Paraguay nearly burst. Hayes became a national hero. Villa Occidental was renamed, and so eventually were streets, squares and football teams. Another senator, Huey Long, was honoured with a Chaco village, known to this day as ‘Mister Long’. But the bunting was always for Hayes.
‘In 1944,’ continued Antonio, ‘my father was at the war conference in Washington. Negotiations were at a delicate stage; the Paraguayans were still undecided. Then, one evening, they asked Roosevelt if they could pay tribute at the tomb of President Hayes.’
Antonio was smiling. ‘White House officials searched all night.’
‘Did they find it?’
‘Of course not. No one could remember.’
Even today, the only American monument to Hayes is a plaque at his birthplace in Delaware, Ohio. It’s now a gasoline station.
107
THE ESPINOZAS HAD a ranch the size of the Isle of Wight. There were fifteen gates in the driveway and forty-two men on the payroll. The place had its own miniature power station and the garden pond was full of alligators. Two pet rheas kept the lawns at bay.
The house was new and smelt of polish and fresh linen. There was a room full of riding boots and a Labrador that fought the alligators. The baths and sinks had arrived on a ship from England in 1955.
‘Our last house,’ explained Antonio’s wife, Diane, ‘was eaten by the termites. All we rescued was the plumbing. It follows us everywhere.’
Diane was Texan, and sometimes she thought it all reminded her of home.
Each morning I was woken by a bat flying round my room. I assumed it wanted blood and hid under the covers until dawn. Then, at a wink from the bleary orange sun, the carnival of the Chaco would begin again. Even in their names, the revellers were exuberant and brash: limpkins, laughing falcons, pygmy tyrants, puff birds, flickers and Chaco earth-creepers.
The estancieros were in their saddles long before the sun had burnt the sparkle off the grass. They were magnificent men; scowling, black-faced and languid. ‘Half-centaurs’, according to Cunninghame Graham. They wore leather aprons – pierneras – to protect their legs from the lash of a taut lasso, which will slice a man open. Most had revolvers and short swords. They picked up their extras killing leones, or pumas.
We spent the days watching the grass. To me, it seemed bountiful and lush: brilliant salads of green, endless swamps of glossy tussocks, pools, lakes and stooping caranday palms; long-horned zebus crunching through the water hyacinths; the suck and plop of hooves. To Antonio and his machines, there was only scarcity, no fat on the land and – worse – none on his cattle. He scuffed at the soil. It was powdery and white like flour.
‘Hardly any nutrients,’ said Antonio.
We were, he explained, at the eastern extreme of Andean run-off, the interface between the Pacific west and the Atlantic east. ‘The silt that gets this far is just dust.’
To a man who had to think in beefburgers, it was little comfort to know that he lived at the axis of the continent. Fat cows were a matter of guile. On my last day, we drove down to the southern edge of the Chaco, almost to the Pilcomayo river. We went to meet other ranchers, to roast flanks of beef and to talk grass.
108
THE RANCHERS HACKED the beef from flaming wooden skewers and threw the lungs to their dogs. On 27 January 1891, a roast like this was interrupted by the sight of Indians moving through the carandays.
Tobas! The pioneers snatched their weapons and ran for the cabin. A good lunch was suddenly bristling with guns. You could never be too wary of a Toba. He was a verminous, lank-haired thief with a flat, roasted face and cactus spines in his ears. His women were animal and tattooed with soot. In times of meat, they ate it raw. In times of want, they killed their children and turned to piracy. Their arrow-tips were made of stolen fencing wire, sharpened along all its edges to maximise haemorrhage and to allow the arrow to work loose and be re-used. They moved through the grass like whispers and took no prisoners. The killing was without end or reason: a Bolivian military mission slaughtered; the ethnologist Clevaux scalped with twenty men; Commander Page’s expedition missing for eleven months.
The boys took aim.
‘Let them come to us!’ hissed the ganadero, Don Pedro Gil. He had fifteen men to fifteen bravos. The war-party closed in, padding like cats.
Suddenly, Gil spotted a larger shape among them. Though caked with mud and cactus-down, he wore a coat! The face was raw with the sun but there were thick side-burns and a long, thin nose. And a rifle, a .45! A waistcoat, a gun-belt, two revolvers! Gil had only fifty paces to think. Didn’t his Indians talk of a wild cacique inglés leading savages down the Pilcomayo? Hold fire, he told his men.
