The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (27 page)

It was almost dark. Stewart had leisure to watch all this: the boy’s arms falling out wide as his kneeling, dragging mother pulled him towards the gap she had made in the grass. His head was flung sideways, to show his mother the skin of his ear and throat. And his eyes were bent towards the men.

The Little Colonel looked across the grass at them. His face was livid with the sunset. It looked like a saint’s face – he was so young, and his green eyes were glazed with the red of the flaming sky. Eliza let him drop at the lip of the grave, then lifted and pushed his head and shoulders into the hole. She lifted and pushed some more. But it became apparent that she, herself, was in the way and so she stood
up
to move around the other side. She must have trod on her own dress then, because halfway up she was jolted to a halt, and something tore. Eliza looked at the line where her skirt was joined to the bodice, and a sound came out of her crouched body that Stewart would remember for the rest of his life.

‘Why did you not help her,’ Venancia said many years later. And Stewart looked at his wife with fond amazement.

‘I would have been shot,’ he said.

But thinking, not of Eliza, nor of the dead bodies, nor even of how one action of his might have begged another, but of the river playing with the mist, and the evening gathering of birds in the Cerro Corá.

In fact someone did approach her, early on. At first he was not stopped by the guards – perhaps because his face was so raw-looking and bare. He stopped before he reached her and signalled in a strangely covert way. He stood with a leaning look to him, craning towards her, and his hand fluttered in the middle of his chest, as though to say ‘Pssst!’ When she lifted her head and looked at him, he straightened up and smiled. Then the guard hustled him away. It was the eldest son of Francisco López, Stewart saw, the one he had by his first mistress, Juana Pesoa.

That evening the captured men – Creole Spanish for the most part, along with those Guaraní of discernible rank – talked about destiny. Stewart was amazed at their temperament; but, ‘Philosophy is the luxury of the defeated,’ said his wife’s cousin, Frederico Báez. They told stories of the day’s battle as though it had happened many years ago. Stories of their own escape, mostly – rehearsing them for their own amazement, the sequence of events that lead to the fact that they were still alive. The war was over. It was like blood returning to a deadened limb and some of the men cried; there was such anguish in the air that they kissed
each
other on the cheek and on the mouth and fell asleep, some of them, in each other’s arms.

As for Stewart, he said that there were many different ways of tracing a life, but sometimes you think you would have ended up here no matter what. You would be the person you are, in the place where you are, watching a particular woman bury her son. And the stories you will tell your children; of journeys and chance encounters, of stray bullets and rolls of the dice – they may be true, but they are not necessary, after all.

‘Then why are you still holding those scissors,’ said Frederico Báez, and Stewart saw he had not let the blackened forceps out of his hand since noon.

There were many more stories told on the long walk home. One was a story of Eliza climbing a mound of corpses – like a rag-picker or a woman bereaved – and looking for a single face. It seemed that everyone knew this story, and each man had a different face in mind. One said that it was the face of a lover, a Brazilian who would step into the breach when López was dead. Another said it was the face of a woman that she was looking for, and when she found it she scored her ring across the cheek and eye, like she was trying to get blood out of the corpse. One of Il Mariscal’s women, most likely; of which there were so many. But that is the problem with revenge – you cannot kill the dead. The grief of it, he said, when your enemy is gone and you can not hurt them, any more.

A Little Dog

1873, Edinburgh

VENANCIA WAS AS
happy as Stewart to leave, after the last little baby died. Besides, it was hard to spend money in Paraguay, and it seemed they had a lot of money, now. The problem with Paraguay was that everything had to be imagined and ordered and shipped. And of course it grew more gorgeous as it crossed the ocean – a chair, a shawl, a glazed china rose: whatever gee-gaw it was, it became the most remarkable gee-gaw in the world, until you opened the box. There was something about the air of Asunción that made things shrivel.

This was, finally, the talent Eliza had, Venancia said. A talent for shipping. And before they left, she took from La Recoleta a small, handsome, wrought-iron dog, with a narrow-bladed back. It was some time before Stewart realised what it was – a boot-scraper from outside Eliza’s front door. Only one? The other was already taken, Venancia said; she had to pay a boy to hack this one out of the mortar where it was set.

