‘Paraguay,’ he wrote on arrival, ‘is the most interesting, loveliest, pleasantest country in the world.’
After a month, he was bored. ‘I have lived a very monotonous life, without any incidents to make it worthwhile to keep a journal.’
Wearily, he wrote down anything that vaguely intrigued him: the priests smoked big cigars; the only amusement was in making house-calls; there was lots of red hair; the cathedral choristers spat at each other across the aisle; the Payaguá women were distinguishable from the Paraguayan women by their ‘extreme hideousness’; there were only four Englishmen in Asunción. Poor Mansfield drank away his last few weeks aboard a British warship, the first in Paraguay, and then went home. The task of editing his lovable ramblings fell to his friend, the writer Charles Kingsley.
Although Kingsley was never able to make much of Mansfield’s jottings, he nursed them through to publication. More importantly, Mansfield’s wanderings provided inspiration for Kingsley’s own work; three years later he produced Westward Ho!. Although, strictly, it was a swashbuckling adventure on the Spanish Main, Kingsley strained the plot a little with a short, freshly painted glimpse of Paraguay. The effect on Victorian readers was startling. The image of a ‘fair land’, a lost Eden, was back, embedded in the public perception. Even G.K. Chesterton, writing at the end of this period, identified Paraguay with the earthly Utopia:
Ye bade the Red Man rise like the Red Clay
Of God’s great Adam in his human right,
Till trailed the snake of our trade, our own time’s blight,
And man lost Paradise in Paraguay.
For some, it was not enough to see Kingsley’s prose swinging around the page. They had to be there. Edward Knight was not the first traveller to arrive in Paraguay with a well-thumbed Westward Ho!. When a group of Australian socialists arrived in the country in 1893, searching for Utopia, Kingsley’s book was one of the few that accompanied them. It was not only their inspiration, it was their guide; they had little clue as to what else to expect.
But perhaps the greatest work of English literature to be set in this region was yet to come. It would be inspired by the dreadful catastrophes that befell Paraguay in the second half of the nineteenth century. This time, the perception would shift the other way; whilst still the land of the Improbable, Paraguay would no longer be Paradise but Purgatory – torrid, amoral and despairing. The book would be Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.
The curator told me that Dr Francia’s house was acquired by Stroessner. It was no surprise that Stroessner compared himself with El Supremo – nor was it any surprise that he hated others to make this comparison. When Roa Bastos published his Francia burlesque, I the Supreme, in 1974, Stroessner felt a stab of mockery and had it banned. Roa Bastos was exiled for life.
I asked the curator when the government had acquired the house.
‘We didn’t buy it,’ he said, and embarked on a story about the previous owner, Velasquez, who’d dithered over the sale and then lost his papers. ‘Without his papers,’ he crowed, triumphantly, ‘we were able to say to him “On your way, Velasquez! Hop it!” – and that’s how we got it.’
It was, I suppose, brute power wittily applied. Francia’s entire regime had been about demanding surrender. That, by 1840, is what he got. Things might have worked out well but for the fact that – when he died – Francia delivered his cowed and dangerously obedient nation straight into the hands of those who were bound to abuse it.
The López dynasty.
50
THE WAR CAME – as it inevitably would – but rather earlier than Francisco López had hoped for.
The immediate causes of the conflict were obscure, but once the four newly fledged nations had committed several hundred thousand men to the meat-grinder, they didn’t seem to matter much anyway. Some say that Francisco, still smarting at the Emperor’s refusal to hand over his daughter, was champing to blast away at Brazil, and that any excuse would do. Some saw it as part of a wider demand by López for ‘respect and attention’, the twin peaks of his majestic folly. Others weren’t prepared to blame Paraguay at all.
Even now, Paraguayans often see the causes as foreign, and trawl the improbable for explanations. ‘It was all started by the British,’ one man told me (on a bus). ‘Paraguay refused to sell them cotton cheaply. They took revenge by destroying the country. That’s how it happened.’
