At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  Some claim that Battlefields provided the inspiration for Nostromo, but I doubt it. Whilst Conrad may have admired the Arabian adventures, Burton’s treatment of the dictator seemed rather generous as a template for Conrad’s ‘Perpetual President’ (‘who ruled the country with the sombre imbecility of political fanaticism’). Far more likely, Conrad borrowed his characters from the work of a friend, a fellow socialist and another explorer of the southern cone. He was yet to arrive in Paraguay.

  As to Battlefields, I prefer to regard it as six bad weeks in the life of a brilliant but fractious old cynic.

  58

  ON THE PLAIN of great blue vents that marks the beginning of the Central Highlands, I stopped at Ybycuí.

  It was an unmemorable town of tool stores and tyre shops. I booked into the only hotel and a small child showed me up to a room wedged (somewhat disconcertingly) full of bunk beds. The floors were so glossy with disinfectant that I could see myself walking around upside-down, looking rather alarmed at all this sudden hygiene. It was then that I discovered that the building doubled as the district pathology laboratory and that its constant stream of visitors weren’t guests but supplicants, each with an offering of bodily fluids. I had a sudden and horrible image of a cholera epidemic sweeping the town and my dormitory being swamped with tyre-fitters sludging themselves into a stupor and being swabbed down with boric acid. My enthusiasm for the hotel rapidly dispersed and with it went any residual fondness for Ybycuí. I decided to be gone by nightfall.

  There was one place I had to see, the oldest iron foundry in South America. I asked people in the street how I might get to La Rosada, with mixed response.

  ‘That’s in Asunción, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t understand a word you’re saying.’

  ‘No idea. Are you from Germany? How is Lady Diana?’

  Eventually, a bleak picture began to emerge. The foundry was fifteen kilometres away. The last bus had gone. There was nowhere to stay out there. It was in the forest.

  ‘Ask the builder if he’ll take you.’

  The builder looked at his pick-up doubtfully. ‘I don’t think it will go that far.’

  He was right. There were too many essential structures missing. It would have been like driving around in a diagram.

  I started reinforcing my pleas with offers of cash. I worked my way up the street, making more and more outrageous proposals at each tyre shop. My bidding reached its critical momentum in the grocer’s. I was now offering the equivalent of fifty newspapers, three old prostitutes or a night-and-a-half in the Hotel Dysentery. It was good enough for Lino the grocer. He was soon packing me into his fancy new pick-up, with his wife out on the back. I was pleased that she was coming because it took the hard commercial edge off our transaction, turning it into more of a family outing. Mrs Berera brought her swimming costume, a beach towel, a garden chair and a bottle of frozen cherryade. It was obviously an excursion they’d enjoyed many times before and Mrs Berera wasn’t the least perturbed when her chair slid backwards and forwards across the truck as Lino whirled along in a tornado of red volcanic gravel. We tried to keep an eye on her in the mirror but sometimes Mrs Berera slid completely out of view and it wasn’t until the next fold in the earth’s crust – and the reversal of centrifugal forces – that she made her stately reappearance.

  ‘This is the most beautiful place in Paraguay,’ said Lino with unrestrained happiness.

  He may well have been right. The red road curled across the rolls of greenery between flawless young, volcanic cones. The forests of the lower slopes were swooping down to meet us, and there, at the head of a shallow valley, the Mbuyapey gushed greenly and deliciously out of the rocks. It all seemed such a beautifully improbable site for an English ironworks. But it was true: in 1849, at a time when England was perfecting the darkness and satanism of its own mills, Henry Godwin was putting in the foundations of an exquisite red-rocked foundry here in the heart of Arcadia. His work was enlarged by the tireless Whytehead, and as if to prove the point, a crew of local engineers now had photocopies of Whytehead’s plans spread out in front of them and were rebuilding the foundry exactly as he’d ordered. The plans were signed, and dated 1854.

