Venancia's body. It filled the hut where they lay with accusation. It was not her fault. Stewart looked into her eyes (their brown plea) and knew that she might give her favours where she liked, but her life belonged to him. And all her cleverness, only to him. She had taken this journey, not to talk about money, but for love of him. Even so, the words that came to him were something like ? do not', and then ? do not', over and over again. A scrap of a phrase that begged many endings, one of them being -there was no doubt about it – ? do not want you any more, Venancia Baez.'
High in the Amambai mountains, Stewart fingered the cold hair of the girl who slept beside him. It was brown. There was a white man back there somewhere, in her line. Some Jesuit.
'Poor William,' he wanted to say. 'Poor William Stewart.' Such scruples as he used to have. Now all he wanted was to hear the rasp and sigh of the girl's breath. All he wanted was to fling his life, one more time, into the body of Venancia (as was) Baez.
Later, he woke the girl to look at a low star which had gathered about it a light of great delicacy in the bone-coloured dawn. He was not sure she understood, but she sat easily on his legs and, after he had pointed and she had looked up, they stayed like that for a while, waiting for the day to begin.
She was younger, now. The farther they went in the northern hills the smaller and more helpless she seemed to him. So perhaps it was true. They were going to a more innocent place, after all.
In the morning, Eliza would climb on to the back of a cart and play the captive piano, still tied where it stood. She played ' La Palomita' while Lopez, as often as not, shot someone. He did it personally – there were so few men left to do it for him; but also, it must be admitted, he needed to do it himself these days, like a morning expectoration or a fart.
When the time came to shoot his brother, however, the massively incompetent Benigno Lopez, he spared the man no honour. He called upon the services of Bernardino Caballero, the highest-ranking officer he had left. Also he had everyone stand as though on parade. He signalled Stewart forward to check the condemned man's health and the comfort of his bonds. He pulled their weeping mother towards the stake, and shook her shoulder and cast her down, as if to say, 'See! See, what you have done to this woman your mother.' And Eliza, for the occasion, played ' La Palomita' standing up. She wore red.
Benigno was stripped down to his underdrawers, and the mound of his belly was immensely comical and afraid. It quivered and heaved, and was so inviting that Lopez could not help but cut him loose one last time, to send him careening around in a circle, snorting like a pig. Everyone roared. They kicked or spat, while Benigno squealed. He seemed to enjoy it, in a bitter sort of way. He squealed fantastically well, and then he squealed even better. Then Lopez gave a brief nod to Caballero, who had the man-pig pulled back to the stake and shot.
Eliza finished the last verse of the last round of ' La Palomita' and was helped down from the cart by Pancho, her son. She had not missed a single note.
After Benigno, Lopez forbade the use of bullets, because they had not enough, and men were lanced where they stood. Particularly the men who had conspired with Benigno, but also, and sadly, the boy Paulino Alen, who came to the camp at San Fernando with a hole in his throat after the fall of Humaita. He had tried to kill himself, and failed, so Lopez made a gift of it and finished the job for him. Stewart might have balked at this particular death or at another, but there was always the general truth of the war, and the honour of their cause. Benigno had conspired – there was no doubt about that. He had plotted to slip a knife between his brother's ribs, to hand over the country to the enemy, to hoard supplies, to deny marching men meat, to divert from the front line all kinds of fat bacon and shoulders of lamb, lard and cutlets and blood sausage and tripes. It gave Stewart satisfaction to see the man die, because there was justice in it. It gave him pleasure to see Mother Lopez caterwaul, the attitude she struck like The Virgin at the bottom of some savage cross. Also to see the tear seep out of the Little Colonel's green eye, before he turned to help his mother down from her cart.
Somewhere on the road Stewart had become a creature of Lopez. They all had. They could feel him in their blood. The terrible rapine that might seize a man, the frenzy of hacking and slashing – that was Lopez – the terrible urge to shit that might swell inside him when he had killed, so that soldiers dropped their kecks in the view of enemy fire there on the battlefield. It was not fear that made them so incontinent, but a madness of the body that filled them to bursting and demanded egress – of any kind: also carnal; the men being endlessly urgent and ignoble in that way.
Stewart, not being in the thick of it for the most part, kept his pants in order back and front. He confined himself to indifference – a narrow, whining sort of madness that might let a man die because he did not like the look of his ugly face. A civilised, smirking sort of thing, which stepped through the heap of enemy wounded and slit this, or that, throat. These were all pleasures. And he knew that once they slipped out of him, he could never call them back.
As the personal doctor of II Mariscal Lopez, Stewart lived close to the abrupt gesture; a wave of the hand that could kill a man. He tried not to fawn. He opened his medical bag with decisiveness and closed it with a satisfying click. Then he became too careful about his bag. Then he became too casual about his bag. He left the bag behind, as he squatted in a manly, companionable way and daily checked the presidential feet, the calluses and the many small joints. He rubbed Lopez down like a horse, feeling the tendons where they joined the bone. He enquired after his digestion and went behind a tree to check his stools, which were always a matter for congratulation. He lifted his member and rubbed it with a chalk mixture, to give a more cosmetic consistency to the gonorrhoeal drip. He treated the body of Lopez with cheerful hands. Not to do so endangered not only his personal health, but also the health of every man there, not to mention the well-being of the entire region of the Rio del Plata.
And sometimes, when he sat with Lopez talking about the need for heroes or the mechanising tendency in modern life (his foot idly tapping his doctor's bag), Stewart thought him the sanest man in the world.
In Tacuati, the straggling army bunched up to a halt, and they stayed for a week. There was an
There was no other madness.
Eliza encouraged the feeling of respite. She managed to give the place the atmosphere of a small spa. There was a little spring in the courtyard, and she drew wooden beakers of water from it, which she handed to the men herself; saying how restorative it was and extolling the pure heights from which it came. There was food, too, from the barns. And though they lived in uncertainty, there were things a man had not had, or heard, in some time, such as the sound of rain on his roof, for example, that lulled Stewart into an afternoon ecstasy of remembrance.
He was housed, for the duration, next to Eliza's quarters – a sympathetic billet: ever since they stopped, Stewart was fighting a sharp fever that followed its own clock; he could never tell what time he would be weak or clear-headed, and what time he would be stretched. It was a small, pungent room with no window and one rotting door. Where the dividing wall reached for the roof, there was a blessed, blunt triangle of open space; a dark gap through which the sounds of Eliza's 'drawing room' came to him as he lay on the floor. What a Babel! He would wake or drift to the sounds of her sons, speaking French to their Mama, or Spanish to each other, or Guarani to the men. Once, Stewart thought he heard German or something like it – Swedish perhaps -something guttural and rational and quite gorgeous that was telling him to lie down and keep his clothes on. And once, a whole sentence in English, 'The book is on the windowsilp, that was the most beautiful thing he had heard in a long time.
The girl lit a cleansing fire in his doorway and it flamed in the daylight, weakly orange, while the yard beyond buckled in the heat. Stewart saw things in the flawed air that he decided to tell no one about: not the girl, not Venancia, not his aunt, not his mother, not Eliza on the other side of the wall. He would tell no woman about these things that he saw. And he longed to rest his eyes on Eliza's boys, who stayed constant, all of them, and easy, through the haze.
Stewart could tell that they were fine young men, and very proud. Eliza had a certain way of sitting or being that could halt them at the mere sight of her – because of course they worshipped her, as
