Carlos was wriggling free of the spell and had forgotten about the Canadian girl.
‘I’ll take you to the Botanical Gardens,’ he said.
I was impressed; our little adventures were beginning to show signs of turning into a tour. Actually, Carlos was toying with a rather different idea; her name was Angela and she was a goddess of science.
I would have been quite happy if we had never reached the Botanical Gardens. I was enjoying spluttering around Asunción in Carlos’ self-propelled garbage bin. He kept me constantly drip-fed with intriguing gobbets of information that he’d gleaned, mostly from Paraguayan newspapers.
‘Did you know, John, that in your country McDonald’s are trying to burn people by serving the coffee very, very hot?’
Whenever he told me any local political gossip, he made a little beak with his finger and thumb and his hand chattered in time to his words. It was a sort of disclaimer; it’s only what he’d heard from a funny little bird called ‘the Gossips’.
I asked him about his family. It seems that Carlos was born to a family rich in vicissitudes. His father was a conscientious objector during the Chaco War but had earned extraordinary respect for his courage in carrying water to the front lines. Carlos’ brother, on the other hand, was a general in the Paraguayan Marines, an entity which is in itself amazing for a country that doesn’t have a drop of sea-water. The brother had died from unhealthy overindulgence, and so Carlos’ life was dedicated to healthy self-restraint; he was a trader of herbs and minerals.
‘That’s Freddie Stroessner’s house.’
Carlos’ car was scraping along a kerb on his blind side. Beyond the grinding and nashing of hub-caps was an area of wasteland, thickly forested with tall, crackling grass. I could just make out the outline of the White House, Washington. It looked dejectedly different from the original; there was no glass in the windows and it appeared entirely hollow. A group of boys were playing football on the terrace.
‘It was never finished.’
I noticed that this was the Gossips talking, telling tales from its perch on the steering wheel.
‘When Stroessner heard that Freddie had stolen all the money from the bank,’ the beaks paused and jabbed in the direction of another concrete blob, the National Bank, nestling in equally long and rank grass some distance away, ‘he put a stop to the building.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Stroessner left in ’89.’ Carlos whistled though his teeth. ‘It must have been in about the early eighties. It’s been abandoned for nearly twenty years.’
‘Why is it just left like this?’
The Gossips were on their perch again, twittering. ‘Freddie’s dead – drugs. No one knows who owns the land. It was all fake companies. Now no one will touch it.’
It was the last and most enduring monument to the Stronato – a wretched eyesore, built with plunder, abandoned in haste and recriminations, ensnared in a tangle of law and weeds.
When we got to the Botanical Gardens, we didn’t go straight to see Angela. Instead, we walked through the grounds and the little zoo. This had, until 1862, been the summer estate of Carlos Antonio López, and – however sweaty and ballooned-up on his own fluids he may have been – I had to admire him for the park he chose to rest in when the mercury lurched into the upper nineties. I’d been here before, in summer, but now – in spring – the grounds were feathered in pink lapacho blossoms and cool, sweet clumps of frangipani and jacaranda. It was all achingly attractive and I would have been happy to sprawl out on the grass all day, admiring a cocktail party of ostriches and parakeets. But Carlos tugged me away – on through the zoo, to cast an eye over a giant anteater, six jaguars and, of course, Angela.
In terms of their excitement value, Carlos would have put them in that, ascending order. I would have put them the other way round. The giant anteater was exorbitantly exciting. It had a tail that fanned out like a great cloud of ash and its tiny (but brilliant) brain was encased in a strangely conical velvet head, like a Womble from Wimbledon. But this was no Uncle Bulgaria; any dog that ventured to attack it would have found itself admitted into the arc of the beast’s paws, and then two sets of claws – each like tailor’s scissors – would scythe into the dog’s back, take a purchase on the attacker’s flesh and pull it apart. Dogs, it was said, simply opened up and spilled themselves like ripe fruits.
By comparison, the jaguars looked rather plump and tranquil – or was it tranquillised?
