At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  Once under steam, the courtiers, fops, diplomats and first ladies sluiced away the whisky faster than the ratings could get it round. A navy photographer, who was slicked with hair-oil, darted among them like a mouse, draining the paper cups of dregs. He never once got the lens cap off his ancient Zenit.

  As the Itaipú approached the iron-ore wharf at Villa Hayes, the launch was dispatched, like a hornet, to disperse a little flotsam of rowing boats. It buzzed around crapulously, rousing the floppy-hatted fishermen from their fishy dreams and scattering them in the current. I watched as the fishermen were hauled away by the muscular waters, open-mouthed with astonishment.

  They were entitled to their astonishment. The cultural party that docked in Villa Hayes was a cargo of caricatures. The dames and fancy ladies were carried off first and left on the wharf to wade through puddles of rust in their satin pumps. Oscar became even more energetically thespian. At that point, the American Ambassador made good his escape, clambering into a waiting limousine and disappearing in a puff of iron ore.

  A small party was on the quay to meet us. First, there was a line of constables, whose main concern was to ensure that we didn’t photograph them (‘We’re here to make sure you don’t photograph us,’ was how I interpreted their role). Behind them was the mayor, a gentle, rather faded man with pale, sandy eyes and a scrub of brittle moustache. He waved us to a bus and we juddered into his billowing, empty town of dust and shacks. This is our museum, he said apologetically. More bayonets shattered in the vigour of combat. A stuffed armadillo and the mothy flag of the Paraguayan Olympic Committee.

  The mayor’s name was Monsieur Rousillon. He was a descendant of the survivors of New Bordeaux.

  Madame Lynch was discovering that her sumptuous outing was not bringing out the best in her ungrateful guests.

  It hadn’t been hard to get them there; curiosity, malice or just plain gluttony had driven them up the companionways. The problem now was to get them to acknowledge her. She greeted each of the ladies graciously as they tripped and trolloped aboard. Each of them ignored her. They simply skirted her formalities and made for their own lively, impermeable cliques on deck. Even Madame Cochelet returned her hostess’ niceties with withering condescension. Madame Lynch, the most exquisite of them all, was neatly marooned, alone among her liveried footmen.

  Although it was another fiery, tropical morning, the mockery and humidity didn’t ruffle her. She ordered the barque to set sail and they moved off upstream. The recalcitrant ladies, meanwhile, bore down on the magnificent luncheon, twittering and grunting with satisfaction. They packed themselves so tightly around the tables that their hostess now found herself blockaded from her own brilliant reception. She responded decisively. Her orders cracked like whips among her footmen.

  ‘Throw it all overboard! Everything!’

  To splutters of collective amazement, the footmen heaved the feast into the Río Paraguay. Over the side went the bakes and the roasts, the glasses and glazed fruit tortes, and then went the trestles and the damasks and finally an entire dinner service of Limoges. But Madame Lynch gave her guests plenty of chance to reflect on the lunch that they might have had. She ordered the captain to moor the barque midstream. She then took her chair to a cooler spot in the shade, from where she could survey her lunch party’s growing astonishment and thirst.

  ‘By ignoring Madame Lynch from the moment they boarded the ship,’ one biographer observed, ‘the ladies had made their point. By the time the captain received permission to weigh anchor and return to Asunción –ten hours later – Madame Lynch had made hers.’

  For Eliza Lynch it was a moment of rare and bitter triumph. She and Wisner clacked with mirth for some days afterwards. But her laughter was hollow and lonely. As well as a triumph, the New Bordeaux picnic had also been a painful reminder of her isolation.

  For New Bordeaux, the incident was merely a portent of the hunger and acrimony that would destroy the colony. Most of the settlers were back home within two years – destitute – and their ship, Aquitaine, was sold to pay off their debts. A few, however, remained, scratching food from this withered extremity of the Chaco.

  There was only one beneficiary of this colonial fiasco. Ironically, it was Madame Lynch: she got a new French chef.

