He poured himself some beer and it foamed down the glass, on to the table.
‘I’ve thought about this a lot,’ he went on. ‘I call it Paraguay occulta. I learnt history at school but I now realise that most of it was lies. That leaves me wondering who we are. Was our Jesuit provincia really an enlightened republic or just another state of delusion? Who was Dr Francia? Was he black? No one seems to have exploited our confusion better than Francia. He ruled Paraguay for years and years and then vanished. There’s hardly a trace of him.’
‘What about the López era?’ I asked.
‘It was a fantasy which we all shared, then regretted, then rebuilt. What was the war all about? What happened to the treasure? Was there any?’
The last century, said Palacios, had been just as elusive.
‘You can see why we became a hideaway for Nazis. For them, it was like running deep into a forest. We didn’t even know what our own people were doing. What happened in the civil war? It was a war as catastrophic as the Chaco but it’s never mentioned. A third of our people disappeared but there isn’t a single memorial to them, not even a plaque.’
A waiter appeared with flanks of beef and maize cake. Palacios waited until he’d moved away and then continued his theme.
‘Stroessner. He called himself “The Luminous Lighthouse”. It sounded good (none of us had ever seen the sea), but it just meant we’d be dazzled. Even now he’s gone, we’re still frightened that his people are out there, in the dark.’ He paused, chewing thoughtfully. ‘Paraguay occulta. It’s a good name, isn’t it?’
I mentioned the airbase.
He shook his head ‘We don’t know who runs this country. Or who owns it. Our politics is just a sleight of hand. Who killed Professor Argaña? Did anybody kill him? Our politicians seem unable to lead us without trickery, without filling their pockets first. It’s as if there’s no tomorrow. Only today counts. That’s the way the Indians think.’
The scientist sighed. ‘That’s it, I suppose. Although we don’t know it, deep down we’re still Indians.’
128
I HAVE NEVER found departures easy but I’d never imagined that leaving Paraguay would be so difficult. This was partly because Asunción was now smothered in summer and many of those I’d come to know had fled the city. Without the goodbyes and the rituals of departure, my journey seemed frayed and incomplete. I spent a whole morning punching numbers into my telephone but all I got back was my own trills or, worse, the irritation of servants.
‘They’re away until next March. May I take a message?’
Or: ‘Miss Yegros has gone to a wedding for two months.’
Or: ‘I’m sorry, he’s in São Paulo having his bowels examined.’
I even called Gareth but the phone just rang and rang. Some months later, I got a card from his wife saying that Gareth had taken a turn for the worse and that they’d taken him to the alcoholics’ home in Filadelfia. It was hard to imagine Gareth with a German God and all those tapirs but at least he’d found a form of surrealism that wouldn’t drown him. As usual, I had a feeling that I’d probably never see him again. More than ever, I hoped I was wrong.
I didn’t call everyone. I didn’t have the stomach for the lactating girl with her strawberry shakes and I didn’t have the guts for another rocket-tour with Fluff.
The other difficulty with leaving was that I’d contracted a bout of bereavement. I’d always suspected Asunción of underlying melancholy and I began to wonder if I wasn’t somehow tainted. Dr Palacios had done nothing to allay my fears. ‘We’ve been in mourning since the Grande Guerre,’ he’d said. ‘It overwhelms us like sleep.’
I realised I was being ridiculous. I simply didn’t want to leave. I’d settled back into the rhythm of the city: my room at the old skin clinic; the delicious torpor of the evenings; piraña soup at The Lido; lancers in uniforms of cobalt and silver. On the day of my return to Asunción, the gunboat Humaitá had been decommissioned and I’d climbed aboard with a commando of schoolchildren. Humaitá had seen seventy-three years’ service, two wars and thousands of layers of slaty paint. She still had her hammock-hooks and Genoese guns and a bloom of hot diesel still wafted up from the hatches. I was entranced and would have yelled and blubbered down the speaking-tubes except that – fortunately – words now completely failed me.
Palacios was right, of course; the city bore its loss like sleep. In the squares, Asunceños wore a dazed, confused expression and life was glimpsed in a series of inexplicable dreams: a pink palace, a man carrying a stuffed lion, the giant bronze frogs. What would the citizens find when they awoke? Perhaps they never would and this would always be the Republic of Regret, the antithesis of Eldorado. I had no doubt what lay at its centre. All roads led there. I often found myself outside and now I went there again: the Panteón de Los Héroes.
