At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  ‘In record time,’ he wrote, ‘the Indians constructed seven hundred rafts and enough dugouts to be used by twelve thousand people.’

  Montoya launched three hundred boats into the rapids to see if any would survive. Each one was splintered. The neophytes would have to hack their way through the thorns. On the first day they sang hymns, and on the second they began to die. Bandeirantes preyed on the stragglers. Two thousand perished and six thousand took their chances in the deeper forest. It took the survivors eight days to reach the end of the cataracts. Montoya conceded momentary despair: ‘I confess I suffered infinitely.’

  He rallied on the river voyage that followed. He even revived his fascination for the strange monsters that were eating his followers. ‘There are fish that the people call culebras which have been seen to swallow men entire, and throw them out again with all their bones broken as if it had been done with stones.’

  The Exodus drifted downstream. Eight hundred kilometres from Guairá, the exiles would find their Promised Land. It would be known simply as Misiones, or ‘the Missions’.

  Not tempted by the river route, I hurried round to see for myself the surprising developments that took place next.

  96

  MONTOYA, MEANWHILE, REALISED that to survive, the Christian Guaranís needed to be able to fight.

  Here there was a problem: under Spanish law, savages were forbidden from bearing arms. In 1638, Montoya set off for Madrid to lobby for change. It took him six years to advance his arguments. He was tireless. Between submissions he wrote orations, an ethnography of Paraguay and a Guaraní dictionary.

  Madrid hesitated. It was barely a century since the papacy’s recognition of the Indians’ human tendencies. The most powerful court in the world was now being asked to concede a savage’s right to kill, even his right to kill a white man. Spain (and therefore Europe) was about to redefine her relationship with the subjugated world. Unsurprisingly, she stalled.

  In the end, a decision was forced on her.

  The Guaranís had been unable to bide the outcome. When the bandeirantes swaggered back into Paraguay in 1639, they were met by a Jesuit force under the command of Chief Ñeenguirú. A small Spanish squadron from Asunción stood by and watched in astonishment as the Christians sliced the bandits down. Two years later, São Paulo sent a powerful army to evict the Jesuits for ever. Ñeenguirú was ready for them. His artillery, comprising cannons of giant bamboo, was directed by the holy fathers.

  The battle of Mboreré lasted seven days. It would determine the frontier of the Spanish and Portuguese empires once and for all. The Guaranís fought with astonishing courage (courage that it would have served their neighbours well to heed in the centuries to come). The bandeirantes fled in pieces.

  Madrid was unrestrained in its gratitude. With the Portuguese pressing on her frontiers, she suddenly awoke to the advantages of a Guaraní buffer-state. The court celebrated with a liturgy of thanksgiving and the Guaranís’ right to defend themselves became inevitable. Ten years later, they were charged with the defence of Eastern Paraguay.

  Montoya never returned to his adopted homeland but died in Peru. A cortège of forty Guaraní warriors carried his remains back over the Andes. In 1656 he was finally laid to rest in the heart of a vigorous Jesuit republic.

  97

  IT TOOK ME two days to get down to Misiones. I stayed in Encarnación, a city of outlandish Ukrainian churches and yellow horse-drawn taxis. The Paraná had been swollen by another hydro-electric barrage and its waters now seeped into the lower streets and plazas. The citizens were gradually moving their city uphill.

  Although its catch-line – ‘Pearl of the South’ – was a little over-ornate for a town of corrugated iron and cement, Encarnación was undeniably pleasing. It was still steeped in late blossom. It also had a blatant honesty about it that had been so floridly missing in Ciudad del Este. Argentines crossed the river frontier for good cheap education. Banking was performed without commandos.

  ‘Whenever I go there,’ one Asunceño told me, ‘I get a feeling of hope for Paraguay. And then I come back here …’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the Germans,’ said another. ‘They run it.’

  It could equally have been the Poles or the Czechs or the Russians. Reggie Thompson had been here when they arrived in cattle trucks between the wars. They’d named their children after the ships that saved them from Europe. Neptunia, he observed, was a particular favourite.

