Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  Gabriella simply didn’t see Asunción’s poverty. She drove from her house to the shops, to the bank, to her friends’ houses, and back. She never used buses or walked, except in short hops in safe suburbs, such as from her house to the Gran Hotel. She had no idea what the central business district was like, as seen from on foot, because she had never been there as a pedestrian. I couldn’t imagine living somewhere I could not walk freely, anywhere I wanted. You couldn’t do that in Asunción any more than you could in LA. Civilization is an intangible concept, but being able to walk the streets in reasonable safety in daylight is surely one of the crucial indicators.

  Gabriella was having some work done to the front of her house. The labourers – all short, dark, Indian-looking men – were laying tiles in concrete along her front path. When I arrived I made to walk towards the front door, through the garden gate, but they stopped me with sudden shouts and gestures; this was not because I was going to walk on their still fluid path, but because they didn’t know who I was. Gabriella’s invitation to the funeral had been made over the phone, and I had walked round to meet her. She hadn’t told the peons I was coming, clearly. I explained I was a friend of the señora, but I was made to wait outside the gate while one of them informed the maid of my arrival. Eventually, after at least five minutes’ wait, during which the workmen stood looking at me in a hostile fashion, Gabriella appeared, and I was allowed past the peons and inside the house. Dropping by, that very English custom, was unknown in Paraguay. Poor communication, too, was a local factor: no one bothered to tell the lower orders what had been planned.

  Hugo was in a hammock, in the back garden, his usual post. I was more than ever convinced the cigar factory did not actually exist. Each time I visited he was always at home, usually asleep in the garden. Gabriella had hinted that London had not been easy for Hugo because his import-export venture had not worked out. I suspected that Gabriella had always earned whatever money the family enjoyed. Gabriella was glad to get out of the house as it was also her office. She had a spare bedroom kitted up with an ancient computer, a fax machine, telephone, e-mail connection – Paraguay had broadband. What with hubby, the kids, the maid, the peons banging and singing outside, it wasn’t the quiet haven a journalist might desire. I was an excuse, as was the funeral of Paula, for an outing. Paraguay was still a place were respectable middle-class ladies were expected to stay at home and look after the family. I suspected Gabriella missed the great freedoms and challenges of her London or Miami life. She was full of complaints about the macho attitudes of the Paraguayan men towards women in professional jobs. I had praised Ultima Hora as a surprisingly good paper. She had wrinkled up her nose and frowned. ‘The editor is very full of himself. Arrogant, macho. He pretends never to remember who I am when we meet.’ I mentioned I thought of meeting him, for an interview. She was frankly hostile to this. ‘You won’t get anything from him. He’s an opinionated know-nothing. I can get you far more information.’ I realized that I should not have mentioned Ultima Hora to her at all, but simply made my own arrangements. As soon as you mentioned one Paraguayan to another they immediately tried to convince you they were useless, became jealous almost. Gabriella was putting herself out to be helpful to me. She had already hinted that her normal fee for this sort of thing was US$100 a day. I made a mental note not to mention Paraguayans to each other – it was counter-productive. I suspected Gabriella had tried to get work at Ultima Hora and had been rebuffed by the editor, hence her hostility.

