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At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

Page 32

by John Gimlette


  ‘This is the land of the pagan Nogogolidis,’ it says, scrawled across the empty Chaco. ‘They are the Lengua Ocelot. There is no water in summer.’

  One who did survive was a German, Father Martin Dobrizhoffer. He would return to write Vienna’s best-seller for 1784, in Latin. That he thrived at all is remarkable; when he first heard his Indians, he thought that they were talking in coughs and sneezes. But he persisted and, like every old freelancer, he was soon buying their souls, in his case with beads and scissors. He supplemented his report with a few sample savages. By the time he’d got them back to the mission, however, they’d died of nostalgia.

  Little more was heard from the Chaco until almost the twentieth century.

  After the bridge, Foxhound produced a rifle and started firing into the swamps. He was looking for capybaras.

  ‘Or alligators,’ he said, leaning out of the wheelhouse and emptying a clip of bullets into the mud.

  ‘Alligator fat makes excellent mosquito repellent,’ announced the quack. ‘Especially when it’s rotten.’

  The quack had been reading the Bible all afternoon in preparation for the storm. I asked him what other medicines he prescribed. His yoke was stuffed with pills, teas, unguents, bones, herbs from the Indians and charms.

  ‘This one is made by the Aché: cat’s claw tea.’

  I bought a sachet. It was a cure for lung cancer, bronchitis, internal tumours, jealousy and Aids.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘Everywhere. I am always travelling. I don’t have a home.’

  The horse-trader came to join us. He was very pleased I had a French name.

  ‘My ancestors were German,’ he said proudly.

  This promising friendship only faltered when I told him that he’d need 5,500 guaranís to buy £1. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he said and stamped off to the galley. He returned a little later wearing the cook’s glasses.

  ‘Will you now please take my photograph.’

  I did so and our friendship was back on track. The three of us spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the wheelhouse roof, dangling our feet and staring out into our empty, silver world. Occasionally, thick rafts of water hyacinths floated past.

  ‘Big enough,’ said the Quack, ‘to take a man to Argentina – or a jaguar.’

  Apart from us, there were few other boats: a cattle barge; a bulk-carrier bringing iron ore down from Brazil; a dugout and a fisherman. The Guaraní stopped several times at lonely estancias and villages of straw. Some of our Indians got off and others got on. Peóns in thick leather armour emerged from the thorns to haul away their cement or to leave us with produce. We accumulated a large box of bearded fish.

  At one village two prostitutes got on. Foxhound brushed his teeth and selected the fatter one. Her friend joined the Indians in the galley, eating boiled pumpkin and pig fat. When they’d finished, they all wiped their faces on the tablecloth. The Quack returned to his yoke and his Bible. It wouldn’t be long now until the storm.

  Once, all these river travellers were mere bait for the ‘sweet-water pirates’, the Payaguás. They were far from sweet themselves; ‘the most pestilent Indians on the river’, according to Father Dobrizhoffer, ‘atrocious pirates … more like beasts than men’. They hunted by canoe, swarming out of the reeds to overwhelm merchantmen with their slaughter and cannibalism. But they fared badly in the era of gunpowder and rifling. Blasted from the water, by 1852 they were in Asunción begging and selling little birds.

  The end came soon enough. After this, I’d only find them as a footnote in Thompson’s War in Paraguay. López had conscripted them into an artillery battery. For a while they seem to have been loyal and effective bombardiers, but in time they were all blown to mincemeat and the tribe became extinct.

  The storm came as the herbalist had said it would. The crew draped the decks in tarpaulins and the Indians nuzzled into shawls. All night great sheets of static exploded over the river. I thought of the petrol lashed to the foredeck.

  ‘This,’ wrote Knight, as The Falcon was being tossed around on the river, ‘is the most electric region in the world.’

  Right or wrong, it was a bewildering display of volts. I watched it all, through the chinks in my cupboard. By dawn, the forge was spent and the day emerged shiny and brilliant, like newly minted silver.

  The Quack crawled out from under his herbs.

  ‘Drink this,’ he said. ‘It will soothe your bowels.’

