As he had seen her do, quite recently, as they stood on the dais at Cerro Léon. It was during a grand parade. She whispered, he laughed; then they both turned back to watch as men marched past on their way to the grave. Eliza's face, without changing at all, had become implacable, somehow, or greedy. Or hideously serene. She had gone from Angel of Mercy to Angel of Death, without a blink of her lovely eye.
Was it too late to turn back? Was there any other way for her to go? Stewart wished that Lopez would marry her – he almost longed for it. He felt, in the most foolish part of himself, that there might be something this woman could do – a bedroom something that their beautiful Eliza might say to their impetuous Mariscal that would stop it all, the torment and horror that was about to descend on them. Because it was the fate of angels, was it not, to intercede?
And now here she was, her ordinary flesh beside him on the roadside, and Stewart her protector. She was smiling at him, after pulling at his arm and letting it drop. He had just said her name.
'Eliza.'
'Yes?' she said, and took his elbow again, quite patient and sisterly.
'Be careful,' he said. And this time he walked on with her, because, pathetically, he did not know what else to say.
Ί am always careful,' she said (evil, quite evil) and the toes of her satin shoes slipped, one after the other, out from under her dress and on to the grit of the road.
It was not far to her house. She talked, remarkably, of Southern England, the small town in Kent where she had been married. 'For I am married, you know', to a M. Xavier Quatrefages. A beast, but a very minor beast, she said. A horse doctor in the military. But Kent was beautiful, all the same. The Weald – was that Kent? Perhaps it was Surrey. And so they came to the gate of her quinta, where she turned and took his hand in hers, and he, like some village Romeo, pushed forward to kiss her on the mouth. Or on the cheek. Or he brushed his mouth against the skin of her face, as she turned away.
He did not even like the woman. It was a part he was obliged to play, and she, to complete the scene, turned and fled prettily into the house. The theatre of it annoyed him, but not as much as the riot in his blood that had been gathering ever since he tracked her in the dark. He felt trifled with. He felt tempted, and scorned. Even if this were true (and it was not true) – no matter. What mattered was the violence with which he had wanted her, a woman talking of Kent or was it Surrey, as though she did not want him too. Was this passion? This epilepsy?This urge to destroy, like a child in a fit, the room, the house, the entire world? And that anatomical thing, his member, foolishly forward, seeking a place he could no longer imagine, let alone name, until there, on his hand, an appalling, imagined wetness; poor forked animal that she was. Gone now, through the gates of her house. Gone to bed.
He shook it off like a dog and headed back to town, and like a dog, he felt he had been whipped. But the road was straight and he knew where he was going. He was going to his annoying wife Venancia for some love. Just that. The odorous cushion of her breast beneath his ear.
For a long time, the memory of that night's encounter clung to Stewart like a dream you cannot wash off in the morning. It returned, in one detail or another – the sound of the insects in the dark; the turn in the road; and what might have happened if some different move had been made. If he had spoken more, or better. If he had stopped. If one or other thing had shifted even slightly and he had ravished, or been ravished by, a woman he did not even like, who walked out at night as he did, alone.
Nothing much, of course. The sexual act. A different way of looking at Lopez. His own throat quietly slit perhaps (or perhaps not). A great passion, or no great passion. A mess. Any number of things, none of which would increase the sum of his pleasure in seeing Eliza secretly in the dark, as though she had invited him to this assignation, and him alone.
Of course she was not there for him. What Stewart knew – but did not realise for some time – was that Eliza's stillborn daughter was buried in the graveyard along whose walls she walked that night. It came to him, seven years later, when he buried a child for Venancia, who could not attend, being not yet churched. It was their sixth, a meagre little daughter who died as soon as she was born. They scraped out some earth and put her in. Stewart looked up, and Venancia's absence on the other side of the tiny grave made him think of other ghosts – the lilac paleness of Eliza that night, in the June of 1865, when the war was still something you might win or lose.
