At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  The problem of food was partially solved by the cavalry, whose horses were so honey-combed with bone disease that – after the first pitiful lance charges – they were diced up and fed to the troopers.

  52

  AFTER AN HOUR, the taxi lurched over the long ripple of sand that was all that remained of the outer trenches. ‘Welcome to the Heroic City of Humaitá’ said a sign, but there was nothing there. The track simply curled away into the grass and cactus. Then, after more slewing and retching of sand, the track uncurled itself and bolted straight for the Río Paraguay. In the verges were the shacks and cottages of the Humaitá that had survived – all that remained of a fortress that had been a mile long, three miles wide and home to 24,000 skinny troops.

  Although I was to become fond of this relic of nineteenth-century warfare, it is almost easier to think of Humaitá in terms of what it wasn’t rather than what it was. There were no cars, no trucks, no children and no sounds but for the river and the birds. There was no glass in the windows and no stone on the paths. The horses grazed without boundaries on great scrapes of spiky emerald grass, on the football pitch and on the Square of the Heroes. There was no rubbish, no advertisements, no writing, no frivolity. Boisterous gardens of sunflowers and dahlias were restrained by neat, white picket-fences. No one looked up as we passed, no one knew if the village had a hotel and no one had shoes.

  ‘I’ll leave you at the shop,’ said the taxi-driver. I could tell that he resented the sand and the strain on his engine.

  We churned on, down the last half-mile towards the river. There were other shops along the way: a sewing machine clacking busily in a dark doorway; a cave of unguents and potions; a bicycle-man with a tray of parts but nothing to ride.

  The river widened in our strange blue windscreen. It would not be long before the Río Paraguay lost itself for ever at its confluence with the Río Paraná. After its magnificent south-bound roll, 1,700 kilometres down from Brazil, it seemed to have made one last effort to save itself and to loop north again. On the outer curve of its hopeless U-turn stood Humaitá. Half a mile away across the water was the fearsome Chaco desert. There was still nothing there – just a tangle of reeds and thorn. The Chaco had played little part in the siege; it’d still been dangerously infested with Guaycurú tribesmen. For a while, the Brazilians tried to recruit them, but the Guaycurú would not be owned; they sold their new weapons to the Paraguayans and then returned to the Brazilians for their scalps.

  ‘This is the shop,’ said the driver.

  The taxi slumped into the sand, a short distance from the waterfront. The sun was scattered across the water and brilliant shivers of light escaped into the trees and played among the dark silhouettes of cattle on the shoreline. Long-tailed swallows scribbled their whirling crescents in the blue, all gone before the ink was dry. I paid the driver, and in a glorious cumulo-nimbus of dust, he flogged his taxi back to Pilar.

  The shop was one of several buildings on the waterfront, all rebuilt some thirty years after the siege. Each was single storey with a pantile roof, lolloping plaster scrolls and curly neurotic ironwork. The shop was beginning to crumble away. The split-palm rafters were unscabbing themselves from the ceiling and the termites had undermined the floor so industriously that it now lunged dangerously towards its customers. Although it was a barn of a place, it was cluttered with the wreckage of the last hundred years: three bony bicycles, an antique motorbike, two billiard tables stacked with cement and a Christmas tree trimmed with steel wool and cobwebs. The cabinets around the walls had once been glass-fronted, but much of the glass had gone now and the shelves were silted up with dust and sand. I would often have to wait some time for the old shopkeepers to emerge from their slit in the shelving, but I didn’t mind. It gave my eyes a chance to forage among the shelves, enjoying all the unwanted stock of the shopkeepers’ blunt, unprosperous lives: grimy bottles of ‘Golden Drops’ rum, holsters, whips, rodent traps, cakes with crusts of dark fur and bread rolls heaped up like cobbles.

  She was grey with pain and he was purple with drink.

  ‘I’m not well,’ she’d creak whenever I came in. I soon realised that her only hope was that one day a stranger would walk in with a diagnosis. Until then, she – like nine-tenths of Paraguayans – couldn’t expect to benefit from any healthcare at all. It was small wonder that, in such a place, symptoms were allowed to develop from merely life-threatening to spectacular. Crónica had recently run a horrid front page about a woman in Guairá who’d just been detached from a seven-kilogram tumour.

