The Adventuress

In more than five-hundred years of history, Brazil has only fought in three foreign wars. The costliest in terms of casualties was the so-called War of the Triple Alliance.

In that one, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay were all united against tiny Paraguay. The conflict, some say, was brought about by the actions of one woman. That woman was Eliza Lynch. Never heard of Eliza? Then let me enlighten you.

South America, like most other places, is rife with women who achieved fortune, fame, and even power, by their skill in the bedroom. The Marchioness of Santos comes to mind. And the two wives of Juan Peron, Evita and Isabelita. But, for my money, the most extraordinary one of them all was Eliza Alicia Lynch.

Eliza was Irish. In 1845, the Great Famine was in full bloom, and her family fled from Cork to Paris to escape it. She was ten years old, dirt-poor, uneducated, and illiterate. She spoke not one word of French. But she was hard-working and driven to succeed. Within five years, she’d bloomed into an attractive young woman with a full figure, a rich vocabulary and a passable accent in her now-fluent French. After a short and unsuccessful marriage, which brought her to Algeria, and then back to Paris, she wriggled her way into the circle of Mathilde Bonaparte, the niece of Napoleon I – and set herself up as a courtesan. Then, in 1854, at the age of nineteen, she met the man who was to determine her destiny.

General Francisco Solano Lopéz, twenty-eight, was the son of Carlos Antonio Lopéz, president of Paraguay. He had two interests: women and war. He’d come to Paris to indulge them both. But his training with the French army was soon to be over, and he was scheduled to return home. Eliza knew nothing of South America, spoke no Spanish, didn’t even know her new paramour that well – but, in an astounding act of courage for a woman of her time, she agreed to go with him. Their love affair was to last until Lopéz’s death, sixteen years later. They never married. She was to bear him six children.

In 1862, the president of Paraguay died, and his son succeeded him. The younger Lopéz was not a particularly ambitious man, but there’s no doubt that his girlfriend was – and she’d become the most powerful woman in the country.

Up to that time, Paraguay wasn’t much more than a buffer state between Brazil and Argentina.

 

But the country had grown rich from the production of maté tea, an immensely-popular beverage back then and one that, even today, you’ll often see the gauchos of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina sipping from gourds through silver straws.

What the Paraguay of Lopéz’s day lacked to transform it into a full-fledged regional power wasn’t more money in the bank, they had enough of that. It was access to the sea. Eliza, her ambition outweighing her good sense, convinced her lover to try to get that access.

They began by invading Uruguay, which they might have gotten away with if they’d left it at that. But they soon bit off more than they could chew by making incursions into Argentina and Brazil as well. It was a huge mistake. Eliza hadn’t done her homework. The people they’d attacked outnumbered them ten to one. And those people mounted a massive retaliatory response by sea and by land.

 

Lopéz and Eliza, to everyone’s surprise managed to hold out for five years against overwhelming odds. But by the time the inevitable defeat took place fully half of the total population of Paraguay was dead, and 26 percent of its territory had been lost, never to be recovered.The final battle was at a place called Cerro Corá, now Paraguay’s largest national park. Virtually the whole male population of the country, still loyal to Lopéz, rallied about him. But to no avail. They were hopelessly outnumbered. Lopéz himself was run-through by a Brazilian lancer while trying to escape by fording a river.After the Brazilians killed him, they moved on to capture the civilians who’d accompanied his army. Eliza was there. Her eldest son, Juan Francisco, 15 years old and recently promoted to Colonel, was there too. The Brazilian officers told him to surrender. "A Paraguayan Colonel never surrenders," he is recorded to have said. And he didn’t. And they killed him. Eliza was permitted to bury both father and son (she did it with her bare hands) before they took her away.She was banished from the nation and returned to Europe with the four children she had left (the youngest having died of dysentery while she was on campaign). There she lived on until 1886, dying at the relatively young age of 51. A little over a century later, her body was exhumed and brought back to Paraguay where it now lies in this tomb in the Cemetery of la Recoleta.

