The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

Champagne

December 1854, Rio Parana

We have entered Paraguay!

Sometime in the afternoon, after long hours spent slapping about this vast puddle, we found the channel. The tan of the water began to grow thin. I did not notice until Whytehead pointed it out to me, but the general muck that we have lived upon for so many days was splitting, by liquid degrees, into the red of the Rio Parana and the clearer grey of the Rio Paraguay.

The meeting of the waters. Over to starboard, the red thickened and settled into a streak of colour that clung to the bank, as though some huge painter had cleaned out his brush, far upstream. We were watching this, myself and Whytehead, and being very geological, when my dear friend gave a shout and all the home contingent ran to the rails. They pointed at the rusty discharge that was not yet a separate river, but still a current within the larger stream. And I thought of all the waters of the world, twining themselves in a watery plait like this, on their way down to the sea.

My friend came over to announce that we were approaching friendly territory.

'My country’ he said, and gravely bowed.

I took the moment to talk a little. I pointed to the wash of red in the clear grey. I said that this was the way that we should be, now that the course of our lives had met. I said we should mingle our two watery souls.

He looked over the rail.

'It might be some battle,' I said. 'Or a wounded god, staining the far waters red,' and he blushed almost, at the insistence of my tone. My wrists are bruised with his finger marks, and we are not easy with each other, all day.

'It comes from the far north,' he said. 'From the Mato Grosso and the mountains of Maracaju.' Then,

'When we are old, we will tend our garden there.'

For which I was grateful indeed.

And so the river forked, and in the widening crotch, or so I was told, is the country that I will learn to call home. I looked at the spit of land where it exactly began. Paraguay. It looked like an island in the middle of the river: but from one side of the island came red, and from the other grey, and we chose the grey. And so our path diverged from itself. We were beyond the confluence of the two rivers, and I bid farewell to the Rio Parana, hidden behind the swell of new land. And I said goodbye, too, to the far country it brings to us, spilling into the stream.

Later in the morning, Milton sidles by to say that the red earth comes from a place without evil. And yes, he says, I was right about the blood. It is indeed blood that comes downstream. Surely not so much, I say, if the place is innocent. He looks at me, and I see the calculations run across his face of how much to say, and how it will be received.

He has taken, my little savage, to telling me things. It is a flattery of sorts – at least I find it so, as he lets something indifferently drop about this daemon or that tree. Of course he is young. I tell him that he is a very leaky Indian. If he keeps talking he will leak all his soul away.

And now, my dear friend's country is on the right-hand bank, while, to the left, a grey swamp sheers flatly from us, all the way to the horizon's line. Sometimes it lies quite low, this flatness: other times, the whole plane of it seems to rise up and bisect the sky. The effect is quite distracting. I tell Milton to sling the hamacathe other way, so I might look at the other bank, and this he does, quite solemnly, unstringing and gathering it, and turning it and hanging it up again, while I stand there and look at him. Then I see the futility of it, and laugh. It is very dull to be this stupid, it is very wearing, and it puts me to endless trouble. Still, Francine hands me into the about-faced sling while Milton stands proud enough – as though the pointless west-to-east of it had given him some satisfaction, too.

And so I lie, watching, now, the right-hand bank: which is Paraguay. It is indeed an Arcady, as my friend promised; all wild orange groves, and 'bosky glens'. It looks soft. You can see the mist hang on distant forests and the hills are quite medieval, in their trackless pastoral. Endless and ancient, and waiting for the story to begin.

'Tell me about your daemons’ I say to Milton. 'Are they very bad?'

'They are big,' he says.

'How big? As big as a jaguar, as big as a tree?'

'Not big like that,' he says, after a while. 'They are big like a song is big.'

They are like a song, which you cannot hear – except that sometimes you can hear it. They are in the shape of things, but they have no shape. I tell him that he is a very philosophical Indian. He says that, actually, some of them are as big as a jaguar. And they look like a jaguar, and all the rest of it. It seems I have insulted him then, because he wanders off and I must coax him back with a smile.

Later, I tell my dear friend all this, and he gives me a sharp look – not annoyed, just close. And I feel, once again, that he knows me to the bone.

But since we have entered his own country, there is a kind of innocence to him, an ease and an urgency. He wants to be doing things. He wants to get things done.

We come in sight of Humaitá; a busy little place, with a bright Spanish church gleaming on the hill. My dear friend waves like a boy while the captain blows the whistle and a bright flotilla disentangles itself from the general trade. The sharp canoes run across the water; a shoal of fish, or a litter of boatlets, coming to suckle at our big wooden side. The Indians have decked themselves out with ribbons; they flutter from the ends of their spears, and it all looks very gay and savage. In each prow a man stands easy, with his cloak drifting back; revealing, in each case, his 'all'.

I am a little giddy with it, the sun and the ribbons and all the rest. Who would have thought it? Of all places – who would have thought I might end up here, in this distant spot, looking at so much male flesh, and with such equanimity? Because it is very brown flesh, I tell myself, and, as such, no great insult to my virtue – this last aperçu I cannot turn to say, half-laughing, to my dear friend, whose nativeness seems less an affectation now that the sun has licked the white off him. It has, I realise, made him quite black or, at the very least, nut-brown – as brown as the men in the boats; as brown as the faces that peer from between the trees on the bank, so utterly still they seem at one with the bark.

In the canoes, the men wear spurs and hat brims with neither hats nor boots. My dear friend tells me that the spurs are just for decoration; these men have, most of them, never ridden a horse. He seems almost proud of this fact, and it is borne in on me that these are his people and that he loves them, and so I must love them too.

'How funny,' I say.

The hat brims, he says, are all that is left of Francia, the first Dictator, who required the entire country to wear hats so they could be doffed when he passed. Over the years, the hats fell apart, but the brims remain. It is a way of telling the people that they are governed, he says. And I say,

'They will be lifted, some day, for you.'

I look at these naked men, their heads and heels circled with silver and felt, and think them already innocent and lovely. And they do doff the brims; they wave the little circlets in the air, and hulloo.

We receive the Governor of the district in his own parlour -a mismatched little man with a frock coat and nankin pants. He will come with us now, as far as Asuncion, but first we must dine in his courtyard, and have speeches, and roast a pig, and all the rest. At dinner, I notice he hides his feet beneath the table and takes off his shoes. Despite which, he is altogether very sonorous and grave.

