At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  For the castaways, their own warlike tendencies were held in check. In their straitened circumstances, the prospects of plundering seemed suddenly remote. There was no choice but to settle down among the Guaraní. Their hosts were forest dwellers who lived off the land, growing only simple crops of manioc and maize. They didn’t know the wheel, the plough or draught animals. Their lives were intertwined with the cycles of forest life. They had names for some 1,100 plants, and their paradise – Yvaga – meant simply ‘the place of abundant fruit trees’. They even mimicked the sounds all around them in their strange, onomatopoeic language. With little else to do, Aleixo García set about learning it, the first European to master Guaraní.

  Despite their simple existence, the Guaraní were unsettled people. In the seven hundred years prior to the arrival of the castaways, they’d swarmed – like hornets – across an area from the coast of Brazil in the east to the River Paraguay in the west and extending south well into what is now Uruguay. They were restless partly because they were too many for their original territories. But they also had a deep conviction that there existed – within their finding – an earthly paradise – the Land without Evil. Their failure ever to find it was a constant source of melancholy.

  But in their wanderings, the Guaraní were energetic conquerors. Their warriors, the kyreymba, literally engulfed the tribes in their path, taking their wives, adopting their children and eating whoever remained. Cannibalism afforded them rare pleasure in their restlessness.

  It was not, however, a pleasure that they kept to themselves. As far as possible, those who were about to be eaten were expected to share the enjoyment of the occasion. In being prepared for the cooking fires, the victim was accorded the best of Guaraní hospitality. He was soothed with music and dancing and plumped up on the best food. That wasn’t all.

  They give him their wives and daughters [wrote one Spanish chronicler, Hernandez, some years later] in order that he may have every pleasure. It is those wives who take the trouble to fatten him. Those held in the greatest honour among them admit him to their couches, adorn him in various ways according to their custom, and bedeck him with feathers and necklaces of white beads and stones, which are much prized among them. When he grows fat they redouble their efforts; the dancing, singing and pleasures of all kinds increase.

  At this point in their crescendo of pleasure they were hacked up with axes and roasted. The task of dispatching them was an honour usually granted to small boys of six or seven. They were given tiny hatchets to work with. The victim’s captivity which had, until that point, been flying by, must suddenly have seemed hideously – agonisingly – protracted.

  It wasn’t only the men that were eaten. Women and children were jointed and roasted if there was no other requirement for them. Like their menfolk, they were fattened up – according to a Flemish adventurer, Hulderilke Schnirdel – ‘no otherwise than wee doe Hogges’.

  ‘They keep a woman some years if she be yong, and of commendable beautie,’ slavered Schnirdel, twenty years on, ‘but if in the meane time, she apply not herselfe to all their desires, they kill and eate her, making a solemne banquet as marriages are wont to be celebrated with us.’

  Aleixo García was impressed by the warrior Guaraní – and intrigued by their weapons and armour; although they were almost naked, they carried copper machetes and wore breastplates of beaten silver. Where did they get them from? he asked.

  They came from the mountains, said the warriors, and indicated to the west, far away. They said it was the empire of the White King.

  García decided that he’d found El Dorado. The expedition, which had now been stalled for several years in the camps of the Tupí, was back on. He would march west and capture the city. He had no conception of how far away the mountains – the Andes – were. He had no conception either of the dangers that he’d encounter on the way: the most powerful rivers in the world, the carnivorous cats, the thorns that would tear and poison his flesh – to say nothing of the savages. He would be the first European to cross the continent – one way, as events turned out.

  Not all his companions were so enthusiastic, and only a handful – including his son – agreed to go with him. Undeterred, he recruited the Guaranís.

  A lesser man might have been troubled by the idea of heading a cannibal army off in pursuit of gold. Cannibalism held special terrors for the early explorers of South America; the word itself was a reminder of the horrors they’d first encountered among the caribs of the Caribbean, and the name had stuck, albeit slightly deformed. To men who’d supposedly sailed under the banner of the Church, cannibalism was a crime as unnatural as pecatus nefandus, homosexuality. In the minds of many, the two were inextricably linked. Even today, Indians in Brazil are often still referred to as Bugres – or Bougres in French – the Bulgarians (the unfortunate Bulgarians having, at some stage in history, acquired an extravagant reputation for sodomy).

