On my way back to the hotel I bought a bottle of Argentine red wine and a packet of biscuits from the Korean corner shop. I intended to consume these on my own, in my room. Every time I went into the bar I was waylaid by Alejandro Caradoc Evans who was proving depressing company. Mac was due back from Ciudad del Este shortly and had promised he would phone me: I was hoping his contacts in the north-east would help me. I failed to avoid Alejandro, however: he was sitting in the foyer in front of the large stone fireplace, watching a programme on local TV about diphtheria and yellow fever in Paraguay, entertainment custom-made for him. Small, diseased children, pathetic in their hospital cots, gaped and drooled at the camera. There were no blankets, mattresses or sheets, let alone medicines in the hospital: it was simply somewhere to take people to die. Against my better judgement, Alejandro led me off to the bar, where, I knew, I was in for another diatribe of some sort. The papers were full of the current spate of false police; they had been robbing Brazilian tourists who had come across the border in the north-east to buy contraband. ‘The police don’t get paid here, so they pay themselves by robbing the public,’ commented Alejandro, settling again on his favourite bar stool. I said I thought these were ‘false police’, not real ones. ‘The difference is purely academic in this country. All the police here are false police. The police are bandits and the bandits pretend to be police. How does anyone know whether they are real police or false police robbing tourists? If they are real police they just make sure they are using cars with false number plates – it’s not difficult.’ I asked Alejandro how people could bear to live under conditions of such chaos and disorder. ‘They don’t live, they go through the motions. They pretend. It’s all V. S. Naipaul stuff – mimic men. Argentina is a copy of a forgotten, now imagined, Europe, and Paraguay is a distorted copy of a copy, with local crazies thrown in on account of the Guarani who are culturally out to lunch, and historically several sandwiches short of a picnic.’ I asked him, then, where his remarkable knowledge of colloquial English had come from. I had met porteños – people from Buenos Aires – in London, but they didn’t have his grasp of the vernacular. ‘Well, both my parents spoke the gringo lingo at home, it was their mother tongue, not Welsh, and we all spoke it at boarding school. My Spanish is fairly ropy, actually. There are more than a quarter of a million Argies of Brit descent, mostly in or around BA, and we are quite cliquey, intermarrying and so on. I mean we are Anglican, my family, not Methodist or Papist. We all spoke of “the Argies” as the other lot, behind closed doors.’ Who had his family supported during the Falklands/Malvinas war? I asked. Had he served in the Argentine armed forces? He looked a bit embarrassed about this, and twiddled with his packet of cigarettes, avoiding my eyes. ‘God no, weak heart, doctor’s certificate, no chance of my getting mixed up with those psychopaths,’ he said finally. And the Falklands? ‘Borges called it two bald men fighting over a comb. Who knows – there may be vast reserves of oil down there. My parents found it convenient to drag themselves over to Montevideo in Uruguay for a few months – they’ve got a flat by the seaside over there. I happened to be down in Pat with relatives, just a nipper, you see, remember nothing about it all …’ his voice trailed away, lost in ambiguity. So who did you all support? I insisted. ‘It was a bloody nuisance, as far as my parents have told me – embarrassing, dangerous and a waste of everyone’s time. Maybe the Paraguayans should have the islands, then they could start a high seas piracy fleet. They could rename them The Isabels. Only one person has really understood Paraguay. Know who that was?’ I said I didn’t. ‘Joseph Conrad. His novel Nostromo was based directly on his researches into Paraguay during the dictatorship of Solano López and the War of the Triple Alliance. If you read Masterman’s book Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay you will find all the characters there that Conrad adopted for Nostromo. Monygham was an English sculptor tortured by López – Conrad turns him into a doctor tortured by his fictional dictator. Mr Gould was the British consul in BA who came upriver to try to get the British out, Captain Fidanza was an Italian ship’s captain whose vessel was confiscated by López. This Fidanza, the name Conrad used for his hero-anti-hero Nostromo, was shot by López. Costaguana – the coast of birdshit, in Spanish – is a pretty good name for Paraguay when you think of it, though as it happens there’s neither a coast nor any birdshit here, as such.’
