Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  Eventually, at 12.30, the door opened again, and one young man in jeans and a blue shirt, and one middle-aged fellow also wearing blue, with a greying beard came in and sat down in front of me by the table. They introduced themselves as friends of Don Mac, but neither of them was Don Umberto, who was, it seemed, either in Bolivia or Brazil, they were not quite sure which. Mac had asked them to look after me in Concepción, which they would, of course, do – not that a stranger needed looking after in Concepción, unlike that nest of vipers and sink of criminality, that gulf of Colorado wickedness and abyss of depravity, that Sodom of the South, in a word … Asunción. After the introductions were over and substantial cigars had been produced, flourished, felt, sniffed, rolled, and finally lit, I asked them the question that was uppermost on my mind. What news did they have of the revolution? Had Oviedo got to Asunción? Was there fighting? Had the army risen in his support? What was the news?

  ‘We know nothing,’ said the older man: his companion nodded his agreement. ‘And what we do learn from those cabrones – the cuckolds in Asunción – we have learnt to mistrust. They drink in lies with their mothers’ milk down there. Our TVs are tuned to Brazil. We trade with Brazil. The Brazilians are our friends and allies. The Colorados of the south have ignored us for 50 years. They give us no money, no guns, no infrastructure. Even the boats have stopped. You have seen the town, a little. It is a ruin, a catastrophe, a farce sunk up to its ears in catatonic mud. If Oviedo reimposes a military dictatorship, it is nothing to us. He will still give us nothing. And we shall ignore him,’ concluded the older man amid a cloud of cigar smoke. I asked if they had any newspapers from Asunción, had heard any news on the radio? Surely the Brazilians must have announced that Oviedo had crossed the border? Surely the fall of Asunción would merit a mention on their news?

  ‘There has been nothing said as yet. We know nothing and we believe nothing,’ said the young man, with finality. ‘Nada de nada,’ echoed the older man, like a tropical chorus from Aeschylus. They made maté, now, and we drank this, passing the gourd around, smoking our cigars meditatively. Above us, from the ceiling, a three-bladed fan had started to churn the air softly: the town’s erratic electricity had come back on again. The shutters were closed and the room was pale grey with shadows, thin bars of light flickered on the far wall, cast from outside.

  ‘Did you bring the guns?’ the middle-aged man asked me, eventually, in a conversational tone.

  ‘What guns?’ I enquired.

  ‘Don Mac said he might be able to get us some guns, proper guns, AK-47s, mortars, Uzis, heavy machine-guns – proper, serious guns, foreign guns from el norte,’ commented the younger man hopefully. I regretted that, alas, I was forced to disappoint them. They looked downcast at this, and gave resigned shrugs. No guns at all, the younger man put in, not even a small consignment, a trifle, a mere bagatelle – just the odd machine-gun? I showed them Mac’s loan apologetically, explaining why I could not sell it to them. They examined it with mild interest, and got out their own pistols to show me, which were worn and ancient revolvers kept in leather holsters inside the backs of their trouser waistbands.

  ‘We need heavy weapons, which we cannot buy from Brazil with ease. Pistols we have in plenty. Also shotguns and hunting rifles. Machine-guns, mortars, semi-automatic assault rifles we do not have,’ said the middle-aged man, feeling at their absence inflecting his voice. ‘Tanks also would be nice. Tanks and armoured cars, with flame-throwers, napalm and grenade launchers,’ chipped in the younger man dreamily. I had a feeling I knew what these weapons would be used for if ever they did get them – an assault on their enemies down in Asunción.

  ‘Never mind – we have no money to pay for these things anyway. We are so poor in Concepción that it is ridiculous,’ commented the older man, and both of them laughed, at the ridiculousness of their poverty. The maté gourd passed round again and we dropped the subject of weaponry, for a short while at least.

  Eventually, they took me to a Korean restaurant where we had a large meal of pork, rice, beans, green vegetables, chipá, mandioca and Brazilian beer. Unlike Asunción, it seemed to me that here the foodstuffs were locally grown and produced. I paid for this lunch, for they had no money, their ridiculous poverty being the cause, but as the whole meal scarcely came to five US dollars, I didn’t mind at all. ‘Come and see us again,’ they chorused, as we left, ‘many, many times – we can talk about guns.’ They had a large illustrated mail-order catalogue from a gun dealer in Houston, Texas, printed bilingually in Spanish and English, and they had shown me this during lunch. Copiously illustrated, it was well-thumbed and grimy with use, like a masturbator’s favourite porno-mag. ‘Wonderful!’ they would breathe ‘Look – here – exquisite – the sheer elegance of the lines! No?’

