by Pico Iyer
I could not help dusting off a few of my apprehensions when I went to the Jardín Botánico, formerly an estate of the presidential Lopezes and now filled with the saddest and thinnest elephants and tigers I have ever seen. (“The little zoo,” says the South American Handbook, in its inimitably tight-lipped way, “has inspired some unfavourable comments.”) Around them were groups of children held together by circles of string behind their backs, and moving from cage to cage in what seemed to be portable cages of their own.
Nearby, in the Museum of Natural History, I finally cracked, amidst its hundreds of beetles and spiders pinned up in elaborate patterns on the wall, its staring pumas and stuffed albatross, its six-hundred-year-old preserved corpses, its skulls and its snakes like homunculi in jars. It looked like the workplace of some demented Frankenstein, and I could not help but think back to the stories of Dr. Mengele, who famously kept rows upon rows of eyes pinned up on his wall.
Yet such macabre scenes are in many respects the exception in Paraguay. The people here are generally amiable and attractive, and nicely turned out, if only because clothes and cosmetics are so inexpensive in this tax-free zone (even the schoolgirls here wear Dior and Worth). The license plates on the Alfas and Chevys, in the American way, give nicknames to every city—“Spiritual Capital,” “Heroic City,” “The Frontier of Friendship,” “The Young and Happy City”—and the main post office is a lovely colonial building, with rooms radiating out from a sunlit, fountained Andalusian courtyard and upstairs, one of the sweetest views in the capital (not to mention a bust of Marshal López at its center and pictures of him around the walls). Bank tellers walk down the street with the straight-backed dignity of applicants for the Paraguayan Bottle Dance. Paraguay is not without its shady charms.
And there is something engagingly unpretentious about the place’s openness and its apparent freedom from illusions about itself: the aerobics show I watched on TV seemed to be called “Kleppomania,” and a jeans store (offering, as they all do, “Instant Personal Credit”) called itself, nicely, “Credi-billy.” Though a few cunningly angled photos present Asunción as a thoroughly modern city full of skyscrapers, the truth of the matter is that there are only about five or six high-rises in the entire place and they are topped by signs for Marlboro, Lucky Strike, and Philips.
The governing principle of Paraguay, indeed, seems to be one of languid illegality, and the country shambles along with an inimitable kind of slow-motion hustle—quick kills played out at a tropical pace. For all the talk of negocios, Paraguay has none of the huckster’s usual energy or determination, none of the con man’s tenacity; by Saturday noon, all the money changers have gone home for the weekend, and the bankers are drifting into the No Problems bar. The guidebooks always point out that offices here open at 7:00 a.m. or even 6:00; what they neglect to mention is that the banks, for example, close at 11:00. This is the land of the four-day siesta. If there were a prize for the world’s least persistent touts, Paraguay would surely win lying down. (“How much for this?” “Twenty thousand guarani!” “I’ll give you five thousand.” “Okay.”) In Paraguay, there’s no business like slow business.
For me, then, the essence—the spiritual heart—of Asunción was the Plaza Uruguaya, a leafy park just a few blocks from the center. Old men sipped maté under trees, and younger men pitched coins along the sidewalk. Hot-pants girls winked lazily at every passerby, next to the statue of the Virgin donated by the Lions Club of Asunción. A small crowd formed to watch men playing checkers in the shade.
On one side of the square stood the quaint yellow railway station, whose construction, like much else, had been cut short by the War of the Triple Alliance. A sign proudly reported that it was the first train station in South America—neglecting to add that it was now the last to receive steam engines. In the empty portico outside the station, raspy voiced old women of nineteen and twenty hissed “Pssst!” at every unaccompanied male, while girls under umbrellas flagged down passing cars with lottery tickets. Within the plaza itself there were two huge transparent tubes that looked like cellular greenhouses made of cellophane. Inside were stacks of books—though this seemed an unlikely spot for literateurs—with titles like Absolution for Hitler?, My Cat Speaks (“A Book of Mediumistic conversations between a human being and two cats”), and Read the Future in Grounds of Coffee. The works of Lobsang Rampa, the “Tibetan lama” later exposed as a fraudulent Englishman, seemed especially popular in Paraguay.
