The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (7 page)

Every day, Eliza sallied forth in a carriage so beautifully sprung you could ride it across country without spilling a cup of tea. Every day, Stewart saw them spit as it passed: the old Spanish aristocrats, with more surnames trotting after them than they had horses; they crossed themselves and covered their daughters’ virgin eyes. But why should the woman not take the air? Why should she not sometimes walk down the street, with her parasol gently twirling, to dare the men to bid her good day – to dare the men
not
to bid her good day? Because they all went. There was not a man for a hundred miles who had not ventured out to the
quinta
at La Recoleta to see for himself the little oriental
carpets
, the French tapestries hung in the tasteful rooms, and to drink the political cup of
café au lait
that was handed to them, in person, by the mistress of Francisco Solano López.

The mother, old Doña Juana, spent the day fingering her rosary beads and screeching, ‘I will
never
accept that woman. I will
never
accept that woman!’ in the tearful company of her daughters; the hirsute Rafaela, the glandular Innocencia. Stewart prescribed laudanum. He did not say that there was no cure for the facts of the case – that the old woman had been outfoxed somehow by her own son; that every time she thought of La Lincha now she saw her own future, and old López dead.

There was nothing like a good root around the López ladies to remind Stewart of Eliza Lynch, who had a different order of flesh from the rest of us, who had the kind of flesh that might redeem a man. William Stewart was the only person in Asunción who was banned from visiting La Lincha – for most people it was the other way around – and it was a sort of private joke with him. Still, he sometimes thought of her with regret. He would never get to palpate, nor suture, nor ease. He would never cool those limbs in the flush of influenza, nor brush from them the bloom of measles. Above all, he would never see them asplay in the blood and terror of childbirth – a scene that he had, in fact, missed, after coming thousands of miles to see it. This might seem a little remiss of him, but Stewart was absent for complicated reasons, in which drink played only a minor role. Quite simply, he could not get off that boat, with its horrors, quick enough. He walked off the gangplank and through the crowd and disappeared into a week he could not himself remember. William Stewart missed Eliza’s lying-in because she made him shudder. That was all. He took whatever remnant of him was still decent, and walked it off the
Tacuarí
, and got it drunk as a lord.

He could hardly recall what scruple it was he felt then. He did not name it, because it was impossible to name. Nor did he encourage it – he pickled it. He preserved it in alcohol, like some misshapen curiosity with the label gone. If he held it up to the light now, he would not be able to tell you what it was, or what class of creature it had once been.

As for that other remnant of her river band – when he met Keld Whytehead, they did not speak of it; as if they had both been marked by something, about which there was nothing to say.

And what of Eliza? Alone! said the gallant Captain Thompson. Completely alone. She poured coffee on the balcony, and talked of home. When the day was hot, or the political climate warm, she touched her hand to her breast and said, ‘Paris, ah Paris!’ in just that tone. Picking out a little melody on the fabulously real piano, taking up a book and putting it down again. There were things in her head, you could see that. Once he had explored one of these volumes and found it contained, not
Geneviève de Brabant
but Voltaire’s
Candide
. She laid her hand on his arm, and gently took the book and said, ‘Ah. That, it is the story of my life, you know. And you, Captain Thompson, are my own Doctor Pangloss.’ No, there was no doubt about it, Eliza Lynch was delectable. To love her was to succeed, the Captain said, to hate her was, quite simply, to fail.

In which case, no one succeeded better than Francisco Solano López. The city was a building site – he had an army of haggard, small boys pushing blocks of stone from the Arsenal to the Post Office; taking the roof off the Library and dumping it on the Shipyard steps. López coming in after a hard day of pointing and striding, the little son crying Papa! Papa! to be nipped on his rosy cheek by his father’s dirt-stained, ink-stained, finger and thumb. There was, as yet, just one child. Mme Cochelet said that Eliza had ridden
like
the furies to purge herself of the second, but Thompson said she had laid the stillborn thing out in a white robe, with little gauze wings on the back, like an angel doll. Thompson had seen it himself, at the most tasteful wake possible, and you could not doubt the mother’s grief. Now, there was an ornate little grave inside the gate of the cemetery at La Recoleta that said:

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade

    Death came with friendly care

The lovely bird to Heaven conveyed

    And made it beossom there

And so we are finally humiliated, thought Stewart – by spelling. This is what it meant to be far from home. And he would sigh as he passed the bollixed stone on his way back to his house, where he would sit and get his boots pulled off and think about his own, terrible life.

