At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  Robbers, snakes, rabid dogs and wounded jaguars contributed the outlines of my anxiety. Paraguayan mythology contributed some unnecessary embellishments. This was not the time to be thinking of the mboya-jagwa, the huge dog-snake that eats travellers, ravishes women and yelps like a puppy. Or the carbunculo, a revolting carnivorous hog that disguises itself as a trough to engulf the unwary drinker. To the Australian settlers of 1893, these creatures all seemed real enough. MacDonald added to the list with a bird that shone in the dark, a giant bisexual ant-bear and a sabre-toothed sheep of uncommon ferocity named – a little ineptly perhaps – the ow-ow.

  There was heavy breathing in my face. The thought of ending my days savaged by a sheep or violated by a giant ant-bear was more than dignity could bear. I untangled a flashlight from the soppy dishcloth of my shirt and shone it in the monster’s face. In confronting my fears, I’d confronted a cow, which now regarded me with undisguised contempt.

  I had two hours to go, on an invisible, croaking road now obstacled with steers. Only one car passed. I caught the look on the driver’s face as he accelerated to safety. It suggested that he’d just seen an awful, soggy, hunch-backed creature picking out the cattle with a pen-torch. I was uncertain of the reception I’d receive in Nueva Londres, now famous for not having any hotel.

  At last, a speck of white on the skyline turned into a light, several lights, a street. Disconcerting rasping noises turned into enormous slavering guard dogs, all making little secret of a desire to eat me. Nothing, of course, turned into a hotel.

  ‘You can sleep here if you want,’ said a boy at the police station. ‘Or ask the priest.’

  I opted for the priest, who had a cottage on the square. I shouted through his letter-box, causing a small crowd to gather at my shoulder. Soon they were all shouting through the hole. Nothing.

  ‘I know someone who has a room,’ said a boy with a horse.

  Five minutes later, I was bedded down in the dog-house of a large villa. Everything, including my bed, was richly gravelled in rabbit-flavoured biscuits. I was embarrassingly grateful. What, I asked the horse-boy, was his name.

  ‘Kennedy,’ he said. ‘Welcome to New Australia.’

  The story of the foundation of New Australia is the tail-end of a brutal struggle: the Queensland shearers’ strike of 1891. When the government turned a 9-pounder on the strikers and threatened them with extinction and copious hard labour, many decided that enough was enough. They were through with Australia and with parliamentary democracy. They sought a socialist Utopia, and a bushy-tailed English hack called William Lane persuaded them he’d found it, in South America. There was no limit to his ambition, nor his imagination.

  ‘A disciplined army,’ he promised, ‘would emerge from the Paraguayan jungle to lead an inevitable world revolution.’

  But his lieutenants were a rag-tag of misfits. One was Dave Stevenson, a Scottish Highlander and a cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson (whose literary success funded much of the adventure); another was a Londoner called Arthur Tozer. He’d had his own experiences of revolution, in Buenos Aires (he’d spent many lazy afternoons popping off revolutionaries with a revolver, from the comfort of his flat). Another figurehead was Mary Gilmore, a woman of shrewish looks and temperament who had been variously a poet, a teacher and a terrorist. She said she’d been abducted as a baby and reared by Aborigines. Although the cause vaguely appealed to her, she came along because she had a passion for Stevenson. She even brought enough cloth for a wedding dress in case he ever returned her feelings. He never did, preferring to cast his net more widely among the young housewives.

  Two hundred had set out in 1893, aboard The Royal Tar. In case any man had ideas of his own sexual adventures among the natives, Lane reminded them of the Colour Line: they were white and weren’t to pollute themselves by contamination with the coloureds, Land of Women or not. There was no solace in grog either; the Utopians were on the wagon.

  Initially, the Australians settled on what is now the Ruta Dos but soon the mosquitoes and the polvorinos drove them to the higher land of the present settlement. Within four months, the colony began to disintegrate: the food was unpalatable, as was Lane’s socialism; Tozer strutted a revolver and behaved like the authority they’d all run away from. Within the year, Lane, Tozer, and Stevenson (closely followed by Mary) had broken away to start a rival colony at Cosme. That too floundered. After an allegation of sexual impropriety with a new recruit, Lane fled the continent in 1899 and rediscovered himself as a right-wing politician in New Zealand.

