The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

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 glace 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 Humaita.

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 ? 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