Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  After my book on Albania had been published the distinguished author and former Times foreign correspondent Peter Hopkirk, who had been instrumental in getting my first book published, asked me ‘Where are you going next? You can go anywhere now, you know.’ I replied that I was going to go to Paraguay. ‘Why?’ I explained to him about my great-great-grand-uncle Charlie Carver. ‘To do an “in-the-footsteps-of” book, then?’ he asked skeptically. ‘The trail will be a bit cold after, what, a hundred years.’ No, I replied, not at all. I had no interest in ‘in-the-footsteps-of’ travel books. Besides, Charlie’s footsteps were only too well known – he walked into virgin jungle and was killed by Indians, end of story. What I was interested in were the half-made, half-abandoned places in the world, like Albania and Paraguay – and one could see Paraguay as a sort of South American Albania – lawless, piratical, bandit-ridden and corrupt, where neither tourists nor travel writers usually penetrated. And there was something else. South America had attracted the Spanish and countless other European adventurers who hoped to make their fortunes out of the river of silver and gold that had flowed, at such cost in human misery and suffering, after the Conquest. Yet quite another vision of America had also seized the imagination of the European mind. America could become a place of redemption, a place where the human spirit could be reborn, remade and refined. From its first discovery America had been a realm where imaginary Utopias could be set, and a place European dreamers could actually set sail for, arrive in and set up ideal communities which would, it was hoped, become beacons to mankind. Paraguay, from the first, had been a place which attracted Utopians and idealists. First the Jesuits had experimented with their Reducciones, theocratic communities of Christianized Indians ordered by a multinational caste of Jesuit priests; later 19th-century German nationalists, fin de siècle Australian communists, Mennonites, Moonies, and even renegade Nazis had all tried to set up their colonies in Paraguay. You could make a case that what New England was to Cotton Mather – a place where the exiled English Puritans could attempt to build the City Upon a Hill, which would be a light to lighten the gentiles – so was Paraguay the South American equivalent. In a strange sense the bifurcation of the human mind was reflected in the European’s Manichean obsession with America – a place from which to loot and steal gold and silver, to pillage, rape and plunder, and a place to found ideal communities which would redeem mankind, straighten the crooked timber of humanity, and to build the Perfect City.

  Both Charlie Carver and I were heirs to this dual, paradoxical, contradictory tradition, for we were both descended, after all, from John Carver, a Puritan gentleman from the English Midlands who in 1620 procured a vessel in Holland that was renamed the Mayflower, and who was then elected Master of the company of Pilgrims for the voyage, and on arrival in New England was elected first Governor of Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts. Though the English settlement eventually prospered, the first Governor did not. He was shot with an arrow by an Indian while out ploughing the land and died of his wound, leaving behind his wife and children, and his brother who had accompanied him on the Atlantic crossing, one Robert Carver. His descendant, Jonathan Carver, a captain in the Massachusetts Militia, had taken the Union flag of Great Britain to its furthest point west in the years immediately before the Revolution of 1776. He had been the first anglophone to overwinter with the Lakota Sioux, had made detailed plans to cross the Rockies and reach the Pacific coast, and whose travel book – published in London on his return – had proved a sensation all over Europe, translated into at least seven languages. He became a figure in literary London and at Court, and never returned to America. He was a disciple of the French philosophes, and in his tolerant appreciation of Indian culture and moeurs was a century and a half ahead of his time. Our family, I argued, had made a habit of going to America on quests – mine would be in the tradition.

  I explained all this over several cups of cappuccino in a London coffee bar to Peter Hopkirk. He thought about it and gave a slight smile of approval. ‘It does sound like an interesting quest. But remember, two Carvers have already been killed by American Indian arrows. Just make absolutely sure you are not the third. Always remember, you can’t write a book if you are killed while researching it. Jonathan Carver is clearly the one to emulate. Steer well clear of silver mines, I should.’ This was very good advice, and I often thought about it later when I found myself in much hotter water than I would ever have thought it possible to get into – and then get out of alive.