  ‘But you have no money,’ I commented. ‘This is our tragedy, actually, our poverty. So poor and so far from all these wonderful weapons,’ they agreed, sighing deeply again, and then calling for more Brazilian beer, in cheerful voices, from the Korean proprietor.

  Concepción was deep in siesta as I walked back to the Hotel Suizo, which was not at all far on foot, in spite of what I felt with my painful big toes – a mere 200 yards or so from the restaurant. The sense of orchestrated subterfuge which had surrounded my arrival seemed to have entirely dissipated now, and my two hosts waved adios to me loudly and happily outside the restaurant. I had no guns, was harmless; I was like them, ridiculous in my poverty as well, perhaps. Later, in the early evening, the bells rang out from the large, twin-domed cathedral, and crowds of people flocked into the church for the service. Until now I had not been aware of being in a Catholic country at all. The cathedral in Asunción had always been deserted and I had never heard church bells.

  I stayed at the hotel for a week, nursing my toes, taking bat bite medicines I had bought at a Taiwanese pharmacy: all the medicines came from Singapore, Taiwan or Brazil. I tried to find out what was happening in Asunción, and attempted to get information on any boats that might be going upriver to Bolivia or Brazil. No one knew anything; there were no boats going north that anyone knew of, but I had heard that story before down south. The few TVs in shops and restaurants showed endless soap operas in Portuguese, broadcast from Brazil: there were no newspapers and the radios could provide no news at all. Concepción made Asunción look like a modern, European city. I tried to phone Mac by mobile and landline without success. I tried to fax, e-mail and phone the Gran Hotel to get news, then everyone I knew all over the world. I had no success. Concepción was right off the communications map. The landline phones hardly ever worked, even locally. The electricity was off most of the time. If you ever need to hide away somewhere where no one has a cat in hell’s chance of finding you, try Concepción. There may have been police and army there, but I never saw any. There were no real shops, except ice-cream parlours, and nothing whatsoever to do. You couldn’t buy a book in any language. There was an open market where goods smuggled in from Brazil were sold, as well as local fruit, vegetables and dubious-looking meat – much of it, I suspected, from animals caught in the Chaco. It was very dirty, like the rest of Concepción, and the people looked extremely badly dressed and poor. Rain sluiced down a good deal of the time, and there were bevies of indolent mosquitoes: I was taking anti-malaria pills every day. The roads filled with water, the potholes brimming over with mud and slop. The whole place stank of horse dung and urine. Men in broad-brimmed cowboy hats rode into town on horses, openly wearing revolvers in waistholsters, rifles cached in leather stocks by their saddles. There were very few European faces in the streets, and people stared at me, which they had not done in Asunción. I was not threatened, however, and felt reasonably safe by daylight. I carried Mac’s automatic everywhere with me though, and loaded. I did not go out at night. I slept for much of the time, drank a lot of rum, and ate too many Umlaut bars, which on balance, I came to greatly prefer to El Snob bars: the former had raisins and bits of figs as well as nuts and caramel, I discovered, whereas th
e latter became cloyingly sweet after a while, and fragments stuck in between one’s teeth. I smoked the rest of Mac’s cheroots and bought a fresh bundle all for myself for a trifling sum of guaranis. Although there was no formal bathroom, the Hotel Suizo did, in fact, have an antiquated cold water shower at the back, which drained away into the garden; when the water was on, which was rarely, I could have a long cooling shower for 10 cents a time, in what I assumed was unfiltered river water which came brown from the showerhead: I only hoped that any stray candirú would be so disoriented as to miss my dick, and I made damn sure I never pissed even within sight of the shower. The lavatory was an ancient alla turca at which I squatted, housed in a small room at the end of my corridor. I hadn’t remembered to bring the tea strainer, so again I just hoped for the best. Out of boredom I did visit Mac’s pals several times again, but as each of these visits inevitably ended in my standing them both a meal and beer at the Korean restaurant, I rationed these excursions somewhat. I never found out what they did, if anything. ‘We suffer our ridiculous poverty in absurd tranquillity,’ the middle-aged man had said to me once, with much gravity, when I asked what they did. ‘With a placid stoicism not altogether unworthy of ancient Rome,’ added his younger sidekick. ‘Seneca was, of course, a Spaniard, and therefore, in a certain sense, a Paraguayan as well,’ commented the older man philosophically. ‘He would have understood our plight.’ ‘Understood, sympathized – and probably supplied us with arms, too,’ suggested the younger man. I didn’t feel I had sufficient evidence to refute this proposition. I suspected they were Authentic Radical Liberal politicos, and if they were, this placid stoicism and poverty explained why the party had found itself in opposition for so long: they had all the vitality and energetic optimism of torpid tree sloths.