I took to spending a few moments each day in the square, watching the world go by—or not do so. The plaza seemed like the echt Paraguay, fragrant with the blessings of a place that time has left behind.
From the Oasis I moved onto a NASA bus for a trip into the Chaco, the vast, impenetrable scrubland that takes up two-thirds of all Paraguay, a place so hellish that the average temperature (allowing for many 75° days) is 98° Fahrenheit, a place so primitive that a wild hog believed to be extinct since the Pleistocene era was found there less than a generation ago. On the bus, I and the driver were the only ones without blond heads. Hausfrauen with yellow buns were chattering away in Plattdeutsch with old German men in farmers’ caps. A family of four very blond Californians was sitting in one row transporting boxes of Frosted Flakes to fellow missionaries in the interior. The driver, in any case, was often not visible, except for his legs, which dangled in the aisle from a hole in the roof, where he was hacking down branches with an evil-looking machete. The Brazilian-made bus had symbols on its side of TV, Video, Music, Drinks, Playing Cards, and a WC. As far as I could see, it did have a WC. Still, it seemed the best vehicle to take: the other two daily buses arrived in the desolate Chaco at 2:00 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. respectively.
Within thirty minutes of leaving the capital, we were in oblivion: just trees, greenness, space, greenness, here and there a small white grave beside the road. We drove past the Río Confuso, the town of Benjamin Aceval, the departamento of Presidente Hayes. There are wonderful birds in the Chaco—birds with transparent wings, birds with pink feathers, birds in the colors of Brazil. There is not much else. The population density here is less than one person per square kilometer.
As darkness fell, there was marginally less to see. Driving through the Chaco at night is like walking through the dark with your eyes shut. About sixty kilometers from the last light, the bus might stop and two elderly Germans might get off and disappear into the dark. Then the bus would resume its straightline path. “When can we get off?” bawled one of the missionaries’ sons. Are we having fun yet? The Chaco is not an ideal honeymoon location.
Finally, after nine o’clock, we arrived at Filadelfia, the main Mennonite settlement in Colonia Fernheim. I got out and started walking down the huge, unpaved red road, broad as the Champs-élysées. “Filly,” as the Californians affectionately called it, is like an empty, one-lane, red-mud version of the Wild West. On all sides, you can see the town end and the nothingness begin. There is a used-car lot here and a Toyota showroom—this is, after all, still Paraguay—but not much else. One pickup truck; three straw-haired boys on Yamahas.
I wandered into the Hotel Florida, on the corner of Avenida Hindenburg and Calle Unruh, just two doors down from the Reisebüro, and was greeted by a very polite young Uruguayan boy who looked like Boris Becker. “Kann ich diese Zeitung nehmen?” I asked him, “Of course,” he said, in flawless English. “But will that be enough for you?” On the walls of the hotel were daily rainfall tables (whole months passed by without a single marking, and then, on some days, it said 204, 131, 189). There was also a map of the area: the Chaco is so deserted that the maps show every house and shop.
I went into the courtyard to have dinner and met two young Brits who had lost their way, on their bicycles, in the middle of the Bolivian part of the Chaco. We established that we were from the same country, and then ate at opposite sides of the empty garden.
What the Mennonites have achieved in this inhospitable “Green Hell” is quite remarkable. (“In the summer, the te
mperature’s about one twenty-five,” a man in Asunción had told me. “But with the humidity, of course, it feels much higher.”) When first the German settlers arrived, fleeing Russian Communism in 1930, they found an ungodly wilderness peopled only by a few Indians, and swarming with poisonous snakes. Many caught typhoid and died. Two years after they arrived, the Chaco War broke out all around them. Yet somehow they hung on to erect an astonishingly clean and well-managed community, with its own schools, buses, laws, and enormous cooperative stores. The supermarket in Filadelfia was spotless and better stocked than a store in Orange County and offered Japanese Super Gummi candies, Chinese Perfect Cube boxes, Jordache jeans, and tapes of Fips Asmussen. Nearby, a Christian bookstore (“The Messenger”) sold Indian statues of turtles and owls, and a video store promised James Bond and Mad Max, as well as special tapes in German, of the Bombing of Baghdad and the Paris-Dakar rally.