As far as I could tell it was a faithful and sturdy replica of Paris except that it was rendered in cement. It had taken sixty years to complete and had sat out two wars in its scaffolding trusses. The result was bluntly secular and would have delighted Voltaire (who is walled up in the original); in here, even the Virgin Mary had to wear her medals. Everything smelt of gun-oil and boot polish. The Napoleonic guard were hunched in a corner with their Coca-Colas and cheese empanadas. Beneath the dome was a large round nest, clustered with caskets. These were the caskets of heroes: Estigarribia, Caballero, Carlos López, Francisco López (empty, eaten by leaf-mould), Francia (empty, eaten by alligators) and poor General Díaz (now all in one box, reunited with his leg). It was a sobering thought that, of Paraguay’s greatest figures, only two had gone quietly to their graves. Perhaps it was no surprise that her people seemed to regard death as a virtue and bereavement as hereditary.
Perhaps too there really was a contagious aspect to it all: I now had a powerful urge to slow things down. I decided to buy some souvenirs. It wasn’t that I wanted anything elaborate, just a few hostages to slow the pace of departure. It was a hopeless strategy. Most of the stuff was made of scooped-out armadillos or other harmless animals and was offered up as ashtrays and handbags. Other things were only tangentially Paraguayan (like the statues of Napoleon) or just odd (like the masturbating goblins). I settled for a tape describing itself as the Himno Nacional, but when I got it back, all I could hear were some old men, singing their way home on the bus.
My efforts to wrap things up and say goodbye were going dismally. In the absence of living company, I decided to go off and visit the dead.
129
MARSHAL LÓPEZ HAD carved off a corner of Recoleta for his dead contractors.
It was supposed to be a British cemetery, insisted Robert Eaton.
‘It was not just for any Protestants,’ he’d said. ‘My wife, Dorothy, was most indignant when they let the Germans in.’
Poor indignant Dorothy was now packed down among the erstwhile Germans. There was a vase of fresh roses on her tomb and, in breach of her own rules, she’d left a space at her side for a foreigner, the American who’d never stopped adoring her. Nearby were her family – her mother, Constance Kent, and her father, Charley the trapper. Charley had seen action in three wars: Boer, Great and Chaco. At the age of seventy, even he had realised that he was too old for his fourth. He died a few days after the liberation of Naples, in October 1943. Infuriatingly, he’d been outpaced by his old classmate and enemy, now leading the embattled Britons: Sir Winston Churchill.
There were other names I recognised among all the gothic and frangipani: the Australians – Woods, McLeods and Apthorpes – and the socialists – Stanleys, Kennedys and Smiths. But there were also many missing. I couldn’t find any sign of the great Yanqui rednecks; perhaps all this nicety hadn’t suited them. Nor could I see the English barristers; perhaps ‘the Land of Women’ had proved more than gentlemen could handle.
Leon Cadogan was there. His tomb was not that of a wandering Irish poet, which was how he saw himself, but a liberator, which was what he became. Many thousands of Indians owed him their
lives and they’d repaid him with an altar of black granite and a title – Dragonfly – in silver letters: Tupá kuchuvi vevé.
I walked on, to the far end, to the wreckage of the English contractors. Many of the tombstones were missing or had been prised apart by the slow dentistry of roots. Those that remained told a painful story. Here lay the little Nesbitts, none of whom had reached the age of one. Mary Watts had lived just long enough to see her husband win the Order of Merit, for heroism at the naval skirmish of Riachuelo. They weren’t to be reunited in death: John fell foul of López’s paranoia, was shot by firing squad and was buried in the southern marshes.
Here too was John Muir, driven to drink at the age of twenty-six. On 11 May 1863, he’d cut his own throat and then hanged himself, astonishing the doctors with a self-decapitation. At the time, his death was blamed on the bullying of Newton and Grant, the same men who’d driven Whytehead to suicide. Mrs Newton was here (Mr Newton had escaped on a British gunboat), but where was Grant?
