At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  Further on, down next to the railway station, were the later villas of the Italians who’d settled here in the 1890s. Some had prospered and built themselves scaled-down castles and palaces that reminded them of the landlords they’d fled – and wanted to be – in Piedmont and Liguria. Many were now abandoned or, like the Castillo Carlota Palmerola, which had once been white, were sleepy with heavy green mould. The orchids and Lady of the Forest, once trained to delight, now rose up as conquerors. Swimming pools had long ago stopped struggling and had become exotic lagoons of emerald lilies and deep green neglect. The little bridge that led to the villas had collapsed, and so now the only visitors down here were the curious and the furtive. I clambered back, along the overgrown street, to the railway station.

  The last train had ground out of here only two months ago and the station cat still sat on the platform, gazing up the track. The last goods waggon was now snuggled deeply into its siding. Its axles had been rapidly colonised with weeds. The inside too had been eagerly colonised – by an Indian and her noisy family. She looked like the Old Woman that lived in the Shoe, children sprouting from every chink in her home.

  ‘Is it a good home?’ I asked her.

  ‘Of course, it is high and very dry up here. And I have electricity!’ She pointed at a wire that was nailed to her roof and which dog-legged its way off into the jungle.

  At the top end of Lake Avenue was the church of Aregua. Like many Paraguayan churches, it was solid and squat and surrounded on each side by deep, cool arcades that shaded its walls from the summer sun. There was a halo of lightbulbs round the altar and – all day long – a rasping sound as a gnarly brush and a gnarly devotee scraped away at the flags. Behind the church was the Town Square, walled in on three sides by low buildings with heavy pantiled roofs and deep colonnades of stores and snuggeries. This square was once the site of an extraordinary ball, held in August 1881 by an Englishman called Edward Frederick Knight.

  The story of how he ended up in Aregua is one of courage and eccentricity.

  Edward Knight was a barrister with a head full of adventures and little appetite for the law. Like me, he practised at the Inns of Court in London, and like me, an unseen hand plucked him from his sensible work and sent him off to Paraguay. Our adventures, however, unfolded in very different ways.

  To get to South America, Knight needed a boat and a crew. His Cornish fishing lugger was hardly ideal for the southern oceans – or the great Paraná and Paraguay rivers – but Knight adored it and renamed it The Falcon. He knew nothing about sailing but persuaded Arthur Jerdein – who was an officer on a packet – to join him on the adventure. As to the remainder of the crew, there were two more barristers – Messrs Andrews and Arnaud – both of whom were as feckless as their captain when it came to matters of the sea. Various cooks were also supposed to accompany them, but when they saw the crew, they reneged on their contracts and fled. At the last minute, a homeless waif called Arthur Cotton, who’d been wandering the docks at Southampton, was recruited as a cabin boy.

  Knight was unsure what to expect when he got to Paraguay. He took his copy of Westward Ho! and read it on the voyage. It didn’t seem to trouble him that Charles Kingsley had never actually been there, but he was mindful of the need for care. A brass swivel-gun was mounted on the prow of The Falcon, capable of delivering devastating fusillades of grape and canister if the excursion ran into difficulty. As an extra precaution, the barristers also armed themselves with cutlasses and the latest in Martini-Henry rifles. Finally, they recruited a kitten, but it got no further than Cape Finisterre before it abandoned all hope. As Europe slipped away, it jumped overboard.

  The kitten’s pessimism proved misplaced, and after two months’ sailing, The Falcon made it to Brazil in October 1880. There, Mr Andrews, who the others now considered to be a milksop and a dandy, deserted them and returned to his sensible life. The others carried on, and by early 1881, they were in Buenos Aires.

  They had to wait two months before the river was high enough to sail upstream. To pass the time, the crew rode around Argentina dressed in ponchos and cartridge belts. Knight delighted in everything he found: the bullfight which left fourteen horses disembowelled, the stocks where criminals were held upside down, and the railways run by Irishmen who’d run away. On the way back to Buenos Aires, he bought a puma to amuse them on the voyage, but – when they set sail – it became unruly and had to be shot.

  It took them ninety-one days to sail up to Asunción, and they survived on the game that they caught on the way. Knight relished his new diet.

  ‘A dish of young monkeys,’ he wrote, ‘is not to be despised by anyone.’

