The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (8 page)

But nothing she did could kill him: no amount of soirées or Italian poets or diamonds or new colours for a shawl. Nothing, that is, until the theatre.

That was the trigger, thought Stewart; though the bullet was slow. He dreamed of the actor Bermejo, with a revolver. Bang! The gun springs a flag from out of its long muzzle. The old Dictator laughs. He clutches his chest. He falls endlessly towards the floor.

And where does the actor come from? The actor slithers, wet and fragrant, out from under the skirts of Eliza Lynch.

A whore needs a theatre and Eliza was a very great whore, so the building was a miniature version of Teatro alla Scala in Milan (no less), though it lacked a roof – also an orchestra, scenery, gas lamps, and women of dubious reputation in very good clothes. Eliza talked to the architect over little glasses of
fino
and sent to Paris upholsterers for the exact shade of red. Who else understood these things so well? It was Eliza who, before the roof slates were sourced or ordered, invited Bermejo in from Madrid.

The news that a real actor was making his way across the Atlantic flung the virgins and matrons into reverie. When
he
finally arrived, a little redhead with a pretty wife, the blankness of their afternoons was subtly different from the usual blankness of their afternoons. The evenings he spent with Eliza, of course, but during the day they could stroll past the veranda of the Frenchman’s hotel where he sat drinking coffee, ignoring them all, and suddenly writing. The excitement of it! He wrote as though pricked all over, as though attacked by bees. Sometimes, he waved his arms to clear the buzz of thought from about his head. He feigned, he ducked, he went very still: then mysteriously the swarm would settle, and he covered page after fluid page, sheathed in a drowsy, dangerous calm.

It was there on the page. It was growing. It was the first ever Paraguayan play.

Dangerous indeed. When a closed carriage stopped beside the veranda one afternoon Bermejo had instinct enough to run out and kiss the hand that appeared on the sill; also the small female fingers that fluttered out of one window or another, obliging him to run around the carriage, and back again. After which kissing, there was a more official
beso mano
at the presidential palace. Then dinner with the López ladies. After which he regretted the fact that he could not attend Eliza’s salon again. The first Paraguayan Theatre would belong, not to the whore, but to the nation. The actor had finally come to town.

In the theatre, vast and roofless, dried leaves stirred and eddied as Bermejo’s ghosts took to the stage. And as they thickened and moved, old López began to fail. The maiden woke, and his pain turned into a lump: she started to speak, and the lump became a boil. By Act Three the boil had blossomed into an ulcer, livid from ankle to calf and quite likeable in its way. At least, that is what Stewart thought as he dressed it and wrapped it, and bled the old man a little because he asked to be bled. The Dictator made an unexpectedly sweet invalid. He propped his leg up on a
chair
, and had the shutters closed and let the nonsense that was the theatre, with its actors ordered in from Madrid and its dresses ordered in from Paris, wash turbulently by.

And it was because of the theatre that no one noticed how he failed to appear in the streets any more, or how his personal butcher had stopped bringing shoulders of meat to the back door.

‘Chops!’ he said. ‘It’s all chops and broth.’ And so the realisation spread. The women, rifling through the bales of georgette and
satin de Chine
, let the cloth settle on their laps and were still. The realisation became a rumour and the rumour a terrible fact – he was dying. He was dying! and they sewed on in a guilty frenzy, as though stitching him a silken shroud. Fear seeped into the town. Carmencita Cordal started to walk at night and was seen abroad, naked, or bloodstained or dressed in white. In the morning, people found flowers jammed between doors and their lintels, and wreaths floating downstream. Cattle died of secret wounds. Eliza sent the measurements of her own body, by personal courier, to the House of Worth.

On the opening night, there is still no roof. The Guaraní stand on the floor of the theatre, ghostlike in their white smocks while around them the walls rise sheer to the stars; a giant dovecote, each nook rustling with velvet and plush. Old López stiffly enters his box and the audience sighs to its feet. He sits. He does not turn or speak. Beside him, the stolidly staring face of his wife and his overexcited daughters in their crinolines; all bands and zigzags, fat and festive as Bavarian eggs.