The graveyard was beautiful. It was one of those blessed days when you thought there could be no hardship in such a place and with such weather. The jacaranda trees were in smoky bloom, the birds sang into the stillness, and the whole world seemed to whisper 'Afterwards. Afterwards'. It was all finished, now. The war. Lopez. Any number of dead. Stewart found it hard to care, after so much slaughter, for his own tiny child, but of course he did care, and the animal sorrow he felt seemed so unfair – that you should never be free of it, that, like hunger, pain would always be new and hard. And as he turned away he remembered that Eliza's daughter was buried here too. So that was what brought her out along the road that last night in Asuncion. She had come to visit the bones of her baby – so light and tentative and barely formed. He thought of them as they lay in the earth now, open and loose; melted back from each other where the cartilage had not had a chance to harden into bone.
Stewart stepped back with a snort that surprised the gravedigger. He had remembered – but last of all – the kiss. And with the memory came the thought that the kiss, despite its opiate clarity, might not have been a kiss, after all. Also, and either way, that it did not matter now. Perhaps it had not mattered then. And Stewart felt a fierce nostalgia for the war. Standing alive, as he stood now, among the great sighing mass of the dead.
It is possible they all saw themselves as standing on a magnificent canvas, one that might run the length of an old hall. It would be filled with smoke. There would be hills with men toiling up the slopes, other men firing down from above. A gorge. A swamp. Far embrasures and redoubts – strategic details compressed into a tea-coloured distance before the Paraguayans run out of wall. In the centre, the river, shallow and lazy, flows or dallies past the story of the war fought along its bank: the battles of Riachuelo, Tuiuti, Curupaiti, the trenches at Curuzú and, looming above it all, the besieged fort of Humaitá; its builder, the gallant Captain Thompson, unrolling his plans high up there on the mud wall.
Below him, Brazilian ironclads squat on the river while, from ship and shore, the mouths of cannon spit primitive flame. The river is spattered with shot that falls just shy of the ships: the walls of the fort, though vaguely pocked and dented, are never breached. It seems a pleasant enough stalemate – an expensive way to fish. Along the wicker battlements, men point into the middle distance or click out a telescope to glint in the sun. Their names might be written on ribbon unfurling below them. In the centre, Lopez; with an unlikely white stallion rearing under him on the high wall. Pedro Inácio Meza, the ruined hero of Riachuelo dying of his wound, stiffly, on the church steps. Colonel José Diaz charging, and taking, a battery of La Hitte cannons from the Uruguayans at Estero Bellaco. Huzzah! General Francisco Isidoro Resquin running up the left flank at Tuiuti, General Vicente Barrios on the right, the fierce Guarani soldiers wading through swamp and thicket under close enemy fire to face the sixty thousand Brazilians, Uruguayans and Argentines, housed in that vast city of cloth. How could one man paint them all? And though we see men throw up their arms and roll their eyes, although we see the bullet even as it enters; the stricken faces of comrades who reach but can not save ('oh, no!' the picture might be called. 'Oh, No!'): although we see plenty of dying, we do not see one corpse – so quickly are bodies emptied and then discarded, even by their own stories – nor do we see the vast heaps of the dead. We might miss the vast heaps of the dead: we have come to relish them; the unexpected anatomy lesson of a man's neck open to the spine; the way a group of bodies tangle and subside; the way we must follow the line of a leg to see whose foot that is, so strong is our impulse to unite the body and give each man his proper parts. Also the horror, of course, when the leg stops short. Ten thousand men died at Tuiuti, and as their skin leathers in the open air, the hill of the dead settles and grows horribly flat (who would have thought there could be so many elbows in the world?). A lone photographer stands on the field of death, and there is no one to paint them: the painters are all fled. What happened at Tuiuti? A battle, that is all. Nothing but swamp was lost and nothing but swamp was gained. But the man who lost the swamp was Lopez.