Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  There had been an article in the Asunción press stating that ‘bio-diesel was a reality in Paraguay’. Someone was mixing vegetable oil and alcohol in a 10–1 ratio and selling it from his garage to diesel users. It was vastly cheaper than imported diesel fuel, but this was one man with a few cans in a small garage, not an industrial enterprise. Paraguay had virtually free electricity from the huge Itapá hydro plant, yet there wasn’t a single electric car in the whole country. The sun shone virtually every day of the year, yet there was no solar powered hot water – whatever the British Ambassador claimed. Paraguay was run as a colony still, run on imported ideas and technology created in the USA or Europe for quite other conditions. Paraguayans were incapable of seeing things might be done otherwise. When I asked about electric cars or solar power I got shrugs. When these things were made in the USA or Europe and exported up the river to Asunción, then Paraguayans would start using them. Being a colonial means not having to think for yourself, just imitating what has been evolved in other places. It is part of the great tedium of colonial life – no one is thinking, merely repeating what has been worked out elsewhere. Paraguay was run almost as badly as it is possible to imagine a country being run. Given a small amount of capital almost anything might be produced here. It was potentially immensely wealthy. In reality it survived on raising soya beans and cattle, and the ubiquitous smuggling. ‘It has to be very easy, or Paraguayans lose interest immediately,’ Mac had observed about the national temperament.

  La Recoleta was an ornate Latin cemetery in the Spanish manner, with family vaults above ground which resembled small rococo temples or palazzi, each of which was padlocked and chained. There was, of course, a La Recoleta in Buenos Aires, similarly set out, but grander and more pretentious. These vaults were little houses for the dead, grouped as families in death as in life. The coffins were slid into place in wall niches, joining the other dead ancestors. My chauffeuse and I joined the procession which snaked through the walkways between these sarcophagi, following the pallbearers who carried Paula’s coffin. I was expecting to see a priest at this stage, with incense, Latin, prayers. There was nothing of the sort. It was an entirely secular funeral and rather impressive for so being. Paula had left one family house and taken up residence in another, that of her ancestors. This suggested to me that Guarani religious culture had survived in Paraguay despite the ostensible conversion of the country to Spanish Catholicism. There was nothing here of the intense religiosity, the death-obsessed ceremonies and iconography I was familiar with in the Iberian funerary tradition. We all filed silently past the vault into which the coffin bearing Paula had been placed. It was very hot and there was a dense, oppressive throng of people, as many as 200. No one spoke. How many people in Europe have 200 mourners at their funeral, I wondered grimly? I had never been to a funeral with more than four mourners: often I was on my own in the chapel with the priest. Clearly, behind the chaos in Paraguay an unatomized, strong family life persisted. It was heartening.

  One of the least attractive aspects of modern Western culture is its intense selfishness. Travel writers from ‘advanced’ countries almost always go to Third World countries, because in these places people still live largely out of doors and talk to one another and to strangers without inhibitions. Travel books set in Europe or America always have the author spending a great deal of time alone, in hotel rooms and restaurants, and there are very few conversations with the locals. Every time I return to England from a ‘poor’ country I remark immediately on how alone and how unhappy the people look. The poorer the country, the more frequent the smiles on people’s faces; the richer the country, the more evident spiritual misery – the USA being, with Scandinavia, the human high watermark in sheer spiritual wretchedness, with Britain not far behind. The only friend I made in Los Angeles was a 17-year-old boy called Fidel from the Congo: he was the nightwatchman at the boarding house in which I stayed. We spoke French together, and complained about LA and its hostile people. ‘As soon as I get some money together I’m going back to the Congo,’ he told me. ‘This place is death.’ I couldn’t have put it better myself. Perhaps now in Europe only a few peasants in the remoter regions of Greece, Italy and Portugal have any sort of organic social life which demonstrates the collective expression of joy and celebration, sadness and tragedy. These qualities, like extreme poverty, have been excised by the Welfare State, bureaucratic employment, and the cult of selfhood above all social ties and obligations. If you want to see unhappiness, boredom and frustration you have only to look at northern European tourists trying to ‘enjoy themselves’ in Mediterranean or tropical resorts – they are pictures of frustration and misery. To get blind drunk and to fight one another is almost always the end result. They have paid a fortune to ‘come on holiday’, but once there they do not know what to do: they find themselves as ugly aliens, barbarians in a balmy, long-civilized locale. Work, the slave-state, regimentation, the brutal ugliness of the northern European workers-barracks is all they know, drugs and alcohol their only means of temporary escape. The immense popularity of travel books in places like England, almost always set in Mediterranean, tropical or Asiatic countries, indicates the depth of the malaise. In a recent poll, 47% of British people said they would like to leave the country altogether, for ever. A Cuban refugee I knew married an Englishman, and exchanged extreme poverty and political repression for democratic freedom and bourgeois comfort in Winchester. She hated it. ‘No one laughs, no one smiles, no one enjoys themselves, no one has friends or lovers – it’s a nothing life, crammed full of goods and insincerity.’ She left her husband after a year and returned to poverty and political repression in Cuba.

