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At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

Page 41

by John Gimlette


  For the Mennonites this created a dilemma. They’d sought isolation and now found themselves beginning again among the most primitive people on Earth. The irony of fleeing persecution only to become invaders hadn’t escaped them. But what were they to do? There was little guidance in the scriptures: they were not to exploit or evangelise. On the other hand, doing nothing wasn’t an option. All around them were starving, naked wretches, drowning babies in sand and eating poison frogs. The Mennonites’ instinctive reaction was to employ them.

  Initially, the results were satisfying. Infanticide was abandoned (except for runts, twins and deformities) and the Lenguas took to clothes. Then the numbers proliferated and the Chulupís marched up from the Pilcomayo, demanding their share of the providence. In seventy years, the indigenous population rose to 25,000, twenty-five times what it had been in 1926. Suddenly, Filadelfia had its own vast, helpless lumpenproletariat packed ten-to-a-shack in the so-called labour camps.

  Eva enjoyed driving me out to these places. It was the only time that she felt self-righteous.

  ‘Black Filadelfia,’ she announced.

  Lives lay in components: sticks, cardboard, plastic, dust, turds, rags, bones. Nothing was attached or possessed. Things just fluttered in the grit. There weren’t even paths between the tribes: Chulupí, Lengua, Toba, Sanapaná. Each one had its own grit and refused to cross into another’s. The only language they had in common was Plattdeutsch.

  One tribe refused to settle at all: the Ayoreo. The others said they were scalp-hunters and lived only in the thorns. Before the Lencos came, there had been a war, lasting thirty years. The Ayoreos hadn’t been forgiven for their savagery. They hate us and we hate them. They even attacked some Lencos and killed them with their clubs. That was ten years ago but the Lencos still watched it on their videos.

  One day, a farmer pulled up outside the hospital with a truck of Ayoreos. He was a giant in giant tractor-boots and overalls. I’ve brought them for their vaccinations, he said.

  ‘Is it true,’ Eva asked him, ‘what the other tribes say?’

  The Mennonite looked over his charges thoughtfully. They had bright nutmeg skin and glossy black hair like horse-tail. They gurgled up at him, tiny teeth in thick purple gums.

  ‘They’re very emotional,’ he said. ‘Yes, traditionally their first response was always to kill. That’s how they’ve survived.’

  The Chaco War provided the occasion for a revised approach to the Indians.

  Both sides had regarded indigenas as spies and had them machine-gunned like pigs. The Lenguas were almost exterminated and those that survived scattered deep into the needles. After the ceasefire, a teacher called G.B. Giesbrecht went off in search of them. He found them out at Armadillo Pond – or Salve Yange. From now on, he insisted, the Indians would no longer be vagrants and scavengers but would themselves be farmers. He began to organise the purchase of land and a new initiative: settlement.

  After his death, his work was continued by his son. Helmut Giesbrecht had silver temples and a gold filling but his office was painted Filadelfia sludge. He agreed to take me to the settlements, but as he spoke only Plattdeutsch and dialects, I persuaded Eva to come as translator. She wore slingbacks and something small and mauve.

  A long road lanced into the haze.

  We stopped at the farm of a small, shrivelled Lengua called Lorenzo Brillante. His tribal name was ‘One Boy’ because his mother had smothered all his siblings. He remembered the Ayoreo war: they took away babies on their spears, as if they were going to roast them. He was a hunter before he came here. Now he had two hectares of beans, a hut, three chairs and a wife.

  ‘He didn’t burn the house down when his father died. These days, they paint the door a different colour. That’s enough to confuse the ghosts.’

  Even though Helmut Giesbrecht was filtered through Eva, I recognised commitment and perseverance. He knew his work could never be finished. Sometimes it couldn’t even be understood.

  ‘The Lengua must never show emotion. Whatever he wants is a secret.’

  ‘Do they get divorced?’ enquired Eva.

  ‘They separate. The children go to the grandparents.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ she muttered, in English.

  ‘Nicht gut,’ corrected Helmut, ‘aber natürlich.’