  Aleixo was untroubled by his conscience. He had no difficulty putting business above piety when the situation demanded it.

  His ill-assorted party set out in 1524, and after covering nearly two thousand miles on foot, they reached the River Paraguay. There, he enlarged his militia by recruiting a further two thousand Guaraní warriors; they were delighted at an opportunity to carry out another raid on the Vultures, as they called the Incas. Some of them already knew the territory that they were bound for, having raided it before.

  They set off, followed the river north, skirted the Chaco and after some months found themselves in Peru. They began to harvest the silver in vast quantities. Only when the Incas – under their leader Huayna Capac – mustered for a counterattack did García pause in his looting. He and his savages were forced to retire with their gains. The booty was hauled back to Paraguay, and García sent a message to those that had remained on the Brazilian coast, inviting them to join him. With it, he sent tempting samples of the treasures that he’d stolen. They weren’t moved and refused to join the party in Paraguay.

  The Guaraní, meanwhile, had tired of the Garcías. They fell on them and ate them.

  Their fate was to remain a mystery to the outside world for several years. There had, however, been some encouragement in the fact that they appeared to have reached El Dorado, and so, in 1526, a party was sent to investigate. The new expedition, under Charles V of Spain’s new Pilot-Major, Sebastian Cabot, consisted of four ships and six hundred men, including old cronies of Cabot’s from the English West Country. One of them, Roger Barlow, was particularly impressed by Paraguay and wrote in glowing terms to King Henry VIII of what he’d seen. Fortunately for the Spanish, Henry wasn’t at all impressed, and from then on, the only interest in the territory came from Madrid.

  Even then, Cabot’s expedition gave a misleading impression as to the natural resources of the region. They’d found a little of the booty remaining from García’s raid, and believing it to have come from local sources, they named the river the Río del Plata, the River of Silver. It was a cruel error; the name stuck even though it was soon realised that the area was totally without mineral wealth of any kind. The Cabot expedition was in all other respects a failure; Cabot had failed to find the City of the Caesars and his attempts at colonisation had failed. On his return to Spain, he was hauled off to the slammer and then banished to Africa.

  Although it was ten years before the next expedition up as far as Paraguay, the dream of El Dorado continued to nag at the avarice of young Spanish wolves. In 1536, Madrid sent a massive expedition to conquer the lands adjacent to the Plate – and what is now Paraguay – and drive a route through to Peru. There were eleven vessels and 2,500 men. Three of the ships were sent up to Paraguay, each under a separate commander: Ayolas, Salazar and Irala. The first of them was short-lived. Ayolas had a rush of blood to the head and dived into the Chaco in search of El Dorado, only to be ambushed and diced up by Indians.

  When there was no news from him, the others gingerly followed. They were only two ships and about a hundred
men, and they found themselves under constant attack from the Indians on the west, the Chaco side. The Abipones had mustered 10,000 bravos – or wild men – to oppose them. At one stage, the braves launched 500 war canoes but they were no match for the Spanish muskets, which cut them up in the water.

  ‘We slew a goodly number of them,’ recalled Schnirdel, ‘they having never in their lives before seen a gun or a Christian.’

  The conquistadors anchored their ships for repairs some 1,300 miles from the mouth of the River Plate, in the lee of a strange conical hill. It was 15 August 1537, the feast of the Assumption of Maria, and so they called the place Asunción.

  The hill was occupied by a local Guaraní chieftain who would, as his final service to his people, give it his name: Lambaré.

  I travelled out to Lambaré on the bus.

  I always enjoyed bus journeys around Asunción. It wasn’t that the views were particularly good or that the buses were even comfortable – they tended to be raw-boned hulks that whined and belched their way across the city; it was the mercantes.