  That there is something desperately wrong with modern Western life has been acknowledged since the critiques of D. H. Lawrence and others in the early part of the 20th century: quite what it is has been more elusive to pin down. Lawrence the novelist elided into Lawrence the travel writer and moral critic of Western civilization. And there is a tendency for travel writers to become foreign-residence writers: they leave the places they come from, and set up in the places they used to visit. William Dalrymple, for example, now lives in New Delhi as well as London. After walking to Constantinople, Patrick Leigh Fermor built a house in the Peloponnese. There are whole shelves in WH Smith devoted to the genre I had dubbed ‘How Green Was My Olive Oil’ – the I-bought-a-Ligurian-farmhouse-for-a-song-and-lived-happily-ever-after books. In a world where few now believe in Heaven, the Mediterranean farmhouse has come to be its secular equivalent for millions of northern Europeans. When the Roman Empire was buckling under barbarian assault, one group of Germanic attackers said to the Romans: ‘Let us in to settle in your lands, or we will invade and destroy you.’ The Romans let them in and settled them on some land: modern second-residence tourism works on much the same principle.

  Paraguay itself had once been an exotic tourist destination. Books were written about spending a few months up the river in the northern winter, enjoying the tropical heat and languid pace of life. From being a place of hope and romance, of escape and optimism, Paraguay had descended into that lowest category of contemporary countries – those that do not have their own guidebook for travellers. Graham Greene and Norman Lewis had both visited the country during the depths of the stronato; the former had, somewhat unconvincingly, set part of Travels with My Aunt in Asunción. The latter had, as usual, found evidence of genocide among the Indians of the Chaco. Neither had been back to report on the post-dictatorship chaos. It is easy to condemn dictatorships when you live in Europe and have just dropped by on a visit: much harder to admit that post-dictatorship democracy often made conditions worse for ordinary people than before. Democracy is an unchallenged good in modern Europe and America – it is simply never questioned. Yet for millions democracy has brought them nothing but disorder, violence and insecurity. Iraq as well as Paraguay suffers this fate as I write. The truth is that the Anglo-American version of democracy has existed in very few countries and for a v
ery short time. As late as 1944 there was not a single democracy in continental Europe except Switzerland and Sweden – fascism or communism ruled supreme. Most European post-1945 democracy is fake, an imitation of a successful model derived from elsewhere. Italian, Spanish, German and French politics are still basically authoritarian, corrupt and dictatorial: the instincts of European politicians are bureaucratic and elitist, secretive and non-consultative. The administration of the European Union itself resembles closely the workings of a non-democratic imperial power of the 19th century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example – EU Commissioners are neither elected nor accountable.