I knew about this. George Frederick Masterman had been one of the many British experts, or mercenaries, employed by Solano López in his efforts to modernize Paraguay sufficiently to take on Brazil and Argentina, and so become Emperor of Southern South America. Masterman had been Military Apothecary at the General Hospital in Asunción, and had known all the principal players on both sides in the disastrous war. Unlike most of them he had survived to tell the tale. His book ‘a narrative of personal experience among the Paraguayans’ was published in London in 1869 when he was safely back in Europe again. He describes the grotesque cruelties of López in deadpan style. The dictator had two large jaguars in cages at Humaita, to which he fed Brazilian prisoners – ‘immense brutes’ is how Masterman describes them. They became so sated with human flesh that after only a short while López had to go back to shooting his prisoners. The jaguars, the ‘tigres’ of Paraguay, were no longer interested. López’s preferred torture was splitting the fingers and their bones with mallet and chisel, as well as the infamous ‘cepo uraguayo’, originally called the ‘cepo boliviano’ as it was invented during the Bolivian War of Independence. This device, one of South America’s contributions to the world’s stock of torture methods, was exquisitely agonizing: the victim had a musket placed under his bent knees as he sat on the ground. This was attached to another musket resting on his neck. The two were fastened together by tight cords on either side: additional muskets could be added on top of the neck. The back is bent, the head thrust forward, and blood circulation is inhibited. Even an hour of this torture semi-cripples a man for days afterwards, and the pain is excruciating. Before López’s victims were put in the cepo uraguayo they were generally staked out naked on the ground in full sun, tied to four orange trees, for the whole day, and given no water. More than a day in the uruguayana crippled a man for life. Conrad gives a graphic description of this torture in Nostromo, which he got straight from Masterman. López was accompanied by his personal torturers and interrogators wherever he went; the two worst were Roman Catholic priests, notionally chaplains in the Paraguayan army, in uniform, with small crucifixes grotesquely sewn on to their tunics. Prisoners were loaded with double irons, blacksmiths forging fetters so heavy the prisoners could scarcely walk. Apart from splitting fingers and toes with hammers, whips for back and buttocks, iron scourges and red hot pincers were also used on eyes, noses, genitals and the soft fleshy parts. López had his own brothers shot for treason, after months of torture, and carried his mother and sisters around in iron cages on carts, taking them out to have them whipped in public at regular intervals. Anyone who surrendered or lost a battle or retreated was a traitor, and was tortured first, then shot or fed to the jaguars. Suspicion, whim or bad temper were enough for López to condemn whole regiments to torture and execution.
While his armies were fighting the Brazilians and Argentinians, his prisons were bursting with those suspected of conspiracy, plots and treachery. As these victims were executed, more were arrested and tortured. The whole country was a charnel house, hundreds of thousands perished in agony and for nothing. Garrisons were decimated, officers executed on the merest whims, the foreign consuls imprisoned, tortured, beaten and finally shot. Until right at the end, at Cêrro Corá, no one dared take the obvious step and shoot López himself, thus ending the grotesque carnival of madness. Disease killed the great majority of Paraguayans during this insane war, after that López’s executions, and in poor third came casualties on the battlefield at the hands of the enemy: no one knows how many died, although the overwhelming majority of the male population perished. Masterman blamed the Jesuits for having inculcated the Guarani population into a blind, un
questioning obedience to their superiors. Many contemporaries of López, including Captain Richard Burton, who visited the battlefields while the war was still going on, refused to believe López’s cruelties. It was only after the war when the collected testimonies of the survivors emerged that the full horrors of his regime were exposed. Politics and ideology played a part in this process of denial. Brazil was an empire which still had slavery; Paraguay a republic which – nominally at least – had abolished slavery. The Brazilian army was led by European aristocrats. Thus, supporting Brazil against Paraguay was very difficult for ‘progressive’ opinion in the USA and Europe to countenance. López, advised by Madame Lynch, portrayed himself as the gallant republican defender of a small ‘native state’ which had abolished slavery, and was progressive, freedom-loving: many fell for this astute but completely misleading propaganda. Masterman also blamed Madame Lynch: it was she, he said, who placed the absurd notion of López becoming Emperor in his head, encouraging him to emulate Napoleon I and III of France. There is a passage in Nostromo where one of the Costaguanan officers, who is busy stealing Dr Monygham’s pocket watch, unleashes a paean of praise for Bonapartism and the ‘higher democracy’ where the heroic imperial master spirit unites the nation and raises it to an empire through glorious acts of war and conquest. Conrad always had at the back of his mind – and often right at the front of it too – the partition and subjugation of his native Poland by the empires of Austria, Prussia and Russia in the 18th century. He was acutely sensitive to imperialist oppression. His own family had been deported to Russia from Poland and killed. The reason he himself became a naturalized British subject, rather than a French citizen, was that France had a treaty of extradition with Russia and England did not. Conrad, once safely a British citizen, frequently went back to Poland. He was, in fact, in ‘enemy’ Poland when the first war was declared, and only managed to get out and back to England with much difficulty. Costaguana is based on Paraguay, but it also stands in for tyrannized, oppressed Poland, and it is no coincidence that his anti-hero who betrays the nationalist revolution by stealing for himself the silver of the mine is an Italian from another European Catholic country with a long history of partition and colonial oppression by Austria and Spain, reunited by Garibaldi after a nationalist revolution and war of liberation such as Conrad dreamt of for his own Poland.