  There was no help to be had from the husband. He only appeared at the slit when he wife rasped for him to fetch something down or to open the money drawer. His flesh was as plush and liquid as sausage, and a little medallion winked among the cushions of his chest as he barrelled around the shop. There was something unpleasantly comical about him. In his rotting shop, ravaged by termites and drink, he was a source of Micawberish, quite unjustified optimism: the motorbike would run again and the billiard tables would soon be busy with sport; he invented buses back to Asunción and dreamed up delicious breakfasts which, on the table, turned to mould and cups of gluey grey milk. As I never knew their real names, I came to think of the shopkeepers as the Micawbers.

  ‘Is there a hotel here?’ I asked them.

  Another brittle mosaic of pain spread across the old lady’s face. She unclenched some fingers from her abdomen and crooked one at the other building on the waterfront.

  The Hotel Municipal had also, at some stage, suffered an attack of optimism. In 1896, a grand building had been planned with a cloistered courtyard, heavily ornamented doors and brilliant French tiles fading into the distance. But only one corner had been completed, an abandoned ‘L’ with its ends whittled away by misfortune. Recently it had been given a fresh coat of lime green on the outside and whitewash on the inside, but it was otherwise determinedly abandoned. There was no sign that it was a hotel. I peered into all the unlocked rooms calling – rather absurdly – for service. Eventually a woman appeared from the cottage opposite, heaped with sheets and pillowcases. She put me in a room with five beds and showed me the shower room. Its walls were patterned with tiny green tree-frogs which, at the smell of soapy water, detached themselves from their patterns and slithered into the foam. There was only one other guest and he kept his lights on all night and snored like a band-saw. In the mornings, he started up his motorbike in his room, revved it into the cloister and then hurled himself through the front doors and disappeared.

  These were not easy nights. My bed was only yards from the river. After dark, thousands of operatic frogs slipped from the ooze and launched their plaintive arias at the crackly, tropical night. Whilst their songs were glorious in the evening, at night they intruded on my dreams, begging, pleading thousands of times over. I piled all of the spare beds against the door and burrowed under my mosquito net. But the attack came from below, from the carnivores that inhabited the mattress. By the morning, my back and buttocks were lumpy with rude, cherry-coloured blobs and drunken trails of blood.

  After the hot, noisy struggles of the night, the day dawned fresh and serene. My room was angled partly at the river and partly at a curious brick stack, a sort of giant, toppling ginger cake that had – like me – been gruesomely nibbled. It was the ruins of an eighteenth-century Jesuit church. During the siege, its ginger towers were all that protruded above Humaitá’s earthworks, and for the Brazilian ironclads, they offered an easy if rather unsatisfying target. At the height of the conflict, the allies poured 4,000 shells a day into the fortress. Had it been the age of high explosive, the church would have been powdered instead of merely chewed.

  Among the crumbs of ginger brickwork, I found a cannon of the Paraguayan defence. It was a honey-combed Portuguese relic, already 200 years obsolete by the start of the siege. There had been 195 such guns, mounted in earthworks with names like ‘Madame Lynch’ and ‘The London Battery’. The defenders had even produced a new cannon, weighing over twe
lve tons; it was cast from church bells and was called the ‘Cristiano’.

  ‘It’s now in the museum of Rio de Janeiro,’ Micawber later told me, his voice slushy with pride.

  The Brazilians had lumped all their confidence in the ironclads. These fearsome, unwieldy vessels had already proved their fury in the American Civil War. The military world had gaped in wonder as the Monitor and the Merrimac had slogged it out at Hampton Roads. Now the Brazilians had fifteen of their own, each covered in four-inch plate and armed with 70lb Whitworths in revolving turrets. As marching across the esteros was out of the question, the ironclads would punch through Humaitá and up into the underbelly of Paraguay with laughable ease.

