One of Franco’s earliest memories—he must have been five or six years old—was of being at his father’s quinta and trying to pat a dog, a mixed-breed, brown-and-white working dog, and the dog, without giving him any warning, biting him. Years later, when Franco was riding back to town one day, he saw the same kind of brown-and-white dog trotting along the side of the road, and he caught up with the dog and whipped it. Brandishing his whip, Franco continued to chase the dog on horseback, and each time he overtook it, he whipped the dog some more, until, bleeding and whimpering, the dog fell down by the side of the road. Then Franco dismounted and walked up to the dog—the dog was a bitch—and very deliberately, Franco whipped her again. Franco knew perfectly well that this dog was not the same dog that had bitten him, but he did not care. For him, justice was served.
“The mingled feeling of enmity and contempt felt by the people toward Paraguay and especially the Lopez dynasty,” Charles Washburn, the conservative American minister, who disapproved of Franco from the start, wrote to U.S. Secretary of State William Seward, “has been greatly intensified lately by the rumors that the form of government here was to be changed to that of Empire. Nevertheless the indications here are that that change will be made. The President is building a new palace of grand dimensions which it is supposed is to be the imperial residence, and Buenos Ayres papers report the purchase of a crown in Paris, giving particulars of its cost and design. But as it is said that it is the same crown made for His Ethiopian Majesty, Faustin the First, it may be that the report is only got up to burlesque the whole affair….”
British Minister Edward Thornton’s report to Lord Russell, in a “Confidential Dispatch,” was more critical: “The great majority of the people are ignorant enough to believe that they are blessed with a president who is worthy of all adoration. The rule of the Jesuits, of the Dictator Francia, and of the Lopezes, father and son, have imbued them with the deepest veneration for authorities. There may be three or four thousand who know better and to whom life is a burthen under such a government…. His Excellency’s system seems to be to depress and humiliate; if a man shows a little more talent, liberality or independence of character, some paltry excuse is immediately found for throwing him into prison….”
Aiii! Aiii de mi! The headaches were bad and Maria Oliva was afraid she would go blind or pass out or, worse, drop Leopoldo while she was feeding him. All her joints ached. She was afraid to tell Rosaria for fear Rosaria would tell Ella, and Ella would dismiss her, then where would she go? Back to Villa Franca? No, never. She had wanted to ask the American doctor, Dr. Kennedy, but it had been several months since she had last seen him. Another foreign doctor had come to the house the time Enrique fell out of a tree and cut his head. Maria Oliva would never forget the amount of blood and how it took both her and one of the gardeners to hold the screaming boy down while the doctor stitched up the cut. An older man, the doctor had a kind face; he spoke good Spanish and was married to a Paraguayan lady. When he noticed how pale Maria Oliva looked, he told her to sit down. If ever she saw him again, Maria Oliva was determined to gather up her courage and ask him about her headaches. In the meantime, she would have to bear them.
11 MARCH 1864
The boys are growing so fast! All of them, thank God, sturdy and strong (Federico appears delicate but is not; he is the quickest and most agile of all the boys). This afternoon we went riding and we made quite a handsome little group if I do say so myself! Federico and Enrique rode their ponies and Pancho, who claims to have outgrown ponies, insisted on riding a horse. He is so much like his father! We went all the way out to Campo Grande and rode past fields of manioc and corn, bordered on each side by lemon trees—the fragrance of the lemons at this time of year is indescribably delicious. Again, I was enchanted by the simple beauty of this country. We stopped briefly for refreshments at the ranch of Don Mauricio, a very charming old man. (In parting, he gave Pancho and me cigars—and Pancho insisted on smoking his!) On the way home, Enrique’s pony shied suddenly—a rabbit ran in front of him—and poor Enrique was thrown. Luckily, the child was not hurt except for, I daresay, his pride (although of all the children, Enrique seems to be the one most accident prone) and we rode on without further incident. Only—and this was very strange—just before we reached home, I saw a figure limping along the road and when we approached I recognized Doña Iñes. I could hardly believe my eyes! We stopped and I asked her where she was going and she said she was on her way to the market to buy pomegranates. I fear she may be going mad: not only is it not the season for pomegranates but there is no market within walking distance of Obispo Cue. Dismounting, I told her to get on Mathilde and I myself would lead her home. At first Doña Iñes refused—she said she had never ridden before and she was frightened of horses—but the children and I somehow managed to persuade her, and between the four of us we got her up on Mathilde’s back (I must say Mathilde behaved very well, she only tossed her head a bit to show her impatience). Poor Doña Iñes, she clutched both the reins and Mathilde’s mane and giggled nervously all the way home but, in the end, she seemed to enjoy her ride on Mathilde. However, I must think what to do with her—I cannot send her back to Spain or France on her own.