  The funeral parlour was a strange, modern wedding-cake decoration neo-Palladian building on Avenida España. I had noticed it before and wondered vaguely what its function was, for it had no signs outside that might give one a clue. P. J. O’Rourke, the US author, had been in Asunción, and had written of the city that it was ‘like a tropical Leningrad – a very relaxed tropical Leningrad’. I had been puzzled by this comment when I had read it in England: I could make no sense of it at all. Now I was here it was evident what he meant – it was the plethora of peeling, faded, neo-classical stucco mansions common to both cities. The Italianate villas off Avenida España, buried, choked under luxuriant untended gardens full of palms, bougainvillea, bananas, tropical shrubbery and flowers, were huge: the gates and railings were pitted with rust and streaked red with peeling oxidized metal flakes. Many had sagging balconies of wrought iron on the first floor, with faded pale green louvred shutters, these often hanging off their hinges. The ochre-painted walls had been bleached by decades of brazen sun. These magnificent follies were for the most part locked up and abandoned, though a few had become Embassies. Their dereliction was deeply attractive to me: the cracked, weed-infested paths leading to porticoed, balustraded steps and antique wrought-iron-protected double front doors deep in shade. They had a fin de siècle charm which worked its magic: if I had been forced to stay in Paraguay I would have tried to get hold of one of these monstrosities. Once, evidently, these had been the villas of the wealthy, before the rich had moved away to other suburbs more modern, or else left the country. This frankly classical European style had long been superseded by the Californian ranch look. Nature always won in the end, though, and nowhere more so than in the tropics. The gardens of these palazzi were turning back into riotous jungle, roots reaching out under the walls and forcing up the pavement outside. Leave a garden or a building for a decade in the tropics and it looks as if it was abandoned half a century ago. If you wanted to shoot a low-budget movie of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, one of these buildings would do you just fine. You could cast it from any of Asunción’s parks, too.

  Inside, the funeral parlour was bright, well-lit and antiseptic modern. There was no trace of any religious symbolism. I had expected bleeding hearts of Jesus, weeping Saints, dolorous statues of the Virgin Mary – none of that, just plain pastel modern functionalism. The body of the deceased lay in an open coffin in an inner chamber. People were making their way to and from the antechamber to pay their last respects. The mourners were middle-aged, middle-class Paraguayans, friends and relatives of la difunta – the defunct one, as they say in Spanish. There was much more Guarani being spoken than Spanish. I was introduced to the widower, to whom I offered my condolences. There was no priest, no pastor, no prayers; it was all apparently quite secular. No staff in serious suits were visible either. I had never seen a place like this before: it struck me as very strange, like an H. G. Wells vision of death in a future society some centuries ahead. There was no sign of either mourning, nor of a wake, a celebration. I met an elderly man of Uruguayan and Scottish origins, and we talked with Gabriella about the political situation and the economic crisis, which were the only topics of conversation in the capital. ‘The government will simply print more guarani notes to pay salaries and so fuel inflation,’ Gabriella said. ‘Then they will get no hard currency loan from the IMF,’ I suggested. ‘I believe nothing – nada de nada – nothing at all,’ commented the Uruguayan-Scot. Like everyone else I had met, he disassociated himself from the country in which he lived and worked. He had been born here, worked here all his life, yet as soon as you introduced yourself he told you he was ‘really’ a Uruguayan of Scottish descent. I wondered if when I said I was English, people thought I meant ‘of English descent’. I think my poor Spanish may have convinced them I really was from el viejo mundo as the papers called Europe – ‘the old world’. In Paraguay your nationality was where your ancestors had come from. ‘Paraguayan’ was code for ‘Indian’. To be Paraguayan was not a statement of nationality, it was a predicament, it meant you had nowhere else to go. Those with ‘papers’ – Italian, Spanish, German – could get out and go elsewhere. There had been a rush on the Italian Embassy. Thousands of people whose grandparents had emigrated from Italy at the turn of the 19th century when Italy was poor and South America rich, were now trying to get Italian passports and return to claim the generous EU-funded social security payments. The Embassy was not being co-operative. ‘Go back to Italy, get all the papers, and then come back and
apply,’ they advised. There were millions of South Americans of Italian origin – Italy didn’t want them back again.

  Italy was now a place of wealth and security compared to South America. The miracle that 50 years of peace in Europe had wrought was a continent which imported the hopeful poor rather than exported them. All this had been achieved by redistributive taxation, subsidies from the richer North to the poorer South, and the creation of a vast, almost wholly unproductive public service sector, without which there would have been mass unemployment. This was paid for by high taxation. Countries like Paraguay still ran pre-World War I European-style economies, with very rich, very poor, and a small middle class. How long could the post-war European ‘social model’ last? Every year capital left the EU and very little entered it; businesses closed, factories relocated to cheaper countries; budgets shrank, tax avoidance grew, unemployment rose. High wages and taxes meant that an underclass of immigrants from the Third World formed to carry out work Europeans no longer thought it worth their while doing.