  But the Brazilians were soon choking on their mirth. Quite apart from the Paraguayans’ refusal to present them with a target, the ironclads weren’t as formidable as expected. The river could rise or fall by up to fourteen feet, and treacherous sandbanks would swell up and leave the monsters helplessly grounded. When they weren’t floundering, they were guzzling coal, and no sooner had they reached Humaitá than they had to retreat. The enemy’s pipsqueak artillery couldn’t sink them, but it could batter them enough to disable their gear. This wasn’t their only trickery. For a while the Paraguayans launched home-made torpedoes at the ironclads until their engineer, an American called Cruger – blew himself to kingdom come. Simpler and more effective was the iron chain strung across the river. Until a freak high water eventually carried the ironclads over, this simple device kept them from Paraguay for what seemed a political eternity. The Brazilians now threw 40,000 men into the conflict, joined by 18,000 Argentines and 4,000 Uruguayans.

  When the Allies first established a toe-hold in southern Paraguay, López responded with flamboyant stupidity. Although the advantages of defence were obvious, he launched 23,000 thin, dysenteric troops across the swamps to meet the Allies at Tuyutí in May 1866. They were shredded. The worst to suffer was the 40th Regiment, comprised of the Asunción gentry. Vindictively, López had them placed in the spearhead. To ensure their colourful destiny, he tossed them into the maelstrom without any training or shoes or even weapons. If nothing else, Tuyutí tidied up the opposition.

  ‘That battle,’ wrote an Englishman on López’s staff, ‘can be said to have annihilated the Spanish race in Paraguay.’

  But the rank and file fought with blurring ferocity. They were Guaraní warriors again, relishing the mano-a-mano fighting. Such was their tenacity that the allies took only 350 prisoners. They only managed to capture the Paraguayan standard by chopping it from the hands of a sergeant (another dying standard-bearer prevented his flag falling into ‘monkey’ hands by tearing it apart with his teeth). In the end, however, it was hopeless. The Paraguayans were forced back by hot, sticky mud and the lacerating technology of their enemies. They left 6,000 dead on the field. Often, the corpses of fighters were found locked together, transfixed on each other’s bayonets. López had lost the pick of his garrison.

  ‘The Allies,’ noted one stupefied report, ‘heaped up the Paraguayan corpses in alternate layers, with wood, in piles of 50 to 100, and burnt them. They complained that the Paraguayans were so lean that they would not burn.’

  Both sides fell back to lick their wounds. López ordered the bands to play victory marches to make his men think he’d gained the day. Stalemate ensued. The Allies in the southern heel of the country became so established that they built themselves brothels and a theatre. In Humaitá, 7,000 wounded soldiers were committed to hospital. The doctors, who were mostly British contractors, were endlessly astonished at the brawn of their Paraguayan patients; whilst the Brazilian and Argentine prisoners allowed their wounds to overwhelm them, the Paraguayans simply heaved themselves from their straw and stumbled back into battle.

  Paraguayan women began to arrive at the front. At first, they simply followed their menfolk down to Humaitá, but later, all women of age sixteen to forty, were conscripted as labourers. Most prominent among them was of course Madame Lynch (who wasn’t going to be penned up in Asunción when issues of power were being resolved 250 miles to the south). In the Paraguayan imagination, she is to be found leading a cavalry charge of Amazons against a barbarous foe. It’s a preposterous image; in reality, the Irish adventuress turned up in Humaitá with a train of ball-gowns, the Pleydel piano and some geranium seeds to prettify the presidential bunker. She only briefly toyed with the idea of military activity, dressing up a small troupe of ladies in sashes and Irish tam o’shanters. Their main task seems to have been to extract jewellery from other women.

  In the months that followed, Humaitá achieved its own Paraguayan version of normality. A Prussian telegraph engineer called Baron Heinrich von Fischer Truenfeld produced paper from caraguatá pulp, and the army printed two newspapers. One was in Spanish and the other in Guaraní – both plum-full of jokes that the English found ‘wretched and sometimes scandalous’. The ink was made from black beans. There were even experiments with orange wine and trousers made from raw hides (the wine was nauseously sweet and the trousers ripped the wearer’s skin). Then, to the fury of Madame Lynch, her tropical Paris was cannibalised for the war effort: the carpets from the ballrooms were cut up into ponchos ‘so stiff that they stood up like advertising boards’; the books of the National Library met a similar fate, chopped up into cartridge and squib cases.

