And no one spoke about it, at all.
Of course, the women still gossiped after the picnic, the men still murmured and spat, but a silence crept into the cracks between their words, until the words themselves became inconsequential. Everything sounded like a joke, now, spoken to an empty room.
Stewart, making his move, requested and was granted a meeting with the coming Dictator Francisco Solano Lopez. On the appointed day he was shown into a large whitewashed room that contained nothing but a large table. On the table, draped to the floor, was a thick cloth woven with a twining abundance of dull gold. He faced Lopez over this expanse and the same weary joke was in the look they gave each other. 'Who would have thought?'
When Lopez spoke, these days, things happened; when he moved, the world drew out of his way. There was no distance now between seeing, knowing, doing. Francisco Solano Lopez had become simple and Stewart found that he was talking to an animal of sorts, as dangerous and easy. He regretted the two fools of the Tacuari, the little strutting mestizo and himself; the pride of Edinburgh University, stunned and soulful and drunk. Where had he gone? that messy young man who looked out over the swamp and found what he was looking for – a wilderness finally big enough for him to howl into (his aunt's drawing room being, for the purpose, a little small). What had happened to him in the intervening years? He had grown harder and weaker, that was what – and he had called it love.
When Venancia asked him how the meeting had gone, he said that he had secured, as he had wished to do, the post of Surgeon General of the army. He had discussed the export of some yerba maté and had received a licence at exceptionally fine rates. He said that their future was secure. He did not say she had ruined his life. But he knew that, once the thought had entered his head, it would wriggle its own way out, in time.
He asked instead for the true story of Eliza's picnic -this would be the extent of his cruelty to her, for now. They were walking in the walled orange grove behind her house, between trees heady with blossom. Her aunt sat a distance apart and Stewart thought it might be possible to kiss her now, quickly in the dappled shade. It might even be expected, and looking at her lips so intently distracted him from the words that came from between them, for the first while.
Venancia looked at the ground. When she spoke it was in an indifferent, lilting way, and she did not meet his eye.
It was Mme Cochelet who rallied the ladies, she said, frozen as they were in the face of the humiliation that waited for them on board the Tacuari. There were some things, Mme Cochelet declared, that, as wives, they might not avoid; and there were some things that, as ladies, they simply could not do. And so they must suffer, and compromise. They would attend. They would dress. They would walk on to the Tacuari as though going to a fête-champ être and not a funeral. But they would draw the line at Eliza Lynch.
And so on the appointed day, at an early hour, with their gilt-edged cards in their beaded reticules, they walked up the gangway to the Tacuari; in virgin white, in green damask, in candy stripes of grey and rose. They squeezed their skirts between the rails, lifting their front hoops to prevent an indecent tilt at the back, and when they reached the top of the gangway, each and every one of them ignored the woman who stood at the top. La Concubina Irlandesa. Their hostess. She wore a dress entirely of lace. It crawled about her neck and crept down her hands, to be caught in a sort of glittering mitten by the rings she wore. She was enceinte - yet again – and this made it easier somehow to suck themselves in as they wove around her, avoiding her bastard stomach and her flagrant emeralds, and the heavenly scent that she wore. Eliza smiled and greeted each of them, sometimes (horribly) by name. Not one woman answered her back. They did not feel capable of it, said Venancia, when Stewart (woken from his kissing reverie), asked her how they could be so sullen. They just could not, she said, and the gooseflesh he saw on her lovely forearm did not give her the lie. The disgust was physical. Venancia Báez, he realised, could no more touch Eliza than she could touch a turd.
They filed past, she said, and kept their nerve: blank girls and nervously grinning women; the spinster Cordai with the sudden, hooting giggle, and lesser fools who ducked, or bolted over to the other rail. La Lincha turned to follow each profile as it walked by, now a high Cordai nose, now a pair of bulbous, white-trimmed eyes that announced a daughter of Mme Cochelet. Even her own 'sisters-in-law' Rafaela and Innocencia (well, you could not call them 'sisters-in-sin') she stared at brazenly, as they looked quickly past her to admire, in loud voices, the bunting strung from the masts. She stood her ground, you had to give her that, and, all the time, her face twitched with pride, as if to say Ί know you. I know your husband, your brother. I even know your father. They tell me things they would not dream of telling you.'
It was horrible, said Venancia, and difficult. It was the most difficult thing she had ever done. Some of the girls had to use smelling salts just to get to the top of the gangplank. But they all did it and, their hearts beating, their eyes glittering, they sat and chitchatted in quite the normal way; enjoying the water and the feel of the breeze as the boat pulled away from the quay.
There was no person on the deck so unwatched as Eliza. Fifty pairs of eyes refused to see her. Fifty smooth brows regarded the place where she stood as containing only air. And so they travelled, admiring the two great paddle wheels, the stateroom with its bolted, slightly mouldy, furniture – that was yet so delicate you might think the boat would bring you all the way to Paris, or discover Paris around the next bend. They sat on the sunny side because La Lincha took the shade, and they waited for the picnic.
Venancia paused to swallow. And as she began to describe the dishes that were set in front of them, Stewart remembered another girl on the Tacuari, dreaming of food. He remembered Eliza at nineteen, whining for melons. He remembered her at table, trying to eat in a casual way; and how she looked at the birds on the water and the animals on the bank. 'Cooked,' said her eyes to a snowy breasted egret. 'Roasted,' to a sleeping tapir. And to a leaping fish, 'Grilled, with a sauce meunière.'
'Truffled turkey,' said Venancia. 'Eggs à la neige, pepper-cured ham, smoked eels.' As each was set down, a major-domo murmured the name and origin of the dish. The eels were from Russia, the ham from Xeriga, the foie gras from Strasbourg. There were also things that pretended to be from Europe but probably weren't – a stuffed and larded 'pike', whose face had a more benign and local cast, patridge wings that looked just like tinamu, though the sauce of chestnut cream smelled real. There were sweetbreads with crayfish sauce, a fresh tunny, plates of roe. There was champagne and claret and, for the fainter-hearted, syllabub, negus and punch. There were leather buckets lined with ice, which held canteens of strawberry juice and pineapple juice, there were bottles of Montbello water for the more dyspeptic. The dishes kept coming, veal cooked with fat bacon in its own gravy, miraculous early peas, all kinds of pastry, Poulet Marengo, a suckling pig. One enormous platter contained a heap of asparagus, sown, so the major-domo said, on the deck of a ship in a French port and nurtured on the voyage out (they like salted earth, as Mme Cochelet later explained), through the forced spring of the Atlantic passage, so that when they arrived in the high summer of Asuncion the spears showed white at the roots. Ripe. The effect on Mme Cochelet of this green mound was so marked that the ladies on either side of her held her arms. Whether to contain a faint, or contain her greed – either way, it was clear to all of them that Mme Cochelet must hold her resolve, or they would all be exposed – to what they could not say, but Mme Lynch was approaching the table now to preside over what was, after all, her picnic, and those closest to her shrank, quite naturally, away. Fortunately (at least it seemed fortunate at the time), at the head of the table was a mixed contingent of Cochelet-Cordals, and they showed their mettle by closing ranks seconds before La Lincha reached the 'groaning board'.