The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2 page)

Then he threw the empty-hearted card at her, across the baize.

This was a man who needed nothing.

This was a man who needed it all – but he did not need any
one
thing, except, and absolutely, to be inside her. As he now was.

Ten:

The dressmaker on Rue de Rougemont. Short and quick like a jockey, with burning, slithery eyes. She might like him. In another life, she might quite take to him. He looked her over and the deal, he seemed to be saying, was either her or 20 per cent. So she settled on the spot – lay herself down amid the silks and stuffs; a spool of Bruges lace still grasped in her hand. The lace cost, in labour, a metre a week. She thought about this – about how long it would take some Flemish hag to finish a fancy cuff, an entire dress, and the thought of the hag made her want to cry. She looked at the side of his head and her hand tightened on the wooden spool. She saw his blood on the hammered silk; she saw black blood seeping into the bombazine. When they were done, she asked him about the dresses, and he – as open in his love of warp and weft as he was closed in love (a grunter, a face-puller) – took her round the room, and romanced her with cloth.
Nankin, taffeta, piqué, foulard
. And so she got, on tick, five of everything, morning, afternoon and evening. Her under-linen, she must supply herself. She owned nothing, not even the
peignoir
she lay down in. She was not yet nineteen and she lived like a countess – on credit.

The money! The money! It was running through her hands like water. She tried to catch it, hold it: clutched instead at his neck, or his throat, or his mouth.

Eleven:

His hair smelt of Lilac vegetal by Pinaud. His shirt smelt
clean
. She would be rich. She would have a
calèche
like Cora Pearl, the English tart who dyed her dog blue to match her dress. A man said that her pearls were fake – she broke the string and let them scatter. The pearls sloughed from the string with a pull of her hand, spitting out all over the floor. Who picked them up? The pearls bouncing into corners, rolling under tables and little love seats. What fine young man paused at the door and silently stayed behind, then dropped on to his knees and grubbed around on the Turkey carpet, picking them up? Eliza caught her breath. The blue dog, the
calèche
upholstered in sky-blue kid. She would have to change the curtains now, on her fabulous bed, because blue was Cora Pearl. A starving man she saw once, his legs set wide, and his thing hanging down in the gap, lush and fat. Eliza cried out. She had tried to be good, had wanted to be good, but the curtains had cost her a month of fucking and they were far too blue, and the pearls were scattering and rolling all over the floor.

Twelve:

Oh. Her voice in the room. A shudder in the hanging meat of his face, his eyes behind their closed lids like he was trying to squeeze something delicate and large through a very small gap – but only if he could find it. It was in there somewhere, in the centre of his head, and she wanted to kiss him; help him gather it up. A man he saw once, dragged by a horse; the bones sticking out of his ruined back. The man looking at him as though bored by it all, he said. Then slightly distracted. Then dead.

She was writhing away from him now, her eyes fixed.

Thirteen:

They were still there. They had left their traces inside her.
The
man who failed, and failed again, and slapped her to keep himself going, and wore her out with trying. The man who wiped his mouth afterwards – picked up a corner of her dress and wiped his mouth – and chucked her on each breast before he put the sapphires down. The dressmaker, with his clever eyes shut, straining against her, his head full of something that kept slipping out of his grasp. And Misha who left – the bills not paid, the sheets still rumpled on the bed. Misha in his Hussar jacket, who loved her better than his horse, he said, who loved her enough to die – who said, open your eyes, open your eyes and kill me, and she opened them to see him staring down at her, with a look so ordinary and hard his eyes might have been made of wood. Before Misha, Quatrefages, his wet stomach sucking against her back, who said on their wedding night that if she kept her chemise on, she might do; Quatrefages just a cover for Raspail, who twisted her every which way, and all she could remember of Raspail were his hands. Raspail a friend of Bennett who was the first. Bennett the doctor administering a cure; Bennett who said, ‘Do not be frightened, my dear, and if you are frightened, shout.’ Mr Bennett smiling thinly, until he rolled his eyes back to show the whites. She thought she had killed him. He smiled at her, as though her insides were quite useful and nice, then suddenly he cracked open in front of her and horrors, horrors, came spilling out. She was sure she had killed him, Mr Bennett, her father’s friend. She was killing him now. She was killing them all. The bed man, the dress man, the man who wiped his mouth, Misha her lover, Raspail her master, Xavier her husband, Mr Bennett, her father’s friend. She was killing them in Paris, Algiers, Kent, and Bennett everywhere. She was killing Bennett in Mallow, where he never had been, and Bennett in that room in Bordeaux, and Bennett who had followed her here because he was inside her still, between her legs, and behind her ribs, knocking,
knocking
to get out. Every time he crashed into her. In the pause, she caught and held him. And killed them one by one.

