Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  ‘Vamos,’ said the capitán, and got back into the rowing-boat. I shoved off the prow and jumped in after him. ‘Good luck,’ said Mac. ‘And if you do fall overboard, or the lancha sinks, make a lot of noise and splashing, and head for the nearest shore. The piranhas don’t like noise, or so I’ve heard. I shouldn’t fall overboard if I were you though.’ He stepped back, gave a short wave; then was swallowed up by the mist on the river bank, as the capitán rowed us out to the lancha which was anchored more or less in midstream. The mist was thinning by the time we reached the boat, which was a low, concrete barge with blunt bows and two large Johnson outboard motors clamped to the stern. I climbed up a short, rusted metal ladder and on to the deck, which was loaded with sacks of rice, produce of the USA, according to the labels, sacks of Argentine cement from Mendoza, and open-slatted wooden boxes full of plumbing fittings – taps, sinks, basins, pipes and so on, all clearly visible in their containers, though loosely wrapped in grey corrugated cardboard. The capitán followed me up the ladder, made fast the tender to the boat with rope, and beckoned me forward. ‘Mira’, he said, with some pride in his voice. The barge had twin diesel inboard engines as well as the outboards. ‘Tractor,’ he added, indicating a well-known US brand name embossed on the engine casings. ‘Muy bien, muy fuerte,’ I commented, with what I hoped was enthusiasm in my voice. ‘Muy fuerte,’ confirmed Don Octavio, and wiped the twin tractor engines with an oily rag. ‘Venga,’ he indicated, and we made our way aft. There was a small cabin with a single wooden bed, table, chair, cupboard and hanging wardrobe, about the size of those on a cross-channel ferry, though made of unplaned wood with glassless windows covered with rusty wire mesh to keep insects out. ‘Por usted solamente,’ the capitán indicated, showing me how the louvred shutters closed on the inside to give shade and privacy. There was a blanket, a pillow and a thin foam mattress covered with a floral-patterned coverlet of nylon that looked to me of Taiwanese provenance. I had a feeling US$40 was buying me the capitán’s cabin. ‘¿Bueno?’ enquired Don Octavio. ‘Perfecto,’ I replied, and splitting the bundle of cheroots in half, presented him with his quota, tying up both bundles with the tricolour riband, which I cut with my penknife. He took his with thanks. ‘¿Tranquilo, tranquilo aquí, por usted, vale? ¿En cinco pequeños minutos un café y desayuno, vale?’ ‘Vale,’ I replied, and sat on the bed. It was very hard.

