At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  We walked back through the huts. A baby was asleep in a hammock.

  ‘All my men are Sanapanás,’ said the capitaz.

  ‘No Lenguas?’

  He shook his head. ‘You can’t have both. They won’t work together. They have different ways. Some won’t eat eggs, others believe their dogs are holy. The Lengua thinks he’s superior.’

  Suddenly, there was noise up by the gate: engines, barking dogs, thundering horses and a wild pig whistling round in a deep, tight groove. A blaze of sparkling birds hurried to the scene.

  ‘Miss Baker returns,’ said Miguel.

  She was smaller than I’d envisaged. I knew that her work covered hundreds of square miles and I’d made her much larger; she was light and fragile, like a bird. I’d also expected someone shot with colour and acerbity; she was calm and pale. She wore a print dress and rubber shoes and had a crest of ashy hair. She was nearly sixty and had been in the Chaco almost half her life.

  ‘You’re from London? So was I.’ There was still a trace of an accent. ‘How about a pot of tea? Peppermint or ordinary?’

  She busied herself with ordinary. The house was being eaten by termites and had sagged to one side. She hopped nimbly across the slopes, put the kettle on and washed her syringes. Her animals were now sounding a crescendo of demands. She sent a shovel of birdseed out among the cardinals and mashed some offal for the dogs.

  ‘They all sleep in here at night, to keep me warm. There was a puppy,’ she said absently, ‘but the rattlesnakes killed it.’

  She made some toast and listened to the radio messages, first in Spanish, then Lengua and Sanapaná. (‘Ramón Gonzáles, your tyres are ready’; ‘Sepe of Zalazar South, your mother has tuberculosis …’). She then warmed the teapot and sent me off to feed Ping, the wild pig.

  Ping was a white-collared peccary that Miguel had rescued from the Indians. Despite all my potato peelings, our friendship didn’t flourish. Every time he saw me, his bristles swelled up and the air was suddenly gassy with concentrated jockstrap and vomit. As I fled, retching, he whistled in triumph.

  Beryl had laid the table. ‘I hope you’ll stay. The tractor driver’s hut is free.’

  I thanked her. ‘As long as it’s not with Ping.’

  We sat down to tea and a large brown head appeared at the window and whinnied.

  ‘This is Eldorado. I’ll tell you about him. He once saved my life.’

  When they closed Makthlawaiya, I brought Eldorado with me. There was no other way to visit patients. I rode everywhere.

  I got my first job working in a government place, down the road in Pozo Colorado. It meant working for Stroessner, but what choice did I have? Pozo is a trucking stop and pretty rough. The so-called doctor ran the clinic as a brothel, and eventually, he just disappeared. After that, I ran a clinic in the middle of nowhere – by myself. It was very dangerous. The nearest house was five kilometres away and all I had was my horse.

  Then, one Saturday night, some men came up from Pozo in a jeep. They were very drunk and were stripped down and very excited. ‘Let us in!’ they shouted. ‘We’re sick.’ I told them that the clinic was closed. ‘Come back in the morning,’ I said. They started to throw themselves at the door, to get me (I was younger then …) I must have screamed.

  Then I heard Eldorado, somewhere in the darkness. He was stamping and snorting and I could hear him charging towards us. Suddenly, he appeared, rearing and bucking. He grabbed one of the men by the ear and flung him to the ground. They were terrified. I could hear them screaming, ‘It’s a beast! A beast!’ They ran for their jeep with Eldorado kicking and biting at them. He chased them all the way down the road. I never saw them again.

  The Chaco is a dangerous place. Drifters end up here. And criminals. Eldorado makes me feel safer. Although I don’t ride much any more, Eldorado is always around. He can sense danger. If someone starts to raise their voice at me, Eldorado pushes between us and shoves them out of the way.

  He knows when I’m afraid.

  111

  THE NEXT DAY, the Lenguas came to the dispensary. Some had walked all night and were hunched under the trees, chalky and exhausted. Their clothes were cheap and their faces blank and taut, as if the skin had been stretched too tight. No one spoke. The children were just weeping miniatures of their parents. For 18,000 Indians in the eastern Chaco, Nurse Baker offered the only prospect of medical treatment.

  All morning, the dispensary rattled with tuberculosis.