I take my chance to ask him about Francia – whose name, I realise, has been in the air ever since I met my dear friend. So – gravely, sonorously – he describes a man dressed all in black with a tricorn hat; a man who read Rousseau and Voltaire; a man 'who would be his own revolution, his own guillotine'. When Francia walked out, the streets were empty – all the shutters in Asuncion were pulled to. Even the dogs were shot, so they would not bark at him while he rode, like Lady Godiva, through the town. El Supremo, they called him. And every fifth man was a spy. He closed the borders and started a nation, which was the nation whose soil we stood on, now. The Spanish colonists were his particular enemy. There would be no such thing as 'pure' blood, he said. From now on, all blood was pure, all blood was Paraguay.

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 Lopez, 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, Lopez 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 Asuncion. 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 Tacuari. This to be worn with a white lace veil, almost bridal.

The Josephine a 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 canato 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 hamacato 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-full. Lopez 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 Ί 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 knuw 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. Ί 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.

Tor 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, Lopez 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.

From time to time, he whispers. And once, he points.

So at least I have some pleasure. To see the girl hazard more than she could earn in a year. To see her handle it – the heft and clink of it in her palm, the gathering feel of the metal rims as they slither into a column between finger and thumb, which she then sets down on the baize. The hand withdrawn. So careful.

I can see a vein flutter on her neck.

I know money. I know the value of, for example, three hundred pounds – how a maid could live a lifetime on such a sum, how my father could live a month, how my mother might have raised her children on it for more than a year. I burned a note, once, that belonged to Mr Bennett. A fifty. I said to him, as I did it, 'This afternoon, I think I'll love you for free.'

These are the things I could tell the maid as she makes a timorous throw into the centre of the table, and then flinches when one of the coins begins to roll. I could tell her, as she loses, hand after hand, a modest dowry – which is to say, a life; a husband, a child she might keep – that money is the least of it, my dear.

And my goodness, she does lose. It takes a little over an hour. It takes a minute at a time. Whytehead leans over her shoulder, his superior mind in a welter of calculation, and is no use to her. Stewart, who bets promissory notes on his future salary, takes her money too. He reaches over and pulls it across the baize: once, twice. He takes it five times or more. The solid fact of it goes into his pocket when the game is done. Which it is done when the maid has nothing left to lose.

Ί have the best of it, tonight, it seems,' says Stewart, all good humour – as though she might get it back from him, another time. Then he makes his way to the decanter, with ponderous regret. But his hand trembles, as he pours.

My dear friend smiles, and excuses himself to smoke outside. No one follows him. Perhaps because they were not asked. But still – Stewart, who eats cigars, who has a passion for them, runs a finger over the cut of the crystal in his glass. Whytehead, who sticks so religiously to my husband's side, has, it seems, finally become unglued. And it amazes me again, how we make way for other people's desire.

Even I am unmanned by it, until I say,

'You may go.'

She picks herself up and she walks, not towards the stateroom where my clothes need laying out for the night, but into the open air.

He is not my husband. Of course he is not. I must train my turn of phrase. The man who is not my husband comes back fifteen minutes later – I have counted it by the clock. His cigar is still lit, though now it is a stub that he chucks, unceremoniously, out the porthole window on the far side of the room.

'And why is it', I ask, 'that a man must come inside to fire the butt of his cigar through a window, when he has the whole vast river to throw it into, over the rail?' I say that he must have the satisfaction of the porthole, because men must always be throwing things; but more than that, they must be aiming them too – and the smaller the target, or in this case the hole, the better.

Everyone laughs. My friend looks at me with a new admiration. And I quite frankly meet his eye. It is as though we have done this thing together. And this makes me feel lonely and quite giddy, both at the same time.

Later, Francine comes to unlace me in the dark. I have fallen asleep in a chair, because to lie down seems to strangle the child, or strangle me, one or the other. So she whispers quite close to me and heaves me a little forward to get at the hooks and then the stays.

I groan a little. And, in my sleep-weakened state, all I can think of is the closeness of her belly to me and the hope that there is not a child in her too. I can smell him off her, and this makes me gag a little. Because in the bargain, whatever it was, there was nothing agreed about smell.

And then she has me undressed and under the bedclothes, free of my corset, and happy as a boiled egg, all peeled.

In the middle of the night, I stir and find he is not yet come to bed. It is some time before I remember why this might be, and when I do I am awake and raging. He must not sleep with her. These hours, I think, are meant to punish. And, if so, he will be punished in return. Because he has started the wrong game here. He has started a small game and I am hugely, wildly bored by the small game. I was not sure I wanted to play, but if needs must, then I will play big.

Such is my ambition, in the middle of the night.

I hear the darkness breathe and stir; an animal close to my ear. I never sleep alone. I had Francine crawl in with me in Paris, when there was no man in the bed (I can hardly call for her, now). Because there was always my sister and, when my sister bolted, there was any number of girls at Mme Hubert's. The first, the only, nights I spent alone were in that inn, when Mr Bennett brought me to Paris.

Or did not bring me to Paris. He was sick with something like grief – stiff with it, in the corner of the post we took. It was as though his back would not bend into the angle of the seat. He looked at me while I gazed out the window or played with the cards I had in a little walnut box; clever things – three children playing with their kites made up the three of hearts, I remember; though all the ones I turned were spades, with women weeping, and skeletons.

'Your fate,' I said, flicking them into Mr Bennett's poor lap – mostly to amuse the man who shared the post with us, a fat fellow with a glazed eye. Mr Bennett was, by that time, so maddened by the presence of men around me that it turned the ends of his fingers blue, and I hoped he would not die before we got to Paris, which is to say, before my fortune was made. I was fourteen. We passed though Orléans and I could smell Paris on the road. I could see the smoke of it ahead of us; there was a smudge of Paris on the clear blue sky.

We stopped a night in Artenay, and Mr Bennett, out of jealousy, I thought, locked me in my room. I do not know when he left. He may have stayed to take some supper. The innkeeper had instructions for me to stay where I was – the bill was already paid.

This I found out in the morning, after a night of horror. Then another. And a third. They left me like that, as you might lock up a dog; the better it will love the man who sets it free. I think about it still. I had money – quite a lot of money – in my trunk and variously hidden in my clothes. I was not, after the first night, locked in. And still I craved the rescuing knock. And then it came.

It was the fat man who took the post with us. His name was M. Raspail.

The baby turns. If it is a girl, I will drown it, that is all.

Not that there is anything so terrible about Raspail. He was protracted, endlessly so, in his pleasures, and very private – he would never, for example, let me witness the spasm, if there was one, which I sometimes doubt. But he was clever, and always turned my strength against me. And I am disgusted still, by the thought of his hands.

So, if it is a girl, I will drown it.