  The capitán went forward, and I closed the door and shut the louvred shutters. I looked at my watch. Half an hour before I had been sitting on the terrace outside my room at the hotel. Now I was in full flight from a convicted mass murderer who would have me shot if he could; someone I had never seen and sincerely hoped I never would see. I lay full length on the bed, using my day pack as an extra pillow. From forward I could hear the heavy tractor engines turning and misfiring. I had a diesel myself in England and I could hear that these were damp, probably from the mist on the river. Eventually, one of the engines caught and then the other: with a rattle the anchors came up, fore and aft. I could hear the light step of the mozo passing down beside my cabin in bare feet: the capitán wore shoes. The lancha trembled, and very slowly, we began to move off, upriver, towards Concepción. There was a faint movement of air through the shutters, bringing the scent of diesel fumes. I spread my sleeping bag underneath me and took a swig from the water bottle I had brought with me. I noticed my hands were trembling, and not through the movement of the boat. I shut my eyes, but graphic images of revolution and civil war jumped up before me. I had, I reflected, spent more than the last two weeks trying to get a boat to Concepción, with no success at all. Mac had organized the whole thing in an instant. But he was of the country, of course, and I was not. I could not lie still. I got up and opened the louvres to look outside. The mist had largely gone, and pale early morning light flecked the river. On the other bank, the Chaco side, stood low, indeterminate foliage, scrub you would call it, jungle being too dense, too impressive a term for such sparse, pale green tracery. Occasionally there were trees, spindly, leaning askew: tufts of marsh grass, weeds, rank vegetation rose up from the swampy low-lying shore on either side. Already we were outside Asunción. From time to time a one-storey house appeared, with a path leading down to the river where a boat would be moored by a wooden jetty, or else a canoe. We were moving very slowly in our lancha, our tiny wake hardly rocked these moored craft. I wanted to go out on deck now we had left the city behind, but I had a feeling that Don Octavio wanted me hidden away until at least after breakfast. I began to get hungry. After an hour and a half – a fairly average to short Paraguayan ‘pequeños cinco minutos’ – the mozo knocked discreetly on the door of my cabin. I could see through the louvres that he was carrying an aluminium tray with food and drink on it. I opened the door and let him in. He put down the tray on the table and indicated a thermos flask. ‘Por el maté’, he said, and then indicated a smaller metal pot, ‘el café’. I thanked him, and he bowed slightly and backed out, closing the door behind him. On the tray was an orange and a pair of bananas, a carton of orange juice, two boiled eggs and a twist of salt in a newspaper screw, chipá, a packet of Argentine-made sweet biscuits, as well as the coffee, hot water for maté, and a small packet of Paraguayan-made leaf maté. There was no maté gourd or bombilla, but as no Paraguayan man ever moved from his house without these essentials, doubtless the capitán assumed I had these items already. And he was right, in fact I did. I had been haunting the antiquaries in the weeks I’d been in Asunción, and had already purchased two silver 19th-century bombillas, and two attractive gourds, one made out of a curious tropical hardwood and chased with decorative silver around the base and top. For once I actually felt like maté. It quenches the thirst and calms the soul. I made myself a gourdful and attacked the breakfast with gusto. Things could be worse, I reflected. The automatic pistol, unwrapped and lying on the wooden table, indicated as well that they might yet get much worse.

  I lay down on the bed again after breakfast – the cabin was so small that sitting at the table or lying on the bed were the only two options. I finished off the coffee and sampled one of Mac’s cheroots: they were surprisingly mild and aromatic. I hoped the mosquitoes would dislike their smoke. From time to time I tilted the slats of the shutters and peered outside. The sun was higher and the dull, grey-green river bank we passed had been replaced by yet more dull, grey-green river bank. The river itself appeared to be deserted. We had passed no one and no one had passed us. We were the only moving thing on that watery expanse surrounded by bush; our two diesels thumping tractorlike amidships the only sound in that vast realm of silence. Not for the first time I thought of Joseph Conrad; about moving by boat upriver from civilization and its ambiguities to a primal, primeval world, ancient, sparse of men, a journey back to an earlier epoch of human existence. If Mister Kurtz were to go back in time, to the early 20th century, Paraguay was a good place to do it. Somewhere off to my right, up a branch of the Paraguay River, a group of Germans had done just that in the late 19th century.

  Led by Elizabeth Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher Friedrich, and her husband Dr Bernard Forster, a virulently anti-Semitic German chauvinist, a colony had been set up called Nueva Germania in 1886. Germany was rotten, they felt, decadent with Jewish usury and corruption, capitalists and stockbrokers: here, in Nueva Germania, Lutheranism, vegetarianism and rabid Teutonic nationalism would redeem the race, set free the tormented German soul and create a beacon for blond, blue-eyed herrenvolk everywhere. Elizabeth hoped her brother might quit Germany to join them, but he was unenthusiastic, and hated her husband Forster’s anti-Semitism. The ‘purification and rebirth of the human race’, as Forster grandiloquently declared, was the object of the colony. Seventy kilometres from Antequera, deep in the bush, the Paraguayan government granted the settlement land on which to found their new imperium. The colonists, shipped out from Germany, built a vast mansion, Forsterhof, of timber and thatch, where Dr Forster and Elizabeth were to live. Peasants from Saxony formed the basis of the colony;
Jews were forbidden, though it was suspected that at least one had smuggled himself on board, in order to wreck the venture. ‘We have found the next thing to Paradise on Earth,’ Elizabeth wrote to her brother, though one girl died of fever coming upriver from Asunción. In the evenings, she wrote, after work the sturdy German colonists serenaded her and her husband with ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles’. Feudal virtue, simplicity, prelapsarian harmony was to be re-established in the tropical wilderness.

