The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (17 page)

It was around this time that the story went about that
Eliza
ate the flesh of the dead. She said it tasted just like pork, but gamier – like the truffle-hunting boars you get in the Auvergne. Some said it was Brazilian flesh she liked – though there was little enough of that about – others said it was their own. The story was universally believed – it was the truffles that did it. You could not
invent
a detail like the truffles: besides, who among them had ever heard of the Auvergne? And the taste of gamey pork circled endlessly in their mouths; the wetness so bad they must spit as they thought of Eliza pulling a long strip of pale ham from an amputated joint. These were men who looked at their own arms now, during a long day in the trenches, and judged the ratio of lean to fat. And though there was a horror to it, they did not exactly blame Eliza her portion, so much as blame this gaping world, into which you threw bodies, perhaps your own body, as though the sky itself were starving.

Then, when she appeared, the cannibal thoughts had nowhere to land. Eliza was, in all the mud-coloured world, the most beautiful thing. And they ate her with their eyes.

But what of love? said Stewart’s worried thoughts. What has all this eating to do with love? Of course he found the cycle of life here uncomfortably close. They all did. During the endless afternoons, his medical heap of discarded flesh was often raided by dogs, who might be shot as they worried their human spoils. The shot dogs were then eaten. Of course they were cooked first and this made a difference, but the closer a man got to the line the more important it was to maintain it. And what else would keep the line, but love?

He was not the only one who felt this way. There was a keen trade in priests, these days, or the priest-like – men with a mellow, melancholic wisdom that in peacetime would have tempted you to hit them across the back of the head with a shovel – they drew their pipes on other men’s tobacco, and gave, in return, a wise sigh and a story,
preferably
one of woe. Stewart did not listen unless it was a tale of love, because although love still frantically concerned him (also fate and mischance), death did not trouble him at all. The last death he had cared about was Whytehead’s, and Whytehead had died some years ago. It was hard to remember when. Before that first action at Riachuelo, or after? It was certainly before any of the big engagements of the war. Whytehead was missing all the fun. No, the last time Stewart had seen him, the band was playing ‘La Palomita’, and the crowd were cheering their heads off, and Whytehead was just standing there, looking at them all.

It was the morning after Stewart had, or had not, kissed Eliza Lynch; the morning the fleet was dispatched to break the blockade. The whole town stood in Plaza de Palma cheering, one more time, the
Tacuarí
. With her now were the
Paraguarí
, and five or six more, including the
Ygureí
, the
Jejuí
, and the
Salto Oriental
. The captured Brazilian steamship
Marquês de Olinda
was re-rigged with the national flag and it all looked so fine, and so very much his own, that Stewart forgot about fumblings with this woman or that. No man’s heart can resist the tug of ships and, as they pulled slowly away, Stewart flung the stupid kiss, and all kisses, after them, as you might lob a pigeon; a flurry of muscle and emotion, which soared up to drift awhile in their wake.

‘Huzzah,’ he shouted, and he waved his very British hat. ‘Huzzah!’

And Whytehead gave him a narrow look.

So he was almost pleased when, after a few weeks in the field, the news came of the man’s death. The ships had engaged in the shallows of Riachuelo and the action had failed. The
Jejuí
and the
Salto Oriental
were lost, the
Paraguarí
laid helpless. The commander of the fleet, Commodore Meza had, wisely, stopped off in Humaitá to die of his wounds. And it was at Humaitá that Stewart
heard
the news that, upriver, the Arsenal had lost its chief engineer and the army their free supply of
matériel
. And he felt whatever thread tied him to Whytehead snap.

He was curious to find that there actually
was
a thread somewhere, like a tendon in his chest in which the connection he had to this man had been manifest. He was surprised to feel an actual sensation of loosening. The picture of the Fates was, he thought, quite just – their big shears cutting the threads of a man’s life – because what the world feels when a man dies, even at a distance, is an unravelling.