I do not believe in the baby any more. Stuck in me now like a ship in a bottle: it is too big. It will kill me on the way out. Either way, I do not think that I can love it, which is all to the good. My poor mother suffered from excessive love of her babies, so when she lost them her health went too. 'Wait,' she seems to say to me now. 'Do not love it when it is small. Do not love it when it suckles. Do not suckle it. Do not allow it by you until it is weaned, and then not for any length of time. You may start to love it when it toddles over to your skirts. You may love it a little more when it starts to talk. But you must not actually love it, until it walks away from you, into the wide world. Safe. Arrived. Alive.' Poor Mama. Poor Adelaide Schnock. So blonde and Saxon-stupid, offering tisane in her little china cups to the unbelieving rakes of Mallow.

In the morning, I hear my dear friend try the door. There is a long silence when he finds that is locked. I wait for the sound of his receding footsteps or a shot fired on the lock; an axe through the walnut or the sound of running men. I wait for his pleading, or the sound of his body abjectly sliding down the wood. I feel his silence. I test it and match it with a silence of my own; longer, more indifferent.

I slide a stiletto blade through the keyhole. All the way through.

I will always sleep alone, now. I will fend off my ghosts how I may. And in this way he will never be able to walk away from me, he will only be able to approach my door.

I pull back the knife. He knocks. I open up the door and smile.

Later, I go out to my hamaca, and the maid appears in order to wrestle me into the net. I do not even bother to check her face.

I heard a woman say once that birth was like falling asleep – being just as simple and mysterious. Who could tell you what it is like to fall asleep? So when my baby draws his first breath I will know what some insomniac angel knows when it wakes for the first time. 'So that is what it is all about. So that is what we crave.'

I lie in my tent and lift the thin curtain and say, ' Milton,' and he runs to my side.

' Milton, I hear him shouting. Will you see what your Master wants?' The boy gives me a steady look and spits as he walks away. The whole world insults me, I think, and then I close my eyes and think no more.

Coffee

1869, Paraguay

The carriage was an old-fashioned Spanish affair, high and closed, and the blackest thing you ever saw. Black as obsidian. It was the black of ten coats of lacquer, maybe more, and though a black coach wasn't in itself remarkable, this one unsettled the eye by being unrelieved by any other glint or colour – leathers, harness, bit, all so deep a black you might fall into it. The wheels, it was said, were made of iron, and you would swear the glass in the windows was black, if such a thing were possible – it looked as though she rode behind a widow's veil, as though coal dust had been mixed in with the glass. Perhaps it was the ordinary difficulty of seeing inside a place so lambently dark: the seats gleaming, the dangling fringes of jet, the cushions of black silk embroidered on black. It was some kind of witticism; one that no one but Eliza could understand. Ί wanted it black’ she said, and laughed.

The horses were so black they would run in your dreams. Though there was a flowering of pink where sores had erupted, veined and flyblown from the thickness of their hides. They pulled a heavy load. The trunks were packed with jewels and gold plate – there was no doubt about that. There were diamonds slipped into the stuffing of the seats, the cushions might rattle if you shook them, and under Eliza's own crinoline was a curved, fireproof box filled to the lid with American mining shares. Or so they said.

Sometimes they thought of the heat in there. Eliza rode with her mistress of the robes, the widow of General Diaz. The Little Colonel, Pancho, sat up beside the coachman, and strapped himself upright in case he should fall asleep, or loosed his ties in case of attack.

And, with a guard in front of it and an assorted rabble behind, the carriage proceeded north and east. They were going where the light was thin: soldiers and prisoners, travelling shopkeepers, some mad people, girls with babies in their arms; they followed the high, bow-sprung box, as it lurched and bobbed over tree roots and stones. They carried it over streams, levered it out of swamps, coaxed and rolled and rescued each sharp iron wheel of it, pressing their cheeks, as they did so, into ten coats of lacquer. And not once did she open the door.

Sometimes they forgot there was anyone inside. When night fell and camp was set, she would step out, and she looked just like herself: but during the day the changing landscape played changing tricks on their minds, so as they moved from rock to high grass, as they reached a ridge, or rounded a spur, a man might think that he had been in this place before – perhaps as recently as yesterday – or he might think that his life had slipped forward somehow, that he had moved into another day, or another week, and no one to tell him where the lost time had gone.

One evening she stepped out of the carriage with a newborn baby, and it might have been her child or the child of the widow Diaz for all the sound they had heard. Whatever woman gave birth in there did so in silence, like a Guarani woman, who knows better than to shout. The father made up for it. When Eliza held it up to him, Lopez took the child and, holding the naked thing over his head, he galloped down the straggling line, hullooing and making the horse veer and swerve. So the child was his, then, they smiled to say – though that still did not answer the question of who the mother might be.

Stewart had not attended this birth either, but he was called upon to pass a nurse for the baby, which obliged him to check the breasts and teeth of three clamouring women – together with their clamouring babies who seemed to know it was their birthright that was being bargained away. As it happened, the teeth were bad and their milk too little and too thin, so he set the lot of them on a cart at the end of the cortège, passing the infant from one dug to the next, until a girl wandered out of the trees with a dead baby in her arms, and dripping. When he saw her standing there in the dappled light, Stewart felt a spreading stain on his own chest, as though he had been shot – but when he looked down, there was nothing there.

He was always being shot, these days. He was following his own hearse through the hills for the longest funeral a man had ever known. It had started indecently early, before his corpse had even a chance to climb into the coffin, and it was getting away from him now, the mourners, the horses, his own death. At other times he was following a London cab, and might hail it, if he had half an English crown. And once, it looked like a hat, Stewart thought, an enormous hat, worn by some tiny man, who sang and waggled his head, as he pranced ahead of them down the endless grass road.

After the coach, came the carts. The first cart was for her clothes: it was stacked with leather boxes, twenty of them or more, and all with some sad blue growth creeping out of the seams. The next cart was for her piano which was roped down in its upright, playing position and covered again with a red toile; a vast sheet of careless shepherds and pretty shepherdesses on their swings – also a small dog, endlessly rampant and yapping, and all of them repeated and folding into themselves from one end of the shroud to the other. After this, a cart for servants and younger sons, then food. Finally, a closed wagon for the mother and two sisters of Lopez – which looked like a cage, since the awning had rotted from its wicker arch. The Lopez women sat on sacks of manioc flour and beans as they lurched along. Ί am pissing in your soup,' Il Mariscal's mad mother was reported to have cried. Ί am pissing in the soup of every man here.'

She might look a while for men – there were few enough of them: there were families, and the scraps of families; widows and orphans. There were the remnants of men, who made up the army now. And every so often, it was true, there were men. They turned up. You saw them, squatting beside the morning fire, in their spurs and hat brims, the male contents of some village who had joined their quest – for it was hard to call it a war any more, or even a fight. And yet it was not nothing. It was the last battle, said Bernardino Caballero, a man who had seen enough last battles, you might think, to give him some inkling of when a war might end.