  The fantasy of Paraguay as paradise had taken over: fruit would fall from the trees, the natives were friendly and obliging, and a railway planned to cross the Americas would conveniently pass through the colony. Settlers from Germany would throng in. In reality the crops failed, there were fevers and snakes, insects and wild animals: the colonists barely survived and were not amused to be made to stand to attention and salute when Forster passed on his white horse. Forty families had come out from Germany but more than a quarter of them left within the first two years. Forster fell into debt, could get no more settlers to come out; he spent increasingly long periods out of the colony, soaking up beer and caa at the Hotel del Lago, a German-run hostelry in the overwhelmingly German settlement of San Bernadino just a few kilometres from Asunción, where more practically minded Teutons had reproduced a Bavarian lakeside pleasure resort in the subtropics. In the end it all became too much for this dreamer who had once been an intimate of Wagner and his circle at Wahnfried; in 1890, Forster killed himself in his hotel room with a self-administered injection of morphine and strychnine. He was just 46. Elizabeth hushed up the scandal and the death certificate of her husband indicated that he had died of a nervous attack, which was, in a way, also true. The colony continued its decline and Elizabeth went back to Germany to latch on to her brother’s writings, and her brother himself in his long mental illness, as self-appointed Keeper of the Flame. She supported the rise of the Nazis and became an admirer and intimate of Adolf Hitler, who attended her funeral. Earth from the Fatherland was sent out by Hitler in 1934 to be put on the grave of her husband, who was claimed by the Nazis as a prophetic forerunner of their creed.

  Paraguay had the second oldest Nazi Party in the world, after Germany itself, founded just a few years after the original. By 1991, when the author Ben Macintyre visited Nueva Germania to research his excellent book Forgotten Fatherland, there were fewer than ten families left, with names such as Fischer, Schubert, Halke, Stern and Sweikhart. They lived in huts and scratched a living from a few vegetable patches, surrounded by the forest. Some of the colonists had volunteered to fight for the Nazis during the Second World War. In the 1950s, a stranger had come into their midst, a refugee from Germany: this was the notorious Dr Mengele of Auschwitz, ‘The Angel of Death’ who had performed such disgusting ‘experiments’ in the name of perverted science on Jews, gypsies, twins and other helpless victims. He had at one time been personal physician to Stroessner, and later moved to Brazil where he died. He lived under his own name in Paraguay, and became naturalized as a Paraguayan citizen: it seems he was a well-known figure in Asunción.

  If I had been Paul Theroux, at this point in the journey I would have unpacked my folding Klepper canoe – or perhaps my Feathercraft – and paddled away up the branch in the river to visit the remains of Nueva Germania. However, rather more comfortably, I settled for a bottle of caa from the mozo (US$1.25) and lay on my bed smoking cheroots, counting the thumps of the tractor engines and thinking of Hugo (‘You have no idea, Robert, how enjoyable it is just to lie back in the afternoon in a hammock and look at the sky and smoke a cigar …’). Perhaps at last I was beginning to start to do things the Paraguayan way.