  As I padded around the town, I began to wonder why I’d left Encarnación almost until last. Perhaps it was MacDonald’s quips about the insects and the ‘Misiones itch’. Or perhaps it was what Cunninghame Graham had written about the Jesuits and their ‘socialist utopia’.

  It was not a concept I was finding easy to digest.

  98

  I GOT A ride out to the reductions with a road gang. They wore their overalls tucked into their socks and knew little of the Jesuits.

  ‘They abandoned us,’ said the shy one.

  After an hour of sugar cane and undulating grasslands, we came to a toldería of crumbled shacks and rust. ‘Karate Lessons’ said a sign.

  ‘This is Trinity,’ announced the foreman. ‘The reduction is up the hill.’

  I climbed through the village to the outer defences of Trinidad. It had been the greatest of the eight reductions in Paraguay, founded in 1706. Thick red blocks of sandstone had been heaved to the hilltop and sculpted around a vast, airy plaza. Now it was empty, with no sound but the swish of grass.

  The gatekeeper had silver fingernails and patent leather shoes. She was unable to embellish on the ruins.

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ she pleaded. ‘I only do the tickets.’

  Her ancestors had lived in stone cubicles around the square. The hard red lines of each home were considered an antidote to the promiscuity of Indian tolderías. Housing was identical in each of the reductions; a man could travel from one to the other and believe that they’d followed him. But the roofs were gone now and parrots nested in the joist-holes.

  The shape of the reduction had however survived: a great urban experiment rising above the plains of Misiones. Here were sandstone bakeries and hospitals, cloisters, asylums, granaries, abattoirs and armouries. I found ovens and cisterns and the crimson outline of the sewers, slicing into the forest.

  From up here, the Jesuit fathers could watch as their neophytes turned the estates to profit. Within two decades, there were 4,000 souls at Trinidad. Life was conducted to music and work to the rhythm of drums. The Indians wore smocks of embroidered cotton and would never know money. Whatever they produced was tupambaé, that belonging to God. They sang hymns as they tilled.

  ‘On rainy days,’ wrote Cunninghame Graham, ‘they worked at other industries in the same half-Arcadian, half-communistic manner, only they sang their hymns in church instead of in the fields.’

  It was not easy to connect this serenity with his Scottish Labour Party, all raw-faced and tweedy. Graham, however, had been deeply affected by the ruins of the experiment.

  ‘The laws were respected there,’ he went on. ‘Morals were pure, a happy brotherhood united every heart …’

  This was only partly true. Although their detractors would struggle to find evidence of depravity among the Jesuits, discipline was swiftly administered with a whip. Punishments were prescribed, with some degree of stringency, in the Society’s orders:

  For Unnatural Acts and Bestiality … 3 months imprisonment, without emerging (except for Mass), and in the said 3 months they are to be given 4 whippings, 25 lashes each time, and to be the whole time in irons. In the case of other crimes such as incest and relationships with stepmothers and Mothers-in-law and contrived abortion, they are to be imprisoned two months in irons …

  There was no death penalty, and after every flogging, the accused kissed the sleeve of his scourge, the priest. Here, perhaps, was the most telling feature of all: in each of the reductions there were seldom more than two Europeans. Whips or not, the Jesuit Arcadi
a was a community by consent.

  I crossed to the upper end of the plaza, dominated by the magnificent shell of the basilica. It had been designed by Primoli of Milan and had once seated 5,000 Indians. Here, they’d enjoyed heaven on earth, an extraordinary stone jungle of mythical creatures and acanthus. The vaults had been leafed in gold and the apostles had beckoned with giant sandstone hands. It had taken nearly forty years to build and had barely survived the experiment. By 1800 the roof had collapsed and tropical rains were honey-combing the masonry.

  I picked my way through what remained: pieces of the exotic saints, pheasants, harps, rococo ducks and a font inscribed ‘Ano 1720’. Friezes of flamboyants grew around the doors and the stiff flames of Purgatory licked up the sinners. The largest statue to survive had the face of a fish and the wings of a cherub. The spirits of the forest had, it seems, mingled their seed freely among the angels.

