We lie there for some time, watching, each of us, the sun-splattered water as it dances on the ceiling, and I want to touch him with the bare tips of my fingers, or with my lips that are all alive, now, with the thought of touching him. I want to touch him where the skin is thinnest so I might drink it out of him, lick it like sweat – a prickling that comes to my mouth from the thought of what lies inside this man.
If I had killed the sailor, say, instead of mopping his brow, would I be so much the stronger? Would I walk upright? Instead of creeping about at midnight to get my fill of him? I might, instead, just live. Just breathe. Because my chest is tighter and tighter, now. It is closing up as my belly balloons, and I cannot fill myself any more, not with food nor even with air. These dainty, quick breaths I must take. This prison.
Lopez stands at the end of the bed and, taking my foot, he lifts it high to place it flat against his heart.
'So, ask.'
'Ask what?'
'Carmencita. "Was she pretty?" or "Do you love her still?'"
I turn my face away.
'What way did the world change?' I say. 'Was the sky more blue?'
'Yes.'
'More full of birds?'
'Definitely.'
'Was the grass sweeter?'
'And so on. And so forth.'
I do not know what we are talking about, now. But it is enormous good fun, of a sudden, and not about death at all.
My sister in Mallow would bring me to things that she was too squeamish to kill; childish things; a frog or a daddy-long-legs, and I would dispatch them, and it would make her cry. And then later, of course, some blurted telltale, and the horrified face of my Mama, the two of them clinging to each other as they watch me walk towards Hell-fire. She always was a silly thing, my sister. She ran off with a visiting piano player and decided to call it 'marriage'. Let her call it what she likes.
But I dream, this afternoon, of daddy-long-legs, and I am the beastie with my belly huge and my limbs all feeble and waving, and bits gone, and so on.
It is very hot.
I think of the time I went for a fitting to the dressmaker on the Rue de Rougemont. The dress was so delicate that two women stood on chairs to lift it over my head. They used two long sticks apiece to make a canopy of the skirt, and I walked in under it. Then they settled it down over me, and it was like the sky falling, in a rush of silk.
What is it about soft things that makes us want to weep? I stroked, once, the foot of a statue, its marble underside so cold and tender it made my eyes shut. But my hands were not soft enough to stroke this silk, which was such a shade of blue. My hands were too numb and rough: I must feel it with my cheek, with my lips, almost, and be rendered by it disbelieving. I tell you, it was the difference between soft and impossibly so, as if there were a degree of fineness beyond which the world melts.
And I knew, at that moment, what money was for. It was so you could have things that were impossible. And around me there appeared a whole country of things that have crossed this line into the wonderful. Things hard to believe, that are for so long hidden, until that time when you spot the first. After which, they all beckon and clamour and call you by name. The most beautiful cloth for blue; the most beautiful shape to be wrought from a gold stitch on a pink field; the most beautiful black marble to set against the white. All absolute. All at a price.
I stood under that dress and it was like lowering my life down over my head. And the soft blue skin of it was armour to me, and transcendence. I swear I did not so much walk in it as float. I looked in the mirror and knew there is something about beauty that can never be touched, that can never be bad, no matter what the price.
I think he knew when he walked into the room: when he gave his little bow and looked up from under it with glittering eyes, I think he knew he was looking at something quite other. Though the look he allowed me was the look a man might afford not a work of art so much as a good dinner before he eats it – the happy thing being that with Francisco Solano Lopez the eating is never done; there is always another course, and then another, which is why I have so many dresses, is it not? – so that the pleasure of removing them will never be repeated, but always new.
I am so nostalgic for him – even though he is here on the boat; even though he is but sixteen or twenty feet away – that I call Francine to sit beside me like some sweet and dutiful daughter, while I talk and sigh.
I ask if she had any intimation, when she opened the door to him that evening, of the journey we were about to embark upon – because it is her journey too. And she says that, No. How could she tell him from any of the others?
Which is pure impudence, of course.
Oh, but now she considers, yes, there was that look he had about him, of a man who will not be thwarted.
I say that when he walked into my room first, I cannot deny it, I wanted him to be taller and perhaps a little more pale; but she was right about the look he had -it made you feel all squirming, but pleasantly so. And she said,
'Yes.'
I say I enjoyed him at cards, because he played properly, and for high stakes. He looked at me over his hand and tried to seem indifferent, not because he wanted to bed me, but because he had two aces and a king. And I won. I would have carried on winning (it was, after all, my deck) but I stopped and said, 'If I win, you will not like me.' It was important, of course, not to drive him away. But also, you know, I wanted him to like me – this man who played a serious game. And I wanted to keep playing, too. And so we were locked into it; whatever amorous battle we are still fighting now.
And he put his cards down.
'Do you remember?' I say, but Francine does not like this break in form. She is a servant. She did not pretend to be in the room at the time, so how can she pretend to remember? To agree would be indiscreet of her, and she wants me to stop talking, now.
And I want to stop talking too, because I realise, as I ramble on, that my dear friend wants to have Francine and that I am bruising her a little, as you might bruise veal, the more tender to have it when the time comes to throw it on the pan.
He bows, and walks on for another round of the deck. Or trots. He is never still. There is always shouting and planning. There is always a huddle in a corner, a call across the room or the deck, a different gathering of men in another cabin for more or different conversation. He gets them one-to-one, and the talk is low and hard, it is all of railway sleepers and branch lines, of wagons and mines and supplies of saltpetre.
I look at him as he recedes. He disappears around the stern and the boat is still. Then he comes back. He is talking to Whytehead, as usual, about the melting temperature of -is it charcoal? – the bulk of it anyway, and wagons. I keep hearing the English word 'wagons'. They are, apparently, the key.