The box where they sit is strangely off-centre. The middle box – the biggest one – is empty. It is like a tic in the corner of your eye, but no matter. The play begins.

At first, Stewart cannot tell what the audience makes of it, or even if they know what they are watching. The moments
trundle
by – a maiden lost in the forest. A tender scene with the injured lion (Bermejo, with a tail), a gallant scene with her rescuing Guaraní Prince (the Englishman Captain Thompson, very white).

The Indians are enormously silent. Do they like it? Perhaps they have no opinion, as such, or as yet. Perhaps the play is simply as interesting to them as a new kind of animal, one with three legs, or five. But, no – there is a murmuring in the stalls. The Spanish maiden confronts her Conquistador father. He is too cruel, she says, and someone shouts. A boot, an actual and expensive boot, is thrown on stage. Then a general shushing, then more shouting, women’s voices too. The maiden weeps for the plight of the Indian and her father spurns her – the stalls hiss. She defies him – they cheer and hulloo. He strides off to battle – the crowd roars their contempt.

They like it.

After which, the interval. No one in the stalls knows what this is, quite. They look a little foolish while, in the boxes, the better class of people pass their maté and preen. Then a shiver gathers in the crowd. At one distinct moment, everyone turns to the central box, as the most remarkable thing they have ever seen walks in and smiles.

Oh.

In the long silence, M. Cochelet, the French envoy, stands to his feet, and bows. It is not a question of diplomacy, but of the soul. All the foreigners rise, one by one. If Eliza were a horse they would be tempted to salute an animal so fine. But she is not a horse – she has made herself, and it is to the woman who created this, as well as to the woman who
is
this, that they offer their deep and ironical homage, as though, in her beauty, she has transcended herself.

Her dress, it seems, is spun gold. Her underskirts are lapis lazuli, the colour of the night sky when it glows. Five diamond clusters knuckle around her throat, and a
deep
sapphire pendant hangs over her bodice, so low that, when she sits, it nestles in her lap. So much money.

Stewart finds himself on his feet with the rest, leaning forward to catch her eye. A woman whose hand he has kissed. She belongs to them all. So tender she is, to the poor, the crippled, the ailing, you might think her touch enough to make them whole. But no, that is why the smile is sad, her eyes so wise. Others must suffer, while she can only bless, and offer her beauty for their consolation.

Stewart feels all this as a thrill in his blood, and he knows that he is a fool. But he is not the only one. The crowd watches, rapt, as she picks up the sapphire and opens it. What can be inside? It is the very nexus, as though the entire theatre had been pulled into the world, like the finest shawl, through its pure blue doors. She glances inside – a figuring look. It is a watch, impossibly small. What use is the hour to anyone here, or the minute? Eliza leaves it carelessly open, hinged like an oyster on the blue-gold bed of her skirts, and Time spreads through the theatre, expensive and minutely ticking. Time for the interval to end. Time for the play to recommence. Time for the battle scene.

‘A riot,’ they said afterwards. ‘A complete riot.’

In the stalls the white-clad Indians press forward and lift their faces to the stage, all at the same terrible angle, while men hack at each other with wooden swords and ‘Gadzooks!’ ‘Have at thee!’ they cry. At first, it comes from nowhere, a low groan, the rough keening of someone trapped by the action on stage (where they are losing – the Indians of 1750) and then it is all around, it is everywhere – the crowd is growling.

Few people here have seen the sea, the great mournful mass of it, so who could describe the waves of sound that helplessly break against the proscenium’s retaining wall? Some of the rich have travelled but as they watch the stage
they
feel the rough utterance enter through their boots, to lodge in the base of their own throats. As for the foreign diplomats, the engineers and railwaymen, they do not even hear it – transfixed as they are by the thought that the people on stage manifestly cannot act, and so must be killing each other for real.

And when the stage is filled with bodies and pig’s blood, the tide ebbs.

Thank God for plot, thinks Stewart, as the maiden walks out into that open, astonishing space to unmask her (very white) lover for the Guaraní Prince he is. And so, the play proceeds, in all its lovely irrelevance. The prison scene, the duet through the bars, the firing squad, the huge roar of the rescuing lion, the cameo appearance of the King of Spain (old López in his box deader than ever), forgiveness, penitence, tears and …

Actually, no applause. Silence.