Fourteen:

She would have a carriage that was entirely black: Chinese lacquer, trimmed with ebony, upholstered in seal, the windows thin sheets of obsidian, the cushions black silk, punctured with buttons of jet. High and closed; Eliza’s carriage was the most expensive shadow ever thrown. She was making her escape in it. She was riding it over the bodies of her former loves. She bounced it across their chests and legs, bumpitty bumpitty bump. And she was gathering speed.

There was more, of course. There was the feel of cloth running across the skin, of blood running across the skin, and other people’s hands. There was the taste; not only of the quails they had eaten that night, but of every meal they had ever forgotten. All this now gathered up, as though in a massive cloth, with Eliza and Francisco lying in the centre of it, their lives tumbling down towards them; the sound of a piano, a song they had each heard, the various smells of home. The past they brought with them to this bed was not – how could it be? – populated by French emperors and English tarts, that was just the skin of it. More like, they carried with them the ghostly circle of rice powder scattered on Eliza’s dressing table or the unexpected beauty of his valet’s hands. They brought the smell of vegetable peelings, his favourite saddle, a pool she swam in as a child. They brought, finally, themselves: the landscape of his shoulders as he dropped his head above her, the tracery of veins on her white breast. All these things glimpsed, or nearly glimpsed. All these things swelling in their minds, a bubble impossibly
big
. And when the bubble bursts they are showered, not with pianos, valets, saddles, lovers, meadowsweet, silks; when it burst their minds are (pop!) a blank. Hope. The feel, quite simply, of him-inside-her-around-him, the feel of flesh turning to silk, of silk turning to muscle, and wanting everything! everything! because they are nothing now, and afraid that they will be destroyed by it – by the too-muchness of him and the too-muchness of her. And so:

Fifteen:

Pop! Nothing.

Sixteen:

A blank.

Seventeen:

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Eighteen:

Everything.

Nineteen:

Everything!

Twenty:

And a little bit … more.

Usually at this point, the man would roll off and look for his
boots
, but they stayed and stroked each other. He fingered her necklace – perhaps it was this had made him pause. She ran her hands along the flesh of his back – so neatly packed. She started to laugh. They had surprised themselves. He reached down by the bedside, and hauled up a bottle of slightly flat champagne.

‘My father,’ he began. He talked about Paraguay, the country that no one had ever heard of, a railway line he would build, tick tack snicketty snack across her stomach and between her breasts, until bumph it hit her nose.

In London, he told her, he had mounted his first train. Thirty-nine advisors, one hundred and three trunks, and return tickets to Brighton. What a young fool he was. Outside the window, the city did not stop. Valera, his equerry, would not take the hat off his lap, his knees prissily together, the words stalled in his mouth. England, that wretched country – they did these things so well. He went back to his London rooms, and every day there was another scroll of paper uncurled and weighted on his desk, another engineer indicating this elevation or that point of strain. A ship – the
Tacuarí
– rising in the dry dock at Limehouse, even as he spoke. Plans for an arsenal, a railway line. Above all, there would be railways. Eliza could not imagine it, but Francisco’s father never left Paraguay. Before him, the first Dictator, Francia, never left his own bedroom. And now, here he was in Europe, meeting men by the hour, hiring them with a look, these buzzard British, immensely polite and ignorant, Jesuits all. He said to them, Can you see? Can you see? The silted land of the Paraná basin, the groves of orange trees, the willing men, a country with heart. Can you see? A country that will eat you, and love you and make you her own. We will embroider steel across her breast.

