There was only a brief moment when this stew of debauchery was threatened with a chilly dose of moral rectitude. It came with the appointment of a new governor from Spain, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, in 1543. Nuñez was a man of starry naiveté who attempted to bring a little humanity to the treatment of the Indians.
His early experience of South American Indians was impressive. Like Aleixo García, he had a fine tradition of being shipwrecked. On his very first expedition to the Indies in 1529, his ship was caught in a storm off what is now Florida, Argentina, and wrecked. The South Atlantic swallowed up the wreckage and then regurgitated Nuñez – completely naked – on the beach. The natives thought he was a god because of his two beards – one on his face and the other in his groin. This didn’t dissuade them from enslaving him, and for five years he remained their captive. He made productive use of his time, working his way up from slave to pedlar and then on to doctor and chieftain. Finally, at the head of an army of Indians, he set off for New Spain. After some months, he encountered a roving Spanish mercenary and was eventually reunited with his countrymen. He urged them not to harm his loyal Indian followers but they thought this a curious instruction and had the whole lot put to death. The intransigence of his compatriots in their treatment of the Indians was to become a recurring theme in Nuñez’s unhappy life.
He set off for South America again in 1537, to take up the appointment of Governor of the River Plate. His first task, however, was to assist in the relief of Buenos Aires, which was still being dismembered by Indians. He never made it, and once again arrived on the continent in a wreck. By an unhappy coincidence, he and his men were washed up in exactly the same place as Aleixo García – at Santa Catarina in Brazil. Hearing that Buenos Aires had been all but abandoned, they decided to head for Asunción. Their walk took them four months. All the way, Nuñez infuriated his men by insisting they pay the natives for everything they bought. They arrived in Asunción in March 1542, in disagreeable shape.
Asunción too was hardly agreeable at that moment. The city was under attack from the Guaycurú, who came from the other side of the river. These savages were a group especially to be feared; they existed purely for the torment of white men. It was known that they particularly valued the scalps of the karai. They even plucked their eyelashes out so as to better enable them to see the Christians and slay them. Worse, they were adept horsemen, ‘more truly of one flesh with their horses than with their wives’, as one disgusted onlooker put it.
Governor Nuñez was concerned about the legality of going after the Guaycurús, and sought the opinion of the clerics. To Irala, who was all ready to go and swipe some heads off, this was the action of a nincompoop. A rift developed. For the time being, however, it was plastered over; the opinion of the clergy was that not only was a counterattack legal, ‘it was also expedient’.
The expedition was a disaster. It had got off to a bad start when Nuñez discovered that his soldiers had imprisoned Guaraní girls in the ships’ lockers – to pleasure them on the campaign. He ordered the maidens to be released, and in doing so secured the loathing of his men. Meanwhile, the Guaycurús had evaporated into the heat and mockery of the Chaco. After several months upriver, the conquistadors encountered nothing but a few straggling Payaguá pirates. They sliced their ears off, of course, but it wasn’t the bounty they’d hoped for.
On his return to Asunción, Irala raised a revolt and had the over-fond and dabbling governor dumped in prison whilst he contrived a case against him. Although Nuñez was not to see anyone except the Indian girl who prepared his food, he still managed to get word to his allies. This infuriated Irala, who ordered that the girl be stripped naked and her hair cut down to a prickly stubble. Still Nuñez managed to smuggle the messages out – on pieces of paper hidden between the girl’s toes. Irala was intrigued. He procured an Indian boy to seduce the girl and find out her secret.
‘This he failed to do,’ noted a nineteenth-century historian, ‘owing, perhaps, to his love-making being wanting in conviction on account of her shaved head.’
Nuñez was eventually sent for trial in Spain, with his defence documents secretly bolted to the ship’s keel. He spent an agonising journey home. He was convinced he’d be murdered and he trailed his piece of unicorn (probably rhinoceros horn) through his food to protect him from poison. Back in Spain, he was acquitted – after an eight-year battle – but he was never reinstated to his post, nor was he ever paid for his well-intentioned services to date.