Venancia was nothing if not tough; Stewart knew this, though the cold air of Scotland seemed to make her timorous and excessively kind.

‘Oh yes,’ she would say to some local biddy, over tea. ‘Oh, I do so agree.’

And Stewart would move to the window, to admire the view.

Sometimes he discovered her hidden away in a room, sucking maté out of that disgusting gourd. She had a terrible greed for asparagus, and she reared her own chickens in a coop near the house. Other than that, they seemed, both of them, unmarked by the war and the lean years they had endured.

Venancia’s looks were much worn, of course, but that was the children. She might be any age, he sometimes thought, from thirty to dead. Stewart had always liked old women, though he never expected to find himself in bed with one, or even, as occasionally happened, in a kind of accidental congress, which always left him feeling faintly hilarious.

In the early evening, when she was most busy, he might find himself following Venancia, for no reason, from room to room until she shooed him away with both hands flapping, and this always amused him, as though, together, they had done something quite witty.

This was the woman he had longed for, from San Fernando to the Cerro Corá. She stood in front of him – a woman who had the same name as the woman in his head. This, he finally thought, was love. And, indeed, when she moved close to him there was sometimes a fluidity; a looseness that was like the looseness of a man’s tongue in a woman’s mouth, or the shifting play of remembrance, or the sense of flesh giving way.

Stewart came up to Edinburgh one autumn day to tend to his legal affairs and meet with his pregnant daughter and walk her down the Royal Mile. She looked quite Scottish – so, though she had missed her mother’s good looks, at least she had Stewart’s breeding, and he was desperately proud of the contents of her belly, which had something, and nothing, to do with him. It was like throwing your
voice
, he thought. Or catching a fish by letting go the line.

So their progress was quite stately and domestic and gorgeous, as Stewart doffed his hat to this acquaintance or another, while his daughter panted gently by his side. Such respectable reproduction on the Royal Mile – it was very like a vista: the future opening ahead of him, even as he felt his own life close.

As they passed St Giles, however, the street suffered a subtle alteration and Stewart looked around to see who was watching them. It was a servant in livery – as negligible a presence as it was proper for a servant to be. Perhaps that was the thing: he was too absent. It was as though he surrounded himself with stillness, and in that stillness Stewart suddenly remembered trees. Not plane trees, or elm or even oak. But trees that ticked in a man’s eye as he passed; trees that were each, if you stopped to look at them, a madness of variation and character. ‘If you die here,’ they seemed to whisper, ‘I will eat your bones. But very slowly.’

It was the darkie, Miltón. A little cleaner than when he saw him last, but still the same Indian who, from San Fernando to the bank of the Aquidabánmi, ate clean grain while Stewart ate mouldy; who leaned forward one night and whispered in Stewart’s ear, ‘Water, Chambertin, Latour, champagne,’ like he was putting his tongue in there, and not words.

Stewart felt a little violated by his eyes on his daughter. Or perhaps blessed. Because the man smiled at them – and it was such an open, friendly thing, that was the mystery of it. It was the smile the girl gave him as she held on to his stirrup, high in the Amambai mountains. Deliberate and yet free: it was a gift. It was always so much more than he deserved, Stewart thought – wherever these people got it from.

Then he looked around, in a panic, for Eliza Lynch.

She had passed in front of him. She had crossed the
pavement
not two feet away and was walking up to a door on the Royal Mile. How could he have missed it? There was something quivering about her, as though the street was her stage, the very stones rapt. A hood of fox fur played with the idea of falling back from her gold hair as she waited at the door. He could not see her face, then she turned slightly, and brushed her cheek with the back of a gloved hand. The glove was russet-brown, and the sleeve of her dress red – an autumnal theme: she was the season itself, all aflame with a rich decay and gloriously sad. She was also an old tart. Perhaps it would pass in Paris, but that gold hair was quite scandalously bright under an Edinburgh sky.

