At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  I asked them if they still found anacondas.

  ‘Plenty in the swamp here,’ they said, ‘but we don’t eat them.’

  It was almost dusk and the swamp behind us was thrashing and croaking with reptiles. I thought of the thirty-foot specimen on Robert Eaton’s wall.

  ‘He can swallow a pig,’ said the stevedores, and laughed.

  Doubtless this would have been less amusing to the São Paulo dentist swallowed by an anaconda in 1999. For a while, the internet carried his portrait, taken after a month in the snake’s digestive system. Father Montoya had filed equally distressing copy with the Jesuits in 1636. He’d seen an anaconda attack an Indian woman ‘for the purpose of violating her’. ‘The woman was speechless with fright on seeing the huge snake so licentious, and the latter, carrying her to the opposite side of the river carried out its lascivious purpose.’ Maybe it was the cat’s claw tea. Or perhaps Montoya had been too long on the Paraguayan rivers.

  As darkness fell, I was rescued by the Guaraní and returned to Concepción. There were no cupboards left on the return leg. That night, I slept on the wheelhouse roof and woke under a sky as cold and silvery as fish.

  85

  FROM CONCEPCIÓN, I took a bus up into the northern shoulder of Eastern Paraguay. This was the Amambay Range, with a reputation for snakiness and umpteen degrees of brigandage.

  To me, it unfurled like pages from The Lost World; dizzying parabolas of grassland, lunging forests and great purple volcanic molars embedded along the Brazilian frontier. But, like Palacios, many believed that Amambay had indeed been lost, bought out by foreigners. I could see what they meant. Americans and Brazilians had acquired big ranches along the road, with waggon-wheels on the gate and radio masts nosing up from the grass. Lyndon Johnson’s cousin, Clarence, had blown his fortune on coffee ventures up here, but others, like ‘Rattlesnake’ Matheson, had found serenity of a sort. A former rodeo rider, lumberjack, high steel worker and linebacker with the Cleveland Rams, Rattlesnake now kept 10,000 acres and a little business selling engines and dog-chews.

  I went as far as I could, to the frontier and Pedro Juan Caballero.

  I soon realised that it was wrong to imagine that Paraguay had been sold out. Pedro Juan had survived – and thrived – precisely because it was so doggedly Paraguayan; it was a smuggling outlet. In fact, it was more than an outlet; it was a sort of volcanic vent spewing contraband into southern Brazil. Three-quarters of Brazil’s marijuana was being transshipped through Paraguay, most of it through Pedro Juan. The town was pure Paraguayan puppetry, strings pulled from above. When, in 1985, a little Pedro Juan aeroplane was impounded, wheezing under 700 kilos of pure cocaine, no one was particularly surprised to find that the pilot was one of General Rodríguez’s trusties. This was, according to the old mantra, merely the ‘price of peace’.

  The price of Scotch, meanwhile, was lethally affordable. I found Pedro Juan’s main drag walled in by boxes of the stuff, like a cardboard canyon. For whatever the Scotsman pays for his bottle, the Paraguayan gets five bottles and still has change for two hundred ‘Cowboy’ brand cigarettes, a Barbie doll or a gross of Earl Grey tea-bags. Small wonder that some twelve and a half million bottles were now washing in and out of the country every year.

  ‘Smuggling,’ wrote Graham Greene, ‘is the national industry of Paraguay.’

  The scale of duplicity was indeed industrial, and yet nobody called it smuggling. It was intermediación. These huge consignments of contraband were intermediated around town by horsemen with cloaks and trilbys and long bamboo whips. French champagne was cheap enough to bathe in, and business went on all night (with gunmen sprawled out over the merchandise). In the excitement, no thought had been given to sewers or streets, which rippled along like river beds. Even the idea of electricity had come as an afterthought, in 1974.

  For a while, in spite of tropical downpours, I found Pedro Juan intriguing. I bought some whisky at a shop called ‘Winckler the German’. I weighed up each revolver in the Mount Lebanon Gunshop. The frontier ran through the middle of the town and I wandered in and out of Brazil all morning. The two countries were separated by thirty metres of sodden red grass and they bled freely, one into the other. Even the Brazilian politicians often came blaring across the border in their loudspeaker vans. But on their side, the shops were prim and productive (shovels, gasoline tins and overalls). On our side, the merchandise was rather more disorientating.