  There was an understanding among drivers and vendors that – for a few stops at least – the vendors could ride along for nothing. At each bus stop there would be new mercantes and we were always eager to see who’d climb on next. They were like little dramas punctuating our journeys. Some of their efforts to raise money were ingenious and others were just plain desperate. Some got on and made speeches (‘Only Christ can save us from drugs’) and then passed hats around for our coins. Others sold things – stickers, fizzy drinks, chipa, cigarettes one-by-one, hair-clips – anything worth a coin. There was one man who had a string of balloons, each dangling a tiny polystyrene aeroplane. When he moved up and down the bus with his flock of bombers fluttering along behind him, the coins jangled into his pockets. The only mercantes that the drivers wouldn’t let aboard were the fishermen, with their yokes of slimy pacú. They lay in ambush for us at the lights.

  On the day I got the bus to Lambaré, two small boys got on, barefoot and shadowy with grime. They stood at the front of the bus and sang in Guaraní. Their strange, ululating words carried high above the engine, and when she heard them, the women next to me started to cry. I looked around. The other passengers were choked and grey with silence. What was it that had unearthed such deep, grainy emotions? Poverty? Maybe. Or perhaps it was the sound of Guaraní, surviving – miraculously – in the mouths of another generation?

  After an hour, the bus dropped me at the bottom of the conical hill. But the road was fringed with a tangle of shacks, wrecks and wire and I couldn’t see a way through. Two men were sitting at the side of the road, smoking. One had no teeth, and the other had too many and they filled his mouth like broken china. Neither man looked up. I stopped at their knobbly feet.

  ‘Excuse me, how do I get to the hill?’

  ‘Follow the road along,’ they said, ‘until you get to the San Marino girl. Then you’ll see the way through.’

  The San Marino girl? I went back along the main road until I came to a large billboard: the San Marino girl. It was an advertisement that I’d seen before, an absurd image that – until then – I’d hardly bothered to look at. A young slick was sitting in a sports car offering a girl his cigarettes, two of them erupting temptingly from his packet. The girl was swooned against the bodywork – voluptuous, milky-skinned, thick tresses of satin-gold hair rippling over her back. She wore only a thin silk slip which barely covered her buttocks and which was slashed up to her waist. Her rump was tilted up to the camera – a nice touch this – so that fevered smokers could see she wore no knickers. She was seconds away from sex, possibly even orgasm.

  What I liked best about this image was the expression on the boy’s face – a look of doggy glee. Even he seemed surprised at the effect that his foul, cheap cigarettes were having on this gorgeously available creature. Who was she anyway, this kerbside goddess? Too classy – too foreign – for a hooker, she must have been recruited from a dream. I looked back towards the two men sprawled out by the road; a life of San Marino hadn’t brought them such kerbside fortune. They looked as if they were asleep and so I turned up the road to the hill.

  A little further on, the road was joined by another one, broader and asphalted. It seemed that, as the road climbed upwards, corkscrewing around the hill, it got wider and wider still. Near the top, three lanes of tarmac were sweeping up through the jungle, enraging the parrots and scattering the trees. It was Stroessner who’d unleashed this road. He was obsessed with asphalt and trying to spread as much of it as possible over Paraguay. When Isabel Hilton, a journalist, interviewed him in exile, in September 1989, it was about all that he could remember of his achievements (700 kilometres of asphalt! Or was it 1,500? He’d lost count). This coil of grit and bitumen was his most fatuous project, curling up into the sky and ending in a car park and a great concrete pylon. It was supposed to commemorate Lambaré’s Indians, though why Stroessner felt moved to make such a gesture is a mystery; elsewhere, his army trucks were carrying Indians into slavery and Christian fundamentalists were picking others off with rifles. Don Alfredo had little patience for the Indians.

  It was quiet at the top. Only one car appeared but the occupants didn’t get out. For a while, I saw some feet pressed up against the window and then the car drove away. As it was early spring, most of the kiosks were shut. There was one open and a man and woman and a dog were watching television. They lived up here all year and didn’t welcome my unseasonal intrusion into their altitude.