Why do they not clap? The truth is that most of them do not know that they should and the rest check with old López. But old López sits unmoving while, in her central box, the heavenly Eliza Lynch looks merely smug, as though she had created this too.

The Dictator rises to leave. Perhaps he knows that the play has killed him. Or perhaps not – at the time it is neither rebuff nor disdain; it is simply a man turning, painfully, to go. It takes a foreigner, the young poet Hector Varela, who has come all the way from Buenos Aires for this night, to start a snide and rebellious act of applause that crackles briefly through the crowd and then stops.

Just before dawn, the crisis came. It hit him in the chest. And with it, he told Stewart (who was still in his evening clothes), a preternatural flush of horror.

When Stewart looked at the paper that Miltón (or was it another Indian?) handed him the next day, his first
thought
was that Eliza wanted to know when the old man would die.

‘Please come.’

He read the note and stalled. He took a glass of Madeira. Then he shouted for his horse and fumbled his foot into the spinning stirrup (he was a fool, she was dying!). He tried to pace the ride to La Recoleta but it was the only straight road in the country, after all, and the horse galloped the length of it to haul him up, sweating, at her door.

He was shown up to the drawing room – which was, indeed, a glorious sight: it was some moments before his eyes got used to it, and yet another before he saw that Eliza was already there, sumptuously seated among her things. At first he mistook her for another
objet
; her face was made so tiny by the billow of watered grey silk about her on the ottoman. But it was Eliza, and she was very pale.

The doctor thought with a shock that she was lost, or drowning, that perhaps she would sink under the weight of it all. He stepped forward. She offered her hand, as though it were yesterday.

‘Whatever I can do,’ he said, and kissed it.

‘Can you keep a secret?’ she said. And then she smiled.

It all happened, he thought later, so quickly. As though they had both foreseen it, this room, his lurch forward, her hand under his lips. There was an understanding, but he could not tell what it was. And so he followed her down the corridor to a distant door with no sense of what might be behind it, except that it would be everything, and his head was almost spinning as they stood outside. She turned to him with a grave look. And then she opened it.

Stewart had no idea when she left. There was a shudder of grey beside him and, when he looked, she was gone. In front of him, sitting on a chair, was a woman in a good dress. Perhaps it was one of Eliza’s. A silk dress, in pink, with the skirts arranged somehow to resemble
a
rose. The pink, he thought, was wrong. It brought out the redness in the woman’s face, which was to say the redness of the flesh where her mouth should have been. Also where her nose should have been, but was not.

He thought he knew the eyes. Of course, they were the eyes of every woman who sees death come in the door. Or perhaps it is life they see. The desperate eyes of the dying, that long for something – and it might be you, Doctor Stewart.

‘Francine,’ he said.

The woman’s tears were a torment to the open meat of her face and he told her to stop crying, please, if she could. He tilted her by the chin towards the light and got her to open the remains of her mouth so he could assess the state of her throat. It was a classic presentation, with ulcerations of the nasal and buccal cavity, disfiguration of the vocal chords. He put his fingers to his lips, in case she should try to speak.

‘You had a lesion on your skin, some years ago,’ he said, and she nodded. And so he proceeded to tell her what she already knew.

Eliza was not outside when he left the room. There was an Indian in the corridor – almost definitely Miltón – who took his script and, rather brazenly, read it aloud. To counter which unlikely erudition, Stewart said,

‘Lutzomyia, you know,’ and Miltón said,

‘Sandfly. They like white meat.’

Stewart wished he would stop being a vulgar, clever man, and start being an Indian again, and this irritation kept him busy all the way back to the bottle of raw cane alcohol at home. He had Scotch, but this was not a Scotch occasion. Scotch would make him weep.

And the next day, from Eliza, a gift – a basket of cherries, red as an old wound, their delicate stalks and
their
thick, dark skins no more miraculous than the ice in which they came.

When Stewart next called to La Recoleta, he found Eliza playing diabolo in the courtyard with the only son of Juana Pesoa, the abandoned mistress of Francisco López. The doctor looked at the dazed, ardent eyes of the boy (who was far too old for such games), and faltered.