  The most celebrated horizontal resident of La Recoleta was probably Madame Eliza Lynch, one-time mistress of the mid-19th century dictator López. She had been plucked from obscurity in the 1960s by the Stroessner regime, and exhumed from Père Lachaise in Paris, when her lover and protector Mariscal Francisco Solano López had been elevated to a national hero, and had been reburied in the Paraguayan Pantheon of Heroes. Expiring on the battlefield fighting the Brazilians with the appropriately heroic words, ‘I die with my country’ on his lips, Solano López had been hastily buried by Madame Lynch herself, with her bare hands, to prevent wild beasts devouring his corpse, before she was escorted by the Brazilian army downriver, into exile in Europe. Some bones, allegedly those of the defunct Marshal, had been excavated at Cêrro Corá, and reinterred in the mock-Les Invalides in Asunción. López had been turned from arch-fiend and national villain into fallen martyr and stout defender of Paraguay by Stroessner. Madame Lynch had warned off the Brazilian officer who captured her with the words, ‘Respect me – I am English,’ which was 19th-century code for ‘Lay a finger on me and I’ll have the Royal Navy up your rivers belching fifty-pounders before you can say Jaicomo Robinson’. He took the hint: she and her surviving bastards, and their not insubstantial loot, were allowed out of the country scot-free: the Paraguayan tradition of claiming any nationality other than Paraguayan in extremis was clearly well developed even in the mid-19th century. Madame Lynch’s exile was marred by lengthy and acrimonious litigation in Scotland over missing sums of money she claimed she had given to Dr Stewart, a mercenary in the employ of López, when he left Paraguay, to bank for her in Edinburgh. She accused him of stealing it. She was not successful. The new Paraguayan government claimed she and López had stolen the disputed money anyway, and they should have it back: they were also disappointed.

  Proving who owned what and who had stolen or smuggled what in Paraguay has never been easy. Possession is eleven tenths of the law, especially if the loot has been squirrelled out of the country and hidden where no one can find it, which is always the case. Now plain Mrs Lynch again, Madama retired to Paris, which was shorn of its imperial upstart Napoleon III, though cleaner, better lit, and in possession of more fine new boulevards. Here she lived in quiet obscurity, fading from the public eye. Her critics claim that she returned to the brothel business, in which she had been engaged before she met the Marshal, this time as a madame rather than a whore. She was eventually buried in a pauper’s grave in Père Lachaise. While living she had actually returned to Paraguay to try to reclaim some property she said was hers; she was given a heroine’s reception at the quayside by the Guarani ladies of Asunción. Perhaps they saw her as a fellow victim of López or perhaps she had been genuinely popular. At any event, the new government immediately shipped her downriver again; all her property in Paraguay had been nationalized, as had López’s.

  If the Liberales ever managed to get back to government again I wondered what would happen to the bodies of López and Lynch. Dictators who fall out of favour are given short shrift in Paraguay. Dr Francia, the first of the great crazed 19th-century dictators, who made stark naked Indians wear hatbrims by law, which they had to take off when they passed a soldier, and who had people shot for not saluting all public buildings, or for coming closer than ten yards to his sacred person, was thrown into the river for the alligators to eat after it was finally ascertained that el Supremo, as he called himself, had definitely become el Difunto, or the Defunct One. After independence from Spain, Francia locked Paraguay up tight for his whole reign, more than 30 years, allowing in no foreigners and allowing out no Paraguayans. Those foreigners who did drift in by accident were kept under house arrest, sometimes for years. Francia made it illegal for Spanish Paraguayans to marry each other, forcing them to wed negroes or Indians, and was the first to organize a secret police, instituting dungeons called the House of Truth where prisoners could neither stand nor lie down, and were chained up and left in the dark for decades on end. During his reign, Paraguay became known as the ‘Tibet of South America’, so difficult was it to get in or out. Thomas Carlyle, a proto-fascist who admired strong, brutal men in government, wrote an admiring essay on Dr Francia. Paraguay still has not recovered from Francia and Solano López, the two men who between them ruined the country completely: Francia laid the authoritarian base, demanding absolute obedience to his will, Solano López using that dictatorial system to wage war on the whole world, including his family, leading to complete disaster.