The farmers of Cerro León were surprised to suddenly see a steady stream of war supplies and armaments, troop instructors and officials arrive and take up residence in their beautiful, peaceful valley. Sober and thrifty, they had not changed their ways much in the last two hundred years: tilling their soil, growing corn and manioc, tending their livestock, picking the plentiful oranges and drinking several gourds of yerba maté a day for their refreshment. But by the end of June, Franco had created a vast military training camp that numbered thirty thousand soldiers, and built both a railroad that linked the fifty or so miles from Cerro León to the capital and a telegraph line—the first telegraph line in South America, installed by Baron von Fischer-Truenfeld. Even so, the now familiar sight of their president, who spent days reviewing his troops and conferring with his officers Vincente Barrios, Antonio Estigarribia and Wenceslao Robles, and riding around on his big mule, did not reassure the farmers of Cerro León completely.
Franco’s big-gaited mule stood over sixteen hands and was much taller than the native Paraguayan horse. Headstrong and hard of mouth, the mule was also difficult to handle and not friendly. At the sight of another horse, the mule rolled his eyes and laid his ears flat back on his large head and tried to kick; before the stable boy realized what he was up against, the mule had kicked and bitten him both. But Franco found the mule a challenge and he liked to sit taller in the saddle than anyone else.
“Oh, what an ugly animal,” Ella remarked the first time she saw the mule. “What do you call him?”
Perversely, Franco had named the mule Linda.
Taita guazú was how, in Cerro León, all the farmers, including Julio Ignacio, called Franco. In turn, he called Julio Ignacio mi hijo—my son—as he listened to him tell about the lack of water that year for his manioc crop, how the corn had grown only to waist height and how his youngest son, who was eleven, coughed so hard he coughed up blood. When Julio Ignacio was finished listing his troubles, Franco told him how all his problems would be attended to and solved once Franco had dealt with their next-door neighbor, the Argentine Republic, whose revolutionary parties were in a constant condition of civil war and who, with their other neighbors, those macacos—the Brazilian monkeys—were plotting to take over all of Río de la Plata, and how it was Paraguay’s duty to stop them. Afterward, Julio Ignacio’s wife came out of the house and Franco complimented her on her embroidered dress and on the ornaments in her hair. He also thanked her as, smiling shyly, she presented him with a loaf of freshly baked chipa and a bouquet of flowers. Before he left, Franco did not forget to lean down from the big mule and pat the heads of Julio Ignacio’s children—including that of the eleven-year-old boy who coughed up blood—then, flicking his whip and kicking the mule with his heavy silver spurs, Franco rode off at a quick and smooth paso fino. When he was out of sight of Julio Ignacio and his family, Franco threw away the bouquet of flowers and took a large bite out of the freshly baked chipa—the rest he would give to the mule, Linda.
Franco trusted Dr. William Stewart. A Scot, Dr. Stewart was senior medical officer in the Paraguayan Army and had been Franco’s father’s personal physician; now Dr. Stewart was his. Dr. Stewart was married to Venancia Baez, a Paraguayan lady, who was lively, slim and rich. Venancia Baez liked to travel and she had many friends in Buenos Ayres.
Several times, Venancia tried to entice Ella. “Come with us. Next week is carneval.” Or she tried to tempt Ella with talk of the monthly ball at the Club del Progresso. “This month’s ball will be the most elegant, the best attended.”
Several times, too, Franco asked Dr. Stewart and his wife, on their frequent visits to Buenos Ayres, to oversee the proceeds from the sale of large quantities of yerba that were exported to Argentina and, on Franco’s behalf, to deposit the money (a sum total of 212,000 gold pesos) in the Royal Bank of Scotland, where Dr. Stewart’s brother was a director. Dr. Stewart and his wife were more than happy to oblige and to make matters official, Dr. Stewart signed a letter to confirm the transactions.
“You should have been there with us,” Venancia Baez reported back to Ella as, laughing, she did a graceful twirl in place to demonstrate. “We stayed up half the night dancing.”