Others accuse Paraguay’s neighbours of plotting to carve her up amongst themselves. The difficulty with this is that the Allies – Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina – were traditionally enemies and were caught wholly unprepared in their war against Paraguay.
Besides, it was always Paraguay that made the first move. In December 1864, López grabbed the remote Brazilian province of Matto Grosso (it was so remote that news of its capture took a month to reach Rio de Janeiro). When Buenos Aires objected to his trespassing, López simply captured Corrientes and two Argentine gunboats. His declaration of war (conveniently lost in the post) followed a week later, in February 1865. Within the space of a few months, López had made enemies of his three old friends and had united three enemies as The Triple Alliance. In diplomacy, he’d shown himself to be little more than the sweaty, ham-fisted oaf that he was. He now had the next five pitiful years to demonstrate his imbecility in warfare.
Whatever the cause, the mouse had roared. There were barely 1,300,000 Paraguayans compared to ten million Brazilians. Brazil was the second largest empire in the world, and – in theory – her National Guard outnumbered the entire population of Paraguay.
But the contest was not as unequal as it first appeared; in the previous six months, López had drilled 65,000 men and (if he counted all old men and boys) he could raise 100,000 troops. The Argentine regular army was only 6,000 strong and was scattered through its untamed provinces. Had López faced them alone, his loopy fantasies might just have prevailed. Instead, he was already committed to tussling with the mighty Brazilians, who were now steaming up the Paraná in their impressive fleet of ironclads.
Another problem for López was that events had unfolded sooner than he’d expected. Although his men were ready, quivering with obedience and desperate to die for their republic, the arms were not. López had ordered massive consignments of modern weapons from London, but they hadn’t arrived and the Allies now had the country under siege. Paraguay would have to cook up its own weapons, and by the end her troopers would find themselves facing the latest technology – Krupps’ rifled artillery and Whitworth shells – with wooden cannon, spears and pieces of glass.
Initially, López was buoyed by his successes – even though his enemies hadn’t even been on a war footing. Paraguay had captured enough gunpowder to sustain it throughout the war and was ecstatic. López announced two months of victory balls and circuses. He appointed himself Mariscal and Congress meekly conferred upon him a diamond-encrusted baton, at a cost of $30,000. Madame Lynch was to be honoured with a coronet in the style of the Empress Josephine. She then further enraged the First Ladies by inviting whores to the victory balls and by relieving every lady of her jewellery – in the name of patriotism. It wasn’t entirely clear how she intended to turn the jewels to her besieged country’s advantage, but her supporters generously assumed that Paraguayan cannon were nine parts iron and one part gold.
Then the fantasy began to crumble.
López’s Argentine campaign quickly fell apart due to his curly strategies. His invasion of Río Grande was totally unsupported, and when his army was split by a river, the two disembodied flanks were picked off piecemeal and 12,000 men were lost. At Riachuelo, he threw his precious wooden gunboats against the ironclads, and although the Paraguayans and their English engineers fought with wincing courage, they were mashed. It didn’t help that they’d not been supplied with grappling hooks and were therefore never able to exploit the Paraguayan gift of bravery. Five ships and ten barges were lost. Modest though the losses may seem, the battle is still regarded as the greatest-ever riverine enga
gement in the history of naval warfare.
It is an honour that López’s commander, Robles, could have done without. He ordered a retreat, and for his cowardice was hauled against a wall and shot. From now on, everything that López did was tainted with desperation.
In April 1866, a year into the war, the Allies – in sluggish pursuit – crossed the Paraná into Paraguay. But the country was like a great inverted bottle, naturally impenetrable on all sides except upwards, through the neck. To get to the interior, the Allies would have to force their way up the Río Paraguay, but there – in the bottleneck – stood Humaitá, ‘the Sebastapol of South America’.
All the armies converged on Humaitá, and that’s where I went next.
51
IT TOOK ME eight hours to get from the central highlands down to Humaitá.