  Our cultured group, now smudged and thirsty, was wafted back towards the bus. I asked the mayor if the Rousillons were the only surviving descendants of the French colony. He sounded surprised.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘there are a few of us.’

  He started to reel off their names. In his list, there seemed barely a hint or a shadow of the last hundred and forty-five years: the Mouchets, the Castagnets, the Cottets from Lyons and the Touchet-Cottets, the Bouviers, the Renauts and the Hellions from Bordeaux.

  Old Bordeaux, that is.

  36

  AFTER A PRICKLY honeymoon, Madame Lynch’s Paraguayan ‘marriage’ began to turn to thorns.

  She was no nearer securing a lawful union with Don Francisco, even if she’d wanted one. Her lawyers didn’t seem able to extract her from the match that she’d entered as a child, even though – as a child – she’d always been told that the match was of doubtful validity.

  But getting herself knotted up with the López dynasty can hardly have been an attractive option, even if there was no other. Although the death of his father, in 1862, had invested Francisco with power, it had not graced him with dignity. He was still greedily inserting himself into the daughters of the aristocracy, preferably the virgins, although he wasn’t always fussy. Those that resisted him, like the gorgeous Pancha Garmendia, ‘the Jewel of Asunción’, would pay a high price for their treasonous modesty. Garmendia’s death – some years away yet – would be particularly agonising.

  López was also still greedily inserting oily meats and stuffings into himself. The presidential corpus was now bloated and gargantuan, rather as the previous encumbent’s had been. Washburn – still smarting from the fancy dress lampoonery – provided the world with this description of his old friend:

  He had a gross animal look that was repulsive when his face was in repose. His forehead was narrow and his head small, with the rear organs largely developed … His face was rather flat, and his nose and hair indicated more of the Negro than the Indian. His cheeks had a fullness that extended to the jowl, giving him a sort of bulldog impression …

  For Eliza, extracting herself was not an option. It was not just a question of losing a little wool on the way out of the brambles; she was deeply entangled. She’d had seven children by López and there was no prospect of support from any other quarter than the resources of their father.

  Enigmatic as she was, it’s hard to say what, if any, fulfilment Eliza found in her association with López. The crueller commentators of her time speculated that the children weren’t born of any affection and that Eliza had even tried to stifle their existence. One account had her riding hell-for-leather round Asunción during her second pregnancy, trying to procure a miscarriage. But this wasn’t the behaviour of a woman who was temperamentally cunning, physically Junoesque and – as a mother – exemplary. The truth is that she was delighted when Corinne was born on 6 August 1856, and was devastated when, six months later, the child died.

  Corinne Adelaide Lynch was buried at La Recoleta, and I visited her tomb on the day of my visit. It was very white and prominent and obviously a spot much favoured by the grave-diggers. It was siesta time and they were sprawled out on her bed of marble. At the head of their cool couch was an obelisk mounted on four sets of thick claws, and a plinth decorated with scallops and a winged hour-glass. In its design, the spirit of Eliza was almost palpable; she’d added the misremembered words of an English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

  Ere sin could blithe or sorrow fade

  Death come with friendly care

  The lovely bud to Heaven conveyed

  And made in beossom there

  I could almost hear her stumbling through the words, just as her Guaraní m
ason had stumbled on ‘blossom’. It was, for me, the only time that Madame Lynch ever spoke up from her past. After that, she moved back into her half-world; powerful, controlling, conjuring and deeply elusive.

  President Francisco López – bulldog, bully and glutton – still nurtured an ambition to be the resurrected Napoleon Bonaparte. ‘His solitary qualifications for the character,’ remarked another waspish contemporary, ‘were that, like his prototype, he was fat and liked women.’ These qualities were good enough for Don Francisco, but he was exasperated by the slow pace of imperial growth. Then he hit upon a scheme which, he envisaged, would see him crowned ‘Emperor Francisco Primero’ within the year. It was a scheme of breathtaking cheek: he would conquer Brazil by marriage. He immediately started blasting off proposals to Isabella, daughter to Dom Pedro II, Emperor of the Brazilians.