It would not do to greet her; even so, it thrilled him to see her so close. Eliza Lynch: changed – old perhaps – but the woman herself, in whatever flesh. The door closed behind her and Miltón turned to the carriage from which she had just lit; a fine little cabriolet, with a little dog on the seat. The dog – or could Stewart be imagining it? – was dyed the same colour as its mistress’s hair.

Stewart’s heart was pounding as though he had escaped some terrific danger, a bullet, or a mud-slide – but the street looked just the same. As he walked on, a heat gathered between his shoulder-blades that might have been Miltón’s stare. Or, more like, the urge to turn back and stroll past, at just the right time. He was almost resolved. Oh, to face her again, eye-to-eye. The pleasure of it. He would pay good money to have the advantage of surprise: to let her know, by a coldness, a slight smile, an inclination of the head, that no, he did not forgive her. He did not forgive her anything. Not the war, not the money. He did not forgive her his entire life.

‘Are you all right, Papa?’

The last time he had seen her, she was in chains.

She must have spoken to the Brazilian general, Camarrá. Eliza was thirty-five when López was killed, too old to
play
the innocent, too recently bereaved to play the whore. Stewart could imagine the high, hurt tone she adopted with him, but she would have to offer something other than her body. Money, certainly – there was no doubt that money would, in such a situation, change hands. But a lot of people had money. She would have to offer something else – that indefinable thing she had. Her fame. The shift a woman makes when she says ‘I am beautiful’ that a man is helpless to, whether or not it is strictly true.

Or he might just have liked her, as men tended to do.

Or, ‘Save me,’ she could have said – and indeed the López women would have killed her with their bare teeth, given half an hour.

Whether Camarrá was a decent man or a politic one, Stewart saw her, at any rate, climb into a gunboat at Concepción. Never mind the chains, she was followed by her trunks – every last one of them – also by her younger boys, her retinue, and the widow Díaz.

She was getting away.

So Stewart and the other prisoners trudged down the river path, while from his horse General Camarrá saluted, with greatest pleasure, the most reviled woman from here to Buenos Aires, and the boat found the current and floated towards Asunción.

*

Stewart did not wonder what she was doing, so many years later, in his own home town: she was paying a visit to her lawyers, just as he was doing. They were due in court in three days’ time, because this is how it ends, he thought, not in death but in litigation; a matter of fifty thousand pounds lodged in the Royal Bank of Scotland under his name, a promissory note that Eliza claimed to hold. This was a woman who had taken the gold combs from out of
the
prostitutes’ hair, a woman who had bled the country dry. She had written to him personally. Quite a diatribe – she made free use of the word ‘disloyalty’.

‘Disloyalty.’ Stewart closed his eyes. He laughed. And yet, he did feel disloyal. For no reason at all, he felt disloyal, too.

Eliza Lynch claimed that the money was duty on the export of yerba maté, lodged abroad for the use of the Dictator’s children. Let her say what she liked. López never married her. And if the money
was
hers, why then it belonged to one Xavier Quatrefages, her lawful husband. ‘A very minor beast,’ as she called him one night by the graveyard at La Recoleta. ‘But a beast, all the same.’

He had always remembered the name.

‘Papa?’

‘Yes, my dear, perfectly fine.’ Though he was not fine. He wanted a drink. He wanted to get his daughter away from Eliza Lynch. He wanted to go home, and scrape his boots, and see his wife.

Acknowledgments

I must acknowledge the work of Josefina Plá (
The British in Paraguay in the 19
^th
Century
, Richmond, 1976) and of Helene Clastres (
The Land-Without-Evil: Tupí-Guaraní Prophetism
, University of Illinois Press, 1995). As for the rest: Eliza Lynch seems to provoke in her English-speaking biographers all kinds of sneering excess. Some facts seem to remain constant and it is around these facts that this (scarcely less fictional) account has been built. This is a novel, however. It is Not True.

Thanks are due to The Arts Council/An Comhairle Ealíonn; to the ever-wonderful staff at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig; and to the library of Trinity College Dublin.

Special thanks to Mario Rosner of Buenos Aires for a likely picture of the
Tacuarí
, to the friends who read the manuscript, and to Shane Enright for additional library work.