The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

Flowers

January 1855, Rio Parana

At last, a town of some size. I see it in a smoky distance, all flat and loose on the landscape, like something spilled out that no one has bothered to wipe up. The houses are jumbled and tiny, so far away; then clearer – a flag, a washing line. The red tiles I have seen along the river, which were always a sign, in their fat corrugations, of a rich man's estancia, now gathering so thick as we approach I wonder how they got so many. Red tiles. Hundreds of red tiles. Thousands of them!

This is how long I have been on the river.

I stand in the prow, face forward, belly forward. The boat thumps behind and under me, through my fat, hot feet. It is a lullaby sung in my bones. Still, the sleeping baby wakes to the sight of his city on the horizon; the blind baby delights in what I see. My blood paints him a picture of the future that approaches, and he beats out his answer on my tender hide drum.

And he does not stop. As my eye lingers and proceeds -on the rooftops, and the boats and the docks now coming into view – as I clasp my hands and wring them, almost, with relief and expectation, the child twists and bangs and hammers on. Is it a message or is it a dance? It is a wrestling with himself, an urgency to be free. I feel his impatience -but what can I do?

Look, look!

The baby not seeing but demanding, What is it? What is it?

Home. Where you came from.

Though this child has already come from everywhere: Paris, Rome, Madrid, Bordeaux. The only home he has had is me. And if you are to tell from the thumps and the kicks, the strength and meanness of his intent, he has difficulty in staying even there. My travelling boy. My man who would be on his way.

'They hit you hard, your children,' says my mother's wan voice in my head. 'They hit you hard and they start early.' It makes me weary to think she may be right. But I also know now, as she once knew, the pleasures of such submission -to the uncaring fists and the uncaring smile of your own heart's child. I will let you out of my womb, but not out of my arms. I will let you out of my arms, but not out of my head.

And also, 'Go, if you want to – this is a burden to me too.'

So I stand in the prow, very statuesque and still, while my belly boils. Along the bank small children start to shout and run as we glide past the first shanties: a melon patch, a scum fringing the water for the foraging pig, a girl who stands watching, her thin skirt bundled away from the water that runs, so flat, between her legs. It runs thus sheer – or so I have come to tell her – all the way to the sea. And she lifts her face to watch us slide past, and her look says that she always knew she would see this someday, a sight this fine, and when she catches sight of me, up there in the prow, she knows who I am, too.

But the smell of so much human habitation turns my stomach while the baby twists the other way. It is time to go in. Such spin and counter-gyration, as Mr Whytehead would perhaps put it, have me laid flat on my bed, sickened again by the lift and sigh of the river, and longing, just longing, for the ground beneath my feet once more.

I lie in the hot darkness of the cabin and imagine the ship making her way smoothly along the bank. I imagine it so hard I cannot tell if we are moving or still; but then, after the longest time, I hear the men shout and the slipping roar of the anchoring chains. The ship strains forward, and stops. We have arrived. I roll myself upright to look through the porthole, and see, on the quayside, a scrabbling crowd. They are altogether like the crowd I saw from the first boat I was ever on, the Plymouth packet from Queenstown. And so my life runs in circles, and not in a line, after all.

All my restlessness collapses into a silent wail, as I lie on the bed and think of all the things I have gone through, just to get back to the place I started from – all the journeys I have made, the seas I have crossed, and the love I have lost or discarded along the way. My family, both dull and vicious; I almost miss them – and I wonder where my father is, now.

I was ten at the time, and thought they were out to kill him. The crop had failed for a second time, and the bailiffs we were daily expecting turned out always to be the poor at the door, ever more indigent and ghastly-eyed. There was one woman who reached out a purple knuckle to graze my cheek saying, in a soft kind of way, that she would eat me, I was so lovely and so fat. As the countryside weakened -with the first, or perhaps the second corpse in the ditch – my father gained sudden strength to pack us up and out of there, off to the ship in the middle of the night, pursued, as I thought, by these skeletons. They were there on the quayside, lurid in the torchlight, beseeching the sides of the ship as they might some squat deity, the God of Escape. It is possible some of them drowned – I was terrified that they might, and there is something sickening, I still find, in the sound of a splash. But I only remember scraps. A face perhaps. Also, the first man's member I ever saw, nearly as thick as the two legs on either side of it. The man – was he sitting or lying? – he was, at any rate, dying; lazily so, with his hand idling in his flaccid lap.

