‘This is my Paraguayan grandmother, Raphaela, visiting Germany in 1929.’
She was wearing a coat of jaguar pelts.
Jorge looked past her, across the mildewed Kurfürstendamm. ‘I don’t know why Grandfather ever left it.’
Proud though he was, Jorge knew that the Halke home had never been Elizabeth Nietzsche’s. The Försterhof had had stone floors, couches and cabinets of liqueurs and crystal. A lumpy Germanic script hung in the saloon: ‘Over all obstacles stand your ground.’ When Elizabeth fled, it was sold to Baron von Frankenberg. Then the Neumans owned it for a while.
‘Then the Rissos bought it.’
We went to see Risso after lunch in his carpentry shop. He was carving an axle out of urunday. His father, an Italian doctor, had lived in the Försterhof until the civil war of 1947.
‘It was badly shot up by the liberales.’
All that remained were some black stumps in a field of ragwort.
‘We saved very little,’ said Risso. ‘Just some beams and this funny table.’
It was mounted with a marble top and a broken mirror: Elizabeth Nietzsche’s vanity stand.
*
Elizabeth fared rather better than her furnishings.
She survived in similar circumstances to those in which Eliza Lynch had perished. Both women had hitched themselves to men of strong words and weak will power. Both had seen their stars ascend in the capitals of Europe and crash to earth in the jungles of north-east Paraguay. Now, each returned to Europe, facing middle-age, widowhood and some dangerous scandal.
Their fates would take very different paths. Whilst Eliza had had to live on baubles looted from Paraguay, Elizabeth was busy looting her brother’s literature. Eliza’s assets dwindled as Elizabeth’s engorged. Eliza would spent her last years struggling against lawyers, detractors and creditors. Elizabeth, by contrast, went with the flow. With the rise of Nazism, she suddenly found herself in currents that carried her thrillingly close to power.
Like Eliza, she was a courtesan at heart (though not in practice, thanks to a squint and a cast-iron face). She flattered Hitler – ‘Superman’ – and sat through the Munich putsch trial of 1923. She sent political billets doux to Mussolini and presents to the Führer: an anti-Semitic petition of Dr Förster’s; her brother’s walking stick. None of this was going to make her the darling of the Nazi Party, but there was satisfaction in being its matriarch. There was also a fat Nazi stipend.
In these, her glory days, she didn’t entirely forget Nueva Germania. Meni Woolf got his Nazi teacher. Dr Förster’s grave got its dusting of German soil. They were mostly gestures, a tilt to her faintly embarrassing past. Her dreams of a master race were now firmly bedded in Europe. Though she was intellectually turgid, Hitler and his armaments minister, Albert Speer, visited her in 1934, in a search for inspiration. Speer was moved to describe the occasion as ‘oddly shallow’.
Within a year, Elizabeth was dead. There was no pauper’s slot for her. Her body was carried by an SS guard of honour up to the church of her birthplace, Röcken near Leipzig. Stormtroopers lined the route and Hitler himself barked his way through the suitably turgid valedictories. She was then lowered into her grave, indecently close to her brother.
Though she was only eleven years younger than Eliza, Elizabeth’s guile had proved the more enduring. She’d survived La Concubina Irlandesa by nearly fifty years. But there were still the fascist years ahead. In posterity, one would flounder, one would flourish.
*
‘This colony failed because people took advantage of German nobility,’ said Jorge sadly. ‘We should be getting money from Germany but our negative history now makes this impossible.’
Jorge had drawn up plans for a museum and a statue of Dr Förster should there ever be a change of heart. ‘This should be a city.’
As I got on the bus to leave, he pressed something in my hand: a jaguar’s fang.
‘Remember us,’ he pleaded. ‘Remember us to all your friends.’
92
ON MY WAY south, I took a detour to what must be the foxiest city in the world.
It was only established in 1957, burrowed into the walls of a gorge separating Brazil and Paraguay. Through the gorge rumbles the Upper Paraná, a river that is said to carry as much water as all the rivers of Europe put together. In 1957 they found the technology to span it. The bridge was called ‘Friendship’, although the relationship between the two banks has seldom been more than venal. When it came to pumping contraband into Brazil, the city made Pedro Juan look like an ornamental faucet. Here, the movement of materials was seismic; smuggling turned over the equivalent of five times the value of the official Paraguayan economy.