  Spread out, way below, was the glitter of a rubbish tip. Minuscule figures, like hot insects, scoured it for nutrients – for cans, buttery papers, dead cats, anything. Beyond them was the city of Asunción. I was surprised by how forested it looked from up here. When in it, only the people reminded me of the forest.

  I crossed to the statue of Chief Lambaré. He looked like a great brass socialist, bare-chested and bulky with muscles and balls and a chin like a plough. He was a ludicrous sight and someone had shot him. Where the bullet had entered his pectoral there was a perfect, shiny puncture, and on the other side, a brilliant tussock of yellow metal sprouted from his back. Bang, bang. The Indians are dead.

  When Lambaré’s Guaraní saw the approaching Spaniards, they came down from the conical hill to greet them. They tried to offer them food. The Spaniards were wary of such friendly overtures. They’d only just chopped and blasted their way up the river, through a dense tangle of crazed savages. They chose instead to fight. The Guaraní fled back to the hill and put up the best resistance they could against squalls of lacerating ball and shot. For three days, forty of their warriors held out at the summit. Chief Lambaré was killed, and when his warriors could stand the stench of their dead no longer, they made a second attempt to sue for peace. They sent their enemy a party of young women as a gesture of their submission.

  It was a well-aimed gesture. The girls were bare-breasted and biddable, and at the sight of them, the Spaniards – and Irala in particular – were devoured by their urges. After months at sea and weeks in the ecstasy of slaughter, the opportunity to plant themselves on these pretty creatures was too great a temptation. Irala, a powerful, thick-limbed hooligan with a taste for splitting savages limb from limb now found that he had a taste for their women. Happily unencumbered with scruples, he greedily took them to his bed, several at a time.

  A truce was established, on the rather unpromising principles of lust.

  42

  FOR THEIR PART, the Asunción Guaraní were more than satisfied with their truce with the white men – the karai. It was what they’d wanted from the outset. They were living, at that time, right at the margins of the Guaraní area of influence, and those margins were being worn ragged by the merciless tribes of the Chaco. The river pirates of the Abipones and the Payaguás constantly harassed them, sating themselves on their women and filling their canoes with Guaraní booty and scalps. Now, here were the karai. They had horses and weapons, and an alliance with them offered the
prospect of a swift victory over their old enemies. The provision of harems for the Christian warriors was but a small price to pay.

  They might have felt differently had they anticipated the enthusiasm with which the karai would gather up their sisters and daughters. Having long abandoned their own sets of values, the invaders saw no reason to adopt the savages’; family ties were waved aside. Irala took seventy women to his name – and to his bed – and didn’t stint at reminding his colleagues in Buenos Aires of this fact (they, at the time, were being rigorously mauled by the Indians and were on the brink of starvation). This lewd, rutting warrior would soon be able to claim as many offspring to his name as there had been soldiers in his expedition. Even today, the name Irala fills several pages of the Asunción phone directory.

  Other Spaniards took on dozens of women each. ‘One is poor who has only five or six,’ wrote Francisco Paniagua to the King, ‘most having fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty …’

  Over the next twenty years the Spanish residents of Asunción would produce six thousand mestizo children. At the time, it was conservatively reckoned that, on average, each conquistador must have heaved himself on to at least three different Guaraní women.

  Even the doughty Fleming, Hulderilke Schnirdel, relished the pleasures of this flesh-pot, dipping more than a finger in the sauce; he procured himself a household of over fifty Guaraní, including children. ‘Amongst these Indians,’ he thrilled, ‘the Father sels the Daughter, the husbande the wife. Sometimes the Brother doth either sell or change the Sister. They value a Woman at a Shirt, a knife, a Hatchet or some other thing of this Kinde.’

  The missionaries that accompanied the warriors were appalled by the scale of the concubinage and licentiousness (to say nothing of the cannibalism of the brothers-in-law). But they also saw the establishment of a Christian colony, and in the end, their concerns were mostly for the savages’ cultural flabbiness. ‘They are,’ wrote Francois-Xavier de Charlevoix, ‘of extraordinary small intelligence, more or less stupidity and ferocity, an indolence and distaste for work, and absence of provision for the future that has no bounds.’