The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (18 page)

‘Doctor Stewart,’ she said.

It was a small group. Paulino Alén, the Caballeros, Bernardino and Pedro – what might be called the coming men, though the truth was that they were the only men left. Paulino Alén was a boy, and there was something embarrassing about this: his snot-nosed gravitas, his beautiful clear skin. He ran an abrupt hand on the seat of his pants, then held it out. Stewart, quite moved, shook it, then turned
to
peruse the cloth along the walls. Among the drapes of Pompeian-red and soft olive was the same green as poor, timid, Whytehead’s curtains – perhaps Eliza got them from the same warehouse; there were so few in Asunción. Then he saw the tassels, and the thought occurred to Stewart that she might have taken them from Whytehead’s own windows, after he died.

A cage of stuffed birds! When there were so many living ones in the swamp beyond the walls. They were not the exotic birds you might trap on your rooftop here, but – even more exotic – birds such as you might find at home. A startled sandpiper chirping its alarm, a pheasant picking up one claw to run. A very Highland theme. The cloth spread beneath was a new tartan, in a wonderful close pattern of turquoise and yellow and grey. Eliza was turning him into a woman, it seemed. Stewart wanted to run the cloth along his cheek; he wanted to stuff it inside his jacket against the skin of his chest. He wanted to
have
this piece of cloth, and love it, and take care that it should not be torn.

‘Ah, you have seen my birds,’ she said. ‘Do they not remind you of home?’

‘So much,’ he said.

He thought she should have offered the birdcage to him then, so he could refuse it and beg the cloth instead. But she did not.

Why should she? She owned it.

A knocking announced Il Mariscal López – as ever formal when entering the house of Eliza Lynch.

‘Let him in,’ she said to the servant, who lifted the flap for the Dictator to walk through. After which theatre, he looked a little silly. He was always smaller than you remembered him to be.

López kissed the hand of his consort, then waved for them all to sit down. You could not oblige a soldier to
wait
, these days, when the smell of cooking was in the air. As the chairs were pushed in under them, a figure slipped into the place beside Stewart.

‘Late, Pancho,’ said Eliza. ‘You must always be late.’

‘Sorry, Mama.’

He was sitting beside the Little Colonel, and this made Stewart’s pleasure complete. They were all so fond of the boy. His eyes were the lightest green you might see this side of the Atlantic; so green as to look quite blind in strong light. The blankness of them was almost decadent. The lurking passivity of his youth and the slowly blinking lashes made a man think about women’s eyes; ask what they were doing – so modest and yet knowing – in the middle of a boy’s face.

But he was a boy – there was no doubt about that – as precious and wild. He was also a National Thing, being, one day, the reason why they had all fought this war. And as such he was already glowering at Alén who, quite wisely, examined his cutlery and did not look back.

There was quite a lot to examine. When Stewart caught Alén’s eye, he tapped the outermost of five forks, to the boy’s hidden relief. If the truth be told, Stewart only knew what three of them were for: meat, fish and pastry – even this act of identification made his mouth indecently water. He reached for a glass and faltered, at which Eliza’s manservant leaned out of the darkness and, with a whisper almost sexual in its tact and generosity, called the glasses out to him. ‘Water, Chambertin, Latour, champagne.’ Then he withdrew.

Stewart sought, and found, the Little Colonel’s eyes of mineral green.

‘Any good shooting, these days?’

He was about to weep. It was possible he was weeping already. He looked at the boy speaking to him and did not hear a word that came from his young mouth. Perhaps
because
she understood, Eliza served, almost at once, not a soup, but a camp stew such as they were used to of manioc and meat. A good one. There was a terrible silence as they fell to. After which incontinence, the meal proper was possible, in all its ritual loveliness: soup, salad, fish, game, meat. The salad was a little ‘Indian’, and the fish was the usual fish bombed out of the river, but it was fresher than Stewart was used to, being snatched from under the snouts of Brazilian guns, and it looked up at him from a
sauce à l’estragon
. All in all the food made him feel quite patriotic. The bird was local game, shot before it reached the enemy guns. The leg of pork was a gift, Eliza said, from someone grateful, and the chocolate mousse was particularly colonial and fine, being made straight from the cocoa bean. But as for the last dish – that last fork sitting so mysteriously on its silver rest – when the last dish came they all cheered.
Sorbet de cassis
. How did she do it?

