His maid told him she had awoken with her underpants pulled down and her nightdress over her head.
“My wife said you could see the fingerprints on her clothes,” Peter said. “Their hands and feet were dirty from climbing on the roof.”
“Fingerprints on clothes? Footprints on the blanket?” It sounded far-fetched as evidence. Peter stared at me, wide-eyed, as if to emphasis the severity of his story.
“May I speak to her? Is she inside?” I asked, nodding towards the kitchen door, from which came the clink of porcelain and the splash of dishwater. I had asked several different leaders if I could interview some of the victims. Each time I was turned down.
Peter shook his head and pursed his lips in refusal. “No. It’s better not, they want to forget it.”
Peter was concerned that his own nineteen-year-old daughter had been raped, so he took her to Santa Cruz to see a doctor, who told Peter her hymen had been broken, an unscientific and inconclusive but widely accepted sign she was no longer a virgin. The doctor had not shared his findings with Peter’s daughter directly.
“On the way home, I said, ‘Well, that’s a relief, the doctor says that nothing has happened to you.’ And she sighed a breath of relief. I didn’t want her to worry about it and feel bad.”
“But your daughter is nineteen. Is she that naive?” I asked. “Don’t you think she knew what had happened, if she was ‘used’?”
Peter shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“So you believe your own daughter was used. How does that feel?”
“And maybe even my wife, we don’t know. She once said to me she was suspicious that something had happened,” Peter said in a hoarse whisper. He lifted his hands and held them in front of him as if pushing against a wall. “I said no. That’s enough. Stop it. I don’t want to hear any more.”
And neither did I.
CHAPTER 16
Paraguay
The Green Hell
I began the next day in a foul mood. My bike was acting up. Bolivia’s crappy fuel had clogged my carburetor and I hadn’t found time to clean it, so the bike was sluggish and unresponsive. But truthfully, my bad mood had festered and brewed the entire time I was in Bolivia. My mind had been occupied with other people’s rape and ignorance for too long, and it had left a sour memory. The entire Bolivian experience had confused me, sidetracked me from my mission to learn more about the Mennonite in me.
It was mid-November. I’d been on the road for five months and was becoming exhausted. Dirt ingrained every part of my body, bike, and luggage. On some days I revelled in the physical challenge of the ride, but not on this day. My bike seemed to agree.
By now I knew the bike’s weaknesses, when I’d find the power I needed and when I wouldn’t, when the tires would grip and when they’d skid. I’d learned to ignore the noises, vibrations, and small flaws that had become part of her, and to notice new, temporary ailments like a rattling chain or spongy brakes. I could feel her weariness, her sullen resentment at where this journey was taking us as we set off that morning.
Still, I felt a tinge of pride at what I was about to do, the honour of the struggle.
“Riding solo across the Chaco. This’ll show them,” I thought, not bothering to complete the thought to include who would care, why, or what I’d show them.
The Gran Chaco plain is unbearably hot, hotter than almost anywhere else on the continent. In the west this flat lowland is dry, filled with bottle trees, thorns, and cacti. This used to be a seabed, and the water that comes from the ground is salty and undrinkable. To the east the Chaco becomes wetter, even swampy in places, and quebracho trees grow large enough to be used for timber. In the whole, the Chaco is a wretched, bug-infested hell that breeds disease and malcontent.
This alkaline wasteland, sometimes called the Green Hell, sprawls across borders into Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, and Paraguay. Similar to France in size, it is walled in by the Andes Mountains on the west while the Paraguay River bounds the misery of the Chaco in the east. Yet-to-be-discovered tribes of hunter-gatherers hide from modernity in its depths, choosing to share their lives with jaguars, howler monkeys, and giant peccaries. There are other shadowy figures seen in the bushes at dusk, revealing themselves so rarely that scientists have yet to identify and name them.
