Benigno Lopez mentioned over a bruised billiard table that Eliza Lynch did things in bed that a man could scarcely believe – he had it from his own brother – and he clicked the blue towards the centre pocket, and missed. Captain Thompson said, quite gallantly, that she had a pure soul. But they were all agreed that she was sleeping with someone behind Lopez's back – an Englishman, or that Indian, or a dog. No one said that she was sleeping with the maid, however, which was, in its own way, strange.
Keld Whytehead did not listen to gossip: he built Lopez an arsenal and then he built Lopez some guns. He sent his money home. He went out to La Recoleta as necessary, and sometimes, he said, the beauty of it all made a man's eyes sting. At Christmas he sang carols (perhaps that French carol he sang on the Tacuari), while Eliza accompanied him on the piano. That was all.
On the other side of town, Lopez's abandoned mistress, Juana Pesoa, sifted the truth from the chaff. She said Eliza slept with Lopez and with no one but Lopez, because once a woman surrendered to Lopez there was nowhere else to go. Juana Pesoa had a son by Lopez – his first – and the boy now lived with Eliza. When he came to visit, he brought his mother stories from La Recoleta, as you might bring a caged animal meat.
Stewart sat with her and ate.
Eliza wants to christen her son in the cathedral – she wants to make him the prince, the heir, the most important son. But the boy is a bastard, and will always be a bastard, and the bishop forbids her the use, not just of the cathedral, but of any holy ground. Eliza screams. She raves. She gives Lopez no rest. She calls in a crooked priest who takes one look at the boy – two years old by now, with his mother's blazing green eyes – and declares that he cannot send this small soul to Limbo. If the churches are barred to them, then he will baptise the child there in the quinta. For which promise he receives a fat bag of gold.
Juana Pesoa was a handsome, pinched woman. She had an illness which Stewart called 'knowing your place'. She did not rage against Eliza, who was rearing her son with every advantage, nor did she pine for Lopez, who still parked his carriage outside her door from time to time. She went very still and worked on a stomach cancer. Something she could call her own.
Stewart left in a sorrowful frame of mind. He wouldn't mind a go at Juana Pesoa himself, just to cheer her up, just to knock against something that bitter. But as he made his way down the street he found himself wondering, not about the emotional little rictus that was Juana Pesoa's sexual part, but about Eliza Lynch. Were her eyes blue or were they green? he wondered. What was the exact colour of La Lincha's eyes? The colour of absinthe? Or the colour of curaçao? No matter. They were the colour of whatever was at the bottom of his glass, and he was going to look at them, right now.
Mme Cochelet said that Eliza might invite anyone she liked to her unholy christening – no one would go. Old Lopez had put his foot down. And her voice rose with satisfied indignation as Stewart, working blind under her petticoats, tightened the patent truss (after five children, Mme Cochelet suffered from a painful separation of the pubic bone).
'Good’ said Stewart. Ever since Eliza's invitations went out, he had spent his time waving smelling salts under the noses of the Lopez ladies; going from one to the other, from hysteric to phlegmatic, and each of them had a separate and very mobile pain. Finally, some respite. On the day of the baptism itself, he decided, he would get nicely soaked.
He did so on his own. The town was so silent and shuttered that Stewart felt like a ghost, roaming the streets. Everyone stayed indoors: the women sewing perhaps, the men mending their boots or reading the broadsheets, the children all subdued. And all of them thinking about the deserted rooms of La Recoleta, the impossible food spoiling on the plates, the splendid wines all untouched; a few household Indians, perhaps, gathered around the specially wrought silver font, while thousands of cut flowers wilted in the heat. They were thinking about Eliza in a dress unthinkably fine, a quiver in her cheek, a tic in her lovely whore's eye, as she looked around the empty rooms and faced, and knew, and ate, and got rightly sodomised by, her shame.
And Stewart hated the lot of them – so smug and delicious with revenge that when the guns opened fire they ran into the streets crying that the demon mistress of Francisco Lopez was coming to kill them all. Of course it was just a gun salute. It was just a reminder that old Lopez may have the country, but young Lopez had the army (as well as something else, a lover sent from Hell and a voice that came from the sky, like Tupa, the thunder god of the Guarani, rolling out over the town. Boom. Boom. Boom).
A boy pulled Stewart, by now half-cut, through the thunder to fetch up at the house of Dona Cordai. The matron opened the door herself and pushed him upstairs, where her incarcerated daughter, the madwoman Carmencita Cordai, was shouting at her dead lover. Carmencita Cordai told her dead lover that the boy who was christened that day was called Juan Francisco, as their son would have been called, if they'd had a son: that his mother called him Pancho, as she would have called her own, sweet boy. She told him that she had seen the child in the street stumbling after a hoop, and that he was very beautiful. Stewart patted his pockets for laudanum. The guns stopped.
In the shebeen where he found himself, late that night, Milton (or some Indian) said nothing. They never do. Even so, Stewart's hangover was pounded not only by the memory of the guns, but by some knowledge that he had now, but could not remember: Milton talking about a land without evil. Stewart agreeing with this place, this idea, quite loudly. They are wonderfully chiming. Milton says that Lopez is not his father's son. Undoubtedly, says Stewart, he is more European than his father, fresher, with more brio. No, says the Indian, like Jesus – like Jesus is not Joseph's son. It is possible they argued that one, for a while, but there is a kind of drunken sense to it that makes Stewart look more closely now at the squadrons of Guarani soldiers on the streets. There is a pilgrim light in their eyes. Put whatever name you like on it, they are going somewhere, and you might be obliged to come along. As for Francisco Lopez – that fat baboon – it is a sort of universal joke here: that his father is a cuckold, his mother (in her youth) a pious, trembling whore. The usual stuff – but true all the same. Because the son-and-heir is never the father's son. He could kill his father any time.
High up in the Cordillera, the scrubby hills to the east and north of Asuncion, there is a town called Piano. It was named for the fact that Eliza was obliged to abandon her piano there, a hundred miles from nowhere, and another hundred miles from anywhere at all. For all we know, the piano still survives. Perhaps a wooden panel shores up a chicken coop, or the wires are tangled into a fence and sing a little, when the wind is high. The hammers and their moss of green felt must be long decayed, but perhaps a few keys remain scattered in a broken smile, to choke the cattle or confuse the plough. Better still, the piano might grace a parlour, or what passes for a parlour in the Cordillera, with a paper taped to the front, Έ1 piano del Piano'. Perhaps it still holds the memory of the last fingers to touch it, the doctor's tender hands picking out ' La Palomita', as it stood bravely upright, surrounded by grass and by dead men, a long way from home.