  The others followed. Tozer abandoned politics, agreed he’d been ‘an ass’ and went to work on the railways. Mary didn’t give up politics altogether but concentrated on women, Aborigines and cats. She became an Australian institution, appeared on the ten-dollar note and died in her King’s Cross cattery in 1962. Only Stevenson stayed on, at least for a while. He took a bullet in the lung at the Somme in 1915 and retired to a guest house in the Channel Islands. He died there during the Nazi occupation in 1942, succumbing to disappointment and malnutrition.

  With the loss of all the colony’s leaders by 1894, the Australian press crowed the demise of the ‘harum-scarum’ New Australia. They were a little previous in doing so.

  My host, the owner of the dog-shed, was Marcelino Godoy Vera. He was the local Colorado boss, a man of great physical and political mass. He was made of ham and leather and was best friends with Lino Oviedo.

  ‘I only ever eat meat!’ he declared.

  ‘And what about Lino?’

  ‘A man of military strength!’ he thundered, so loud that his displaced dog began to bark. ‘Did you like the dog-house?’

  ‘It was perfect.’

  Although Marcelino’s superstructure swayed with laughter, he insisted that tonight I move inside. It was a curious lair, blushed in deep pink and decorated with cuddly toys, guns and a second and very tiny wife (the first had been killed in the same accident that left the ham unevenly distributed across his scalp). There was a Colorado Party clock, permanently stuck on mealtime.

  ‘Ah, we must get breakfast.’

  We had three, in different parts of the old colony. At each farm they called it an ‘Australian breakfast’, fried beef and coffee. Marcelino smacked it all down without knowing or caring who the Australians were.

  ‘Ask the priest,’ he suggested.

  This time I had more luck. To my surprise, he was Irish: Father Feehan.

  ‘I came here thirty-three years ago from the Vatican,’ he mused, a note of satisfaction at the course his life had taken. ‘The Paraguayans have proved truly Irish.’

  We talked about the Utopians. ‘I knew some of them well. Of course, they weren’t all Australian. Some were Irish, like Casey.’ A dry smile spread over his face. ‘He was a feckin’ rascal.’

  Here is what happened after the departure of Lane.

  For a while, they faced great hardship. Jaguars took their cattle and the men were eaten alive by jiggers. There was no money and The Royal Tar was seized to pay their debts. But they improvised, had cricket matches and balls with the natives and tied fireflies in their hair at Christmastime. Casey’s father, Gilbert, took up with a Paraguaya and the land was divided up. But it was still socialism and there were even fresh recruits: the Sheppersons from America, the Kennedys from Scotland (1900), and the Smiths from London (1909). The Smiths had a son, named after some impressive labour riots: Ricardo Lille.

  The Kennedy boy and Ricardo became inseparable friends. They worked hard and every week they rode up to Asunción with their ox-carts full of surplus. By 1942, they had a cattle empire. It was time to dismantle the remains of socialism and establish a town. They were good men, and in deference to the original settlers, they asked the Australian government for permission to call it New Canberra. When no one answered, they called it New London instead.

  ‘Ricardo only died in 1990,’ said Father Feehan. ‘We all miss him. He was ninety-three.’

  ‘Are there any Australians lef
t?’

  ‘You’ve obviously not met my neighbour, Bruce Murray.’

  *

  Murray was lying in a chair, launching great flobs of tobacco juice on to his wife’s clean patio. He had crumbling yellow nails and a head of wispy grey knots. He wasn’t surprised to hear the sound of English and responded in crackling Australian. The good men in his stories (like himself) were ‘kangaroos’ and the smart ones were ‘kangaroo-killers’. He, of course, had never seen a kangaroo, or cricket, or a billabong, or Sydney Harbour Bridge. Nor had his father.

  ‘Grandad just put a house down, caught a chicken and that was it.’

  His eyeballs suddenly seemed pink and angry.

