But it was during his early travels in post-Triple Alliance Paraguay that Graham fomented his high-octane radicalism. Though his progressive ideas seem undemanding today (universal suffrage, free education, prison reform and abolition of capital punishment), in the closing stages of the nineteenth century they were seen – even by his allies – as volatile and giddy. ‘Graham’s socialism,’ wrote the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, ‘was based on romantic ideas of freedom and his profound feeling for the bottom dog.’
This was to understate his strength of feeling. Quixotic though he may have been in appearance, he was reckless in confrontation. In 1887, he got his head cracked by a policeman during labour demonstrations in Trafalgar Square and did six weeks porridge for riot. He was equally explosive in Parliament; his only contribution to the Parliamentary record is an insult to the House, followed by ‘I never withdraw.’ Once again, his friend Shaw borrowed from his life; Graham’s words appear in the mouth of the Bulgarian hero of Arms and the Man.
What had troubled Graham in Paraguay wasn’t so much the destruction and cruelty of the war (which was evident all around him) but the squandering of opportunity. He found a beautiful and sensuous land but its human spirit had been crushed. He’d sensed perfection in the Paraguayans’ Jesuit ‘Republic’ of 1609–1768 (a period he’d come to regard as pure socialism), and it angered him that it had been dissipated in the years of oligarchy and absolute power that followed.
He would write about Paraguay on and off for the next sixty years. These works were often achingly nostalgic (Vanished Arcadia), and in López he found the personification of human evil. His prose, always breathless, became positively anoxic on the subject:
Sadism, an inverted patriotism, colossal ignorance of the outside world, a megalomania pushed almost to insanity, a total disregard of human life or human dignity, an abject cowardice … joined to no little power of will and of capacity, were the ingredients of his character.
Though his passion may have impeded communication with the British at large, his idealism had a powerful effect on his contemporaries: Shaw, Keir Hardie, John Burns and Joseph Conrad. Two old comrades even went off to join the Utopians of New Australia: Smith and Kennedy. Graham was the first president of the Scottish Labour Party and was to give British socialism something it might never otherwise have had, a blast of Latin fervour. He was also a durable fighter; whether against imperialism or cruelty to animals. On various occasions he championed the Irish, the Turks, the Zulus and prostitutes. As underdogs, the Paraguayans were natural objects for his affections.
Conrad, meanwhile, was absorbing the Paraguayan story. His nightmarish political novel, Nostromo, emerged in 1904. It is Paraguay, seen through the prisms of his great friend’s anger – Napoleonic dictators, ‘high sounding sentiments and supine morality’, English contractors and a Great Conspiracy. There is even ‘a barefoot army of scarecrows’ and a priest who becomes the state torturer.
After this flare of publicity, Paraguay slipped back into dark shadow.
Cunninghame Graham kept the story alive. At the age of eighty-one he finally wrote López’s biography, Portrait of a Dictator. Three years later, he returned to South America in the certain knowledge that he’d never see Britain again. Perhaps, with all the old radicals dead, his only remaining roots were out there. He died soon after his arrival in Argentina, on 20 March 1936. His body was paraded through the streets of Buenos Aires. At the head of the procession was the President, two gauchos and Don Roberto’s beloved ponies, Mancha and Gato. For underdogs everywhere, life would now be that much bleaker.
He was buried in Scotland alongside his wife, who’d predeceased him by thirty years. ‘A Master of Life,’ reads his monument, ‘A King among Men.’
At about the time the Master was being lowered into his Scottish grave, López was re-emerging from his, at Cerro Corá.
89
MADAME LYNCH LEFT the battlefield of Cerro Corá with her pride (and her loot) intact. Although the ladies of Asunción would have liked to dismantle her with their fingernails, the Brazilians were merciful. They swept her and her four surviving sons off downriver to Buenos Aires, where she was packed on a ship for Europe. She immediately began the task of restoring her reputation.
