummed the same note for a while, to admonish it. And when he looked away for long enough – at the beautiful birds, for example, or the beautiful hills – he found an old tune wandering out of his hands. Something Scottish, he thought, although he could not remember the name.
When he caught up with them that night, López was impatient at the delay. His stools were yellow he said. They smelled of smoke. Stewart prescribed charcoal. He said, with a laugh, that at least there was plenty of that about – then realised, as he looked at López, that he had just very nearly died.
But he had not died. He had been given something to eat, and he had lain down. He watched the stars while his back sought and swooned into the hard Paraguayan earth, and he listened, as they all did, to the fight in the presidential tent.
They fought in French. There was an occasional shadow-play of bodies on the canvas, but the figures loomed or receded hopelessly; or ate themselves, as they flicked from one to the other wall. It was hard to tell what was going on. Eliza was keening for her piano, of course. But she would not say it: she wouldn’t mention it by name. Instead there was a litany of things she had to put up with: incessant travel and bad food and no help and badly washed clothes. Her throat was so full that she choked on the words, she had to squeeze them out of her, until her voice broke in a thin shriek, a wail.
‘And when will we be married, you son of a bitch? When will you marry me?’
By the sound of it, she was up close to him. Stewart imagined that he held her by the wrists. She was trying to hit him, or bite him. Those handsome teeth. Of course, López could take out a pistol and shoot her. He could push her out of the tent and have her lanced before she stumbled to the ground. He could put her in with the prisoners and have her daily flogged. And then – and this was the greatest comfort to them in these last, terrible days – he could do none of these things, because he loved Eliza Lynch.
Silence. The president’s doctor held his breath. Il Mariscal might be hit. He might be nursing a hurt lip, or crotch. The silence went on so long, he might be dead. Or she might be dead. Or nothing might be happening at all; they might be each reading their separate books. Then the sound of tears – Eliza crying in a rush, and slapping him (or could he be slapping her? He was a brute, but not that much of a brute), or were they slaps, after all? They had a rhythm – and the rhythm thickened and gathered into a dull hammering, and then, with a high, puppyish whimper, it was done.
‘Yay!’ said the bright face of the boy who was sitting on the other side of Stewart’s fire.
‘Yay!’ said Stewart back to him, because children made the worst spies. And he waved the little stick he was chewing, briefly in the air.
When a man is inside a woman, he rules the world.
The River
Part 4
Flowers
January 1855, Río Paraná
AT LAST, A town of some size. I see it in a smoky distance, all flat and loose on the landscape, like something spilled out that no one has bothered to wipe up. The houses are jumbled and tiny, so far away; then clearer – a flag, a washing line. The red tiles I have seen along the river, which were always a sign, in their fat corrugations, of a rich man’s estancia, now gathering so thick as we approach I wonder how they got so many. Red tiles. Hundreds of red tiles. Thousands of them!
This is how long I have been on the river.
I stand in the prow, face forward, belly forward. The boat thumps behind and under me, through my fat, hot feet. It is a lullaby sung in my bones. Still, the sleeping baby wakes to the sight of his city on the horizon; the blind baby delights in what I see. My blood paints him a picture of the future that approaches, and he beats out his answer on my tender hide drum.
And he does not stop. As my eye lingers and proceeds – on the rooftops, and the boats and the docks now coming into view – as I clasp my hands and wring them, almost, with relief and expectation, the child twists and bangs and hammers on. Is it a message or is it a dance? It is a wrestling with himself, an urgency to be free. I feel his impatience – but what can I do?
Look, look!
The baby not seeing but demanding, What is it? What is it?
Home. Where you came from.
Though this child has already come from everywhere: Paris, Rome, Madrid, Bordeaux. The only home he has had is me. And if you are to tell from the thumps and the kicks, the strength and meanness of his intent, he has difficulty in staying even there. My travelling boy. My man who would be on his way.
‘They hit you hard, your children,’ says my mother’s wan voice in my head. ‘They hit you hard and they start early.’ It makes me weary to think she may be right. But I also know now, as she once knew, the pleasures of such submission – to the uncaring fists and the uncaring smile of your own heart’s child. I will let you out of my womb, but not out of my arms. I will let you out of my arms, but not out of my head.
And also, ‘Go, if you want to – this is a burden to me too.’
So I stand in the prow, very statuesque and still, while my belly boils. Along the bank small children start to shout and run as we glide past the first shanties: a melon patch, a scum fringing the water for the foraging pig, a girl who stands watching, her thin skirt bundled away from the water that runs, so flat, between her legs. It runs thus sheer – or so I have come to tell her – all the way to the sea. And she lifts her face to watch us slide past, and her look says that she always knew she would see this someday, a sight this fine, and when she catches sight of me, up there in the prow, she knows who I am, too.
But the smell of so much human habitation turns my stomach while the baby twists the other way. It is time to go in. Such spin and counter-gyration, as Mr Whytehead would perhaps put it, have me laid flat on my bed, sickened again by the lift and sigh of the river, and longing, just longing, for the ground beneath my feet once more.