Pancho, the eldest, was a strong sturdy boy; he smoked cigars and knew how to read and write. He teased his younger brothers, especially Federico, who retaliated by calling him un matón, a bully. But Pancho was oblivious of insults, he was oblivious of most things and persons—already he showed a lack of emotional attachment, except to his father. He manifested this attachment by trying to imitate his father exactly: the way Franco walked, a rolling sort of gait; the way Franco talked, gesticulating with both hands; the way Franco puffed on his cigar, tilting his head back to exhale a thick cloud of smoke.
Pancho’s favorite game was one he had invented. In the game he played Paraguay and he always won. His brother, Enrique, just six, was Brazil, Federico was either Argentina or Banda Oriental and three-year-old Carlos Honorio was the country Federico, at the time, was not; Leopoldo, asleep in his carriage and too small to play, was assigned the distant role of Spain or France or England.
While Pancho shut his eyes and counted out loud to ten, the three boys, without a word or a look at one another, their hearts pounding, raced off as fast as they were able. Enrique went to the stables, where there were a lot of places to hide, inside stalls or up in the hayloft; the quickest, Federico sped in the opposite direction, toward open country and fields where, even if Pancho spotted him, Federico could dodge and outmaneuver him and where Pancho could not catch him; genuinely panicked, little Carlos Honorio headed in a frantic zigzag toward the garden and the orchard.
Diez!
Once Pancho had captured Argentina or Banda Oriental—it was always poor Carlos Honorio, who could not run as fast as Federico or hide as well as Enrique, or if Carlos Honorio did hide, a part of him, an arm or a leg, always stuck out—Pancho would invent a new torture. He tied Carlos Honorio to a tree and pelted oranges at him; he stripped off his clothes, blindfolded him and spun him around so many times that, dizzy, Carlos Honorio fell down; one time, Pancho buried Carlos Honorio up to his neck in the flower-cutting garden and left him out there among the rows of gladiolas, zinnias and asters, his head broiling in the hot midday sun.
Dios!
Doña Iñes was the one who found him. Dropping her scissors and the red gladiola she had picked, she got down on her knees and with her bare hands, she began to dig.
Ella spoke fluent Spanish and she had no time for lessons; if truth be told, most days she did not think about Doña Iñes. On the few occasions when she did run into her, the time on the road when she made Doña Iñes ride Mathilde, outside in the garden or walking in the upstairs corridor, Doña Iñes looked thinner, her limp was more pronounced.
“Doña Iñes, wouldn’t you like to return to Spain?” Ella stopped and remembered to ask her one day.
Mumbling to herself, Doña Iñes looked distracted; for a moment it seemed as if she had not understood Ella. “No, Señora,” she finally answered, “I cannot go back to Spain. Have you forgotten that my father—God rest his soul”—Doña Iñes crossed herself—“was a member of the Progresista party and that he died saving the life of Colonel Garrigo at the battle of Vicalváro?”
“Ah, yes. You are right,” Ella answered, “I must have forgotten.
“Then how about returning to France?” Ella started to ask, but Doña Iñes had gone. Ella could hear the wooden sole of her shoe thumping along on the corridor floor.
19 JULY 1864
I perfectly understand the animosity the Paraguayans feel toward the Brazilians—what do they call them? macacos—monkeys!—the result of the endless border disputes in Río Grande do Sul and Matto Grosso provinces. As for the others—the colonel has done his best to try to explain the situation to me—the alliances keep shifting and are confusing: there are the Blancos and the Colorados, the whites and the reds of the Banda Oriental and the Confederados and the Unitarios in Argentina. Franco has offered to mediate again between them and the fools have turned him down and now, too late, Dr. Octavio Lapido is here, whining and begging Franco to join forces with Berro and the Blancos in Montevideo. Let him beg, I say! I agree with Franco that Paraguay must be treated with the respect the country deserves and its important position in Río de la Plata must be acknowledged. But enough about dreary political matters—I must get ready for dinner. I will wear one of my new dresses—luckily they arrived along with Franco’s latest shipment from France—although the shoes I had also ordered with the dresses were nowhere to be found, which I find most distressing. When I questioned the ship’s purser more closely on the subject, the man swore up and down to me that he had never laid eyes on a box of shoes and that he had searched everywhere on the ship and had gone through all the boxes full of bayonets, guns, cartridges and whatnot, but the whole time he was speaking to me he was sweating so profusely that it was hard for me to believe he was telling the truth. Instead I imagine all the ladies in his family staggering around on my new high-heeled silk shoes—my hope is that they will break their silly necks! Another unpleasant bit of news is that Rosaria tells me that something is the matter with Maria Oliva, the young wet nurse. Hard to believe—never in my life have I seen a healthier-looking girl. My instinct tells me that Rosaria is jealous of Maria Oliva, who is young and very pretty. But what should I do—dismiss them both? Poor Franco, he has been so preoccupied lately and he has enough on his mind without listening to me complain about the loss of my silk shoes and the troublesome servants. Tonight I want him to enjoy dinner; the cook is making his specialty: carne con cuero—beef cooked in its own hide—Franco’s favorite dish!