At first the bus was full, so I took the only seat left, by the lavatory. The lock kept jamming, and as I released people, I got to know nearly everyone on the bus. At the very first wail I was up tugging at the door, and then, with a loud pop, imprisonment would be over and a hundred and fifty pounds of panic would bowl me backwards into my seat. The reaction of the detainees was puzzling. Where I come from, people in this situation would extract themselves from each other with paddling apologies and plenty of pinkish giggling. Not here. People gathered themselves up with yellowing suspicion. Perhaps they thought I was playing some nasty foreign joke on them? One lady, who was magnificently bosomed in turquoise satin, stabbed a short brown finger at me.
‘It’s not safe,’ she snorted. ‘I could have been in there for hours.’
Looking back on it, this was the first and last time that I ever saw anger in Paraguay. Every other indignity had been borne without words, without faces, without any expression at all. That always surprised me in a country where people were – apparently – so eloquent with their knives.
I was able to forgive the angry lady. Her indignity and panic must have been unbearable; as she lurched back to her seat, I noticed that parts of her magnificent underwear were still trying to escape, over the waistband of her skirt. A little girl two rows ahead of her was unable to stomach the prospect of incarceration in the privy. In fact she was unable to stomach anything at all. She was colourfully sick in the aisle. As we dipped and looped through the cordillera, an orange swell lapped backwards and forwards like the tide.
At some point an artilleryman got on board. He was very young, cropped and athletic and wore olive-green breaches tucked into jackboots. There was something about him that was oddly heroic and beckoned an early tragedy. He might have been a nineteenth-century statue to Patriotism except it wasn’t carnage swirling around his heels but unstomached orangeade. He fixed his gaze on the road ahead, and then, when an artillery base appeared, he swaggered off. His comrades were posted around the camp perimeter with gas-capes and rifles. It was as if an attack was imminent. The army, it seemed, was unable to shrug off its conviction that an old-fashioned war was about to re-erupt.
Once again I settled into a rhythm. I decided I liked what I’d seen of the rural Paraguayans, despite their determined suspicion. Perhaps it was this that attracted me most of all. Their intense privacy, their quaint military costumes, their inexplicable emotions – it all made them so amenable to make-believe. Deep down, I was appalled by my reaction – it seemed so superficial – but I couldn’t help inventing lives for my fellow-passengers. There was of course the heroic bombardier and the lady with the migrating knickers. Then behind me were two cowboys in sombreros and whiskers and gun-belts bobbled with shiny bullets. I placed them on the outer limits of lawfulness. Right at the back was an old woman with brilliant blue slavic eyes. She wore a head-scarf and had a large home-made cigar clamped in her gums. I decided that every male in her ancestry had met an early and unjust death wherever their migrations had ended.
Make-believe scenery tickled these fantasies along. At first we rolled through woodlands of feathery grey-green trees and pink lapacho. Then, at the edge of the cordillera, the bus tumbled through an outlandish rock-garden of brilliant red fissures and finger-like projections, all nuzzled in luxurious clumps of tropical greenery. There were mountain streams glittering among the rocks, and bathing spots and paddocks of crimson ant-hills and ragwort. Then suddenly the garden was gone and we double-jolted across the disused railway into the flatlands of the south. There was Paraguarí, with its cobbled plaza and its market of plastic footballs and straw hats, and then we were in the swamps.
It took nearly all day to cross the swamps, or esteros. At first, in the north, the horizon was toothed with pale volcanic cones, but as we moved south, there was nothing but the curve of the planet. The road, no more than a ridge of banked sand mounted with asphalt, launched itself directly south into the submerged grass and the emptiness. Where the land was at its lowest, tiny lines of cattle nosed their way through the water, whipped along by leathery horsemen. Where it was raised a few inches above the surroundings, trees seeded the drier soil and packed themselves together in dark, cramped tufts. They looked like islands, but the swamp-dwellers, who had no concept of altitude, had long ago named them the montes, literally ‘the mountains’. Apart from telegraph wire which looped from one crooked stump to another, there was no other sign of human life. Oddly, however, death was often bleakly present: tidy clusters of pink and yellow tombs, set back from the road. After a life spent waist-deep in mud, the estancieros would at last find themselves blissfully submerged in it.