  Discipline was enthusiastically violent. Every third man was detailed to shoot deserters, and the floggings were lavish. Those who finally made it back from the previous year’s defeats in Argentina were whipped without hesitation. Two men who returned with smallpox were whipped to death. A Correntino girl who tried to slip away was whipped before the eyes of the Englishmen in López’s service. ‘She received 60 lashes on her bare flesh,’ one reported, ‘which was considered a very good joke.’

  The Allies seemed unable to enjoy the war in quite the same way. The Paraguayans’ behaviour unnerved them; first their ferocity and then, worse, their domesticity. The Allies again resorted to technology to find out what was going on. At a cost of $15,000 they bought a hot-air balloon, but on its inaugural flight, it blew up. The French pilot was sentenced to death for sabotage. Later efforts, employing the American Allen brothers, were more successful and the spies managed to float over the batteries at Humaitá. The Paraguayans’ response – one of the first-ever responses to aviation warfare – was to loosen their breaches and show the Americans their grubby backsides. They then set fire to the grass and forced the balloonists – hacking their lungs out – into retreat.

  Strange as the war in the air may have seemed, it was nothing compared to the bizarre naval battles that were taking place on the river.

  I returned to the river several times a day during my stay in Humaitá. It was constantly changing colour: gorgeous magenta mornings bled themselves white by midday, and then – none too soon – this wincing light dissolved itself in the subtle infusions of the afternoon. But in the evenings came the real rewards – the rewards for so much heat and fine-blown dust. I sat on the rump of the earthworks and watched this great inland sea slide crimsonly towards the ocean. Most of the fishing skiffs now lay rotting in the lilies on the water line, but some evenings the last of them was out, a fragile arc of green, hunting the great golden fish – the dorado. The locals said it weighed thirteen kilos and fought like a tigre.

  At the end of the soft turf beach was a large white villa called the Paraguayan Navy Southern Prefecture. It always smelt deliciously of oxtail and was manned by two bristly, blistered marines armed with assault rifles. They never put their guns down – even when crunching up ox-bones in their powerful teeth. I had to go up there one day to get the keys to Mariscal López’s house, which the navy guarded against termites and sacrilege. The captain tossed me the keys without looking up from his bowl of gravy and ribs.

  López’s house was the third building on the waterfront, a squat ranch house, whitewashed on the outside and vaguely catty on the inside. I didn’t believe that López had ever l
ived there (his contemporaries had him as far too much of a coward to be on the front line), but it was just possible that he’d visited to watch his little ships tearing themselves apart in front of him.

  One of the steamers that the Paraguayans had captured from the Argentines was the Gualguay. Although it was barely more than a pea-pod, nothing delighted López and his mistress more than to watch it bob around among the ironclads. They watched it through opera glasses as it pinged its pathetic 12lb cannon against the impenetrable Brazilian armour. The Allies responded with balls of 70 and 150lbs, and every day, the plucky Gualguay ran its pointless gauntlet through the giant waterspouts and blizzards of red-hot metal. Once, she ran aground and was abandoned, but when the Brazilians came to reclaim her, her crew rose from the slime and butchered them with knives. The Gualguay was free again. The hilarity lasted a full three weeks before her funnel was blown away and His Excellency was forced to find alternative entertainment.

  He was determined to capture an ironclad.

  An opportunity came some time later, when the Río Grande do Sul anchored sleepily offshore. López made a plan of hare-brained audacity: a raid by twenty-four canoes lashed together and disguised as camelotes – or clumps of water hyacinths. Madame Lynch saw the raiders off with cigars and girlish encouragement and they floated alongside the ironclad and drove its terrified crew below. The naked warriors then scrambled on to the armour, looking for holes for their grenades. It was too late. Another ironclad steamed alongside and raked the decks with canister and shot. A few jumped clear and swam off to uncertain adventures in the Chaco. The rest were fish bait.

  It was now the Allies’ turn to make a blunder. Unable to reach the Pilar road at Humaitá, they went for Curupayty, fifteen kilometres downstream.

  They launched a full-scale attack. Across the swamps.