  Lino waved his hand over the things he thought I ought to see – the great brick furnace, the water-wheel and the charcoal shutes – and then waddled off down to the river with his wife. I crossed the spiky grass, past a statue of an Indian with head-feathers and a shovel, and peered inside. There were more engineers clambering over the wheel, barefoot and thickly greased with soot and oil. They worked without pause, chirruping to each other in Guaraní. Their bedrolls, I noticed, were spread out below them, among the hoisting gears and the massive iron teeth of a crusher. In Whytehead’s day there was a labour force of convicts, supplemented by foreign technicians: Englishmen, Italians, Americans, Frenchmen, Swiss, a German and two Spaniards.

  Perhaps the most endearing of these technicians was Charley Twite, the mineralogist. He was brought out to survey for coal, and whilst he didn’t find any, he found plenty of iron ore. He and Cruger also developed the Paraguayan torpedo, and although the American was blown to bits by an early prototype, the final model was no laughing matter. The ironclad Rio de Janeiro took one smack on the waterline and sank with all hands. But it is not for this that Twite is best remembered. ‘He turned out to be a prospector in more senses than one,’ wrote one historian. ‘The sight of a Paraguayan Venus would exalt his investigating powers to their fullest stretch and his prospecting enthusiasm in this direction led him into more than one scrape …’

  Despite Twite’s uncontrollable prospecting, production was staggering. Ybycuí produced several hundred artillery pieces, boilers for ships, parts for the railway and even the railings that run around Recoleta cemetery. Whytehead galloped between the Ybycuí and Asunción in a day and perhaps the strain contributed to his downfall and final interment among his railings. My only regret about Ybycuí is that the museum hardly credited Whytehead at all. He would be mortified to discover that all the honour goes to that foul-mouthed drunkard Alexander Grant, who took not only his job but also his life.

  In the end it perhaps matters little. Four months after the capture of Asunción, in May 1869, the Brazilian cavalry poured into La Rosada. The foundry commandant, Insfran, greeted them, unsurprisingly, with chilly detachment and so they beheaded him. They then dismantled the machinery, pulled down the walls and jammed the water-channel to flood the valley.

  ‘La Rosada,’ says the memorial, ‘is still a symbol of pain. Its destruction was the destruction of an era.’

  I left Ybycuí that night and went north, to Pirebubuy.

  59

  THE WEATHER CHANGED again and I found Pirebubuy damped down in highland drizzle. The hammock-makers’ doors were clumped in soggy purples and pinks and the elderly were snuggled together in ponchos beneath the jacarandas. A small figure was hopping with surprising dexterity through the cloisters, selling jams and honey from a basket on her head. She got to the tavern and they shrugged her away. Three soldiers were seated at the back, as gaunt and silent as watchers in a triptych. This was the town where they still made the best ox-carts in Paraguay (as they had since 1636).

  In the middle of the square, mounted on a mat of neatly nibbled grass, was the church, a great creamy afterthought from 1737. In some places, the loggias had been chewed by gunfire and large divots scooped from the woodwork. It was a reminder that for a few months after the fall of Asunción Pirebubuy was the capital of Paraguay. It had known happier days; the population swelled from 800 to 10,000, and with the newcomers came bouts of malaria and outrageous starvation. Her new citizens ate saddles and rats and built their new capital in branches and strips of rawhide. The cloisters were requisitioned as official residences. President López made himself a palace of the squire’s house, and Madame Lynch took a place over on the south side. Hers has long gone, home now to a crumbling lorry and a tethered heifer.

  The Americ
an Embassy – or Mission – was much as it had been on the day it was abandoned in 1869. It was the only house still determinedly empty. I climbed on to the veranda and wandered among its blunted scrolls and columns. The windows were boxed up in powdery shutters. I pressed my eye against a crack in the panelling. There was nothing; it was empty and dark.

  That, I supposed, might well have been the epitaph for the American efforts at diplomacy. Mr Washburn had long gone. He’d never recovered from the unfortunate fancy dress incident, and his stabs at peace-making had had a peculiarly inflammatory effect. Proposing to the Allies that Emperor Dom Pedro should abdicate rather suggested that he didn’t have a grip on the issues. When, after a period on leave, he tried to smash his way back through the blockade on a US gunboat, it was agreed that he didn’t have a grip on his senses either. He was recalled. The USS Wasp hauled him back down to Buenos Aires and that is where Burton found him, gibbering incontinently and trying to untangle himself from a nervous breakdown.