  I politely obeyed and crossed the Tropic of Capricorn on a breakfast of tinned fish and cat’s claw tea.

  81

  CONCEPCIÓN WAS BUILT by the Italians in all the hope and ebullience of a new century, the twentieth. It stood with its back to the jungles of the north, confronting the Chaco – which the Italians shrewdly suspected of abundance. They built a city to receive the wealth as they reaped it in: a cathedral and a palazzo for the bishop, statues of Equality and Liberty, mansions – scrolled, panelled and lavishly tiled – and a post office the size of a fortress. There would be parks and walks and a club for the gentlemen. Everything would be drenched in the colours of home: the ochres of Tuscany, fruit gelatis, fresh raspberries and the lucent blues of the Mediterranean.

  The century didn’t work out as planned. Concepción was always at the crucible of revolt. The first, in 1913, merely filled a mass grave. The second, the Civil War of 1947, sent nearly a third of the country into exile. The city could easily have become just a cowboy town, a frontier post and a last, jaunty drinking-hole for those about to perish in the thorns.

  Surprisingly it hadn’t.

  I followed the pony carts up from the port. The carters rode them standing up, like charioteers. As they thundered along the arena, billowing sand, I suddenly realised we were in the centre, walled in by miniature palaces. The citizens had maintained all the aspirations of their founders; their city was as curly and fruity as it had been on the day of its eponymous conception. Even the tack shops were defiantly flashy; I could have bought a set of reins with solid-silver buckles or a gun-belt made from jaguar.

  I stayed two nights, at The French Hotel.

  Enrique Wood, I discovered, lived just behind the hotel. His house was typical of the street, smaller than it first appeared because from a rather promising front it tapered off like a wedge of cheese. Enrique and his wife lived there with two of everything: two children, two maids, two cats, two refrigerators and two sausage dogs. Every time their enormous front door opened, the sausages rushed out and attacked someone. The cats ate all the cake at teatime. These unrelated facts were merely the outward signs of Enrique’s life; everything seems to have occurred or accumulated haphazardly, unsought and uncontrolled. It was an ancestral problem.

  The Woods had arrived in Paraguay in 1894. William Wood, shearer, Queenslander and agitator, had never settled and died of the grog. His wife, Lillie, lived for the next seventy years at the breakaway colony at Cosme, wishing herself in Australia until the day she died. They’d had three sons, brought up wild and barefoot in the campo. Each drifted into the Great European War: Norman signed up with the Engineers; Alex joined the Black Watch in Palestine; Bill fought at Gallipoli and lost his virginity to an Arab girl. To their surprise, the brothers survived. Disowned by the countries they’d fought for, they wandered back to Cosme. Overjoyed to have them home, the colonists celebrated with rum and with fireflies in their hair. The boys said they’d never leave Paraguay again.

  Then came the revolution of 1921 and they were scattered. Norman, Enrique’s father, ended up in Concepción, working sometimes in tannin, sometimes in cattle. Enrique kept a photograph of him shaking hands with the Duke of Edinburgh during a rare surge in his fortunes. He made the Duke look very pale and undernourished.

  Enrique was proud of his Australian origins and wore an Akubra hat. He was acutely myopic and tended to look at things with disbelief, which I soon realised was much how he felt. Like his father and uncles, his life had been carried along in the currents; he’d
been a vet, a cattle-dealer and an ice-cream man. Even his socialism – for which he’d been casually beaten during the Stronato – was of the fluid kind.

  ‘Who,’ I teased, ‘should be the king of Paraguay?’

  It was easy. ‘Our goalkeeper,’ he said, without hesitation, ‘Chilavert.’

  He took me all over Concepción on his moped. A town of such abundant generosity and such unfulfilled expectations, it seemed to complement him perfectly. He was very popular. Every time we stopped he was surrounded and patted and ruffled.

  We visited his relatives, both dead and alive. Don Norman was buried in his own zone of the cemetery between the revolutionaries and the babies. He’d held out until 1992. Of those still in the pink, Gladys Davey was a butcher and Robert Pfanl-Smith a bigot.

  ‘You can’t blame him,’ said Enrique. ‘He did well under Stroessner.’