The city almost went without a name. The Paraguayans had named their other cities after the formative experiences of Christianity: Conception, Incarnation and Assumption. Here, inspiration failed them. For a while, it was named after the King of Smugglers, Port Stroessner. Now it was simply Ciudad del Este, ‘the City of the East’. It hadn’t been planned, it had just erupted. There was no cemetery because there was no older generation, and like Pedro Juan, the streets bounced around like orange rapids. Trade never stopped. Even as I watched, great ant-hills of concrete were sprouting on the banks. Others burrowed three storeys deep into the laterite, eerie fluorescent lairs of perfumes, Reeboks and sub-machine-guns. Bald dogs ate the rubbish, and liveried private armies kept the peace. Every ten minutes a bus left for Brazil, packed (as often as not) with cigarettes instead of people.
‘What’s there to see here?’ I asked at the tourist office.
‘Nothing,’ they said with sleepy candour. ‘Just shops.’
I turned to leave.
‘If you want any more help,’ they yawned, ‘just ask.’
Obviously I’d have to find my own way around in this great twinkling rat’s-nest of booty. I went underground and climbed up into the haze. I went bowling in a subterranean twenty-eight-lane bowling alley where they gave the scores in Japanese. I found a supermarket of pornography and the usual emporia of Scotch. But the most intriguing trading was always in the gutter: statues from every religion, blonde wigs, ‘Hermès’ scarves in rasping nylon, oil paintings of the Marina Piccola on Capri and a perfect British Army SA80, firing pink ball-bearings. Fraud was conducted with such nonchalance that the perfume cartons were often just photocopies. The traders didn’t care and they didn’t expect their customers to. One of them had covered herself with silk cushions and moved around like an enormous Ottoman germ. Way above her head, asleep in the plush, was a very small baby. Perhaps she didn’t know it was there.
I soon realised that in its name – City of the East – there was not merely a smattering of geography but also a clue as to ownership. ‘CDE’ was luridly Asian. It wasn’t just the pagodas and the restaurants – the Osakas and the Taipeis – the Taiwanese flag actually flew from City Hall. They had, after all, paid for the place.
‘In return,’ friends in Asunción told me, ‘Paraguay always votes for Taiwan at the United Nations. We are Taipei’s oldest and cheapest friend. And South Africa’s. And Israel’s (they paid us in guns).’
Dalliances with Israel didn’t seem to have worried the Arabs of the Ciudad. They regarded it as an exotic version of Aleppo and had scooped themselves a magnificent mosque from a tower block. It was widely thought that Hezbollah kept a cadre there, preying on the world’s seventh Jewish community: Buenos Aires. Between 1994 and 1996, 115 Porteños were blown to bits by Hezbollah and Argentina rounded on the City of the East. The city responded much as it had to me: there’s nothing here but shops.
93
THERE WAS A strange footnote to these bombing atrocities. One of the scrambled victims was identified by a Paraguaya as her husband, Patricio Irala (undoubtedly a descendant of the lewd conquistador). The Argentines paid her $50,000 compensation. It was only in April 2001 that they spotted pó-caré, the little twisted hand of the Guaraní.
Irala wasn’t mangled at all. He a
nd his wife were back in Ciudad del Este, growing fat in their new bakery.
94
THE GREAT PARANÁ came boiling down from the north. I took a bus a few kilometres upstream and watched as the watery heart of the continent sucked its way south. Although, in terms of length, the Paraná is only the fourteenth river in the world, in terms of water discharged it is surpassed only by the Amazon, the Congo and the Brahmaputra. Every second, enough water passes to fill over twenty-seven Olympic swimming pools.
Then, at a place the Guaraní once knew as the ‘sound of rocks’, the river fell strangely quiet. All that I could hear was the dull, insistent hum of turbines. The Paraná had been severed and restrained by a wall nearly eight kilometres long, comprising over eight million cubic metres of concrete. It stood a few storeys higher than London’s Telecom Tower and held back perhaps the greatest man-made deluge in the world: the Itaipú Dam.
