LITMIR.BIZ

       THANK YOU, CHARLY

      I woke to fog. And what a fog: as though a fat linen cloth had been draped across the world, giving a ghostly density to the view from my apartment window. The sun-blasted square, the headless statue of some worthy gentleman (the plaque was stolen a while ago, so everyone’s forgotten who he is), the dogs sniffing the foot of the marble plinth, and their owners gathered in a circle, some with surgical masks, others covering their mouths with handkerchiefs. It was like one of those famous London fogs, but without the watery eeriness: a scratchy haze the color of unpolished granite. A mile-wide column of ash had entered the city from the west, blowing in from some meadow fires that had sprung up in the Delta. Emergency helicopters had been out for several days attempting to douse the flames. A few hours earlier, both of Buenos Aires’s airports had been closed, and all road traffic was being diverted away from the city.

      On the news it said there was nothing to worry about, that the carbon monoxide levels were low. That didn’t stop me worrying about carbon monoxide levels. Any kind of pressure, it seems, and I come unstuck . . . I was on a ship once and began feeling seasick, my head spinning like a cheap umbrella in a storm. I went over to the railing and, though I did hear the other passengers call out that the waters were shark-infested, jumped straight in. When I feel wrong physically, any danger, however great, simply becomes unreal in comparison with my personal state. And now, now I had to escape this fog. I tried to convince my husband to leave the city with me; we could head south, the smoke was sure to clear at some point, we’d get a view of the sky again. Before I became pregnant I could be very persuasive, I’d do anything (anything) to get my way, but lately all my husband’s replies had been starting with the word “no.”

      So I took the car and drove myself; my own private space to think. I put on my sunglasses to make it from the house to the car. I’d happily have donned a chador if I had owned one. I turned on the AC; bad idea: a blast of air like sandpaper hit me full in the face. After a brief coughing fit, I turned it off and headed south along Avenida Corrientes. I didn’t know where I was going at first, but whenever I’m in survival mode like this I find myself drawn irresistibly to museums and galleries, like people running for air raid shelters in wartime. I remembered one on the other side of the city that I hadn’t visited in a long time, which was strange given that the collection included work by one of my favorite painters. I’d been having to rest during the pregnancy, and was feeling rusty on my history of art, though I’m not sure that entirely explains why I talked to myself the entire way. I tried not to move my lips at traffic lights, so as not to alarm the other motorists. I told myself the story, or the bits I could remember, still coughing every now and then although I kept the windows up and the AC off. I was like a paleontologist climbing out of an excavation, bringing forth the final trio of bones she’s been missing to piece together the creature.

      Cándido López thought that in order to touch the heart of reality, it had first to be deformed. He studied under Ignacio Manzoni, who, convinced he saw signs of the true artist in López, suggested he go on a tour of Europe. Not having the money to do so, he set off around Buenos Aires Province instead, offering his services as a portrait painter, or he could do daguerreotypes if people preferred. He stopped in a place called Carmen de Areco, where nothing worth painting caught his eye except for a young American woman he met during carnival. She wore her hair in plaits, golden as wheat, and she also happened to be spoken for. López went on his way. An accounts book has survived from the time, and you can read all of his incomings and outgoings, town by town. Mercedes; Bragado; San Nicolás de los Arroyos. The last is where his records end, on April 12, 1865: we know that at some point that day Cándido López bought matches.

      On the same day, President Mitre of Argentina refused permission to Solano López, the president of Paraguay, to sail a fleet past the river port of Corrientes and go to the aid of the Paraguayan Blanco Party. Solano López reacted angrily, capturing two Argentinian ships. In Buenos Aires the locals gathered outside the presidential palace to protest, chanting: “Death to the tyrant!” Argentina entered an alliance with Brazil and Uruguay, taking Paraguay as their common enemy, and the War of the Triple Alliance began. They put forward Solano López’s dictatorial behavior as justification, but in war there are always two sides to the story—at least two sides. Control of the Paraguay River was the real prize. For the neighboring towns along this immense watercourse it was like being pitched into civil war, rather than a war between nations. Cándido López, however, was pro-Mitre, and a porteño to boot, and when news of the hostilities reached him he went straight to the Guardia Nacional barracks in San Nicolás de los Arroyos to enlist. Some say he was compelled by a desire to put the American woman out of his mind, others that he had plans to set up as a war reporter. He took along a leather satchel full of notebooks and pencils. Manzoni’s response was unequivocal: “With this you forsake any future as a painter.”

      CLEAN ME was written on the hoods of parked cars, and as the ash continued to drift lazily down, the world became less and less clearly defined. A painting in grisaille. The man in the car alongside mine was wearing a surgical mask and I, having been so terrified, suddenly felt a sensation of imperviousness, of utter immunity to the ash: do your worst, I thought. For a moment I forgot what I was doing and where I was going: so it seems to be anytime I experience happiness, it always has to be slightly to one side of reality. Some very faint jabs inside my belly brought me back to earth. I was much bigger than I had been just four weeks before. I still didn’t know the baby’s sex but, whatever it was going to be, it was that by definition—going to be. There, floating in its own private jacuzzi, it was in the best of all possible worlds. Future-bound, nothing more. I remembered the cloying song my mother used to sing to us at bedtime: “Qué será, será.” I always found this both bewildering and depressing, mistaking it for a question, one that I was expected to answer, rather than a line about accepting your lot. How am I supposed to know what will be? I always wanted to shout. How I hated that song. I swear I ruined a childhood trying to come up with the right answer.

      The guardias of San Nicolás ford the waist-high Batel River, wading on through the estuaries of eastern Argentina, watching for quicksand as they go. Dead bodies begin appearing four days in. Cándido López spends his free time sitting sketching the troops. “So much horror, it is difficult to look upon,” he writes in his notebook after they camp in the vicinity of some emaciated children’s corpses, so little flesh on their bones that the pyres refuse to light. All talk in the evenings ceases, and rather than falling asleep the men collapse into it: it would be quite possible for them to cross from sleep into death and not know it. One day Lieutenant Cándido López is called to General Mitre’s tent. Mitre is deep in a translation of The Divine Comedy, but he has left his Italian–Spanish dictionary behind at their previous camp, and is looking for distractions while he waits for it to be brought. Looking over Cándido López’s sketches, he says: “Look after these. History will have need of them one day.” Then, putting the pictures to one side, he says: “Enough talk of you and me, let us discuss Dante.” The dictionary never comes, and a number of hours later Mitre orders the advance on Curupaytí. Frustrated in his attempts to translate The Inferno, he chooses instead to perpetrate one of his own.

      Later in the day, the Brazilian admiral, sensing rain, will advise against the attack. The Paraguayans have dug in: the trench is just over a mile long and lined with tree trunks, branches bristling forward like metal tines. The horn sounds and the Allies begin their advance, Cándido López running full tilt, eyes dead ahead, convinced that some invisible mantle is protecting him, until a grenade blows off his right hand—the one holding his saber aloft. He picks the weapon out of the tufty grass with his left and goes on, blood gushing from him; soon he begins to shake all over and, feeling nauseated, collapses in a crater.

      Lying in the mud, he watches as a ladybug saunters along a blade of grass near to his face. A soldier, face bathed in blood, drops to the ground a few feet away. On the verge of losing consciousness,

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