At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  The squire of love then bounded into the presidency of his own party, the Reds, and then on to the presidency of the Republic itself. It was not a position where his cut and thrust was at its most appreciated.

  ‘He is not a great diplomatist,’ continued the traveller, ‘but is the very man for Paraguay in the present day – a plain, straightforward trooper.’

  What did Silvia’s great-grandmother do with her straightforward trooper?

  ‘She threw him out,’ said Silvia matter-of-factly.

  *

  More lights appeared. It was San Lorenzo. Who was he?

  ‘Our saint. He got barbecued in the Inquisition.’

  Silvia had slowed down, and some barrack huts unblurred themselves from the darkness. It was Silvia’s university. Did she stay in those huts?

  She feigned a look of horror. ‘Those were the huts for the poor kids! I drove back into Asunción every night.’ She paused. ‘Do you know, I never knew they had poor kids until I got to university?’

  We carried on into San Lorenzo. The outskirts were flattened out by truck parks and cement stores. Somewhere among them, we stopped and picked up Juan-José, who Silvia had known at university. He lived behind big iron gates in a pound of bickering, yellow-hackled dogs. Juan-José was cumbersome and droopy-lidded and desperately in love with Silvia. She pretended to ignore it. ‘He’s a country boy,’ she’d explained. ‘He is not one of us.’

  The San Lorenzo fair was in its third and last day. It was like trudging into a giant hangover. The air was muzzy with roasted offal and disjointed songs and the farm-hands – the peóns – were dreamy and broke. Ancient, battered fairground machines whirled emptily around our heads, animated scrap. Some of the peóns were still colourfully drunk. Others were already tucked up in their hats and leathers, snuggled into doorways and gutters. Around their feet nipped flurries of icy sand, brought in on a goose-pimpling southerly. Blunt with rum and poverty, they slept on.

  Juan-José elbowed us into the crowds. He dropped a wad of notes on the poker table and, to murmurs of approval, lost the lot. He hardly noticed, he was so luminously happy. Silvia went with him on La Rueda, the Big Wheel. He could hardly believe his luck as they were harnessed together and La Rueda cranked them off the ground. It lingered deliciously at the midnight of its revolution and then jolted them back down to earth. Juan-José will remember those dangerous mechanical pleasures for ever. In his giddiness, he bought us presents of buttery beef. When they were gone, there were envelopes of cheese and manioc, all fried up in a glue of pig lard.

  ‘Only El Gordo does them this good,’ he grinned, swollen with pride and pork grease. The eponymous Fat One was now heaving tongues and giblets into a pan of spitting oil.

  ‘I think we’d better go,’ said Silvia sweetly. ‘Or we’ll miss the bullfight.’

  *

  We needn’t have hurried. The bullfight didn’t start until two hours after its billing. ‘We don’t start until the stadium is full,’ said the gatekeeper.

  The stadium had been erected specially for the occasion on some wasteland. It was like a great basket, made of rough planks lashed together, and it creaked this way and that with the mood of the crowd. In the centre, in the bowl of the structure, was the arena, which was curtained with thick nets to keep its monsters in. The beasts were kept in a crate up one end, and every now and then it was stoked with a stick until its sides thundered with the reassuring sound of angry hooves. The audience shuddered with excitement.

  The stands, however, remained only half full and the spectators packed themselves up one end, in the lee of the cruel Antarctic wind. This caused the stadium to be slewn, like a tipsy rhombus, to the north. When a fight broke out on the south side, everybody rushed over to watch and the stadium, momentarily upright, then scissored to the south. As the fight never reached a satisfactory conclusion, our seats pitched and yawed all evening on swells of curiosity.

  Eventually, two clowns were released into the arena, to roars of meaty laughter. They sang songs that mocked love and played their guitars behind their backs and twanged them with their teeth. They made jokes in a strange language that made the stadium sway around with pleasure.

  ‘It’s a Jopará,’ panted Silvia, clenched with laughter. ‘A mixture of Spanish and Guaraní. Everybody loves it in the country.’

  ‘What are they saying?’