  All the fantasy colonial ventures in Paraguay tended to have the same trajectory – initial enthusiasm and idealism, the investment of large sums of money and energy, the unrealistic expectations and dreams of world-changing Utopian perfection, the dictatorial, impractical, hysterical leaders, the split, the departure of the faint-hearted, the sensible, and even more diehard fanatics, the disillusionment of the settlers, the death or departure of the broken-spirited leader, the slow decay and eventual abandonment of the project which sinks back into subsistence farming at the same level or lower than the Paraguayan peons around them. Eventually, the jungle comes back and reclaims the site, lianas and vines snaking over the abandoned and roofless buildings. The Jesuit Reducciones, Nueva Germania, Nueva Australia, Nueva Bordeos (New Bordeaux), the colony of ‘the Lincolnshire farmers’ – a group of English ‘agriculturalists’ who had in fact been the sweepings of the London slums – all these had conformed to the pattern. Now in the far north, I had read, were colonies of Moonies who had bought large tracts of land and were trying the same thing.

  The only outside group that had thrived in Paraguay, in the inhospitable Chaco, were the Mennonites, low-German speaking Christian followers of an Amish-like pacifist sect who had been motivated by religious zeal and wished only to continue a way of life they had developed in Russia over hundreds of years. Rather than try to remould human nature in experimental form they had merely sought to preserve what they evolved without state interference. They demanded to school their own children, keep out the corrupt world beyond, and not be subject to conscription for military service. Russia, Canada and Mexico had all promised these things, but always reneged: the modern state insisted on interfering in citizens’ lives, most notably in education and military service. The Mennonites had moved from Russia to Canada and Paraguay, but now they were unhappy and were moving again – to Bolivia, I had been told. Perhaps a litmus paper of the state which interfered least in its citizens’ life was where the Mennonites were moving to at any one time. Was there anywhere on Earth, I wondered, where you could get right away from the power of the state? Only, perhaps, on very small and obscure islands in the Pacific to which you could only get by private yacht, and on which no one lived. Even the Antarctic and Amazon basin were staked out, owned, colonized, regulated. You can, however, purchase a passport for a country which does not exist: it is very useful for leaving at hotels, hire car offices and so forth, where identification is needed. Many people who have this passport have claimed that it is also possible to cross some borders with it. The last refuge of true individualists who wish to escape state control is the ocean-going yacht: there are still vast tracts of the Southern Ocean which are unpoliced, unvisited and unregulated. The nomad, as ever, is able to evade what the settled must suffer – police, armies, taxes, other people’s rules, regimentation – in a word, the slavery of mass society. The Mennonites’ problem was that they simply wished to avoid the post-Renaissance nation state, a desire incompatible with the all-embracing octopus of the bureaucratic society whose raison d’être is regimentation and standardization. The hardest thing in the modern world seemed to be simply to be left alone to get on with one’s life: the most expensive and desirable real estate in the world were islands with no one on them. Paraguay offered a degree of autonomy, but also chaos and lawlessness. Perhaps if you got far enough into the jungle you might escape, but I rather doubt it.

  I had expected that we would be calling in at various riverside settlements to collect cargo or passengers en route, but we did not. Don Octavio steamed ahead, slowly but steadily. From time to time he would leave the engines and come to see me in the cabin; eventually, when he judged we were far enough from Asunción, I was invited out to perch on a cement sack and admire the diesels again, thump-thumping away. He had seen Mac’s automatic, which I left on the table deliberately: he had, as predicted, offered to buy it, but had not been offended when I refused. It emerged in conversation that Don Octavio did not want me to be seen by any riverine Paraguayan eyes. When we were approaching a small settlement I was ushered back into the cabin by the mozo, who would close the shutters for me. It was evident that to carry passengers some sort of permit or authorization was required that Don Octavio did not have. In all Hispanic countries people live in fear of the denuncia: fines, prison, aggravation, beating, forced br
ibes can all result from being denounced. And not just in Hispanic countries: a friend of mine in the Gers in France had bought a farmhouse, and on the first day of occupation was denounced by five people before lunchtime for painting her shutters without notifying the mairie. There were five houses in her hamlet, so every single household had denounced her. During the German occupation of France, the Nazis had had to operate a complete government department just to deal with the huge volume of letters from men and women denouncing each other to the enemy.