  Life, like whisky, was competitively priced if not downright cheap. According to Crónica, the racketeers often sprinkled each other in machine-gun fire (and were then colourfully epitaphed across the centrefold). Visiting congressmen could expect to be fêted with Molotov cocktails. Journalists were faced with equally bleak prospects: be discreet or be a monument. I acquired a loyal taxi-driver, and whenever we went any distance, we had to let his daughter know where we were going. He had bad news for the victims of this casual slaughter.

  ‘The police dump the bodies between the frontiers,’ he said. ‘It saves an investigation.’

  The image of corpses rotting in the red grass, of whisky canyons and crimson storm-water boiling through the streets soon took its toll. I spent more and more time in my hotel room, watching Paraguayan television: chat shows for swingers; advertisements for tarot-card readers; news bulletins read by men sucking maté, with ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ rumbling away in the background. I was merely killing time, waiting for the rain to stop before I could make my next move.

  Madame Lynch and her sweaty consort had re-emerged from the jungle, forty kilometres to the west, at Cerro Corá.

  86

  THE NEXT MORNING, before the lightning had abated, the loyal taxista drove me out to Cerro Corá. He dropped me at the bottom of a long, wet track. I walked up it, following a set of light paw-prints.

  ‘It’s a tirica,’ said the warden at the lodge. An ocelot. ‘They’re always here.’

  The warden was Wilfred Cardoso. He had a patriot’s sense of history and his park was a shrine to the great Marshal-President. He also had a pet monkey that looked like Barbie in a mink trouser-suit. She climbed into my lap and fell asleep. We allowed the official version of the End of the López Era to swirl around us: ‘noble self-sacrifice … the birth of a legend … a path lit for posterity’. Wilfred then showed me the detritus of the last fight – a few musket balls, a cooking-pot cast at Ybycuí, and a lance made by early Jesuits. When the lightning stopped, I woke the miniature monkey, thanked Wilfred and rejoined the paw-prints up to the battlefield.

  Cerro Corá had probably changed little since February 1870, a swollen red haunch bulging from the jungles of Amambay. From the top, the views rolled away in all directions, from viridescence and emeralds to the pale mauves of the volcanoes. These jungles, Wilfred said, were still hunted by the jaguar – though only occasionally. This infrequency was reassuring as I plodded along in its little cousin’s paw-prints. The jaguar is the third largest cat, up to ten feet from whiskers to tail, and a thunderous 300lbs of muscle. Unlike bigger cats, he’s cunning and unpredictable and kills his prey by splintering its skull. The Aché were terrified of them and so was MacDonald. Only his bisexual giant ant-bear was a match for ‘Johnny Spots’. The two were often to be found together, dead and enmeshed in each other’s teeth and claws.

  Jaguars were the least of López’s problems as he blundered northwards. There were still 8,000 Brazilian cavalry hotly at his heels. His new capitals at Curuguaty and Ygatimí had lasted no more than a month. Then the scrags of his forces would set off again, possessed not so much by tactics as hunger.

  These excursions were doing nothing for the Marshal’s sanity. The persecutions continued. His brother, Venancio, now flogged, ulcered and caked in blood, died like a pig at Chirigüelo. As for the beauty Pancha Garmendia who had been caged up like a canary after she’d defended her virtue, she was lanced. There weren’t bullets to spare for a firing squad. Three more British contractors – Hunter, Nesbitt and Alan Taylor’s son �
� tendered their resignations. López paid them, thanked them and then had them disembowelled. Finally, at Cerro Corá, he embarked on his most ambitious persecution yet: his mother’s. He had the old crone flogged and, on the eve of battle, signed her execution warrant. She was saved by the arrival of the Brazilians.

  I found myself alone on the plateau where the Paraguayans had camped. General Stroessner had marked the spot a century later with an ugly fin of concrete. The plateau was still bare of trees and the storm made the red mud simmer and bubble. López’s stragglers had arrived here on 8 February, perhaps a thousand of them. Madame Lynch and the children followed by carriage. The eldest boy, ‘Panchito’, was now fifteen and a colonel. He kept a muster-sheet of the available soldiers: 409 men.

  I found a thick handmade screw in the muck of the Paraguayans’ camp. They’d awaited their fate for three weeks, hunting and foraging in the jungle. López designed a medal three days before the end. It was inscribed ‘He overcame hardship and weariness. Amambay Campaign 1870.’ He rejected Madame Lynch’s proposal that they should break out for the Bolivian border, to the north-west. The die was already cast. He promised his men that he’d die with them, a subject he’d already given some thought to. As a student of Napoleonic France, he’d chosen his last words with care. In the end, he borrowed a taunt from Alexander of Russia, thrown in the face of Coulaincour: ‘I will die with my nation, sword in hand.’ His men sang a valedictory: Morir por ti, Patria.

