childhood, dashed into the house.
'Poor child,' she said, when he was gone. 'His mother is dying, you know.'
She said it so perfectly – perhaps she meant well. And to fill the doctor's silence she took his arm and said,
'You know, Doctor Stewart, I am the most fortunate woman in Paraguay. So it is a sort of motto with me – one must always
Stewart looked at her birds. There was, indeed, a vulture, chained to a stake in the corner, and it was very beautiful. He did not want to touch the woman at his side. He did not want her hand on his arm.
She enquired after his lodgings – did he have a garden? And his aunt, was she well? When all this failed she signed to a servant,
'You must meet Pancho,' she said.
Her son. Whose heart he had heard fluttering through this woman's thick skin. He must be four or five by now. The stories told of a little animal, who bit his nurse and would not learn to read, but when Stewart saw him appear in the doorway he thought him pure beyond the normal purity of children, he thought him pure like a flame. And so his mother played out her scene. She ran forward and embraced him; her lovely knee bent, her lovely silk in the dust. The child fought to be clear, and started to talk, and the angle their faces held was so perfect, the distance between them so radiant and careful, that Stewart forgave her – of what crime he did not yet know. This was the antidote. This was what he wanted. This. He wanted to possess, not the body of a woman, but the still air between her downturned face and the upturned face of her child. Air that is shaped by cheek and eyelash, by smiling lips and hopeful, reassuring eyes. He did not want to have a woman – not even this woman, Eliza Lynch – what he wanted was to give some woman, or to take from some woman, his son.
After which sentimental ambush, Francine seemed to him to be treated well enough; to be properly fed and tended in a room that was small but clean – to be a normally melancholic set of problems, symptoms, assuagements; a tropical illness; a usual, hopeless attempt at dying.
On the other side of town, old Lopez was taking his time. Never a thin man, now he was fat-seeming in peculiar places. The lids of his eyes grew tight and heavy, the lobes of his ears plumped up. Stewart does him with diuretics, with dandelion powder and digitalis, and his piss filled buckets. He swelled, pissed himself smaller, swelled again, and Stewart, no stranger to liquid pleasures and liquid pain, found himself going through a dry time. He was seen, when drunk, to slop his
In fact, rumours of his sobriety had been mistimed. He stopped drinking during the first illness; the ulcer that made the Dictator's flesh become, as it were, runny. He stopped once, and then he stopped again. He stopped six or seven times in all. But he did not actually stop (for the last time, for the first actual time) until that night at the theatre when, turning to go, he brushed against the virgin, Venancia Baez.
Or perhaps this was just the story he told himself at the time – that the two reasons he became sober were the two brown eyes of Venancia Baez, brown as oblivion, brown as black is brown (or brown, as he said after they were married, as a monkey's; playful and wise). Because the story changed when they were in the middle of the war and the lovely Venancia became querulous and small, because the war did not suit her, and she saw no reason why it should. The war made her hoard things and grow fat, and she could not make love when the war was on, she could not be pleasant, even to her own children. When this happened, Stewart decided it was the Dictator's illness that made him give up drink after all, because this carnage, the waste of it, the pile of limbs he harvested from wounded men growing beside him on the floor, all this made him feel alive and undiluted. The early days of war made him so simple he thought he had found his true self; that all wrong turnings and seemingly blind alleys of his life had led him here, and so they must have been the right turnings after all.
Another story might simply be that Stewart was more sick of drinking than he was sick of himself – always a delicate equation. One night he woke up to his dead mother's touch and found it was a dog licking at the vomit in his hair – and what lingered, what won out you might say, was his mother and not the dog. This was a story for his old age when his mother – so long forgotten – was back with him again, all the time.
But no matter how he told it or lied about it as the years went by, the fact was that Stewart took to English tea and constant attendance on the bloated form of old Lopez. And when he was not by the bedside he was under the window of Venancia Baez, in the Latin style, courting her father like a woman – getting his love letters written by one of the elderly spinster Cordais, who poured all her dreams into them, and knew the form.
It was two years from that first sighting in the theatre before he would see the naked breast of Venancia Baez again, two years before he laid eyes upon her bare throat or the skin of her lovely arms. Every Sunday, he looked at her on the way to Mass, hidden under a mantilla of black lace, with her heavy velvet dress creeping over her like moss, and sometimes he wondered if, under it, her body had not changed. He gave her diseases in his head; a goitre pushing at the pearls she wore that night, a spreading psoriasis, a phthisical rattle souring her sweet and easy lungs. Besides, he had fallen in love with a child and she was turning into a woman. There was nothing he could do to hold or stop it – he was caught between his desire for what he had lost already and his desire for what he might gain, and this maddened him, as though he was in love with the future and in love with the past, and his days moved with vegetable slowness, while somewhere inside her deep, cool house, Venancia Baez bloomed.
Meanwhile the theatre was shut. The place was a brothel, after all, and who could think of such pleasures while they waited for the death of old Lopez? He must be dying – the doctor was sober, he grew more sober from day to day, and everywhere there was a frenzy of calm.
Outside his shuttered window the country seemed to stall, but surged ahead at the same time. Railway lines snaked out into the countryside, the rails slapped down one after the other; gathering speed, like a woman who knits faster to finish before she runs out of wool. The orders issued one after the other – or were they imagined? – from the dark room where old Lopez lay dropsical. It was as though his weakness made him omnipotent. His wife Dona Paula took her true place as Cerberus at his iron-studded door, and sometimes forbade admission to her own sons, who sloped about like whipped pups and cut each other in the street.
Everywhere in Asuncion, people rode this current wave, not realising that the whole vast tide was about to turn. They said the next president would be a Cordai, they said that Francisco was finished, and they gloated over the humiliation of Eliza Lynch. It was coming any day now. It was here. She was seen leaving at night with a wooden crate full of gold. She was seen with the marks of a beating. She was seen diseased.
When Stewart went out to La Recoleta these days, he found Eliza frozen with panic. Francisco sat in the upstairs drawing room with a distant look, as though listening to his father's breath labouring on the other side of town. One afternoon, she did not serve him herself, but sent their son across the room with the delicate burden of a glass of brandy for his father's teeth. Eliza pushed him in the small of his back, as though sending a toy boat on to the water, and the luminous child wavered and set out on the long journey to his father's chair. He stood in front of the old bull and the brandy flared in the light, and his father looked at him, and the child returned the look with a serious, sweet smile. For a moment, thought the doctor, it all hung in the balance, whether Lopez would take the offered glass, or strike it from the boy's hand. He shifted massively and pushed against the arm of the chair, as though bracing himself to stand. And then he subsided.
'On the table,' he said, meaning the small console at his side. The child set the glass carefully down and Lopez booted him back to his Mama, with a languid kick to the backside.
'Time we cut your hair,' he said. 'Eh, Pancho?'
He showed Stewart a piece of paper – the first ever railway ticket for the first railway in the Southern Americas. He was so proud of it, he did not want to let it out of his hands. He fingered it and flattened it out on the round of his thigh; until he was surprised to see that he had rolled it altogether into a tight little cigarro, which he popped, as the doctor took his leave, into Eliza's
And: He loves her, thought Stewart. He loves her after all. Because there – beyond the conspiracy of their drawing room and the conspiracy of their bed – was a look passed between them that might well be called 'love', being gentle and fierce and completely empty. Stewart thought of the stories that were current now – that Eliza procured the daughters of distant landowners for him; that she checked with their own