These days, she enjoys (if the dead can be said to enjoy anything) the status of “national heroine”, having been pronounced as such by another Paraguayan general who became a head of state (and government, and everything else) the dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, was an adventuress. Don’t you think she makes Evita look like an amateur? Isn’t Eliza the one who really deserved to have Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice create a musical about her?

Leighton - Monday

Behind the Smiles

One of the things that draws Western men (and a few women) to Thailand is the availability of relatively inexpensive sex. From Phuket and Pattaya in the south, to Chiang Mai in the north -- and, of course, with Bangkok in between -- there are literally thousands of bars, brothels, "private clubs," "no-hands" restaurants, massage parlors, and other variations on the meat

market where the children of the poor, both male and female, go to sell their beauty.

One of the primary continuing characters in my Bangkok books is Rose, now the wife of my western travel-writer protagonist, but previously one of the most beautiful women in the most garish and raucous of Bangkok's bar areas, Patpong. This stumpy little road -- the longest short street I've ever walked -- is quiet and mostly abandoned by day, but at night Patpong is all bars. There are perhaps thirty of them and some of them employ 50 or more women, so we're talking about a lot of women. And tucked into the darker streets behind Patpong there are ten or twelve go-go boy bars.

The basic format doesn't vary much from bar to bar. Bad music played too loudly, raised stages, dancing women in abbreviated outfits, drinking men, the time-tested architecture of soft pink light on soft brown skin. Smiles, the ravishing smiles for which Thailand is famous, being bestowed lavishly on the customers, an unimpressive gathering of males (mostly) who are mostly middle-aged, mostly overweight, mostly drunk or on the way to being drunk.

And always the smiles. Many of the customers fall for the smiles, take their invitation personally. The smiles make these customers feel for the moment that they're attractive, that there's something different about them, something that sets them apart from all the other losers in the room, although of course, there isn't. But they believe there has to be something real, something genuine, behind smiles like those.

And there are: poverty and powerlessness. To the left is Isaan, in the northeast, where my fictional Rose, and virtually all the bar girls and boys, come from. It's the poorest part of the country, the only place in Thailand where rain is so scarce that only one rice crop can be grown each year. The families who live here work and scrape all year, on land they can barely be said to own, to raise that single, sparse crop, in order to sell it to a rice cartel that manipulates prices mercilessly.

Some families in Isaan survive on less than US $400 per year.

These Isaan girls are playing checkers. They're using bottle-caps for checkers and they've drawn the board onto the bench. They own nothing. They're wearing probably one-third of their total wardrobes; each of them is likely to own three T-shirts, two or three pairs of shorts, and a pair of flip-flop sandals. They'll go to school until, perhaps, sixth grade, with time out when the crop must be planted or harvested, and then -- what?

They're an expense to their families. Unlike sons, whose duty it is to take care of their aging parents, daughters are honor-bound to take care of their husband's parents. What can these girls do, when they turn 18?

Well, they can support their families. This little girl, standing in front of her house in Isaan, may, when she's eighteen, go down to Bangkok to work in a bar, where she can make more money in a week than her father earns in a year. If she does take that heartbreaking route, she'll send most of that money home to keep her younger brothers and sisters in school beyond sixth grade, to give them a better chance in life, and to help her parents establish a more secure old age in a system where there's neither health insurance nor social security. Once in a while, she'll go home to her village in her Bangkok finery, looking like a movie star, and other little girls will look at her and consider taking the same leap.

When one does, she'll be entering one of the more benign forms of the world's oldest profession. The bar girls have no pimps, keep all the money they earn, are free to change bars or quit whenever they want, and -- perhaps most important -- they can turn down any customer. If he's too belligerent, too drunk, too anything, or if she just plain doesn't like or trust him, the bar girl can say no. Some women eke out a living on the commissions they're paid every time a customer buys them a Coke.

But to send money home, the girl (or boy) has to say "yes" sometimes. She or he has to smile. So what's behind a bar girl's practiced smile is an innocent girl like the one above who's turned her back on poverty for herself and her family, and who has become someone she barely recognizes as the unworldly village girl she used to be. Behind her smile is the unrelenting, unsparing, soul-scraping grind of poverty.