But the most exciting thing to do in Filadelfia, for me, was simply to watch the Mennonite women clean my room every morning. A task force of three stormed into the small, immaculately maintained chamber, scrubbing floors, beating rugs, picking up shoes, whisking off wastebaskets and then storming out three minutes later, leaving the place born again.
My first morning in town, I went for a ride through the red-rutted emptiness with the proprietor of the hotel, a wonderfully hospitable Mennonite named Hartmut Wohlgemuth, accompanied by a sweet-smiling young Paraguayan proselyte. We bumped over tire-muddied paths, the roads around as empty as airstrips (which often they are), the cries of “Danke schön” as frequent as in a Cuban police station. “Before, the Indians could not sleep at night,” my host explained. “They believed in spirits, ghosts, things almost satanic. They were afraid of the night, of things that moved in the dark. It was terrible. Now they believe in Jesus. And this is better. Whoever you are—Paraguayan, Brazilian, German, Indian—you can believe in Jesus and find salvation. I am not just saying this. It is the truth.”
Not everyone here could keep up with such fervor. “It is a big problem,” Herr Wohlgemuth admitted. “The young do not want to live like this. They want excitement, the modern life. They want money. They want drink.” Did many of them marry the Indians? “Not really,” he said, and then went on, with characteristic straightforwardness, “They have sexual relations, of course. But marry, no.”
We drove into Indian settlements famously appointed with basketball courts, prayer halls, and Bible schools: they looked like rough drafts of the Mennonite communities. “Some Indians have TV’s, radios,” Herr Wohlgemuth informed me. “Some even have cars.” “Do they want all this?” “Yes. They all want them.” A few Indians clattered past on a horse-drawn cart, like latter-day replicas of the early Mennonites; others played volleyball, or stood inertly by their huts in Minnesota Vikings T-shirts. We got out, and an aged Indian man, in lucid Spanish, gave us an account of the missionary’s life. “El Señor was hit by a bow and arrow. The arrow went into his side. There was no blood. Three hours later, he was dead.”
We got back into the pickup, and my beaming host, patting me on the back, pointed out serpents, tucutucos, and, mostly, doves. I thought it might be imprudent to ask him about the Ache Indians, a small Stone Age tribe of hunters and gatherers who, according to many reports, have been virtually eliminated by missionaries. (Norman Lewis, only a few years ago, wrote of a man selling his own son for seventy-five cents, down from the going rate of five dollars.) Better, I thought, to discuss the most famous reported settler among the Mennonites.
“Do you know Dr. Mengele?” “Mengele? No! People say that he lived among the Mennonites, but that is a lie! A complete lie! He was never here, never! They found his bones in São Paulo!” “Yes,” piped up the Paraguayan from the back seat, unschooled yet in the party line. “He was with another group of Mennonites, in another part of Paraguay. He was a doctor among the insane.” “Another group?” said Herr Wohlgemuth, a little taken aback. “Really?” “Yes. He was a doctor before.” “But a rustic doctor only.” “He was a friend of Stroessner,” the boy from Asunción went on. I was about to ask what this said about Stroessner—the madman responsible for up to 400,000 deaths was said to be the president’s personal physician—but then the smiling boy went on: “He was a good man, Stroessner, a very good man. He returned to Paraguay last week.”
Herr Wohlgemuth was the perfect host, a thoroughly likable soul who roared with joy when he saw a motorcyclist do a wheelie. He stopped in Lomo Plata, the largest Mennonite settlement in Menno, and he bought us ice creams in a Mennonite shop decorated with posters about how cholera could be caught from ice cream. “It is difficult,” he said, now contemplative. “Between our culture and the Indians’ there is a Mediterranean.” That night, he screened for me a video of the Indians singing a hymn, in Spanish, to the tune of “Red River Valley.”