  Outside the Gare du Nord in Paris I had seen an immigrant from black Africa roasting corn cobs over a small fire in a supermarket trolley, and then offering them for sale – a small business more suited to Mali or Chad than a modern European capital. There was a huge cash economy in Europe which was neither taxed nor regulated. The critics of the Welfare State system predicted an end like Batlle’s Uruguay – a grossly inflated state sector which taxed the private sector into emigration, leading to complete economic collapse. When the tax base fell below a certain point the state either had to inflate its currency by printing more money, which chased ever-disappearing goods in an upward spiral of price inflation, or else cease to pay its public service employees and cut public services. The current exemplar of this meltdown was Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, where starvation and hyper-inflation had followed the destruction of the productive white-run private sector, in particular agriculture. Paraguay was already on this road. Only its tiny public sector provided hope – that and the refusal of the capital-owning classes to be taxed. You could create new jobs in the state bureaucracy in Paraguay, but there was simply no way of paying for them. If the businesses in Paraguay could ever be taxed effectively, then a vast bureaucracy would be the result, because this is what the poor would vote for, but tax evasion was so ingrained in Paraguay that even draconian compulsion could do nothing. Virtually everyone could be bribed for a few dollars, and most of the real money was overseas already.

  It had become apparent to me after only a few weeks in Paraguay that Miami was the real capital of the country, as well as of many other South American countries. People went to Miami for dentists and doctors, schooling and training, to buy what they needed and arrange the importation of everything from plant machinery to furniture. All the hi-tech goods that kept the creaky infrastructure from complete collapse – computers, cash registers, tractors, hospital equipment, mobile phones, petrol pumps, heavy trucks – all these and more came up the river, shipped down from Miami. There was virtually nothing in Paraguay that emanated from Europe except luxury foods, and cars which had originally been exported to the USA and were now re-exported to Paraguay. The US publication Harper’s Magazine, a left-liberal monthly with long, serious articles on social and cultural matters, had posed the question to its readers: ‘Is the USA an empire?’ Naively, the response had been an overwhelming ‘No’. You only had to come to somewhere like Asuncion to see the imperial outreach of the USA’s commercial and political grip. The US Embassy – positioned cutely on 1776 Avenida España – was vast; US military bases in the Chaco sent great cargo planes and jet fighters all over the world; and US narcotics police operated exactly as if they were in Texas or California. Every day, ships ploughed up the river bringing in goods from el norte as the US is universally known in South America.

  There was even a University of el Norte in Asunción, with guards in baseball caps armed with pump-action shotguns to deter the kidnappers from trying to grab the well-heeled students from the campus. There was an ‘Italian’ restaurant within walking distance of the Gran Hotel: I went there one evening. It had booths, like a US eatery, and the pasta dishes came in plastic trays, packed in Miami, bland as only US restaurant food can be. Only a US citizen could be blind enough not to notice his country’s imperial presence everywhere; he simply took it for granted. There was bafflement in the USA when a group of French farmers burnt out a McDonald’s fast food outlet in the south of France. The local farmer who led the group became a folk hero in France. In the US, McDonald’s was just a cheap eatery for the poor, it had no symbolic resonance. An article in a French paper by a well-known intellectual had lumped together Disneyland, McDo’s (as the French call it) and Harry Potter as ‘US cultural imperialism’. Though Harry Potter, his author and mise-en-scène were English, it was all American to the French, because it was in English and not French.

