At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  ‘Motorbikes stolen in Zone 3, two. Cars stolen, four. Property recovered, nil. Motorbikes stolen in Zone 4 …’

  Who was listening to this fretful mantra? Everyone, it seems. People talked of emigrating and gun sales tripled. The banks snapped up nearly all the police to guard their money (the rest busied themselves defending police stations). Homes were patrolled by liveried private soldiers. Even the kindergartens had armed guards, usually little fat ladies with revolvers and plenty of malice.

  Most people fed their fears on bloodthirsty newsprint. The worst was Crónica. Its photographers had a nose for mutilation. Every day, half the nation terrified itself on three scarlet pages of suicides, murders, drunks burst apart by lorries and torsos slashed with knives. There was little respite in the next three pages – spreads of teenage girls apparently gagging to be violated – and then Crónica plunged its readers back into the afterworld. ‘Taxi Driver Mutilated. Left Arm and Ear Amputated.’ There was no other news from around the world (except for Princess Diana’s persistent, ghostly love affairs). Life was just a brief bloodbath. Small wonder that the Paraguayans were now – like their ancestors – frightened of the dark and of their eerie forested city.

  Despite the concerns of my friends, I moved into the centre.

  I took a room in an ugly house on Fulcrencio R. Moreno called Residential Itapua. It had been built by an aviator called Rios whose days of wartime glory were remembered in a propeller of black pebbles, embedded in the garden wall. After the Chaco conflict, Dr Rios had made a tidy fortune as a dermatologist. There was a portrait of him in the hallway of the house, taken at Niagara Falls in 1949, wearing a thick coat of fox pelts. As his practice had expanded, so had his house, creeping in lumps and growths first into the garden and then up the back. Inside, everything was painted cheese and pale green in deference to the unhealthy skin on which he’d prospered. His fortune made, he’d then put a brave face on the whole thing – with an enormous pair of Ionic columns.

  On his death in 1998, Dr Rios had left the house to his daughter, Miriam, and her husband, Victor Giosa. Victor described himself as Sicilian, but as to the details, he was hazy; he wasn’t even certain where Sicily was and had no idea which generation of his threaded ancestors had finally abandoned it and wandered off to South America. Although – with his family – Victor was affectionate, he was not the provider that the doctor had been. He had a fry-up in Tacuary Street and a look of deeply ingrained penury. When the Ionic columns had erupted in a mange of neglect, he and Miriam had decided to take in lodgers.

  Dr Rios’ house had made an easy transition from cheesy home to cheesy pensión. Every little nook and graft of the doctor’s labyrinth was colonised with beds. There were tiny cells for salesmen and dormitories for the Peace Corps ‘kids’. On the second floor lived two old ladies and a terrier that hated me with clockwork yaps. I usually had the room above them, an architectural afterthought on the roof. Although by day it was too hot to sustain life, at night it was a thoughtful place from which to survey the neighbourhood. It looked out over a sierra of corrugated rust, and some nights, power-cuts swept over this landscape like sciroccos, enveloping it in silence and fiery darkness.

  At breakfast, the hallway became a dining room. The only decoration was a brass frieze of The Last Supper and a Houses of Parliament ashtray from London. Miriam wasn’t interested in breakfast and left it to her daughters. She left most things to her daughters. The two heavy teenagers – like a pair of book-ends – padded around noiselessly, keeping everything upright and orderly. Most of the time they actually ran the place and Miriam disappeared on long, mysterious shopping trips that sometimes ranged as far as Buenos Aires. After her longer absences, Victor would decorate the hall with balloons and a banner saying ‘Bienvenidos’. As the family awaited her return, the balloons exploded around them, pricked by vicious insects that Victor called the bichos – the little beasties. Just enough gaiety would survive until Miriam’s well-parcelled return and then, once she’d distributed gifts of talc and cigarettes (and a statue of Aphrodite for Victor’s mother), the debris of her welcome would be swept away and life would return to normality.