  The distinction between what was good and what was natural had persisted at Armadillo Pond. It was like a preliminary sketch of Filadelfia except that the blossom was yellow, not khaki, and grapefruits grew in the street. There was a Lengua supermarket and a Chulupí school. The British Embassy had donated a college to teach girls ironing and showering and the other advances of the last ten thousand years. The nurses at the krankenhaus were crisply starched Lenguas.

  ‘Did they train in Asunción?’ we asked.

  ‘No,’ said Helmut, ‘here. If Lenguas leave their territories too long, their people won’t ever let them back.’ He smiled. ‘Progress is slow. We can’t force the pace.’

  Not everybody shared Helmut’s enthusiasm for settlement. His brother had run away to join the anthropologists.

  They said that the destruction of nomadic institutions was disastrous. Women, who’d once selected those who’d live from those who’d die, had become disenfranchised. Worse, mimicking the patriarchal Mennonites had made women merely chattels. In every other sense, the Indians were still unable to grasp the concept of ownership. They were unable to use what they had and yet they’d lost the ability to share. Manufacture seemed generations away.

  Some thought it was all a waste of time. As soon as the Mennonites turned their backs, everything fell apart. ‘If an Indian’s cold,’ said Bobby, ‘he’ll just pull his front door off and throw it on the fire.’

  On any view, the rate of settlement lagged behind vagrancy.

  My last day in Filadelfia, Bobby took me to the tip. Indians poured down the slopes of smouldering rinds and husks to meet us. This infuriated Bobby, but as usual, his anger was unleashed without directions.

  ‘Thousands of Indians!’ he snarled. ‘Living on the surplus of a few hundred Mennonites!’

  The Indians tore into the fresh garbage.

  Helmut had said, ‘I believe they were sent by God. They force us to confront ourselves, our embarrassment of riches.’

  119

  REMBRANDT KNEW ALL about the embarrassment of riches. He was married to a Mennonite and the marriage brought him lucrative commissions. In Cornelis Claesz Anslo and Aeltje Gerrits Schouten or ‘The Mennonite Preacher and his Wife’ (1641), a young couple pose in black. They want to celebrate their thrift and so Rembrandt has included a candle and scissors in the foreground. Cut the taper and save the fat. On closer examination, the couple’s collars and cuffs are exquisitely embroidered. Thrift has rewarded them well.

  They seem only remotely aware of the presence of the artist. The preacher is admonishing his wife with hard words from the catechism. He wants to be remembered for his piety. She wants to be remembered for her suffering. They are good people though unlovely. They have found the love of God.

  Finding some for their fellow man will prove a little harder.

  120

  THEY SAY THAT the trees in the Chaco are so specifically adapted that nothing introduced can survive. I discovered that there was an exception. Its introduction was almost as gruelling as its survival.

  The journey began in Siberia on 17 December 1930.

  As black day turned to white night, fifty sledges set out for the frozen Amur. The riders, two hundred of them, were the remnants of one of the Mennonites’ bleaker attempts to find isolation in the world. For some years, they’d farmed the frosted earth between the Zeya and Bureya. Then Stalin had found them and had determined that what was theirs should become The People’s. The settlers waited for the ‘River of Peace’ to harden, and then, on a night as heartless and propitious as any, they slipped away.

  There were Soviet guards posted at every mile along the banks. Parents smothered the cries of their children
. One infant choked on over-caution. They quickly buried her body in the snow and hurried on. Shortly before dawn, they dropped on to the petrified currents, which popped and rattled like gunfire. Most were terrified, some were scorched by the ice. Abram Unger was so badly frost-bitten that they had to hack his feet off.

  At sunrise, the frozen Israelites stumbled off the water into China. But Manchuria was not a Land of Milk and Honey. For thirteen months, they lived twenty to a room in Harbin, working as servants. A new home was sought but nobody wanted the stateless ‘Harbiners’. In the end, they set off through the Chinese countryside for Paraguay.

  From the coast, they caught fishing boats to Shanghai and then travelled ‘freight’ through the South China Sea. In Saigon, they bought seeds for their unquantified future. Then they hitched onwards, west: Singapore, Suez, Marseilles, Le Havre, Lisbon, Rio, Buenos Aires, Asunción, Casado, ‘Kilometre 145’. The old hands rode out to meet them off the trencito, amongst them the Brauns. They built the Harbiners their first mud homes and the Siberians thanked them with all they had: the seeds.

