Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  I thought privately that this was all highly fanciful, and that Alejandro was more than a shade paranoid, though I said nothing out of politeness: in fact I took his whole spiel as alarmist, of the sort those in the know love to plant in the minds of the timid newcomer. As events progressed, however, I began, slowly and reluctantly, to come round to the idea that some, if not all, of what Alejandro suggested might have a grain of truth to it. His words echoed in my mind, right up until the last moment, when sweating and frankly terrified, I sat waiting on the tarmac in a crammed exit flight, waiting to see if we were in fact going to be blown up before we took off. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, as W. B. Yeats sagely observed: the questions no one can answer are: a) how fast are they falling apart, and will they take me with them when they finally explode? and; b) will the centre be able to mount one last horrendous act of violence before it falls apart and bumps thousands off including oneself? An old hippy on the island of Ibiza who had hitched right round South America, including Stroessner’s Paraguay in the 1970s, had advised me laconically, ‘It’s very easy to get offed in Paraguay – paranoiaguay, as we used to call it.’ How right he turned out to be, and how little things had changed in thirty years.

  Six

  An Ambassador is Uncovered

  Finding the British Embassy was not easy. Once, it had been downtown, lodged in an upper floor of an office building. Terrorism and attacks on British diplomats in other parts of the world had meant a whole new secure complex had been built far out in a new suburb which hardly anyone in town knew how to find. It was not even registered in the phonebook, and it was so new the large-scale map of the city in the hotel foyer wall did not include the suburb. Eventually, after contacting Gabriella d’Estigarribia, who was up on these sorts of things, the hotel receptionist did manage to phone the Embassy, find out the address, and book in an appointment for me with His Excellency, whose diary seemed as empty as mine – any day at any hour of any day would be convenient, it seemed. I spoke to the Embassy secretary myself, after all the toing and froing had been got over: she had a brisk, efficient manner and spoke excellent English, yet was not herself English. I wondered if it was the same lady who had fielded all those calls from ardent Paraguayans volunteering to take a swipe at the Argies in the Falklands War. Plucky little Paraguay had a reputation for trying to get into other people’s wars. Stroessner had volunteered to send troops to Vietnam, but Lyndon Johnson had turned him down; an unusual case of preferring someone to be outside the tent pissing in, than inside pissing out. A Paraguayan regiment or two, particularly of horseborne hussars, say, or lancers in 18th-century full-dress uniform, would have enlivened the bar scene in downtown Saigon, if nowhere else.

  The Gran Hotel had a clutch of taxi drivers on call who were reputed to be reliable – that is they wouldn’t rob and murder you, nor yet deliver you to kidnappers, or so it was piously hoped. On the appointed hour I took one of these safe-cabs out through quite light traffic through a part of Asunción I had never seen before. I was begining to wonder how much of Paraguay I was actually going to be able to see with such high levels of insecurity.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Alejandro had told me when I expressed this fear to him, ‘95% of the crime is concentrated in Asunción and a few border towns where the smugglers and arms traffickers hang out. The rest of the country is very quiet – except for drunken Indians with machetes, but those are a liability anywhere in the continent. My advice is to cary an automatic pistol and shoot at any Indian who threatens you. It’s a well-known practice here. They tend to run off if you shoot at them. If they don’t run off, you have to shoot them dead, of course, or they will slice you up with their machetes. Give the police $10 to get rid of the body, explain you are a personal chum of the British Ambassador, and Bob’s your uncle. This is the wildest part of South America, you know. There’s no point getting macheted for the price of a pistol, is there? Everyone who can afford one carries one, as you will have noticed – including yours truly.’

  All this trigger-happy, shoot-’em-up macho stuff made me distinctly uneasy. Buying a pistol would certainly be no problem. Every supermarket seemed to sell them and the papers were full of adverts for the latest special offers on imported models. You bought a licence at your local police station. It cost US$5. You just showed your passport or driver’s licence, so Alejandro told me. Even before I left for the interior, still in the comfortable womb of the Gran Hotel, I felt I was getting badly out of my depth. I had always avoided carrying firearms on such trips as these but could I afford to here? I asked myself.