It was a dream. Sometime during the fish Stewart woke briefly to see, rising above the glittering crowd of cruets and epergnes, a centrepiece of flowers and – could those be grapes? It looked as beautiful and familiar as another life – a life he might have led but had not. And he wondered where it had got to, and who was living it now – Stewart’s other life that was intimate with such flowers, strewn with them: purple, orange and blue, they gathered the shadows into their moist hearts, and he found himself sinking his face into the colours and the scent. And then, of course, he was doing no such thing. He was eating a whole fish, and the fish had an amused look in its dead eye and he was talking about Scotland, trying perhaps to claim for himself that piece of new tartan, with its overlapping squares of yellow and turquoise and grey.

Over the pork, he seemed to mention his aunt, but he must have forgotten to say that she was dead, or that she was his aunt, because Eliza was laughing. The pork had
very
hairy crackling, and it was most distracting – perhaps he had been witty, all unawares.

‘Oh, the English,’ said Eliza. ‘The English have no mothers. They grow like cabbages in a garden: they are entirely self-generated. Or if they have such a thing as a mother, it is always a matter of furniture. “I am expecting my mother’s furniture” or “This armoire, do you like it? It belonged to my mother.” Behind every Englishman there is a woman in a mob-cap surrounded by lumps of walnut and mahogany, and completely beside the point. Frenchmen – now their mothers write novels, or burn novels in their drawing room grate, their mothers are distinguished lovers, or know how to mend a clock that has not ticked since 1693. A Spanish mother is an object of terror, an Italian’s mother an object of piety absolute, but an Englishman’s mother … mob-cap, a little needlework, and a Queen Anne writing table of oak inlaid with yew.’

Stewart was comfortable with none of this. He was not English. He was about to remonstrate – he was quite strongly moved to it – when he remembered that he was not wearing any linen, so instead of banging the table and shouting, he brought his clenched hand up to his mouth, and cleared his throat,

‘You are too harsh, Madame Lynch,’ he said.

‘I am delighted to hear it,’ said Eliza. ‘We Celts have enough reason for harshness, we must not renegue.’

It was becoming clear to Stewart that he had missed some essential link in the conversation. Or perhaps it was not just this conversation, but all conversations. Perhaps he would not be fit for society, ever again. Something about this prospect seemed disastrous to him. So,

‘And what of the Irish mother?’ he bravely said.

‘The Irish? Oh we eat them,’ said Eliza. ‘You should see it. We start at the toes and leave nothing out.’

They all looked at the pork, and there was a small silence, into which Pancho, for some reason, cheered.

‘Diabolito,’ said his mother, while Stewart’s mind nibbled along the legs of some poor woman to arrive at a most unthinkable place. The woman was, of course, Eliza, but it was also, a little, his poor rotten aunt, or the clean bones of his long-dead mother, and Stewart felt the violence of it so keenly he wanted to shout ‘Whore!’ or some other desecration. ‘Irish bitch!’ was the phrase that sprang to mind. How strange, he thought. And useless. How could he explain to Paulino Alén, or to any of them, that this woman came of an irksome race?

Then the sorbet appeared, and Stewart tried not to groan aloud as he ate. Through all the meal, not one word had been uttered about the war or their current situation, and the dull splashes of shot landing in faraway mud were, when you remembered to listen out for them, almost pleasant to the ear.

Then López pushed back his chair.

‘Señor,’ he said to the boy Alén, with mock formality, and Eliza stood to allow them retire. They went to a table in the corner, where a map was unrolled while Pancho’s eyes grew wide with rage and pleading.

‘You must come with me, Doctor,’ Eliza said. ‘While Pancho has his war. You must keep me company and pretend to listen to my pulse.’

‘A pleasure,’ he said. He offered his arm, hinging it stiffly from the shoulder like an old man. As they left they paused for López to kiss his mistress’s hand. And it really was like being in bed with the two of them, the way they looked each other in the eye. The galvanic charge of madness from López (for he was quite mad) made Stewart feel quite dizzy. But Eliza seemed to like it, or soothe it, or take it in – at any rate she looked straight at it, as though she would quite like to bed it, by and by.