Or even, thought Stewart, of where the ending might have begun. At Angostura, perhaps, where the gallant Captain Thompson walked over to the enemy and handed up his sword. Or later, on the Azcurra heights, after yet another last battle: twenty thousand Brazilians against a battalion of women and children, with beards on their faces made of grass and wool; the new capital (a poor enough town) Peribibui lost. After that, Acosta Nu, held to the last minute by Caballero, so that Lopez might escape to San Estanislao – another 'capital city', this one lost without a bullet shot. Curuguati, then eastwards to the heights of Panadero. All of these places boldly marked on a map that Lopez had – though Stewart could point until his arm was sore at this far place or that, waiting for a Guarani to lend him its name.

After the carts and wagons came certain prisoners who were never shot. They comprised the life story of Francisco Lopez. Some woman he wanted. Some woman he did not want. A man who scorned him. The son of the sister of the man who betrayed them to the Brazilians at Curupaiti, or Curuzu. They were given more food than the common soldiers, so that they should not die when they were flogged. Some of them were quite hale, and Stewart wondered why they did not escape. Though how could they, when everyone here was escaping? They had been escaping so long, it made a man think that this was what life was – a regrouping against forces that are large – yes, admittedly very large – but also clumsy and beneath his contempt.

'Hah!' said Stewart, to illustrate his point, and the small girl who walked now with her hand always on his stirrup looked up at him and smiled.

She was a Guarani girl, of uncertain age.

They do not listen to words, Stewart noticed. These children only look, and it is always at the wrong place. They do not watch your eyes but your mouth. Or they do not watch your mouth but your hands. They make you feel not so much wrong-footed as wrong-faced. Or they might watch your eyes, but that is not the same thing as meeting them: a man might long for another human creature just to return his gaze. Perhaps that was what dogs were for. And he spent a while that day thinking about eyes – whether they were the door to the soul, or the soul's mirror. Do they open, or reflect, and what was the anatomy of it all.

He thought of the blue and stupid eyes of George Thompson at Angostura, looking at him while he fingered the hilt of his soon-to-be-surrendered sword. The table where they sat, with a sheet of ants lapping up and over the edge of it, on their way across the room. The rest of the ants walking happily on the floor.

Thompson's eyes of cerulean blue; a flare of white around the pupil, a matching outer ring of a darker smoky blue

– there was a pattern to this dark rim, as it fell towards the pupil, a kind of gothic veining. Which blue came first? Stewart was a doctor. He should know about such things, about the previousness, or lateness, of colour, and how colour grows. He should have paid more attention, at the time, to the bruised, navy colour of his own children's eyes, as they shifted into brown.

A British boat was waiting down river, Thompson said. It would take them to the Argentine, and then home. Stewart did not answer. He looked at the ruin of his hands, his cannibalised nails. He did not want to go.

And so his life was shaped by a kind of stickiness. He did not want to leave his family in Asuncion – those little strangers his wife had reared for him. He did not want to leave his wife – herself a stranger to the woman he had once loved. Besides, he could not abide Thompson. And so he drifted along with the war, which was not so much a stream as a sequence of separate moments, each so vivid and different from the last it made him feel quite hilarious, the way that nothing now was connected to anything else.

Thompson gave Stewart his horse that day. How did he surrender? Stewart sometimes idly thought. Did he walk?

The languorous dip and buck of the creature's back beneath him provoked thoughts of a slow, abrupt congress, but it was also conducive of other rhapsodies and regrets

– that he had not made a contribution, for example. There were trees around him demanding botany, and birds their taxonomy. There were things his aunt would have admired, if you set them on her mantel in a glass jar. There was the fame of exhibition: Ά series of glass eyes, blown and variously pigmented to the specifications of Dr Stewart, with a brief note of their metamorphosis and pathology. The eye of the diabetic patient, the eye of the bereaved woman, the eye of the blind.'

And there was a gorgeousness too, in not doing these things. In never having done anything, except go with the stream, which, although he cavilled, was not finally the stream of duty or obligation, but the flow of his own desire. The only time he went against his own inclination was when he stopped drinking: the rest – exile, marriage, the army, children – each an annoyance to him, and each the only thing he wanted to do at the time. He regretted the fact that he had lived a life of constant regret, and called an end to choice, with all its teasing grief. He looked instead at the life around him, from fungus to flower, and thought about eyes.

Sometimes he felt, as he rode, as though he were inside something; that he was looking out through the sockets of his eyes, as an antique soldier might look through a slit in his helmet. He felt that, between his skull and his self there was a gap, an area of darkness, across which he must peer.

At other times he felt that his eyes were as big as his face, and as open; his face itself was wide as the sky. But then the helmet was back again, and his eyes were darting through the gaps. Like bullets. He shot his gaze at a tree, at a bird. He never missed.

He wished he had a pen, or even that Venancia were here so he could share his observations with her. He was grown most chatty, and so he told the girl with her hand on his stirrup that the eye was not a door or a mirror, but a weapon, at war with the world. And she looked at him.

Some days later she surrendered. She met his eye, and then she did something with her own eyes. A kind of swoon, but without looking away. She made her eyes flat and unjudging, so they looked, he thought, quite gelid. Then – did they open? They became inviting, somehow, like water. The tiniest shift. A liquefaction. Just enough to say, 'Yes.' Or even, 'Please.'

Stewart's pleasure was not what it had once been. It was thin and weak and he did not know what to do with the body of this girl under him, which was very small. It seemed more like a bundle than a body, though hot inside – which struck him as sad. His desire was a meagre, hard blade with which he stabbed himself, not her, where once desire had been (he could hardly remember what it had been) – oceans, rivers, forests, God help us: everything. The girl was younger than he had thought and he did not take her again.

The last time Stewart slept with Venancia there was nothing to be done. Perhaps there had been some physical exchange, but he could not remember it as a carnal event. If, for example, he were to die, and in his dying try to remember the last time he had been inside his wife and the last time she had been about him, he would not be able to do so. As the journey went on, as the landscape unfolded in front of him and unravelled behind, he wondered if the people he had left in the past still existed. He wondered if there was any way to stitch the path back up, and make his way home to them. And he regretted the night he had lain in the dark at Venancia's side talking about warehouses, licences, a lawyer in Buenos Aires they both knew. They had a chance, and they did not take it. A chance for what, he was not sure. Desire was the least of it. But it was also, perhaps, a chance for desire.

