At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  He’d agreed to take me with him, camping in Ybytyruzú. It was a place that brilliantly combined his twin passions. ‘Ybytyruzú’s a young range of primary forest. Once the trees came right down here, to the grasslands, but all that’s gone. Just gallery forests and bamboo now. They’ve even started to clear the lower slopes, fuckin’ pricks with chain-saws. The only wild bits left are up on the top.’ And then, absently, ‘The bugs are goin’ to fuckin’ love you.’

  Before the wild bits, however, was a strange, tropical outcrop of Bavaria. Suddenly, we were bounding up into meadows of Friesians, past alpine chalets and a little Saxon church steeped in oranges and sugar cane. There was a Deutsche schule with a Prussian eagle and a bierstube of yellowy Germans. It was Colonia Independencia, founded in 1919 with 12,000 peasants.

  We stopped for Schnitzel mit pommes frites. Garth saw a man he knew and waved. The labourer waved a stump back at him.

  ‘Hansee lost his arm in the sawmill,’ said Garth. ‘Some of the Germans have money, some have shit. Hansee has shit.’

  I was secretly rather impressed with Independencia. It was as pretty as a train layout.

  ‘They still celebrate Hitler’s birthday here,’ said Garth.

  Was I supposed to find this endearing?

  ‘Bunch of fuckin’ pricks.’

  70

  THE YBYTYRUZÚ RANGE was everything Garth had promised (or threatened). We camped at Swiss Falls, where a gulch of green water crashed out of the forest and lost itself over a cliff. The isolated chalets up here had long been abandoned – in haste, it seemed, with the stoves still full of ash and the beds unmade. Everything was thickly matted in dust and bat-droppings and so we shrank away, to the open ground. As the pines and the lapachos threw their shadows into the clearing, the polvorinos clustered densely in my hair.

  There was another treat too: the mbaragui. Each one was a chilli-grain of vengeance. They found my hands (everything else was parcelled up and drenched in deet), which for the next week looked like boxing gloves, studded with bright-red nail-heads. Garth meanwhile was cultivating serenity.

  ‘I need to be alone,’ he said (superfluously). These were Garth moments, spent grubbing around in the forest, collecting leaves, dirt and bits of mould. I stayed behind on the lip of the falls, peering out over the grasslands way below.

  These highlands, I’d read, were once the hunting grounds of a mysterious people. There were few of them; a hundred square miles of this forest will only support twenty hunters. They were naked and hunted with stone axes, like living fossils. If they’d ever farmed, they’d lost their skills in the great invasions of the Guaraní and had become fugitives in their own forests. They evolved to their life in the shadows; they turned white as their pigmentation faltered; they learnt to communicate in silence and birdsong; they became adept raiders of cattle and women. The Guaraní were terrified, believing these guajakí – or ‘rabid rats’ – to be the scourged ones, punished by the Sun God for their nudity. In the seventeenth century, the Guaraní’s allies and patrons, the Jesuit fathers, tried to understand these savages. A group of thirty were captured for their studies but they stubbornly refused food and died.

  The scholarly chronicler, Father Lozano, recorded what he could. In The History of the Conquest of Paraguay he detailed their weapons and their devilish customs. There was precious little to go on. They are a small ‘nation’, he concluded, continually attacked by jaguars and wild animals: ‘They are not unified and each is separated from the others, they cannot help each other and are buried in impenetrable woods, forced into them by the same wild animals who disturb their tranquillity.’ He was puzzled by the scarcity of women and swiftly concluded that their society was riven by little wars. He knew nothing of their rituals.

  There was no further scholarship until the second half of the twentieth century. The guajakís remained pale spectres of the forest. Even MacDonald (who knew the Ybytyruzú well) never saw one, although he was aware that they were often hunted by the Paraguayans – and some Europeans. The skins of the guajakí, it was said, made the best hammocks.

  He didn’t even know the name by which they called themselves: the Aché – ‘the people’.

  I slept in the jeep that night, besieged by insects and dreams of the rabid white rats. Garth slept in the forest, reappearing at dawn with two infant Guaranís, dressed only in football shorts and riding a horse. They got off and approached me very carefully, entwined with fear.