  ‘You don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘Ask what you like, mate.’ He rubbed his belly and spat. ‘As long as it’s not who I sleep with!’

  It was an unappealing thought. I brought us back to the language.

  ‘I was brought up speaking Australian. My folks wouldn’t have us mixing with no Paraguayans. Not until school anyways.’

  He talked of his forebears, a rattly collection of chancers and fiddlers, a Scottish nanny and an Englishman who drifted in with the railways. Little Bruce had himself wandered into the cattle trade. He’d merged his misfortune with a Paraguaya and they’d produced a son who was everything Murray had dreamed of being: a corporal with the policía. Had it been a good life?

  ‘That depends,’ he winked, ‘which way yer lies.’

  I thought it better to avoid this. ‘What about 1947? The Civil War?’

  A wet, yellow grin. ‘It was a chance for people to have a good drink and kill one another … we all had the black cat.’

  My encounter with Murray should not have troubled me as much as it did. Father Feehan had warned me: ‘People here don’t have the warmth of other Paraguayans. There is not that sense of belonging.’

  I thought about this as I made my way back through the square. It was planted with silky oaks, brought from Australia with the first settlers. There was a plaque to the villagers who’d perished in the war against Bolivia: Drakeford, Jones, King, Shepperson and Douglas Kennedy. Dying for Paraguay was, I supposed, only part of belonging to it.

  The Australians had obviously proved rather harder to digest than the Japanese.

  66

  I CAUGHT RICARDO Lille’s son on his way out to work. Although Harold Smith was nearly seventy, he was dressed for a day in the saddle; faja, gun-belt, sombrero and breaches. Unlike Murray, the sound of English left him shocked and floundering for words. He then did a very curious thing: he stood to attention and saluted.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he stuttered. ‘It has been such a long time.’

  We shook hands and he mounted his horse and rode off into the campo.

  67

  ON MY LAST day, Marcelino and I took a double breakfast at the Kennedys’ ranch, which was called the House of Sarah.

  Sarah had been a servant girl and the lover of James Craig Kennedy of Dalricket Mill, New Cumnock in Ayrshire. James was the eleventh of thirteen children, and already, by 1899, Kennedys were dispersing themselves across the globe: New York, Trinidad, Sydney and Kimberley. James left his wife with a broken heart and an empty house and was carried on a breeze of socialism and illicit passion to Paraguay. He brought his two children and his scullery girl to New Australia, where they settled. Sarah produced seven more little Kennedys, all boys, and the family grew rich on cattle. Their lives seemed charmed until 1935 when news came through that the favourite son, Douglas, had died of tuberculosis in a Bolivian prisoner-of-war camp. James buckled with grief and was dead by the following year. Sarah survived him a few years longer, before she too was carried away to the family plot beneath the lapachos. As the ranks of brothers thinned, the ranch passed to number six, Nigel.

  Don Nigel was waiting for us outside, propped up by granddaughters and deeply cardiganed in Arran. ‘I’m eighty-five, aren’t I, Ardyne? How old am I?’

  The stately party moved into the House of Sarah, a low building of cement and quebracho logs. Nigel was lowered into an armchair, around him the artefacts of his adventures. There were horns and pelts, cattle certificates, furniture from the colony carpenter (‘Mr Martin’), mildewed books and crusts of photographs: Don Nigel with a Colt .45; with the Pope in 1988; with a prize zebu; with his son, killed in a car crash, the week of his graduation.

  ‘I never went to school,’ he said absently. His English was brittle and old-fashioned. As he was deaf, the story of his life emerged unbidden, in fragments snatched from his memory, like the snapshots.

  ‘Douglas shouldn’t have died. He was stronger than me. I expected to die in that war. There was never enough water – or food. We advanced in ox-carts – there were no trucks until the end. I think we got all the way into Bolivia. I think so. We had dysentery.’

  The breakfasts arrived. Marcelino ate them and fell asleep.

  ‘The Colorados renamed this place, you know. For thirty years, Nueva Londres was called “Hugo Stroessner”, after the President’s father.’ He snarled. ‘Colorados! The lick-bottoms!’