  Fulcrencio R. Moreno was a quiet, tree-lined street that rolled gently over several hills. Once, other professionals had practised in the street – doctors, psychoanalysts and a good number of quacks and mountebanks. A few doors down was the old dental surgery of Dr Heikel, who’d polished up teeth for Mengele and other Nazis. But it was all gone now. The only traffic was the Number 11 bus. For its drivers, the street was the roller-coaster in their otherwise tedious rounds of the city. For us, the Number 11s were like passing meteorites. But they too were soon gone, and when the dust had settled, Fulcrencio R. Moreno settled back down to its genteel long afternoon of snoozes.

  From Moreno, the streets tumbled down towards the river in increasingly sleazy layers. A few blocks on was The Britannia pub, the latest attempt at English seediness. There were beer mats and pumps and pictures of Stonehenge and guardsmen. But I only ever went there once; somehow it made me feel lonely because its Englishness was just a trick. ‘Servimos tu Guinness in manija de 355cc’ said a sign, and the waitresses wore Union Jack aprons and fake-ocelot boots. Even the owner was part of the illusion; I’m German, he shrugged. I preferred to press on to The Lido bar.

  Further down were the prostitutes and transvestites and the watchmen, grilling little sticks of meat on dirty fires. The girls, up to their heels in litter and reproach, clustered in tight knots, muttering in Guaraní. Beyond them were the transvestites, long-legged and boldly denying the dinginess and smoke with their extravagance. One night, a particularly spectacular creature pitched out of the sickly shadows. Heels, suspenders, glossy thong and choking bodice. Long, pale legs sheared into the road; a BMW bundled to a halt, threw open its door and the apparition was gone.

  Plaza Uruguaya was for the older prostitutes.

  I often came down to the plaza during the day. Like Plaza Independencia, it still affected a raffishly Parisian air. Instead of statues of whippets and frogs, however, it was graced with goddesses and Greek muses. Perhaps that was why the prostitutes had originally liked it, feeling that the sight of all that white flesh was good for business. Strangely, the plaza also had the best bookshops in Asunción, housed in great glass tents. I often wondered if Langan was right that no one read in Paraguay. Anyway, literature and old prostitutes now shared the square. The bookshops stayed open late into the night, to mop up any loose intellectual urges.

  Mostly, people came down to the plaza – as I did – just to feast on the colour of the blossom. At the beginning of the spring, the whole canopy of trees blushed the deep pink of lapacho rosado. Then as the air lost its brittleness, there was a second seething of colour: the hot, ripe yellows of lapacho amarillo. People just sat and let the winter drain out of them. Many spent the whole day like that, simply lying back and thinking in oceans of colour. Others played chess or sat at tiny stalls selling iced tea – tereré – or sugar-cane mosto. Occasionally, one of the old ladies might heave her way over and probe around for business.

  ‘Would you like to buy me a tereré?’ one asked me. She was wearing green culottes and a red tunic, well filled with leathery flesh. Despite her life and the loss of all her teeth, she was oddly ceremonious.

  It was easier to pretend I didn’t speak Spanish. But she wouldn’t have it.

  ‘Buy me a tereré and then you can take me to bed.’ She sat down next to me and laid a dry, clawed fist on my knee.

  I kept up my charade but there was something that I simply had to know. I decided to find some Spanish. ‘How much?’

  A zig-zag of gratitude and gums broke across her face. ‘Fifteen thousand.’

  Fifteen thousand Guaraní, the price of her remaining dignity. It wasn’t much, even in Asunción; it bought seven cans of Coke or fifteen little buns of maize, thirteen short bus rides, fifteen copies of Crónica, supper at The Lido or an aluminium cooking pot. It might just be enough
for two mobile phone calls, as long as they were quick.

  I now had to pay for my curiosity with the task of extracting myself from the little claws. I made excuses; I’m waiting for a friend. But she wasn’t persistent.

  ‘Maybe later,’ she said, and went back to join the other ladies, clustered in the shade of Diana the Huntress.

  The fact that I survived and thrived downtown puzzled me. How had I survived Fluff’s criminal anarchy?

  I began to get the feeling that perhaps the crime question was more subtle than it first appeared (and certainly more subtle than it appeared to readers of Crónica).