Tim - Sunday

What Lies Beneath

As I work from home, I rarely venture on to the London Underground these days, which is no bad thing because I'm mildly claustrophobic and being crammed on to a rush hour tube can cause the most sanguine passenger to panic. But earlier this week I ventured into town for a meeting. The tube lived up to its clapped-out image and my journey along the District Line was delayed by about 20 minutes thanks to a signal failure, a frequent occurrence. We were held at Sloane Square station, and not for the first time I thought it was a shame that the bar which used to be on the platform, the only one on the whole of the underground system, had long since closed. A pint might have made the delay more bearable. However, it wasn't too bad, and from where I was sat I could see one of those little curios that make living in London so special.

When the owners of the Metropolitan Railway built Sloane Square station in 1868 they had a problem: the River Westbourne, which flowed into the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park (and was originally crossed by Knight's Bridge, later Knightsbridge, home of Harrods). What did they do? Relocate the station? No, cocking a snook at nature, they built the station regardless and carried the river above the platform and encased it in a large iron pipe. It was that pipe I could see from my vantage point on the train.

Though travelling on the tube can be occasionally unpleasant, there is much I love about it. Rattling home, late at night, slightly drunk, trying not to doze off and miss your stop; the hot blast of musty air that precedes an oncoming train; people-watching on a long journey; the laconic announcements from long-suffering drivers; tourists staring bewildered at the labyrinthine maps; the underground is an integral part of London life. I'm fascinated by its history. Discovering that my local station, Ladbroke Grove, used to be called Notting Hill, but was later changed when a new station was opened and named Notting Hill Gate provided me with the first big twist of my debut novel.

I'd love to find a plot device where I can incorporate the various 'ghost' stations on the line; disused stations fallen into disrepair, of which you catch a tantalising glimpse in the murk of as your train hurtles past. Stations such as Aldwych, which is used as a film set because it's still in good condition; or Down Street, closed in 1932, used as an air-raid shelter by Winston Churchill and his war cabinet, much of which has been bricked up, though some rooms still survive and the fabulous old facade remains on view at street level in Mayfair.

However, my favourite piece of 'hidden' London Underground arcana is above ground and can be seen by anyone, though, understandably, people often walk past blissfully unaware. When the District, Circle and Hammersmith and City lines were built, architects employed a technique called 'cut and cover.' As they were near the surface, they cut a deep hole to house the track and then covered it with a tunnel. This meant having to knock down houses and cut through roads. In working class areas they went ahead without a care, turfing people out of their homes, often without paying compensation. This being Victorian London, in more affluent areas, the story was different. When the Metropolitan line was built in 1868 and ran through a prestigious terrace named Leinster Gardens, in Bayswater, the residents, in a fit of NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) complained that a great gaping hole where the tube would run might ruin the look of the street. They were also worried that the steam from the trains venting off might rise above street level and that could also prove unsightly.

After much wrangling a compromise was reached to preserve the street's demeanour (and the value of the residents' property): the railway owners would knock down two houses, numbers 23 and 24, to make way for the line but keep the facade, door, railings and windows. From the street, the houses look like this (note the blacked out windows):

Convincing huh? But from the back,  you see this:

A 1930's hoaxer once sold tickets at ten guineas each for an exclusive charity ball at the address, prompting hundreds of guests to turn up in full evening dress and knock on a fake door, and heaven only knows how many pizza delivery drivers, taxi cabs and people spreading the gospel of some God or other have been sent there for a giggle.

cheers


Dan - Friday

Hole in One

The excitement of being in the African bushveld – “the bush” as we call it – is that you never know what you’ll see next. It may be an attractive lizard that you can’t remember seeing before, or a particularly beautiful tree bursting from the bareness of winter into flower, or an unusual bird, or it may be one of the Big Five.