  The Falcon arrived in Paraguay in the aftermath of its great war. Despite the destruction, the crew were deeply impressed by ‘the country of women’. It was, said Edward Knight, ‘a very fairyland of romance’. Naturally, the Englishmen were delighted by the attentions of the ‘statuesque beauties’ who now outnumbered men by ten to one. The Argentines had warned them of the Paraguayas’ enthusiasm for dances, and so Knight’s crew had arrived with a hurdy-gurdy. Everywhere they went they threw balls, but the greatest of these was to be in Aregua. In mid-August 1881, they took the dawn train out to the lake town, loaded with their music, beer and several demijohns of wine.

  *

  Every hour or so, a thin metallic carillon was tapped from the church belfry. In Knight’s time, the carillon had been rung by two naked boys who scrambled up there ‘to ring the bells in most energetic style’. Now their work was done by a computer, the unwelcome innovation of the last priest – Lucy’s cousin. The machine was loathed – a constant intrusion in the town’s sleep – and had eventually cost the priest his living. The people of Aregua disliked being reminded that time was moving on.

  Many of those who lived up here, near the square, were potters. They lived in little cottages next to their alfarerías – or kilns. There was a cup-tree at each door and a smaller clay oven for baking chipa and roasting slabs of beef. The smoke from the kilns was sweet and woody and seeped downhill through the trees. Each morning, ox-carts laden with firewood heaved themselves up Lake Avenue, past my door, to restock the fires, as they’d done for the last four hundred years.

  Sadly, tradition had not survived in the work of the potters. There were a few pots and wood spirits – with astonished vaginas and stumpy penises – but the rest was kitsch. The roadsides were four-deep in Father Christmases and Winnie the Poohs. There were hundreds of thousands of cold, ceramic Dalmatians and whole piggeries of money-boxes, all pink and vaguely obscene.

  When the Falcon crew arrived, they were greeted off the train by a dozen portresses who carried their liquor up Lake Avenue to the square. A spare house was found among the colonnades and hung with clean hammocks.

  In honour of the foreigners’ arrival, the local priest got extravagantly drunk and publicly announced that he’d be unable to open the church for the duration of their stay. He was a fat old Indian who wore a dog-collar with a broad-brimmed hat and no boots. He lent the church collections out at an extortionate sixty per cent and delivered his sermons in slurred Guaraní. The only Spanish that he could ever remember were the names of beers, but his parrot had a repertoire of indecencies and blasphemies which were screeched across the square. He’d also taught it to imitate the wailing of women at funerals and the mumblings of the Latin mass. Whenever his high spirits overwhelmed him, the priest was heaved into his hammock and rocked into a crapulous slumber by his squall of grimy children.

  The ladies cleared the largest room on the square for the ball. They covered the mud floor with Aregua’s most luxurious piece of carpet and hung the walls with petroleum lamps and Chinese lanterns. When everything was ready, fireworks were blasted over the town, ‘for this,’ observed Knight, ‘is the Paraguayan way of issuing invitations’.

  All night, the Englishmen danced. But they were not enough for the women, who mostly had to dance among themselves. ‘It was curious,’ said Knight, ‘to se
e a girl and her partner puffing away at their long cigars across each other’s shoulders while waltzing vigorously.’ Knight found himself with the belle of the ball, a lady ‘who gloried in the possession of boots and a golden comb’.

  The next day, the priest refused to let his Englishmen leave without attending the feast of Santa Rosa, a picnic held outside the town. Knight agreed, sharing a horse with the lady with the boots. A cart of beer led the procession, followed by Santa Rosa, decked out in parrot feathers and humming-birds. They didn’t go far and the day was spent at cock-fighting and sortija, a sport still popular in Paraguay today; a hoop the size of a wedding ring is planted in the ground and lancers scoop it up on their lanzas, riding at full tilt. Paraguayans excel at it – even, apparently, after a day of rum and cock-fighting.

  At midday, the party had lunch. ‘Our meal was a luxurious one,’ recalled Knight, ‘chipa, roast parrots and stewed iguana or lizard being a few of the many delicacies that were spread before us.’

  The ladies did not eat with the English guests but stood behind their chairs, feeding them delicate morsels on their forks. The priest was also unable to eat with them as he’d drunk himself into a state of imbecility.