He did not think of it during the day – there was always some other irritation to occupy his mind; a man's skin that was designed as a penance and not a protection; the changing vista, the clouds hanging in the branches of some forest, the feeling of legend from the landscape, and also of unfairness when you looked at such wide beauty from the narrow torment of your body; a chafed heel, an ulcerated shoulder, or the sense of your life gone astray. And then, around noon, there was the daily despair. It was a physical thing, like a drench of rain; you were dripping with it. It burdened every part and compartment of Stewart with a liquid grief, so that he wasn't so much riding as carrying his tears, brimming in some slopping leather bag, with gaps spouting in the seams.

And with the sadness came a decision. He would put his burden down. Every day, around noon, Stewart resolved to kill himself by the nearest means. He loved the force of the resolution; relished the relief. He craved death as much as water, more than food, and he fingered the handle of his knife at his side.

But he would have to pull away into the trees – and where was the right path among them, the most forgiving glade? The wound would have to be just so. The pistol in his saddlebag lacked shot. He might reach into his saddlebag, or fondle the leather plaiting on the handle of the knife. He might remember to put the leather in his mouth, because the doctor in him knew that this moment would pass, if he would only eat.

And yet, his throat was so dry. He might suck a little on the knife. Or he might nick the inside of his cheek to feel something sharp and taste the blood. Then it would come to him in a rush and he would stuff whatever handful he had been given into his mouth. After a moment, he would feel the prayer of it sweep through him and he was always glad, then, that he had stayed alive. There was always something to make him glad – the sharpness of grass, or a rock exquisitely veined with red, or pollen touching the child's skin and leaving its stain.

Story time. He looked at the green sward, the medieval crags, the black brooding carriage, and he held his little girl by the hand. His Lily. His Rose.

By mid-afternoon words had left him again. He was not sure what remained in the pan of his skull, but the last thing to go was the mechanism whereby a man counted things. He could feel himself tick with each passing tree trunk, fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two – as though counting was the last tenacity. And then the numbers, too, were gone, and his thoughts were made of nameless rocks and trees, the nameless eyes of the child at his side, and the wide, nameless sky.

Dusk.

The evening, like the morning, was full of business, as he tended to Lopez. After which, there might be food, or even music. As he turned to sleep, his mind would snag on some domestic thing the girl had arranged for him, a hot stone against the mountain cold, or the girl's own body bundled beside him: he would feel his own smallness under the stars, and there, on the side of the cold hill, he would long for something that was the exact temperature of Venancia Báez. His fingers twitched as he fell asleep, fumbling for the gaps in her imaginary clothes, and the feel of her skin was intimate as oblivion to him, and as large, and kind.

He thought about the last night he spent with her in San Fernando, at the mouth of the Tebicuari. He could see her eyes in the dark. She was very clever, his wife. She had not come to the camp in secret – nor did she come openly. She came like a woman covered in dust, limping on bark shoes, and so she walked in past the sentries and then walked out again, back to the captured city of Asuncion.

She slipped into his hut after sunset, and looked at him.

Later he saw her body. Or some of it.

It was not just Venancia's body that Stewart had slept with in the early days of their marriage, but it was her body that was beside him now, as they lay and faced each other and talked – close, so as not to be overheard. The swell of her hip and the angle of her shoulder, her breasts falling out towards him in a line; it certainly was her body, or a swollen version of the same. But it seemed to him too lush, and hypocritical, now. Venancia's flesh, once so intoxicating, just irritated him: it made all the bites on his skin sit up. The whole pudding of it – his own starved, mortal shanks shivering beside her with something that might have been desire but felt more like tears.

'How do you live?' he had whispered, and she just smiled. Venancia grew things in the forest, or under the floorboards; she grew things in the dark. And even as he talked to her about a bank in Scotland, a broker in Buenos Aires, he was deciding not to touch her. She had given herself to some military fool, he decided, some Brazilian, saying, Ί have children to feed.' And how could he blame her? They were his children, after all.

Venancia's body. It filled the hut where they lay with accusation. It was not her fault. Stewart looked into her eyes (their brown plea) and knew that she might give her favours where she liked, but her life belonged to him. And all her cleverness, only to him. She had taken this journey, not to talk about money, but for love of him. Even so, the words that came to him were something like Ί do not', and then Τ do not', over and over again. A scrap of a phrase that begged many endings, one of them being -there was no doubt about it – Ί do not want you any more, Venancia Báez.'

High in the Amambai mountains, Stewart fingered the cold hair of the girl who slept beside him. It was brown. There was a white man back there somewhere, in her line. Some Jesuit.

'Poor William,' he wanted to say. 'Poor William Stewart.' Such scruples as he used to have. Now all he wanted was to hear the rasp and sigh of the girl's breath. All he wanted was to fling his life, one more time, into the body of Venancia (as was) Báez.

Later, he woke the girl to look at a low star which had gathered about it a light of great delicacy in the bone-coloured dawn. He was not sure she understood, but she sat easily on his legs and, after he had pointed and she had looked up, they stayed like that for a while, waiting for the day to begin.

She was younger, now. The farther they went in the northern hills the smaller and more helpless she seemed to him. So perhaps it was true. They were going to a more innocent place, after all.

In the morning, Eliza would climb on to the back of a cart and play the captive piano, still tied where it stood. She played ' La Palomita' while Lopez, as often as not, shot someone. He did it personally – there were so few men left to do it for him; but also, it must be admitted, he needed to do it himself these days, like a morning expectoration or a fart.

When the time came to shoot his brother, however, the massively incompetent Benigno Lopez, he spared the man no honour. He called upon the services of Bernardino Caballero, the highest-ranking officer he had left. Also he had everyone stand as though on parade. He signalled Stewart forward to check the condemned man's health and the comfort of his bonds. He pulled their weeping mother towards the stake, and shook her shoulder and cast her down, as if to say, 'See! See, what you have done to this woman your mother.' And Eliza, for the occasion, played ' La Palomita' standing up. She wore red.

Benigno was stripped down to his underdrawers, and the mound of his belly was immensely comical and afraid. It quivered and heaved, and was so inviting that Lopez could not help but cut him loose one last time, to send him careening around in a circle, snorting like a pig. Everyone roared. They kicked or spat, while Benigno squealed. He seemed to enjoy it, in a bitter sort of way. He squealed fantastically well, and then he squealed even better. Then Lopez gave a brief nod to Caballero, who had the man-pig pulled back to the stake and shot.

Eliza finished the last verse of the last round of ' La Palomita' and was helped down from the cart by Pancho, her son. She had not missed a single note.

