The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

gave him as she held on to his stirrup, high in the Amambai mountains. Deliberate and yet free: it was a gift. It was always so much more than he deserved, Stewart thought – wherever these people got it from.

Then he looked around, in a panic, for Eliza Lynch.

She had passed in front of him. She had crossed the pavement not two feet away and was walking up to a door on the Royal Mile. How could he have missed it? There was something quivering about her, as though the street was her stage, the very stones rapt. A hood of fox fur played with the idea of falling back from her gold hair as she waited at the door. He could not see her face, then she turned slightly, and brushed her cheek with the back of a gloved hand. The glove was russet-brown, and the sleeve of her dress red – an autumnal theme: she was the season itself, all aflame with a rich decay and gloriously sad. She was also an old tart. Perhaps it would pass in Paris, but that gold hair was quite scandalously bright under an Edinburgh sky.

It would not do to greet her; even so, it thrilled him to see her so close. Eliza Lynch: changed – old perhaps – but the woman herself, in whatever flesh. The door closed behind her and Milton turned to the carriage from which she had just lit; a fine little cabriolet, with a little dog on the seat. The dog – or could Stewart be imagining it? – was dyed the same colour as its mistress's hair.

Stewart's heart was pounding as though he had escaped some terrific danger, a bullet, or a mud-slide – but the street looked just the same. As he walked on, a heat gathered between his shoulder-blades that might have been Milton 's stare. Or, more like, the urge to turn back and stroll past, at just the right time. He was almost resolved. Oh, to face her again, eye-to-eye. The pleasure of it. He would pay good money to have the advantage of surprise: to let her know, by a coldness, a slight smile, an inclination of the head, that no, he did not forgive her. He did not forgive her anything. Not the war, not the money. He did not forgive her his entire life.

'Are you all right, Papa?'

The last time he had seen her, she was in chains.

She must have spoken to the Brazilian general, Camarra. Eliza was thirty-five when Lopez was killed, too old to play the innocent, too recently bereaved to play the whore. Stewart could imagine the high, hurt tone she adopted with him, but she would have to offer something other than her body. Money, certainly – there was no doubt that money would, in such a situation, change hands. But a lot of people had money. She would have to offer something else – that indefinable thing she had. Her fame. The shift a woman makes when she says ? am beautiful' that a man is helpless to, whether or not it is strictly true.

Or he might just have liked her, as men tended to do.

Or, 'Save me,' she could have said – and indeed the Lopez women would have killed her with their bare teeth, given half an hour.

Whether Camarra was a decent man or a politic one, Stewart saw her, at any rate, climb into a gunboat at Concepcion. Never mind the chains, she was followed by her trunks – every last one of them – also by her younger boys, her retinue, and the widow Diaz.

She was getting away.

So Stewart and the other prisoners trudged down the river path, while from his horse General Camarra saluted, with greatest pleasure, the most reviled woman from here to Buenos Aires, and the boat found the current and floated towards Asuncion.

Stewart did not wonder what she was doing, so many years later, in his own home town: she was paying a visit to her lawyers, just as he was doing. They were due in court in three days' time, because this is how it ends, he thought, not in death but in litigation; a matter of fifty thousand pounds lodged in the Royal Bank of Scotland under his name, a promissory note that Eliza claimed to hold. This was a woman who had taken the gold combs from out of the prostitutes' hair, a woman who had bled the country dry. She had written to him personally. Quite a diatribe -she made free use of the word 'disloyalty'.

'Disloyalty.' Stewart closed his eyes. He laughed. And yet, he did feel disloyal. For no reason at all, he felt disloyal, too.

Eliza Lynch claimed that the money was duty on the export of yerba mate, lodged abroad for the use of the Dictator's children. Let her say what she liked. Lopez never married her. And if the money was hers, why then it belonged to one Xavier Quatrefages, her lawful husband. ? very minor beast,' as she called him one night by the graveyard at La Recoleta. 'But a beast, all the same.'

He had always remembered the name.

'Papa?'

'Yes, my dear, perfectly fine.' Though he was not fine. He wanted a drink. He wanted to get his daughter away from Eliza Lynch. He wanted to go home, and scrape his boots, and see his wife.

Acknowledgments

I must acknowledge the work of Josefina Pia (The British in Paraguay in the 19^th Century, Richmond, 1976) and of Helene Clastres (The Land- Without-Evil: Tupi-Guarani Prophetism, University of Illinois Press, 1995). As for the rest: Eliza Lynch seems to provoke in her English-speaking biographers all kinds of sneering excess. Some facts seem to remain constant and it is around these facts that this (scarcely less fictional) account has been built. This is a novel, however. It is Not True.

Thanks are due to The Arts Council’An Comhairle Ealionn; to the ever-wonderful staff at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig; and to the library of Trinity College Dublin.

Special thanks to Mario Rosner of Buenos Aires for a likely picture of the Tacuari, to the friends who read the manuscript, and to Shane Enright for additional library work.

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