  The women of the place [noted Knight] had tucked his fat carcase into a hammock and were engaged in fanning his apoplectic-looking visage. Women in all lands show affection for the ministers of the Church but the devotion of the Paraguayan women towards their pastors out-does anything in the way of curate worship at home. It was very sad to observe what a lot these kindly girls made of that horrid old man.

  As he lay in his cups, a boy crawled into the shed. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘may I have a blessing?’

  The priest swore at him. ‘Not today!’ he slushed. ‘Not today, those farces! Tomorrow; today is Santa Rosa and I am drunk – very drunk!’

  That evening, the lovely ladies came down to the station to see the Englishmen off, on a train bound for Asunción. There were flowers and plenty of tears and then the train was gone. Within a fortnight, The Falcon had sailed, leaving for ever the Land of Women. But for two of the Argonauts, it was also to be their Land of Sirens – they were unable to tear themselves away; Jerdein abandoned his dreary life on the packets, and Arnaud threw in his practice at the bar, to live in Paraguay.

  Of the original crew, only Knight and Arthur Cotton set sail for home. After its journey of 22,000 miles, The Falcon had to be abandoned in Barbados, when Knight was called back on urgent business. He completed his journey by steamer, rounding Hartland Point exactly eighteen months after he’d left. He’d always intended to return to Barbados to collect The Falcon and sail her home, but four years later, she was smashed to pieces in a hurricane.

  It was not the end of Knight’s adventures. He never went back to the bar. He became a war correspondent and galloped off to wherever there was trouble: the Hunza-Nagar campaign, Matabeleland, Madagascar, Sudan, Cuba and many others. His right arm was shot off at Belmont, in the Boer War, but it didn’t stop him. Two years later, he sailed round the world in the Ophir. Next, he served with the Russians in the Japanese war of 1904, and later rushed home for the Great War, throwing himself into the Royal Navy. His adventures only ended in July 1925 when death finally caught up with him.

  He was buried in Putney, London, a mile from where he’d been born, seventy-three turbulent years before.

  45

  ON THE OTHER side of Lake Ypacarai was San Bernardino. One day – an icy day when the wind sliced in from the south – I took a bus around the shoreline to pay it a visit. There were only two other passengers: a woman with hundreds of empty yellow plastic bottles tied up in a sausage of netting, and a soldier in ceremonial dress. He had a dagger with an eagle-head handle swinging at his hip and a blue stripe speeding down his uniform. As the bus wheeled and banked around the lake, the yellow sausage burst and we arrived in San Bernardino with the cold and the bottles swirling round our feet.

  Everything was still shut for winter. It was a summer resort for rich Asunceños, and now the sailing boats were pulled up on the beach and the pier was shut. There were villas along the shore and tennis clubs and camping sites for Baptists. Stroessner had had a lake-house here and so had Samoza, guarded by his apes in speedboats. But all was clammed up now and nothing moved except the gardeners, brushing winter into their smoky fires.

  Towards the centre of the town were alpine chalets and stern, stony flanks of Bavarian architecture. There were bierstubes and a miniaturised rathaus made of softwood and corrugated iron. Hugo Bottner’s factory had long since ceased to be a place of ‘Carpentry and Steam’, but other businesses had survived, defiantly German: the Schulz Mercedes dealership and the place where I had breakfast, all kaffee and Viennese cakes. San Bernardino was established by German colonists in 1881.

  ‘We called it New Bavaria for a while,’ a man had told me at the café, in his lugubrious Spanish. ‘But later it was renamed, after the Paraguayan president, General Bernardino Caballero.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  He thought about it for a moment. ‘I think he put the road in,’ he smiled. ‘Without it, we were just a few German hicks stuck up here in the hills.’

  Silvia’s great-grandfather would have been delighted; his name carried into posterity by twelve mistresses, forty children and now a little German city. But the pioneers, too, were delighted with their home from home. They built their chalets and a German club – the Deutsche Verein – and gave the streets their throaty, guttural names. Others came out to join them, and after the Great War there were more, from Tanganika and Sudetenland. The rate of immigration was torrential and San Bernardino took its share. Even today, over 100,000 Paraguayans can claim German ancestry – or one in every fifty-five of the population.

