The candles droop as he speaks and lean slowly sideways. The flames keep their easy, hopeful stance – and then, the crisis – I watch them shrink to a point and then recover to lick back up the tallow, now upside down. The engineer sucks the dregs of his maté and we listen to the night.
Of course, it all happened years ago – he gives the date, being by temperament exact. I say that it is hard to imagine these great trees having weeks and fortnights, as we do: all they know is another day, and another day, and another day after that. Indeed, he says. For eight of these primeval days and nights, she wandered alone in the howling wilderness; surviving on berries and bird's eggs; shouting and singing to keep the jaguar at bay. She went in a young woman and, when she came out again, her hair was turned quite, quite grey.
He pauses in some satisfaction, and surveys the room. I say that she probably ate the brother. She didn't just take his shoes; she took a bit of leg as well. She lopped off a nice big ham and slung it over her shoulder, to help her along the way. Senor Lopez gives a great shout of laughter, and hits the engineer between the shoulder blades, and we have another round of cards.
I like the way he glanced at me when he said the word 'naked'. He is full of slips and blunders. He leaks. He cannot help it. He seems such an unbending, abstemious little man, but I sense the longing in him to give in and live as other people might. The doctor too, rolls his watery eye, and heaves, and sighs. He is very big, when we are so confined in the cabin. Still, in the middle of so much awkwardness – his mouth; small and nice.
Francine says, apropos of nothing, that a mother has only to look into the eyes of her newborn to believe -believe what she could not say. Only that we are ancient, that we come of an ancient race. Senor Lopez looks down at the table and his eyes film over with tears. She lifts her face to the light and says that we spend our first weeks forgetting who we are, and then the rest of our lives trying to remember it again.
This is very pretty of her. Francine started this journey as a maid and will end it as a lady's companion. And so we go. 'And what would you know of newborn babies?' I say, with a sporting glance at the assembled men. At which, quite wisely, she declares rummy, and we continue with the game.
So, she has had a child. It is surprising what a journey will throw up. Poor Francine.
But now, in the river dark, my mind turns to the luckless Indian dying in his hovel – only to be plucked out by these travellers (these angels of death) with their exotic clothes. And so he does die, but marvellously, for a hat.
Of course the hat was important – a white man would die without one. A white man did die without one.
This morning I do not move, and the boat does not move. I wake to a clanging sound, then the abrupt hiss of coals hitting the river as they clear the boilers out. Pht. Phht. Pht. I lie in the oven of the stateroom all morning. Through the open door, I see Senor Lopez busy, frantic, intent. He does not notice me. He unrolls plans on the table and calls for his engineer, Mr Whytehead, so I must have the door closed and dress in the airless dark. Outside, the light hits like a brick. My dress instantly wilts. The starch gives way in the wet air and my skirts limp altogether along the floor. So I trail around the deck and look at no one, as no one looks at me; then I lie in my gauzy tent and swing.
At noon they raise sail to catch a whisper, and so we veer from one side of the vast river to the other, at which point, the whisper dies.
Everyone sits about. The English – all sorts of railway-men, fitters, miners – fill the boat with dull delirium. Their voices drift on the hot air, and then stop.
I ask Milton for the name of a tree on the bank -a handsome tree with red and peeling bark. He laughs and gleefully rubs his forearm, saying, I think, 'White Man's Skin/
In the afternoon, I have Francine put all my white veils away. They increase the power of the sun's light and the danger of sunburn and freckles. They are also, I think, very injurious to the eyes. Green is the only colour that should be worn as a summer veil.
Freckle wash – take one dram of muriatic acid, half a pint of rainwater, half a teaspoonful of spirits of lavender: mix, and apply it two or three times a day to the freckles with a camel's-hair pencil.
When Doctor Stewart joins us after dinner, I take him aside to ask for muriatic acid. He says that my complexion is probably subject to my condition, but that lemons may do just as well. He has little French and no Spanish, and so I am forced to speak English to him. Mr Whytehead has everything, of course, up to and including Swedish.
And so we assemble – my little band. It is too hot for cards. It seems that, apart from my freckles, there is nothing to talk about. I try Sebastopol. I recall Buenos Aires. I wonder at the possibility of a garden in Asuncion, and what might grow there. But Senor Lopez turns always to the state of the unmoving boat, her inner workings, her boilers, vertical or horizontal, her trunnions, whatever they may be. I have no words for these things, and leave it all to Mr Whytehead.
I long for my piano, but it is deep in the hold. Sometimes, lurching across the Atlantic, I would hear a tinny discord; a distant twang that felt like one of my own heartstrings snapping.
But we must have music, the boat is so still now, and the night gathers about us as though there might never be another day. I have the captain order in a musical seaman, in order to push back the darkness. The man holds his cap in his hands and gives a humble, swelling account of 'Barbara Allen'.
Ο mother, mother, make my bed To lay me down in sorrow. My Love has died for me to-day, I'll die for him to-morrow.
Senor Lopez trumps him with something astonishing in Spanish and Mr Whytehead, prevailed upon by myself, finally opens his mouth – out of which floats, to our amazement, an easy, soaring tenor. The room is all tenderness. He sings a carol, 'Quelle est cette odeur agréable, bergères, qui ravit tous nos sens? and all uninvited, pro patria, you might say, Francine supplies the descant.