  To the north of the plateau, the cerro sloped down to the river Aquidaban, a youthful orange torrent gnashing through the woods. In the rains, it looked impassable and ferocious, but on 1 March 1870, it had been languorous and shallow. Dawn rose, as hot and sickly as any that summer, and the Brazilian cavalry charged over the Aquidaban. López was surrounded.

  In most accounts, Madame Lynch made a formal appearance at the little battle. She put on a white crinoline gown which she’d last worn to dance with the Emperor at the Tuileries. There is no saying what effect her appearance had on the troops; a middle-aged Juno, trussed into a ball-dress she hadn’t worn for seventeen years. It can only have been momentary; within minutes, the skeletal Paraguayans were being crunched up under lance and sabre.

  López meanwhile was effecting an equally dramatic disappearance. He clambered on to a charger and belted off south, the way they’d come. Once again he’d abandoned his fancy lady and his litter to their fate. They tumbled after him in the carriage. Six Brazilian cavalrymen also set off in pursuit. They caught up with him several hundred yards away, at a stream called the Aquidaban-Niguí.

  Down by the stream, the scrub was thicker and fortified with thorns. The thickets were stippled with parrots and woodpeckers and brilliant cardinals. It was here that a Brazilian corporal called Chico Diablo (‘the The death of Francisco Solano López as depicted by his great-nephew, Luis Agüero Wagner. Little Devil’) had tangled with the Monster, driving a lance deep into his belly. It sliced through peritoneum, intestines and bladder before ripping its way out again. The two men disengaged and the President then lost a slab of his forehead to a sabre. Mustering his last vestiges of cowardice, he kicked his wounded horse into the thorns and momentarily disappeared. They found him a little later, half in, half out of the dark, gingery stream.

  The death of Francisco Solano López as depicted by his great-nephew, Luis Agüero Wagner.

  ‘Give yourself up, Marshal!’ bellowed the Brazilian commander. ‘I am the Imperial General Camara!’

  The presidential corpus bobbed in the water. He remembered his last words.

  ‘Muero con mi Patria!’

  A trooper was sent to haul the Monster out of his mire. There was a brief tussle and the Brazilian blasted a ball into the bloater’s chest. Blood frothed from his nose and mouth. The most vicious war of modern mankind ended with a gurgle.

  The cavalrymen carried the corpse back up the slope to the Paraguayan camp. On the way, an officer hacked at its ear and tore it off.

  ‘I promised I’d bring it home!’

  In a spasm of righteousness, Camara ordered an autopsy and his doctors immediately set about eviscerating López. Matters had concluded well. The Paraguayan dead included the President and Vice-President, nine colonels and five priests (later, each would be commemorated with a small concrete bust).

  The rest of López’s pups were soon rounded up, fleeing the field in their carriage. Colonel Panchito was riding escort and the Brazilians ordered him to surrender. But he’d inherited his mother’s good looks and his father’s arrogance.

  ‘A Paraguayan colonel never surrenders!’ he shrilled. As he fumbled for his pistol, a lance tore through his little chest. A figure in a white ball-dress clambered out of the carriage.

  ‘Respect me!’ said Eliza Lynch. ‘I’m English!’

  Camara regarded her with unrestrained amazement. She ordered him to take her to the body of her blubbery sweetheart, now both formally and informally mutilated. The slave-soldiers were dancing around the pieces. She found the officer of the watch, Major Peixota (who would later be president of Brazil).

  ‘Is this the civilisation you’ve brought with your guns?’

  In truth, she was grateful for the presence of the Brazilians. When the Little People of the Paraguayan camp heard that their president was dead, they offered to tear his whore apart – first her jewellery, then her hair, then her limbs. The Bavarian Eggs were no more forgiving. They scolded their lacerated mother, Doña Juana.

  ‘Why do you weep, Mother? He was no son, no brother. He was a monster.’

  Camara took Eliza and her loot into safe custody. Though he was a shrewd man, the scale of her bijouterie surprised him; ninety-two pieces of jewellery, eleven gold watches, a diamond-encrusted marshal’s baton, 14,000 Paraguayan dollars (now worthless) and six bars of gold. Chivalrously, he told her she could keep the lot.

  That afternoon, he let her bury her son and his father.