  In the market I was offered young monkeys, small yacarés, or alligators, brightly coloured parakeets, a baby cat-like creature that looked like an ocelot: these, I was told, would make excellent pets – or I could eat them for lunch. I declined to buy any of them. I was evidently on the edge of what I had come to regard as David Attenborough territory, where pink, sweaty white men of a certain age, dressed in khaki shorts and desert boots, were wont to crouch unconvincingly in tropical shrubbery, whispering inanely into microphones, while their cameramen pestered innocent animals, which would much rather be left alone, all for the entertainment of the gormless millions crouched in front of their TV sets during the endless British winter: a modern, electronic version of Elizabethan bear baiting, in fact. I’ve never seen a wildlife TV programme where the infuriated beasts turned on their tormentors and ripped them into small pieces, and then devoured them alive, on camera, but such a justifiable spectacle would be well worth watching, and represent real value for money for the licence fee.

  The afternoon siesta of my second day at the Hotel Suizo was marred by discordant, childish singing from the garden, directly outside my room. Infants of the female, pre-pubescent variety. I expected them to stop after a while, but they did not. They sang the same song, again and again. Eventually I made out the chorus, ‘Pequeño burro, pequeño burro’. I was being serenaded with ‘Little donkey, little donkey’ in Spanish. Eventually, I was forced to go downstairs to wake the sleeping desk clerk. ‘Who are these children and how can you make them go away?’ I asked. He looked at me reproachfully. ‘These are the school choir of the Santa Elvira del Rio Bravo Home for Incurable Lepers,’ he said. ‘They have heard of your culture and interest in the fine arts of Concepción, and so have come to make a performance for you.’ Clearly, word had spread, and I suspected my open-handed lunch-buying propensities had not passed unnoticed.

  Lepers. I was being chugged by small, pathetic Paraguayan leper girls, who would never grow up to have novios – boyfriends – to marry, or have families of their own. Their voices rose and fell, fell and rose outside, an endless wave of discordant misharmony.

  ‘They receive religious instruction?’ I demanded mildly.

  ‘Leprous nuns and priests furnish them with the comforts of Holy Scripture,’ intoned the desk clerk. ‘They worship outside church, under the shade of palm trees, so as not to discompose the congregation from within.

  ‘They wear shoes – all of them,’ he added proudly. ‘Gifts of the wealthy citizens.’

  Most children in Paraguay did not, of course, wear shoes, because they could not afford them.

  ‘Are they disfigured – with the lion head?’ I whispered, sotto voce.

  ‘Hideously, señor. Many have lost their fingers and toes already. They have to wear veils to prevent the horses from bolting in the streets, so eaten away are their little faces. Some have no noses …’

  ‘¡Basta, hombre! Enough! How much is required for them to cease their singing, and never return here again while I am in residence?’ This question, too, had evidently been asked before: the desk clerk answered immediately, without having to think, ‘Five dollars, señor, in guaranis.’ The price of a slap-up lunch with the boys in blue, the Authentic Radical Liberales. Cheap at the price. Normally I bargain, but you don’t haggle with plucky little lepers sweating in the midday sun under the protection of their patron saint. I took the money from my wallet and handed it over. The clerk reached under the counter and pulled out a long cleft stick of the sort Boy Scouts used to carry messages: he thrust the guarani notes into the cleft of the stick and advanced to a side window, opened it a fraction, and slid the stick out, notes forward.

