The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (20 page)

My dear friend, always watchful of my conversation, catches this last, and makes a toast to ‘Mixing it all up’. (
He
has been swallowing his brandy tonight.) ‘Here’s to my nigger father,
El Excellentissimo
Carlos Antonio López, and my Creole mother, who is bastard Spanish mixed with any bastard you like.’ I check around my little band, to see how they are taking this. Whytehead looks like a duchess who reaches for the sugar bowl, only to find it missing from her tray. Stewart lifts his glass high and gives a heaving hurrah! At which, López leans towards the British to say,

‘Don’t worry. It is the Spanish who are the canker here, not you.’

Oopsa! And in case he should think me one of them, I say, ‘Not like poor Ireland,’ with a smirk that seems to offend everyone, even my dear friend.

There has been quite a lot of champagne. To get us over the hump I declare that my dear friend should speak to us of this man Francia, as one statesman of another, and so he stands and gathers himself for an address.

‘You could not touch him,’ he says, with a sudden frankness. Then he looks down at the table, to score it with a thumbnail. ‘The man would not suffer himself be touched. You could not look at him. It was the law. So when he died, no one would approach the corpse. Besides, who could believe that he was dead? He lay there for three days.’

He looks up into the night, and when he speaks again his voice is thick with unshed tears. His own father, he says, had Francia’s lanky bones dug up and thrown half-rotting into the river at Asunción. His own father. And it broke his heart to do it.

‘My father’, he says, ‘is the loneliest man in the world.’

And so to bed, where I comfort him from fathers and from men in tricorn hats, and I keep the world, with all its necessary exhumations, at bay.

Dresses for today: in the old empire style.

The Josephine: a high-waisted white muslin frock over
scarlet
slip, of utter simplicity, for sitting about, when it is hot, also for my condition, and for pleasing my dear friend when he will not be distracted from matters military – such as all this afternoon with Whytehead; a discourse on lanyard shooting, and the rifling, or otherwise, of the gun barrels on the
Tacuarí
. This to be worn with a white lace veil, almost bridal.

The Josephine
à Visite
: a high-waisted ditto in grey glacé silk, with a waistcoat bosom, quite masculine, in lilac; to be worn with long kid gloves of dove grey.

The Corsican: a pelisse in army blue, the shoulders mock-epaulettes, with a tablier of scarlet, and deep cuffs of same, for levees, or for reviewing troops, as my friend proposes; his plans being large and very rationalising. I am to become their mascot, he says, I am to become their Higher Thing.

The Sot: my drinking dress. Something green to take down the flush in my cheeks. When I looked in the mirror tonight, I found myself pure scarlet.

Also there is a banging now on the inside of the ship; a thin sound made booming by the river. It comes from so far below the waterline, it makes my very skull feel hollow.

‘What is that?’ I finally say, and, getting no answer from my sleeping friend, I open the door of the stateroom, to find Valera, the equerry, seated outside. I do not know why he is sitting outside my door. Or why he is awake. Or whether he is there to guard or protect. I gather my dignity along with the front of my open
peignoir
, and enquire in a clear voice what the matter might be.

There is, he tells me, a prisoner in the hold.

‘Who?’

Valera does not so much as glance at my dishabille. With great reluctance he disgorges himself of the name I require. It is the Governor of Humaitá.

The little man in the nankin pants? But I saw him come
up
the gangway myself and it was Valera who guided him by a drunken elbow to his quarters. So they locked him up. It must have been done on a look or a nod – I saw nothing, at any rate. And now the little fellow has found something to bang – it sounds like a tin cup – and the whole ship is uneasy. Also, I think there is a wind coming, because a faint rolling under my feet makes me feel a little sick.

‘Why? What did he do?’ But the equerry just looks at me, with something like contempt.

Back in bed, the knocking drives me to distraction: it is as hard to ignore as the moans of the dying sailor were, in their time.

Tock.

Tock.

Tock.

Has he stopped?

Tock.

No. Or, perhaps, yes. He stops, not once but a hundred times. He stops, after each and every knock. Then, after each and every knock, he decides not to stop. He decides to knock one last time.