  Naturally, there was no place for Eliza Lynch in this design, and for the first time in her Paraguayan adventure, she had to contemplate the prospect of being marginalised. Francisco’s wrestles with the gentry’s daughters had never worried her; those pups were merely vessels for his excess of virility. Isabella was a rather different prospect.

  Fortunately, her father didn’t regard Isabella as a López prospect at all; the Emperor had absolutely no intention of coupling her to that ridiculous feathered savage in the interior. He pronounced Francisco to be ‘licentious, dissolute and cruel’ and returned his lewd proposals with as little decorum and as much venom as possible. To add insult to injury, he had Isabella married into the French royalty, to a bloodthirsty dilettante called the Comte d’Eu.

  Francisco erupted. He had never been so thoroughly and unmercifully insulted. Nor could he remember a time when he’d not been given exactly what he wanted. Something began to change inside him. He would never be quite the same again. From now on, the anger was always there, dangerously near to the surface. It was an alarming and precarious life for those around him.

  ‘His eyes, when he was pleased, had a mild expression,’ noted one observer, ‘but when he was enraged the pupil seemed to dilate till it did not appear to be that of a human being, but rather a wild beast goaded to madness …’

  For Madame Lynch, the path ahead was unclear. Her position as the presidential concubine was secure, and the President, in his scribbly moods, even became a little dependent on her. But what had she become queen of? The Argentines now regarded López as ‘a dangerous cacique heading a wild and alarming tribe of savages’. Brazil had become a sworn enemy and Asunción’s mob was inflamed on a diet of ‘bread and games’. López ordered months of carnivals and flung open the hippodromes, the bullfights and the distilleries. There were endless patriotic balls and the President’s grotesque masked clowns – the camba rangas – moved among the revellers extorting money for his war chest. Merchants were forced to subscribe their profits, and the terror began.

  It is a measure of the intensity of that terror that, of López’s original cabinet of ten, only two would be spared execution. Of his mistress’ ladies-in-waiting – originally three – only one would survive. The accused usually danced to their deaths to the accompaniment of a fine polka called La Palomita (a charming tradition revived in the Stronato). Other potential opponents were incarcerated for life (which would be short) and then forced to pray for the happiness of the Chief Magistrate who’d condemned them. It was a period known as the Great Circus. The next stage would be the Grand War.

  To Eliza Lynch there seemed no escape from the inevitable calamity. But just in case a pathway cleared, she’d opened a bank account in Edinburgh and had started feeding it with loot.

  37

  ON ITS SAINT’S day, the little town of San Lorenzo held a fair and a bullfight.

  When I told friends in Asunción that I wanted to go, most were unimpressed. San Lorenzo was far enough outside Asunción to be regarded as the countryside, and although Asunceños were dependent on the interior, they preferred to ignore its existence. The countryside was coarse and backward. Every now and then they’d come across country people dancing in their restaurants, and although their bottle-dances and cooing, dovish waltzes were vaguely diverting, the idea of participating was rather distasteful. Cock-fighting and bull-fighting came within the same category.

  ‘These bullfights,’ advised the American Ladies, with their usual delicacy, ‘are colourful but rather informal affairs. In fact, sometimes if a bull is made to fight too long, he may just lie down in the middle of the bull-ring for a rest …’

  It took me some time to find anybody who was prepared to come with me to the San Lorenzo fair. It wasn’t something that I felt I could enjoy by myself. Then, to my surprise, I found a volunteer: Carlos Yegros’ student cousin, Silvia.

  Silvia and her mother lived over on the other side of Asunción. Although I went to their house several times, I still have no idea exactly where it was. Silvia used to come to my hotel to collect me. It always seemed to be at night. Like Fluff, she had a jeep and, like Fluff, she launched it across Asunción like a torpedo. But this torpedo seemed to go on for hours, ducking and weaving down inky conduits and gutters, across great blackened ring-roads and junctions of snarling metal. Eventually we would stop somewhere very dark and I’d be hustled in through a back door. It was like being bundled into the hideaway of a secret organisation.