  ‘I could cure the TB,’ said Beryl, ‘but they go to the wiski first. He takes their money and sucks the evil spirits out. Six months later, they come to me with a chronic condition.’

  She was prising cattle ticks off her arms.

  ‘But when the wiski is ill,’ she went on, ‘he comes to me. And he can pay!’

  ‘So things are back to where they were?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I suppose they are. The wiskis are very powerful. They have all sorts of tricks – drinking snake venom and finding money in people’s ears. But it’s not just conjuring; it’s vocational. It’s also terrifying. To be cursed by the wiski is to die. I have seen Lenguas simply curl up in their blankets and will themselves to death. It takes surprisingly little time.’

  That afternoon, Beryl took the children back to their tolderías in the Land-Rover. They were overwhelmed by the experience and fouled the seats.

  ‘I have to be everything,’ she said. ‘Nurse, orderly, gynaecologist, midwife, dentist (I’m good at pulling teeth). I see a lot of gunshot wounds and stabbing. And cancer. There are hard decisions to be made every day.’

  ‘I don’t suppose the money grows on trees.’

  ‘Dear Rhett does what he can. The British Embassy bought me the Land-Rover. A church in England pays for the petrol. It’s always a struggle.’

  I asked Beryl if she was angry at what had happened. She thought about this.

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted, ‘I am. What did the anthropologists think would happen? They were here for no time. They stayed in the tolderiás and made themselves ill and then they went back home. Did they think the Lengua was a Noble Savage best left to his own devices? This is not a museum. These people are entitled to progress. Did they think the Chaco could be happy hunting grounds again? It’s impossible; like turning ham back into pigs. Anyway, Lenguas want radios and motorbikes. There is no going back. Yes, I am angry. In their “kindness”, they’ve trapped the Indians between two worlds. They’re condemned to a life of witchcraft and manipulation.’

  On my last afternoon, Beryl told me a story that gave me little hope for her and even less for the Indians.

  Three weeks before, the Indians brought her a badly wounded man. He was a good man, a Paraguayan who’d often helped them. He’d also witnessed two thugs from Concepción stealing cattle. They attacked him with knives at a wedding. It was a professional job; the blades sliced through his liver, kidneys, intestines and lungs. There was nothing that could be done for him. They set off for the Mennonite Hospital but he died a few miles up the highway.

  What happened to the killers?

  They were arrested and released the next day. The police won’t touch them. The Indians are frightened and give them money and food. Sometimes the thugs come round here, asking for work. Rhett says he’ll put a bullet in them if he has to. Miguel’s got a rifle and so has the tractor driver. We don’t know what will happen.

  As to the Indians, it seems that now they’re on their own.

  112

  I CONTINUED UP the highway into the Kolonie Menno.

  On the map, it was a large white rectangle lightly freckled in the north. I had a friend in Asunción who was born up here. ‘Go and see my parents,’ she said. ‘Just ask for Heinrich and Maria Braun. I’ll tell them you’re coming.’

  The Brauns lived in a clapperboard cabin on the edge of Loma Plata. It was a small town with a streak of red sand running through the middle. The townsfolk had yellow hair and dungarees and lived to a simple code: Tod, Not und
Brot (‘Death, Need and Bread’). There were three churches and a bibelschule but no bar, no cinema and no restaurant. It was as if the Wild West had been won by German Anabaptists, which in a sense it had: this was the heart of the peculiar state-within-a-state, the theocracy of the Mennonites. Here, Paraguay was momentarily on hold: no tax, no national service, no colorados, no whisky. A million hectares of land fell under this Mennonite privilegium, divided into three colonies: Menno, Fernheim and Neuland.

  The colonies, and Menno in particular, did not encourage frivolity. Abstention was administered by pastors and oberschulzes and there was a police force of beefy pink puritans called the Ordnungsmänners. Their beliefs forbade them guns, but after careful debate, they’d agreed to flashing red lights on their cars. Loma Plata fell silent at dusk and there was never dancing. If the Jesuits had created the perpetual Sunday, Menno had refined it to Sunday Evening without End.

  The Brauns welcomed me with pickles, cold chicken and guava tart.