It seems I am weeping. The tears slip out of my eyes, quite fast and silent, as though they have nothing to do with me.

We have arrived.

The worst Atlantic crossing you could ever have, or so they said in Buenos Aires: days and weeks of storm, the broken wheel, the men all sick. Most of this beyond my ken; my stupid body wracked by its own storm, rolling and heaving until I was afraid I might puke up the child itself.

And now, whatever is on that dock, whatever path starts there, a yard or two from the side of the boat, that is my life's own path.

And O! everything falls in one me in a clatter. I lie on my bed and it is only four feet away, my future, it is only a jump away. I could swim it. A fly from my future could come and bite me now, still lying in the past. And then I think that perhaps I will not make it. I will not be able to do it. I will never put my foot on the piece of wood that will lead to the ground where my path begins.

I do not cry, as a rule. I am not the crying kind. I keep my finger and thumb pressed down on the lids to save my face from ruin, but I cannot stop. It feels like all the bad times are back, hanging on to me – why do I think of them as women? – a grove of women weeping and clutching at my skirts, saying, You must not go on.

I am such a fool. The weeks after Misha left me in Paris, I thought once, were the worst weeks I would ever spend. Ditto the time after I was married off to that man Quatrefages. Ditto the inn at Artenay. I could give an inventory of the worst, which have turned out since quite well enough. What is Misha? He is like a doll to me now, with his little blue jacket and his braggadocio. I am indifferent to the memory of his mouth, or his throat. The only things that remain to hurt me are his lies. Look at this doll (I wave him about in my head) – how he lied to me. Ow. Ow. Ow.

And still I cannot rise off the bed.

Sweet Christ, we have arrived. And I think that here -four feet away from the side of this boat – I will be safe. I will be safe from M. Raspail, and Mr Bennett, and all the rest of them. I will be free of their jealousy. For they were all, I think, jealous of me, as a man might be jealous of a painting that he may pay for, but will never properly have. As men are jealous of all beautiful things.

I will have a carriage that is all in black. It will be my funeral coach. It will be the blackest thing you ever saw and my flesh inside it, the whitest. And if Lopez abandons me here, I will ride about in it quite naked and unseen, and my name will be If-You-Dare.

Open the door.

This is what I think about, as the tears wreck my face, and the baby kicks and wrestles to be free. I think that my name is Mortality.

Poor pregnant Dora, who thinks she can kill a man just by the way she looks at him. There she is on the bed – her skin a rash, her feet so big she must cut the heels off her shoes. Her belly is quite sacred, you know. And as it grows, poor Dora withers away. What can save her? Nothing but love, of course. And a little bit of money.

I am so far from myself I do not hear Francine come into the room. She lifts me by the shoulders and I weep and say I cannot, she must not make me. I also say (at least I think I say) that, if I die, she must know that I forgive her all that she has done to me. Ashamed already of my blabbing – we are both ashamed. Francine says nothing, but lays me back down while I weep some more. She wipes my hands with something cool and also my face.

'What must I do?' I am saying. 'You see what he is.' And more such until Francine says,

'You must love him. There is no other way.'

My obvious Francine. She is right. And a glow spreads in my blood with the rightness of it. It happens all at once. I have found a place in my soul where I can stand – the place where I love Lopez. It is quite elevated and lonely, but also easy; also warm. I am staring at the ceiling. I have found it. My tears have stopped.

Then, with a crack, my tins of powder and paint are slapped on to the dressing table. A fall of lilac as she lifts my dress and lets it drift across my feet.

'Let us show them a little bit of France,' she says.

I sigh, and my sadness turns delicious. I have arrived. I am in love. The stage is set. This dress was the newest colour in Paris two months ago, and it is the newest colour on this vast continent: it is the future, and it is wrapped around me.

Still, I am frightened. I cannot manage myself properly in public any more. I know this. Look how I cry and tremble when I am alone. It is the baby – the size of him, now making me so stupid and swooning. And although I can keep my head in company it is only for a short while. Everything must be brief, now. Dressing. Walking. Everything must be brief.

I am muttering this as a kind of refrain as she gets me into my clothes. Drawers, petticoat, embroidered petticoat, stiff jupon petticoat, Balbriggan stockings, corset. My belly fights back against her lacing. We are in the middle of the push and shove of it, when my entire bump goes hard. And with it the clenching, a feeling on the skin as you might get on your scalp when your hair is pulled too tight. It crawls from either side of me, and meets out front. I push the maid away, and sit, and think, counting slowly, and passing my hand over the skin.