The body was found in his tobacco barn and the story circulated that Whytehead had hanged himself from a beam there. His dinner doctors, Fox and Skinner, had diagnosed self-poisoning: he had taken an infusion of nicotine they said; a pesticide he concocted against aphids. Stewart knew he would do no such thing. It would mortify his sisters. And he sat down to write and tell them so. ‘Dear Misses Whytehead,’ he began. Thinking that the letter would never reach them. Wondering how much of their brother’s money would ever make it to the Mile End Road.

In the months that followed, Stewart’s thread theory, or tendon theory, was of some comfort to him. It was as though he had a little packet of humanity stored safely in his chest, and he occasionally patted himself there, as a man might check for his pipe, while around him the cholera came and with it all other kinds, shades, varieties and types of shitting – dysentery, typhoid, and the rest. He wondered why God had not designed for mankind a convenient plug. He thought, also, that if he saw another man with his pants stinking, he might kill him, just to save time.

In October the northern army had limped down from the Cordillera and there was little enough for Stewart to do. Only the minor wounded made it back, carried over that great distance by brothers, or friends, or even strangers – who must have been put out when López shot their burdens
as
soon as they set them down, in order to purge the shame of the surrender at Uruguiana.

The general was shot first – which was the difference between López and other commanders of men. There he goes, thought Stewart. My animal Mariscal with his animal war. He walked up the lines of the wounded and stared each man in the face, checking his eyes as the band played ‘La Palomita’.

The great slaughter had begun, and it was years before Stewart cared again.

Then, in June of 1867, a man came up to him and spoke a sentence so clearly that Stewart wondered at the path this news had taken – it had travelled such distances to hit with precision the side of his head, where nature had placed an ear to receive it. The
Doterel
had been let through in June with a new English envoy; perhaps the news had come in a letter that Venancia opened on his behalf. Was it her voice he heard through the man’s face, as he came up to him in the middle of a busy afternoon and said, ‘I am to tell you that Miss Steerat of Edingbur is dead.’ It was news, he said, for ‘El Doctor’ – who indeed had an aunt called Miss Stewart who was by now long dead in Edinburgh as opposed to any other town. Where the news had come from, or who had paid for it, Stewart did not know. When he lifted his suddenly heavy face to thank the man, he had already turned to go.

‘She was a mother to me,’ said Stewart, pathetically, to his back, and the man looked over his shoulder at him, very like the statue of Perseus at Albani.

And so the previous, ordinary months of siege became extraordinary months, in which he had been alive, while his dear aunt was dead. If it was possible to experience life in retrospect then that was what he was doing now – a rush of sensibility pouring through the days, a lurch in time, a doubling back – as though he had dropped her
death
along the path, all unawares, and was returning to collect it, now.

The heavens were open to him. There was no one between him and the wide blue sky any more. Stewart looked up, as though for the first time, and decided that there was none so peculiar a colour as blue. The woman who reared him was dead, and he had felt nothing – no intimation before the news, no emotion on its receipt. And so his thread theory of human connection itself unravelled, many miles from home.

Of course, when he last embraced her, he knew that he would never see the woman again. Which is just as we all do, he thought, because ‘Farewell’ with a woman is always for all time. Even the small partings. Even if she puts her bonnet on and walks as far as town, which is not very far. Farewell. Because that is what women are for. For leaving, and loving from a distance, very like the way we love the dead. And he thought of the slender angel he would like to set on her grave – he spent his time inscribing the headstone beneath with one phrase or another. Finding the right words and forgetting them, re-making them in his head. Some day the thing would be settled with a pen and paper, but in the meantime he managed and forgot sentence after sentence until the moment when his mind was stilled with some lines that Whytehead had recited to him that day in Asunción.

But O for the touch of a vanished hand
,

And the sound of a voice that is still
.

And with this, a sadness filled his (already much engorged) heart, and although Stewart still, in general, liked the war, he could not remember how it started, any more.