  The taxi ride to the Embassy took less time than I had been told. Outside a modern, white-painted concrete block with a garden in front and high metal railings stood a Paraguayan policeman on duty, sub-machine gun slung over his shoulder on one side, thermos for maté hot water on the other. There were concrete lumps all along the front approach to the Embassy to stop potential suicide bombers from smashing a car through into the compound. This was not paranoia. In Buenos Aires, the Israeli Embassy had been bombed as well as a Jewish cultural centre, with heavy loss of life. The attack was believed to have been organized by Hizbollah, who it was thought had an active cell in Ciudad del Este in Paraguay on the border with Brazil. When my taxi attempted to get as close to the concrete lumps as he could, the policeman raised his sub-machine gun and warned my driver off angrily. The taxi stopped immediately and I got out, waving my British passport in the air and shouting ‘Soy británico’ to the policeman in case he had mistaken me for a Middle-Eastern terrorist. This, the lady at the reception in the Gran Hotel had advised me, was the local form when approaching one’s Embassy. It was easy to get shot in Paraguay for the wrong reason. A teenage daughter of the American Ambassador had been shot dead outside Alfie’s palace during the stronato: the guard hadn’t been told she was coming and she didn’t understand his commands to halt. This cop registered that I was white, evidently a gringo, and perhaps taking cognizance of the red passport I held aloft, he waved me on and I walked inside a small metal booth, a kind of high-tech Tardis, the door of which shut behind me with a definitive click. I was in a decompression chamber, neither inside the Embassy, nor outside on the street. I was examined by a camera and asked who I was by a loudspeaker. After a pause in which my answers were weighed and found acceptable, the door in front of me opened. I stepped into a large anteroom which had a thick bulletproof window and a person sitting behind it, who took my passport through a thin letterbox, and examined it. This too being found satisfactory, a third metal door opened and I walked out of the Tardis on to a gravel drive, which was the Embassy forecourt, and so up some steps and in through a normal front door. In the entrance foyer, which was painted pale blue, there were chairs, a low table, and magazines praising the English countryside. I signed in, a cool, unsmiling young lady proffering the book and pen. Then, after a fifteen-minute wait I was ushered upstairs into the presence.

  The Ambassador was a friendly old cove with a thinning thatch and silver-framed specs: he looked as if he was coming up for retirement, which turned out to be the case. Asunción would be his last posting. He was an old Asia hand, and had spent virtually his whole career in the Far East. He showed me to a seat by a coffee table, and we began to chat, as if by pre-arrangement, about living in la France profonde, this a subject we were both interested in, and one we had discovered in common within a few minutes of meeting. Having been based in Europe for the last 20 years, and having spent three of these actually living in France, I was in command of more up-to-date information than HE and I was gratified to see that he began to take notes. On balance, my considered recommendation was the Gers in Gascony, a region the Ambassador did not know personally but had heard good reports of before mine. Outside the Embassy, in full view of where I sat, hung the gold-starred EU flag, alongside its Union counterpart, justification for our euro-chat. Coffee, milky and in mugs, arrived with a plate of Nice biscuits: the British genius, at least in Public Service guise, did not ext
end to coffee making. This effort was clearly made from powder and probably imported from the UK, if not Eastern Europe or even China. The biscuits were soggy, and neither of us dunked them – they were damp enough already. Reluctantly, after a good hour of French real estate and lifestyle discussion, I dragged the conversation on to Paraguay. HE had a pre-prepared typed-out sheet of names and addresses of local politicos, with e-mail addresses and phone numbers to boot.

  ‘What is the difference between the Colorados and the Liberales?’ I asked.

  HE shifted in his chair, raised his fingers together into a church steeple under his chin, and pondered. ‘The Colorados are red …’ he said after some thought, ‘and the Liberales are blue …’

  I waited for further elucidation, but none came. ‘What are we doing in this part of the world, development, that sort of thing?’ I continued.

  HE looked through the church steeple and shifted in his seat again. ‘Ah – well, now – I believe someone from Britain set up some sort of solar energy plant somewhere up near the Brazilian border a while back. If you go up there do please make some enquiries and see if anything came of it. I’d like to put it in one of my reports back to the CFO. It’s the sort of thing they like to know about back home.’