‘Who are you?’
Commander Page is dead, announced the rags, and his soldiers have fled.
It was Graham Kerr, undergraduate of Edinburgh University and naturalist to the expedition. He said the Indians were friends. Without them, he’d have perished.
Be good enough to let us through. We’re going to Asunción.
Gil escorted the boy to the River Paraguay. In Asunción, he was met by Dr Stewart, now sleek and long-recovered from his scuffles with Madame Lynch. An unedifying tale emerged, the gist as follows.
In February 1889, the journal Nature ran an advertisement: naturalist wanted for Argentine expedition up the Pilcomayo. Kerr, who was just nineteen, bought a copy on Waverley Station and applied. He was appointed and immediately went out and bought four guns and fifty litres of pickling alcohol.
The expedition appeared well organised. There was a gun-boat called Bolivia, mounted with a maxim gun (‘the very first automatic machine-gun to be taken on active service’). Fifty Argentine troopers were seconded as escorts, with splendid blue pantaloons and sabres. Commandante Page wore a golden hat and ordered that if anyone so much as stole a biscuit, he’d be shot pursuant to military law. Other than Kerr, there were only two other foreigners: engineer Henderson and an Italian doctor in a bowler hat.
The Bolivia had hardly entered the Pilcomayo before things started to go wrong. The dried beef ran low and cockroaches ate their hair at night. Bolivia was grounded in the shallows and the troopers dug dams to raise the levels – and then deserted. A relief force was massacred by Indians. At night, the river glowed green and the ghostly Tobas stole their axes and clothes.
Page developed dropsy and was sent downstream by canoe, with two negroes. These boys were so terrified of persecution that when their commander died, they simply paddled on. Four days later, Page arrived at a relief post in such a state of putrefaction that he and the canoe had to be buried as one. His excitable son, Midshipman Nelson Page, took command and sliced Henderson’s eyebrow off with a sabre. Everyone developed malaria. The Italian doctor died next, begging that his bones be sent home to Bologna.
His bowler hat came in useful. Kerr gave it to the Tobas he’d met out hunting. An uneasy bond began to form. Kerr shared their luktaga, a drink made of regurgitated locust pods, and earned their admiration. Their gifts got better and better: first, guinea pigs, then beetle grubs in honey and then lustrous naked girls. ‘The position was trying,’ admitted Kerr, ‘but in spite of the intimacy and friendship of my relations with the Tobas, I managed to avoid closing the gap which naturally separates the races of men.’
They’d now been ten months lost. Nelson was leading raiding parties against the Orejudos’ sheep. In the teeth of tribal war, Kerr decided to run for Asunción. Chief Chimaki agreed to escort him through hostile territory. They set off in full war-paint.
The end of this story is only partly happy. In Asunción, Chimaki was introduced to ice-cream, bagpipes and the Kosmos Club. Paraguayan women thought him the embodiment of masculinity and several tried to steal him. After five days, he and Kerr set off, in no particular hurry, to rescue Nelson. Meanwhile, Buenos Aires sent a brutal Indian-hunter called Bouchard to retrieve the Bolivia and to settle scores.
‘It was a touching farewell to my Tobas,’ wrote Kerr. ‘Their lame
ntation at being left with the Cristianos and expressions of hate towards them made me feel that the future was rather doubtful.’
He didn’t forget them. Many years later, Sir Graham Kerr, Professor of Zoology at Glasgow, published his peculiar story as A Naturalist in the Chaco. Chimaki’s fate is unknown (his weapons went to the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology in Cambridge). Perhaps he didn’t survive Bouchard’s revenge. Kerr always feared the worst.
The Tobas had, however, survived, though without much dignity. They couldn’t compete in the age of the Mauser. Under Stroessner, they were trucked around so much that they became vapid and disorientated. By chance, I saw a small group as we drove north from the Pilcomayo.
They were squatting by the highway; spears and roasted faces. Hanging in the thorns were the carcasses of armadillos, peccaries and deer – meat for sale. In their old lands, the Tobas were now poachers and outlaws.