  It was obvious that crime in Paraguay terrified – but it also empowered. The threat of criminal chaos had aroused magnificent gusts of rhetoric throughout the election. It was the new menace. I’d read that, during the Stronato, Don Alfredo had enjoyed a partnership with another, equally appalling bogeyman: communism. Communism justified everything he did. It even justified crime; ‘El Contrabando es el precio de la paz’, as he’d say. The fight against communism provided useful justification for his caudillo power; for authoritarianism, for 33,000 men under arms, for gunboats and states of emergency. Now, Stroessner may have gone, but Colorado power had survived and so had the hardware of the Stronato. Once communism had evaporated, what other justification could there be for caudillaje? No one was rushing to dispel the perception that Paraguay was slipping back to primordial chaos.

  That’s not to say that crime wasn’t worse. Everything I read about crime in Paraguay was discouraging. One would hardly expect it any other way in a country where half the workforce was without work and where the economy was unbolting itself nut by nut. When – just after I arrived – a gang of thieves stole $11,000,000 of foreign exchange on its way out of the country, the whole structure visibly tottered.

  Crime was thriving. The most spectacular example of this was in cars; over half the cars in the country were now mau, or ‘dodgy’. Newspaper advertisements could barely be bothered to disguise their curliness; sale by contrato privado was a sure indicator that there wouldn’t be a shred of documentation. The Paraguayan market was now so saturated in stolen Brazilian cars that many were now just rushed straight through to Bolivia.

  Paraguay’s crime incensed her near-neighbours. The Chileans accused the Paraguayans of flooding them with marijuana and the Brazilians accused them of importing seventy per cent of all its cocaine. The Argentines continued to accuse Paraguay of polluting them with everything: drugs, cars, toasters, immigrants and even foot and mouth disease. None of this was particularly new; Paraguay had always been a merry roundabout of contraband. It was now just better at it.

  This was all still a very long way from criminal anarchy. Could it be that the perception of crime was out of proportion to the reality?

  ‘I come from a normal American city on the West Coast,’ said one of the aid workers at my pension. ‘Compared to that, these guys don’t know what crime is.’

  My feeling was that he was right. But meanwhile the politicians watched for chaos with greedy interest. As to the citizens of uptown and Legoland, they thought their city was unravelling itself and could only look on with a growing sense of horror and fascination.

  Crime was no more horrible and fascinating than at the Police Museum.

  It occupied the top floor of a police station called ‘Identificaciones’. The whole building was full of surprises: Indians camped out on the ground floors, pleading for an identity; kitchens and banks of typewriters on the first and dormitories on the second. Some small boys were selling bottles of shampoo up here, and when one of them saw me clambering up through their dreary concrete sandwich, he peeled off and followed. I eventually arrived on the third – the museum – with the waif at my heels and two litres of conditioner pressed in my back.

  The police had made a determined effort to horrify. Death was seized upon pointlessly and blankly. Each of the exhibits brought to mind not the detection of crime or the prevention of evil, but the moment of agony, the violent extinction of life. Here were the hands of a strangler, his cold grip cast in plaster. Or a little bowl of skull, hacked from the head of Gaston Gadin, who’d sliced up his parents in 1915. One whole wall had death glossily preserved in snapshots: wives dangling on ropes, blue-lipped and sleepy, throats cut; drivers sloshed around their cars; bodies pulled from fires and a decapitated baby. Perhaps worst of all was the pickling jar: six aborted foetuses clutching at each other blindly, furious at a life wasted in formaldehyde. ‘The most abominable crime against humanity’, said their little cardboard tombstone.

  An elderly policeman appeared at my side. The shampoo boy melted away. ‘If you have any questions,’ said the policeman, stiff with pride, ‘just ask.’

  I was so numb with horror that I couldn’t think of a sensible question. Everything was so appallingly vivid that I wasn’t sure I wanted him to clarify it further. But I could see he was hovering, waiting to furnish me with ghastly details.

  ‘Tell me about this one.’ I aimed a finger at a photograph of a man, cold on the slab. ‘What happened here?’

  The policeman peered into the photograph. ‘That’s Cáceres, a drug runner. He was shot as he was driving round the back of The Gran Hotel.’