  At the centre of Concepción was a steam engine, made in Leicester in 1909. The Italians had bought it for a railway that only ever happened in part. It now carried a small notice, painted with all the indignation that the city could muster: This is not a public lavatory.

  82

  I FLEW UP to Valle Mi in a machine called a Caravan 208. The river looked panic-stricken from up there, wriggling and ox-bowing as it recoiled from the Chaco. Out on that great steaming baize, there wasn’t a single river that ran the whole year round, and the temperature often scorched into the forties. I could also see the Guaraní, on its microscopic journey north. I would rejoin it later in the day, for the voyage back.

  Valle Mi was choking in its own cement mine and so I got a boatman to take me downstream, to Puerto Casado. He lived in a mysterious and sometimes terrifying world: this river is full of two-kilo pirañas; here is the only rocky outcrop in the eastern Chaco; over there is a cave that is said to go down for ever.

  This land was no less mysterious or terrifying for its first pioneers, at the turn of the twentieth century. It was still widely thought the Chaco would turn into a forest without light or a whirlpool that dragged men into hell. The natives drank warm blood from skulls and burnt their captives’ feet to prevent them from escaping.

  ‘It is pretty well-established,’ wrote the doughty MacDonald, ‘that there is an unknown monster here …’

  Unsurprisingly, the first to come were men who valued their lives at less than a good adventure: Charley Kent, the old-Harrovian; George Loman, who married an Indian and sent three exotic sons to boarding school; Bob Stewart, who could drink a bottle of Scotch and still spell his name in bullet holes.

  It was the Americans who arrived with the heaviest clout. Most had found that their own west was no longer wild. Tex Rickard arrived in 1912 with a gang of rednecks. He’d made his fortune promoting fights in Madison Square Garden and his men punched out 300,000 hectares of cactus. On their furloughs, they punched out the bars of Concepción, shot the bottles off the shelves and cooled their heels in the slammer.

  There were plenty of others – Kelly, Lewis the Texan, and Hillman, who fought a day-long battle with the Indians all on his own.

  One of the Americans surviving from this era was Margarita Kent’s great-uncle, Robert Eaton. He’d invited me for coffee one afternoon, in Asunción. He was ninety-one and lived in a bunkhouse of faded photographs and anaconda skins. This is how it happened, he said:

  I was born in Vermont, which is just a bunch of old rocks. I wanted adventure, cowboy stuff. You seen Will Rogers? Well, like that. Anyway, I applied for this job, $60-a-month job, working cattle in Paraguay (which I thought was the capital of Uruguay). I signed up in New York on Black Monday 1929 and bankers were jumping out of windows and all that. I was twenty and had my own saddle, lassos, a thirty-thirty and a Colt .38. That was all.

  We came up from Argentina on the steamer, me and the manager, a Scottish feller called MacBain. Then we went upriver until we got to the little railway, the trencito. We hadn’t gotten far when there was this log across the track. Next thing, MacBain has a bullet in his head and his brains were on my pants. ‘This is the frontier!’ I thought. ‘It’s real !’ I was sorry about MacBain but here was a lesson: if you have a gun, always have it ready. Ours had all been in the toolbox.

  The company had 4,000 hectáreas, eighty kilometres inland – previously unoccupied on account of hostile Indians. The Paraguayans were terrified of them – Sanapanás mostly – but I was intrigued. The cacique taught me to shoot a bow and arrow. They called him ‘Seven Germans’ because he’d killed seven Germans from a survey team. It wasn’t entirely true; they were French. I was OK with the Indians. They called me ‘Almost-an-Englishman’ and I gave them jobs in return for corn and yerba …

  In 1932 I met my wife, Charley Kent’s daughter, Dorothy. She was only nineteen but she knew the Chaco well. She had no fear of the Indians and took care of all our medical problems. She had Dr Black’s Home Medicine and could fix broken arms and gunshot wounds. I don’t know why she came with me! I was Kit Carson! Davy Crockett! She was such a pretty girl … She’s dead now. She died in 1988.