109
AT EXACTLY THE same time as Kerr was hacking his way out of Toba territory, a neighbour of his from Edinburgh was hacking into Lengua territory, a hundred miles to the north.
He was Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb, six years older than Kerr but made of the same stuff. Among his ancestors were Tudor pirates and Jacobite rebels, and his grandmother had escaped from the Paris rebellion of 1830 dressed as a boy. He was sinewy and powerful (the Lengua called him ‘Bull-neck’) and wore linen suits and bandoliers of bullets. When the suits were burnt, he wore Indian dress, feathers and necklaces. Everything about him was indomitable. Even his cat killed snakes.
Unlike Kerr, his enthusiasm for the continent was spiritual. He’d been recruited by the South American Missionary Society during the same thunderstorm that killed the Earl of Lauderdale. By 1886, he was among the Yaghans of Keppel Island, living on mutton and penguin eggs. Three years later, he proposed to Mary Bridges of Harberton, Tierra del Fuego, and left for Paraguay. He wouldn’t see Mary again for twelve years.
His foray into Lengua country was the first of many. He set off with little water and no languages. His guides usually lost heart and deserted him; no one had ventured this far since the Jesuits’ gruesome adventures. Grubb would travel perhaps a hundred miles without seeing a soul, surviving on venison, fox-meat and insects. Then, when he did meet the Lenguas, his problems would begin.
The term ‘Lengua’ was Spanish (they were ‘Guaycurús’ to the Guaraní). It derived from their lip-plates, which made them look as if they had long, lolling tongues. There was virtually no sense in which they could be compared to other humans, so adapted were they to life in the cactus. They had no concept of private property; the greatest sin was not to share the meagre resources of the wild. Nor had they any concept of obligation; there was no word for ‘must’ in their language and there were no punishments. There was never an opportunity to store resources and so the idea of capital accumulation had long been lost. Not only could ‘things’ not be owned or accumulated, they couldn’t be worked; art and manufacture were an affront to nature.
All that a man could call his own was his name. Even this changed regularly and was never addressed to his face. The name usually described an attribute: Monkey, Rat-face, Alligator-stomach or Stinking-water. In all other respects, the language was stripped to the essentials: just seventeen ‘sounds’ articulated in pops and clicks. They used no more than a thousand words, often hitched together to express more complex needs.
Scarcity was at the heart of their existence. It determined not only how they lived but who should live. Every pregnancy prompted an enquiry: are we able to feed another mouth? If not, the foetus was beaten from the womb or, if the mother was unable to endure the pain, the pregnancy continued and the newborn was choked with sand. Even after birth, a child had to be sustainable; if it became ill or lost a parent, it was clubbed to death with a bone-axe. If its mother died in childbirth, it was buried with her, alive.
Intervention in this state of Eden was, as Grubb knew, dangerous. Lenguas lived in perpetual fear of magic. Their terror was supervised by the wiskis, who’d earned their authority through gruelling weeks of initiation: eating raw snakes and bats and swallowing poisons (if they vomited, they had to start again). These shamans were seldom keen to yield such hard-won power. ‘The wizards,’ wrote Grubb to Mary, ‘are evil and must cease to exist. I must declare open war on them.’
War it nearly was. He was often threatened and occasionally fired on. He developed his own rules for survival: respect Lengua taboos; give no presents; laugh at danger. It wasn’t always enough to save him. In 1897, a convert called Poet shot him in the back with an arrow. The head passed beneath his shoulder-blade, smashed a rib and penetrated his lung. Alone and over a hundred miles from the Mission, he excavated the arrow-head and collapsed. He was found by other Indians and taken to their toldería, but his problems weren’t over; Lenguas believe that if a man dies during darkness, his spirit will haunt them for ever. They decided that Grubb wouldn’t survive and that he should be buried before sunset. Grubb was now laughing for his life. He offered them an ostrich hunt and bought a reprieve. Two days later, in foundry heat, he threaded back to the Mission. Poet was less fortunate. After a fortnight, he was caught by the Lenguas, and in an unusual gesture, they decided to kill him. He was given an opiate and clubbed to death.