When I retuned to the capital, everything was still ambling along in its state of lazy illegitimacy. A black magician was holding court in the Plaza of the Heroes, performing tricks before a huge circle of admirers with a spitting snake and a reptile in a box. The camera artists were doing a roaring trade snapping prints of excited young girls in from the countryside, and touts in UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA COLLEGE OF LAW T-shirts were palming bank notes above shirts that said OAKLAND ATHLETICS 1954 WORLD CHAMPIONS (BASKETBALL WORLD SERIES). The Cine Victoria had a new double bill: Deep Throat II and The Night of Penetrations.
In the Plaza Uruguaya, the same girls in the same polka-dot dresses were standing against the same trees. Occasionally, they snuggled up to distracted-looking businessmen on park benches and talked in numbers (“Fifteen thousand.” “Ten!” “Why not fifteen?”), before shuffling off together to the nearby Casa Reina, or House of Queens. I asked a girl if she was not worried about AIDS. It was a lie, she said, it didn’t exist (and in Paraguay, you could almost believe it: anything could be true on this distant planet).
At night a blood-red fountain began to play in the Plaza of the Heroes, and children went round it solemnly on tricycles. The parking space outside the Hotel Guarani was still reserved for the Embassy of South Africa. On TV, messages about cholera were flashing across the screen during advertisements for the Miss Universe contest. Booming above me, from the “Dancing Restaurant,” there came the sound of a band doing “My Way.” The next day was a national holiday—Workers’ Day—which was a strange notion in a land where 60 percent of the people have no real work at all.
Yet for all the slow-business as usual, I could see why so many visitors had a soft spot for Paraguay. For there are very few shadows in Paraguay, and the capital at least is one of the safest places on the continent. In a country where crookedness is above ground and official (“Legalize Crime” might almost be the national motto: “Just Say Yes!”), people have more lucrative ways to redistribute income than by taking advantage of visitors. One could, in fact, make a Wildean case, after seeing Paraguay, for saying that if crime were made legal (as it is here), petty crime—pickpocketing and mugging and assault—would be all but eliminated. The only things I was robbed of in Paraguay were my malign preconceptions: I never looked over my shoulder here, or thought twice about taking a walk, or left my valuables in the hotel, as I would have to do in fun-loving, free-and-easy, murderous Rio. At night, there was a policeman—or a prostitute—on every street corner, keeping the peace in a kind of way.
Before I left Paraguay, I returned to the Gran Hotel. The golden kids of the generals were practicing their forehands, and the babies were squawking and whistling like birds. “Too many babies,” whispered the friendly receptionist, the cosmopolitan daughter of a diplomat, and an amateur historian. “But what can we do? We cannot refuse them rooms. Maybe we can set up a special room for them where they will not disturb the other guests?”
“Yes,” I said. “After all, this is a place with a special history.”
“No it isn’t.”
“I just mean Madama Lynch and all that.”
“She never lived here.”
“What?”
“I tell you, I don’t know where that rumor started. It’s a lie! The truth must be told!”
There was a long and uncomfortable silence.
“This house belonged to an Italian family. They lived here. Madama Lynch lived near the Jardín Botánico. I think they just started that story to bring in guests.”
Fact or fiction, truth or gossip? Who could tell? History, like everything else, was on special discount here in the orphaned land.
Australia: 1988
FIVE THOUSAND MILES FROM ANYWHERE
Start with the light. Everything starts with the light here.
In the hour before nightfall, what Hollywood calls the “magic hour,” the buildings in Australia start to glow with an unearthly light, and the gold-touched clouds look like something Blake might have imagined in his highest moments. The sky becomes a canvas on which absent gods are doodling: over here, patches of tropical blue; over there, shafts of silver slanting through the slate-gray clouds; everywhere, double rainbows arcing over gray Victorian monuments and avenues of palms. Yet this is hardly a warming scene. Rather, the Australian twilight has the same chilly strangeness, the same otherworldly calm—the same off-the-edge-of-the-earthliness—as Iceland in midsummer: a cold and science-fictive beauty. And as the night begins to descend, it seems as if the land is reclaiming itself, and Australia is more than ever a place emptied out of people, some dark, elemental presences awakened behind the placid surfaces of its newborn world.