Angela was already clamped within the arc of Carlos’ paws by the time I got up to the curator’s building. She was looking neither plump nor tranquil but bore an expression which said that, though she was very fond of Carlos, she wished he was a little less demonstrative. A slender, vigilant hand was already slapping away the Gossips that were nibbling their way across her thigh.
‘You like her, John?’
Angela was very pretty and I had to admit as much, in a way which I hoped didn’t sound even fleetingly demonstrative. She offered up her lovely face to be kissed. She had cool, creamy skin, deep black tresses and deep black spectacle-frames that ought to have been unappealing but which made her seem inquisitive and paradoxically desirable. It was only when I found out what she did with her days that she plummeted in my league-table of tingles.
I’d felt slightly awkward, standing in front of Angela and Carlos, she rather formal and zoological and he uncomfortably natural, and so I slid imperceptibly into the next room. It was Angela’s laboratory.
I was horrified at what I found. Hundreds of dead, chemical eyes were staring at me from their bell jars and tanks, creatures swimming in poison, frozen at the moment that they’d yielded up their lives to science. There was a sickening reek of formaldehyde, and the walls prickled with butterflies and scurvy moths speared on to cemeteries of cork. Here were stuffed monsters too: monkeys leaking straw and stockings from their fatal wounds, the gangly aguara guasú – the maned wolf – now grotesquely deformed by taxidermy, and a capybara that had been so plumped up with enthusiastic stuffing that it looked like a clawed cushion. I wiped a little scurf from one of Angela’s pickling jars. The eyeball of a whale, the size of a croquet ball but veiled in lacy white tissues of meat. His brain in the next jar. Above them, armadillo foetuses, curled up like armoured roll-mops.
In the remaining jars were Angela’s prize specimens – the freaks in a collection of horrors: a calf foetus with two heads, each regarding the other with bleached, unbridled loathing; finally, a pickled puppy with a horn like a unicorn.
I returned to the others. It was now impossible to regard pale Angela without gagging on a tiny, phantom hiccough of formaldehyde. I unhooked Carlos from his specimen and towed him back out into the sunlight.
I’d surprised myself with the volatility of my perceptions. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been all that surprised; pickling freaks all day puts even a pretty girl deep into the territory of the weird. It can’t do anybody any good to direct their life’s energies solely to the preservation of pain, deformity and death. Anyway, my perceptions were going to be nothing compared to those of Asunción’s children; their entire appreciation of the animal kingdom was based on an anteater, six dopey jaguars, the runaway dogs, a unicorn and half a dozen other marinated curiosities.
33
‘SEE THAT?’ CARLOS had said, on the way back. ‘That’s our railway station.’
I knew it well. It took me back to the days of Eddy and Kevin, now nearly two decades ago. We had called in at the station every night for bowls of beef and manioc. In those days, it had been full of grumbling steam trains.
‘We’ve just finished paying for it. After a hundred and fifty years!’
The San Roque railway station was the quirky, mechanical sister to Government Palace. It was both functional and whimsical, a whole series of ideas that had set off as one thing and arrived as another. Partly hôtel de ville, partly gothic cathedral, it played on arches, frets, pinnacles and Paraguayan cloisters. There was even a latticed cant
ilever roof somewhere among all the garnish. The whole ensemble had then been lavished in creams and pavilion yellows and floated off on fancy Roman columns.
The railway station was Whytehead at his most exuberant. Everything that he felt unable to share among the salon sophisticates, he now expressed in architectural fantasy. This building made him indulgent and ethereal, qualities that were repulsive to him in the flesh. If San Roque seemed at all ecclesiastical, this was no coincidence. To Whytehead, the completion of the project had become a spiritual quest and it would whip him to the limits of his endurance. In his curly mind, he now saw in these benighted, infested tropics an industrial Jerusalem.