The spiritual conquest of the Lenguas was a daunting task never completed. Unlike the Guaraní, their beliefs wouldn’t easily interbreed with Christianity. Theirs was a terrifying world, created by a beetle. There was no god – only vampires, spirits, holy dogs and magic. Man had four souls, and in death, the fourth – his evil jangaoc – could only be liberated by burning his shelter and his animals. The corpse’s bones were then smashed up, to prevent him walking as a ghost.
Grubb never fully recovered from his wounds but declared it his duty to rescue the Indian from the torture of magic. Others joined him in this blistering effort and suffered: Hunt was ‘covered with boils from head to foot’, Major Rapin of the Swiss Army died of malaria and William the Cook drowned crossing the Paraguay. Like the Jesuits, they recognised the need for settlement and sustenance. They taught the Indians horticulture and ranching and built mission stations, the most enduring at Makthlawaiya. Photographs of this time depict a life of uncomplicated pleasure: capybara hunts; the brick church; the chief wearing deerskins and a silk top hat.
In 1921, Grubb retreated home to Edinburgh. The cold killed Mary, but Grubb survived another nine years, keeping goats and digging coal from his own little seam. His party trick was to get one foot up on to the mantelpiece, and at the age of sixty-four he took up driving lessons. He achieved 40mph on the Biggar Road, which was considered a good speed for a man who’d been attacked by Redskins. He died the following year, surrounded by his pelts and magic charms.
Response to the Missions’ work has always been mixed. To the Paraguayans, Grubb was el Pacificador de los Indios. To his fellow-countrymen, he was ‘the Livingstone of South America’, though his fame was surprisingly transient. However, to a contemporary German traveller, Hans Tolten, the missionaries lived a ‘Robinson Crusoe existence, as if on some wild forgotten island’ (he himself preferred to conduct relations with the Sanapanás at a more sexual level). Others objected to evangelism in any form. This is the line Burton would have taken. To him, shamanism, like slavery and cannibalism, ‘had its uses’: it was the first step from savagery; it created a ‘comparatively learned class’; it taught the art of governing. Christians, he thought, tended to regard it ‘with childish and unreasonable horror’.
In the end, the Burtonian view prevailed. The missions survived until the 1990s and the arrival of social science. Perhaps they’d served their purpose, providing the Lenguas with a glimpse of their inevitable fate: of property, ownership, law, fencing and retribution. The next glimpses would be much harder, without top hats and vicarage teas. Anthropologists declared Makthlawaiya to be a relic and it was abandoned. The missionaries and doctors were dispersed.
Just one had stayed on,
resisting witch-doctors and anthropology.
‘She lives on the Trans-Chaco,’ people told me. ‘Just ask the bus driver to drop you at the English nurse.’
Her name was Beryl Baker.
110
TWO HOURS UP the highway, the carandays began to thin, leaving only the winter swamplands. The persistence of nothingness was bewildering. After a while, it was hard to recall any other world but this: the blue, the indefinite grasses and the desolate punctuation of thorns. No wonder that the Lengua believed that a dead man’s spirit wandered this earth for ever; there was nowhere else, no hiding, no shadow. A man could stand here and see everything there had ever been and ever would be: watery nothing in winter, dusty nothing in summer. I imagined that it made him a little mad, a king of infinite space.
After four hours, the bus shuddered and stopped.
‘The English nurse!’ announced the driver. He pointed at a brittle nest of aromitá and yuqueri. Beyond it, there was a small lagoon speckled with ibis and storks. In a moment of enchantment, I got off the bus and let it crash away into the void.
There were huts among the trees. In the first, there was a small dispensary, a living room and a washhouse. The sink was piled with ten dog-bowls and a Union Jack teacup.
‘Miss Baker is out,’ said the girl sweeping the porch, ‘visiting the Indians.’
Though no one was expecting me, visitors are rare and valuable in the Chaco. She took me to her father, the estancia foreman, Miguel. He was a big, leathery man in pantaloons and home-made boots. He had his own chameleon and a weakness for alligators. We drank a few horns of bitter tereré and stood on the edge of the lagoon, watching them thrash and squabble.
‘This estancia belongs to a very good man,’ said Miguel. ‘He lets Miss Baker keep her clinic here. He is from Texas (near the United States) but now he lives in Asunción. His name is Rhett Butler, which always makes foreign people laugh. I am not sure why.’
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 38