  ‘I told ’em,’ sneered Garth, ‘that you eat little kids.’

  I was beginning to warm to Garth. Too late, it was time to part.

  Had he ever seen the Aché?

  ‘I saw some over on the other side of the range. But they didn’t want a gringo pokin’ around. They had enough fuckin’ problems.’

  It was a fair summary of their predicament. It was almost their requiem.

  71

  TWENTY KILOMETRES NORTH of Villarrica, in the other direction, the people of Letter Hill were tormented by visions of rather different white men: the Vikings.

  I got an old bus out there, to satisfy myself that this was insanity.

  The obsession with a Viking ancestry is an old one, twinned with the delusions of treasure. Hadn’t Viracocha, the Inca god, been a white man with a beard? Stories of a lost civilisation fluffed up the greed. The Jesuits reported more lost white-beards and marked their Paraguayan maps with Viking place-names. By now, the southern cone was cluttered with lost empires: El Dorado, Atlantis, the City of the Caesars, Meta, Omagua, Manoa, the Empire Puytita and – for the Guaraní – Tapuá Guazú. Even Dr Förster took up the theme, propagating rumours of long-lost Paraguayan-Aryans at somewhere called Guana-quí.

  The ‘runic scripts’ of Letter Hill would ensure that this one ran and ran.

  The village huts were scattered in the lee of Ybytyruzú. The villagers washed in a mountain stream. As we drove in, a hunter was pedalling his way home with an old Winchester slung across his shoulders. He had claws and teeth like a dog and growled as the bus passed. I got out at the village school, which was furnished with only a table, the teacher’s chair and a chart of the human nervous system.

  I scrambled up to the caves with the schoolmaster, Mr Gómez. We craned our necks up at the gouges in the rock.

  ‘It’s a treasure map,’ said Mr Gómez.

  All I could make out were whirls and snakes, spirogyra, stickmen, Snoopy and some balloons on string. I tried to imagine what it said: today we caught eight armadillos and an extinct thing.

  ‘We believe there’s a lot of treasure,’ continued Mr Gómez. ‘There’s an Austrian living higher up the hill and he’s translating it for us. We expect results any day.’

  We were joined by Isadora from the farm. She was on her way to feed the piglets. ‘The descendants of the Vikingos still live over the mountains,’ she said. ‘They have blond hair, green eyes …’

  ‘… and Swedish names!’ added Mr Gómez.

  I noticed, with disappointment, that they were pointing in the direction of Colonia Independencia. The idea of a longship’s warriors surviving a journey round the world and thirty-seven generations of disease, miscegenation and conquest – appealing though it was – now seemed irredeemably tatty.

  I wished them both well with the treasure. Mr Gómez took me back to Villarrica with him on his moped. We drank a lot of beer together. He didn’t think the gold would change him.

  So what had started all this, the whiteness and the elusive tribe? My feeling was that it all came back to some of the earliest and most secretive inhabitants of the continent: the Aché.

  72

  IN AUGUST 1959, an extraordinary event happened: the Aché of Ybytyruzú simply surrendered.

  The last decades had been the worst since the invasions of the Guaraní, possibly the worst in their thousands of years of existence. Their hunting grounds had been chopped away by foresters and their territory sliced in half by ruta dos. Worse, there was now an insatiable demand for guajakí slav
es. Each savage was worth the price of a horse.

  The demand was partly historical: the Guaranís’ need to overwhelm their own fears, to conquer these pale, supernatural spectres and to possess them as slaves. They were expensive because the Aché were hard to track. The montaraces – the Indian hunters – could move right through a guajakí camp without knowing they were there. Even in captivity they could move as quickly and silently as an idea. Although the women were often intractably bonded by means of prostitution, the young men were more elusive. They were tormented by the prospect of never fulfilling their sexual and therefore spiritual ambitions (no Paraguaya would ever have contemplated coupling herself to such a half-human). In a celebrated case in 1943, two braves were whipped for attempting to escape. As soon as their tormentor was asleep, they forced a flaming log down his throat, stole his weapons and fled, back into the forest. The dead man’s son joined the montaraces.