He wondered, from time to time, about the whereabouts of the maid, Francine – no one seemed to mention her, though they talked of everything else.

Doña Cordal and her obscurely ruined daughter Carmencita said that Eliza kept her courtyard full of birds: parakeets, hummingbirds, macaws from Brazil and, tethered to a stick in the corner, a big, fat, Karakara vulture. Mme Cochelet said that Eliza kept a troop of raw Indians dressed to the nines and trained to pour wine like French footmen. She said that, apparently, the food out in La Recoleta was a miracle.

Benigno López mentioned over a bruised billiard table that Eliza Lynch did things in bed that a man could scarcely believe – he had it from his own brother – and he clicked the blue towards the centre pocket, and missed. Captain Thompson said, quite gallantly, that she had a pure soul. But they were all agreed that she was sleeping with someone
behind
López’s back – an Englishman, or that Indian, or a dog. No one said that she was sleeping with the maid, however, which was, in its own way, strange.

Keld Whytehead did not listen to gossip: he built López an arsenal and then he built López some guns. He sent his money home. He went out to La Recoleta as necessary, and sometimes, he said, the beauty of it all made a man’s eyes sting. At Christmas he sang carols (perhaps that French carol he sang on the
Tacuarí
), while Eliza accompanied him on the piano. That was all.

On the other side of town, López’s abandoned mistress, Juana Pesoa, sifted the truth from the chaff. She said Eliza slept with López and with no one but López, because once a woman surrendered to López there was nowhere else to go. Juana Pesoa had a son by López – his first – and the boy now lived with Eliza. When he came to visit, he brought his mother stories from La Recoleta, as you might bring a caged animal meat.

Stewart sat with her and ate.

Eliza wants to christen her son in the cathedral – she wants to make him the prince, the heir, the most important son. But the boy is a bastard, and will always be a bastard, and the bishop forbids her the use, not just of the cathedral, but of any holy ground. Eliza screams. She raves. She gives López no rest. She calls in a crooked priest who takes one look at the boy – two years old by now, with his mother’s blazing green eyes – and declares that he cannot send this small soul to Limbo. If the churches are barred to them, then he will baptise the child there in the
quinta
. For which promise he receives a fat bag of gold.

Juana Pesoa was a handsome, pinched woman. She had an illness which Stewart called ‘knowing your place’. She did not rage against Eliza, who was rearing her son with every advantage, nor did she pine for López, who still parked his carriage outside her door from time to time. She went very
still
and worked on a stomach cancer. Something she could call her own.

Stewart left in a sorrowful frame of mind. He wouldn’t mind a go at Juana Pesoa himself, just to cheer her up, just to knock against something that bitter. But as he made his way down the street he found himself wondering, not about the emotional little rictus that was Juana Pesoa’s sexual part, but about Eliza Lynch. Were her eyes blue or were they green? he wondered. What was the exact colour of La Lincha’s eyes? The colour of absinthe? Or the colour of curaçao? No matter. They were the colour of whatever was at the bottom of his glass, and he was going to look at them, right now.

Mme Cochelet said that Eliza might invite anyone she liked to her unholy christening – no one would go. Old López had put his foot down. And her voice rose with satisfied indignation as Stewart, working blind under her petticoats, tightened the patent truss (after five children, Mme Cochelet suffered from a painful separation of the pubic bone).

‘Good,’ said Stewart. Ever since Eliza’s invitations went out, he had spent his time waving smelling salts under the noses of the López ladies; going from one to the other, from hysteric to phlegmatic, and each of them had a separate and very
mobile
pain. Finally, some respite. On the day of the baptism itself, he decided, he would get nicely soaked.