But now that his aunt was dead, he felt a need to dress in the evenings and to look at the men about him with social eyes. Instead of a jaundice, he might see, for example,
a
tendency to cut corners. He applied his aunt’s horse language to them: that one was a bolter, another a swerver, when faced with the great ditch of life. And, as though Eliza realised this from a distance, one morning, busy (as a man might occasionally be) with his lice, he was interrupted by a small girl with a card.

Mme Eliza Lynch

requests the pleasure of

Dr William Stewart’s

company at dinner

on Saturday evening July 7
^th

at half past seven o’clock.

It was this that brought him, finally, to tug at the sleeve of the woman who walked the walls. He found her ordering the wicker gabions into a high gap and he interrupted her for so long as to request a piece of paper, if it could be found. It arrived that afternoon – quite a good sheet – in return for some future life saved, or lost (she would tell him when the time came), and he rinsed his hands with dry grit before picking it up.

Humaitá, July 4
^th

Dr William Stewart

accepts with pleasure

the kind invitation of

Mme Eliza Lynch

for dinner

on Saturday evening July 7
^th

at half past seven o’clock

Spacing one line after the next, so sweetly, filled him with a quiet elation. Just this – the simple cross and return of a pen, made him feel almost noble again.

Her recent confinement, and the birth of a fourth son, meant that it was many months since Mme Lynch had entertained in her little house in the compound behind the church. This was a pity, because Eliza by candlelight was a wonder. She gave her guests the gift of an easy, profound attention, and the liquid approval of her lovely black eyes. Her voice, when she spoke, was both light and proud; her whole conversation so carefully matched to the male mind that one was never obliged to stall or defer. This all he told his aunt as he scraped his face with a bloodied bistoury on the eve of the dinner, and followed the line of cut hair with a blind hand. But because she was dead, his aunt kept asking him questions, as though vetting a woman he might bring through her own door. (Eliza there – good Christ! – in his aunt’s parlour. And when her dress falls away there is nothing under the whalebone but more bone, and then more bones. Eliza falling at his dear aunt’s feet in a clatter.)

He stepped into what was left of his broadcloth, and attacked a green and spreading stain that fed on its map of sweat. He unfolded the revers across his chest, for lack of linen, and knotted a rag around the collar to keep it all in place; all the time attempting to answer his aunt in his head.

Eliza’s Irishness, for example – was she really Irish? And what kind of Irish, while we were at it? The right kind, Stewart answered, in the main – her manners seemed bred, not learned. Though it was possible she was about as Irish as any woman who wanted to do well in Paris where they thought the Irish
sauvage
and the English only spinsters.

But why should she doubt it? (His aunt was being most vexing.) Of course Eliza was Irish. There was the whole business of those ‘laughing eyes’. There was the embarrassing tendency towards politics. An insistence, almost.
There
was the frankness of her habits; a sometimes comic sense of cunning, which seemed to wander wherever, and tease at a man, particularly at his privates.

And what of it? She is more than all that, he told his dead aunt, as he made his way through the muck – she is also Eliza.

Her house was a lantern. A low, ordinary bungalow, quite large; instead of walls there were curtains of canvas hanging from the eaves. The lights glowed through the greased cotton until the whole shallow cube seemed to float in front of a man’s eyes: particularly if he was hungry. If he was very hungry, the place seemed to dance and recede, and then it seemed to be in front of his nose and very bright, just a little bit too soon.

A man might push aside the flap of the door as Saladin entering his pavilion, or Genghis Khan his Mongolian yurt. Stewart swept the canvas aside and stepped into the ‘hall’. He had brought a copy of Suetonius for Eliza to read, but thought it, of a sudden, all wrong, and slipped it, quietly, on to the card table as he waited to be shown through. The inner walls were also cloth and he followed an embroidered scene down to the dining room; a little miracle fashioned from curtains and tapestry and painted cotton.

‘Welcome to my field tent,’ said Eliza, with a wave at the vaguely billowing walls, and she walked with a frank affection towards him, raising her hand for the kiss. Then she turned and swept him towards the other men.