Anne Enright - The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

A flower lands on the floor by my feet. Another. It is raining flowers. The horses are solid and easy as we push through the throng. Milton stands on the dasher as though on the prow of the Tacuari . The sun shines through his ragged pants, turning them to gauze, and again he is mysterious to me; his thin bones and his soft, old face. He waves, and the crowd shouts. Which is the sound, too, of the blood in my ears, as the clock of my body begins to chime.

I had a laughing labour. At least for a while. They say it takes women funny, and every woman a different way, but the rush of my breaking waters made me laugh and the tightness of my belly was so like the pain of laughter that I felt I might as well join in. It took me over, too, very like laughter does. It had me hanging on to the end of the bed, insensible with that mirth that is close to pain. Oh Lordy. Oh Lordy. Don't say another thing. And then, Here it comes. Something funnier than the last. Something so funny I must die. It is possible I was a little insane.

I was in a strange room: it was white. It was already, I think, a day since we had arrived. There was a worried-looking matron leaning towards me, clucking and kind. On the windows were dull red curtains, a hundred years old, so rotten that when I grabbed on to one it opened under my hands. It struck me as odd, the way the cloth did not so much tear as give; hundreds of threads and cross-threads, each disengaged. And as the cloth tore, or sometime later, I felt the same thing in me, a rending or a loosening, I cannot say which.

Francine entered with the doctor's bag and I realised I was clinging, not just to old curtains, but to whatever remained of my mind, and what I had kept it for was just this moment – the one when the doctor walks in the door with his wicked pad of chloroform. And I know how frightened I have been, all this while, not of the pain, which is every woman's lot, but of dying, and, more than that, of the baby born dead; my Love standing there, looking at me, with some poor scrap of flesh in his hands.

The bag comes in but the doctor does not follow it. Francine goes back to the door, and there is an altercation. Milton is there, also Stewart, I am sure of it. Drunk, I think, the man is drunk. The world has gone mute. I think I am screaming. Francine scrabbles in the bag. Milton stands in front of me with his finger to his lips and he is so intent that I should be quiet that I stop and listen, suddenly, to the room. And yes, I say, I can hear them. They have a high clear sound, very clean. They gather in the shape of the room, Milton 's daemons. They are in the crook of a corner, or in the slant of a shadow falling from the shutter on to the floor. The three lines that make up a corner are the three notes of their song, or perhaps it is just one note – very beautiful. It is an A: I could play it on the piano. And although it is just one note, it feels like a whole symphony to me, as though it must be approached and left with many other notes. And still it comes out true – an A – simple and pure. I felt this in a flash, the shape of the room, the shape of the daemons there, the need for silence as, inside me, the baby set sail.

So much I remember: the baby riding high and large under the bone until I thought that I might split, not in pain but, as a fruit might, in pleasure at the ripeness of itself. The head came. He turned into the world like a screw twisting out of me, and his nose looked quite large. I thought this while the rest of him was still inside me, and the timing of it seemed so odd or unworthy that I laughed, and the laugh pushed his shoulders out and the rest slopped clear. And he drew breath.

A boy. I knew it. I will call him Juan Francisco, for his father. And I will sweeten it to Tancho', for me.

His own cry seemed to astonish him – or so I thought. But I am already too fond. And then, sometime later, my Love was there. He took the boy by the neck, twining his fingers around the tiny bones of his ankles, and raised him high over his head, offering him, it seemed, to the ceiling, or the window, or the street below. And, as he did so, he shouted. He roared. This all to Milton 's great irritation, who bustled over and scolded like a woman. Lopez handing over the baby then; almost slinging it at the matron who had attended me, whose name I now know to be Juana Pesoa.

And then later he is in the crook of my arm. They say you must love a child – but not too much! They say you must do this, or that. But a word like 'love' means nothing to us. It is not even a feeling I have for him, or he for me. It is a silence, or very like a silence. It is the inside shape of me – and it is the outside shape of him. It is nothing that you could stick a word between.

And now I fret at the way his father lifted my boy, as though daring fate: the ghosts or gods of this place. Though I know that we make our own lives. Who knows it better than I, having made my life at last – with this journey, this man. A woman's crowning achievement, Miss Miller used to call it. Well look at me now. I have a child that will never know hunger, and more than that, Miss Miller, I have had a child who will always be rich. And even as I look at his ugly, tiny face, I wonder at it: how careful – through all my mistakes – how very careful I have been.

The only peculiar thing about all of this being that when I look for the house, some weeks later, in order to find the woman and thank her (perhaps the one friend I will have in this place), I keep missing it. I ask for, and am directed to, the house of Juana Pesoa, but I drive my little phaeton around one corner and the next. This happens so often I have a boy lead the horse by the bridle to the door, but the house we stop at has just one storey, when the house I gave birth in had two. Or so I remember. When the curtain ripped in my hand I was standing at a window looking down into the street. There were people going about their business, down there, unawares. But this house has blank walls, a fancy wooden grille over the one window, which faces, across a lane-way, another wall.

When I knock at the door, it is indeed opened by the servant of Juana Pesoa. To still my agitation the mistress of the house shows me the room where Pancho was born. There is a window on to the courtyard and, hanging in the dusty light, the curtain still torn.

Ί thought I was high up,' I say. Ί thought I was on the first floor.' And she looks at me.

March 1870, Cerro Cord

It was necessary was to bury him before he began to rot. He was very fat, still. His eyes were neither shut nor open: there was a bland rind of white under the lids, which seemed, in their gentle curves, like two little smiles. Eliza walked the length of his body, from head to toe. Death made him smaller: she was brought short by reaching the end of him. She stopped, then turned and walked back up to his head. She toured the length of him in this way, once, twice more; and when a young Brazilian captain came over she pushed him away from her and did not break her stride.

She halted at the midsection, and looked at him. Lopez lay as he had been dragged out of the river; his toes pointing gracefully down and his arms by his side. The water had mixed with the blood of his wound, leaving tidemarks on his shirt; the last piece of clean linen in Paraguay. It made it look as if he had died, not of a bullet but of some small, domestic indignity. It looked as though he had died of a stain.

Eliza nudged a pale arm away from his side; then she drew her foot back and kicked him in the ribs. The last air rattled out of him with a flabby sound and, as though frightened by it, she kicked him again, quickly, in the neck. Then she walked back to his feet. On the next turnabout she kicked him in the head and his skull was so heavy and hard she seemed to hurt her foot. The head spun away, then lolled back, while she lifted her toe behind her and dabbed it in the air. His eyes rolled fully open on the return; you could see them stare, as though to protest the kick to the blades of grass that grew unseen, close to his dead eyeball.