  I walked down to where Eliza had buried López overlooking the Aquidaban. I found the grave in a clearing of kuruñais. One of the trees bore a notice saying that it had been there during the time of these ‘historic events … of abnegation … the titanic struggle’. It sounded like Wilfred’s work. The grave itself carried a tablet dedicated to the ‘Unselfish Irish Comrade’ who’d given a Christian burial to the Marshal-President and to Colonel Panchito ‘With Her Own Bare Hands’.

  In burying her consort, Eliza spawned what is perhaps the most enduring image in Paraguayan culture: a brilliant golden-white woman, dressed in the splendid fal-de-ral of Paris, scraping a bed for her lover in the slime of this benighted jungle.

  87

  FRANCISCO SOLANO LÓPEZ’S promise to die with his country came not a moment too soon. Had he left it any longer, there might have been no country left to die with.

  Of an original population of around 1,300,000, only 221,079 had survived. Of these, only 29,746 were men. Nine out of every ten men had perished. It would take nearly seventy-five years to recover population levels.

  ‘Seldom,’ wrote Burton, ‘has aught more impressive been presented to the gaze of the world than this tragedy; this unflinching struggle maintained for so long a period against overwhelming odds, and to the very verge of racial annihilation.’

  The apothecary Masterman gave expression to despair: ‘The Paraguayans no longer exist – there is a gap in the family of nations …’

  The Allies stayed on in Paraguay for six years and fathered the next generation. The Argentines imposed their system of law and a constitution based on the United States, both of which survive. But the main interest was reparations (Brazil had spent $300 million on the war). The Allies squeezed the country to the pips but the booty was pitiful. The Brazilians plundered what they could, including thirty-seven cases of material from the National Archive, dating from 1596 (they hauled it back to Rio, where it remains). In the end, the Allies settled for land, annexing 55,000 square miles, or a quarter of Paraguayan territory. Then they marched out.


  They left the country to a half-century of penury, polygamy and political sterility. Between 1870 and 1936, there would be thirty-two presidents (two assassinated), six coups, two successful revolutions and eight failures. Women became labourers – a development that subsequent generations found hard to reverse. No one remembered how textiles were manufactured and so the industry withered away.

  The only creatures to profit from this chaos were the jaguars. Knight reported that they’d become man-eaters since the war – and ‘the glut of human flesh’ – and that they’d now wander into the towns looking for more.

  In the European imagination, Paraguay, having briefly played the part of Arcadia, now took the role of Gomorrah.

  88

  CREDIT FOR BRINGING the world news of post-apocalyptic Paraguay goes to an extraordinary adventurer, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham.

  Cunninghame Graham arrived in Paraguay in 1873, at the age of twenty-one. His life had already become a rodeo of improbable adventures. Born of aristocratic blood, both Scottish and Spanish, he had a laird’s sense of honour and a hidalgo’s head for idealism. Learning Spanish from his grandmother on the Isle of Wight, he was out in the New World by the age of seventeen. For four years he rode the Argentine pampas, working as a rancher, hunter, cattle-dealer, horse-breaker and poet. He learnt to throw the boleadoras and to hunt ostrich with the gauchos. He affected their dress (a habit that survived all his life) and fought with the rebels against Sarmiento. He survived the poison arrows of the Indians and the eager teeth of the river-fish. To the Argentines, he was (and is) Don Roberto, el singularísmo escritor inglés.

  These adventures were merely the early rumblings of his riotous life. He met his beautiful wife in Paris by almost mowing her down with his horse. They were immediately married and set off for Texas, where their new home was enthusiastically plundered by Mescalero Indians. He befriended Buffalo Bill and set up ‘Professor Bontini’s Fencing School’ in Mexico City. Eventually he was driven home by debts (both his and his forebears’). In Scotland, he bought an Argentine mustang that he found hauling trams through Glasgow. When, to his surprise, he was elected MP for West Lanarkshire, he rode ‘Pampa’ to Parliament every day, arriving in the glorious manner of Don Quixote (who he now resembled from almost every angle). He was an MP for six years before setting off again on his helter-skelter travels. He went off in search of Pliny’s lost treasures of Lusitania in 1892. Three years later, he was trying to reach Tarudant, the Forbidden City of Morocco (becoming instead the inspiration for George Bernard Shaw’s Captain Brassbound’s Conversion). With the outbreak of war in 1914, Don Roberto, now sixty-two, offered his services as a rough rider. Instead, he was sent to buy horses in South America. Typically, he was torpedoed and shipwrecked twice on the way.