'Why should I not sound ordinary, Doctor,' Eliza was saying. Ί am ordinary. I am ordinary as well.'
'As well as what?' he rudely asked. Well, she had woken him, after all.
'As well as a whore?' he might have said – but who cared these days? They were all meat. (Though could 'meat' be said to sleep, as he now needed to sleep, and was it not the blissful thing about Eliza, after all, that she was absolutely meat, and absolutely not meat at the same time, which is to say, a woman, as opposed to a potential corpse? This whirligig of philosophy taking no time at all in his head, or just exactly the time a man needed to shut his eyes and open them again, which is an eternity, or about as long as a blink.)
'As well as being the First Lady of Paraguay,' said Eliza, her voice a little hurt, and proud.
'Of course,' he said.
'But they would hate me anyway, I think. Honestly. You might as well be in Ireland. You might as well be in Mallow – where I grew up you know – a bitter town, it made my mother weep – but we all come from bitter towns, do we not, Doctor? Every unfortunate on the surface of this earth comes from some or other bitter little town.'
He could not but agree.
And as he slept and woke for the next while (sometimes while looking straight at her) she continued to speak. She was most eloquent, though she had the disconcerting habit of suddenly appearing in a different place in the room.
'My dear friend's greatness is a burden to him,' she might say.
Or, 'All I want is to be with my family at this terrible time.'
The surprising thing was that she meant it. Here in the middle of everything, she was talking about nothing at all.
'You know that I came to Humaitá to escape his brother's contempt, and the contempt of his mother and sisters in Asuncion. That is why I came to the field of battle, even though I was with child at the time. Because real bullets are as nothing to me when compared to the slights I suffer at the hands of those women. I came to tell him as much. I found him and flung myself at his feet.'
Stewart woke. He sensed a conclusion in the air.
'For every enemy that he has, I have two, because for every man that hates him there is another who says that whatever he does it is at my urging; because a woman's ambition is a fathomless thing – as though I was some witch who hexed him into my bed, and whispered, "You must, my darling, invade the Mato Grosso before the spring." And so we suffer, Doctor. A woman has no limits, because she may not act. She is all reputation, because she may not act. So, even as we do nothing, our reputations grow more impossible, and fragile, and large.'
This seemed to him partly true, though a little bit dull. To say that women were beside the point always struck him as being – well, beside the point, somehow.
'My dear Eliza,' he said.
She paused. She had let herself down. And feeling it keenly, she tried to make him hers again. Stewart was entirely awake as she turned to him with ardent, very female eyes.
'We have come a long way together, William Stewart -you and I. Sometimes I wonder how we got here, at all.'
There was a lot to disagree with in what she had said. He might start with the word 'we'. He might point out that, though they were together in this room, they had 'arrived', each of them, in very different places. And he had a huge yearning for the life he might have led – a life that was familiar with flowers and unfamiliar with Eliza Lynch. But as he tried to enter it, and imagine it, he found he could not. Whatever life he was living now, it was the only one he had got, and it was bound, however loosely, to this irritating woman. He could not conjure one without her.
'At least I have a friend, in you, Doctor. At least I have that.'
He stood rather smartly, and bowed and sat back down again. Perhaps she meant it. Their silence was so profound it drew Lopez at last – he snatched back the door hanging and put his mad face into the room. For a second, Stewart was afraid, but Lopez was not jealous in the least. Such was Stewart's smallness, in the scheme of things. And indeed, Eliza stood and walked towards him as a Great Woman might walk towards a Great Man. At which, Stewart's stomach notified him, of a sudden, that he had eaten more in the last few hours than in all the previous week.
On the way back to his hut, Stewart tried to remember that he was in love with this woman, in a dashing sort of way. He tried to relive the high, more spiritual love he felt when Eliza walked out on her big wheel, with a boy laying a plank in front of her, and another boy snatching one up from behind.
'All love is fuss,' he said, not for the first time, and perhaps out loud. He sought a sight of the moon. And it was there. The moon was white, and he loved Eliza Lynch. Of course, a spiritual love is a question of faith. You say Ί love' and it is as true as mutton. And so we survive.
At the edge of the compound he passed some of the mud-coloured women scrabbling under the door of a shed. It might have been a privy but, from the human whine that came from it, Stewart realised that it was some sort of lock-up or oubliette. The women – there were two of them – were scraping a hole under the door. It looked as though they were trying to feed the person inside. Such generosity, he thought. Such love.
'Goodnight,' he cheerfully said, to the cheerfully saluting sentry. Lopez had his own private prison; another hole where rumour might breed – that he locked up men for Eliza to eat, or that Eliza locked up women for Lopez to ravish, such was the love they had for each other – and with the genderless whine of the prisoner teasing his back, Stewart made his way back downhill and into his bed. And as he fell asleep in his broadcloth – even as he pulled away the rag at his throat – he thought that if he had his war again he would not tear up his last linen to save a dying man. If he had his war again he would treasure his linen -of which there was so little – and leave the dying, of which there were far too many.
A few weeks later, word came that the Ygureiwas sunk and the Tacuariscuttled by its own crew. Stewart escaped with Lopez across the river into the swamplands, leaving Paulino Álén with a small force to defend Humaitá. The boy had got his promotion. Eliza must have liked him, at dinner.
The River Part 3
Champagne
December 1854, Rio Parana
We have entered Paraguay!