More pressing, however, was the need to restore her finances. When she arrived in Paris, she discovered that her Scottish physician, Dr Stewart, who was meant to have salted away 220,000 gold pesos on her behalf, was now denying any knowledge of the money. With characteristic brass, she sued him in the High Court in Edinburgh. The legal establishment stood back, aghast, as the jackals fought over the booty of some awful tropical hole; both sides told spectacular lies; General MacMahon sent a deposition in support of the delicious Mrs Lynch; she then somehow managed to produce a receipt. Dr Stewart argued that under the law of her marriage – French law – she couldn’t bring her own action. When her long-forgotten husband, Quatrefages (now bigamously remarried), entered a compearance, Stewart changed his plea to one of ‘force and fear’. The jury found him to be the worse liar of the two, and in considering their verdicts, the judge was constrained to agree. Mrs Lynch had won. The defender undertook to pay her the money and then promptly declared himself insolvent. She got nothing.
To add insult to injury, Dr Stewart returned to Paraguay and to his considerable fortune. He became a pillar of the community; manager of the railways, physician to the rich, British Honorary Consul and Paraguayan citizen. MacDonald met him in 1911, in his eighties. ‘My only complaint,’ Stewart told him, ‘is that if I had not been exceptionally unfortunate, I might have possessed the whole territory.’
His descendants – often called the Estobartes – still argue with the López tribe about the missing cash.
After the litigation, Mrs Lynch stayed in London for a while. She had a house in Thurloe Square or Hyde Park Gate and put her boys through St Joseph’s School, Croydon. We get a last glimpse of her through Cunninghame Graham in the early 1870s:
I saw her several times getting into her carriage … In her well-made Parisian clothes, she looked more French than English, and had no touch of that untidiness that so often marks the Irishwoman … her appearance certainly did not seem that of one who had so often looked death in the face; lived for so long in circumstances so strange and terrifying, buried her lover and her son with her own hands, and lived to tell the tale.
From then on, Eliza Lynch became ever more enigmatic. She returned to Buenos Aires in 1875 to relaunch herself as the victim and to sue her detractors. The experience of being laughed out of court merely accelerated her withdrawal from public life. She sailed up to Paraguay but was given three hours to get out or face arrest. She never went back. Instead, the Paraguayan government came after her, suing her in the Westminster County Court on a debt of $33,000. Surprisingly, she won but the Paraguayans refused to recognise the judgment. The scene of this, her last, bitter triumph, is now Brown’s Restaurant on St Martin’s Lane.
After that, she reverted to inscrutability and almost disappears. She moved to Paris and sank through the strata of the seventeenth arrondissement as her loot ran out. Some say she was addicted to champagne. Others have her as a madam in a cat-house. It is even rumoured that she went off to the Holy Land for three years, begging for absolution. There are no clues in the photograph that survives from this period; did she have dreams or only nightmares? In the curl of her lips was there contentment or merely bitterness? Had her jowls thickened with leisure – or just the greasy slops of poverty?
One thing is clear: she died alone. It’s also likely that she died in agony, with a voracious cancer of the bowel. When her neighbours had heard nothing for several days, they broke her door down. She’d died on 27 July 1886 at the age of fifty.
She was conveyed to Père Lachaise cemetery and placed in a cheap slot. Her sons erected a plaque to an ‘Unforgettable Mother’.
Within fourteen years, another six paupers had been piled in on top of her.
90
>
‘WHEN I FIRST got here, in 1929,’ Robert Eaton had told me, ‘López was still a villain.’
That was all about to change.