Such a construction would have been remarkable anywhere, but to find man’s greatest-ever public works project in the fringes of Paraguay was eerie. Behind me was a land of ox-carts and antique cavalry, of tribes struggling with their cannibalism and of goitre and savage infant mortality. In front was hydro-electric energy sufficient to power eighteen Paraguays or the whole of New York State. At 12,600 megawatts, it had nearly twice the capacity of the Grand Coulee and six times that of the Aswan High Dam. A quarter of all Paraguayans didn’t even own a light bulb.
The scale of human effort was Pharaonic (a matter of some pride to General Stroessner). The plans alone would have stacked up fifty storeys high. Forty thousand men were involved in the construction, beginning in 1973. They moved eight and a half times as much spoil as Eurotunnel (if it had been loaded in trucks, the queue would have stretched three times round the planet). They produced enough steel to build 380 Eiffel Towers and enough concrete to build 210 Olympic stadiums – or fifteen Eurotunnels. The men ate three tons of rice every lunchtime and 160 of them were crushed, ground up, electrocuted or drowned. By 1983, volts were snapping out of the turbines.
‘Who paid for it all?’ I kept asking.
People in Asunción hadn’t been sure. It certainly wasn’t them. Paraguay’s contribution wouldn’t even have covered the rice.
‘It must have been Brazil.’
The co-owner had paid for the lot. In return, Stroessner’s men agreed to the flooding of the Guairá forests and to Paraguay paying her share from her surplus electricity. Filling their pockets with Brazilian bribes, they also agreed to sell the surplus only to Brazil and only at production cost.
‘We’ve been robbed,’ most agreed.
Meanwhile Brazil was picking up the bills. From an original estimate of $2 billion, the cost rose to $26 billion. Although Paraguay won only a fraction of the contracts, $1.5 billion gushed into her tiny economy. It was like gasoline in her spluttering boilers. Asunceños began to eat Dutch cheese and the General began to cover his country in tarmac. Contract-fixing became wildly ostentatious. Wasmosy headed the Paraguayan consortium and underwent his revoltingly spectacular metamorphosis.
‘At Itaipú,’ friends told me, ‘even the man who planted the grass became a millionaire.’
Doubled up with indigestible statistics, I called at the dam reception. I found a PR man in a lacy shirt and orange plastic hat. He was surprised that I didn’t know Princess Diana and told his colleagues that I was a gentleman from England who’d come to make a report. They gave me a plastic hat and attached me to a Technical Team. They would be going into the dam’s bowels by van.
We took a seven-lane super-highway to the rockfill. It was the only dual carriageway in Paraguay and was completely empty and ended in a cave. We passed through, entering the dark concrete kingdom of Itaipú. It was a state as Piranesi would have dreamed it – a chasm of vertiginous gothic arches and gantries, of dripping, lifeless walkways and crushing perspectives, of the sun glimpsed through tiny trapeziums of rock and a sky of angry black waves. There were corridors two kilometres long and shafts that simply vanished into the Earth’s core. Somewhere around here, up to four thousand souls were toiling away, including a little khaki army with machine-guns and double-headed eagles. We saw no one.
Eighteen gargantuan steel intestines – or penfolds – sucked the Paraná down through the rock. Each gut was big enough to engulf several buses at once, and the water thundered through it at 700 cubic metres a second. At the bottom it had to turn a turbine the weight of four hundred cars. Even the furious Iguaçu Falls would only just have managed two of these penfolds.
A brilliant silver lift darted like a fish through the darkness and we were as deep as we could go.
‘The old river bed,’ said the technicians.
In the gloom we scuffed through the shingle of the broken river. ‘It’s like a tomb,’ said the engineer absently.
Two hundred metres below the new river, this was an unappealing thought. The fish darted us back to the surface.
The van then zig-zagged up the rockfill on the Brazilian side. Below us, the concrete mixers, crushers and ironworks lay mouldering in the belly of the gorge. We doubled back across the lip of the dam into Paraguay. To the north, the horizon was flattened by the dark waters of its new inland sea.
The inundation had swallowed up 1,500 square kilometres of jungle. More Aché hunting grounds had been lost, drowned in deep black water. Millions of animals were driven away or perished. Some of the jaguars were rescued in a flotilla of Noah’s arks and, like the Achés, they’d had to find new lives in camps and gardens and zoos. But lost for ever were the Guairá Falls. By volume, they’d been the greatest waterfalls in the world.
