Later again, I wake to find my dear friend disappeared. There is a low, urgent noise from the next room – the one that leads on to the deck. Someone is talking. I realise that I am trapped here. I think that Valera is behind it all -squatting like that outside my door. I think my friend usurped – dead! his body already floating out behind us, a ragged thing on the flat river. The voice goes on, and the tone is so conspiratorial I am afraid to open the door. I press my cheek against the wood and ease the latch and, on a breath, break open a crack to see who the new masters of my fate might be.
The first thing I see, by the flare of an oil lamp, is the face of my dear friend, as the Spaniard Goya might have done it, all brown and livid in the smoking yellow light. There are two crystal schooners of brandy in front of him; pushed away and half-full. Lopez buries his face in his hands. He raises his head again. He is, I see, talking to the little Governor. He turns to him, and then away. He lifts his hand and brushes his fingers together; clicks them, once, twice, in the man's face. He holds, briefly, the bridge of his own nose and says something with quiet emphasis, as though for the hundredth time; his eyes still closed. The Governor says nothing: his face is completely still, and somewhat ecstatic, and wet with tears.
The child has not moved since four in the afternoon. I should not have stayed with the dying sailor. I know it. Or perhaps it is the champagne.
I do not think he sleeps. When I wake, he is already gone, but he comes back in with my morning chocolate, to kiss me where I lie. He picks up my forearm, and looks at the marks his fingertips left there. Then he is up and away.
No breakfast. Later I watch him from behind my muslin veils, stalking the deck. There is always something to be pounced upon, worried at, cleaned or polished or heaved overboard. And none of it, it seems, has anything to do with me.
'We are in Paraguay now,' he says, when I ask him to take a little lunch with me – meaning Ί am busy', meaning 'This is who I am. I have come into my own.'
And so I lie weeping and plotting indoors and sleep all afternoon. And yet I am not abandoned. When I wake, heavy with dreams, I see he has come to sit and perhaps to look at me awhile. He is there in the chair, staring at the floor, his eyes agape at some dull horror. But when I stir he looks up and, quite naturally, smiles.
'How is the boy?'
'Good,' I say. 'Your little wrestler.'
And then he heaves himself up, and is gone.
He is so impatient with me, now. I do not know what he wants. Oh I knuw he wants me to choose, in the morning, what clothes he will wear. He wants me to speak French with him. He wants me to tell him about Voltaire. But more than that. He wants me to twist some knife in him, and I do not know where, or in what wound.
There is something wrong now, over and above what is usually wrong – what will never be right – with him. There is a bargain: there is some bargain I must keep, and when he looks at me I try to remember what it is. I knew it once but have forgotten. He wants something. It may be something small. It may be the pivot. Of course – he wants the maid. Let him have her then. If that is all. What is it to me?
I have Miltón bring me back to my hamaca, but she comes running, to help me in – and a large business it is, as we take each other by the shoulders and grapple, until I, safely, fall.
'Stay with me,' I say. And she sits on a little folding stool by my side.
The maid. She has a good enough profile, quite pure, in the way that simple faces sometimes are. A hidden saint. Her father is a dolt and her mother a whore, and there she is – my clever girl Francine. The tricks that she knows. The secrets she has been obliged since youth to keep. Which is why she was for me such a very excellent maid.
Sent by Dolores the Spaniard because she was getting too pretty. And I looked at her, and thought her perfectly fine, and not too pretty at all. Ί will call you Francine,' I said, and she bobbed a little and was pleased to be hired.
I wonder what her given name is.
'What's your name?' I say.
'Why, Francine, ma'am.' She seems perfectly surprised by the question. And so I let it go.
Now that she is beside me, my dear friend comes as far as my pavilion on his endless round, and he bows on the turn. Beside me, I feel her prickle and go still. And by the fourth or fifth turn I am bored by it – but massively so -and I tell her to go inside.
I want to tell the silly girl that she might get a marriage out of it, as M. Raspail married me to Quatrefages. And even though this is not Paris, it still might be done. The equerry Valera might suit, or someone a little lower down. Though any hopes of Whytehead are perhaps now gone.
'Would you like to know how I got married?' I say as she folds up the stool. She looks up from her crouch.
'Why yes, ma'am.'
But I find I cannot do it. 'Another time,' I say.
She leaves, and I lapse into a greedy silence. And so the ship ploughs on, while I rehearse my woes.
He wants the maid.
Dressing for dinner, I am so overcome by the tedium of it all, I must chuck the string of pearls on to the table in front of me. The maid absents herself, as does the valet, and my friend comes over to fasten the string himself. We watch one another in the mirror.
I say I will not have the equerry Valera about me, I do not like the look of him. My friend says he is a very effective young man, and I say that I do not care how effective he is, I do not want him outside my door at night, because I don't like his long nose and the way he looks down it, at me.
He says, in that case, he will have him flogged.
Tor what?'
'For impudence, my love.'
But that is not it, either.
I turn from the mirror and stand. I am close to tears now. I want to run away from him, but there is nowhere to go. He takes me by the shoulders, and looks at me, and shakes me a little – tenderly. Then he slips his palm along the length of my arm to find my hand, which he touches, holds, and lifts for a kiss: all the while fixing me with a stare.
And his eyes promise everything.
I want to sneer. But this is not a vulgar bargain. It is an invitation. He is inviting me to join him in his life -his impossible life, where the sky is more blue, and the grass more green, where you can have things just by taking them. He is telling me to hold my nerve. He is saying that if I hold my nerve, like him, then I can have anything I want.
'Francine!' I call her back.
When she comes in, Lopez squeezes past her in the narrow doorway and makes a clicking noise with his tongue. Then he is gone.
The room is so small. The maid looks at me, then she tucks her head down and strikes out for the dressing table, but I halt her where she is. I tell her to stand so I can look at her, and she fumbles one hand in the other, while I take my fill.