At the precise moment that Cunninghame Graham was preparing for his poetic demise in Buenos Aires, the Paraguayan fascists were seizing control in Asunción. There was no shortage of enthusiasm for their strong-arm policies, but what the fascists lacked was a figurehead, an embodiment of Paraguayan nationalist virtues. López was hauled out of notoriety. On 1 March 1936, the sixty-sixth anniversary of his death, he was declared a national hero (the date is still a national holiday). Overnight, all laws derogatory to his memory were annulled. A historian called Juan O’Leary was contracted to sweeten up his image. Several hundred hectares of farmland later, he was able to say that López had ‘surrendered his cherished life on the battlefield of glory’ in order that his country might be ‘as it remains today, a bastion of liberty and democracy’.
All that was needed now was this great democrat’s cherished corpse. The fascists rushed off to Cerro Corá to find it. It was a daunting task: the battlefield had long been reclaimed by the jungle; a big, well-rotted corpse buried in the leaf-litter would have been attractive to scavengers. Despite the difficulties, the fascists found it. They paraded a colourful array of witnesses, veterans and descendants who’d ‘remembered’ the exact spot of interment. Paraguayan history was being shamelessly O’Learied.
His casket was placed in the Pantheon of Heroes. Later, Stroessner (whose wife had a touch of the López) would add his own frothy analysis: ‘With his sword in his hand and his country on his lips, he overcame want and exhaustion at the head of his last troops on his last battlefield.’
The casket had been placed next to Dr Francia’s. That too was empty because, of course, an earlier generation had thrown his remains to the alligators.
91
FROM CERRO CORÁ, I followed the rains south. The bus driver screened a video of Cerro Notting, or Notting Hill. The passengers regarded it with bleary scepticism and hardly noticed when first the sound failed and then the picture flaked away. I got out, two hundred miles short of Asunción, at the junction for Nueva Germania. I flagged down a truck to take me the last twenty miles.
‘What do you want to go there for?’ said the driver. ‘It’s dead.’
He may have been right. We sludged into a great rotten forest. Wisner von Morgenstern had flogged this land to the German supremacists at a time when Paraguay itself seemed almost dead. They’d never paid and nature had long since wrestled it back. ‘Most of the Germans have gone now,’ said the driver indifferently. ‘Only a few are left. The Lost People …’
After an hour, there were palisades in the margins of the gluey track, soggy shacks and patches of vegetables. New Germany, announced the trucker. Sticky orange damp had leached out of the earth, seeping into the whitewash, the thatch and everything. Even the horses were wearily orange. The truck belly-flopped through a crust of mud and stopped at the petrol pump. I asked the attendant if there was anywhere I could stay. He looked at the goo bubbling up between his toes.
‘Ask Mrs Neuman.’
It was the first glimmer of German. There were no pretty Saxon churches or bierstubes here. Just thatch and orange and carts thrashing through the mud.
The undignified death of Dr Förster in 1889 had started – or rather hastened – an end to the Germanisation of the forest. Within two years, half the colonists had wandered off to Argentina, seeking either a passage home or just a better form of poverty. The colony shares were dissipated among foreigners and with them went the stench of racial supremacy. Only a hard knot of zealots held out for their clunky principles, retreating six miles into the forest, to Tacuruty. The rest – Ercks, Sterns, Schweikharts, Fischers, Neumans and Woolfs – concentrated on survival.
Förster’s squinting, steel-haired wife, Elizabeth, was among the first to leave her sinking ship. She found an excuse in the madness of her brother, Friedrich Nietzsche. Fame had left him vividly deranged; he was now kissing dray horses and calling himself Dionysus or the Duke of Cumberland. Elizabeth said he needed her. In reality, she needed him. His mind was now too curly to resist her anti-Semitism and so she was free to realign his work. She mangled his philosophy so utterly and completely that it was her, not Friedrich, that the Wagnerians put forward for a Nobel Prize – three times. In 1900, Friedrich conveniently died. Elizabeth was now someone. Her portrait was painted by Edvard Munch and she founded a swanky museum immortalising her brother (and herself). When Germans were deciding whether to fight in 1914, she puffed the little flames with ersatz Nietzsche.
Nueva Germania was temporarily forgotten.