  I began to realize that Alejandro had been rather more accurate about Ambassadorial thinness of material than I had suspected. I then got HE on to Burma, about which he knew a great deal, having served there for many years, though the regime had not let him travel to see anything of the country. I recommended Shelby Tucker’s books on the country to him, which he had not heard of, and in return he gave me a Spanish-language edition of Josefina Plá’s book, The British in Paraguay 1860–70 – now a rare edition, published in Asunción during the depths of the stronato and very hard to get hold of. I thanked him sincerely for this, a practical and most useful aid for me. I asked HE if he had read Roa Bastos’s classic novel of Paraguay under the Dr Francia dictatorship, I, the Supreme, which also had as its subtext the dictatorship of Stroessner. Bastos was an exile during the stronato, in France and England, and his novel, which many experts on Hispanic literature rate more highly than García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, was banned in Paraguay during the dictator’s rule. HE told me he had ‘dipped into it’. Later, back in England, I was reading a volume of Spanish history which informed me that the Spanish Kings had signed all their official documents ‘Yo, el Rey’ – thus ‘Yo, el Supremo’, the manner of signing his official documents used by Francia, was a clear carryover from the Spanish colonial period. I wondered if Black Rod in, say, the Nigerian or Zimbabwean Parliaments, still stood up and said ‘Oyez, oyez, oyez’ when Parliament was opened: I also wondered what ‘Oyez’ actually means – it sounds medieval French to me. (I was right. On returning to England I found it by chance in an original-language text of the Chanson de Roland. ‘Oyez’ means ‘listen up’.)

  It was time, after several hours, to leave. We exchanged cards. HE wrote his name with a pen on his card, and said, ‘If you get into any sort of bother with the police or army, show them this, say you are a good friend of mine, and for them to ring us here to vouch for you, or else ring the President’s office mentioning my name. Do this immediately if you are questioned by them, don’t wait. Getting people out of gaol is much, much harder once they are inside. In a real emergency get in a cab and come straight here – I mean if security breaks down or anything, which I don’t suppose it will for a moment. But we are on a sort of alert at present, though it hasn’t yet got to advising British citizens to leave.’

  I put his card carefully in my wallet, not realizing how prophetic his words would become, and how, covered in my own blood from a dramatic head wound, and in police hands, I would indeed do as he advised, hoping his card would work its magic.

  The Embassy ordered one of their ‘secure’ taxis, and the policeman outside, now wreathed in smiles as I had both gone into and come out of my own Embassy, and so was obviously a good egg, offered me a slurp from his maté bombilla. I declined, but with smiles, and politely. The taxi journey back to the hotel was quick, the traffic having become even lighter. The lady at the reception desk, whom Alejandro had unkindly called ‘that old bat’ was also full of smiles for me as I collected my room key. ‘Did you find the Embassy all right?’ she asked. I replied that I had, that the Ambassador had been charming, that I had spent several hours in his private study with him discussing weighty matters, and that he had been most helpful. I showed her the Embassy printout of local politicos on headed notepaper and with my name inked in on it. Proof positive I hadn’t invented the whole episode. She looked at this carefully, with great attention and approval. ‘You are just the sort of passenger we like to have at this hotel,’ she purred, handing me back the list with my room key. ‘Passenger’ was how, translating directly from the Spanish ‘pasajero’, they rendered their guests into English on all the little notices stuck around the hotel, viz: ‘Passengers will please refrain from allowing creatures into the swimming pool alone.’ Creatures here was translated from ‘criaturas’, and meant ‘little children’, which is I suppose where the US term ‘critters’ comes from, as in ‘them darned little critters needs their asses whippin”. Passengers were also advised that the swimming pool area was not to be used to attempt to pick up girls: I only ever saw one girl by the pool, a chubby, very white Brazilian, who looked most disgruntled. I got the impression that she would have welcomed an attempt to pick her up, but none of the few of us available felt up to disobeying instructions, with such an unappealing potential prize.