  Two

  An Ambassador is Born

  At Sao Paulo airport the passengers in the transit lounge slumped forward like the dead, eyes shut, their heads resting downwards, caught in metal and canvas cradles, motionless, their arms hanging limply beside them. Above, around, and all over them hovered lean, lithe, intense young girls dressed in white t-shirts and jeans, with bare suntanned midriffs, their fingers, fists and elbows kneading their clients’ skulls, backs, shoulders, torsos and feet. This service, unlocking flight-tautened muscles and imparting spiritual calm, cost five US dollars, and took place in full view of everyone; a whole line of these modern penitents were slumped as if in prayer between the coffee stall and the newspaper stand. The newspapers and magazines on sale were all from the Americas – from all over Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela, as well as Mexico and the US. There was nothing from Europe – and nothing, of course, from Paraguay: sometimes known optimistically as the Switzerland of the continent, it was more like the Tibet. You could get no information on the place anywhere. I was in a new continent, a new hemisphere, and a New World – and one in which my destination was as invisible as it had been in England.

  The transit passengers, mostly Brazilians waiting for internal flights, whether upright, prone or at all angles between, were uniformly young, elegant and beautifully dressed. Wasp-waisted black men, ranging from double espresso to palest café au lait, drifted past me dressed in impossibly stylish suits of pastel hues. They were shod in elegant patent shoes which looked like Milan goes Carnival in Rio. There was a calm, almost Zen atmosphere to this hyper-modern airport, hi-tech tranquillity, luxe, calme and volupté. By definition, only the richest could afford to fly in this huge but deeply divided society. The chaos, the colour, the poverty of the favelas was nowhere in evidence. Problems? What problems? you might ask yourself. But the newspapers reminded you every time you glanced at their headlines. Argentina, Brazil, much of South America was in deep crisis. Argentina had withdrawn from its commitment to value the peso on par with the dollar. Foreign currency reserves had vanished in unexplained circumstances. The banks had shut their doors. Now outside the angry protesters, already known as los ahorristas, hammered at the roller-shutter doors with sticks and batons, while the police looked on sympathetically – they too had lost their savings: this was a middle-class and middle-aged protest. They wanted their money back. They had trusted their government but their government had, in effect, stolen their money, promising to honour an exchange rate, then reneging, then closing the banks by fiat, refusing to allow savers access to their own money. Who would ever trust their money to an Argentine bank again? How could you run any sort of economy when the banks were untrustworthy and closed the doors on their own customers? Argentina could not, would not service its international debts. It had borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, but the money had all been stolen or wasted. No new loans could be negotiated until the country agreed to start repaying the interest on its old loans. There were already food shortages, medical supplies running out, layoffs and bankruptcies. Kidnapping and gunlaw had proliferated. The demonstrations in the streets against the government were turning ugly. One of the richest – in theory at least – countries in the world was behaving like one of the poorest. In Brazil the situation teetered on the edge of crisis. And what of Paraguay? It was hard to find anything out about that secretive and isolated country. I would simply have to go and find out for myself.

  Initially, I had favoured the classic appr
oach into the country – via Argentina – to Buenos Aires, and up the River Plate and River Paraguay to Asunción. It was the route everyone had always taken from the first Spanish conquistadors to the exiled Argentine President Perón. But the old Mihailovich steamers had passed out of service, and Paraguay itself had started to look away from Argentina, from the south and its past, instead looking east to Brazil, and north to Miami and the USA. So I decided to fly to Asunción via Sao Paulo. There was another reason, apart from chaos, that I did not want to go via Argentina. It is no secret that the relations between Paraguay and Argentina have always been poor. Every Argentine I had met in London – and I had met dozens of them – had expressed a low opinion of Paraguay and Paraguayans. I was not going to get any helpful information from such entrenched and biased enemies of the country I wanted to explore. They seemed to regard the Paraguayans as backward natives, Indians in tents, almost savages. Their contempt was palpable.

