Free The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch by Anne Enright Page B

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.
    ‘Go on, now. Run along!’ said Eliza, and the young man, in a clumsy imitation of childhood, dashed into the house.
    ‘Poor child,’ she said, when he was gone. ‘His mother is dying, you know.’
    She said it so perfectly – perhaps she meant well. And to fill the doctor’s silence she took his arm and said,
    ‘You know, Doctor Stewart, I am the most fortunate woman in Paraguay. So it is a sort of motto with me – one must always
include
.’
    Stewart looked at her birds. There was, indeed, a vulture, chained to a stake in the corner, and it was very beautiful. He did not want to touch the woman at