With Nuñez out of the way, the field was clear for Irala. He ruled Paraguay until 1557, when stupor finally overwrought him. There had only been one small disappointment in all his delightful years of slaughter and debauchery: his expedition to Peru had been too late. His fellow-countryman, Pizarro, had already picked the carcass clean. The conquest of Paraguay had – to some extent – been in vain.
With the death of Irala came the end of conquistador rule in Paraguay. Apart from a few powdered buffoons that Madrid would send out to lord it over them, the country would now be in the hands of its half-breeds; the new Paraguayans.
The Guaraní, in saving themselves, had inadvertently secured their own extinction. Within three decades of the Spanish arrival, there were almost no pure-bred Guaraní left. The degradation of their people wasn’t confined to Asunción either; the genetic colonisation of Paraguay fanned out, deep into the interior.
‘There were now a number of half-breeds,’ wrote the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres, ‘the offspring of hidalgos and beautiful Indian women. Their features and rather coppery skin clearly show that there is Indian blood in their veins, although they might not want to admit it.’
Why should they not want to admit it?
Clastres, who lived in Paraguay for several years in the early 1960s, had a simple answer: half-breeds often treat their ‘purer-bred’ cousins with the contempt that the white men show for them. Paraguay was no exception; even the poorest mestizo – only one notch above the undiluted tribesmen – was apt to treat them with scorn. His attitude would vary between amusement at the antics of the indigenas – as they’re now called – and loathing.
He would be very surprised [wrote Clastres] to learn that he and the Indian share common ancestors – in fact he would refuse to believe anything so absurd. He instinctively puts a high value on what he does not have; not material wealth, to which he attaches little importance, but white skin and light-coloured eyes. This preoccupation is evident in the popular aesthetic’s ideal woman, expressed bluntly in Guaraní; the most desirable woman is kyra, moroti ha haguepa – fat, white and with thick hair.
That, it occurred to me, broadly described the San Marino cigarette girl.
43
THE GUARANÍ HAD, however, survived in their language, as I was often reminded. The strange, bird-like noises chirruped from the radio and jingled on the buses. Politicians made speeches in tweets and growls and commercials went on air in forest sounds. Newspapers ran off long, peculiar rafts of vowels, and menus made themselves giddy with Guaraní. The dishes’ names, it seemed to me, had simply been shredded, whisked around and then sprinkled freely across the page, delicious acrostics and anagrams.
One of the early English visitors to Paraguay, in 1852, had reported back that the natives spoke ‘a very queer gibberish, but not devoid of elegance’. But for the Paraguayans, this ‘gibberish’ is what they hear in their thoughts. Almost the entire country speaks Guaraní – ninety per cent at the last count – and many speak no Spanish. Paraguay is the only truly bilingual country in South America. Spanish may be the official language but Guaraní is the language of love, of the hearth and of friendship.
‘The Paraguayans are the happiest people I have ever met,’ wrote an Argentine journalist, enviously, in 1888. ‘They only become grave and serious when they speak Spanish. Even the educated Paraguayan abandons restraint when he speaks Guaraní.’
Guaraní is also the language of patriotism, and in the Chaco War it had flourished as a sec
ret language on the battlefield. Some war veterans still preferred to speak Guaraní to Spanish, Stroessner being one. Those who followed him, like Lino Oviedo, also used Guaraní – to inflame the populace. But as well as being passionate and superficially unifying, Guaraní is also divisive: it creates a whole class of people excluded from higher opportunities by their ignorance of Spanish. The line between the haves and the have-nots follows a disconcertingly similar course to that between those who can get by in Spanish and those who gibber.
As a language of the forest, Guaraní has retained its vast diversity of names for animals and plants. Some Guaraní words have been swallowed whole by English – examples being ‘capybara’ and ‘coatimundi’. A few have got a little mauled on the way; jagua should have meant ‘dog’ (in Paraguayan Spanish, the confusion is avoided by calling the big cats tigres). As to thousands of other Guaraní names, taxonomists have simply absorbed them into their science.