  These early impressions turned out not to be so far removed from the reality. Silvia and her mother were the bohemian twiglets on a mighty family tree of politicians, the Caballeros. In fact, almost every new spasm of Paraguayan political thought had been initiated by a Caballero. The family was congenitally factious. Silvia’s great-grandfather, General Bernardino Caballero, had been the founder of the Reds – the Colorado Party – and his son had then been president of the Blues, the Liberales. Silvia’s father, splitting away from both parties, had formed the Greens – the Febreristas – who were originally fascists but who became revolutionary leftists and then expired. Finally, in an act of ancestral reunion, Silvia’s brother, Guillermo Caballero Vargas, had formed the rainbow party, Encuentro Nacional.

  ‘Encuentro,’ confided Silvia, ‘was a total disaster.’

  Her mother, Lucy Yegros, had nothing of her husband’s political instincts and was rigidly avant garde. She had all the eccentricity that comes of being a Yegros. At first, she rather alarmed me, with her black velvet suits and skull-caps, cropped grey hair and brooches like car parts. She had an old Fiat that she’d painted red, white and blue, an awful parody of the Paraguayan tricolour, and at full throttle, she looked as if she was off on a bombing raid. She was, however, far less dangerous than she appeared. Only occasionally did she drop bombs into the conversation.

  ‘I met Mengele several times,’ she’d say and then go on to sketch the Beast of Auschwitz as a dreary non-entity. ‘He was often around here.’ She waved a hand over her mysterious neighbourhood.

  As I got to know her, it surprised me less and less that Lucy knew the Nazi war criminals; she knew everyone. I suspect everyone knew her. She was tirelessly conspicuous and conspicuously theatrical (‘Nothing is chance!’ she once roared at me across a restaurant). She’d travelled everywhere, soaking up languages and surrealism in Italy, France and Japan. Now she was back in Asunción, doyenne of the art scene and herself an exuberant painter. The two recurring themes of her paintings told the story of a strange life: a woman with unnaturally large breasts, each one a gramophone record, and cats wearing football strips.

  Silvia and Lucy lived alone in the house. Silvia’s father had died many years ago. I was right that the house was only a back door. The front end had been sold off at a low point in the family fortunes.

  *

  Silvia detonated her jeep, and with the engines exploding, we blasted off towards San Lorenzo. I was so proud to be sitting in the cockpit with my beautiful, angular, creamy-skinned pilot that it hardly troubled me that I was about to be wiped out in a catastrophic high-speed pile-up. As we flew along, she gave names to the lights that streaked past our
windows. Near San José, there were some pink ones.

  ‘The love motels! This is love city. People rent these places by the hour – or less.’

  Did she mean they were brothels?

  ‘Not necessarily. Paraguayan boys can’t take their girlfriends home and so they bring them here.’

  ‘But what happens if the girlfriend gets pregnant?’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter.’ She shrugged. ‘All the maids have babies. Ours does.’

  A truckload of Colorado supporters was thundering towards us, rockets and flares bursting out of the back. Silvia nipped to one side, ducked into the verge and then was back out on the road again.

  ‘In fact,’ she said absently, ‘my great-grandfather never married my great-grandmother.’

  General Bernardino Caballero had had rather a reputation for irrepressibility. In war, he’d chopped his way deeply into the enemy’s lines, and then, in captivity, he’d chopped his way back again. In peacetime, he was equally uncontainable. With dangerous good looks and a ready spark, he was soon the father of forty-five children by a dozen women.

  ‘He is a fine-looking man,’ observed an English traveller in 1881, ‘with no Indian blood in his veins, indeed more like a fine specimen of an English squire than a Paraguayan. The expression on his face is kindly and no man in the country is more respected and loved.’