“Give me that caudillo Urquiza any day. He and his band of gaucho assassins!” His mouth full of carne con cuero, Franco was discussing the struggle between the Confederados and Unitarios in the Argentine Republic and how Venancio Flores had taken refuge in Buenos Ayres from where he was conducting raids against Montevideo with the help of General Bartolemé Mitre.
“Speaking of Buenos Ayres, Franco, chéri, Señor Varela was just describing a new Italian opera which has been an enormous success. What was the name of it, Señor Varela?”
The talk at dinner, despite Ella’s efforts to turn the conversation toward lighter and more amusing topics, was always the same: politics.
“Any fool can see that Mitre owes his victory over Urquiza to Flores.” Franco ignored Ella and helped himself to more red wine. “Which of course is the reason Mitre is helping Flores with the raids against Montevideo.” Franco turned to his brother-in-law Saturnino Bedoya, whom he had just appointed minister of the treasury. “What do you think, Saturnino?”
Caught off guard, Saturnino hastily swallowed his food and stuttered, “I think our duty—”
“Yes, yes, I agree. Our duty lies with Berro and the Banda Oriental. Until they show their good faith, I will never sign an agreement with the Argentines. And you, Venancio, did you read what that faggot Andres Lamas said?”
Venancio Lopez had been appointed minister of war and marine by his brother. He had just spilled some of the carne con cuero gravy on his best silk shirt. Busy rubbing the stain with water, he did not right away answer Franco.
Franco glared at his brother. “I’ll tell you what Lamas said! He said, ‘One might as well ask China to mediate as Paraguay.’” Shaking his head, Franco helped himself to more meat. “And look who they ask instead—that incompetent, rude monkey, Dom Pedro of Brazil!”
Still wiping the stain, Venancio finally replied, “In my opinion the Banda Oriental must accept mediation or face a Brazilian attack.”
“La forza del destino,” Héctor Varela, who continued to be a frequent guest in Ella’s house, was finally able to say.
“Speaking of Brazil, Vincente, have you told Franco about my new parrot from Matto Grosso province?” Nudging her husband, Inocencia suddenly spoke up. “The Profesor says it is a very rare species, a species that is nearly extinct.”
“Be quiet, Inocencia.” Frowning, Vincente Barrios turned his back on his fat wife.
“A new parrot?” Ella smiled brightly at Inocencia. “Oh, that makes me think of my friend, Princess—”
But Franco interrupted her. “The newspapers in Buenos Ayres print nothing but lies. They are influenced by those Spanish traitors, the Decouds, the Saguiers—and what do you people mean by liberty? The kind you have in Buenos Ayres?” Franco had turned in his seat and was shouting at Héctor Varela. “The liberty to insult one another in the press, to kill one another in the district assemblies for the election of deputies, to keep the nation divided, for everyone to do what he pleases without respect for anyone else?”
“La forza del destino?” Again Ella tried to change the subject from politics. “Next season we must perform the opera in Asunción.”
Under the table, Rafaela was desperately searching with her bare feet for her shoes.
Four or five times a week, Franco rode his big mule, Linda, back and forth from Asunción to Cerro León. In the evening, when he came to visit Ella, he was tired. His body was sore, his muscles ached. Taking off his boots, lighting a cigar and setting his brandy glass on a table near him, Franco, for once, was perfectly content to stretch out on Ella’s chaise longue and listen to Ella read out loud to him:
“I scent the Hurons,” he said, speaking to the Mohicans; “yonder is open sky, through the treetops, and we are getting too nigh their encampment. Sagamore, you will take the hillside, to the right; Uncas will bend along the brook to the left, while I will try the trail. If anything should happen, the call will be three croaks of a crow. I saw one of the birds fanning himself in the air, just beyond the dead oak—another sign that we are approaching an—”
Looking over at Franco, Ella saw that his head was thrown back, his mouth was open and he was snoring softly. Shutting the book, Ella leaned down and picked the cigar up off the floor, she did not have the heart to wake him.