Whytehead zealously urged the works on. Blyth & Co. shipped out the railway parts and dispatched more engineers. A tiny locomotive arrived and was called Sapuchai – Guaraní for ‘The Scream’. Benson’s of Ludgate Hill sent station clocks and whistles and badges for the porters. Convicts were put to work, digging footings and embankments. A railway company was formed – the first in South America – for ‘The Paraguay Central Railway’. Within six years, sixteen engineers and footplatemen had constructed an extraordinary forty-five miles of line, snaking off into the Paraguayan jungle.
The first stretch of line was ready and inaugurated on 23 June 1861. Sapuchai was to haul carriages of spectators to Trinidad, just outside Asunción. She was a pretty little engine with a cigar-shaped funnel and cow-throwers front and back. Tickets were immediately sold out.
The day arrived, and Sapuchai was packed. On her first run, she reached the phenomenal speed of fifteen leagues per hour. No one had ever seen anything like it. The Paraguayans were ecstatic. In the excitement, the drivers overlooked the end of the line at Trinidad. Sapuchai left her rails and ploughed across the fields. Although she lost two wheels, she was hauled back on to the track and trundled back to Asunción. She managed another eight trips before sundown.
The day was a triumph for Whytehead. He was promoted to Chief State Engineer and his contractors were clapped and fêted. Paraguayans even became curious about their British visitors and began to copy their novel ways. They already had chimneys and now they wanted fireplaces. They started having dinner parties and inviting their friends to supper. They filled their homes with pictures (fox-hunting and erotic Rome) and statues and hung the curtains – English-style – across the windows instead of round the bed. It was the beginning of the age of English sauces and puddings. There was even a new dance – called the London Carapé. Paraguay was becoming eccentrically modern.
The station-master was delighted that I wanted to see his station. He was a pleasant man who said good morning to the prostitutes that worked the station steps and shook their hands politely. You’re free to wander, he said. And so, I suspected, was he.
The truth was that he had nothing to do. The trains no longer ran. San Roque was now all quiet, only pigeons ruffling the silence. It was as if the nineteenth century had simply ground to a halt. Beautiful old trains stood dumb, feathery and awkward – steam locomotives, First Class, dining-cars with gold letters down the side and carriage-handles cast in Leeds. I even found Sapuchai, looking dusty but as coltish as the day when – 140 years ago – she’d taken to the fields.
The Morse-code machines no longer chattered down the line and the station clock had stopped. The whistles and the porters’ badges from Ludgate Hill had been gathered up for curious visitors and sat in musty cases. I rubbed away the foxing on the glass; an ink-blotter, an engine plate from Newcastle and Molesworth’s Pocket Book of Engineering Formulae.
Out in the marshalling yard, the weeds grew waist-high and were menaced by sly, green-eyed dogs. The water tower had burst and was weeping on to the tracks. I saw that the station-master was watching me.
‘Go on,’ he shouted, and waved his arms in encouragement. ‘They won’t bite!’
I pushed into the long grass. The people from the viviendas had already started to dig up the sleepers to burn them in their shacks. A little way down was a carriage that had been smothered in white paint, even the windows. A small sign was nailed to the door: ‘Orthodontic Clinic’.
At the far end of the yard were three more locomotives. One I recognised as having somehow barged its way on to the front cover of The Old Patagonian Express. I didn’t think Theroux had ridden the Paraguayan trains. But this mighty iron beast might just have gone anywhere – even now it was loaded up with logs, only waiting for a match to its boilers.
The other two trains were occupied, one by cats and the other by electricians, fast asleep on their toolboxes.
Even after San Roque, Whytehead wasn’t finished. There was more to be done. He renewed his contracts with the Paraguayans even though his letters home ached with the pain of separation. He worked on through the nights, through bouts of amoebic dysentery and through the bitterness of his staff, who now regarded him as arrogant and detached.
Whytehead drove them all on with work and scorn. The strain began to tell. Some went on strike. It was the first ever strike on Paraguayan soil. Whytehead had all the strikers fired.
Others turned to drink, consoling themselves with cheap draughts of caña. It was dangerously contaminated with acetate of copper and made them mysteriously ill. Several killed themselves and a certain Gibson threatened to cut his wife up. Drink became the greatest killer among the Britons.