  They were like grandparents from a children’s story. Their cabin was surrounded by tamarind trees and bedded in sand. There was always an Indian asleep in a deckchair on their porch. They even had a dog with its head on upside-down and an earth closet and a cage full of parrots. There were canvas shutters on the windows, and when sand-storms blew, they buttoned themselves in and made rag carpets.

  I adored them, but I wasn’t sure what the Brauns made of me. They saw my little camera and thought I was filming them for television (which they didn’t have). Heinrich had lost all his teeth on one side and so looking askance had become anatomical. He was small and crumbly and his hair was tufted into a soft white question-mark. He could speak a German version of Canadian but he couldn’t understand my English and usually answered the questions I should have asked.

  ‘Where was your farm, Heinrich?’

  ‘The porridge was from Canada. We’ve eaten it every day for seventy-seven years.’

  There was more of Maria but she wasn’t able to understand me at all. She’d had thirteen children and was well known for her Mennonite cooking. She spoke only the language of the colonies, Plattdeutsch, but said all she wanted to in soups and fruit pies. A knobbly tract was nailed over her sink: Ich aber und mein haus wollen dem Herrn dienen. At dawn, I could hear her rustling barefoot to the kitchen, muttering prayers and recipes in the dialect of eighteenth-century Danzig.

  The Brauns lived mostly in a large hallway, next to a wood-stove. They kept their knives and forks in old jam tins and the doors were trimmed with frilly pelmets that they called ‘gardines’. There was no other decoration, just things children had brought them, reminders of their farm; an armadillo shell; an oven-bird’s nest; a wool-comber. In my room, there was a large ochre trunk where the family linen was stored. It had giant brass hinges and was lined with prayers and old labels peeled from salmon tins.

  Menno was the oldest of the kolonies and the Brauns had been there since the start. Their story is written in the footnotes of the Mennonites’ endless wanderings.

  113

  JACOB BRAUN WAS only a child when, in 1789, his father decided to hitch up the horses and leave the Mennonite heartlands for ever. Danzig had turned against them since the imposition of Prussian rule. Lutherans spat on them in the streets and broke up their assemblies. New taxes were bringing the farm to its knees, and even if they’d managed to save, they weren’t allowed to buy more land. When the Russian tsar offered them plots in the Black Sea basin, the Mennonites accepted and with them went Jacob’s family.

  The Mennonites called their time in the Ukraine ‘a golden era’, which was a sure sign of trouble to come. They built bible schools and Strassendorfs, villages with streets as long and wide as the Champs-Elysées. The Brauns had farms on the lush black shores of the Chortiza and grew wheat and maize and beets as big as your head. Jacob married and had a son, also Jacob. They learnt the ways of the steppes and hung gardines around the doors. They made soup with beetroot and sour cream, and on special days there were fruit pies and baked pirozhnyes, stuffed with meat and spice. The Brauns seemed happy, as if it had always been that way.

  Then, in 1861, the wind changed. The serfs were freed and the air was chilly with Pan-Slavic nationalism. Mennonites were no longer welcome. Then the Brauns ran into fresh disaster: Jacob the Younger had died in 1863, leaving a son, Abram, aged four. These were bitter winters for the foundling and the resentment never left him. His chance to escape came in 1873, when Tsar Alexander II threatened to draft the Anabaptists into his army. Pacifism and the abhorrence of all violence went to the heart of Mennonite beliefs. At the age of fifteen, Abram ordered the family’s belongings into the great ochre trunk and they joined the exodus for North America.

  The journey should have earned Abram a promised land: Hamburg, Grimsby (where they were confined as ‘pestilent’), Liverpool, shipwrecked off Quebec City, Dakota and – finally – Altona, Manitoba. For a while, the Brauns were satisfied. The trunk was unpacked at Eigengrund and, with their neighbours, they rebuilt the steppes on the prairies. Then the Great War came and the Mennonites were first accused of being German and then conscripted into the Canadian army. Some went, like Klippenstein, Heinrich’s uncle (who survived with shrapnel wounds and an English wife and lived out his days as a ticket-collector on British Railways). Others, like the Brauns, dug their heels in. They refused to study English (though some spoke it) and refused to raise the Union Jack in their schools. Abram died, refusing everything, at the end of the war. It would be left to his son, Hein, to load up the ochre trunk and move the Brauns on.