This was the place Mennonites left Canada for. They gave up a comfortable, safe, and democratic home to search for the big dream in one of the most hostile environments on the planet. Paraguay granted them a generous Privilegium, but even so, the first years were brutally hard. There were no roads, schools, doctors, or easy food supplies. The soil, climate, plants, and animals were all foreign to the Mennonites, who had to build everything from the ground up, in a place never before successfully colonized. They nearly starved to death in the early years.
They were so hungry they learned to eat carob pods—which the Mennonites call by the local name algarrobo. Sweet with a dry, mealy texture, they’re often used as livestock feed, and are also a popular health food as a syrup or substitute for chocolate in baked goods. But to the Mennonites carob pods were foreign and eating seeds off wild trees instead of wheat and meat was a sign of just how desperate they were.
But moving all the way to Paraguay gave them a badge of honour for perseverance. No one could think of a more horrible place to start a new life, and there was pride in that. Righteous suffering. Here they’d be left alone to run their schools and colony as they saw fit. The Chaco became a real test of faith, a purifying struggle of unrelenting misery that showed the world just how determined the Mennonites were to live the life God intended for them.
And obviously, being led by God to a new Promised Land should not be easy. The Chaco validated just how promised it would be for that first wave of colonialists. If God had prepared a utopia for them, there had to be some kind of wall around it to keep the sinners out. Just as Moses and the Israelites had become lost in the desert in their escape from slavery, the Mennonites would fight the natural elements of the Chaco to reach their new nirvana. The farther away from Canada, the more conservative and reclusive it seemed the Mennonites became. I thought of the people I’d met in Mexico. Despite the radical motives for their move there, they were so close to Canada, so connected by family and business to their northern cousins that a strong sense of familiarity remained. In Belize, the Mennonites were a bit farther away, their lives more adjusted to the tropical, Caribbean lifestyle, but there was still a sense of connection. In Bolivia, I’d felt like I was far away from home, and the Mennonites there, while maintaining their Canadian roots, were mostly of a radical, ultra-conservative variety that I had trouble associating myself with. But those in the Paraguayan Chaco went beyond that. From what we’d heard in Canada, it sounded like they’d moved to another planet entirely.
Now I was riding my motorcycle into the heart of this horror. A case of misunderstood directions found me on a secondary road through the wilderness, compounding my difficulties. There were few villages and the way stations that did cling to the roadside were simple muddy lots ringed with small shacks and hand printed signs. Gasolina. Taller. A Restaurante serving fly-specked grilled chicken and bottled sodas that had never seen the inside of an icebox. They were all as impermanent as the wind.
The Bolivian frontera was guarded by a small yellow-brick building half hidden in the trees. The painted crest on the front was peeling off the wall and there was no other signage to hint that this was an international border. The thump of my boots echoed in the empty office.
“Hola!” I shouted. No answer, just the bugs and birds and hum of the Chaco.
“Frontera? Imigración?” I walked back outside and saw a guard leisurely sauntering across the yard, picking at his belly button.
“Aduana?” I asked, pointing at the building.
“Si, si,” he answered, as if it were obvious.
He wore no unif
orm, and he looked like he’d been left at this station alone for far too long. His unshaven face was greasy with sweat, his dirty shirt unbuttoned halfway down a round, hairy belly. He took my papers and walked behind the counter, where, with the kathunk kathunk of a stamp, he cleared me out of Bolivia.
The tarmac road was destroyed in many places in preparation for rebuilding works that had not yet occurred. And then it had rained heavily for several days. The parts of the road that were supposedly intact were a patchwork of hard-rimmed potholes that were hidden under soupy mud. I was riding on a bald rear tire, which was causing my bike to spin and fishtail through the mud. Every few kilometres, machines had torn the roadbed away, leaving large hummocks and a wide, soggy ditch to cross. I was still relatively fresh from the morning, having started out in dry clothes, when I reached the first of these ditches. I stopped and pondered the physics of 250 kilograms of luggage, fuel, and Kawasaki engineering on an insecure surface, and then gunned the engine. I was halfway through the mess, legs splayed to each side to catch myself, weaving and lurching drunkenly, when the rear end went right and the front wheel went left. Sitting on my ass in slick Chaco mud was still not the pleasure one might have imagined.