  The arts, we read, were encouraged – but not originality. The Guaranís were faithful copyists. They could reproduce almost anything: violins, harpsichords, clocks, statutes, Dürer, Bosch or Callot. Their choirs could mimic any that the holy fathers had left behind, and an old rival of Vivaldi, Father Zipoli, brought them the art of orchestral music. They absorbed it all and then they copied it. They built themselves a printing press a century before Buenos Aires. At San Cosme, they constructed an astronomical observatory and brought the world important news from Saturn. These were some of the most literate communities in the world and in a state of unceasing adoration.

  Life, as one wag put it, was a perpetual Sunday.

  99

  NEWS OF THE reductions caused a murmur of excitement in the faculties of Europe. The Italian scholar Muratori argued that in Misiones was ‘the perfect image of the primitive church’. Here was Utopia as it had been described in the Acts of the Apostles. It was the virtuous government of Fenelon’s Télémaque, the embodiment of an authority that had long been considered unattainable. Montesquieu urged states everywhere to adopt the model of the Paraguayan ‘republic’ and to establish ‘the community of goods of Plato’s Republic, the respect Plato asks for the gods, a separation from strangers in order to preserve morals, and a city – not the citizens – engaged in commerce’.

  Even Voltaire, who was never comfortable in praise of religious orders, conceded that the Paraguayan example was ‘unique upon the Earth’ and a replica of the ‘ancient government of Sparta’.

  In the face of such dazzling praise, the Jesuits hadn’t hidden their light. Father Charlevoix’s Histoire du Paraguay confidently asserted that the Guaraní republic was founded ‘upon a most perfect plan’, and tossed in further comparisons, with Bacon’s The New Atlantis. There would be others. It would even be suggested that the republic was modelled on Thomas More’s Utopia and Campanella’s The City of the Sun.

  Kind words indeed. But none of it would be enough to save the republic from treachery and the catastrophe which followed.

  100

  WHILST THE SOCIETY of Jesus was preening its feathers, Lisbon and Madrid were conspiring to pluck it.

  By 1750 the two courts were briefly and unhappily linked by marriage. For the crafty Portuguese, it was an opportunity for some creative estate management. They had a monstrous proposal: Portugal would swap the filthy River Plate colony of Sacramento for a vast swathe of modern-day Uruguay. True, Spain would gain control over a pirate’s nest (which had always been a running sore in the mouth of the river), but she’d have to take with it all its pirates. Worse, she’d lose seven reductions and a quarter of the Jesuit economy. The Guaranís would be simply evicted and would receive compensation amounting to two per cent of their property’s value. In the history of Spanish colonial diplomacy, the Treaty of Madrid would stand out as truly idiotic.

  For the Portuguese, it was taking candy from a baby. The Spanish king’s mental faculties had been eaten away by depression and chronic piety. His wife, on the other hand, was a scheming Braganza, an over-engined woman of powerful appetites. She rolled the deal through on the advice of the Marqués de Pombal (who was also Portuguese) and an Englishman (who didn’t care much for either country). South America was not consulted until the ink was dry.

  The Jesuits played their part in the ensuing slaughter. Intellectually, they argued that kings had no business subverting the natural rights of Indians. Disobedience was morally imperative. In the field, the holy fathers exhorted the Indians to resistance. Chief among them was an Irishman of uncertain temper and excruciating Latin: Thadeus Ennis. After four years of stalemate, he urged his Guaranís to battle.

  The Guaraní army had matured beyond recognition since Mboreré. Although it had been hired by Buenos Aires to fight English and Danish corsairs, as a military force it had grown a little plump. As a pageant, it was superbly fluffy. At its head rode the officers, in red velvet doublets trimmed with lace and ostrich feathers. Then came the alcades, in short breaches of yellow satin, and the sergeants in scarlet suits and silver waistcoats. The soldiers followed, soaked in colour and armed with spears, bolas, slings and long English guns that needed rests to fire them. They carried the standard of their patron saint before them, to protect them from evil and shot.

  In Geneva, Voltaire now had his moment of mockery. Candide hoots at ‘his reverence, the colonel’ who dines from gold plates and crystal goblets whilst his Indians trough in the fields. The Paraguayan Jesuits had ‘a wonderful system’: ‘In this country they kill Spaniards and in Madrid they send them to Heaven. Delightful, isn’t it?’

