Free The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch by Anne Enright Page A

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