  He was replaced by General Martin T. MacMahon. With his impressive moustaches and a pedigree of Civil War bravado, he ought to have been just the man for the job. Instead, MacMahon found himself hopelessly disorientated by his desires for Madame Lynch. ‘She was,’ he later blubbed to a Senate committee, ‘one of the most bewitching and gallant ladies it has ever been my privilege to meet.’

  Whilst the loyal soldiery munched their way through their vermin and tack, MacMahon was being comprehensively bewitched. Eliza had resurrected her soirées. ‘Even in this backwater,’ conceded her physician, a half-thawed Scottish kipper called Dr Stewart, ‘Madame Lynch’s house exuded an air of Europe.’ As to her gallantry, the starving British contractors doubtless wouldn’t forget the mouthfuls of tea and sugar that she’d given them. MacMahon meanwhile was moved to excruciating poetry, now safely encased in the town museum:

  Bella y nubil republica de la zona

  Incantada, Reina de mil arroyos,

  Tu nombre solo ayer disconocia …

  Were it not for the fact that this doggerel was written in Spanish, I would have eagerly assumed the relationship between the two Celts had become furtive. Instead, I had to accept that it probably remained a rather public, puppy love. Besides, if Silvia Caballero was right, her great-grandfather was still bounding around, well within Eliza’s sensual orbit. He’d just chopped his way in and out of the Allied lines and was as irrepressible as ever.

  MacMahon’s residence was still there, on the plaza. It was now a ladies’ boutique, selling leopard-print boots and jeans under the unpromising label, ‘Botch’. The Minister himself had proved less enduring than his house. Washington had heard all about Pirebubuy’s ‘Air of Europe’ and recalled the minister to the rather less comfortable Air of the Committee Room. MacMahon was due for a carpeting and it wouldn’t be a red one. In his last service to Madame Lynch, he smuggled several boxes of coin out of Paraguay aboard the Wasp – to be deposited in Dr Stewart’s account at the Bank of England. Some of the booty got stuck to his fingers on the way.

  To the south of the square was a steep, wooded slope leading down to the river. The bathing pools were empty that day and the fields beyond were smudged with mist. At dawn on 12 August 1869, the Allies had rumbled across the flats and up into the Paraguayan trenches. López had long fled, leaving 1,500 waifs to defend his rear. The Guaraní fought with what they could. When they were out of shot, they loaded their cannon with slivers of glass, broken swords and finally coconuts. When the men were spent, the women rose from the trenches and fought the Brazilian slave-soldiers with clods of earth, their nails and their teeth.

  In the filth and smoke, the Comte d’Eu’s boyfriend was separated from his head. The Prince of Orleans’ grief was genocidal. He had the Paraguayan commander strapped between two cannon and his head sawn off with a bayonet. He then hunted down the wounded in the church and cut their throats. Among those who choked on their own blood was Master Fermin López, a schoolmaster who’d led his pupils in the final defence of the town. The Comte’s men then rode out to the hospital, stopped the doors and set it on fire. Only one child escaped. She would walk almost the length of Paraguay to be reunited with the remnants of her family. Her granddaughter would be my brilliantly zigzagged friend, the artist Lucy Yegros.

  Apart from MacMahon’s solid verses and his solid front door, everything else at the museum was in an advanced state of destruction. It was really a sort of anti-museum, a display of things that no longer enjoyed a recognisable existence. There were splinters of metal and pieces of ugly, misshapen shot, charred beams and fractured puddles of molten glass. To my horror, there was even a tussock of human ponytail – sheared, matted and brutally disowned.

  It had been no better for the Brazilians. The booty from Pirebubuy was lamentable. Even López’s wine cellar was a source of disappointment. It was liberated by a young cavalry officer called Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay, who would become one of Brazil’s greatest writers.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ he later recalled, ‘the quantity of champagne was quite small.’

  Two days later, the Allies fell on Caacupé.

