Stewart had not attended this birth either, but he was called upon to pass a nurse for the baby, which obliged him to check the breasts and teeth of three clamouring women – together with their clamouring babies who seemed to know it was their birthright that was being bargained away. As it happened, the teeth were bad and their milk too little and too thin, so he set the lot of them on a cart at the end of the cortège, passing the infant from one dug to the next, until a girl wandered out of the trees with a dead baby in her arms, and dripping. When he saw her standing there in the dappled light, Stewart felt a spreading stain on his own chest, as though he had been shot – but when he looked down, there was nothing there.
He was always being shot, these days. He was following his own hearse through the hills for the longest funeral a man had ever known. It had started indecently early, before his corpse had even a chance to climb into the coffin, and it was getting away from him now, the mourners, the horses, his own death. At other times he was following a London cab, and might hail it, if he had half an English crown. And once, it looked like a hat, Stewart thought, an enormous hat, worn by some tiny man, who sang and waggled his head, as he pranced ahead of them down the endless grass road.
After the coach, came the carts. The first cart was for her clothes: it was stacked with leather boxes, twenty of them or more, and all with some sad blue growth creeping out of the seams. The next cart was for her piano which was roped down in its upright, playing position and covered again with a red toile; a vast sheet of careless shepherds and pretty shepherdesses on their swings – also a small dog, endlessly rampant and yapping, and all of them repeated and folding into themselves from one end of the shroud to the other. After this, a cart for servants and younger sons, then food. Finally, a closed wagon for the mother and two sisters of Lopez – which looked like a cage, since the awning had rotted from its wicker arch. The Lopez women sat on sacks of manioc flour and beans as they lurched along. Ί am pissing in your soup,' Il Mariscal's mad mother was reported to have cried. Ί am pissing in the soup of every man here.'
She might look a while for men – there were few enough of them: there were families, and the scraps of families; widows and orphans. There were the remnants of men, who made up the army now. And every so often, it was true, there were men. They turned up. You saw them, squatting beside the morning fire, in their spurs and hat brims, the male contents of some village who had joined their quest – for it was hard to call it a war any more, or even a fight. And yet it was not nothing. It was the last battle, said Bernardino Caballero, a man who had seen enough last battles, you might think, to give him some inkling of when a war might end.
Or even, thought Stewart, of where the ending might have begun. At Angostura, perhaps, where the gallant Captain Thompson walked over to the enemy and handed up his sword. Or later, on the Azcurra heights, after yet another last battle: twenty thousand Brazilians against a battalion of women and children, with beards on their faces made of grass and wool; the new capital (a poor enough town) Peribibui lost. After that, Acosta Nu, held to the last minute by Caballero, so that Lopez might escape to San Estanislao – another 'capital city', this one lost without a bullet shot. Curuguati, then eastwards to the heights of Panadero. All of these places boldly marked on a map that Lopez had – though Stewart could point until his arm was sore at this far place or that, waiting for a Guarani to lend him its name.
After the carts and wagons came certain prisoners who were never shot. They comprised the life story of Francisco Lopez. Some woman he wanted. Some woman he did not want. A man who scorned him. The son of the sister of the man who betrayed them to the Brazilians at Curupaiti, or Curuzu. They were given more food than the common soldiers, so that they should not die when they were flogged. Some of them were quite hale, and Stewart wondered why they did not escape. Though how could they, when everyone here was escaping? They had been escaping so long, it made a man think that this was what life was – a regrouping against forces that are large – yes, admittedly very large – but also clumsy and beneath his contempt.
'Hah!' said Stewart, to illustrate his point, and the small girl who walked now with her hand always on his stirrup looked up at him and smiled.
She was a Guarani girl, of uncertain age.
They do not listen to words, Stewart noticed. These children only look, and it is always at the wrong place. They do not watch your eyes but your mouth. Or they do not watch your mouth but your hands. They make you feel not so much wrong-footed as wrong-faced. Or they might watch your eyes, but that is not the same thing as meeting them: a man might long for another human creature just to return his gaze. Perhaps that was what dogs were for. And he spent a while that day thinking about eyes – whether they were the door to the soul, or the soul's mirror. Do they open, or reflect, and what was the anatomy of it all.
He thought of the blue and stupid eyes of George Thompson at Angostura, looking at him while he fingered the hilt of his soon-to-be-surrendered sword. The table where they sat, with a sheet of ants lapping up and over the edge of it, on their way across the room. The rest of the ants walking happily on the floor.
Thompson's eyes of cerulean blue; a flare of white around the pupil, a matching outer ring of a darker smoky blue
– there was a pattern to this dark rim, as it fell towards the pupil, a kind of gothic veining. Which blue came first? Stewart was a doctor. He should know about such things, about the previousness, or lateness, of colour, and how colour grows. He should have paid more attention, at the time, to the bruised, navy colour of his own children's eyes, as they shifted into brown.
A British boat was waiting down river, Thompson said. It would take them to the Argentine, and then home. Stewart did not answer. He looked at the ruin of his hands, his cannibalised nails. He did not want to go.
And so his life was shaped by a kind of stickiness. He did not want to leave his family in Asuncion – those little strangers his wife had reared for him. He did not want to leave his wife – herself a stranger to the woman he had once loved. Besides, he could not abide Thompson. And so he drifted along with the war, which was not so much a stream as a sequence of separate moments, each so vivid and different from the last it made him feel quite hilarious, the way that nothing now was connected to anything else.
Thompson gave Stewart his horse that day. How did he surrender? Stewart sometimes idly thought. Did he walk?
The languorous dip and buck of the creature's back beneath him provoked thoughts of a slow, abrupt congress, but it was also conducive of other rhapsodies and regrets
– that he had not made a contribution, for example. There were trees around him demanding botany, and birds their taxonomy. There were things his aunt would have admired, if you set them on her mantel in a glass jar. There was the fame of exhibition: Ά series of glass eyes, blown and variously pigmented to the specifications of Dr Stewart, with a brief note of their metamorphosis and pathology. The eye of the diabetic patient, the eye of the bereaved woman, the eye of the blind.'