  This little drama had obviously been played out many times before: the singing abruptly stopped. A rustling, and low sussuration of girlish conversation then took place as the notes were removed from the stick and counted. The clerk then withdrew the stick and placed it under the counter again: I peered over, looked underneath, and saw the cleft end, where the notes had been, now rested in a large soup bowl of disinfectant. If it was a con, this added a nice, detailed touch to convince the hardened skeptic.

  ‘Muchas gracias, excellentissimo señor mio’ came the chorus from outside. A rustling of feet on grass and a happy collective chatter faded away into the distance. I turned and made my way upstairs again. Then a thought struck me.

  ‘What do they do with the money?’ I asked.

  ‘They will have candles lit to Santa Elvira in the cathedral – and then go to buy ice creams with the rest. The shops know how to disinfect the notes properly.’

  On the eighth day there was a message for me at the foyer of the hotel. A friend of Don Mac called Luis Osvaldo Domenicanos would collect me that evening at 8pm with his truck. Where he was headed I cared not – he was going to take me out of Concepción, which I seemed to have been cooped up in for approaching half my life. I packed, washed my socks and a shirt, had a last, large meal at the Korean restaurant, where the owner had got to know me by now. ‘Concepción no good,’ he said to me gloomily. ‘All ladrones or cabrones’ – thieves or cuckolds. I had half a mind to ask him about the little leper girls of Santa Elvira, but didn’t: there are some disillusionments that might be too hard to bear. I sat in the foyer from 6pm onwards for fear of missing my lift. I had prepared for the journey by buying a large Chinese-made thermos for hot water, and bought yet another bottle of Tricolor rum and two plastic cups. By 9.30 I was beginning to give up hope and was preparing to check into the hotel again, when a large truck, the rear portion of which was covered with a black tarpaulin, stopped outside and hooted three times, the motor equivalent of the three handclaps. I was out of the hotel and into the cab within 30 seconds. At last – at long last – I was to escape from Concepción. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked Luis, after we had introduced ourselves, shouting over the noise of the engine. ‘Brazil,’ he shouted back. So that was that. I assumed the Oviedo golpe was a fait accompli and that Mac had sent Luis to get me out, and move one of his ‘consignments’ across the border at the same time. More Zen calm flooded through me. I had no visa for Brazil. I was carrying an automatic that didn’t belong to me without a licence; I knew no one in Brazil and spoke no Portugu
ese. I was almost certainly in a smuggler’s truck loaded with God knows what contraband, probably including illicit drugs and guns. I had no idea where I was going or what I was going to do. My cameras, and all the rest of my possessions, were in a hotel room in a city I was now unlikely ever to see again, a city which was probably convulsed in rape, murder and arson as the licentious troops ran amok. ‘If I had known, I would have been a locksmith,’ said Albert Einstein: I seconded that emotion.

  Eleven

  Smuggler’s Paradise

  The night outside was pitch black and there was almost no traffic, which was doubtless why a contrabandista’s truck set off at 9.30pm. We were heading for the smuggler’s border town of San Juan Caballero in the far north-east of the country, reputedly one of the most dangerous and lawless places in all Paraguay. This is where all those stories about avionettas laden with dope, illegal gun imports, and hidden landing strips emanated from: perhaps I might meet Erwing Rommel, my favourite local journalist. Conversation was not easy over the engine noise and the loud Brazilian samba music coming from the truck’s cassette player. Occasionally we would stop for a piss and more maté: on one of these breaks, the engine turned off, Luis explained that he was going to leave me for a couple of hours (‘unos pequeños cinco minutos’) at a trucker’s stop just this side of the Brazilian border, while he went across the border with his cargo, and then come back to collect me again. My heart sank. ‘Not back to Concepción?’ I asked. No, he told me, the next stop would be Ciudad del Este, also a border town with Brazil further on down south. This was closer to Asunción and also to Sao Paulo. ‘There will be news of what Oviedo is up to there, the cabrón, and we can phone Don Mac from there, probably, to learn if it is safe to go back to the capital or not. If not you can cross the border and there are fast, comfortable and safe buses from there straight to Sao Paulo. Or anywhere else in Brazil.’ He pronounced it ‘Bratheeow’. ‘What’s it like, Brazil?’ I asked. I’d only seen the inside of Sao Paulo airport after all. ‘A paradise, truly. They have everything, and the women – god you have never seen such women – ah, the best in the world.’