I lie in the hot darkness of the cabin and imagine the ship making her way smoothly along the bank. I imagine it so hard I cannot tell if we are moving or still; but then, after the longest time, I hear the men shout and the slipping roar of the anchoring chains. The ship strains forward, and stops. We have arrived. I roll myself upright to look through the porthole, and see, on the quayside, a scrabbling crowd. They are altogether like the crowd I saw from the first boat I was ever on, the Plymouth packet from Queenstown. And so my life runs in circles, and not in a line, after all.
All my restlessness collapses into a silent wail, as I lie on the bed and think of all the things I have gone through, just to get back to the place I started from – all the journeys I have made, the seas I have crossed, and the love I have lost or discarded along the way. My family, both dull and vicious; I almost miss them – and I wonder where my father is, now.
I was ten at the time, and thought they were out to kill him. The crop had failed for a second time, and the bailiffs we were daily expecting turned out always to be the poor at the door, ever more indigent and ghastly-eyed. There was one woman who reached out a purple knuckle to graze my cheek saying, in a soft kind of way, that she would eat me, I was so lovely and so fat. As the countryside weakened – with the first, or perhaps the second
corpse in the ditch – my father gained sudden strength to pack us up and out of there, off to the ship in the middle of the night, pursued, as I thought, by these skeletons. They were there on the quayside, lurid in the torchlight, beseeching the sides of the ship as they might some squat deity, the God of Escape. It is possible some of them drowned – I was terrified that they might, and there is something sickening, I still find, in the sound of a splash. But I only remember scraps. A face perhaps. Also, the first man’s member I ever saw, nearly as thick as the two legs on either side of it. The man – was he sitting or lying? – he was, at any rate, dying; lazily so, with his hand idling in his flaccid lap.
It seems I am weeping. The tears slip out of my eyes, quite fast and silent, as though they have nothing to do with me.
We have arrived.
The worst Atlantic crossing you could ever have, or so they said in Buenos Aires: days and weeks of storm, the broken wheel, the men all sick. Most of this beyond my ken; my stupid body wracked by its own storm, rolling and heaving until I was afraid I might puke up the child itself.
And now, whatever is on that dock, whatever path starts there, a yard or two from the side of the boat, that is my life’s own path.
And O! everything falls in one me in a clatter. I lie on my bed and it is only four feet away, my future, it is only a jump away. I could swim it. A fly from my future could come and bite me now, still lying in the past. And then I think that perhaps I will not make it. I will not be able to do it. I will never put my foot on the piece of wood that will lead to the ground where my path begins.
I do not cry, as a rule. I am not the crying kind. I keep my finger and thumb pressed down on the lids to save my face from ruin, but I cannot stop. It feels like all the bad times are back, hanging on to me – why do I think of them as women? – a grove of women weeping and clutching at my skirts, saying, You must not go on.
I am such a fool. The weeks after Misha left me in Paris, I thought once, were the worst weeks I would ever spend. Ditto the time after I was married off to that man Quatrefages. Ditto the inn at Artenay. I could give an inventory of the worst, which have turned out since quite well enough. What is Misha? He is like a doll to me now, with his little blue jacket and his braggadocio. I am indifferent to the memory of his mouth, or his throat. The only things that remain to hurt me are his lies. Look at this doll (I wave him about in my head) – how he lied to me. Ow. Ow. Ow.
And still I cannot rise off the bed.
Sweet Christ, we have arrived. And I think that here – four feet away from the side of this boat – I will be safe. I will be safe from M. Raspail, and Mr Bennett, and all the rest of them. I will be free of their jealousy. For they were all, I think, jealous of me, as a man might be jealous of a painting that he may pay for, but will never properly have. As men are jealous of all beautiful things.
I will have a carriage that is all in black. It will be my funeral coach. It will be the blackest thing you ever saw and my flesh inside it, the whitest. And if López abandons me here, I will ride about in it quite naked and unseen, and my name will be If-You-Dare.
Open the door.
This is what I think about, as the tears wreck my face, and the baby kicks and wrestles to be free. I think that my name is Mortality.
Poor pregnant Dora, who thinks she can kill a man just by the way she looks at him. There she is on the bed – her skin a rash, her feet so big she must cut the heels off her shoes. Her belly is quite sacred, you know. And as it grows, poor Dora withers away. What can save her? Nothing but love, of course. And a little bit of money.
I am so far from myself I do not hear Francine come into the room. She lifts me by the shoulders and I weep and say I cannot, she must not make me. I also say (at least I think I say) that, if I die, she must know that I forgive her all that she has done to me. Ashamed already of my blabbing – we are both ashamed. Francine says nothing, but lays me back down while I weep some more. She wipes my hands with something cool and also my face.
‘What must I do?’ I am saying. ‘You see what he is.’ And more such until Francine says,
‘You must love him. There is no other way.’
My obvious Francine. She is right. And a glow spreads in my blood with the rightness of it. It happens all at once. I have found a place in my soul where I can stand – the place where I love López. It is quite elevated and lonely, but also easy; also warm. I am staring at the ceiling. I have found it. My tears have stopped.