  Although the Club had long ago burnt down, much of the paraphernalia of colonial lives had survived elsewhere: ugly oak chairs at the sailing club and – in a museum – their china and their photographs. Most of the pictures were of wasp-waisted ladies with hunting rifles and of young Germans marching off to fight Bolivia, in 1932. One – my favourite – had Nurse Hilda Ingenohl in Red Cross uniform, deep in the Chaco War, a young ocelot cradled in her arms. There was all the civic livery too; of the town’s thirty-two presidents, only five, I noticed, hadn’t had German names.

  I wasn’t sure that I liked San Bernardino. Perhaps I ought to have done; it was prim and scrubbed and stiff with pride. Perhaps I’d just come on the wrong sort of day. The damp and the smoke held the place in a grizzled embrace and the turgid architecture and the bolted doors left me anchored in deep disappointment. Surely the colonists had wanted more than this, an ersatz alpine resort seeping nostalgia? They’d have loathed the flashy riff-raff that came down here in the summer to churn up the lake with their wet-bikes. And what would they have made of ‘Crazy Pizza’? Or the casino – a ‘dollar-wash’ – now steeped in cobwebs and debt? When a pretty ginger spaniel was run over in front of me, I think I must have caught a little of its outrage. It lay in the road, astonished at a life snuffed out on such a promising walk, barked twice and died.

  I walked back towards the lake, along Weiler Street. Bobby Weiler had been the town president from 1931 to 1934, and at the end of his street was his father’s rambling creation, the Lake Hotel. It was built on a bluff slightly above the lake and surrounded by lawns of long wet grass and heavy, dripping trees. It had white walls and dark green shutters, two floors of verandas, Romanesque columns and gothic windows. There was a brick terrace at the back, overlooking the lake and a swimming pool that was now a soup of leaves and old chairs.

  Although it was shut and workmen were shovelling dust out of a window, I went in and crunched across the front hall. All the old Weiler furniture was draped in dust sheets and an electrician was crumbling the ceiling with a crowbar. I crossed into the dining room. The chairs that had come out with settlers were heaped in the middle of the room, bearded in dust. I thought I smelt cooking and picked my way along cavernous corridors
, hung with servants’ bells to the kitchens. It took me a moment to get used to the dark, but then gradually, intriguingly, the details of the late nineteenth century unblacked themselves in front of me: zinc game cupboards, a stone scullery, marble pastry tops and an ‘Alexanderwerk’ mincer, now spotted with age. A fire was glowing in the range and, very softly, a figure stepped into its orange halo. I saw a pair of feet in slippers and then a glint of gold teeth.

  ‘I’m the housekeeper,’ she said. ‘Are you looking for something?’

  I was. The Lake Hotel had been the scene of a strange and sordid incident on 3 June 1889. In fact, it could justly claim to have played a small but decisive role in the disastrous pre-history of German fascism. It came about when the hotel provided rooms to a remarkable – and unequivocally repellent – individual, a white supremacist who’d come to South America with the single intention of breeding his type. His name was Dr Bernhard Förster.

  Förster’s attempt to establish a master race in Paraguay is brilliantly autopsied in Ben MacIntyre’s Forgotten Fatherland. The story is hardly edifying and is certainly not the obituary that Förster would have wanted.

  Bernhard Förster was born in Berlin on 31 March 1843. From an early age, he busied himself with the torment of others until, in his mid-thirties, he found a vessel for his inexplicable loathings: the Jews. He was a doctor of philosophy, but by ranting dangerously on the Jewish Threat, he’d thrown away his teaching post. With time on his hands, he cooked up his hatred. Sometimes it over-boiled; on at least one occasion he simply flung himself at people whose Jewishness upset him. The worst occasion was in 1880, when he was arrested and fined for mauling a Jew on a tram.

  Within a few years he’d got his most violent impulses under control and had organised his prejudices into an ugly political movement. Anti-Semitism was leavened with anti-vivisection, anti-inoculation and passionate vegetarianism. To complete the picture, he squashed himself into an undersized frock-coat, in the belief that it made him loom a little larger, and grew his beard like a biblical prophet. With a German Iron Cross pinned on his lapel, he set out to raise the rabble, booming hatred all over Berlin. He called his party Deutscher Volksverein – the German People’s Party. It and its unlovely successors were to prove themselves persistently troublesome over the next sixty-five years of German politics.