  ‘Is England part of London, or London part of England?’ a Paraguayan priest had asked a British traveller in the 19th century. Before one smiles, it is worth wondering how many people in Britain or the USA even know where Paraguay is, let alone the name of its capital. Prior to coming to South America, an Australian university lecturer from Adelaide had asked me where I was going for my next book. ‘Paraguay,’ I told him. He curled his lip with contempt. ‘Bit bloody unoriginal, isn’t it? That bloke Bruce Chetwind [sic] wrote a book about it already.’ I pointed out that that was Patagonia, in southern Argentina. He waved this correction away with one arm. ‘All a bit bloody exotic if you ask me.’ That was the view of an educated Australian. After I left Australia, I went to live in Italy, and several cultured Italians had been surprised to learn that there actually were universities in Australia. ‘Somehow, I thought it was all desert and sheep farms,’ one said to me. ‘I suppose I assumed the few Australians capable of education went to England or America to study at university there.’ I had actually taught at an Australian university for three years. The professor and head of the department, with whom I had eventually fallen out, said when I left, ‘You’ll never work again in a proper job, because I’ll give you a bad reference.’ When I returned to Europe no one ever even asked me what I had done in Australia, let alone asked for any references: no one cared – I could have spent the whole of my stay on the beach as far as they were concerned. Australia simply wasn’t a real place for Europeans, just a holiday destination. The wife of the mayor of Darwin, on her first visit to Europe, wondered why no one in Rome knew who her husband was: she said she thought it showed ‘ignorance’. She also commented on how ‘run-down and shabby’ the Colosseum looked – ‘pity they couldn’t even give it a lick of paint’ had been her view when asked, back home. It was impossible to communicate to Paraguyans that 99% of Europeans had never heard of their country, or knew where it was.

  I was driven to La Recoleta cemetery where the body of Paula was to be buried by another lady, a friend of Gabriella. I had a feeling there might have been a bit of matchmaking going on. It was very warm and bright outside, the midday sun at its zenith. The tropical greens of the gardens formed a blur with flashing highlights raking across as we passed. My driver’s car was old, but well kept, a small European economy model. For all their US dependence, middle-class Paraguayans have European tastes; they dressed like Italians in the early 1960s, smart, conservative good taste. You still saw young ladies in their twenties, in pastel twinsets, pearls and sensible shoes, the sort of clothes my mother had worn circa 1961. They often had permed hair, neat hats and wore gloves. Sometimes I had the feeling I had wandered into a tropical Italian-influenced 1960s neo-realist film, perhaps made by Nestor Almendros in late-Batista Cuba. Only the big US gas-guzzling Yank-tanks were missing. In Paraguay the middle classes were neat, smart and subdued; the poor were dirty, scruffy, raucous and drunk when they could afford it. The hypocrisies of Europe, where the poor pretended they were wealthy with flashy designer clothes and fading BMWs, and the rich dressed down to disguise themselves, were quite absent. I ha
d known a rich Argentine lady who ran an art gallery in South Kensington as a hobby, while her husband was doing a stint in a London bank. I had been to dinner with them in their rented flat near Victoria Station; they had brought their cook and maid over with them from BA, along with their furniture and oil paintings. The serving maid wore a black uniform with a white pinafore; she was about 18 years old. She chatted happily to her mistress in porteño Spanish as she served the dinner, while her husband talked to me about politics. The lady of the casa was dressed up to the nines in smart clothes and jewels: she was about 25 and still childless. We could have been in Paraguay, I now realized, except that here the maid would be Guarani, instead of third generation Galician. It was Disraeli who observed that ‘colonies do not cease to be colonies merely because they become independent’. He was thinking of the USA in the 19th century, but it applied to Paraguay as well. The sense of déjà-vu, of old Europe preserved in aspic was sometimes so acute that I had to remind myself it was the first decade of the 21st century, not some time in the 1950s. I asked Alejandro if there was still duelling in Paraguay and Argentina. He thought about this hard: ‘Well, among civilians, almost certainly not – I’ve never heard of it. But in the army, it probably still goes on here and there – and in Chile, too.’ I had suspected this might be the case – you only had to look at their formal dress uniforms, dripping with swords and gold lace.