‘After Latin,’ an Asunción scientist told me, ‘it is the most prevalent – of all the world’s languages – in the scientific naming of organisms.’
Guaraní is rather less elegant, but no less charming, in adapting to the world outside the forest. A watch is literally ‘the gold that counts’, a tape recorder ‘a retainer of words’ and – best of all – a television is ‘a machine that imagines’. Counting too presents problems; there was little need for numeracy in Guaraní culture. Numbers therefore tend to lurch up in handfuls of five or ten (for example, 25 is ‘two of ten and five’). Most people prefer to drop back into Spanish once they get beyond five (po or ‘hand’), or even blend the two. This way, 25 might be cinco po – or five hands.
There was only ever one man who was upset by my failure to master Guaraní, and he was magnificently drunk. He spotted me typing an e-mail to my wife at the Shopping del Sol and swooped across the mall, nose-diving on to the keyboard. My first thoughts were in English.
‘What the fuck,’ I asked, ‘are you doing?’
He glared at me. His first words were in Spanish. They were carried into my face on hot, wet gusts of whisky. ‘Say it in Guaraní!’
With that, he paddled a scaly hand across the keys: se5gmta-e-4386f.
It could have been Guaraní for all I knew. I tried to learn a little and even bought a skinny phrasebook. It had only eighty phrases. As I sat riding the bus out into the Interior, I wondered – grimly – how many of them I’d need.
Ne tú hetapiko nde? Do you have many sandflies?
Some of the phrases might lead me into intriguing and dangerous conversations from which I might never safely extricate myself: Ha oñe’ë, okaurö guáicha. He speaks like he is drunk.
But at least I would know when my position was irretrievable: Pa’i ko hína pe oúva. The priest is on his way.
Eastern Paraguay
It is stated and indeed proved that the Garden of Eden was in this place, in the centre of the new World, the heart of the Indian continent, a real, physical actual place, and that here man was created. Any of these trees might have been the Tree of Life.
Augusto Roa Bastos, Son of Man
Another type of slave is the working-class foreigner who rather than live in wretched poverty at home, volunteers for slavery in Utopia.
Thomas More, Utopia
Some day Paraguay will become the garden of South America.
A.K. MacDonald, Picturesque Paraguay, 1911
44
WHEN IT CAME to finding a map, I was hardly any better prepared for the Interior. The only one I could find in London was an air chart, produced by the US Air Defense Administration. It might have been useful to someone organising an air strike, but not for me. Water featured prominently, but not roads. In some parts it simply blanked out altogether with the words ‘Maximum elevation figures are believed not to exceed 3800 feet.’ Worse still, it was the size of a Persian carpet. I decided to leave it at home with Jayne, chicken-pocked with stickers that gave her clues as to where she might find me – among 407,000 square miles of white space and water. That’s the size of California, or thirteen Belgiums.
‘If you find a better map in Paraguay,’ they said to me at Stanfords the map-sellers, ‘bring us back a dozen copies.’
I didn’t find a better one. The only one I did find had been produced by the Paraguayan military. But their printing machines had been possessed by resentment or forest spirits and the resulting map showed the country in a state of detailed chaos: roads ploughed into rivers and railways shrank away from civilisation; towns were stranded without communications or dumped in swamps; there was often no water in the rivers at all and it was to be found a few millimetres away, wandering around the countryside; worst of all, international borders had leaked into foreign territory, dangerously tempting yet more war. With a little imagination, I hauled Aregua out of Lake Ypacarai and that’s where I went first.
Although Aregua was only twenty-eight kilometres away, it took the bus an hour to unravel itself from Asunción. I studied the pandemonium with guilty fascination. Rubbish bins here were on stalks, to keep their bounty from the dogs. The fickle, runaway packs, meanwhile, grazed the fruit stalls, licking up peel and pools of sticky juice. Chipa sellers, with mountainous baskets of fresh cornbread, urged themselves in among the crocodiles of lorries. We passed a circus – the Circo Latino – with piebald horses and grey dollops of marquee. Then the bus ducked under a crashed aeroplane – an obscure advertisement suspended over the road – and suddenly we were free.