Some time before dawn, I take courage and go over to where my dear friend lies suspended in the wakeful dark. Perhaps the man should be let free now, I gently say, or at least given enough
caña
to tip him into sleep. At which a clear voice comes out of the darkness where his mouth must be. It suggests that I might want to join the man in the hold – we could have a good time down there, we could discuss some more Voltaire.

‘Oh Voltaire,’ I bravely say. ‘That fool. Everyone in Voltaire has a buttock lopped off and it is always the one on the left. At least the women do. Not one of them left double by the end.’

‘Good enough for them,’ he says. Then he fights free of his
hamaca
to stamp across to the door.

‘Tell him to stop that noise, or he will be shot.’

Valera, or some rat of a sailor, scurries off in the dark, and a little while later all is still.

Later again, I wake to find my dear friend disappeared. There is a low, urgent noise from the next room – the one that leads on to the deck. Someone is talking. I realise that I am trapped here. I think that Valera is behind it all – squatting like that outside my door. I think my friend usurped – dead! his body already floating out behind us, a ragged thing on the flat river. The voice goes on, and the tone is so conspiratorial I am afraid to open the door. I press my cheek against the wood and ease the latch and, on a breath, break open a crack to see who the new masters of my fate might be.

The first thing I see, by the flare of an oil lamp, is the face of my dear friend, as the Spaniard Goya might have done it, all brown and livid in the smoking yellow light. There are two crystal schooners of brandy in front of him; pushed away and half-f. López buries his face in his hands. He raises his head again. He is, I see, talking to the little Governor. He turns to him, and then away. He lifts his hand and brushes his fingers together; clicks them, once, twice, in the man’s face. He holds, briefly, the bridge of his own nose and says something with quiet emphasis, as though for the hundredth time; his eyes still closed. The Governor says nothing: his face is completely still, and somewhat ecstatic, and wet with tears.

The child has not moved since four in the afternoon. I should not have stayed with the dying sailor. I know it. Or perhaps it is the champagne.

*

I do not think he sleeps. When I wake, he is already gone, but he comes back in with my morning chocolate, to kiss
me
where I lie. He picks up my forearm, and looks at the marks his fingertips left there. Then he is up and away.

No breakfast. Later I watch him from behind my muslin veils, stalking the deck. There is always something to be pounced upon, worried at, cleaned or polished or heaved overboard. And none of it, it seems, has anything to do with me.

‘We are in Paraguay now,’ he says, when I ask him to take a little lunch with me – meaning ‘I am busy’, meaning ‘This is who I am. I have come into my own.’

And so I lie weeping and plotting indoors and sleep all afternoon. And yet I am not abandoned. When I wake, heavy with dreams, I see he has come to sit and perhaps to look at me awhile. He is there in the chair, staring at the floor, his eyes agape at some dull horror. But when I stir he looks up and, quite naturally, smiles.

‘How is the boy?’

‘Good,’ I say. ‘Your little wrestler.’

And then he heaves himself up, and is gone.

He is so impatient with me, now. I do not know what he wants. Oh I know he wants me to choose, in the morning, what clothes he will wear. He wants me to speak French with him. He wants me to tell him about Voltaire. But more than that. He wants me to twist some knife in him, and I do not know where, or in what wound.

There is something wrong now, over and above what is usually wrong – what will never be right – with him. There is a bargain: there is some bargain I must keep, and when he looks at me I try to remember what it is. I knew it once but have forgotten. He wants something. It may be something small. It may be the pivot. Of course – he wants the maid. Let him have her then. If that is all. What is it to me?

*

I have Miltón bring me back to my
hamaca
, but she comes running, to help me in – and a large business it is, as we take each other by the shoulders and grapple, until I, safely, fall.

‘Stay with me,’ I say. And she sits on a little folding stool by my side.

The maid. She has a good enough profile, quite pure, in the way that simple faces sometimes are. A hidden saint. Her father is a dolt and her mother a whore, and there she is – my clever girl Francine. The tricks that she knows. The secrets she has been obliged since youth to keep. Which is why she was for me such a very excellent maid.

