The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (14 page)

Stewart uncurled Whytehead’s fingers to find the wound. It was an ugly, complex thing of scars both old and fresh. Not so much a cut as a hole – something, or someone, had been digging into Whytehead’s hand, then waiting, then digging again. It had been doing so for some time and Stewart feared a parasite, some strangely fixated fungus whose patience was about to be rewarded – being, after months of hurt and healing, nearly through to the other side.

‘I seem to have hit it on a nail,’ said Whytehead, when Stewart offered an enquiring look. And in the interests of precision, he picked up the thing from a side table and lifted it for the doctor to see.

‘Iron,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ said Stewart.

They both looked at the tip as Whytehead turned the nail between finger and thumb, scoring an imaginary curve on the air of the room.

Well, iron was the man’s business after all. Scratching it out of the earth, ounce by painful ounce; smelting, pouring,
casting
. Sacrificing half a ton of shot because the Minister of War wanted fancy railings around his house, which might have cost the country less if they had been made of solid gold.
You can’t sink a Brazilian monitor with golden shot
. As Whytehead might say at one of his dull dinners, where all the dull men sat, pondering the burdensome fact that they were alive.

Stewart eyed the nail. Perhaps he wanted to say that the colour at the tip was rust, and not blood; or that these two things were the same colour, after a time. Stewart knew better than to touch the thing. Let the man have his comfort, his suck, his gouger. His own little crucifixion.

‘Precious stuff,’ he said.

The Brazilians were on the river. They were far to the south, but they were there – around a bend somewhere, or the bend after that. Nothing came in and nothing went out. No one could leave Asunción.

Whytehead put the nail down. Stewart sat in the matching horsehair wing chair. The clock (another clock!) ticked Britishly on. They were both so terribly tired.

It was a pleasant room. The curtains on the windows were moss-green, with little tassels all down the side. There was a framed engraving on the wall of
The Queen at Balmoral, seated on her horse Fairy
. He would like to marry Whytehead, Stewart thought. There would be enormous comfort in it. No need for speech. Everything ordered and on time. A little woman who works a hole in her hand, when you are away.

And, ‘Would you like to see the garden?’ said Whytehead.

‘That would be lovely,’ said Stewart.

They walked out through French windows on to a granite terrace. A row of stone pots held the skeletons of bushes that had been cut into the shape of singing birds. Ordinary birds: sparrows or finches or wrens.

‘The ants got to them,’ said Whytehead and he stood for a while, looking at the wreck.

Stewart’s aunt was of the opinion that all gardeners were insane people masquerading as gardeners. She said the same of men who liked to fish, and she humoured such types in a deliberate, loud voice, so,

‘Even in the pot?’ Stewart enquired, unflinching.

‘Oh they get everywhere,’ said Whytehead, and he led the way across the patchy lawn, and on through a gap in the hedge.

The sky was low and kind as they made their way through Whytehead’s working garden towards a jumble of sheds. They walked so beautifully together; Stewart could feel the way his own thighs moved as they swung their sticks and paced the land. Beans, manioc, maize: Whytehead pointed them out, with notes of botanical interest, also the decorative rose bushes, carnations and dahlias that were planted between the vegetable rows. They paused at his pigsty. They patted the impossible Jersey cow kept for her milk (made thick as butter, it must be, by this heat).

Stewart was walking the country estate of the Chief State Engineer – Keld Whytehead, thirty-nine years old, half-crucified: whose father was nothing you could mention, whose grandfather had been, at a guess, an Orkney fisherman, which is to say a peasant with three words of English, being ‘pence’ and ‘bailiff’ and ‘Sir’.

‘My goodness,’ said Stewart. ‘Yours?’ A tobacco field stretched ahead of them, all alive with the wind and with the shifting backs of peons labouring among the leaves.

‘A good year for it,’ said Whytehead. He could not use a word so vulgar as ‘mine’. Oh bliss.

They would not talk of the war – like tradesmen, like traitors – they would talk of the weather, like gentlemen, and they would do their jobs, which were to kill and to
save
on a large scale; to build cannon and hospitals and put their shoulders to the wheel, which was the wheel of History itself.

‘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 could 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.