The bus bounded away into the countryside. It was easy to see why the conquistadors had so happily embedded themselves in this landscape. Like their Guaraní girls, it was alluring and blushed, curvaceous and drenchingly fecund. I could never tire of it. It reminded me of so many places – Ireland with the heat turned up, Umbria only bursting with reds and tropical succulents, Brazil expressed in miniature – but in the end the comparisons were absurd; they all needed such radical refinement. I would try, as we bounced along, to linger on the details: farms painted like toys, cattle tethered on the verge, miniature panteóns – monuments to motoring catastrophes – exquisitely coloured and candled, like tiny theatres. Then the bus would be rolled up in a dark weft of forest, held for a moment and then unrolled again in a different world; on grassland perhaps, swashed and billowing all the way to the horizon, or – like now – before the improbable blueness of Lake Ypacarai.
Lucy Yegros had lent me her cottage in Aregua. I don’t think she used it often; it was merely a place of exile for her sculptures, which, she said, her husband hadn’t understood. They made uneasy companions – leering elves, tree spirits and women with fantastically exaggerated genitalia. When the trees creaked at night and rubbed themselves raw on my tin roof, I half-imagined these freaks unlocking themselves and sawing each other up with joyless lust. But when I looked out, there was nothing in the courtyard but the swinging lantern and the shadows of the caricatures, swaying in the wind.
I also suspected these spirits of having an evil effect on the plumbing. Although the cottage was small, there was a Gordian knot of pipework and I could never get the water where I wanted it. There were twenty stopcocks and I tried them in every combination I could think of. Most of the time there was no water at all. Then – occasionally – it would erupt from a water tower and I would have to rush around flinging stopcocks into reverse to bring the deluge under control. Once, I elicited a dribble from the courtyard tap but the pleasure didn’t last; when I went back inside, I found that the main body of water was now gushing through the rafters.
In the end I gave up, turned everything off and went out to eat. There was one restaurant in the town, called Old Vienna. My problems were nothing compared to those of the Austrians who ran it: they’d come to Paraguay twenty-six years before – for reasons they couldn’t remember – and were now too poor to go home. They hadn’t, however, forgotten the art of making food taste Germanic, and every night, I had to work my way through a hummock of gravied meat, nestled in a soggy marsh of cabb
age. I was their only customer.
Despite the goblins and the haunted waterworks, I was very fond of the cottage. It stood at the top of Lake Avenue, a steep, cobbled street that ran down to the shore. All the houses, including the cottage, dated from the seventeenth century and had been the homes of gentry, cattle breeders and cigar-makers. They were single-storey buildings with deep verandas and rattan chairs and gardens that could barely restrain their great bouquets of ferns.
The house opposite had once been the Bar San Carlos. The owner, Carlos, had been a resplendent host, according to Lucy, and was famous for his scrambled eggs and for dying of Aids. In better days, Graham Greene had stayed there and I tried to imagine him sitting on the terrace opposite me, ploughing through the meaning of evil and love and drawing Aregua into his troubled Greeneland. ‘I came to Paraguay by a writer’s instinct,’ he once wrote. Had he found what he was looking for? In Travels With my Aunt, it may be that all the disparate threads of his anxieties met at a single point: a land that was comical and shamelessly immoral, a place of ‘sweet orange blossom’ and goose-stepping soldiers (‘Very peaceful,’ my Aunt said. ‘Only an occasional gunshot after dark’) and where the Chief of Customs was also the worst of the smugglers. Had he been happy in Paraguay? Greene would probably have had difficulty in identifying any single moment in his life as properly happy, but I like to think that in the heady, crumbling charm of Aregua, he found a little solace.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 17