The humiliation only intensified my bad mood. I gritted my teeth and growled with effort and rage as I lifted the motorcycle from the mud. There was no one to around to shock with my curses, which robbed me of even that satisfaction. There was nothing to do but remount and ride on, suspecting that this would happen again before the day was over. It did.
The solitude of the Chaco was disquieting. But I was not entirely alone. A rustle in the underbrush turned out to be an armadillo, which scurried away when I approached for a closer look. Rheas popped out of the foliage and stretched out their grey scaly legs to beat a tempo as they galloped down the road. Lizards a metre long whirled around and scuttled for cover as I passed. A dead snake as thick as my leg lay rotting in the heat, its black skin torn apart by vultures. Above me, the vultures spread their giant wings and surfed the updrafts while flocks of smaller birds swept across the landscape like thunderclouds. Doves, plump and round, sat on the road by the hundreds. They thrashed their stubby wings, frantic to gain the altitude to escape as I approached. I ducked my head in fear again and again until one dove wasn’t quite fast enough. It smacked into my helmet with a loud thud and a scattering of feathers. I didn’t bother to stop.
The Chaco’s vast aquifers of salt water fed a bitter, withering vegetation. Ropelike liana crawled out of the ground and intertwined like a nest of snakes to create impenetrable walls fortified by stunted palms with bluish-green leaves. Thorns and vicious sharp leaves sprouted from every plant. I examined my tires for punctures at every stop.
The cattle grazing beside the road, some behind fences while others wandered free, matched the sullen colour of the land: mottled brown and grey and miserable. They took complete ownership of the road and stood in the centre with curved horns lowered. I slowed and edged around them, weighing the risk of slipping off the road against the chance of a horn through my fuel tank.
I rode with my visor open to enjoy the rush of air. I had long ago learned to swallow mosquitoes and flies whole and had earned countless welts from those that bounced off my face. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a split-second flash of black, and then the sharp smack of impact. I felt the bug burrow itself between my cheekbone and the helmet padding, squirming against my skin. I was clawing at my face with one hand while trying to keep my bike upright in the muddy tracks when I felt a numbing sting of pain.
By now I was tossing my head like a startled horse, trying to dislodge the creature. I veered to the side of the road, tore my helmet off and dislodged a bee as big as my thumb. It fell to the ground and buzzed in drunken circles for a second before I squashed it with my boot.
My cheek was hot and swollen. I felt a stab of fear. Months earlier, riding through Alabama, I was bitten by a mystery bug. The bite had caused my nostrils and ears to swell shut. My eyes had been reduced to tiny slits as I gasped for air and fought off a wave of terror. A passerby spotted my dilemma, gave me his own emergency antihistamines, and saved my life. I’d had chills and a fever for two days after the bite. It was the first time I’d had an allergic reaction to anything.
Since then I had carried a packet of antihistamines tucked into my breast pocket. I swallowed two of them now, washed down with a gulp of warm water from my canteen. I took a few deep breaths, worried that I might soon struggle for air, as if I could stock up on it for later. Without the throb of my motorcycle engine and the comforting safety of motion I felt very alone. I had not seen another vehicle or human for several hours. I opened and closed my mouth like a landed fish, then blew air through my nose until the snot flew. It all worked just fine. So far. Waiting on the road for my airways to close wouldn’t help. I restarted my bike and rode on, reminding myself that the Mennonite pioneers had suffered far worse.
The perseverance of the Mennonites who moved to the Gran Chaco was remarkable, even by Mennonite standards. Getting to the Chaco had nearly killed them, and although passing years made escape easier, the vast plain was still a barrier holding back the outside world.