  From time to time, from the tannoy, a soft, sibilant voice would whisper departures in Brazilian-accented Portuguese to destinations from a poet’s lexicon – Manaos and Rio de Janeiro, Bahia de San Salvador and Cartagena de las Indias, Valparaiso and Tegucigalpa. However, there was just one flight to Paraguay and I would have to wait six hours for it. I found the departure gate and read the notice posted in front of it in Spanish, Portuguese and English: ‘Passengers are advised that all revolvers, automatics, rifles and other firearms must be unloaded with ammunition and packed inside luggage that has been checked in. No person carrying loaded or unloaded weapons will be allowed on to the plane. Thank you for your co-operation.’

  With a sinking heart I realized that this was an official indication of what I had been warned of before – that Paraguayans have a love affair with powder and shot, pistol and lead, that knows no bounds. ‘Do they all carry pistols?’ I had asked a seasoned old Paraguay hand in London. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say all – no, not by a long chalk. However, it is fairly common. I mean, there are shootings all the time – I mean every day, everywhere. And knife fights, of course. It’s as well to be very polite to people. That generally pays off. Unless they want to kill you, in which case no amount of politeness would help.’ This was useful advice, I suppose: I had made a mental note to be more than usually polite. In the event, there might have been some Paraguayans I met during my eventful trip who were not armed with some sort of pistol, sub-machine gun, machete or knife, but I couldn’t actually swear to it. Often we find ourselves the embarrassed witness of other people’s intimate little moments when they think they are not being observed – the surreptitious scratch of the groin, the furtive pick of the nose, the fart eased out apparently unnoticed. In Paraguay these moments always revolved around someone’s jacket falling open to reveal a gleaming or matt-black automatic peeping out coyly from waistband or shoulder holster; a drawer opened by mistake to display a cluster of Uzi sub-machine guns, a brace of pump-action sawn-off shotguns, or a vintage Luger with an embossed swastika on the wooden handle. As tea is to China, chocolate to Switzerland or red wine to France, so are firearms to Paraguay.

  The first group of Paraguayans I saw, clearly waiting for the same flight as myself, were obviously vaqueros or gauchos – cowboys in jeans and stetson hats, sprawled on the bench seats near the departure gate. Each of them had a tan cowhide grip out of which protruded the butts of their rifles. They all wore empty leather pistol holsters and belts with empty bullet holders. They had obviously read the same notice I had and would check their luggage in when the counter opened. I was tempted to go and talk to them, but didn’t. They looked tired, many of them actually kept falling asleep. They had clearly driven a herd of cattle across the border from Paraguay to Brazil, and were now returning home the quickest way possible. They would have sold their horses along with the cattle – it would make no sense to ride them back. Besides a certain natural diffidence in pushing myself forward into such an uncompromising bunch, there was a question of language. If the word ‘Indian’ did not convey political incorrectness, one would have said these were Indians. They had coppery skins and hooked noses, dark lank hair and tight, compact bodies. They were cholos, campesinos or indigenos, though, that was what one called them. Indio was considered by many a term of abuse and never used politely, though the first morning I walked through the central square in Asunción a very drunk man approached me from the favela below the Presidential Palace, cackling and swaying – ‘Yo soy indio, señor,’ he shouted at me. It was 7.30am and he was well away.

