The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

fathers whether they were virgins, like buying heifers – and they did not give him the usual satisfaction. In fact they made him sad. Her 'dear friend' loved her. What else was there to say?

The maid, Francine, died gurgling. The cancer that belonged to Francisco's former mistress, Juana Pesoa, broke through the wall of her belly, and she died terribly. And old Lopez revived, to die some more. His daughters cleaned the body of the Dictator down to the waist, his wife tended below. The cloths they used were buried in an unmarked spot, and the priests fought at his door. Then – it might have been the incessant irritation of the cathedral bells, it might have been the first railway train that ran so enthusiastically past the end of the first railway track – but somewhere along the way the people got tired of the Dictator's dying, and with their boredom came hatred and a need to be released from his terrible grasp. It was time to separate the quick from the dead. It was time to sing again, and dance with a bottle balanced on your head. It was time for Eliza's picnic.

She held it onboard the Tacuari.

When Stewart made his afternoon visit to his (now, finally, fiancee) Venancia Baez, he was surprised to see the card that she held out, trembling, for his approval. It was a thick board, gilt-edged, such as Stewart had seen many times – though not, he realised with a pang, since he arrived in Asuncion.

'And what is it to do with me?' he said, annoyed by his nostalgia for the life he had left behind – one in which there were many such wonderful, ordinary objects. Venancia's aunt, napping in the corner of the room, opened one cold eye.

'You must go if you like,' he said, and knew, even as he spoke, that liking had nothing to do with it. Venancia pushed the card against her chest and gave him a brown look. The invitation had been issued in the name of Eliza Lynch.

Fifty Basque peasants had lately arrived in Asuncion and they sat at the docks, waiting to be shipped upriver to a clearing in the forest. The clearing would be christened Nueva Bordeaux. There would be a fiesta. The men would travel overland, while the ladies made their way to the new town by river, and on the river there would be held a grand picnic.

By now, the laboured breath of old Lopez had turned to a milky pink foam. At the docks, the Basques swiped at the air in front of their faces, their eyes hard with disbelief, as the virgins and matrons picked their way through to the newly arrived bales of cloth. Another dress. Another shroud to be stitched for the corpse of their virtue. A strange, elegiac act of choosing between crepe de Chine and glace silk, spilled out like gorgeous water in front of them. They fingered it and loved it and let it drop, as though they were to be sumptuously married, but all to the wrong man.

Stewart told Venancia to wear blue. He told her to smile. He said that they must think of the future now, they must take their chance. His ambition surprised him. Of course, he was doing it for her – the lovely Venancia who must be fed and housed and dressed in the finest – and so he blamed her too; because the price of Venancia, the price of his future, was to show himself in such a way in front of the clever eyes of Eliza Lynch.

'But it is I who will be shamed,' said Venancia. In which case, Stewart told her, she would not be alone. Venancia cheered up a little. It was true: every woman she knew would be on that boat. They would talk about it for months.

But, in the event, no one talked of Eliza's picnic on the river, once it was done. In 'Nueva Bordeaux' the men speechified and drank and did something Basque with a live duck while they waited for the ladies to arrive. But the ladies did not arrive and, some time before dark, the men left the new colonists in their clearing with a heap of provisions (a few precious iron spades, sacks of seed corn that would turn to mould, sacks of manioc that they would plant at the wrong time), and they rode home. There was talk of a collision on the river, of shifting sandbars, but around a curve of the bank, they spotted the Tacuari, her fires banked and her rigging bare. The captain heard their shouts and answered with a whistle blast, and then slowly the great ship turned with the current, got up a lazy head of steam and followed them back to Asuncion.

The men waited on their womenfolk at the dock. They watched them disembark, in single file. They handed the ladies into carriages, or sat them on their horses, or if the horses were worn-out, they took the bridle in one hand and their wife's hand in the other. And if their wife was exhausted they held her about the waist, and in this wanton way the streets filled with couples and their trailing animals and trailing servants; the men silent, the women stumbling and quietly weeping – or laughing, some of them – until the sad bacchanal was fully dispersed and the doors of their houses shut, one by one.

And no one spoke about it, at all.

Of course, the women still gossiped after the picnic, the men still murmured and spat, but a silence crept into the cracks between their words, until the words themselves became inconsequential. Everything sounded like a joke, now, spoken to an empty room.

Stewart, making his move, requested and was granted a meeting with the coming Dictator Francisco Solano Lopez. On the appointed day he was shown into a large whitewashed room that contained nothing but a large table. On the table, draped to the floor, was a thick cloth woven with a twining abundance of dull gold. He faced Lopez over this expanse and the same weary joke was in the look they gave each other. 'Who would have thought?'

When Lopez spoke, these days, things happened; when he moved, the world drew out of his way. There was no distance now between seeing, knowing, doing. Francisco Solano Lopez had become simple and Stewart found that he was talking to an animal of sorts, as dangerous and easy. He regretted the two fools of the Tacuari, the little strutting mestizo and himself; the pride of Edinburgh University, stunned and soulful and drunk. Where had he gone? that messy young man who looked out over the swamp and found what he was looking for – a wilderness finally big enough for him to howl into (his aunt's drawing room being, for the purpose, a little small). What had happened to him in the intervening years? He had grown harder and weaker, that was what – and he had called it love.

When Venancia asked him how the meeting had gone, he said that he had secured, as he had wished to do, the post of Surgeon General of the army. He had discussed the export of some yerba mate and had received a licence at exceptionally fine rates. He said that their future was secure. He did not say she had ruined his life. But he knew that, once the thought had entered his head, it would wriggle its own way out, in time.

He asked instead for the true story of Eliza's picnic -this would be the extent of his cruelty to her, for now. They were walking in the walled orange grove behind her house, between trees heady with blossom. Her aunt sat a distance apart and Stewart thought it might be possible to kiss her now, quickly in the dappled shade. It might even be expected, and looking at her lips so intently distracted him from the words that came from between them, for the first while.

Venancia looked at the ground. When she spoke it was in an indifferent, lilting way, and she did not meet his eye.

It was Mme Cochelet who rallied the ladies, she said, frozen as they were in the face of the humiliation that waited for them on board the Tacuari. There were some things, Mme Cochelet declared, that, as wives, they might not avoid; and there were some things that, as ladies, they simply could not do. And so they must suffer, and compromise. They would attend. They would dress. They would walk on to the Tacuari as though going to a fete-champ etre and not a funeral. But they would draw the line at Eliza Lynch.

And so on the appointed day, at an early hour, with their gilt-edged cards in their beaded reticules, they walked up the gangway to the Tacuari; in virgin white, in green damask, in candy stripes of grey and rose. They squeezed their skirts between the rails, lifting their front hoops to prevent an indecent tilt at the back, and when they reached the top of the gangway, each and every one of them ignored the woman who stood at the top. La Concubina Irlandesa. Their hostess. She wore a dress entirely of lace. It crawled about her neck and crept down her hands, to be caught in a sort of glittering mitten by the rings she wore. She was enceinte - yet again – and this