  In reality, there were few delights for the Guaraní commander, Ñeenguirú’s grandson. ‘King Nicholas’ well knew that wars were not won by fine tailoring and had a premonition of disaster. He wrote his farewells to the Society: ‘We are before God as we await our complete destruction … we will resist to the end.’

  It was not long in coming. Father Ennis stood among the flames and whirling metal, bellowing at his Indians in Latin and Irish, but the colonial artillery was overwhelming. In the last set-piece, many of the Guaranís simply crossed their arms and waited for deliverance. In one hour, 1,500 Indians were exterminated. The survivors took to guerrilla warfare, bivouacking in the trees and cutting throats. By 1756, Ennis and King Nicholas were in chains and the ‘Jesuit War’ was over.

  At the same time, the Hispano-Portuguese coupling fell apart and the Treaty of Madrid was revoked. The war had been in vain. The reductions were restored to the Jesuits. Sacramento was captured by the Spanish, using Guaraní troops. King Nicholas was spared. He would die an old man, signing denunciations of Ennis and the Jesuits. Ennis, too, survived but his journals underwent some decidedly Soviet re-editing. He then disappeared.

  The literary world was less keen to forget the episode. The Brazilian poet da Gama was first, with his great epic of 1767, O Uruguai. Burton translated it to English and enjoyed it for all his own reasons: he thought the Jesuit republic was a ‘sterile, theocratic despotism’ and had no truck with the idea of a Noble Savage. Others were more generous. In the theatre, Fritz Hochwalder’s The Strong are Lonely awoke indignation that had been dormant for two centuries. Roland Joffé and David Puttnam brought the same outrage to the cinema screen.

  The Mission emerged in the last decade of the Stronato. Thadeus Ennis is just recognisable in the swaggering of Robert de Niro. At the time the film was set, Paraguay’s government was considered the most virtuous in the world. By the time the film was launched, it was the most diabolical. Naturally, General Stroessner had the picture banned.

  A similar attack of nerves afflicted the Spanish court in the aftermath of the revolt. Hadn’t the Jesuits raised their hand against the state? So far, they’d only deployed 3,000 of the 20,000 Guaraní warriors at their command. What might they do next?

  101

  OUTSIDE TRINIDAD, A man was carving a new fan-belt with a vegetable knife. In the leprosy of his car I could make out the letters ‘TAXI’.

  ‘Can you take me to Jesus?’

  For all the turmoil of
Trinidad, this was no plea for salvation. The last of the reductions was eleven kilometres away, along a bright-red cart track.

  We bounced through the hills, making taxi-talk. This is where the Germans live, in those chalets in the corn. Did we have cows in England? He had five daughters and a fruit-pulping machine. He’d been horribly mutilated when he fell in the fruit-pulper at the age of thirty-seven. Life is full of uncertainties. You can be sure of nothing.

  We talked about the Jesuits. They brought these orange trees from Europe.

  ‘We still copy things,’ said the taxista, whittling the air with his vegetable knife. ‘We made our own guns in the war. Even a bazooka. We copy anything. Engine parts …’

  ‘Perfumes?’ I suggested. ‘Cigarettes? CDs? Designer labels?’

  He grinned. ‘You can be sure of nothing.’

  The reduction of Jesús was conceived at the height of Jesuit uncertainty.

  The gatehouse was a trefoil arch borrowed from the Moors and shaped in ochre. The last fortress of God stood beyond, on a hill of quebrachos and palm trees. It was supposed to have been the greatest basilica in the Americas, but its walls never reached Heaven. Their empty sockets now gaped out over a Misiones that, in the end, had proved untenable.

  I walked up through the copse. Apart from a cowboy filing his horse’s hooves, I was the only person on the hill. There was no roof to the basilica and its transept was a meadow of campion and rye. Sacristies and vestries were scalloped into the walls and a pulpit had unfurled itself from the stone like a gorgeous orange epiphyte. But the cloisters were merely outlines and the dormitorios had never risen beyond ankle-height. In August 1768, the order had been given that all work was to cease. At a stroke, three thousand Indians put down their tools and Jesús was abandoned.