After Benigno, Lopez forbade the use of bullets, because they had not enough, and men were lanced where they stood. Particularly the men who had conspired with Benigno, but also, and sadly, the boy Paulino Álén, who came to the camp at San Fernando with a hole in his throat after the fall of Humaitá. He had tried to kill himself, and failed, so Lopez made a gift of it and finished the job for him. Stewart might have balked at this particular death or at another, but there was always the general truth of the war, and the honour of their cause. Benigno had conspired – there was no doubt about that. He had plotted to slip a knife between his brother's ribs, to hand over the country to the enemy, to hoard supplies, to deny marching men meat, to divert from the front line all kinds of fat bacon and shoulders of lamb, lard and cutlets and blood sausage and tripes. It gave Stewart satisfaction to see the man die, because there was justice in it. It gave him pleasure to see Mother Lopez caterwaul, the attitude she struck like The Virgin at the bottom of some savage cross. Also to see the tear seep out of the Little Colonel's green eye, before he turned to help his mother down from her cart.

Somewhere on the road Stewart had become a creature of Lopez. They all had. They could feel him in their blood. The terrible rapine that might seize a man, the frenzy of hacking and slashing – that was Lopez – the terrible urge to shit that might swell inside him when he had killed, so that soldiers dropped their kecks in the view of enemy fire there on the battlefield. It was not fear that made them so incontinent, but a madness of the body that filled them to bursting and demanded egress – of any kind: also carnal; the men being endlessly urgent and ignoble in that way.

Stewart, not being in the thick of it for the most part, kept his pants in order back and front. He confined himself to indifference – a narrow, whining sort of madness that might let a man die because he did not like the look of his ugly face. A civilised, smirking sort of thing, which stepped through the heap of enemy wounded and slit this, or that, throat. These were all pleasures. And he knew that once they slipped out of him, he could never call them back.

As the personal doctor of II Mariscal Lopez, Stewart lived close to the abrupt gesture; a wave of the hand that could kill a man. He tried not to fawn. He opened his medical bag with decisiveness and closed it with a satisfying click. Then he became too careful about his bag. Then he became too casual about his bag. He left the bag behind, as he squatted in a manly, companionable way and daily checked the presidential feet, the calluses and the many small joints. He rubbed Lopez down like a horse, feeling the tendons where they joined the bone. He enquired after his digestion and went behind a tree to check his stools, which were always a matter for congratulation. He lifted his member and rubbed it with a chalk mixture, to give a more cosmetic consistency to the gonorrhoeal drip. He treated the body of Lopez with cheerful hands. Not to do so endangered not only his personal health, but also the health of every man there, not to mention the well-being of the entire region of the Rio del Plata.

And sometimes, when he sat with Lopez talking about the need for heroes or the mechanising tendency in modern life (his foot idly tapping his doctor's bag), Stewart thought him the sanest man in the world.

In Tacuati, the straggling army bunched up to a halt, and they stayed for a week. There was an estancia there: a horseshoe of sheds around an open courtyard where Lopez sat at a table, and wrote. Then he sat back and looked at his notes. He talked to a queue of men and seemed to hand down judgment. Then he waved them away. He arranged the papers in front of him. He placed them in particular patterns. From time to time, he burned one.

There was no other madness.

Eliza encouraged the feeling of respite. She managed to give the place the atmosphere of a small spa. There was a little spring in the courtyard, and she drew wooden beakers of water from it, which she handed to the men herself; saying how restorative it was and extolling the pure heights from which it came. There was food, too, from the barns. And though they lived in uncertainty, there were things a man had not had, or heard, in some time, such as the sound of rain on his roof, for example, that lulled Stewart into an afternoon ecstasy of remembrance.

He was housed, for the duration, next to Eliza's quarters – a sympathetic billet: ever since they stopped, Stewart was fighting a sharp fever that followed its own clock; he could never tell what time he would be weak or clear-headed, and what time he would be stretched. It was a small, pungent room with no window and one rotting door. Where the dividing wall reached for the roof, there was a blessed, blunt triangle of open space; a dark gap through which the sounds of Eliza's 'drawing room' came to him as he lay on the floor. What a Babel! He would wake or drift to the sounds of her sons, speaking French to their Mama, or Spanish to each other, or Guarani to the men. Once, Stewart thought he heard German or something like it – Swedish perhaps -something guttural and rational and quite gorgeous that was telling him to lie down and keep his clothes on. And once, a whole sentence in English, 'The book is on the windowsilp, that was the most beautiful thing he had heard in a long time.

The girl lit a cleansing fire in his doorway and it flamed in the daylight, weakly orange, while the yard beyond buckled in the heat. Stewart saw things in the flawed air that he decided to tell no one about: not the girl, not Venancia, not his aunt, not his mother, not Eliza on the other side of the wall. He would tell no woman about these things that he saw. And he longed to rest his eyes on Eliza's boys, who stayed constant, all of them, and easy, through the haze.

Stewart could tell that they were fine young men, and very proud. Eliza had a certain way of sitting or being that could halt them at the mere sight of her – because of course they worshipped her, as boys do, and she adored them in return. Their father scattered them when he came into the room, but he too was indulgent and patient and kind. There was nothing degraded about this household. There was nothing that Stewart could sense of darkness, even when all was dark around him and his own death seemed as close to him as the family on the other side of the wall. Then closer. His own death scrabbled in the high triangular gap – he could smell the coming rot, he could see the long, black fingernails sneak in over the stone.

'Will you take a cup of coffee, my dear?'

It was hard to tell how sick or well he was when sentences like this fluttered down to him. Coffee? He must be dying. He looked at the girl as she dipped a rag into some water and wiped his chest. The rag, the water, the girl: these things were real. The coffee could not be real. He must be careful about coffee. He must stay alive.

Then he smelled it.

And Stewart decided that it was all real, in a way. Because the gods can make for themselves all kinds of felicity. The ease with which they run around, and chat and shout. The freedom they have. The lovely, ordinary nature of it all.

'Take your shoes off, my dear, and put your feet on this,' said Eliza, the cannibal. Eliza the evil one. Eliza who rushed, pregnant, into Humaitá to fling herself at II Mariscal's feet and say, 'Why does your brother Benigno hate me? Why does he insult and humiliate me like this? Why?'

But Stewart was delirious, and death crouched between the thatch and the wall. Death was a nest of insects; a thick, seething, black triangle, all shiny and heaving and trickling down the wall to crawl over him. And he itched and whined in the straw while from next door came the sound of a stool being set down.

'Is that better?'

No. He was delirious and Eliza was just like any other wife. She must nag a little, and provoke; she must never be quite satisfied. Because this was the way of wives, it was their destiny: women must always be thwarted, and so men must always fail.

They had conjugal relations, Stewart thought, no more than twice the week of his fever, and this in a farther room. He heard much more than this, of course, but the actual events he distinguished from the less real by the whimpering, puppy-like sound that Lopez made. At least Stewart thought it was Lopez. If it was not, then it was a peculiar mewling for Eliza to make. But you never knew.