The term Big Five was coined by hunters who regarded these animals as the most difficult and dangerous to hunt – on foot, of course. They are the Elephant, Lion, Leopard, Rhino and Cape Buffalo. Certainly there are other large and potentially dangerous animals that didn’t make the cut, such as Cheetah and Hippopotamus for example. But the Big Five have worked their way into bushlore and now every visitor to the African wilderness areas wants to see them.

Somehow the Lion gets to be first among equals. There is a fascination about these creatures that goes beyond their beauty and grace. There is the subtext that this is the ultimate predator. Their group hunting is strategic involving stealth but also planning. And their prey can be as small as a baby buck or as large as an elephant. Or a human. During the day they are usually lying peacefully under a shady acacia tree, perhaps on their backs, snoozing. But at night all that changes. The darkness is in their favour.

Male Lion at Night. Picture: Aron Frankental.

Going on a game drive is about the fun of experiencing the African bush itself, but there is the pinnacle offered by seeing the Big Five in one drive. It’s like a hole in one at golf. You have to have everything just right and then you have to get really lucky. I’ve been going to the bush for sixty years (admittedly more as baggage than as an asset for the first few) but I’d never seen the Big Five on one game drive. Until now.

Relaxing at a dam in the evening having a sundowner and watching the yawning antics of a waking hippo, we hear that a leopard has been sighted apparently making its way towards one of the other dams. We finish our drinks and head off in that direction. We have no real expectation of seeing the big cat, but we don’t have an agenda for the next hour anyway. The most direct route is blocked by a herd of elephants. We do a three point turn in the bush only to collect a branch. I remove this and discover three elephants – two females and a youngster - loping down the road towards us with ears out and trunks raised. I don’t think they were really angry; perhaps the mother was entertaining her youngster by making us run! Nevertheless I’m on the vehicle in record time exhorting the driver to go, my voice two octaves above the usual timbre.

So we get to the dam. There are four other vehicles facing it, occupants waving and gesticulating to us. We drive in next to them, inadvertently blocking their view and disturbing the leopard on our right. When this is explained to us curtly, we apologise and look more sunburnt than usual. But all is well. Another herd of elephants comes down to drink, and shortly afterwards the leopard gets up and strolls between the pachyderms unconcerned by them or by our rude entry. Everyone gets a good view.

We try to follow the leopard but lose her, only to come upon three male lions – a triumvirate we’ve seen on another night. (One member is the subject of the picture above.) We lose them, staggered by the luck of three of the big four at one dam essentially at once. But almost immediately we come on a small family of rhino – a youngster and two adults. A small girl in the car ahead is almost incoherent with excitement. She’s pointing and waving. We nod; we see the rhino too. But she’s not watching them; the leopard is there! It is toying with the rhino, irritating them and frightening the youngster. It’s an extraordinary piece of behaviour.

At last the rhinos wander into the bush and we lose them and their attendant leopard. Our driver – young and optimistic – asks if anyone has spotted a buffalo, the missing ingredient for a Big Five game drive. No one has. I tell him not to be greedy. We head for home.

A few minutes later one of us spots big red eyes in the bush. The spotlight reveals a lone buffalo bull...

Enjoying the bush isn’t about a Big Five Drive, any more than golf is about hitting a hole in one. It’s the rarity that makes it special, that’s all. The next day we repeated our route of the previous evening and saw very little. But we had a wonderful drive.

Michael - Thursday

The dreaded gym

Much to my horror, my teenage daughter suggested the two of us get a gym membership so that we could exercise together on Friday nights. My mouth dried up and my heart skipped a beat as I would rather spend my Friday evenings doing almost anything other than pointless and boring physical workouts. Somehow managing to squeak a non-reply, hmmm, yes, great, maybe, let’s keep it in mind; I then gathered my wits and asked her what we would do at the gym, once there – on a Friday evening in the hopefully very, very distant future. She was not all too sure but mentioned running and I can only assume that this would involve a treadmill and not laps within the facility. Why my daughter would seek out more gym time is beyond me, at school she has two gym classes and one swim class per week in addition to playing handball and soccer which combined involve team practices every day of the week aside from Sunday. This I believe is more time than I spend smoking and drinking coffee weekly although I have never had reason to sum it up, till now.

