The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

then brought them to the gunners to be better primed and shot back. They cheered as they ran towards them, and jostled each other out of the way to keep their courage up, because although the shells looked like nothing at all lying there – just lumps of metal lodged in the muck – sometimes one would, under a woman's gentle touch, revive, and so explode.

Stewart faced the problem of the women whenever their anatomy ambushed him in the operating hut – every time he panicked that a man's member had been blown away and grubbed through blood and hair looking for the nonexistent wound. Every time he unbuttoned a shirt and found a breast, or two, beneath, he would sigh at the problem of the women. If Venancia were here, would she scavenge for shot? (Venancia becoming, as the weeks and months went by, as beautiful in his head as a glass of water, a plate of fresh food.)

Why, he asked himself, did the women do such a thing? There was a pot of corn for each shell, but there were other ways and other places where a woman might find food. ? had a man who died,' said one, 'and then I had another man who died.' When life was so cheap, she seemed to say, love became general. So they might do it for a general love. Or for love of the General – Lopez. Or because they were told to – as simple as that; the love of discipline. Or because they loved the risk, as some of them undoubtedly seemed to do. They might do it, finally, because no one likes to lose -which is nothing but the love of victory, with her laurels and her wings.

Stewart was much exercised, philosophically, in his cholera tent and in his typhoid tent, by the problem of love. He thought about it obsessively. Perhaps it had always been thus, he thought, as he lifted a mustard plaster from a cholera victim's chest, or paused to examine the gassy, bulging ground over the pits where they buried the dead. 'My aunt always said I was a worrier.'

'But all love is a worried love,' he said, inadvertently aloud, and more than once. 'All love is fuss.'

He thought that he was beginning to love Eliza Lynch, for example. But properly, this time. This did not bother him much: it was a spiritual, even androgyne love – it was not a yearning thing. He did not wait for her to appear. But when she did walk out – her dress bouncing on its hoops, just clear of the mud, and her parasol glowing like a living membrane in the sun – her eyes were so kind, her whole air so simple and redeeming, that it was impossible to call her a woman at all. She was like a sister when she moved and like a dream when she was still. She was what they were all fighting for.

Of course, he was also in love with her in a dashing sort of way – they all were, it was the accepted thing to be. 'We have died and gone to Eliza's', was the joking toast they gave, in the little place she kept beyond the church at Humaita – meaning no disrespect in this use of her Christian name, but on the contrary, a kind of bantering beatification.

Eliza's house was a haven – partly because it was so well back from the arc of bloody muck that was the ballistic limit of the Brazilian ships. Which is not to say that Eliza was a coward; she walked freely out; a distinctive sight -you might even say a target – a swirl of colour with two boys, fore and aft, to lift and lay boards for her feet. They got so adept, it became a kind of game with them all; Eliza walking faster and faster as they ran around her, forming an impromtu wheel on whose inside rim she walked safe.

Stewart could have used the boys, but he did not grudge her this courtesy. It lifted all their hearts to see her looking so fine. There was not a man among them, would not lay down his life to save her stockings from a splash of whatever liquid might taint her: muck, blood (sperm, he idly thought), pus, noble or otherwise, and, God knows, sweat; the soup of putrefaction; good, old-fashioned shit -there being so many ways in which a lady's stocking might get wet, these days.

Every time Stewart saw Eliza, she had grown. He was not surprised by this; Venancia had, for example, shrunk in his head, until she had become a sort of daughter to him – a body he might take up in his arms, fresh and light and loose as water. And sometimes the body was alive and sometimes the body was dead. Either way, even though Stewart knew she was eating her way through her father's estate upriver, along with his own worthless salary, she still became, as the months and years went by, lighter and lighter in his mournful arms.

He himself, he thought, was pretty much the same size, although he could feel his heart getting bigger. His heart seemed to be, by now, the size of a horse's heart, and as the pile of food shrank and the pile of bodies grew, it felt like his heart would take over the entire cavity of his chest, until he was just a thumping, possibly empty, thing of muscle and bone.

There was nothing wrong with any of this, though he found the massivity of his heart, imagined or real, sometimes affected his lungs. He could not draw breath any more, or at least not a proper, manly breath. It was the grief, he thought. He had heard men complain of it -a tightness in the lungs that eased itself only in tears and that had no pathology that he could see. It was just that, as the number of the dead grew, your lungs shrank. As if to remind a man what it was to inhale and so to live.

His stomach escaped this inventory because he did not think of it as belonging to him anymore, and so it might be any size at all. It might be as big as the wide world, or as small as a bullet lodged in your gut. Mostly, he tried to ignore it, so capricious was it, and independent, and mean. But then the hunger moved to his mouth, and this made him want to wrap his gums around things – all manner of things – in order to assuage it. Or he might, in opening a wounded man, catch a glimpse of his last meal, and find a jealous spittle flood his own maw.

It was not that they were famished. They had food -or some food. It was just not the right food. There was something a man craved to see on his plate, but could not name. And as the months went by the soldiers sat around more, and their eyes became more inward-looking and difficult and complicit with their own pain.

It was around this time that the story went about that Eliza ate the flesh of the dead. She said it tasted just like pork, but gamier – like the truffle-hunting boars you get in the Auvergne. Some said it was Brazilian flesh she liked – though there was little enough of that about – others said it was their own. The story was universally believed – it was the truffles that did it. You could not invent a detail like the truffles: besides, who among them had ever heard of the Auvergne? And the taste of gamey pork circled endlessly in their mouths; the wetness so bad they must spit as they thought of Eliza pulling a long strip of pale ham from an amputated joint. These were men who looked at their own arms now, during a long day in the trenches, and judged the ratio of lean to fat. And though there was a horror to it, they did not exactly blame Eliza her portion, so much as blame this gaping world, into which you threw bodies, perhaps your own body, as though the sky itself were starving.

Then, when she appeared, the cannibal thoughts had nowhere to land. Eliza was, in all the mud-coloured world, the most beautiful thing. And they ate her with their eyes.

But what of love? said Stewart's worried thoughts. What has all this eating to do with love? Of course he found the cycle of life here uncomfortably close. They all did. During the endless afternoons, his medical heap of discarded flesh was often raided by dogs, who might be shot as they worried their human spoils. The shot dogs were then eaten. Of course they were cooked first and this made a difference, but the closer a man got to the line the more important it was to maintain it. And what else would keep the line, but love?

He was not the only one who felt this way. There was a keen trade in priests, these days, or the priest-like – men with a mellow, melancholic wisdom that in peacetime would have tempted you to hit them across the back of the head with a shovel – they drew their pipes on other men's tobacco, and gave, in return, a wise sigh and a story, preferably one of woe. Stewart did not listen unless it was a tale of love, because although love still frantically concerned him (also fate and mischance), death did not trouble him at all. The last death he had cared about was Whytehead's, and Whytehead had died some years ago. It was hard to remember when. Before that first action at Riachuelo, or after? It was certainly before any of the big engagements of the war. Whytehead was missing all the fun. No, the last time Stewart had seen him, the band was playing ' La Palomita', and the crowd were cheering their heads off, and Whytehead was just standing there, looking at them all.

It was the morning after Stewart had, or had not, kissed Eliza Lynch; the morning the fleet was dispatched to break the blockade. The whole town stood in Plaza de Palma cheering, one more time, the Tacuari. With her now were the Paraguari, and five or six more, including the