Sent by Dolores the Spaniard because she was getting too pretty. And I looked at her, and thought her perfectly fine, and not too pretty at all. ‘I will call you Francine,’ I said, and she bobbed a little and was pleased to be hired.

I wonder what her given name is.

‘What’s your name?’ I say.

‘Why, Francine, ma’am.’ She seems perfectly surprised by the question. And so I let it go.

Now that she is beside me, my dear friend comes as far as my pavilion on his endless round, and he bows on the turn. Beside me, I feel her prickle and go still. And by the fourth or fifth turn I am bored by it – but massively so – and I tell her to go inside.

I want to tell the silly girl that she might get a marriage out of it, as M. Raspail married me to Quatrefages. And even though this is not Paris, it still might be done. The equerry Valera might suit, or someone a little lower down. Though any hopes of Whytehead are perhaps now gone.

‘Would you like to know how I got married?’ I say as she folds up the stool. She looks up from her crouch.

‘Why yes, ma’am.’

But I find I cannot do it. ‘Another time,’ I say.

She leaves, and I lapse into a greedy silence. And so the ship ploughs on, while I rehearse my woes.

He wants the maid.

Dressing for dinner, I am so overcome by the tedium of it all, I must chuck the string of pearls on to the table in front of me. The maid absents herself, as does the valet, and my friend comes over to fasten the string himself. We watch one another in the mirror.

I say I will not have the equerry Valera about me, I do not like the look of him. My friend says he is a very effective young man, and I say that I do not care how effective he is, I do not want him outside my door at night, because I don’t like his long nose and the way he looks down it, at me.

He says, in that case, he will have him flogged.

‘For what?’

‘For impudence, my love.’

But that is not it, either.

I turn from the mirror and stand. I am close to tears now. I want to run away from him, but there is nowhere to go. He takes me by the shoulders, and looks at me, and shakes me a little – tenderly. Then he slips his palm along the length of my arm to find my hand, which he touches, holds, and lifts for a kiss: all the while fixing me with a stare.

And his eyes promise everything.

I want to sneer. But this is not a vulgar bargain. It is an invitation. He is inviting me to join him in his life – his impossible life, where the sky is more blue, and the grass more green, where you can have things just by taking them. He is telling me to hold my nerve. He is saying that if I hold my nerve, like him, then I can have anything I want.

‘Francine!’ I call her back.

When she comes in, López squeezes past her in the narrow doorway and makes a clicking noise with his tongue. Then he is gone.

The room is so small. The maid looks at me, then she tucks her head down and strikes out for the dressing table, but I halt her where she is. I tell her to stand so I can look at her, and she fumbles one hand in the other, while I take my fill.

She is seventeen. She has already one child, dead or abandoned, and the marks must be under there somewhere, to prove it. I pull the hair behind her ear to check for lice eggs. I want to slap her, but instead I point to the soap and say, as I leave the room,

‘Wash.’

It is very nice soap. Attar of roses.

I can not smell it off her, when she comes through after dinner. Perhaps she does not like attar of roses. This annoys me. It puts me in a perfect rage.

And so we sit for cards.

‘And what are the stakes, tonight?’ asks Stewart. ‘Another story? A kiss?’

So he can sense it, too. Francine does not even blush. My friend leans back from the table and casually gropes for the decanter behind him. I bustle around and serve him myself. I say it is too dull – Mr Whytehead is to blame; we must play for money, because what is an evening without the promise of ruin? I turn to my dear friend and I say, ‘You must give Mr Whytehead more money, my dear, so that he can overcome his scruples and play. (I think I am a little drunk.) Or give the maid money, at least, so we can have a proper game.’

It seems I have stumbled on a solution. And a charming one at that. My friend looks at me, and lifts his glass. And so he is pleased with me, at last.

‘Here’s to the generosity of Madame Lynch.’

And he shouts through the open door for, ‘Money!’

We play just as we were some nights ago. My friend looks at his hand in easy contemplation. Stewart is massive again, heaving and glowering over two hearts and a spade. Across the table, Whytehead leans stiffly in, over the shoulder of the trembling maid.