No, he said. She must come and teach them to put their hats on the floor, in the cool tiled drawing rooms
of
Asunción. But really, he was surrounded by fools; she must come with him as far as Rome.

Eliza lifted her hands and let her fingers trail along the turquoise curtain, showing, as she did so, the skin of her underarms and its astonishing, exotic, red hair.

‘Roma!’ she said.

And so it began. The state visit to Madrid, where she waited at the hotel while he was presented at the court of Isabella; then soothed him when he came back fuming, in a pair of sheets that had once belonged to Napoleon.

‘Where did you get them?’ he said, fingering the little embroidered imperial bee. ‘Oh, Buonaparte,’ he said, and buried his face.

The trip to Rome, where she read the Baedecker to him in bed, bought china, played hostess, chose menus, patted a Dutch broker on his knee, laughed at the puns of a Venetian millionaire, flirted with a bishop who happened to be involved with the Vatican bank (but not, as was claimed in the broadsheets of Buenos Aires, an orgy for the Pope).

The Crimean peninsula, a strategic tour, where Eliza held a picnic on a hill, sitting in their carriage, along with several other carriages, some of whose occupants were brave enough to dismount. She would always remember what she ate that day, the feel of it on her tongue, as through her lorgnette she watched one hundred Mishas in their Hussar jackets risk their body parts and lose them, or simply slide down the flanks of their horses to be lost underfoot. She would recall with perfect simplicity the dryness of the chicken, the honey glaze on its cold, dimpled skin; the crunch where fat met the bone; the fizz of champagne, as the guns crackled below.

Everywhere López went, he kicked the door shut and made love, on beds, floors,
chaises-longues
, patches of grass. Everywhere Eliza went, there were dresses, fittings,
patterns
, flounces, dismissive waves of the hand. Back in Paris, they went to Les Invalides and Napoleon’s tomb, where López cried and said he would build the same, the very same tomb, stone by stone in Asunción. He made it sound like an invitation.

They stayed in Paris, waiting for their ship to be finished (because there was no doubt now, it was her ship too). And when it was loaded with the British railway men and engineers and smelters, they sent their baggage on to meet it at Bordeaux.

With everything nearly bought and packed, the last farewells nearly done, Eliza went to the dressmaker on the Rue de Rougemont, attended by four equerries and her maid, Francine. She wore, for the occasion, a Polish pelisse of merino crêpe, with seven flounces, quite simple, in opaline. It was her parasol that was extraordinary, a cane of clear crystal, her monogram woven into each panel of lace. She looked the dressmaker in the eye; she looked at the contents of his pants. She drank his
café au lait
and took his advice as though quite seriously, made him unroll every bolt of cloth, and then she left. The next day, she sent the equerry, Valera, back, with his bad French, to settle her account.

And every night, silently now, she kissed him in the dark. All the bodies, all the mouths, melting away, as she and López tried to finish what was started that first night. La Irlandesa, Il Mariscal. What was started that first night was a war – they both knew it. What started that night was … love, perhaps. A sense of great peace, and strange dreams. A stirring. An intimation of all things askew, or all things dreadful. A sudden hunger. A shiver along her arms, an horripilation. A sense that someone had replaced the world with a different world that looked just the same. And with all this came disgust – for the smell of López, for the sight of him eating, and for the food on her own plate. A reluctance
to
travel, though she must travel. A change in her eyes. A distant look, as though she were listening to her own blood. You guessed it. What was started that night was a child.

Deep inside Eliza, a future had dug itself into her, and was now holding on. A tiny fish, a presence urgent and despotic. By the time she realised, they were in Rome. By the time she was accustomed to procure her
bondon
, she was knee-deep in Vatican bankers and Sèvres china. Besides, Francine had no Italian – she could hardly go into a pharmacist and mime.

And so it grew.

But this was, itself, in the future. As yet, Eliza and Francisco still lie on the bed, wonderfully spent. And for the next few weeks she finds, as recently pregnant women do, that she loves everyone, to the point of tears, and that life is good.