The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (11 page)

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 are 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.

Outside, under a blank moon, I am free of it. Here is my belly in front of me again, big and hard and round. I stay close to the shadow of the wall and make my lumbering way to the doctor’s cabin. He lies slung outside; the smell of old drink cuts like vinegar the awful honey of the sailor’s decay. I pass the length of him, from boots to hair, and he stirs and settles, his mouth seeking the comfort of the cloth.

When all is still, I push in at the door. The smell is stronger now: it is absolute. And, instead of darkness, here is the river light again, mocking me as I strain to tell the sailor from the cot where he lies. We are in a flickering, shifting, underwater grave. And there he is. The light makes him look alive. I step forward and want to say … what? That I am here – that I am his Dora, or not his Dora – I have a dreadful urge to whisper it, but I do not know his name.

I let my breath out all at once, and startle myself with the sound. It is a bubble of air soughed from out his dead lungs, I am sure of it. This is how a dead man speaks. They say the last breath rises out of him a day, two days later, and if you listen to it you will hear – a curse sometimes, or a blessing, or a name. What is it, that I want to hear? When I see his face for sure then I will go, and I take a step nearer in the dark.

His eye is open. I closed his dead eye, but now it is open again. It looks, not at me, but at everything – at the light that is all the same and the four shifting walls and at me – it picks nothing out, but lets each fall indifferently into the well of his dead gaze – and we are all the same.

His face, I see as I turn to leave, is not like the face he
had
when he was alive. It is more stern. And older too. Ancient, and high in the nose. And the livid flesh and the unburned flesh fall alike, in tranquillity, away from all the sharp bones. He looks quite distinguished.

Back in my room, I see that eye whenever I close my own. Also, the open eye of the doctor fixed on me as I shut the cabin door. There is no doubt this one is alive: his pupil, black and wide with fright.

He is in love with me, I think. You can tell at that moment when someone wakes – the thing that dawns in their eyes. Or perhaps we all love easily in our sleep. Because I think I saw love, or something like it – wonder perhaps – before the fright. So I laid my finger on my lips before he should cry out,

‘A little prayer,’ I said, and smiled at him, as though I were a dream. I hope that he took me for such.

The ship moves gently on the water, tugging idly, over and over at the anchoring ropes. Holding us all, the coughing, shifting men, the dead man and me, retching into a basin in the watery night.

They say there is a sea in my belly now, and that my child swims inside me. And I think sometimes how dark, how blessed, it must be in there.

*

Today, enough wind to steer for the bank and the sailor’s grave. At last. We are almost beached in our eagerness to reach the shore, and the men leap overboard not waiting for the boats.

The sailor’s body is lowered on a chain; covered in hemp and criss-crossed with rope, like a doll you might make out of cloth and twine. He is rigid and, I think, quite ceremonial, as he lands feet-first. I would like to put a hat on him such as admirals wear, and send him off in
his
skiff for an inspection of the fleet. But they angle him down until he is lying the length of the boat on one side. The rower nudges him at every stroke and lifts his oar in fright and so they go in circles for a while.

There is no proper order to all this. Everyone spills overboard. My dear friend climbs down to bury the poor man; Mr Whytehead supervises the digging of the grave (I am surprised he does not draw up plans). Francine, with a soft look, disappears down the net of ropes. Was that a request? Still, I can hardly call her back. She is handed over by the doctor who turns to me to effect a bow, which he then fails to complete. He gives me a fuddled look that has something of last night in it, and then, to my delight, he turns tail and hops over the side.