Then, with a crack, my tins of powder and paint are slapped on to the dressing table. A fall of lilac as she lifts my dress and lets it drift across my feet.
‘Let us show them a little bit of France,’ she says.
I sigh, and my sadness turns delicious. I have arrived. I am in love. The stage is set. This dress was the newest colour in Paris two months ago, and it is the newest colour on this vast continent: it is the future, and it is wrapped around me.
Still, I am frightened. I cannot manage myself properly in public any more. I know this. Look how I cry and tremble when I am alone. It is the baby – the size of him, now making me so stupid and swooning. And although I can keep my head in company it is only for a short while. Everything must be brief, now. Dressing. Walking. Everything must be brief.
I am muttering this as a kind of refrain as she gets me into my clothes. Drawers, petticoat, embroidered petticoat, stiff jupon petticoat, Balbriggan stockings, corset. My belly fights back against her lacing. We are in the middle of the push and shove of it, when my entire bump goes hard. And with it the clenching, a feeling on the skin as you might get on your scalp when your hair is pulled too tight. It crawls from either side of me, and meets out front. I push the maid away, and sit, and think, counting slowly, and passing my hand over the skin.
Is it starting?
Francine looks at my questioning touch, and says,
‘You will feel it when it comes, for sure.’ The hardness melts back to the usual mound, and we get the laces tied – quick, quick – while my belly is unawares.
Chemise, undersleeves, dress. My wonderful lilac hat.
And so I sit and compose my features. And so it is time.
I must love him, because through such narrow gaps in our lives we all must squeeze and crawl. I must love, not his greatness, but the sadness in his brown eyes. I must love, not the ring, but the dear hand. This is the only way forward, the only way through.
But when he comes into the cabin, resplendent in blue, I have no time to tell him that I love him, now. I kiss his sweet mouth and say that I have five minutes, maybe seven, in which to be radiant and whole. After which I am an animal again. I have five minutes by the clock, I say, as we mount to the gangway and the breeze takes my veil, after which I will have fainted clear on to the floor.
And my noble Love presses my arm so tightly to his side, it seems I rise with the pressure – tight, tighter – until, on tiptoe, I float down and through the adulating crowd, their faces all smiling and pushing. I fling up a hand to save my face from something thrown. A flower. Scarlet, like a great gob of blood, come sailing through the air at me. And I know I must concentrate on one face at a time, smile at one child at a time. An old man. A woman. A man. A girl. Their hands are thrust towards me, but not open, not in supplication. They dab little circles in the air – bravo, bravo. One bully-boy is clearing the rest back to lay a branch of palm under our feet, and they laugh and cry out; not López! López! but Barrios! Barrios! which must be the name of the boy with the palm, and I feel – how could I not? – that I am being welcomed in, as though by a family: Look, they say. Here is Barrios, our fool.
Still, a clock is ticking in my blood. Five minutes, five minutes. And the feel of the glad earth beneath my feet makes my belly all hard and hurting. I have held off for this, it seems. Closer, closer, he presses my hand as we walk to the place where the carriages stand. Here we are at a disadvantage, being on foot, but we play it like a couple strolling in the Bois: he shows off his French manners and doff
s his French hat and keeps moving as I dip and smile, thinking I have never seen such a crew for hair, a family with one eyebrow between them, even the women need to shave. Also counting in my head from one to sixty, because by fifty-nine, I decide, I will have pressed the side of my face into the welcoming dirt. But by forty-something we are there. Miltón hops into a carriage so he can pull me into it. López hands me from below, and with the slightest help I am sitting pretty and giggling like a girl.
A flower lands on the floor by my feet. Another. It is raining flowers. The horses are solid and easy as we push through the throng. Miltón stands on the dasher as though on the prow of the Tacuarí. The sun shines through his ragged pants, turning them to gauze, and again he is mysterious to me; his thin bones and his soft, old face. He waves, and the crowd shouts. Which is the sound, too, of the blood in my ears, as the clock of my body begins to chime.
*
I had a laughing labour. At least for a while. They say it takes women funny, and every woman a different way, but the rush of my breaking waters made me laugh and the tightness of my belly was so like the pain of laughter that I felt I might as well join in. It took me over, too, very like laughter does. It had me hanging on to the end of the bed, insensible with that mirth that is close to pain. Oh Lordy. Oh Lordy. Don’t say another thing. And then, Here it comes. Something funnier than the last. Something so funny I must die. It is possible I was a little insane.
I was in a strange room: it was white. It was already, I think, a day since we had arrived. There was a worried-looking matron leaning towards me, clucking and kind. On the windows were dull red curtains, a hundred years old, so rotten that when I grabbed on to one it opened under my hands. It struck me as odd, the way the cloth did not so much tear as give; hundreds of threads and cross-threads, each disengaged. And as the cloth tore, or sometime later, I felt the same thing in me, a rending or a loosening, I cannot say which.