  60

  I STAYED IN Caacupé for several days before I realised with a pang of disappointment that I’d seen everything three times over. People were beginning to recognise me and I’d subconsciously established diversions around the town, to carry me clear of the most voluble beggars, the Makás with their bows and arrows and the most insistent of the cathedral guides. Now, every time I paused at the San Blast Chicken shop, they automatically thrust a few limbs of San Blast Chicken at me, never giving me the chance to see if they did San Blast Anything Else. As it turned out, San Blast was not the industrial process that gave my chicken its richly gritty texture but was the patron saint of Paraguay. Caacupé was the spiritual capital of the country and most things in the town were adoringly San Blasted.

  It didn’t surprise me that spirituality here was as opaque as anything else in Paraguay. Two hundred years of sultans and despots – none of whom were spiritually enthusiastic – had given the Roman Catholic Church a rather fugitive character, and local doctrines had a decidedly foresty flavour. To its eternal credit, the Church had been Stroessner’s most obstinate thorn and many priests had lost their eardrums, their wits and their lives in the pileta. In spiritual matters, however, the Church was rather less obstinate. My friends in Asunción insisted that once you got to the countryside the priests were healers and sorcerers and that religious devotion was largely a matter for women. Less charitably, they suggested that the holy fathers were a little over-attentive to the needs of these, their devotees. It was an observation that hadn’t escaped the barrister-captain of The Falcon, at the end of the Grande Guerra:

  The Paraguayans are reported to excuse the errors of their clergy by stating that the Pope has, in compassion for the now unpopulated condition of poor Paraguay, been pleased to grant to the priests there, dispensation from their vows of chastity. This excuse is a very good one, but from all accounts this people were not famed for their morality even in the days before the war.

  At the heart of this flowering, generous love-child of Catholicism was Caacupé. The Virgin of Caacupé was a distant relative of the Virgin Mary and lived in a star-burst of lightbulbs and sequins at the Basilica of Miracles. She was the product of advanced miscegenation; Indians carved her, Indians found her bobbing around in a seventeenth-century flood, Indians worshipped her, and yet she looked like portraits of Madame Lynch at her most plushly upholstered. The effect, however, of that blank, Giaconda smile was both spiritually and electrically startling. Nuns threw themselves headlong at her tiny feet. Pilgrims came from all over the country to seek a little of her magic. The President came by helicopter, hoping for a lot of it. Conscripts came barefoot from the Chaco to have their national service blessed. Others brought their pets and their cancer. On her special day, 8 December, it was said that all these people came, with rocks on their heads and thrashing themselves with leather whips. There wa
s room for 300,000 of them in the cathedral square.

  Even now, with the square empty, it was somehow crowded. All the frills and riff-raffery of religious devotion were there. I counted fifteen types of pottery Virgin and navigated my way through a great glittering cardiological stew of bleeding hearts. Some of the pink pigs had made it from Aregua and so had the Teletubbies, the Virgin Laa-Laa and the Immaculate Tinky Winky. Even more surprising were the stuffed calves’ heads and the racks of plastic machine-guns. Sensing a little theological weariness, an Indian offered me his stool. It was for rent, by the half-hour.

  I took a room on the edge of the square. It was a pilgrims’ hotel and the sheets were printed with rabbits wearing children’s clothes. Each morning I was woken by the sound of Guaraní carried in dreamy ululations across the square from the basilica. Swaddled in cheeky bunnies and the now-persistent aromas of San Blast Chicken, I decided that this was the nearest that I would ever get to spiritual overload.

  On the Sunday morning, a television crew arrived in the plaza and bottled up these effervescent sources of enchantment, uncorking them across the nation.

  There was only one vaguely troubling aspect to all of this: the face of Madame Lynch (as I was now sure it was) replicated fifty thousand times throughout the town. Sometimes the lipstick missed her lips or her little pottery pupils were up on her forehead but she was consistently, icily demanding. Even if the Virgin hadn’t borrowed her face, she had – according to Eliza’s detractors – come nose to nose with her chilly demands. In those days the statue stood in a ‘sea of jewels’ and her gown was festooned in the pearls and diadems of her supplicants. On a fleeting visit to Caacupé, Madame Lynch had reaped the lot, substituting them with paste. She even stripped the Virgin of her gem-encrusted gown, replacing it with an old fancy dress outfit.