  The Authentic Radical Liberal Party – an outfit suggesting that there might be an Inauthentic Radical Liberal Party about somewhere, possibly in a Tom Stoppard play – took power after Solano López was killed; but under Brazilian and Argentine occupation, Paraguay had lost its independence, and lay prostrate, bankrupt and with very few adult men left alive, so ruinous had the war been. The émigré Liberals had formed an armed Legion in Argentina, and had fought alongside the Brazilians and Argentinians, something the Colorados had never forgiven them for to this day – they still called them ‘legionaries’ as an insult. Once it was thought that as few as 10% of the pre-war adult population of Paraguay had survived: this is now thought too low, but the country had certainly been desolated. It was from this time onwards that Paraguayan women stepped in to do much of the work that before had been done by men.

  The enthusiasm with which the Paraguayan government welcomed the New Australian and New German colonies, both Utopian experiments which eventually failed, is a sign of how keen they were to get new settlers to repopulate the country. There was – and indeed still is to this day – excellent fertile land, well-watered and capable of bearing good crops, simply going begging, uninhabited and uncultivated. But Paraguay was pretty well last on the list of desirable places to emigrate to in the 19th century. It still is today. Europeans need no visa to enter Paraguay – you just turn up and they give you three months automatically. If you want to stay, buy land, settle, work – no problems. There had been subsequent waves of immigrants, Italians in the late 19th century, Japanese in the 1920s and 1930s, Germans in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Koreans in the 1960s and 1970s. The ousting of Stroessner had stopped the flow. The last in, the Koreans, with the Taiwanese, were now leaving or planning to leave – their roots in the country were still shallow. I had found a little corner shop a few hundred yards from the Gran Hotel, where I used to go to buy biscuits and fruit juice, tins of sardines and milk. It was run by a Korean and his wife, whom I got to know after a few days. We used to chat in Spanish together. ‘It was good here,’ they both said to me. ‘But now it’s not good at all. If we could sell this shop we would go back to Korea. It is better back home now.’ This was the story I heard from virtually all the immigrants I met. The papers were full of advertisements for apartments, houses, shops, farms for sale, all offered at half or less what they could have commanded a year ago. Those with capital had moved it abroad: those with no money could raise no credit. Counter-intuitively, this was probably the right time to buy, if you had the money – and if you could bear the thought of living even part time in Paraguay. A friend of mine had bought a seafront restaurant in Portugal at the time of the revolution in the 1970s, when it looked as if the communists were going to take over. He had paid almost nothing for it. The owners simply wanted to get out and escape to Brazil. The communists had been foiled, and he had made a goo
d investment, as it turned out. But Paraguay …? You would have to be pretty desperate, though at one time, of course, the country had looked like a sure bet. All the English engineers, artificers, railwaymen and other experts López had signed up to run his steamships, trains and arsenals in the early 1860s thought they were on to a good thing. Immensely wealthy country, go-ahead young President, modern ideas, willing population – place only needs opening up and developing, you could read these Mr Jingle-like opinions in their journals and letters home. Yet it had ended in death, ruin and disaster for most of them. They were never paid, and the few that survived the war emerged broken, with their lives ruined and their nerves shattered. López was no respecter of persons and had been as willing to shoot and torture the English as anyone else. All the grand projects in Paraguay, which started with such high hopes – the Jesuit Reducciones, New Germany, New Australia, López’s bid for industrial and imperial power – all ended in catastrophic failure. It all looked so easy in Paraguay, but the serpent in this particular paradise always undid these idealistic or ambitious plans. As a country it bred pessimism and skepticism, because nothing ever worked out well, except smuggling, criminality and deceit, which had always been well rewarded and usually escaped punishment.

  The post-1945 Germans had played the same role for Stroessner as the English had for López – to provide these men’s dictatorships with technical and managerial expertise they otherwise did not have. Ex-Nazis ran Stroessner’s army and navy, Dr Mengele of Auschwitz was his personal physician, and German émigré capital and talent ran the banks, factories and estancias. But now Stroessner had gone, how many of the Germans and their children and grandchildren would stay? It was not particularly difficult to get out of Paraguay if you were determined. In the USA alone there were an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, mostly from South America, including a Paraguayan contingent. In Los Angeles I had never seen a middle-class home which did not have latino ‘help’, as the euphemism for servants was there.