There was no other madness.
Eliza encouraged the feeling of respite. She managed to give the place the atmosphere of a small spa. There was a little spring in the courtyard, and she drew wooden beakers of water from it, which she handed to the men herself; saying how restorative it was and extolling the pure heights from which it came. There was food, too, from the barns. And though they lived in uncertainty, there were things a man had not had, or heard, in some time, such as the sound of rain on his roof, for example, that lulled Stewart into an afternoon ecstasy of remembrance.
He was housed, for the duration, next to Eliza's quarters – a sympathetic billet: ever since they stopped, Stewart was fighting a sharp fever that followed its own clock; he could never tell what time he would be weak or clear-headed, and what time he would be stretched. It was a small, pungent room with no window and one rotting door. Where the dividing wall reached for the roof, there was a blessed, blunt triangle of open space; a dark gap through which the sounds of Eliza's 'drawing room' came to him as he lay on the floor. What a Babel! He would wake or drift to the sounds of her sons, speaking French to their Mama, or Spanish to each other, or Guarani to the men. Once, Stewart thought he heard German or something like it – Swedish perhaps -something guttural and rational and quite gorgeous that was telling him to lie down and keep his clothes on. And once, a whole sentence in English, 'The book is on the windowsilp, that was the most beautiful thing he had heard in a long time.
The girl lit a cleansing fire in his doorway and it flamed in the daylight, weakly orange, while the yard beyond buckled in the heat. Stewart saw things in the flawed air that he decided to tell no one about: not the girl, not Venancia, not his aunt, not his mother, not Eliza on the other side of the wall. He would tell no woman about these things that he saw. And he longed to rest his eyes on Eliza's boys, who stayed constant, all of them, and easy, through the haze.
Stewart could tell that they were fine young men, and very proud. Eliza had a certain way of sitting or being that could halt them at the mere sight of her – because of course they worshipped her, as boys do, and she adored them in return. Their father scattered them when he came into the room, but he too was indulgent and patient and kind. There was nothing degraded about this household. There was nothing that Stewart could sense of darkness, even when all was dark around him and his own death seemed as close to him as the family on the other side of the wall. Then closer. His own death scrabbled in the high triangular gap – he could smell the coming rot, he could see the long, black fingernails sneak in over the stone.
'Will you take a cup of coffee, my dear?'
It was hard to tell how sick or well he was when sentences like this fluttered down to him. Coffee? He must be dying. He looked at the girl as she dipped a rag into some water and wiped his chest. The rag, the water, the girclass="underline" these things were real. The coffee could not be real. He must be careful about coffee. He must stay alive.
Then he smelled it.
And Stewart decided that it was all real, in a way. Because the gods can make for themselves all kinds of felicity. The ease with which they run around, and chat and shout. The freedom they have. The lovely, ordinary nature of it all.
'Take your shoes off, my dear, and put your feet on this,' said Eliza, the cannibal. Eliza the evil one. Eliza who rushed, pregnant, into Humaitá to fling herself at II Mariscal's feet and say, 'Why does your brother Benigno hate me? Why does he insult and humiliate me like this? Why?'
But Stewart was delirious, and death crouched between the thatch and the wall. Death was a nest of insects; a thick, seething, black triangle, all shiny and heaving and trickling down the wall to crawl over him. And he itched and whined in the straw while from next door came the sound of a stool being set down.
'Is that better?'
No. He was delirious and Eliza was just like any other wife. She must nag a little, and provoke; she must never be quite satisfied. Because this was the way of wives, it was their destiny: women must always be thwarted, and so men must always fail.
They had conjugal relations, Stewart thought, no more than twice the week of his fever, and this in a farther room. He heard much more than this, of course, but the actual events he distinguished from the less real by the whimpering, puppy-like sound that Lopez made. At least Stewart thought it was Lopez. If it was not, then it was a peculiar mewling for Eliza to make. But you never knew.
And so the week stretched into one long, golden afternoon, where they were, for the most part, as happy as anyone might be, the Devil and his whore. And Stewart was happy with them, on the other side of the wall, as they arranged their lives by rules both tender and aesthetic; as Eliza brought out one shawl or another to drape on the chair, or changed the lamp for a candle, because he preferred it so.
And Stewart allowed them a life like any other couple: a shared past shot through, as it may have been, by moments of great frankness; embarrassed, sometimes, by emotions it seemed their joined bodies were too frail to bear – Lopez after the death of his father, say, or Eliza some ordinary Sunday afternoon, when it seemed to her she might drown in her own life and clung to him as a woman wrecked. And so the fever waned.
Pancho called him. He grabbed the door frame with both hands and leaned into the small room saying,
Ί think there is something wrong with Mama.'
Stewart peered into the boy's looming silhouette.
'One moment,' he said. And so, at last, he went next door.
He was right. It was lovely. She had covered the rough furniture with drapes of sage-green and grey. There was a pier-glass on the wall, a preternatural clock; there was the scent of lilac, and also a fusty magical smell that seemed to say 'Home'. In the middle of all this cluttered ease, Eliza sat with a distracted, strained attitude. She did not turn; but she answered the doctor's greeting, when he gave it, with,
'Yes, a very good evening.'
And still, she did not look at him. She spoke from the side of her face, so as not to disturb some forming thought that seemed to be gathering on the far wall. She squinted a little, as though trying to understand the shape of some stain; the lack of whitewash perhaps; an accident of light and shadow, or a horror of moss spreading in a corner by the door.
Stewart thought his delirium had spread, but there was no fever. He lifted her wrist and felt her pulse. Then he palpated, briefly, the flesh under her chin, by her ears, and along the base of her skull where it met her spine. Eliza's face, her grey brain, balanced there for a moment in his hands.
After which benediction, he sat down.
The creak of the rush seat seemed to catch her attention, at last. She looked at him; her head slightly cocked, like a bird's. It was a long look, and it was deeply estranged, both from him and from the world he was sitting in.
Stewart sought and found the phrase 'hysterical paralysis'. This is what happened to women in Edinburgh, he seemed to remember, from time to time.