By the time the bus reached Pilar, there were few other passengers left. One by one they’d asked to be let off in the esteros. I imagined that they’d seen the colour of the grass subtly change or had recognised a particular post and had then known that they were home. I turned and watched them shrink to a shadow, then a speck, then vanish. Everything I’d dreamed up about them now seemed rather inadequate.
No one was going beyond Pilar to Humaitá. There were no buses until the next day. I was slightly surprised. Humaitá was the scene of the greatest siege in Latin American history. It was the seat of perhaps the bloodiest conflict that modern man has known; eighty per cent of all Paraguayans perished, dwarfing even Poland’s Second World War losses (twenty-two per cent of population). For Paraguayans, Humaitá was the crucible of their heroism and everybody had an ancestor buried in its sand. I was surprised that no one ever seemed to go there any more.
An awkward thought occurred to me.
‘Is there a hotel in Humaitá?’ I asked one of the mercantes. He had a tray of daggers and plastic robots in front of him.
‘No,’ he said after some elaborate thinking, ‘there isn’t.’
‘What about here?’
He peered down Pilar’s main street as if for the first time in his life. I followed his gaze along a scrape of grey, furrowed sand, past grey, caked cars to a slab of grey lodgings. The only colour I could see was a poster: TOGETHER WE CAN BEAT MALARIA AND DENGUE. I hardly felt equal to the challenge. My optimism had evaporated. I decided to get a taxi the remaining thirty miles to Humaitá.
The taxi had all its windows darkened with blue plastic. It was like climbing into a small, self-contained twilight. The little box of captured nightfall was even well attended by mosquitoes. As I offered my juicy limbs to the darkness, they rose in a joyous cloud, each gnashing and thrumming with greed.
‘Are these dengue mosquitoes?’
‘Dengue mosquitoes,’ began a lugubrious voice somewhere out to the front, ‘are big and black and very stupid.’
Although I could only see the mosquitoes in silhouette, I was sure that they were big and black. ‘Are these the stupid ones?’
I saw an eye leering into the mirror. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think they are.’
It was, I suppose, the commercial answer. Thrashing myself wildly, I urged the driver on to Humaitá. Then I opened all the windows and dawn spread throughout the Toyota. The mosquitoes vanished and the grey, sandy road turned white again.
My contentment was restored
. Again, the track followed a thin ridge through the lagoons and the montes. Cattle egrets were skimming over the esteros and a stork took off with a tiny snake in its mouth. The sand was deeper here, and we slewed and yawed along the track like a drunk. We passed some Indians washing their clothes in the swamp and a cyclist grinding up the sand in his cogs. He had a rifle slung across the handlebars and a spoonbill slung over his back. Absently, I waved at him, but the look he returned was one of assessment, as if I were a portent of murky weather.
The Paraguayan army had marched down this same track 136 years before me. They too must have made a curious sight. Each soldier wore white with a scarlet camiseta faced in blue. They were all barefoot – except the cavalry – and some shouldered old English ‘Brown Besses’, stamped ‘Tower of London’. Others had only knives or lanzas. Every man wore a leather kepi in which he kept his comb, cigars, matches and a needle for stitching up his wounds.
Behind came Mariscal López’s personal escort in dandy Parisian uniforms. They were known as the Ácá-carayá – ‘the monkey-heads’ – because their leather helmets were topped with brass and trimmed with black monkey tails. López usually rode among them – until he became too fat to ride – in a spiffy royal-blue cloak embroidered with gold oak leaves. His men called him Taitá Guasú (‘Big Daddy’) but he of course preferred to think of himself as Napoleon Bonaparte.
Although much imagination had gone into the soldiers’ uniforms, little thought had been given to their diet. Most men were unused to meat but were expected to survive on chaqui – strips of blackened, dry beef – and for many this simply brought on long, candid bouts of diarrhoea. Others tried to freshen up their diet by shooting whatever moved on the swamps – egrets, alligators, ducks and frogs. They devised a means of loading their weapons with nails and pieces of scrap, so that by the time the fighting started, there was hardly a gun left with any rifling.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 22