‘No white man has ever seen them in modern times,’ wrote Edward Knight. ‘The Indians say no man can dwell within thirty miles of the falls, for even at that distance, the roar is so great as to produce complete deafness in time.’
Even a century later, when the exploding waters were finally silenced, they were hardly known. Thorns and heat and poison had fortified their seclusion.
However, a white man had scrambled down them, several centuries before. Had I been in Itaipú in August 1631, I would have seen him clambering over these rocks on his way downstream. He was an old acquaintance; the scribbling Jesuit, Father Montoya.
He was not alone. At his heels were 4,000 ravenous Guaranís.
95
THE JESUITS HAD enjoyed mixed fortunes since their arrival in Paraguay forty years previously.
Already they’d established the vast provincia of Paraguay, covering much of modern Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, Southern Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. The governor had the ear of the Spanish king, and in 1608 he sanctioned their efforts to liberate the savages from their ‘depraved mode of life’, to bring them before God and to ‘assure their true happiness’. Indians began to drift into radical Jesuit communities, the ‘reductions’. Here was unparalleled sanctuary: slavery was prohibited; the Spaniards, Portuguese, negroes and even the mestizos were barred. The Jesuit theocracy was gradually assuming its powerful form.
None of this was without its dangers. The great landowners opposed the drainage of Indian labour. The Paraguayan Church sniped at Jesuit privilege and wealth. Even the suspicions of the Guaranís occasionally erupted into bloodshed. Meanwhile, in the Chaco, Jesuits were being eaten or scalped as quickly as they could be disembarked.
The holy fathers, however, were all gristle and determination. Young men like Montoya, Brown, Stoner, Neyderdorffer and Smith represented the most muscular of Europe’s adventurers. Some had ranged as far as Ethiopia, Angola and Japan. They burned with evangelism – but also with curiosity. By understanding the savages’ beliefs, they hoped to infiltrate them with Christianity. If necessary, they’d meet force with force. ‘Go and set the world on fire’ ran their motto.
In 1631 the Jesuits faced a new threat, in the eastern forests of the Guairá.
By then, Father Montoya had already been in the Guairá for twenty years, struggling to establish eight reductions. His neophytes
were hunter-gatherers and cannibals. For Montoya, it was a hermit’s life. His sandals were patched with fragments torn from his cassocks. He lived on cassava and wild fowl and forgot the taste of salt. ‘A demi-arobe of wine lasted us five years,’ he wrote, ‘for we used only what was necessary for the consecration.’
This unappetising existence came to an abrupt end with a massive raid by Brazilian slavers, the bandeirantes.
At its best, the history of the bandeirantes is the scrags of an old squabble between Spain and Portugal. Ever since the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, the Portuguese had been nibbling loopholes in their promise not to expand westwards, into the Spanish half of the world. In modern Brazil, the bandeirantes are heroes, nationalists and conquerors.
Others see them differently. Their motives were invariably acquisitive. Their appetite for slavery was leviathan (by 1638, some 300,000 Indians had been dragged off to the São Paulo plantations). They were hardly nationalists either, but a rabble of outlaws – Portuguese, Africans, Italians, Dutchmen and Tupí half-breeds. The Jesuits hadn’t witnessed such barbarity since the Levant and called them the mamelucos. Montoya was more forthright: ‘The monkey is not a Christian.’
Before his eyes, the bandeirantes tore the eight reductions apart. Sixty thousand Guaranís were enslaved. To the slavers, their harvesting was child’s play. No longer did they have to pursue the fleet savages through the forest. The Jesuits had gathered them into human dovecotes. ‘Of gravest concern,’ wrote one priest, ‘is that the Indians imagine that we gathered them in, not to teach them the law of God but to deliver them to the Portuguese.’
As the hawks closed in for another swoop, Montoya decided on withdrawal. It was to be an exodus of biblical proportions. Like Moses, he foresaw deliverance in a far-off Promised Land. Unlike Moses, he couldn’t rely on the waters parting. He and his Guaranís contemplated the deafening froth of Guairá Falls.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 35