Luckily she has not brought the subject back up and if my luck holds she has forgotten this completely, the mother daughter barbell bonding experience having been replaced with other things that occupy her mind at the moment, Robert Pattison for example. This semi-discussion did however make me look inward and wonder why this mere mention of physical fitness was so horrific to me. We have a good, solid and friendly relationship, spiced with the occasional teenage drama of the light variety, so the dread in no way involved my daughter. The closest thing to an explanation I could come up with was a memory I recall being the last time I stepped inside a gym, approximately fifteen years ago. At the time we were living in Montreal and the apartment building we lived in doubled as a hotel for those seeking a room for longer periods than the average tourist. The establishment had a small gym in the basement which I once reluctantly sought out with my husband after a lot of coaxing. Being pretty pleased with myself once down there, I managed to work up something that resembled a drop of perspiration on my forehead, although it evaporated before I managed to get my husband to witness the phenomenon. This feeling of accomplishment did not last very long however as my fragile physical ego imploded when we were joined by people staying in the hotel. These were gymnasts attending the Circque du Soleil circus school in Montreal and were as such capable of contortions my body could possibly be forced to achieve once dead, after rigor mortis has passed. Not wanting to display my feeble attempts at touching my toes in front of women standing on one leg while the other pointed straight up in the air, I left, towel wrapped around my neck, hoping to appear as having been there for hours on end – not minutes. The lesson learned? Why bother - if I need to point to the ceiling I will use my hand, both feet firmly planted on the ground as nature intended.

Another memory dusted off during this reflection was one where I sat with my grandfather watching the news. He was about 95 at the time and the news tidbit that interested him the most was one where the reporter was walking around inside the newest and most modern trawler just added to the Icelandic fishing fleet at the time. My grandfather was a fishing captain during his heyday and was of course interested in seeing what had changed since he left the scene. When the reporter stopped to admire the gym within the trawler my grandfather became silent and seemed to ponder if this was possibly a hoax. When he realised that it was no joke he shook his head and rolled his eyes – Who the hell is working these bungling idiots if they seek strenuous exercise at the end of a working day at sea? I would assume the only hard work fishermen and seamen were capable of when he was still sailing was to lift the covers off their beds, just high enough to slip under them and fall asleep. No lifting and hoisting of steel bars, stationary cycling or running required. Since on the topic of my grandfather, I must add that he died a little before he turned 101 years and on his 100th birthday he invited his older sister to the party. He never had a gym membership and spent his Friday nights much like his granddaughter – chilling. I am tempted to add another habit we had in common, but am afraid to come across as a Philip Morris spokesman so I will leave it be.

Putting all gaiety and futility aside, my heart goes out to all people of Haiti who have been hit by one of the most destructive forces of nature, one that is void of empathy and shows no mercy when crossing. It is atrocious to listen to the death toll estimates and even more so when you think about the figures that will shortly follow i.e. the numbers of those that have been hurt or maimed. Alltough it is of little solace to the grieving and hurt I assume the whole world is moved by this event and I for one will be doing what little I can as an individual to provide aid through the Red Cross collection currently being organised. May all good things come to pass in future for this small, impoverished and now grieving nation.

Yrsa - Wednesday

A passing

Sorry for the blurry photo but it's the only one I have including Laura Hruska, my editor at Soho. She passed away this weekend. Left to right: me, Katie Herman editor at Soho, Mick Herron crime writer, Laura Hruska, Garry Disher crime writer and Bronwen Hruska Soho publisher. This was taken in NY in May.

This Publishers Weekly short notice tells more about her professional life:

A memorial has been set for Soho Press editor-in-chief, Laura Hruska, who died Saturday after a long sickness. One of the founders of Soho, Hruska also served as publisher of the house until last month when her daughter, Bronwen, took over the position. The service will be held Friday, January 15, at 11:30 a.m. at the Campbell Funeral Home on 1076 Madison Avenue in Manhattan.