Is it starting?

Francine looks at my questioning touch, and says,

'You will feel it when it comes, for sure.' The hardness melts back to the usual mound, and we get the laces tied -quick, quick – while my belly is unawares.

Chemise, undersleeves, dress. My wonderful lilac hat.

And so I sit and compose my features. And so it is time.

I must love him, because through such narrow gaps in our lives we all must squeeze and crawl. I must love, not his greatness, but the sadness in his brown eyes. I must love, not the ring, but the dear hand. This is the only way forward, the only way through.

But when he comes into the cabin, resplendent in blue, I have no time to tell him that I love him, now. I kiss his sweet mouth and say that I have five minutes, maybe seven, in which to be radiant and whole. After which I am an animal again. I have five minutes by the clock, I say, as we mount to the gangway and the breeze takes my veil, after which I will have fainted clear on to the floor.

And my noble Love presses my arm so tightly to his side, it seems I rise with the pressure – tight, tighter -until, on tiptoe, I float down and through the adulating crowd, their faces all smiling and pushing. I fling up a hand to save my face from something thrown. A flower. Scarlet, like a great gob of blood, come sailing through the air at me. And I know I must concentrate on one face at a time, smile at one child at a time. An old man. A woman. A man. A girl. Their hands are thrust towards me, but not open, not in supplication. They dab little circles in the air – bravo, bravo. One bully-boy is clearing the rest back to lay a branch of palm under our feet, and they laugh and cry out; not Lopez! Lopez! but Barrios! Barrios! which must be the name of the boy with the palm, and I feel – how could I not? – that I am being welcomed in, as though by a family: Look, they say. Here is Barrios, our fool.

Still, a clock is ticking in my blood. Five minutes, five minutes. And the feel of the glad earth beneath my feet makes my belly all hard and hurting. I have held off for this, it seems. Closer, closer, he presses my hand as we walk to the place where the carriages stand. Here we are at a disadvantage, being on foot, but we play it like a couple strolling in the Bois: he shows off his French manners and doffs his French hat and keeps moving as I dip and smile, thinking I have never seen such a crew for hair, a family with one eyebrow between them, even the women need to shave. Also counting in my head from one to sixty, because by fifty-nine, I decide, I will have pressed the side of my face into the welcoming dirt. But by forty-something we are there. Milton hops into a carriage so he can pull me into it. Lopez hands me from below, and with the slightest help I am sitting pretty and giggling like a girl.

A flower lands on the floor by my feet. Another. It is raining flowers. The horses are solid and easy as we push through the throng. Milton stands on the dasher as though on the prow of the Tacuari. The sun shines through his ragged pants, turning them to gauze, and again he is mysterious to me; his thin bones and his soft, old face. He waves, and the crowd shouts. Which is the sound, too, of the blood in my ears, as the clock of my body begins to chime.

I had a laughing labour. At least for a while. They say it takes women funny, and every woman a different way, but the rush of my breaking waters made me laugh and the tightness of my belly was so like the pain of laughter that I felt I might as well join in. It took me over, too, very like laughter does. It had me hanging on to the end of the bed, insensible with that mirth that is close to pain. Oh Lordy. Oh Lordy. Don't say another thing. And then, Here it comes. Something funnier than the last. Something so funny I must die. It is possible I was a little insane.

I was in a strange room: it was white. It was already, I think, a day since we had arrived. There was a worried-looking matron leaning towards me, clucking and kind. On the windows were dull red curtains, a hundred years old, so rotten that when I grabbed on to one it opened under my hands. It struck me as odd, the way the cloth did not so much tear as give; hundreds of threads and cross-threads, each disengaged. And as the cloth tore, or sometime later, I felt the same thing in me, a rending or a loosening, I cannot say which.

Francine entered with the doctor's bag and I realised I was clinging, not just to old curtains, but to whatever remained of my mind, and what I had kept it for was just this moment – the one when the doctor walks in the door with his wicked pad of chloroform. And I know how frightened I have been, all this while, not of the pain, which is every woman's lot, but of dying, and, more than that, of the baby born dead; my Love standing there, looking at me, with some poor scrap of flesh in his hands.