  The strange pods were folded into sand. Within a short while, the Chaco had a new flavour: tamarind.

  121

  ALTHOUGH THE FIRST Unger arrived in the Chaco without feet, they’ve never settled. Wandering was now in the blood.

  Even Abram refused to settle. He abandoned the other Harbiners and went roaming with the Indians. He was an adept hunter, and in later life he became an enthusiastic taxidermist, visiting deformity upon his prey for ever. The Filadelfia Museum is still haunted by his crooked sloths and cats and weirdly contorted foxes.

  I’d met his grandson, Jakob, walking in Eastern Paraguay and now I went to visit him. There was much of his grandfather about him. He was temperamentally restless and wore his beard like Solzhenitsyn, which – I imagined – made him feel Siberian. He’d ducked much of his formal education and had spent the time exploring the montes, usually barefoot. He knew the names of all six hundred Chaco birds and could give them in English, Latin and Guaraní. At the age of forty he was the éminence grise of Chaco wildlife. Was it enough?

  ‘No,’ he’d say. ‘This place is finished. Time to move on.’

  This I expected, but there was another side to Jakob which was harder to place. It wasn’t just that he kept a revolver and a house full of computers, all whirring and chirping like the forest; he was incongruously sceptical. By now, I’d developed superior antennae for detecting atheism, and in the presence of Jakob, they began to twitch.

  ‘My mother was from Neu-Halbstadt,’ he said and, little by little, I realised that this was an explanation.

  One day, we drove out to the Neuland Colony. The Neulanders had arrived on the third and last of the waves of Mennonite migration. They were living proof of the wisdom of earlier departures. They were lucky to be living at all. Stalin’s collectivisation had proved more vicious than any had imagined. Then, in October 1941, the Ukrainian colonies were ‘liberated’ by Panzer Divisions. For almost exactly two years, their lives were eerily German. Then the Russian front burst and 30,000 Mennonites were swept backwards towards the west. They buried their dead by the roadside as they went. Nearly 20,000 others were recaptured by the Soviets, who committed them to an uncertain fate.

  It was no better for those who made it to Germany. Any man who could carry a rifle was thrown a uniform and marched back into the inferno. By the end, the survivors’ options were skinny. In 1947, the last few thousand were shipped to Paraguay (which was in the grip of civil war).

  Although the old hands welcomed them with mud huts and chicken pirozhnyes, the Neulanders showed no inclination to flourish. Half the families were without fathers. Friedensheim would be a village comprised entirely of widows. Worse, the spirit was gone. They’d not been allowed to use churches for fifteen years. For many, if God had ever existed, he’d died in all the lice and sleet and burnt flesh of the war. The Neulanders were imbued with a deep sense of futility. By the seventies, half of them had drifted away.

  Jakob took me to a ‘widow village’.

  ‘This is where my mother grew up.’

  One of the original houses had been preserved. The table was laid as if for tea, with Red Army mess-tins and butter-knives impressed with swastikas.

  Jakob and his wife, Maria, kept a little zoo out in Toledo. The Unger family had been gathering specimens in the Chaco ever since their wanderings began.

  ‘My grandfather sent seeds to the Botanical Gardens in Berlin,’ said Jakob. ‘I believe they still have his bottle-tree.’

  Jakob kept some brocket deer and armadillos, but at the heart of his collection were the Pleistocene pigs. I tried to look impressed, but they reminded me of Ping, except twice the size and steeped in rotting farts. They looked like giant sabre-toothed hedgehogs and were known as Wagner’s Peccary, a name they thoroughly deserved. Inexplicably, they were also in great demand. Jakob had bred seventy and dispatched them round the world. San Diego is a hotbed of these brutes.

  I realised that Jakob held them in real admiration.

  ‘I’ve had them in captivity for four generations,’ he said, ‘and yet they refuse to be tamed. They are deeply wild.’

  Nobody else lived in Toledo. There was nothing there but a clearing of blank white crosses. On 28 July 1932, the forest had ignited and all that day a squall of metal had ripped backwards and forwards through the cactus. It had lasted until dusk, when there was a new and stranger sound: the sound of Aymara, guttural in triumph. The Guaranís melted away, into the undergrowth.

  It was the Chaco War, now taking its ominous shape.