  Silvia cocked her head. The clowns were poking tongues and arses at a woman in the front row. ‘Hear my salty words!’ came the translation. ‘Your mother is dead!’

  The crowd, the stadium, lurched with delight.

  Then the first bull was released – an anxious-looking zebu. Loudspeakers thrilled with polkas, the trumpets and drums urging the bull to fight. The clowns did headstands on him and wove themselves between his legs, but he still refused to move. Even the sight of a toreador in a suit of lights didn’t impress him. The toreador was not armed. Not a drop of blood would mar the evening.

  ‘Espectacular!’ roared the speakers.

  The bull was taken back to his crate, looking bemused. Between each contest, the clowns were back at their prattle. They leered and pouted and pumped and wriggled. They clambered up and down the nets and brought a boy on and hauled three foot of ribbon from his backside. There were whoops of approval.

  ‘Magnífico!’

  A little girl came on in a miniskirt and danced in time to ‘Sex Bomb’. Her mimicry of an adult world was compellingly hideous. The stadium seethed and wobbled with appreciation.

  ‘Sexy! Sensacional!’

  The last bull was a little more like the steaming, snorting monsters that the conquistadors had brought from Castille. He had thick, glossy black flanks, strong horns and a weighty pair of velvet balls.

  ‘Superman toro!’

  The clowns fled up into the netting and sat up there whimpering like monkeys. A lone toreador ducked around the arena, trying to snatch the furious animal’s tail. Eventually, the bull tossed him lightly into the crowd.

  ‘Marvilloso!’

  But it was soon over. The toreador recovered his dignity and the bull ran out of steam. As the American Ladies had predicted, he lay down and refused to get up. A clown came down from the netting, sat on the bull’s nose and dispatched him with a loud fart.

  I thought the stadium was going to collapse.

  38

  ‘IF YOU WANT to eff your life up, that’s cool,’ said Silvia Caballero, ‘but if you want to eff your country up, that’s not.’

  We were trying to extract ourselves from the wreckage of the San Lorenzo fair. Silvia was furrowed with gravity. Even though Juan-José – who’d worshipped President López all his life – trotted at her side, she dug deeper.

  ‘López was mad. He effed up Paraguay. But you know what? My great grandfather did the dirty on López, and – to me – that’s cool.’

  I couldn’t think what was coming next. In Paraguayan history, General Caballero was López’s loyal lieutenant, the national hero and the survivor of all the conspiracy charges that had devoured the court of López.

  ‘My grandmother told me everything.’ We were nearly back at the jeep, crunching over little drifts of sand and icy bones.

  ‘Caballero was having an affair with Madame Lynch.’ Silvia smiled mischievously. ‘Why else do you think she stayed around?’

  39

  THE MURDER OF Vice-President Argaña had left a gap in the hierarchy. With President Cubas fled, Gonzalez Macchi had furtively slipped into the presidency but that still left the vice-presidency to be filled. There had to be an election.

  ‘The tragedy of Paraguayan politics,’ one of the half-Britons had told me, ‘is that the Paraguayans have never had the leader they actually wanted.’

  It was a curious thought. The Stronato could hardly be described as a period of free will. Since then, there had been four presidents: in the first election, Rodríguez had ambushed the electorate with the suddenness of his democracy (he’d also got an impressive number of votes f
rom dead people and Donald Ducks); in the second, Wasmosy had cheated Argaña out of the primaries; in the third, Cubas had taken the votes for Oviedo (who was under disqualification for involvement in a coup that may never have happened); the fourth president, Macchi, hadn’t been elected at all but was filling dead men’s shoes.

  Even more disturbing was the thought that, of the last two presidencies, if the choice had been put fairly and squarely to the Paraguayan people, they’d have chosen Lino Oviedo on both occasions. Why was he so popular? Everybody had different explanations.

  He was brilliant in Guaraní and this triggered deeply patriotic obsessions among the Paraguayans of the interior.

  He was strong and offered stability in a country where stability was dangerously overvalued by those traumatised by the 1947 civil war.