As I eased between the fragments, a flock of parrots suddenly exploded from the canopy. They spiralled madly upwards, hung for a moment and then dropped, falling somewhere beyond the wall, in Catholic Recoleta. The noise woke the grave-digger, who burrowed out of the shade and sniffed the air for news.
‘Yes,’ he said sleepily, ‘we have Señor Grant.’
We set off through the marble forest. He said his name was Selso. After a while we came to a bench.
‘Here he is.’
The last monument to Alexander Grant, native of Forfarshire, sometime foundryman of Ybycuí, drunk, misanthrope and bully, had been wrenched out of the ground, upended and was now a repository for bottoms. Selso and I lay on the ground and looked upwards at the inscription. Grant had survived Whytehead by only two months.
I hardly dared ask what had happened to the Chief Engineer.
‘Ah,’ said Selso, apologetically, ‘they put this road through here in 1985. Some of the graves got bulldozed.’
Poor Whytehead. Paraguay’s greatest architect had been ground up to make a cul-de-sac. Perhaps the ambitious Dr Stewart had also been powdered by a Caterpillar, but somehow I doubted it. I preferred to think he’d always fancied something grander – a Parthenon, perhaps – and had defected to the Catholic side.
Selso sensed my disappointment. We set off again.
‘This one was our great hero. He killed hundreds of Brazilians.’
It was George Thompson, buried with full honours: ‘Civil Engineer. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, Lieutenant-Colonel of the Paraguayan Army Engineers.’ Teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.
We walked back towards the gate.
‘Selso, are you sure there are no others?’
He thought about it a moment. ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘There’s a very great lady. She’s over the wall with the Catholics.’ He hesitated. ‘They call her La Concubina Irlandesa.’
Madame Lynch was back from Père Lachaise.
130
THINGS HAD NOT gone quietly for Eliza’s last remains. Just as death had intruded so colourfully upon her life, so now did life intrude upon her death. Whether she’d have wanted it or not, she was about to make her second and probably final trip to Paraguay.
There had been a brief period of quiet after 1900, when the Parisians had stopped pouring corpses into her little grave. The last of her fellow tenants, a Madame Martin, had sealed herself in with a massive lump of granite, and for a while, Eliza would rest in cramped but bearable peace. The López children didn’t think it necessary to provide a flashy monument. Instead, they’d attached a simple and inexpensive plaque that described their mother as ‘Unforgettable’.
She might have proved that even this was a lie but for the rise of Paraguayan fascism. Madame Martin and friends were about to have their peace imploded. First, the fascists came over and riveted the Paraguayan State Seal into Madame Martin’s granite flanks, and then they planted a flagpole. There was then a pause whilst they repaired to Asunción to plan their next move, or rather Eliza’s.
Meanwhile, her image underwent some restoration. The problem was that there was little agreement about what she should be like. The artists made her a strapping warrior-queen with biceps like frozen turkeys. The writers, on the other hand, saw her as the Princess of Love, a sugary popsy who overflowed with tenderness and honey. It wasn’t easy to reconcile the two. Stroessner didn’t bother; he didn’t understand art and had little time for women. A good woman was one who was barefoot, at heel and festooned with babies. That’s how Madame Lynch would be. In 1961, her return was sought.
The task of returning Eliza fell to a Paraguayan-Syrian called Teófilo Chammas. He’d already impressed the government with his aptitude for smuggling and was considered equal to a daunting mission: Eliza had to be extracted from French bureaucracy, from under a ton of granite and from the remains of Madame Martin and a dozen other well-wormed défuntes. How he did it was his secret – and it wasn’t his only one: Eliza Lynch arrived back in South America packed with four kilos of best Lebanese hashish.
For a while, she languished in the docks in Buenos Aires. The Argentines were troubled not so much by the weed as by the fact that she’d returned at all. Eventually, according to the official version, the Humaitá was sent to collect her. In Chammas’ version, he tipped her into a suitcase and flew her back to Asunción in a seaplane. Either way, the day of her return to Asunción, 25 July 1961, became a Day of National Homage. It was also the seventy-fifth anniversary of her death.