  122

  AMONGST MY FRIENDS, I found rare unanimity as to the causes of the war.

  ‘Black gold,’ they said. ‘Oil.’

  ‘Standard Oil supported Bolivia. Royal Dutch supported us.’

  It was a convenient theory because it put the blame for this crazy, fatuous war beyond the boundaries of the continent. But there was never any oil. The subject wasn’t even raised until the fighting was over (when Bolivia used it as an excuse to seize Standard’s assets).

  I preferred the idea that war was geographically inevitable. It was a theory propagated in the early thirties by a Chaco man called Sir Christopher Gibson. The Gibsons had had long associations with Paraguay (and still run the Highland Ball). Old Herbert Gibson was the first man to be knighted for endeavours outside the British Empire. When the First World War began, he returned to Europe to fight and his Lenguas put on war-paint and set off after him. The Gibsons were generally reckoned to know which way was up.

  Sir Christopher saw the Chaco as a great void. On the Pacific side were the Children of the Sun, with their cities and social order, infallible priests and a history recorded in ‘stelas, ideographs and mnemonic quipus’. On the Atlantic side were Arawaks, Caribs and Guaraní, ‘builders of the long house, botanists and herbalists, cannibals by ritual’. In between them lay a vast no-man’s-land, which the Incas called the chacu, ‘the place of abundant game’. It would only be a matter of time before the warring parties poured into the vacuum.

  If this all sounded a little frilly, there was a stout reason why war hadn’t come sooner: technology, or rather the lack of it. Neither side had the means to move an army fast over this desiccated ocean-bed, to drill for water and tanker it to the troops. By the twentieth century, the Bolivians thought they had the machines in place. All they needed was a spark. Ironically, it was provided by the pacifists; Asunción’s land deal with the Mennonites provoked howls in La Paz. Sir Christopher’s offers of mediation were swept aside.

  ‘Is even Paraguay going to push us around?’ snorted the Bolivian president, Salamanca. ‘War should be an adventure for Bolivia! Let us go to the Chaco – not to conquer or die, but to conquer!’

  Such bluster portended disaster. By close of play, almost one in every thirty Bolivians was lost in the Chaco’s dirt. More would die of thirst than wounds. For years afterwards, whole columns of sun-bleached troops would be
found in the thorns, turned to salt in the flight for home. It was true: the war would prove an unforgettable adventure.

  The first campaigns were fought in postage stamps. Bolivia depicted itself sprawling up to Asunción. Paraguay, meanwhile, perched itself in the Andes. In reality, the warring parties were still a month’s journey apart.

  By 1932, they’d expended their philatelic urges and the shooting began. Bolivia had already reached the Mennonite colonies and was picking off Paraguayan outposts, like Toledo. Asunción responded with a fearsome display of poverty. The city buses were commandeered and there was a collection of wedding rings to buy rifles. There were only two significant military assets, the Italian gunboats, Humaitá and Paraguay. Though they would never fire a shot in anger, they ferried the army up to Puerto Casado. From there, the soldiers took mini trains out to the front.

  By early September, the two ancient races were face to face in the thickets of Boquerón. La Guerra de la Sed (‘the War of Thirst’) was about to flare, uncontrolled.

  ‘We’ll drive you over there,’ said Jakob. ‘It’s a strange place.’

  123

  WE DROVE SOUTH along narrow channels, or picadas, cut through the spiny growth. It was a beautiful day of lemon-yellow paratodo trees and cactus jewelled with birds. Jakob called out their names as we passed, like pieces of a lost orchestra: piculets, horneros and undulated tinamous. Maria said the weather was ‘unseasonably fresh’ – quite unlike the spring of September 1932, which is said to have blazed.

  Despite the years of dust-storms, floods and armadillos, we could still trace the outline of the trenches. We followed them into a dark tangle of bottle-trees. The bunkers had collapsed but the marks of Bolivian hatchets were still sharp in the stumps and shorings. They’d had a month to defend their water-hole and had dug a giant kidney fortified with barbed wire, stakes and interlocking fields of fire. In the middle was the prize. Nowadays, it is a succulent lagoon of lilies and whistling herons. Then, it was the only water for sixty kilometres. Already, men were fighting about water, not oil.

 

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