And so the week stretched into one long, golden afternoon, where they were, for the most part, as happy as anyone might be, the Devil and his whore. And Stewart was happy with them, on the other side of the wall, as they arranged their lives by rules both tender and aesthetic; as Eliza brought out one shawl or another to drape on the chair, or changed the lamp for a candle, because he preferred it so.

And Stewart allowed them a life like any other couple: a shared past shot through, as it may have been, by moments of great frankness; embarrassed, sometimes, by emotions it seemed their joined bodies were too frail to bear – Lopez after the death of his father, say, or Eliza some ordinary Sunday afternoon, when it seemed to her she might drown in her own life and clung to him as a woman wrecked. And so the fever waned.

Pancho called him. He grabbed the door frame with both hands and leaned into the small room saying,

Ί think there is something wrong with Mama.'

Stewart peered into the boy's looming silhouette.

'One moment,' he said. And so, at last, he went next door.

He was right. It was lovely. She had covered the rough furniture with drapes of sage-green and grey. There was a pier-glass on the wall, a preternatural clock; there was the scent of lilac, and also a fusty magical smell that seemed to say 'Home'. In the middle of all this cluttered ease, Eliza sat with a distracted, strained attitude. She did not turn; but she answered the doctor's greeting, when he gave it, with,

'Yes, a very good evening.'

And still, she did not look at him. She spoke from the side of her face, so as not to disturb some forming thought that seemed to be gathering on the far wall. She squinted a little, as though trying to understand the shape of some stain; the lack of whitewash perhaps; an accident of light and shadow, or a horror of moss spreading in a corner by the door.

Stewart thought his delirium had spread, but there was no fever. He lifted her wrist and felt her pulse. Then he palpated, briefly, the flesh under her chin, by her ears, and along the base of her skull where it met her spine. Eliza's face, her grey brain, balanced there for a moment in his hands.

After which benediction, he sat down.

The creak of the rush seat seemed to catch her attention, at last. She looked at him; her head slightly cocked, like a bird's. It was a long look, and it was deeply estranged, both from him and from the world he was sitting in.

Stewart sought and found the phrase 'hysterical paralysis'. This is what happened to women in Edinburgh, he seemed to remember, from time to time.

Then she put her head straight and snapped to.

'Doctor Stewart,' she said, Ί felt the need of some arrowroot tea.'

'Of course,' he said.

Tancho obliged. You know I hate him running errands for his poor Mama, but there is no better boy.'

'Mama,' said Pancho.

'Or I should say "young man". Come here to me, my darling.' And Pancho strode gallantly forward, and dropped on one knee. He looked at his mother as she looked at him. She put her hand on his shoulder and, when he felt her touch, he fell forward to lie in her lap.

Her eyes then were an evening blue. They were the colour of the light, when it goes.

'She has put me in charge of sleep,' said Pancho. Stewart nodded. He had come to talk to the boy. Or he had come to sit by the courtyard fire, where they might happen upon the subject of his mother, who did not, after all, drink her arrowroot tea, but fussed serenely around Lopez when he arrived and called a soldier in to sing.

Then much bother about the piano, which must be unloaded at once and brought to her quarters. The evening made unbearable by music; a song called 'Barbara Allen'; notes that coated a man, and fingered every crevice. When the silence was finally clean, Stewart walked out to spit and look at the stars, and talk to the heir apparent.

The boy must be sixteen or so. His skin in the firelight was an uneven and glowing brown and he looked altogether romantic as he squatted there; though also a little glum, as he stared into the tangle of flame. He was thinking, no doubt, of The War.

He had the clearest gaze. Stewart took comfort from his green eyes, which were a window of light in the middle of his face. He took comfort from the fact that, in this whole travelling circus, there was one freak who might be called 'the beautiful boy'. The boy who simply looks. And he was not the only one who felt it. Belief in Pancho was a general pleasure. The men looked at his eyes as you might look at the sky, for the solace of colour, and they indulged the boy and his jewel-like stare.

Behind him, his half-brother, the bastard son of Juana Pesoa, kept fierce guard, as always, in the shadows.

They were talking man-to-man.

Ί am also in charge of the piano. I have my own brigade. We lift it in the evening, if it needs to be lifted. We keep the damp away. I have a man sleep under it, just in case. Not tonight though, as it is with my mother, indoors.'

Stewart did not ask who might want to attack the piano, but still the boy said, 'Just in case. And besides music is a noble business, is it not? This is what I tell the men, that music is just as mighty a business as killing is, and just as useful, in its way. I set them to care for "the beast", as they call it. Or, "his Mama's beast", sometimes, if they want me to hit them.'

And then, as though reciting and forgetting a list, he started again.

'Night-time security. What she calls "Sleep". I see to the bedding, personally. I make up the bed myself. It is a tender duty, you know.'

'Indeed.'

There was something the boy wanted to say.

'But sometimes in the morning, Doctor, the bed is just as I left it, the sheets not even turned down. Other times it is so screwed and wrinkled I feel like scolding her. I say, 'Mama, what is the point? When I have four men outside your door, keeping their eyes open so that you can shut yours. You should become our night watchman, you would walk in our dreams.'

'She does not sleep,' said Stewart, carefully.

'She sleeps in the carriage for ten minutes at a time, I think. But at night she does not sleep.'

'She looks quite well.'

Pancho seemed to think about this for a while.

'She always looks clean, that is the thing of it. Whether or not she has slept, or in what tent or room. She always looks clean.'

'Perhaps it is because she is beautiful,' said Stewart, and the boy looked relieved. It was indeed a burden he carried – the unmentionable beauty of his dear Mama.

'Do you think so? It is hard for a son to tell. But yes I think she is beautiful, even though she is old, now. I think a boy might say that without compromise, about his mother.'

Stewart stood up. He was hugely tired.

'You must get her to take some air, when we move again,' he said. 'The coach is so enclosed.' And the boy prodded the fire a little miserably, and agreed.

It would all keep going, thought Stewart. After I am dead, and after Lopez is dead. The son would keep going, while Woman – lovely Woman – kept turning the handle on the world's dreadful machine.

We really would be better off without them, he thought; as a breed. Apart from all the fuss. And it saddened him that a woman's needs should be so monstrously met, if not by her lovers then by her sons. That Eve should kiss not just Adam but also Cain. That it all keeps trundling on. It leaves her, and then it comes back to her again.

As he fell asleep, he heard her talking to the boy, through the wall.

Tancho,' she said. 'Where did we get this thing?'

Ί think we got it in the cathedral in Asuncion’

'Well it is a very ugly thing’

And Stewart spent his dreams wondering what the thing might be.

The next evening, Stewart sought out the boy again. He could not help it. He wanted to talk to the future. He wanted to see those eyes.