On the quayside, leading the mourners, was Stroessner himself, sobbing manfully and dressed in the style of a Ruritanian Air Chief Marshal. ‘Our National Heroine,’ he sniffed. ‘Our National Martyr.’ In an impressive display of grief, he carried the casket up to the Panteón and laid it next to that of Mariscal López. But, even though no one could be sure that either were in their boxes, the bishop had forbidden the unmarried couple to lie together in perpetuity. So, once the gnashers of teeth had dispersed, Eliza was spirited out through the back door and off to the Ministry of Defence. There she stayed for the next nine years, in her own little shrine, among her last bits of crockery and her lover’s enormous underpants.
Finally, on the centenary of Paraguay’s emasculation, she was on the move again, this time to join the gentry at La Recoleta. All her life they’d tried to exclude her. Now she was to be implanted among them.
I was surprised by Eliza’s latest tomb. It was rudely modern, like some public lavatories under full sail. There were little china swans as tokens of breeding, and pebbledash for Ireland. Her bronze casket was identical to that of Marshal López (which, of course, was identical to Napoleon’s). It was a curious setting for the unearthed Parisians; Madame Martin and friends must have wondered where their eternity was all going to end.
Most surprising of all was the statue on the roof. It was Eliza designed by a junta. All I recognised was the ball-gown, now clinging as deliciously as possible to the body of a ploughman. She was carrying a shovel, and at her feet were two tiny graves into which she’d just tossed the scrags of her family. Underneath, General Stroessner’s sniffles had turned to brass: ‘Eliza Alicia Lynch, who selflessly accompanied the Greatest Hero of the Nation to his Immolation at Cerro Corá’. In fleeing a shortage of potatoes, the girl from Cork had become an Olympian.
A few doors down from the Temple O’Lynch was the Tomb O’Leary. As historian and poodle to the Court of Don Alfredo, O’Leary had provided the last, loyal howls.
Like Joan of Arc [he wailed], she died the death of a martyr, content in the belief that history would vindicate her noble name, would restore her stolen reputation and would enshrine her in the uppermost reaches of that region of heaven reserved for the spiritual remains of the greatest woman South America has ever known.
Goodbye, I mused, Eliza Lynch, Empress of Paraguay.
131
RIGHT TO THE end I continued to bombard the atmosphere with phone calls. The
re was now a note of distress about them, because the old skin clinic, which until then had served me so well, was beginning to eat me. Where once skin had been soothed and creamed and healed, it now boiled and buckled into welts the size of golf balls. Summer had brought a blaze of bedbugs.
I showed Miriam my bed, scattered with cracked carcasses and threads of blood. She was unimpressed.
‘They’re all dead.’
‘They are now,’ I protested. ‘But they have friends.’
Miriam switched to denial. ‘There are no chinches here.’
She would not be moved, but I would. For my last night, I decided my pelt needed sanctuary and so I started to pack. At that moment, the Francos answered my calls. Come up and stay with us, they said. Although it meant moving up to Legoland, their intervention was heavenly. A cloud lifted and with it a plague of controversial bedbugs.
I took a last walk through the old squares. It was a beautiful, silent day, a soldier-blue sky tufted in white. The Guaraní was at her quay, ready to renew her cycle. I could see Foxhound on his exercise bike, pedalling sedately nowhere. On the Plaza de Los Héroes, the Ladies who Lunch were gathered under a banner: Amnesty International (Paraguay). They were stacking up signatures to loose off at Colombia and Yasser Arafat. Injustice, they thrilled, End the Injustice.
‘What about here?’ I asked. ‘The gangsters of the Stronato are still up there, in their palaces in Villa Morra. What about them?’
But they wouldn’t have it. It was like accusing them of bedbugs. They swooned with denial.
‘The big houses were built after Stroessner.’
‘Those days are over.’
Were they? True, Stroessner was in Brasilia, unthreading himself with senility (Doña Eligia had finally abandoned him and Freddie junior was dead, leaving only Gustavo to shoo away the paparazzi and the curious). But the other big players were still out there, dispensing malice: Wasmosy, bricked up in his fortress; President Macchi, driving round in a stolen BMW; Lino Oviedo, pulling strings from his foreign jail. Sometimes Paraguay seemed like one of Estigarribia’s brilliant chess matches, grotesquely mutated. One bishop, five and a half million hapless pawns, twelve faux-castles and three kings, all in checkmate. In one sense the game was over, but all it would take was one false move and all would be back in play.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 43