Hruska, who started Soho Press in 1986 with her husband Alan and friend (and former Dial Press editor-in-chief) Juris Jurjevics, was 74. Hruska helped launched the careers of numerous authors at Soho, including Edwidge Danticat and Garth Stein. With an undergraduate degree from Cornell and a J.D. from Yale, Hruska began her career as a lawyer and worked as a litigator for a number of years before she quit to raise her children and pursue a writing career. In 1976 Dutton published two novels she had written, A Change of Heart and Legal Relations, under the pen name Laura Chapman.

Sarah Weinman in her column noted Laura also helped launch the careers of Jacqueline Winspear, Dan Fesperman, Sara Gran, Martin Limon, Henry Chang, Stuart Neville, Leighton Gage, James Benn, Rebecca Pawel, me and many others.

Laura was my editor for nine books. I owe her so much. Her warmth, her kindness, her vision and brilliance. The laser like way she honed a sentence, helped me see what I was trying to say in that patient way she had of asking questions. Her knowledge of obscure French facts and names...a million things. I'm blessed she edited my next book and put it to copy edits before going to the hospital. Taking care of everything to the last. But that was Laura. I miss her.

Cara - Tuesday

Brazilians Speak Portuguese

But the rest of South America speaks Spanish. Ever wondered how that came about? Read on.

In the last decade of the fifteenth century, the two great maritime powers of the age, Spain and Portugal, were engaged in a struggle for the riches of the Orient. The key to unlocking those riches was a sea route to the East. Since the time of Prince Henry the Navigator, dead by then for over thirty years, the Portuguese had been working the hypothesis that the discovery of The Route lay to the South, around the tip of Africa. They weren’t even sure there was a tip of Africa, but that was their theory and they were clinging to it.

Then, in 1488, they hit the jackpot. Bartolmeu Dias  (left) rounded the Cape of Good Hope – the “good hope” being an expectation that they’d found their way at last.

But before another Portuguese navigator, Vasco de Gama, was able to convert the hope to a proven reality Columbus was back from his first voyage.

Old Chris started spreading the word that he’d found The Route by sailing West, not South.

The Portuguese didn’t believe it for a minute. They thought (and time would prove them right) that Columbus had grossly underestimated the circumference of the earth. They weren’t, however, about to share their conviction with their rival, Spain.

But now, all of a sudden, the Spanish were laying claims left and right. And those claims were being supported by the Spanish-born Pope, Alexander VI, who was issued bulls giving dominion over the newly-discovered territories to Spain.

Concerned, King John II of Portugal opened negotiations with the Spanish Court.

Those negotiations culminated in the Treaty of Tordesillas (a small town near Valladolid, in Spain) in which it was agreed that a line of demarcation would be drawn 370 leagues (a league was about 4.2 kilometers) west of the Cape Verde Islands. It's the westernmost meridian (the one on the left) on the two maps shown on this page.

Any newly-discovered lands to the east of that line would be recognized as Portuguese territory, anything to the west as Spanish.

The Spanish figured they’d negotiated a good deal, because they now had the right to “the Indies”. And Portuguese were pleased because they were quite convinced that the Spanish were barking up the wrong tree.

The treaty was signed and ratified in 1494

In 1498, de Gama (left) landed in India.

Two years later, the fleet of Pedro Àlvares Cabral (right)  embarked on a follow-up voyage, carrying colonists and supplies to the new Portuguese colonies on the subcontinent. On board was de Gama’s pilot, who’d discovered doldrums off the coast of Africa on his previous voyage. He advised Cabral to try to pick up wind by sailing west before turning south.

Cabral did – and bumped into Brazil.

Look at the map.

See the way Brazil sticks out from the rest of the continent? And how close it is to Africa?

One of the first things the Portuguese did after setting foot on shore was to carry out some astronomical observations.

They quickly determined that the spot they’d landed upon was to the east of the line of demarcation. That made it Portuguese territory

And that’s why today, more than five hundred years later, Brazilians speak Portuguese.

Leighton - Monday