  It was the same man who, ten years later, took part in the greatest capture of them, forty tribals herded into San Juan Nepomuceno. The leader of the hunt was a professional, Pinchin López, but his beaters were terrified Paraguayan soldiers. They believed the guajakí had tails, and in their panic they fluffed the ambush and shot a precious slave. The rest were corralled into a cattle pen for the night. Pinchin, a man of notable stupidity and ostentatious thirst, believed the guajakí could be penned up like animals. By dawn, they’d vanished, as silently as ghosts.

  When news of the affair reached Asunción, it triggered the humble beginnings of outrage. For the first time, it became illegal under Paraguayan law to kill an indigena.

  For the Aché, it was merely a stay of execution. Six years later, they padded back into San Juan and gave themselves up.

  *

  San Juan Nepomuceno sits halfway down the whip-tail of Ybytyruzú, two hours from Villarrica. It was a drowsy town of sandy streets and veterinary stores, much, I imagined, as it had been forty years before. I had lunch at the Capybara Bar, which was layered in soft pornography and the curvy white outlines of the San Marino cigarette girl. Every surface was so sticky with dust that the estancieros ate with their hats on, plates of knuckles and gravy. The older ones remembered the Achés.

  ‘When he was hungry,’ they said, ‘the Aché just wandered off. He ate anything – pumas, jaguars, alligators …’

  They remembered Pinchin López too; he shook himself to death with rum.

  Where did the Aché stay?

  ‘About ten kilometres away, at Pereira’s place, on Arroyo Moroti. They may still be there.’

  Farmer Pereira had been only too happy to accommodate the Aché. He believed that, in time, they would lead him to the treasures of Madame Lynch.

  73

  NEWS OF THE Aché’s surrender travelled down the anthropologists’ telegraph. In Paris, Pierre Clastres, a promising young scholar, acquired tapes of their voices and taught himself their language. He read the works of Father Lozano and bought a revolver. By 1963, he was at Arroyo Moroti, eager to unravel the secrets of guajakí – or, as he called them, ‘the savages’.

  For a while, everything Clastres found was to his satisfaction. The Aché were a shy and secretive people whose world was finely balanced between good fortune on the one hand and poor hunting (pané) on the other. The imbalances were addressed by ritual, by complex ceremonies, by sacrifice and by the experience of pain through scarification, piercing and circumcision. In this balanced world, a birth portended the death of a father.

  They were hunters who plucked their bodies of hair to set them apart from beasts. They had no words for ‘to plant’ and the only cassava they ate was stolen from the Paraguayans. A man was never to eat the game he’d killed, for that offended the spirit of sharing. A woman was never to touch his arrows for that would bring pané.

  Clastres stayed with them for a year, delving into their lives. He went hunting with them, dressed only in his boots and gun-belt. He slept in their huts and ate with them: game, forest honey and fistfuls of maggots. He missed nothing. The Aché were polyandrous and knew no sin of adultery. As the night forest was terrifying, their sex was public and unambitious. Although intrigued by some fumbled experiments with fellatio, Clastres noted (with a little Gallic hauteur): ‘They are not experts in the Art of Love.’

  He watched with equal detachment as his savages redressed the imbalances of their society. The unwanted child was punched from the uterus or strangled at birth. The elderly and those too sick to hunt were dispatched with the crack of a stone hatchet. Each year, his Aché met up with other groups from eastern Paraguay for the kybairu, the exchange of unmarried girls. The loss of women was prefaced by mock warfare. Then the war-paint was washed away and the groups play-fought for possession of a proaa bean. It was merely the pretext for touching each other (which, was, at all other times, repugnant), for ritual tickling and for sex and marriage.

  Like Lozano, Clastres was puzzled by the shortage of women. Then, by chance, he made a discovery that he described as ‘terrifying’: the Aché were cannibals.