The bag comes in but the doctor does not follow it. Francine goes back to the door, and there is an altercation. Milton is there, also Stewart, I am sure of it. Drunk, I think, the man is drunk. The world has gone mute. I think I am screaming. Francine scrabbles in the bag. Milton stands in front of me with his finger to his lips and he is so intent that I should be quiet that I stop and listen, suddenly, to the room. And yes, I say, I can hear them. They have a high clear sound, very clean. They gather in the shape of the room, Milton 's daemons. They are in the crook of a corner, or in the slant of a shadow falling from the shutter on to the floor. The three lines that make up a corner are the three notes of their song, or perhaps it is just one note – very beautiful. It is an A: I could play it on the piano. And although it is just one note, it feels like a whole symphony to me, as though it must be approached and left with many other notes. And still it comes out true – an A – simple and pure. I felt this in a flash, the shape of the room, the shape of the daemons there, the need for silence as, inside me, the baby set sail.

So much I remember: the baby riding high and large under the bone until I thought that I might split, not in pain but, as a fruit might, in pleasure at the ripeness of itself. The head came. He turned into the world like a screw twisting out of me, and his nose looked quite large. I thought this while the rest of him was still inside me, and the timing of it seemed so odd or unworthy that I laughed, and the laugh pushed his shoulders out and the rest slopped clear. And he drew breath.

A boy. I knew it. I will call him Juan Francisco, for his father. And I will sweeten it to Tancho', for me.

His own cry seemed to astonish him – or so I thought. But I am already too fond. And then, sometime later, my Love was there. He took the boy by the neck, twining his fingers around the tiny bones of his ankles, and raised him high over his head, offering him, it seemed, to the ceiling, or the window, or the street below. And, as he did so, he shouted. He roared. This all to Milton 's great irritation, who bustled over and scolded like a woman. Lopez handing over the baby then; almost slinging it at the matron who had attended me, whose name I now know to be Juana Pesoa.

And then later he is in the crook of my arm. They say you must love a child – but not too much! They say you must do this, or that. But a word like 'love' means nothing to us. It is not even a feeling I have for him, or he for me. It is a silence, or very like a silence. It is the inside shape of me – and it is the outside shape of him. It is nothing that you could stick a word between.

And now I fret at the way his father lifted my boy, as though daring fate: the ghosts or gods of this place. Though I know that we make our own lives. Who knows it better than I, having made my life at last – with this journey, this man. A woman's crowning achievement, Miss Miller used to call it. Well look at me now. I have a child that will never know hunger, and more than that, Miss Miller, I have had a child who will always be rich. And even as I look at his ugly, tiny face, I wonder at it: how careful – through all my mistakes – how very careful I have been.

The only peculiar thing about all of this being that when I look for the house, some weeks later, in order to find the woman and thank her (perhaps the one friend I will have in this place), I keep missing it. I ask for, and am directed to, the house of Juana Pesoa, but I drive my little phaeton around one corner and the next. This happens so often I have a boy lead the horse by the bridle to the door, but the house we stop at has just one storey, when the house I gave birth in had two. Or so I remember. When the curtain ripped in my hand I was standing at a window looking down into the street. There were people going about their business, down there, unawares. But this house has blank walls, a fancy wooden grille over the one window, which faces, across a lane-way, another wall.

When I knock at the door, it is indeed opened by the servant of Juana Pesoa. To still my agitation the mistress of the house shows me the room where Pancho was born. There is a window on to the courtyard and, hanging in the dusty light, the curtain still torn.

Ί thought I was high up,' I say. Ί thought I was on the first floor.' And she looks at me.

Clean Linen

March 1870, Cerro Cord

It was necessary was to bury him before he began to rot. He was very fat, still. His eyes were neither shut nor open: there was a bland rind of white under the lids, which seemed, in their gentle curves, like two little smiles. Eliza walked the length of his body, from head to toe. Death made him smaller: she was brought short by reaching the end of him. She stopped, then turned and walked back up to his head. She toured the length of him in this way, once, twice more; and when a young Brazilian captain came over she pushed him away from her and did not break her stride.

She halted at the midsection, and looked at him. Lopez lay as he had been dragged out of the river; his toes pointing gracefully down and his arms by his side. The water had mixed with the blood of his wound, leaving tidemarks on his shirt; the last piece of clean linen in Paraguay. It made it look as if he had died, not of a bullet but of some small, domestic indignity. It looked as though he had died of a stain.