  There were long silences. ‘My half-brother went to fight in the Great European war. He met a girl and never came back. They never came for us in the second war. I suppose I should have gone. How long did it go on for?’

  I held up six fingers.

  ‘That long! Good grief!’

  Marcelino stirred. It was time to go.

  ‘My father was always a socialist. He kept up with many of them in England. Show him the book, Ardyne.’

  The book was produced. On the fly-leaf were the words: ‘Dear Kennedy, I was so sorry to hear of your fire. Please accept this as an addition to your new library. Yours &c, George Bernard Shaw.’

  68

  IN DON NIGEL’S YOUTH, the round trip to Villarrica took seven days in an ox-cart. It took me fifty minutes, one-way, in the bus.

  After the collapse of the original colony, many Utopians had drifted into Villarrica and it wasn’t hard to see why. The settlement had been named by a conquistador called Captain Malgarejo in the fond belief that it straddled a stupendous cache of treasure (he wouldn’t be the last to make this mistake). Although the rica never materialised and the villa fledged into a city, it has remained obstinately pretty. Everything about it was charming: the cobbled streets, the colonnades, the public dances and puppet shows, the horse-carts and the stalls of cattle-salts and powdery rifles. The policemen carried ornamental daggers and the Victorian sugar-cane factory still ran on steam. In the main square, there was even a replica of the Statue of Liberty, affectionately smothered in paint.

  There have, however, been mixed fortunes for its inhabitants. A great classical writer, Manuel Ortiz Guerrero, settled here with his girlfriend, Dalmaccia. Although in the city’s portraits she looks something of a herbivore, her loyalty was admirable; Guerrero was a rapidly deconstructing leper. Another transitory resident was ex-President Perón of Argentina. He was unimpressed by house-arrest in Villarrica and sought a fleshier pot for his retirement, eventually settling for Panama.

  There were mixed fates too for the Australians. Laurence de Petrie, a one-armed anarchist who’d once tried to blow up a ship full of ‘double-breasted parasites’, took a job at the railway station (now drifting in thistles). It ended badly when he tried to rescue the station-master’s daughter from a train and was himself squashed flat. Things worked out better for Alexander MacDonald. He was so happy that he wrote a book, Picturesque Paraguay, encouraging other immigrants (though prudently omitting his involvement with the socialists). On reflection, Villarrica was a strange choice for such a rangy adventurer – who’d trekked through East Africa, ridden with the Egyptian cavalry and acted as adviser to the Emperor of Ethiopia – but something caught his eye.

  ‘Men stand around discussing politics, race meetings and cock-fighting,’ he wrote, ‘the whole thing much after the style of an open-air fair in Europe in the Middle Ages.’

  This, broadly speaking, mir
rored my sentiments. I stayed for a week.

  69

  ONE OF MY excursions from Villarrica was with an American who loathed me from the start. At first I found this a little disconcerting, but I soon realised that his hatred was not specific but was levelled at humankind in general. Our lives had been thrown together by mutual contacts in Asunción and a particular source of irritation was that I was British. As we drove along, he probed at this.

  ‘Is it true you drink your beer warm, like piss? What you got a queen for?’

  It was like discovering that The Catcher in the Rye wasn’t just a nightmare, that Holden Caulfield had emerged from tortured adolescence and was now a tortured agronomist in central Paraguay. Just in case he can blush, I’ll call him Garth (although his real name was Brian). In Garth’s world, there were only two redeeming features: plants and insects.

  ‘This is the fuckin’ ant capital of the world. More species than anywhere else.’

  He particularly admired the insects that devoured mankind. It seemed there were plenty: polvorinos, ticks, jiggers (that bored their way in through the toes), widow-flies, mosquitoes, bott-flies and warble-flies (who implanted their larvae in living flesh). Even the taxonomy was excruciating, with names like Hypoderma and Pulex Penetrans.

  ‘The botts burrow deep into the muscle, about the size of maggots,’ said Garth fondly. ‘You just squeeze ’em out. I once had one on my ass-hole …’