  Pereira knew, of course, and had done all along. He feared that if the secret of the Aché got out, he’d lose his treasure-hunters. Besides, the Aché brought other advantages: people in Asunción sent them generous parcels of food (which Pereira siphoned off and sold); he’d also found himself an endless source of unripened squaws.

  He kept his counsel – and his patronage, as chief of the cannibals.

  Clastres greeted his discovery not as an academic triumph but as a matter of profound despair. Cannibalism was an expression of grief. His savages, now under catastrophic environmental pressure, were quite literally tearing themselves apart and self-digesting.

  He realised that they’d always eaten their dead. Father Lozano had been right after all, in giving credence to the rumours of the Guaraní (‘They are like tigres and gorge themselves with the corpses of the dead’). Clastres also realised that they didn’t eat human flesh out of nutritional necessity, though they clearly enjoyed the taste.

  ‘It is sweet!’ they told him. ‘And good fat!’

  Their cannibalism was a religious necessity. The death of a man leaves his spirit – his ianwe – restless yet trapped in the living world. There is even a danger that the ianwe will enter the body of a living person, with fatal consequences. It can only be released by eating the dead man’s carcass. When this has been picked of every scrap of flesh and tissue, the skull is then smashed and burnt and the ianwe is carried away west, to the Land of the Dead.

  Clastres absorbed these details with a growing sense of hopelessness, not because cannibalism existed but because it was out of control. During his year at Arroyo Moroti, the number of savages fell from a hundred to seventy-five. Some succumbed to influenza. Others simply withered because they couldn’t hunt and believed themselves cursed. Here was the danger: such unnatural deaths had to be attended by jepy, or vengeance; the ianwe needed a companion in his journey to the afterlife. Death therefore came in twins. As in Jesuit times, the brunt of the sacrifice was borne by the females. Women were simply cut down with the axe or crushed under a stampede of feet. Then they were eaten.

  ‘This is the way we do it!’ they’d shout as the victim’s life ebbed away.

  The dead were eaten with exacting rituality. Every member of the group was to be invited. Adult corpses were roasted and children boiled in a pot. Every part had to be eaten, except a woman’s sexual organs – and the intestines, if they stank. The fat was soaked up on brushes and the bones were broken up and given to the older women, to lick out the marrow. Anyone could eat the body except relatives, proscribed by the same rules relating to incest.

  ‘To eat someone,’ says Clastres, ‘is in some sense to make love with him.’

  Towards the end of his study, the savages ate a baby that they’d killed. Clastres found the bones afterwards, licked clean by little brushes. He was unable to remain detached any longer, feeling himself a helpless witness at the destruction of an ancient and remarkable race.
Although he would return to Paraguay several times, he could never bear to return to his savages. By 1968, he’d heard, there were only thirty left at Arroyo Moroti.

  Four years later, he published his treatise, Chronique des Indiens Guajakí. A work of compassion, it was immediately banned in Paraguay.

  It was also in many ways an unfinished story.

  It would remain so. In another five years, Clastres would himself be dead, killed in a car crash at the age of forty-three.

  74

  I COULDN’T EXPECT much of my trip to Arroyo Moroti. It was simply historical curiosity, a bleak, secular pilgrimage. I hired a dilapidated taxi and a driver called Edelio, who walloped his machine out into the grasslands, trailing his sump-cover all the way. He was only twenty and had never heard of the Aché.

  Pereira’s farm was unrecognisable from Clastres. They were burning off the winter grass and I could just make out the last charred stumps of the trees. The rest of the forest had shrivelled back, over the horizon into the jagged Ybytyruzú.

  Pereira was long dead.

  We stopped at several little chacras. The farmers offered us tereré and oranges but no one remembered the Indians. Then we came upon Mr Israel, who’d taken his tenancy much earlier than the others, in 1971.

  ‘I remember them well. They wore animal skins, little skirts down here on their …’ he struggled momentarily, ‘on their delicate bits. They had straw houses up over there, all gone now. Back then, they hunted in the forest …’

  We gazed out over the smouldering grass.

  ‘They ate everything!’

  ‘Including people?’ I ventured.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, cupping his balls absently. ‘But not after the War.’