The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch by Anne Enright Page A

particular, private one of his own to inflict. He was to be wed. One week after young López became the only López, Stewart was made Surgeon General of the army, and the arrangements were made for the transfer, from her father’s house to his house, of the lovely Venancia Báez.
    Perhaps the engagement had been too long. Stewart did not relish the idea of deflowering his pretty wife, much as he desired to so do. It occurred to him that she annoyed him a little. He thought already that the happiest time in his life was after he saw her for the first time, when he was caught between the child and the woman, neither of whom was in his arms. And indeed he never wavered from this version of the story of his life. The happiest he had ever been was when he was drunk with love, and her name was everything. Venancia Báez. Venancia Báez.
    On the morning when she would become Venancia Stewart (a name she could not even pronounce), the doctor took a medicinal shot of fine Speyside Scotch, specially imported for the marriage breakfast. By the time he married her, he was so drunk he looked sober again; and by early afternoon he was roaring.
    Venancia did not cry. She smiled. She clapped her hands in childish delight when he fell over his own chair. And so, with all the considerable grace she could muster, she went, one more time, to her doom.
    Of all people to accost, Stewart accosted Whytehead. He got him in a corner. He told him he was a machine, an automaton, a thing of levers and pulleys, and where, he asked, was the lever for his heart? Was it here? Or here? And he poked his fellow countryman in the chest and (nearly) in the crotch. He said, What of women, Whytehead? He said he had no appetite for them either, Whytehead was right, the whole business was enough to make you spew. Whytehead had the right idea, work hard and sleep on your front. Send the money home. The money, the money. Stewart had an aunt. Whytehead had three sisters and a mother still living, did he not? Thank God. Thank God they were all alive these women, so a man had something to do with his
money
.
    Whytehead sat and did not move. He listened. He seemed to welcome Stewart’s words; he almost bathed in them. And the wedding guests, who had seen worse things in their time, slipped some whiskey into Venancia’s glass of punch and let the two ‘
Inglese
’ be.
    ‘We have not been friends,’ said Stewart, and he took Whytehead’s dry hand in his own. ‘We have not been friends as we should.’
    They sat for a while in silence. ‘There will be a war,’ said Whytehead.
    Stewart slumped. His eyeballs rolled bloodily up to view his new wife mingling bravely with the guests on the other side of the room.
    ‘I like them when they’re sick,’ he said.
    ‘Doctor Stewart,’ Whytehead murmured, to indicate that he need not say what was on his mind; he need not go on. But they both wanted him to continue. They looked away from each other, Stewart with a lurch of the head, Whytehead with a calm so intense it might have been a swoon.
    He liked a woman with a good disease, Stewart said. Because they broke a man’s heart. And not only that – he liked his women as he liked his men, raw, pushed to their limit. In the body, that was where the truth of it was. Whytehead did not demur. He was waiting now, his face horribly blank.
    ‘That girl was sick enough. The maid. Did you know?’ Stewart finally said, and then he told Whytehead that she had died quietly in the end. But before the end was atrocious, he said, and before that again she had clung to him. For which Whytehead should be grateful, to have another man do his dirty work for him.
    And his little surge of rage ebbed into love for the human being on the other side of the table. Tears came to his eyes and he stared fixedly for a while at a posy of flowers abandoned on the cloth.
    ‘Are you asking me to thank you?’ said Whytehead. At which he stood, collected his hat and gloves, wished Stewart the best of