'For all her nonsense, you know, mine is an important position. If we lose her we are absolutely lost’

'Yes,' said Stewart.

Although it was the boy he believed in now, and not the mother. The boy's mother was a whore. It was never a word that made sense to Stewart, but it made sense to him now. It was the prickle on his skin of hatred or disgust – the unbearable tenderness where his skin met the night sky. The sensation of falling. Stewart thought that he might fly apart with it. It was a rage and a yearning, and the only word he could put on it was 'whore'. Everything was dirty and dark, now, and his waking dreams stank of Eliza, until he had to seek out her son and rest his eyes on him.

Pancho, as though he sensed his need, tried to put the older man at ease – but of course it was hard for a boy who had been reared as he had been reared to find the right tone. He settled on a story.

Ί bet my boys they would not take the witch Cordai,' he said. 'It was in Humaitá, when she was still caged. Did you see her? If you threw her a bone she would twist it in front of her face like she had never seen a bone before, and my lads were all frightened – she would fling it back at them and they would scatter and shout – or she would gnaw at it, all leering, and once she put it into her private self, whatever you call it, her cunt, though not far. So I knew she was daring us, and I threw a belt buckle I had into the cage for the first man to take the witch Cordai.

'You should have heard my father laugh. He said he would write it in his "Maxims" that a dare is a mirror, because once I said it, of course, I was obliged to enter the cage myself, and attempt the deed. But I did it. Just about – the place being so confined, and the witch, as you may imagine, none too pleased’

Ί can imagine,' said Stewart.

'She bucked so much and spat. I swear it – I saw burn marks on the floor.'

'Really?' said Stewart, who was beginning to hear nothing now.

'She hexed my father, once, you know, but it did not work.'

Thompson's horse died. Stewart sucked its handsome tendons. He chewed them for days at a time. And, once he had eaten the inside of them, he wore the horse's shins pulled up his own legs, with the fetlocks stitched together, for leather socks or hairy boots.

One day, he looked down from the mountains back to the gently folding Cordillera, and noticed that the girl was gone. She had been getting smaller and smaller. It had been hard, for a while, to realise the lack of her. Stewart looked around him, over and again, wondering what was missing – was it his knife? The three bullets he had found to load into his pistol, if the powder ever came his way? When he saw that it was the girl, Stewart's mind went back along the trail looking, not for her, but for the man he had been when he had the girl by his side. Days back. Perhaps a week. When he found him – this past version of Doctor Stewart – he pulled him into himself for a fierce, short embrace.

Yes, the man told him, she was gone. She had been slipping into the bushes more and more often. Her looseness was turning to cholera, even though the air was now so clear. Yes, even when the cholera was leaving them, it was taking her with it. And at night her body had leaked in his easy embrace. And, sometime that morning, she had fallen down and Stewart had not picked her up. And why should he pick her up? There was no time. The Brazilians were hours away. There was no turpentine, nor any emetic to treat her with, and what little he had was kept for the exclusive use of Senor Lopez.

At which, Stewart let his old self go again, and turned back to the black carriage that was creeping like a beetle up the flank of the hill.

By the banks of the Aquidabánmi, the ox that pulled the piano cart died, as did many of the men. They were on the brink of the high meadow lands, where the forest began to thin, a place blessed by hummingbirds and friendly breezes, also circled by the Karakara vulture, who must have known something about the stream there, because three hours after drinking the water they were seized, both animal and human, by griping pains. They could barely pitch camp, and that night you could hear Lopez raving in the darkness, though maybe it was some other man – a strong man – bellowing at death. But despite the roaring, death had taken, as they saw when the morning came, the weakest oxen, and many infants, and considerable numbers of women and men.

Lopez ordered the piano abandoned there, and he had to give the order twice. His own son looked at him, and then jumped to. And when they had it down off the cart, two of his boy brigade folded the huge cloth with that folding dance you see women make, shepherds coming to kiss shepherdesses, over and back, over and across, and over again.

Eliza was in her carriage for this. She did not pretend to watch, but the horses started away just as soon as the piano was left on the grass. Stewart, who stayed to tend the survivors, was left looking at the thing, standing proud in a field full of bodies, silent or groaning. The temptation was too much for him. He lifted the lid and played her out. As the line of fleeing Paraguayans trickled over the far hills, Stewart let his ruined hands wander over the notes. He found he was playing ' La Palomita', as though there was no other tune the piano knew, so he drummed the same note for a while, to admonish it. And when he looked away for long enough – at the beautiful birds, for example, or the beautiful hills – he found an old tune wandering out of his hands. Something Scottish, he thought, although he could not remember the name.

When he caught up with them that night, Lopez was impatient at the delay. His stools were yellow he said. They smelled of smoke. Stewart prescribed charcoal. He said, with a laugh, that at least there was plenty of that about – then realised, as he looked at Lopez, that he had just very nearly died.

But he had not died. He had been given something to eat, and he had lain down. He watched the stars while his back sought and swooned into the hard Paraguayan earth, and he listened, as they all did, to the fight in the presidential tent.

They fought in French. There was an occasional shadow-play of bodies on the canvas, but the figures loomed or receded hopelessly; or ate themselves, as they flicked from one to the other wall. It was hard to tell what was going on. Eliza was keening for her piano, of course. But she would not say it: she wouldn't mention it by name. Instead there was a litany of things she had to put up with: incessant travel and bad food and no help and badly washed clothes. Her throat was so full that she choked on the words, she had to squeeze them out of her, until her voice broke in a thin shriek, a wail.

'And when will we be married, you son of a bitch? When will you marry me?'

By the sound of it, she was up close to him. Stewart imagined that he held her by the wrists. She was trying to hit him, or bite him. Those handsome teeth. Of course, Lopez could take out a pistol and shoot her. He could push her out of the tent and have her lanced before she stumbled to the ground. He could put her in with the prisoners and have her daily flogged. And then – and this was the greatest comfort to them in these last, terrible days – he could do none of these things, because he loved Eliza Lynch.

Silence. The president's doctor held his breath. II Mariscal might be hit. He might be nursing a hurt lip, or crotch. The silence went on so long, he might be dead. Or she might be dead. Or nothing might be happening at all; they might be each reading their separate books. Then the sound of tears – Eliza crying in a rush, and slapping him (or could he be slapping her? He was a brute, but not that much of a brute), or were they slaps, after all? They had a rhythm – and the rhythm thickened and gathered into a dull hammering, and then, with a high, puppyish whimper, it was done.

'Yay!' said the bright face of the boy who was sitting on the other side of Stewart's fire.

'Yay!' said Stewart back to him, because children made the worst spies. And he waved the little stick he was chewing, briefly in the air.

When a man is inside a woman, he rules the world.