“Nothing for it.” Weeks later, another amputation, this time above the elbow. The guardias of San Nicolás had set out with eight hundred volunteer soldiers, and eighty-three came back alive, including the One-Armed Man of Curupaytí. Cándido López is no good to the army anymore. The war goes on without him.
The fog grew thicker as I inched toward El Obelisco, the traffic semi-stationary. The man in the Fiat behind was blasting dementedly on his horn, as if he’d identified me as the root of all his life’s problems. Can’t you see it’s the same for all of us? The ash had been causing mechanical failures across the city, and the traffic lights up ahead blinked amber without ever turning green or red. Brake or accelerate, I had no idea, always the way; everything ambiguous, everything admitting at least two interpretations. A Renault Megane, its driver wearing a surgical mask, tried to cut in off Humberto Primo: Over my dead body, mister! I put my foot down while honking on the horn, glaring across at him. Turning to look forward again, I found the exhaust pipe of a bus coming straight for my windshield. Before I knew it I’d gone into the back of the bus. The ash cloud also had strange acoustic properties: there was a jolting impact, but the sound of it came through muffled and indistinct.
Sir Richard Francis Burton wrote in a letter from an 1867 journey along the Paraguay River: “The ship went well, but our lives were literally in the hands of the drunken sots that drove her, and who passed their time draining the bottle or dancing bear-like to the colic-causing strains of travelling Italian zampognari.” Not that he was afraid: he had explored Africa’s inner reaches in search of the Nile’s source, been on expeditions to uncover the fabled Icelandic sulfur mines, as well as translated The Thousand and One Nights and memorized the Koran; he was by now legendary in Britain for his capacity to blend in with the natives on his travels. But he was in Latin America as a British consul, and didn’t need to disguise himself. He slept in the best hotels and rubbed shoulders with nobility, although his considerable beard failed to hide the scar on his cheek from a run-in with a Somali spearman. Burton was a man constantly at war with himself: part pure Victorian xenophobe, part “lover of all things heathen,” as he put it. Just a fact of life for those of us who happen to exist at the interfaces between cultures.
A Paraguayan guide took him to see the battlefields. A sweet smell drifted across them, dust mixed with the scent of passion fruit in flower, and the Englishman sensed death in the air, the presence of “souls whose suffering is not ended.” The pair went to leave, but the horses refused to take another step. The men dug in their spurs, but could not move the obstinate animals. Straight ahead of them, less than ten feet away, a skinny dog had stopped in their path. Red coat, black legs; in the fading light its silhouette had all the solidity of a mirage. Burton gave a friendly whistle—he had a way with dogs—but its only response was to raise its hackles and snarl.
At the end of the war Cándido López returns to Buenos Aires and takes a job in a shoe shop. One day the blond American woman he encountered in Areco comes in, though in fact her hair is brown: the blond plaits were a wig, part of an outfit for carnival. Her name is Emilia Magallanes, and she has recently been widowed, and Cándido López wastes little time before proposing. They decide to leave the city, going to a place called Baradero, halfway between Buenos Aires and San Nicolás de los Arroyos, where they set up as tenant farmers. In free moments Cándido López begins training his left hand. At first he produces nothing but unsightly scribbles: the right hemisphere of his brain needs dusting off. Once he has managed this, he turns to earlier sketches to begin a series of oil paintings depicting the Paraguay War. These together will eventually form his masterpiece, but they require a lot of work. The hell of the battlefields has stayed with him; he needs only a little solitude for it all to come flooding back. The fire and smoke pose him the greatest difficulties, but what painter can resist the impact of reds, oranges, and white emerging from a black horizon? In his work, though, fire always means dead men, and lots of them.
The new landowner comes to visit one day. He arrives not on horseback but in an automobile. His travels have taken him to Europe, and he’s visited the Prado, the Louvre, the Uffizi, but nothing has prepared him for the pieces he finds on this farm. Cándido López always works in a format that is very wide but not correspondingly tall, and, stacked in a corner, the low, seemingly stretched images at first look dark—but when the painter brings them over to the window they shine. On the prompting of the landowner, he decides to exhibit. Dr. Quirno Costa makes arrangements at the local sports club, and twenty-nine works are put on show. “There, the history professors will have something to look at now,” says Cándido López. The one or two reviews to appear in the newspapers concur: not bad for a one-armed man, and certainly of documentary value. Nonetheless they do not sell. What sell are his still lifes; these he carries out on commission, signing them Zepol.
On the twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Curupaytí, Cándido López offers his paintings to the state—for a fee. “I would donate them,” he writes, “but I am a very poor man.” The government buys thirty-two paintings, which are handed over to the Museum of National History and end up in storage. One of the guards, nothing else to occupy him, spends the long hours staring at them as he sips his maté. His eye is particularly drawn to one called Battle of Yataytí Corá, though he thinks of it as “the black painting”: it shows a field in Paraguay at night, fires raging. He sometimes thinks he glimpses white figures emerging from the charred forest in the background. He mentions this to the museum director in a hallway one day.
“You’re telling me you’ve seen ghosts in the painting?” says the director.
“What I saw were white uniforms,” says the guard.
Before embarking on the return river journey to Buenos Aires, Burton hears of a phalanstery in the middle of the jungle. “People live there who don’t want war,” say the peasant farmers. They are referring to a group of around two hundred deserters, from both sides, who have set up a utopian commune. They have women with them—prostitutes also tired of the war—and they all live together, at odds with the rest of the world but in harmony with nature. They claim that the aguará guazú, the maned wolf, comes out to watch over them at night. The Bordello of Chaco Plain, people call it. Its precise location is never established, nor what really goes on there, because no one who finds it ever comes back.
The museum director wants no loose talk on his watch. The following day, he arranges for the guard to be transferred to a local post office branch. Rumors of the white uniforms spread among the staff, and though they take care not to mention it in front of management, anytime they have to go down to the basement they always do so in pairs. Eighty years pass and Cándido López is never mentioned in art-historical discussions, until the critic Jose León Pagano includes him in his 1971 compendium Argentinian Art. Only then does Cándido López emerge from the basement.
No one on the bus even noticed, but I ended up with a smashed headlight. Could have been worse, I thought, as Lezama Park loomed up ahead, along with the Museum of National History, which had the look of a palace floating on clouds.
I’d had the constant sensation, for a while, that I was forgetting something. Since the conception, my brain had been leakier than a perforated hosepipe. When I walked past the two stone lions at the entrance, the same color as the ash, they eyed me sternly. I felt they could watch a person be impaled and still show no emotion. I ran a finger along one of their backs, coating my fingertip with gray. A sinking feeling came to me.
“The Cándido López paintings are up, aren’t they?” I asked the ticket lady.
“No,” she said, counting out my change with supreme impassivity (it was a donation). “They’re being restored.”
So that was why I had stopped coming.
“All thirty-two?”
My words hung in the air. The lady handed me my ticket. My condition wasn’t going to make her budge. I remembered the sign from the conservators: they said it would take twelve months, but it had now been three years. Which meant there was nothing I wanted to see. I went in anyway.
I came out after a brief look around. I was feeling furious. Why did they have to take them all down at the same time? The thought of the restoration process was unnerving in the extreme,