Then she put her head straight and snapped to.
'Doctor Stewart,' she said, Ί felt the need of some arrowroot tea.'
'Of course,' he said.
Tancho obliged. You know I hate him running errands for his poor Mama, but there is no better boy.'
'Mama,' said Pancho.
'Or I should say "young man". Come here to me, my darling.' And Pancho strode gallantly forward, and dropped on one knee. He looked at his mother as she looked at him. She put her hand on his shoulder and, when he felt her touch, he fell forward to lie in her lap.
Her eyes then were an evening blue. They were the colour of the light, when it goes.
'She has put me in charge of sleep,' said Pancho. Stewart nodded. He had come to talk to the boy. Or he had come to sit by the courtyard fire, where they might happen upon the subject of his mother, who did not, after all, drink her arrowroot tea, but fussed serenely around Lopez when he arrived and called a soldier in to sing.
Then much bother about the piano, which must be unloaded at once and brought to her quarters. The evening made unbearable by music; a song called 'Barbara Allen'; notes that coated a man, and fingered every crevice. When the silence was finally clean, Stewart walked out to spit and look at the stars, and talk to the heir apparent.
The boy must be sixteen or so. His skin in the firelight was an uneven and glowing brown and he looked altogether romantic as he squatted there; though also a little glum, as he stared into the tangle of flame. He was thinking, no doubt, of The War.
He had the clearest gaze. Stewart took comfort from his green eyes, which were a window of light in the middle of his face. He took comfort from the fact that, in this whole travelling circus, there was one freak who might be called 'the beautiful boy'. The boy who simply looks. And he was not the only one who felt it. Belief in Pancho was a general pleasure. The men looked at his eyes as you might look at the sky, for the solace of colour, and they indulged the boy and his jewel-like stare.
Behind him, his half-brother, the bastard son of Juana Pesoa, kept fierce guard, as always, in the shadows.
They were talking man-to-man.
Ί am also in charge of the piano. I have my own brigade. We lift it in the evening, if it needs to be lifted. We keep the damp away. I have a man sleep under it, just in case. Not tonight though, as it is with my mother, indoors.'
Stewart did not ask who might want to attack the piano, but still the boy said, 'Just in case. And besides music is a noble business, is it not? This is what I tell the men, that music is just as mighty a business as killing is, and just as useful, in its way. I set them to care for "the beast", as they call it. Or, "his Mama's beast", sometimes, if they want me to hit them.'
And then, as though reciting and forgetting a list, he started again.
'Night-time security. What she calls "Sleep". I see to the bedding, personally. I make up the bed myself. It is a tender duty, you know.'
'Indeed.'
There was something the boy wanted to say.
'But sometimes in the morning, Doctor, the bed is just as I left it, the sheets not even turned down. Other times it is so screwed and wrinkled I feel like scolding her. I say, 'Mama, what is the point? When I have four men outside your door, keeping their eyes open so that you can shut yours. You should become our night watchman, you would walk in our dreams.'
'She does not sleep,' said Stewart, carefully.
'She sleeps in the carriage for ten minutes at a time, I think. But at night she does not sleep.'
'She looks quite well.'
Pancho seemed to think about this for a while.
'She always looks clean, that is the thing of it. Whether or not she has slept, or in what tent or room. She always looks clean.'
'Perhaps it is because she is beautiful,' said Stewart, and the boy looked relieved. It was indeed a burden he carried – the unmentionable beauty of his dear Mama.
'Do you think so? It is hard for a son to tell. But yes I think she is beautiful, even though she is old, now. I think a boy might say that without compromise, about his mother.'
Stewart stood up. He was hugely tired.
'You must get her to take some air, when we move again,' he said. 'The coach is so enclosed.' And the boy prodded the fire a little miserably, and agreed.
It would all keep going, thought Stewart. After I am dead, and after Lopez is dead. The son would keep going, while Woman – lovely Woman – kept turning the handle on the world's dreadful machine.
We really would be better off without them, he thought; as a breed. Apart from all the fuss. And it saddened him that a woman's needs should be so monstrously met, if not by her lovers then by her sons. That Eve should kiss not just Adam but also Cain. That it all keeps trundling on. It leaves her, and then it comes back to her again.
As he fell asleep, he heard her talking to the boy, through the wall.
Tancho,' she said. 'Where did we get this thing?'
Ί think we got it in the cathedral in Asuncion’
'Well it is a very ugly thing’
And Stewart spent his dreams wondering what the thing might be.
The next evening, Stewart sought out the boy again. He could not help it. He wanted to talk to the future. He wanted to see those eyes.
'For all her nonsense, you know, mine is an important position. If we lose her we are absolutely lost’
'Yes,' said Stewart.
Although it was the boy he believed in now, and not the mother. The boy's mother was a whore. It was never a word that made sense to Stewart, but it made sense to him now. It was the prickle on his skin of hatred or disgust – the unbearable tenderness where his skin met the night sky. The sensation of falling. Stewart thought that he might fly apart with it. It was a rage and a yearning, and the only word he could put on it was 'whore'. Everything was dirty and dark, now, and his waking dreams stank of Eliza, until he had to seek out her son and rest his eyes on him.
Pancho, as though he sensed his need, tried to put the older man at ease – but of course it was hard for a boy who had been reared as he had been reared to find the right tone. He settled on a story.
Ί bet my boys they would not take the witch Cordai,' he said. 'It was in Humaitá, when she was still caged. Did you see her? If you threw her a bone she would twist it in front of her face like she had never seen a bone before, and my lads were all frightened – she would fling it back at them and they would scatter and shout – or she would gnaw at it, all leering, and once she put it into her private self, whatever you call it, her cunt, though not far. So I knew she was daring us, and I threw a belt buckle I had into the cage for the first man to take the witch Cordai.