  … Things could get real rough. One time, we had no water for six months. The only stuff to drink was sixteen feet down. We had a lot of tigres too, taking the cattle. I’ve shot eighteen and two lions, always with the handgun. I caught two tigres alive and one went off to England. London Zoo! I heard they killed it when the bombing began in 1940. In case it got out, I guess …

  I got some pictures someplace. Here. ‘Dorothy, 1931’, ‘Indians hunting ostrich’. Here’s one of that anaconda, up there on the wall, thirty-two foot long. ‘Sanapanás with lungfish’. ‘Indian puberty dance’. We didn’t see much of them after 1932. There was a lot of smallpox and I suppose they just ran away …

  Then, in September, the war started. Soon, we had all the troops arriving, on the trencito from Casado …

  83

  THE BOATMAN LEFT me on the wharf and I walked up a track of blinding white silt into Puerto Casado.

  This was once the capital of the world’s largest private property. Beyond it, the Casado family fiefdom had sprawled into the Chaco, three times the size of Switzerland; 5,000,000 hectares (or 19,200 square miles) of cattle country and quebracho forest. It had even had its own railway – the trencito – and a thousand serfs living in Casado houses. The Casados themselves lived in Buenos Aires – Argentines who’d acquired the plot (without too many questions) in the aftermath of the Triple Alliance. They’d also had holdings in Argentina, but only in Paraguay could they have been so grandiose. Even now, seventy-seven per cent of Paraguayan land was owned by one per cent of its landholders. Not only did the country have perhaps the most unequal land distribution in the world, it didn’t even own itself.

  I trudged through the Casados’ monogrammed town.

  For a while, it seemed, they’d let things prosper. Every silted street was scored with silvery lines – the rails of the trencito – converging on the quebracho factory. This had been the powerhouse of Casado wealth; where the logs were pulped into valuable tannin. Spreading out from the gates was a model village: Dutch-style houses for the managers and pretty cottages for the workers, with verandas and bougainvillaea around the door. There was even a Hotel Casado and a large red church with crow-stepped gables. I lay in there for a while, panting in the heat and drinking in the cool of Casado brick and Casado stained-glass. Here the private empire had been momentarily ethereal.

  Then, suddenly, in 1996, the mighty Casados had simply closed it all down. All but fifty men were laid off. The rest were left to take their chances in a private town on the edge of a private desert. The unemployed gathered to protest, but there was no one left to shout at. Business crumbled. The hotel closed and its battlements were now powdering away. The gardens had been repossessed by feral pigs and foul birds, jays and mocking parrots. In the fountain were feral children, paddling in grey slime. Puerto Casado was disassembling itself, reverting to the scrawny Indian toldería of a century ago.

  I ate a plate of tripe and potatoes at
the copetin and then walked down through the silt to the factory.

  It was an enormous cathedral of rust, yawning and groaning in the hot wind. I scrambled inside, into an oily black jungle of lubricating swamps, cables, idlers and grinding teeth. At the far end was the steam shed and the mottled hulks of the trencitos. There were ten bantam steam engines, each named after a new, mewling Casado. Each bore an engine plate: ‘Berlin 1904’; ‘Leeds 1916’; ‘Percy Grant of Buenos Aires’. I climbed into a miniature carriage and took a seat among the drifts of sand.

  During the Chaco War, these exquisite little toys had hauled over 100,000 troops off into the thorns, 1,600 at a time. Bolivia made some attempts to disable them, popping bullets and bomblets through this great carapace of tin. Buenos Aires – and the Casado family in particular – responded with lacerating invective. Bolivia took fright and wisely pulled her aeroplanes off.

  A war with Paraguay was one thing. A war with the Casados was quite another.

  84

  THAT EVENING, I waited on the pier for the return of the Guaraní.

  The stevedores were waiting too, with their carts and pastries and a box of puppies. They were Sanapaná Indians. As they waited, they hunted for fish, using spears made of steel rods plundered from the factory. Soon the water was bloody and frothy and they heaved a long, sleek monster on to the decking. It had the head and teeth of a dog: the pirá jaguá.

  ‘We only eat this bit,’ they said, and hacked its rear flanks off. The dog-head was furious and lashed about with the new, raw whip of its spine. We all watched as its courage and its life ebbed away.

 

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