  ‘He is,’ said many, ‘the only one who can beat the criminals.’

  ‘He is a criminal,’ said another. ‘He’s the only one with enough money to do the job.’

  One man – a lawyer – thought it had something to do with Lino’s sex life. ‘He’s homosexual. I can’t see how else he gets his support.’

  It was all academic; Lino was in prison in Brasilia. But it did give rise to a difficult question: what would Lino’s supporters, the Oviedistas, do?

  *

  There was only one party dominating Paraguayan politics, and that was General Caballero’s old Red party, the Colorados. They had now ruled the country for the last fifty years. Graham Greene, working on Travels With My Aunt in 1969, had found Asunción completely dipped in Colorado:

  There were red flags everywhere: you would have thought that the town had been taken over by the Communists, but red here was the colour of conservatism. I was held up continually at street crossings by processions of women in red scarves carrying portraits of the General and slogans about the great Colorado party. Groups of gauchos came riding into town with scarlet reins … Decorated cars carrying pretty girls with scarlet camelia blossoms in their hair went by. Even the sun looked red through the morning mist.

  Greene’s anti-hero, Henry Pulling, is at one stage beaten up by party thugs for blowing his nose on a red handkerchief. This sort of goonery was uncomfortably close to the reality; Colorado authority permeated deep into Paraguayan life.

  Quite apart from repression – the pyragüés and La Técnica – the Colorados had made the Paraguayans dependent on them. The army, which – during the Civil War – had been nine-tenths Liberale and rebel, was purged and replaced with Colorado men. They then took over the civil service – without a party card, there was no job. By the end of the Stronato, at least an eighth of the working population had to be Colorados before they could begin to work.

  Things were no better after the Stronato.

  ‘There are now a hundred and sixty thousand civil servants,’ one despairing Liberale told me. ‘Let’s say ninety per cent of them are dependent on the Colorados for their jobs and that each job determines say four family votes. That’s six hundred thousand votes – the government only needs nine hundred thousand to win. This way, the Liberals may never win.’

  But the death of Argaña changed all that. The Colorado Party was now deeply split; the Argañistas wanted the dead man’s son, Félix, in the presidential palace and they wanted Oviedo’s head on a platter. They offered a $100,000 reward for his capture. It was hardly a partnership. The Oviedistas, meanwhile, threatened to take their share of Colorado votes to the Liberals.

  Suddenly, the chessboard started looking rather different.

  Old Colorados acted with panic. ‘If the Liberals win,’ announced the chairman of the party, Bader Rachid Lichi, ‘there will be a civil war.’

  Félix Argaña tried to reassure the country that that would not be the case but when a middle-aged man threw a Molotov cocktail at him on a visit to the prickly north of the country, he must have had his doubts. Colorados armed themselves. In Hernandarias, the party boss and his canvassing staff – all armed with sub-machine-guns – were arrested for assaulting the chief of police. With no differences in policies, the parties had had to find other ways to make an impression.

  Once again, Asunción erupted into political colours.

  This time, however, there was as much blue as red. The street of my hotel might start the day in blue and then be red by lunchtime. Soon every surface was covered in a thick crust of fly-posters. Sometimes, the glue-teams worked so intensely that it was possible to watch them following each other up the street, the leading team gluing and the one behind peeling their posters away and replacing them with their own. When they ran out of posters, they took to their rivals’ work with pens and paint, adding red noses, whiskers and horns. Argaña was an easy target; his face was so hairless and empty.

  The Liberal candidate was more difficult to defile because he was already covered in hair and his huge bulk filled every spare inch of his posters. He looked like a bear stuck in a box. It was also rather harder to defile his reputation; allegations of impropriety wouldn’t stick. In this candidate, there was a real danger of probity. Even his name was growly and severe: Julio César Franco. To soften the effect a little, he campaigned as ‘Yoyito’ – or Little Joe.

  But would the Oviedistas vote for him? A long, bleeding splash of words along Independencia spelt out the consequences for baby-face Félix: LIBERALES + OVIEDISTAS = KILLER TEAM.