Whytehead was ill-equipped to deal with such human failings. In 1863, one of his Paraguayans cracked and lashed out at him with a dagger. The man was taken off and put before a firing squad, but Whytehead was deeply scarred. He began to inject himself with morphine.
Most poisonous of all was his relationship with his manager, another Scotsman called Alexander Grant. Malicious and ill-tempered, Grant had a throat tumour that would only be settled with rum. Like cancer itself, his loathing grew. With San Roque completed, Grant cast around for ways to tip the balance of Whytehead’s delicate state of mind.
Isolated by the other English and by Madame Lynch, Whytehead found friendship with the French Minister and his wife, the Cochelets. He professed great affection for their son. Any sort of affection for a Cochelet infuriated Madame Lynch, and she added Whytehead to her black book of undesirables.
Grant saw his chance. He and a feckless oaf called Newton went round to the quinta and bellowed under Whytehead’s window all night: he was foul and unnatural, he’d seduced the Cochelet boy, he was a hypocrite, a fancy-man, a goat and a sodomite.
It was too much for Whytehead. On 12 July 1864, he tidied up his books and his bottles, fed his animals and left money out for Amos Eaton. Then he injected himself with a solution of pure nicotine, tied his neck to a rafter and jumped.
His body was conveyed to Recoleta on horses supplied by President López. His job went to Alexander Grant and all his property went to the Paraguayan state.
His mother and sister heard nothing for six months and then received word that he’d been replaced in his job. It would be some time before they were to discover that he was long dead.
I made my way back up the track to Whytehead’s great lost tropical masterpiece. The station-master was sitting, drinking maté in his office. ‘When did the trains last run?’
I’d missed it by a month.
‘Until then,’ he said, ‘we went once a week to Aregua. About ninety minutes away.’
‘Why did it all stop?’
‘There was an accident. One of our engines came off the line. It was a great tragedy – a little girl was crushed.’ He shrugged. ‘So we’re not running any trains.’
‘So that’s the end of the railway?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘The railway goes on.’
He was right. The railway carried on. It carried on swallowing up eleven billion guaranís a year. Not a ticket was sold nor an ounce of freight moved. Once, these magnificent trains had rumbled all the way across the country and connected with others for Buenos Aires, for Brazil and the sea. They’d carried fruit and soldiers, girlfriends, sugar cane, Australian social
ists to their Utopias and Polish peasants as far from feudalism as they could get. Then, line by line, the system had been overwhelmed by weeds and its sleepers pillaged for cooking. In the last few years it had run a wheezy service to the suburbs, but now even those trains had stopped.
But the railway carried on. It carried on employing nine hundred railway staff. Some, perhaps ten per cent, were fantasmas – ghosts – and were purely imaginary, the Mickey Mouses and Donald Ducks. Those that were real were often just planilleros or ticket-boys; moonlighting between their railway jobs and other distractions.
‘The Paraguayan railways are just an example,’ an economist had once told me. ‘The public sector is plagued with nonexistent people doing nonexistent jobs. Who can change it? The World Bank plays zoo-keeper, trying to get the elephant back in its cage. Sure, there is some movement but it’s only the zoo-keeper.’
I raised it with Carlos. ‘Why don’t they just shut it down?’
‘It’s an investment. There are lots of foreigners interested. Really. I heard that the Swedish government want to take it over. Or is it the Italians?’ He grinned. ‘I forget. We get so many offers.’
He became suddenly serious.
‘We’ve got to keep it. We’ve only just finished paying for it.’
34
ON THE QUEEN Mother’s one hundredth birthday, the British Ambassador held a cocktail party in the square of jungle attached to his residence. He’d mustered the remnants of over a hundred and fifty years of British immigration to Paraguay and, each with a tumbler of Scotch in one hand and a fluffy pastry in the other, they just about filled the terrace. The numbers weren’t great, but then the number of original immigrants had only been modest. They’d arrived in what could best be described as enthusiastic trickles – unlike the Germans, Russians and Poles, who’d arrived in their hungry tens of thousands.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 11