Mrs Neuman ran a hostelry called the Grill of Triumph. It was a low thatched building arranged around a courtyard of mud-bricks. She kept a lame pig which goose-stepped around all day, demanding food. She also had seven children. The oldest was a policeman in Asunción and the other six wandered about in bits of his uniform. There was no obvious father, but a bricklayer called Cardenas was often around, drunk and bumping into things.
At one end of the courtyard was a rather unprivate privy. Someone had spent a long time in there carving a female torso in the cement. It was entitled ‘Pig Cunt’. At the other end of the yard was my cell, furnished with a foam mattress, a stool and a comb. There was no glass in the window, and so, at dawn the next day, the pig thrust his head through the aperture and showered me in pig drool.
In the evening, we sat around a fire in the main courtyard roasting tufts of meat. The Neumans were hazy about their German origins. In fact, Fritz Neuman had been an enterprising man from Breslau. In 1903, he’d discovered the secret of germinating the yerba plant, and Nueva Germania had been briefly lifted from its economic torpor. The Neumans had even owned a piano. Within thirty years, however, prosperity had expended itself and the Neumans slithered back into penury. The next decade brought fresh tragedy. Like several New Germans, two Neuman boys volunteered to defend their unknown fatherland. They froze to death in Russia.
I had breakfast in a copetin run by Carlos Neuman. He was obviously having an affair. He was always cooing down the phone, and whenever he thought I was listening, he cooed in Guaraní. But in Spanish he was magnanimous and happily passed me round the remnants of the Master Race.
They were widely scattered through the kolonie (Dr Förster had believed that each house should enjoy a degree of isolation, to encourage industry). Miss Fischer lived next door, bitter and bobble-hatted. The Sterns, formerly of Frankfurt, ran the hardware store. Meni Woolf remembered his school, a gift from Hitler himself. It wasn’t a success; once paratyphoid and malaria took a grip on the schulmeister, he too was off down the road to Argentina.
‘It wasn’t Nazism,’ protested Meni, ‘just Germanism. There were many German refugees. Hitler promised to get us all home. That was what the war was all about, you know.’
Only the elderly still spoke any German. No one had a view about the Försters, but they all insisted that Mengele had lived among them. It was something they wanted, not because they agreed with what he’d done, but because it indicated participation in the affairs of the outside world. Their accusations focused on a drop-out called Friedrich Ilg, who’d lived in the woods and who’d been suspiciously solvent. But from their descriptions, he was far too young. Besides, he’d killed himself in Asunción in 1985, jumping under a number 30 bus outside the Victory Cinema. I wouldn’t find Mengele here.
On the second day, Cardenas killed the Neumans’ pig. I returned to find a trail of blood leading from my cell, across the courtyard to a bucket of slippery blue innards. The rest of the pig had been sliced into small translucent cubes.
‘Pig tonight!’ squeaked the Neuman children.
It was an unappetising thought. I fumbled for an excuse.
‘Where’s the Försterhof?’
‘Ask Jorge Halke,’ suggested Mrs Neuman. ‘We don’t know.’
The Halkes lived in what had been a long manor house on
the edge of the colony. The family had once owned a department store, ‘Bruno Halke of Berlin’. Like their fortune, the Halkes’ mansion had been steadily diminishing ever since their arrival in 1905. As its ends rotted, they were simply chopped away. Jorge and his family were now forced to live in the central section, a room divided into stalls. It was still just grand enough to be mistaken for the Försterhof.
Jorge had salvaged something of his ancestors’ dignity. He was the Colorado candidate and worked for the Municipality (he wore his hi-visibility council trousers even on Sundays, with a straw hat). Ten years before, he’d saved Nueva Germania from a jaguar with a brilliant bullet. He was a man for his people, limitlessly generous and humane. He was also pleased to see a European again in his amputated home. His wife and flaxen children waited on us with beans and chocolatey wine. We went through a sea-chest of old photographs.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 34