  There was also the question of what language one should use in speaking to people. Graham Greene, who had visited Paraguay in the depths of the Stroessner dictatorship, had been warned that if he spoke in Spanish in the countryside, he might be assumed to be being patronizing and so run the risk of being shot. On the other hand, if he spoke Guarani, the language of the predominant ethnic group, he might be assumed to be insulting, considering them to be low, ignorant fellows. There was a third lingo, too, called Jalape, which was a mixture of Spanish and Guarani, just to make things clear as mud. I asked my Paraguay expert in London about this. ‘Well, you could always try speaking to them in English – that wouldn’t cause any offence. Not that they’d understand you, of course. In the Chaco the locals speak a version of 17th-century plattdeutsch. They learnt it from the Mennonites who farm out there. So you can find this chappie who knows where the alcalde’s office is but the only language he can give you instructions in is his own tribal palaver and 17th-century Low German. I suppose you speak that fluently, of course?’ I mumbled something about French and Italian. ‘Well, those won’t be much use. The other Germans, the Third Reich lot, don’t actually say “Heil Hitler” any more, but rather “Grüss Gott”. You could manage that, I suppose?’ Surely now that Stroessner, the half-Guarani, half-Bavarian dictator who had had a signed photograph of Hitler in his office and wore a pair of Goering’s boots, had been expelled from the country, things were rather better? ‘Rather worse, if anything. He ran a tight ship, did Don Alfredo. If you were a communist he had your balls cut off with a chainsaw to the sound of Guarani harp music. But if you were white, reasonably prosperous looking and apolitical he gave you no grief. Asunción in those days was a frightened town but a safe one. Now it’s frightened and very unsafe. No one is really in charge, no one has been paid for months, in some cases for years. Tempers are short, so is cash, and with the poor even food. In the last year things have gone downhill badly. There’s talk of a coup in the offing – or a revolution. Keep your head down is my advice.’ Advice I fervently hoped I was going to be able to keep.

  The flight was all but empty. I had been earnestly quizzed by the security staff about my armoury. Was I certain I didn’t have any little amuse-gueules tucked away in my boots, sleeves, or hat? No little derringer pistols, ladies’ handguns, odd trifles I might in my haste have forgotten? No plastic guns, like the Glock, which wouldn’t have shown up in the X-ray machine? We were all frisked and turned over, very politely, three times before we were allowed on board. The group of cowboys sat at the front and got merry on beer. I sat at the back and concentrated on Argentine red wine. The plane went on afterwards to Cordoba in Argentina – Paraguay was just an embarrassing little stop to be got over as quickly as possible. The flight seemed very quick. Before I knew it we were banking over the river, below us a tropical city of low-rise redroofed houses, much dark green foliage, and a few taller buildings in the centre. My stomach knotted up tightly. Why on earth was I going into one of the most dangerous countries on Earth? I let the cowboys – indeed let all the other passengers – get off first, then I ambled slowly in late-afternoon tropical heat across the tarmac. The airport building was shabby concrete, low and small. You walked to the terminal on foot. I had had to fill in an old-fashioned white immigration card, exactly the same size and type as I’d filled in as a child in colonial Cyprus. ‘I’ve flown back into the 1950s,’ I thought, as I made for the Customs Hall.

  Inside, under a high ceiling, a strange scen
e was being enacted. Several passengers with open suitcases were in deep argument with uniformed Customs officials. Between them were being passed a collection of automatics, pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns and boxes of ammunition that had clearly come out of the luggage. They were arguing, politely but forcefully about how much duty should be paid on these items. All the Customs men were engaged in this task. I kept walking.

  A young woman in a smart uniform darted forward and smiled at me. ‘¿Diplomatico?’ she asked.

  This threw me. ‘Yo soy inglés,’ I stammered.

  ‘¡Bravo!’ she said. ‘¡Bravo – el embajador británico!’ even more loudly, and started to applaud me, clapping her hands. The Customs men looked up at me from their deliberations, and gave me great big smiles. Unnervingly, they and their clients with the weaponry all started to applaud me, clapping their hands and calling out. ‘¡Bravo … ! ¡Bravo! ¡El embajador británico!’ I had only a small bag on wheels: I bowed to the left and to the right of me, and gave what I thought might pass as an ambassadorial benediction with my free hand, and kept on my way.

  Another man stepped forward, took my immigration card, stamped my passport, and gave me a smart salute. ‘Any firearms, Your Excellency?’ he asked in Spanish.

  ‘No, señor, nada de nada,’ I replied. ‘Pasar, pasar, Excelencia,’ he said, motioning me with his hand. I moved out into the arrivals hall, which was already all but empty. I was in Paraguay, reborn as an ambassador. I kept walking until I saw the aseos [toilets], and then darted in. I was now in a muck sweat, and it wasn’t the heat. I had arrived all right, but what the hell had I got myself into?