Eliza nudged a pale arm away from his side; then she drew her foot back and kicked him in the ribs. The last air rattled out of him with a flabby sound and, as though frightened by it, she kicked him again, quickly, in the neck. Then she walked back to his feet. On the next turnabout she kicked him in the head and his skull was so heavy and hard she seemed to hurt her foot. The head spun away, then lolled back, while she lifted her toe behind her and dabbed it in the air. His eyes rolled fully open on the return; you could see them stare, as though to protest the kick to the blades of grass that grew unseen, close to his dead eyeball.

By this time, the men were gathered at the edge of the trees, to look. No one moved. The Brazilian general, Camarrá, had a contingent ready to set around her, because the Paraguayan women had started to wail the death of Lopez. It was a foiled, pathetic cry, as though they might as soon tear the body apart as bury it. And, if they could not kill him, because he was already dead, then they might settle for killing her.

Eliza listened. She bent from the waist and took something out of the corpse's boot. It was a knife, but instead of lifting it and lowering it into her own heart, she crouched and slammed it into the ground, just there, where his eyes were fixed on the blades of grass. She talked to him in English as she dug, so that no one would approach. You could hear the metal eating the earth and the hard-sounding phrases as she spoke. Sometimes, too, little whispers in French, which was the language they used when they were alone. She paused now and then, and sat back, because the knife was small and her hands were small, and the hole she had in her mind's eye would not be emptied of earth until it was night.

She cried for a while in the middle of the afternoon and scrabbled faster, scooping the dry red earth with her bare hands up and away to form a shallow bowl, which might, when you looked at it, be enough to keep the wild animals off. Then she stood, and organised herself. She brushed her skirt and pulled each sleeve down to the wrist. She tucked a stray lock behind her ear, then felt around the back of her head and freed the mass of her hair. The stuff fell down behind her, and she shook it out and swung it to one side, before gathering it to be wound into some mysterious knot. It was so deftly done; her hands moving, once, twice. Then one hand held the pile, while the other reached for the pin that had appeared somehow between her teeth, as though she had coughed it up.

She glanced at the crowd. She walked around the body of Francisco Lopez so that it lay between her and the grave she had made for it. Then she bent down again and started to push, then roll him in.

And so it was nearly done.

Stewart looked around the camp they had set the night before, now smashed and overrun. They were in a wide valley, a high bowl in the mountains – the Cerro Corá. A man with a pack mule had told them the name of the place, and then he walked on. They had let him go – as though this was not a war, with the imperatives of war, but simply a road they were on, where a man might travel the opposite way.

Lopez was losing his touch – he who understood more than anyone what a war demands: that you must shoot your own brother, you must shoot your brothers-in-law. You must make your mother swear that you are the only legitimate child of your father Carlos Antonio, the previous Dictator Lopez. You must whip one story out of a man's back and then whip a different story out of his front. You must always change the details or, if the details remain, you must change the conclusions. You must make the facts of the matter shift and wriggle, so that when the time comes, there is nothing real for the enemy to kill.

But the man went by, alive, and his valuable mule was let go with him, and he walked until he found the Brazilian army, and he led it back to where they were, like pulling a toy on a string. And so it was that the man who betrayed Lopez, in the end, was the one to whom he had been most indifferently kind.

They debouched into the valley from two sides, hidden by the folds in the mountains; and, without stopping or regrouping, without a strategy of any kind, they ran towards the Paraguayan camp. Perhaps it was apparent that they did not need a strategy, and this last discourtesy made Stewart look about him at the fleeing, scrabbling crowd, who picked up what they could by way of food or children and ran towards the stream of Aquidabánmi. Perhaps 'crowd' was too big a word for them now. They were a travelling show, an eviction, a village wandering from some clearance. They were people who had no lives left to lose.

Despite which, the Brazilians were upon them like a band of grinning robbers, whistling to each other and whirling weapons over their heads; blades and lances – it was too close for shooting, and too scattered for much close work. A man, galloping low and hard, scooped off a man's head with his sabre, and was cheered as though for some trick, as the surprised neck shot its exclamation of blood in the air.

A stumbling man turned to shoot Stewart, and he had the face of a middle-aged boy. There was some disease that did that to you, Stewart thought, as the pubescent old man lifted his rifle to his shoulder – now, what was it called? The shouted gutturals of his Portuguese sounded, at this close range, like something twisted, perhaps evil; like Spanish gone askew. Stewart thought how foreign it sounded. Then he remembered that he was British, so all languages were foreign, really. Finally he realised that if he was British then there was no reason to kill him, because this wasn't, strictly speaking, his war.