When Paraguayan Mennonite families returned to Canada on visits, we viewed them with a mix of curiosity, awe, and derision. Curiosity, because they were obviously our relations despite their different accents and exotic origins. Distant relations to be sure, but my grandmother could have explained the bloodlines. Awe because we’d all heard stories of just how tough life could be in Paraguay, and these were the people who had experienced it. They loved Jesus so much they’d moved to the Chaco, where they nearly starved and the wind blew dust over everything. Derision because they were so different. Their clothes were outdated, their teeth were bad, and they were dreadfully uncool, even by our own culturally stunted standards. Now I was following them down that hole.
I’d had my fill of the dark underbelly of Mennonite culture in Bolivia, but now I was fighting my way through one of the earth’s most inhospitable patches, knocking a hole through the basement floor in order to find the very darkest corner of Mennonite retreat. My mind’s eye—made all the more creative by the hours spent alone on the road—was filled with Mennonite hillbilly families, mouths full of rotten teeth, spilling by the dozen from clapped-out Econoline vans, too many children to feed or educate properly.
Paraguay has long been a wild frontier where men with cash and big dreams come to make a fortune or create their utopia, far away from prying eyes. It attracts oddballs and dreamers much in the same way that Alaska does, but with a more sinister edge. All that empty space—well, except for the aboriginals, but they’re easily moved—screams potential to people gullible enough to think they can make it here, just as it does to the few that actually do find success.
People have come from Europe, Australia, Asia, and across the Americas to build their own ideals of peace, socialism, and pure living in Paraguay. Most settlers have failed. In the 1880s Elisabeth Nietzsche—Friedrich’s sister and a rabid anti-Semite—together with her husband, Bernhard Förster, founded Nueva Germania, a colony in the jungles of eastern Paraguay. The country swatted away their Aryan greatness, and the place drove Förster broke and mad. Within two and a half years he had poisoned himself, Elisabeth returned home, and their little kingdom fell into ruin. Then Germany’s Nazis came to hide there in the jungle after World War II, creating fertile ground for tales of espionage and manhunts.
In 2000, Reverend Sun Myung Moon, the self-proclaimed messiah who led the Unification cult known as the Moonies, bought large tracts of land in the Chaco to build a paradisiacal community and eco-resort. The plan failed and the land was soon back on the market for the next wide-eyed optimist.
I could understand why they’d failed. By late afternoon my bike had tipped me into the mud a half-dozen times. I’d stopped cleaning myself after each fall. The seat was covered in a slick of muck, d
aubed on coat by coat each time I remounted. But my anger was spent. Not even my most creative curses would make this any better. The Chaco had beaten the ugly mood out of me, and in its place there was a growing curiosity over those who called this Green Hell home.
By the time I arrived in Loma Plata, the town at the centre of Menno Colony, the sun was setting, and I was ten hours and 450 kilometres from where I had started the day. I was bewildered when the road went from mucky chaos to smooth tarmac. The business centre appeared, an oasis, a small slice of Europe. Shade trees in straight rows escorted me towards the downtown. Sturdy red-brick buildings were adorned with flowering vines, wide roads were filled with orderly traffic. Concrete monuments graced the roundabouts.
A shiny SUV pulled up beside me at a stop sign, and through the tinted windows I could see a blond woman wearing dark sunglasses. She saw me staring at her and waved, flashing a pearly smile. Two teenage boys, dressed in shorts and T-shirts, came out of a shop and walked down the street bouncing a basketball between them. I passed a museum, a hospital, and a handsome school. I looked at my map, a nagging feeling in my stomach that perhaps I’d made a wrong turn.
I found my way to Pension Loma Plata, the cheapest of the town’s lodgings. It was surrounded by a red-brick wall, with the hotelier’s family living in an adjacent house. My boots dropped clumps of muck in the shiny foyer as I entered.
“Ohhh, you must have come from a long way,” the receptionist said in hesitant English.
“From Bolivia. I came through the Chaco,” I said.
“Oh ya, that road is terrible when it rains. Welcome to Loma Plata.”
“I wasn’t expecting the colony to look like this.”
She laughed, like she’d heard other visitors say that. “It’s changed a lot from the early days.”
I was exhausted and was about to retreat to my room when she called after me.
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