  The police and army put all their men on the streets. Some of them looked as if they’d marched back from the thirties to save Asunción from civil war; there were rain capes and tin hats, rifles from the Chaco War, webbing and Mannlicher bayonets. Others put on plastic armour and crow-stepped up and down in front of the Congresso. It was a determined show of force, but only the peanut seller and I were watching.

  The city had become seized with lethargy. Asunceños were weary of politics, of its pó-caré, its twistedness, its glue and its awful leaflets. Years of deceit had left them unable to relate to politics rationally; to criticise, to analyse, to question. They just wanted it all over. ‘Don’t vote’, urged the bumper stickers.

  ‘I’m certainly not going to vote,’ the lactating mother had told me, through mouthfuls of steak and strawberry milkshake. ‘What’s the point?’

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that when election day came, the city centre was deserted. Even the police had abandoned it. It felt as though democracy had overslept. But, somehow, I suppose people did vote – they had to by law – and by the evening, the results started to seep out.

  I decided to await the outcome in The Lido bar. I still had an idea that it was the centre of Paraguay, and as a practical matter, it was one of the few places open. There was also something satisfyingly obstinate about it: it had been at the rim of several revolutions, had seen the Stronato come and go – and then the neo-sultans – and had refused to change. It had barely had a new coat of paint. There were the same tangerine ladies and the same dishes of steaks and pirañas. Even the customers didn’t seem to have changed much, still blank, intense and watchful. I couldn’t think of anybody more appropriate to bring me the news of Paraguay’s future than The Lido’s duckling waitresses.

  The Oviedistas, they told me, had teamed up with Little Joe’s liberals.

  Then they brought me a steak the size of a paving slab. By the time I’d chewed my way from one end to the other, the liberals were in the lead. By one per cent.

  A faint ditty of fireworks crackled over the city and then all was quiet again. It was a beautiful, torrid night; vintage Asunción, treacly and whispering with surprises. But few had ventured down to the Plaza – or into The Lido – and the waitresses were bored and chattery. There was nothing to do but wait and study the diners. The one next to me was a prostitute. Her short, plump fingers were tipped in lacerating crimson and her belly lolled into her lap. She ordered a fish and a cake of pig fat and maize and scooped it all up in her nails. Her chrome-plated phone never rang.

  The Reds never regained the advantage. At midnight, I walked home
through a city hot and furtive and stunned into silence; the Colorados had suffered their first election defeat for over half a century.

  *

  There was no civil war. For a while, the Reds contested the election in the courts – more from a sense of disbelief than grievance. It was a sign of the times that the Supreme Court decided against them on every charge. The Argañistas abandoned conflict and reverted to conspiracy. They wound up their persecution of the Oviedistas and called off the pyragüés and their surveillance. The two factions then bedded down together, in a sleazy, reproachful truce. They now had to wrest back control.

  A week after the election, Asunción’s schoolchildren were ordered into the streets and made to clean up. They scraped the city clean of politics. Down came Félix and Little Joe and all their cheeky derivatives: Dracula, Hitler and the red-nosed reindeers. The walls were scrubbed of controversy and the paper battle-cries were bundled up and burnt. When it was done, all that remained of the fight were the shadowy rectangles of glue.

  40

  THE DAY AFTER the election, I left The Gran Hotel and moved back downtown. When I told people that I wanted to be nearer the old heart of the city, they shrivelled with horror.

  ‘You’ll be robbed,’ they said with disconcerting harmony.

  Virginia advised me to hide all my money in my socks. Others advised me not to go out at all. ‘It’s like the Bronx in London,’ said Fluff.

  ‘We don’t have a Bronx,’ I protested.

  She wasn’t interested. Asunción had one. For those old enough to remember the sinister tranquillity of the police state, it now seemed that the city was in the grip of chaos. A crime rate had arrived and the fear of crime had seeped out into the suburbs like cholera. The police hustled the fear along by sending up clouds of statistics into the air waves every morning. In their broadcasts, crime was visited upon the city in awesome columns and rows.