With sudden conviction he lifted up, for the wizened child's attention, an empty bottle of turpentine in one hand and a Smellie obstetrical forceps in the other; both snatched from his open bag. The child looked at them and stumbled onwards, his legs still going crosswise in their fatal dressage. The rifle lingered on Stewart's face, the angle became more acute, and then it slipped away – at which precise moment, the boy pulled the trigger and, still shouting, swung the muzzle around, and ran on.

Stewart looked at the forceps. It was shaped like giant scissors. Each leg was a loop of metal ribbon which was shaped to fit the soft contours of a baby's head. Perhaps the loops were intended to fit around the baby's ears. Stewart was not entirely sure. He had brought the forceps with him from Britain in order to deliver Pancho, the first son of Eliza Lynch. It was the last thing he had about him of 'William Stewart, physician-accoucheur', and he was amazed that it had survived all this time: it had not been whittled down for cutting or stabbing, nor had it been chopped up for shot. Stewart used it, mostly, for cooking – it was handy when you wanted to extract something, or turn it over in the campfire. But there was something, evidently, in this set of blackened tongs that meant that he was either a doctor, or too mad to kill, because the Brazilians rode past him now, as he gazed at the forceps that had delivered him his own life. And, by the time it had happened, by the time it was known – whatever knowledge that rushes through a battlefield so fast that fighting men look at each other, and falter, and stop. By the time it was over – which was very soon. Stewart found himself standing in a meadow, alive.

The work that had been done was the shooting of Francisco Solano Lopez. There were few enough rounds fired, and Stewart thought he might have heard the particular shot echoing around the bowl of the hills, long after it had hit the man's escaping back.

One soldier claimed he had seen it, as they stood, and then sat, in the shadow of the trees to watch Eliza Lynch. He said it happened in the middle of the stream. The horse had fought to get out from under him as II Mariscal jerked bolt upright – almost surprised – and then pitched forward on to the animal's neck. The man said the horse was having none of it, and upped Lopez into the stream, where he thrashed a little before the bubbles came. So it was the horse that killed him as much as any Brazilian, he said. Another few feet and he might have made it, he might be gone clear, or he might be captured and sitting here with them now. The thought amazed them all so much they fell silent, and looked to where the man lay to check that he was still dead.

A few crossed themselves.

Another man said that the horse knew it was time. The thing they hate, the thing they fear most, he said, is to crush a man. And worse than that to have a dead man on their backs. He said, too, that Lopez loved that horse. All horses, he said, after a while. He said that Lopez loved every horse he ever rode. And that the horses repaid that love. Or usually they did.

Stewart wanted to walk away from this, but he could not, corralled as they were under Brazilian eyes.

'Doctor,' he said again to the sentry. 'Inglese. Inglese.' But the man was nervous of him – the sandy red hair, he supposed; the fact that his face had peeled and crusted so badly in the last, long months in the sun. He did look rather like a disease, and a foreign one at that. And so he grinned, in a winning sort of way, and went back to the men.

They sat and were obliged to watch Eliza, as though in expiation of all their crimes, as she rolled the body, first one end and then the other, towards the hole. The legs of Francisco Solano Lopez went in first and then, very slowly, the rest of him followed, turning as it went, so that his face surfaced one last time before disappearing into the ground.

Then she stood – as though, Stewart thought, to show them all the state of her dress. 'Look what you have done to my mousseline,' her hands might have said. She swept them downwards in a tragic dumbshow that might also have meant, 'May God have pity on women. The things that fall out of us that we can never pick up.'

She walked over to where Pancho lay and knelt beside him. And still no one dared to help her as she pushed one arm under her son's knees and the other under the small of his back. She tried to gather him up like this, as you might lift a sick child, but she could not. His stiffening body came up at the legs in a kind of comical kick, which forced the torso back down. Eliza dropped one leg and then the other, and then tried again. She started this time with a hand under the small of his back, then she reached for the knees, but the span of her arms was not enough to compass the length of her dead son, and she ended up circling his torso with both arms and, half-dragging, half carrying him, on her knees to the grave.

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.

Ί 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 Tssst!' 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 Lopez, 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 Guarani 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 Lopez 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 II 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.