  ‘Who shot him?’

  ‘Well, it must have been one of his own men. There were three of them with him in the car at the time. We arrested them all but none of them could remember which one had pulled the trigger.’ He was still gazing deep into the picture. ‘Anyway, they didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Well, who did?’

  ‘After he was shot, he got out of the car and escaped down the road. He flagged down another car and the driver picked him up.’

  ‘To take him to hospital?’

  ‘Maybe,’ shrugged the old constable. ‘But he never made it. The driver shot him.’

  That, I supposed, was about as much clarification as I could expect. I edged away, towards the guns. There were muskets and shotguns and reptile little pieces that had once chattered with bullets. Among them, I spotted the Montoneros’ machine-gun and the rocket-launcher used to kill Samoza. Even the dud projectile was there. Its sides were scuffed with trembling abrasions where the rocket-man had torn it from the launcher, before stuffing a fresh one in and blasting the old voluptuary to pieces.

  Spread across the far wall was a shoal of knives, swimming along like deadly, silvery herrings. Each had been used in a murder. There were bayonets and kitchen knives, stilettos, daggers from Brazil and hunting knives from Spain, flick knives, butterfly knives, survival knives, machetes, cowboys’ facons and scalpels. There were even knives cut from pieces of cars, and cutlery sharpened up to kill.

  Above the blades was a declaration painted in loud gold letters. ‘82% of homicides in Paraguay are committed with knives.’

  I thought of something else to ask the policeman: why, with so many guns, didn’t people just shoot each other? He considered this very carefully.

  ‘I think people like to sneak up on their victims,’ he said. ‘It is the Paraguayan way. Like the Indians.’

  41

  THE MOMENT WHEN Spanish and native Indian blood first became commingled can be pinpointed – with almost indecent accuracy – to the 17 August 1537. It followed a short but unnecessarily vicious struggle on Lambaré Hill.

  The first European to enter Paraguay was not, however, a Spaniard but a Portuguese. He was a swaggering thug called Aleixo García, motivated a little by piety but mostly by greed. The greed was the catalyst; stories of a fabled city of gold, El Dorado or the City of the Caesars, had set his imagination ablaze and fuelled his recklessness. But the piety was useful too; García was a conquistador setting out in the name of God to bring the heathen lands within the fold of the Church. If the savage inhabitants of these lands – the ‘hidden Jews’ – were foolish enough to oppose him, he felt himself charged with putting them to the blessed sword. The enthusiasm of his type for skewering the natives (and raping their women) was soon to r
each such alarming proportions that even the Church felt constrained to act; in 1537, Pope Paul III decreed that the savage was capable of redemption. This gave him the status of a human being. Unfortunately, this news came too late for those visited by the early conquistadors.

  Meanwhile Aleixo García – and his son – were ideal material for these adventures. In 1515, they found themselves on an expedition led by the Pilot-Major of Spain, Diego de Solís. The expedition was fated from the start. The first disaster came as the party of ships attempted to enter the River Plate in their search for an inland passage to the sierras of gold. Diego de Solis was surprised to find himself beckoned on to the beach by a group of charming Charrua Indians. He paddled ashore, but his pleasure was short-lived as the natives broke him apart with axes and ate him.

  This was not how it was supposed to work. Without their navigator the expedition leaders decided to turn for home. They headed north, and then disaster struck again as one of the ships was separated from the others and shipwrecked off Santa Catarina, Brazil. Only eighteen men of its complement survived, among them being Aleixo García and his son. They clambered ashore, thanking God for their deliverance. They then contemplated their next move.

  The Garcías had been marooned among the Tupí, the coastal Guaraní. They were a handsome race, who had lustrous, coppery skin and strong, thick hair and who kept their teeth well into old age. Their name – the Guaraní – came about through their custom of painting their bodies with paint (gua means ‘paint’ and ní is the indicator of the plural – ‘the painted ones’). However, as the Garcías would discover to their cost, there was – even in their name – dangerous ambiguity. ‘Guaraní’ also meant ‘hornet’, a mark of their warlike propensities.