He did so on his own. The town was so silent and shuttered that Stewart felt like a ghost, roaming the streets. Everyone stayed indoors: the women sewing perhaps, the men mending their boots or reading the broadsheets, the children all subdued. And all of them thinking about the deserted rooms of La Recoleta, the impossible food spoiling on the plates, the splendid wines all untouched; a few household Indians, perhaps, gathered around the specially
wrought
silver font, while thousands of cut flowers wilted in the heat. They were thinking about Eliza in a dress unthinkably fine, a quiver in her cheek, a tic in her lovely whore’s eye, as she looked around the empty rooms and faced, and knew, and ate, and got rightly sodomised by, her shame.

And Stewart hated the lot of them – so smug and delicious with revenge that when the guns opened fire they ran into the streets crying that the demon mistress of Francisco López was coming to kill them all. Of course it was just a gun salute. It was just a reminder that old López may have the country, but young López had the army (as well as something else, a lover sent from Hell and a voice that came from the sky, like Tupa, the thunder god of the Guaraní, rolling out over the town. Boom. Boom. Boom).

A boy pulled Stewart, by now half-cut, through the thunder to fetch up at the house of Doña Cordal. The matron opened the door herself and pushed him upstairs, where her incarcerated daughter, the madwoman Carmencita Cordal, was shouting at her dead lover. Carmencita Cordal told her dead lover that the boy who was christened that day was called Juan Francisco, as their son would have been called, if they’d had a son: that his mother called him Pancho, as she would have called her own, sweet boy. She told him that she had seen the child in the street stumbling after a hoop, and that he was very beautiful. Stewart patted his pockets for laudanum. The guns stopped.

In the shebeen where he found himself, late that night, Miltón (or some Indian) said nothing. They never do. Even so, Stewart’s hangover was pounded not only by the memory of the guns, but by some knowledge that he had now, but could not remember: Miltón talking about a land without evil. Stewart agreeing with this place, this idea, quite loudly. They are wonderfully chiming. Miltón says that López is not his father’s son. Undoubtedly, says
Stewart
, he is more European than his father, fresher, with more
brio
. No, says the Indian, like Jesus – like Jesus is not Joseph’s son. It is possible they argued that one, for a while, but there is a kind of drunken sense to it that makes Stewart look more closely now at the squadrons of Guaraní soldiers on the streets. There is a pilgrim light in their eyes. Put whatever name you like on it, they are going somewhere, and you might be obliged to come along. As for Francisco López – that fat baboon – it is a sort of universal joke here: that his father is a cuckold, his mother (in her youth) a pious, trembling whore. The usual stuff – but true all the same. Because the son-and-heir is never the father’s son. He could kill his father any time.

High up in the Cordillera, the scrubby hills to the east and north of Asunción, there is a town called Piano. It was named for the fact that Eliza was obliged to abandon her piano there, a hundred miles from nowhere, and another hundred miles from anywhere at all. For all we know, the piano still survives. Perhaps a wooden panel shores up a chicken coop, or the wires are tangled into a fence and sing a little, when the wind is high. The hammers and their moss of green felt must be long decayed, but perhaps a few keys remain scattered in a broken smile, to choke the cattle or confuse the plough. Better still, the piano might grace a parlour, or what passes for a parlour in the Cordillera, with a paper taped to the front, ‘El piano del Piano’. Perhaps it still holds the memory of the last fingers to touch it, the doctor’s tender hands picking out ‘La Palomita’, as it stood bravely upright, surrounded by grass and by dead men, a long way from home.

But all this is unseeably distant, as Stewart stumbles around in a haze of scrofulisms and alcohol. He imagines Eliza sitting out in La Recoleta doing bad needlepoint, with the back all knots and the front full of holes. She rearranges
the
story of her life, ‘My mother Adelaide Schnock came from a family that included forty-two magistrates and a captain of the fleet.’ She orders patterns from Paris. She keeps house magnificently, and it is said that the servants love her. Servants and men – any number of them – that is all she has. You could say she has everything, except the satisfaction of having it. Also, perhaps, that she cannot relax, because she is not real. It must be hard, to be just a story the matrons of Asunción told each other between the hours of three and four. Everything Eliza does to silence them just makes them talk the more. No, the only way she can become real is by getting married, and she cannot get married until old López dies.