Francisco Solano López, dictator at war with his whole people, scourge and flail, paranoiac destructor-general, had already been imagined before Conrad, by the Marquis de Sade, that anti-Rousseau who had taken the Enlightenment idea of ‘Nature’ and ‘natural’ and painted them red in sadistic tooth and claw. From his prison cell in the Bastille, held under lettre de cachet, de Sade imagined the King of Batua in the Congo, whose whole reign was an endless series of massacres, persecutions, tortures and destructions of his own people. The reason? Because he enjoyed it. Sadism, de Sade’s involuntary contribution to the lexicon of sexual abnormality, is just that – the enjoyment of torture, pain and death. De Sade points out that nature is cruel and the most natural men and women are the cruellest, because Nature is merely a vast impersonal engine of destruction. Justice, fairness, kindness and love are all simply illusions, pain, suffering and death are the supreme realities. William Blake, in his poem on the fall of the Bastille, refers to de Sade as ‘a writer prophetic’ and in this as many other things Blake was more right than he can have known. De Sade’s dystopian vision preceded the discovery by Europeans of African kingdoms in the mid-19th century, such as that of the Buganda in East Africa, which operated on precise and exact Sadean principles. The Kabaka of Buganda, as John Hanning Speke revealed after his visit to the country, executed sometimes dozens, sometimes hundreds of victims every day, merely for his own amusement. His Court laughed with him at the sufferings of the victims. Solano López, like Ali Pasha of Jannina, is a true Sadean hero, who murdered and tortured for pure pleasure, and who destroyed almost his whole country before he was finally struck down himself, probably by one of his own soldiers, after being cornered by the Brazilians at Cêrro Corá as he was trying to escape to Bolivia in 1865.
William Blake’s rhetorical question, asked in his poem ‘Tyger’, what ‘could frame thy fearful symmetry’ is the age-old question about the nature of cruelty and evil. If the world was created by an omnipotent Power of Good, then who or what made the tiger and the typhus bacillus, the rabid vampire bat, the candirú, the piranha, the amigo del culo, and the Paraguayan Technical Service – and why? Costaguana, like contemporary Paraguay, had been imagined by de Sade two centuries ago. The most visionary authors are often not the most comfortable to live with. The dystopian futures imagined by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley have not come to pass exactly, but neither could it be said that they have proved false visions. Elements taken directly from the works of de Sade, Orwell and Huxley can easily be found in everyday life all around the globe. López was one in a long line of destructive dictators who ruined their people in pursuit of a fantasy of power. The guns and swords, glittering uniforms and brass bands, warships and cannon all proved illusory and useless: death and oblivion awaited them all. Alexander of Macedon – ‘that tumour of a man’ as Seneca rightly called him – was the model for Hannibal and Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte and Hitler, and all the rest from Bokassa to Mobutu. The proposition – a man of destiny coming from a poor, backward outstation could by boldness, dash, genius, force of will, gather a huge army and conquer the world. Yet all of these would-be conquerors were failures. Alexander died at 33, a drunkard no longer in control of his own army. He had won a series of battles, but like Napoleon and Hitler, had achieved nothing at all. Psychologists have a theory that gamblers do not play to win but to lose, to ruin themselves, and will play on until they have achieved this goal. López, like Hitler and Napoleon, was of that ilk. The war he started against Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina was pointless and unwinnable. He could have stopped at any time. The Allies offered him peace at every turn and finally, when he had lost completely, proposed that he retire to Europe with all his loot, stolen from the people of Paraguay. He refused, out of vanity and stupidity, and so died in a swamp as pointlessly as he had lived, shot to death by an unknown hand. Nothing of his imperial vision survived him except the absurd half-made buildings he started to put up.