  Three years later, the Mennonite elders announced that they’d found the ideal place: Paraguay. They’d negotiated the privilegium and had bought 138,000 acres of land at $5 an acre, with more to come. It was to be a home for 60,000 Mennonites. In the meantime, 1,765 volunteers would do. Among them, of course, was Hein, with the trunk, his wife and his first five children (there were another ten to come).

  ‘I remember very clearly the day we left Altona,’ Heinrich told me. ‘April the thirteenth, 1927. I was four and a half.’

  A beautiful spring day turned into a murderous summer. The immigrants arrived in stinking Puerto Casado in temperatures of 110 degrees and were held up for a year. In their photographs, the Braun children are dressed in pinafores and straw bonnets, but typhus was soon among them. Johann died in the second month, and a new baby, Abram, died within a day of life. In all, nearly 168 perished and 335 said that enough was enough and went home.

  When the survivors were allowed to move inland to Menno, most were unable to choke their disappointment. The Brauns settled at Schöntal – or ‘Nice Valley’ – a wistful name for a place without contours. Hills were not all that was missing; nearly all the wells were salty, the grass was too bitter for cattle and there was no stone for building. There were no doctors and the only cure for snake-bites was a poultice of gunpowder which was then ignited. Mrs Derksen performed the colony’s first amputation without any previous experience and on a leg ravaged by jiggers. When the north wind blew, the new arrivals were lashed with scalding sand.

  ‘My father didn’t say much,’ said Heinrich. ‘We got down to work.’

  Strassendorfs were once again strung out across the plains. The thorns were hacked back for buffel grass and an ox-track was carved through to the trencito stop, eight days away (the Trans-Chaco Highway didn’t come until 1961). Hein Braun and his children planted oranges, guavas and lemons and all seemed well until 8 November 1936, when locusts ate everything and they had to start again.

  ‘Tod, Not und Brot,’ said Hein and little else.

  The girls wore aprons and scarves and the boys went barefoot. In a snapshot from this time, the Braun children are skinning a pig. On Sundays, they went to the Komitee house and sung hymns under the huge, spiky words GEMEINNUTZ VOR EIGENNUTZ (‘The common good above self-interest’). They learnt arithmetic and the catechism at school and then left. The girls were forbidden to cut their hair and were married off at s
ixteen. Hein made them wear black on their wedding days.

  A picture of Hein has also survived. The experience of photography obviously displeased him and he is buttoned up and dark. His wife died in 1966, and the next year he made his first trip back to Canada. For a man who believed that neckties and moustaches were the outward signs of human weakness, it was an even more remarkable journey than the one he’d made forty years before. As usual, he said nothing, but those who knew him realised that, despite all, he was satisfied with the path he’d taken. He died in the old people’s home in Loma Plata in 1980, and the trunk passed to Heinrich.

  114

  I’D ARRIVED IN the Mennonite colonies with two preconceptions. The first (from the writer Richard Gott), that Mennonites were ‘fearsome religious maniacs with limitless funds’, never really caught the breeze. The second, that they had appalling table manners, found full and colourful expression at the table of Heinrich Braun.

  It was only when he was slurping up his borsch that I realised that Heinrich did have a dental plate after all. Having until then been conspicuously ineffective, it now started thrashing around, mulching up gherkins, chicken pirozhnyes and fruit pies, sometimes in and sometimes out. To work effectively, everything had to be soggy, and so it was shovelled into milky tea, mashed up and then scooped into the thrasher. Heinrich lingered over these rituals, prolonging them with lavish belches and lots of spitting on the floor. When the worst was over, he polished his dental plate in tea, planted his elbows in the chaos and burped.

  ‘Let’s go to Osterwick and see my old farm!’ he said after the third ransacked lunch.

  I hadn’t noticed Heinrich’s car before. It was a tiny Toyota Starlet, slipped in among the parrots. Heinrich, however, was suspicious of its intentions and never took it up beyond second gear. He’d also filled it with cushions so that my face was now crushed up against the ceiling. My first view of the Mennonite farmlands would be rather squashed, like Alice’s view of Wonderland after too many ‘Eat Me’s. We bunny-hopped out of Loma Plata, very sedately and at the head of a long and angry caravan of tractors.