  I had to give Alejandro full marks for in-depth local knowledge. Everything he had predicted had come to pass. My status had indeed been enhanced by my little outing. I decided to retire to my room there to write a long, detailed fax to a London editor friend of mine, praising the local wildlife, waxing enthusiastic about a series of travel articles I hoped to write on the fascinating flora and fauna of this tropical paradise. The old trick of a hair from one’s head stuck with saliva across the opening of a closed suitcase at the side is well known, but still effective. I had sealed all my cases and cameras before I had left that morning, and was not really surprised to find on my return to my room that every single hair had been displaced. A visit to the Embassy was a sure-fire opportunity to go through my effects without being disturbed. As Alejandro had predicted, someone was interested in what I was up to in Paraguay. I had, in fact, made no mention to anyone, nor made any notes about any of the sensitive subjects Alejandro had outlined, but I made a mental note now not to do so until I got out of the country.

  II

  PLOUGHING THE SEAS

  ‘America is ungovernable. Those who serve the revolution are ploughing the seas.’

  Simon Bolivar, ‘The Liberator’

  ‘Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.’

  Seneca

  Seven

  The Gigantic Province of the Indies

  The central square in Asunción, now the Plaza de Independencia, forms the traditional defensive rectangle of the Spanish colonial city. Facing the river bank on one side, now the silted-up sandflat where the poor squatted in a plastic-sheet-and-corrugated-iron shantytown, it was formed by the cathedral, the old barracks and the administrative offices. What had once been the Plaza de Armas, the parade ground in the centre, was now a derelict park, around which vendors with cycle-driven or pushcart stalls sold fruit, ices, pies, juices, sweets and cigarettes. The cathedral was whitewashed and red-tile roofed, an old colonial structure, cool and dark inside; it would not have been out of place in a provincial Andalucian town. On the outside wall, facing the plaza, had been installed a large stone plaque, a carved tableau representing the coming of the Spanish conquistadors, and their meeting with the Guarani Indians. Presented to Paraguay by General Franco of Spain during the depths of the two dictatorships, one doubts if the Church had much say in whether or not this piece of lapid Hispanic propaganda was put up on the cathedral wall or not.
Irala, the Spanish colonial jefe (chief), is pictured in heroic mode, his shirt open at the front and displaying a large crucifix on his chest; open-armed he is almost swooning in an embrace with the Guarani leader, who is depicted, like all the Indians in the tableau, with a hooked nose and decidedly Semitic features. Behind Irala hover monks with crucifixes and beatific smiles, and more noblebrowed, handsome Aryan-looking Spanish conquistadors, all purveyors of Catholic faith and white European culture. The encounter between these groups, the foundation of modern Paraguay, is shown as a comradely, even saintly event, preordained by Heaven. There are no women in the tableau, of course, no sign of the riotous copulation which actually took place, when the sex-starved Europeans, including some Germans, and even an Englishman, encountered the Guarani maidens, who had been sent on ahead by the Indian warriors to blunt the fervour of the Christians’ attack. And attack they had, in spite of Irala having been told by the Guarani that they had no desire to fight, that they regarded the Spanish as their friends and allies.

  The Spanish had known about the Rio Plata, the River of Silver, since Cabot had discovered the Rivers Paraguay and Parana, which flowed into the Plate, while searching for that Renaissance hardy perennial, the westward passage to the Spice Islands. Christopher Columbus, pacing the sands of the island of Santa Maria in the new-found Azores, had remarked on the many large nuts of a completely unknown type which were washed ashore on the beaches facing the outer Atlantic, brought by the east-flowing currents from somewhere to the west. These must come, he reasoned, from westerly islands as yet unknown, close to Japan and Cathay. In fact, they came from the coast of Venezuela. It was Japan, Cathay and the Spice Islands Europeans wanted to reach, unencumbered by hostile Islamic powers which either would not trade at all, or which swallowed up all the profit for themselves. In a Europe still dependent on salted meat, with the animals killed in the autumn, preserved in brine and almost rotten by spring, spices were a vital necessity to make food palatable. They came from the East, overland, and were astronomically expensive. Anyone who could find a western sea route to the sources of supply, to buy directly from the growers, cutting out the chain of middlemen en route, would soon become very wealthy, as the Portuguese were to discover when they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and got to India via East Africa. Columbus went to his grave still believing his Caribbean discoveries were the fabled Islands of Happiness mentioned in Classical antiquity, and that they were close to Japan. The subsequent discoveries of the Aztec and Inca cultures in Mexico and Peru, both rich in silver and gold, gave Spain a more concrete reason for extending her rule over as much of South America as possible.