Yet Paraguayans – or many of them at least – thought all this was glorious stuff, that López was a martyr and that they should call their wretched mestizo offspring Anibal, Napoleon, Julio César, Alejandro and so on, just in case the sympathetic magic might work again. All over the Latin world – in Spain, France, Italy and South America – populist heroes with despotic ambitions kept coming up to overthrow kingdoms, republics or democracies. The French still had no real idea of why Napoleon and all his Marshals were defeated by Wellington. ‘Waterloo was a first-class battle won by a second-rate general’ is a widespread French saying, quoted approvingly by Victor Hugo himself in Les Misérables. Yet what did that make Napoleon, to be defeated by a ‘second-rate general’? All over the world there are Napoleonic clubs and societies, replete with bees, eagles, imperial baubles and bagatelles, but there are no fan clubs for the victor, the man who beat Napoleon and all his Marshals – ‘Villain-ton’ as the French so wittily called him after the occupation. In South America, to this day, Hitler and Mussolini are both widely admired; no one has even heard of Montgomery, Patton, or Eisenhower, the men who had defeated them. ‘He will not be content to stay as he is, now he has done what he has done – he will change the regime,’ Bonaparte observed of Wellington, when on St Helena. Wellington, of course, did no such thing. He was a loyalist and a constitutionalist. He took his seat in the House of Lords, eventually became a very ineffectual Prime Minister, and was finally removed from office, still entirely loyal to Crown, Parliament and the British Constitution, the last of which he thought simply ‘could not be improved upon’ when he was once asked. Napoleon was merely thinking what he himself would do had he been in Wellington’s place, make a coup d�
�état and impose his own personal rule. Undersupplied, poorly equipped, never wholly trusted by Parliament, dependent upon sea power for his every musket, bullet and gram of powder, unable to call upon conscripts, saddled with a drunken, ill-disciplined and often quite uncontrollable army, Wellington had defeated Napoleon’s Marshals one by one in Spain by slow, dogged persistence, and intelligent, unshowy mastery of the military arts, particularly those of victualling, supply and strategic retreat.
Like Solano López, Napoleon never bothered himself with where his supplies came from and, as in Egypt and Russia, simply abandoned armies he led to disaster because they could not be resupplied. He could always raise fresh ones in France with conscription. Vanity, egoism and self-conceit motivated both of them, as it does all dictators and military adventurers. None of them ever learnt because they were too vain, too arrogant and too proud: Bonaparte told his Marshals to live off the land, to steal from the peasants in the countries they occupied, to rob, pillage and loot. The peasants, ravaged and plundered beyond endurance, in return formed into guerrilla bands, murdered French soldiers, and helped the enemies of Bonaparte all they could. ‘A night in Paris will replace all these,’ Napoleon had said, indicating the thousands of French dead on one of his battlefields. He used up his troops profligately, throwing them away as all absolute military rulers have done, including López and Hitler. Napoleon never grasped the importance of sea power any more than did Hitler. With England uncrushed and uninvaded, the dictators were going to be ground down eventually by a coalition of allies supplied through the element they could not control, with superior supplies intelligently applied. Wellington, like Montgomery, hoarded supplies and men and munitions. He also paid for what he needed: when he invaded France, inn keepers and peasants were astounded actually to be paid for what his men consumed. Rommel lost in the desert for the same reason López did in Paraguay – he ran out of supplies. Montgomery and the Brazilians won because they were better equipped and used their forces to better effect. López was always going to lose the War of the Triple Alliance for, like Napoleon and Hitler, he had no idea what made a victorious army. Winning battles is nothing at all in war, unless you defeat the enemy. López had as much chance of defeating Brazil as Hitler did of defeating the USA.
Paradise With Serpents Page 18