‘Coffee!’ she said into the air in front of her, and she walked on – dragging Stewart a little, who had some difficulty getting past the pathetic piece of tartan under the bird cage, his desire for it still shamed him so.

For a moment, in the small space that was Eliza’s reception room, Stewart felt the burden of future conversation. What could he say to this woman? She was too large and he was too tired.

She walked a little away from him, and begged him to sit. Then she paused. Then she walked back to join him, and turned her head a little away as she sank into the matching chair. There was a silence; it seemed easy enough, but a bubble of misery rose quickly to the surface, and broke with,

‘You know, Doctor, I am immensely weary of it all.’

‘Of the war?’

‘No. Of this, my dear Doctor. Of all this.’ She turned and indicated, it seemed, her own skirts – unless it was the floor she was pointing to; the Aubusson blue of the rug that toned so strangely well with the beige of the mud floor. She swept her hands wide and then let them fall into her lap. Then she lifted her face to his with a gaze that might well have been called ‘radiant and sad’.

‘I am immensely weary, Doctor, of being Eliza Lynch.’

Ambushed again, thought Stewart, as the urge to free her came over him, not from the mud or the bullets – though these played their part, as he threw her over the pommel of an imaginary horse and rode her out of there. No, he would grab her and kiss her and take her most violently, and in so doing release her, not from the war, nor the world, but from the terrible prison of herself. This hair, these clothes, this high and graceful look. Come with me and we will simply live. There will be butterflies in the meadow, and so on. Christ, he was tired.

She picked herself off the chair to trail a little across the
room
. Her dress was the most beautiful thing he had seen for a long time – if you did not count the sunset that daily broke his half-mended heart. It was green. What kind of green Stewart could not say. Green that bristled with a silvery light, there in the dark room. She picked up a photograph of López, then set it down again and drifted on. She had sunk, Stewart realised, at least three bottles of champagne. Eliza always was a hearty girl.

‘I work quite hard you know,’ she said.

‘I know that,’ he said.

‘At table for example, I work quite hard to keep it smooth, and I am not looking for admiration, Doctor, not so much – but these bitter little looks and the sentences that creep out of people’s faces, these Ungenerosities, when I have waded through hail and fire to put an acceptable something on the table in front of them. The centrepiece – those careless flowers in their urn – I copied from an oil by Jensen, the Dane. The work, Doctor. The work! And why do I do it? I do it for love. And high endeavour. I do it so that we should not always be so
small
, and it is vulgar of me to say so, Doctor, but pearls before swine is one thing, at least the swine don’t despise the pearls, the way these men despise me.’

‘My dear lady,’ said Stewart, surprised by her nonsense. ‘You are beginning to sound like …’ He was going to say ‘my wife’, but he skipped, quite quickly, to, ‘a quite ordinary woman’.

For one gaping moment Stewart thought he was drunk. Then he remembered that it was the war that made him feel like this; the war and this room within the war; this house – a bowl of light like a diamond in mud, or a diamond, even, in some man’s turd – and he had some memory of a man with his belly slit – or was it the entire length of his intestine? – he had a memory of a man, at any rate, with a jewel inside him at Curupaití, or Tuiutí, or Curuzú, or in
a
dream he had right here in Humaitá, a dream of difficulty and kidney stones and something astonishingly beautiful, precious and hard, that was deep inside a man. Which was when he lurched awake to find Eliza still talking; the murmur of her husband’s voice in the next room a hushed counterpoint. No time had passed at all.

‘Why should I not sound ordinary, Doctor,’ Eliza was saying. ‘I am ordinary. I am ordinary
as well
.’

‘As well as what?’ he rudely asked. Well, she had woken him, after all.

‘As well as a whore?’ he might have said – but who cared these days? They were all meat. (Though could ‘meat’ be said to sleep, as he now needed to sleep, and was it not the blissful thing about Eliza, after all, that she was absolutely meat, and absolutely not meat at the same time, which is to say, a woman, as opposed to a potential corpse? This whirligig of philosophy taking no time at all in his head, or just exactly the time a man needed to shut his eyes and open them again, which is an eternity, or about as long as a blink.)