Modest and kind, Frederick Masterman, the apothecary general to the Paraguayan Army, was popular with the Paraguayan people. By nature solitary and by habit eccentric, he liked the freedom a foreign country afforded him. Every Sunday morning he rode off in a different direction until he found a comfortable spot under an orange or a mimosa tree, where he then sat content all day with his sketch pad and pencils. He gave most of his sketches away—if he drew a little girl he gave the sketch to her mother, if he drew someone’s house or someone’s cow he gave the sketch to the owner of the house or the cow—and he sent the rest back home to his own mother in England. An only child, he was very attached to his mother, who was a widow and lived alone. Along with the sketches, he wrote her regularly, long letters filled with descriptions of Paraguay. When he was not sketching or working in the hospital, Frederick Masterman liked to scour the countryside for medicinal herbs. He found plenty of astringents among the mimosas, the castor-oil plant grew wild, and there were many different types of carminatives and euphorbial purgatives, which he picked and transplanted in his own small garden along with a row of poppies. He grew the poppies for opium, which he needed for some of his patients—soldiers in pain who had suffered from accidents during maneuvers. Frederick Masterman also spent many solitary hours studying the native wildlife—from the fierce puma, Felis caguar, to the lowly sand flea, Pulex penetrans. (In fact the sketch he considered the most successful and lifelike and that he planned to keep for himself—his mother, he knew, preferred portraits and landscapes—was of a female sand flea. He had sketched it at the top of the page, then, right underneath, on the same sheet of paper, he had drawn the same sand flea distended to three times her size with eggs; in the corner, at the bottom of the page, as an afterthought, he also had drawn a sand flea egg).
In the mornings, when Frederick Masterman inspected the wards on his rounds in Asunción’s General Hospital, a gloomy, damp, barracklike building that had once been the dictator Francia’s palace, the sick soldiers lying in their beds—unless a man was too ill—greeted him warmly: Buenos días, muy señor mío! They held up their arms to him so that he could feel their pulse—the soldiers thought that it was a kind of magic charm. If they got well, out of gratitude, the soldiers brought Frederick Masterman gifts—a basket of oranges, a loaf of chipa, a jar of honey. One time, a soldier brought him a huge tame heron. The heron was nearly five feet tall with a foot-long bill. Frederick Masterman kept the heron outside the hospital so he might observe him. The heron was tied with a hide rope, a heavy brick fastened to the end of it. Frightened by a barking dog one afternoon, the heron flew up and the brick hit the wall and broke off from the hide rope—the falling brick nearly hit a soldier who was having a siesta near where it fell. Hearing the clatter of wings, the crash of the brick as well as the startled yell of the soldier, Frederick Masterman ran outside just in time to see the heron fly across the Paraguay River, the hide rope trailing after it.
“What a pity,” he sighed to himself as he watched the heron disappear in the Gran Chaco. He had hoped to sketch the big heron and now it was too late.
When Franco and Ella went out riding together in the afternoons, Franco no longer rode his mule, Linda. The one time he had, the mule had tried to mount Mathilde. Busy talking and pointing out the site for a new paved road, Franco was riding with a loose rein and it took him a minute to recover his seat and pull in the rearing, screaming mule; meanwhile, as soon as she felt the mule’s hooves on her hindquarters, Mathilde bolted. Ella fell off. Luckily, Ella did not hurt herself. Jumping to her feet right away, she brushed off her riding habit, patted her hair back into place, retrieved her hat. Then, she went after the mare who was standing fifty or so yards away, whinnying and shaking her head up and down in an agitated way.
“Whoa, whoa, there, my darling.” Ella talked as she walked. “It’s all right, my love, he won’t hurt you.” In her hand, she held out a bit of sugar she kept in her pocket. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you from that ugly old mule.” When she reached the mare, Ella picked up the reins that were dragging on the ground and gave her the sugar. Gently, she stroked Mathilde’s head and neck before she put her foot in the stirrup and quickly climbed up on the mare’s back again.
“Stay away from us,” Ella called out to Franco, who was watching her. “That ugly old mule of yours is crazy.” Then turning Mathilde around and making clucking sounds with her tongue, Ella urged Mathilde into a fast canter. “Faster, my darling,” Ella whispered, leaning far forward in the saddle and burying her face in Mathilde’s mane. “Faster.”
Behind her Franco kept his distance, but he was also laughing as he shouted after Ella, “In case you didn’t know, my dear, this ugly old mule is sterile.”