Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  The truck stop was nothing more than a tin shack in the jungle with a thatched roof. ‘Two hours, maximum,’ Luis promised, leaving me alone in this dismal hole. He churned away in his truck, which was now covered with red ochre mud that had splashed up from our journey, during which rain had fallen in thick sheets for several hours. Inside were wooden tables, plastic chairs, a single counter with very little on it. I ordered coffee, mineral water, chipá and a packet of coconut biscuits called ‘Tuareg’, which showed a group of Al Qaeda plotters in robes hunkered down in the desert under a tall coconut palm tree, this parachuted in from Tahiti no doubt, with tethered camels in the distance. They were quite tasty actually, the biscuits. Following the local custom, I laid my head down on the counter and slept, my day sack open between my crotch, hidden from view. The owner had been asleep in a hammock behind the counter when I arrived and he returned to this posture as soon as he’d served me. The place was illuminated by strip lighting which I assumed was powered either by solar panels or a generator. They took Brazilian money as well as Paraguayan, and you had to ask to have your change in one or the other, or the patron mixed it up indiscriminately. Were we actually in Paraguay, or Brazil? I asked him. He looked shifty, and avoided my eyes. ‘Un poco de los dos,’ he replied, ambiguously – a bit of both. No man’s land, Tom Tiddler’s ground, off the map – a smuggler’s paradise, and no Customs snakes within miles I’d bet. We weren’t on a proper road, just a muddy track in the middle of nowhere. I was actually very glad I had Mac’s automatic with me.

  How long I slept I don’t know, but when I awoke I was aware of a very old white man, turkey wattles hanging from his neck, gazing at me intently from the other side of the table. He had very blue eyes and a beaky nose which had been broken and reset. I raised my head blearily, my hands still on my open day pack. ‘Shalom,’ said the man, quietly: and raised a small silver automatic pistol, which he aimed right at my heart. He couldn’t really miss – the muzzle was less than two feet from my chest. My own fingers tightened on Mac’s automatic inside my day pack. I raised my head very slowly, and said in Spanish, ‘Sorry, I don’t speak Portuguese, I am English from England.’

  He absorbed this slowly, and lowered his pistol. It was still pointing at me, though obliquely now, and with less menace. ‘Not Israeli?’ he asked, very softly. ‘Not Jewish?’

  ‘No, no, no, señor – English – from London. Christian – Protestant – a tourist,’ I said, slowly and clearly. He blinked his eyes, which watered: and put the gun down on the table. His finger was still round the trigger, and the weapon was still vaguely pointing in my direction. It was a small calibre weapon, probably only a .22. Still, it would kill me if he used it, without a doubt. If I was going to shoot him, now was probably the best time. But I didn’t. Which was a good thing, for over the old man’s shoulder I saw the patron of the roadhouse rise from his hammock, flick the safety catch off a shotgun, which he pointed at the middle of the old man’s back. ‘¡Ho viejo!’ he called out, and launched into a long tirade in Portignol, that mixture of Portuguese and Spanish that is spoken along the borders of Brazil. The old man half turned and, as he had been told, raised his hands, leaving the pistol on the table. I grabbed it quickly, and darted down to the ground in case the patron decided to blast the old boy anyway.

  ‘¡Tranquilo, hombre!’ the patron called out to me, and I kicked the old man’s gun across the floor to the far wall, where he could see it. Still covering the ancient hold-up artist, the patron walked across, and picked up the pistol by the wall. I was on the floor, under the table, still holding Mac’s pistol in my day pack. The viejo might have another pistol hidden away. I was hyper-tense and felt as if the hairs on the back of my neck were all on end. My heart pounded and I wanted a piss dreadfully.

  ‘He is an old fool, señor,’ the patron said to me, putting back the safety catch on his shotgun. ‘He’s not right in the head. He thinks the Israeli secret police are after him.’ The old man turned and looked at the pair of us vacantly, his hands still high. My heart was pumping away, and an old tic in my right eyelid, which had not troubled me for years, was throbbing away. I was surely drenched in adrenalin coursing through my veins. I got up from the floor, sat down on my chair again, and put the day pack on my knees, invisible under the table. I still held the pistol, my finger on the trigger: I was obviously in a madhouse. The patron was giving the old man a bollocking in Portuguese now, wagging his finger, and pointing at me. The gist of it was, I think, that he mustn’t come in here annoying the clientele with his gun and silly suspicions. Something like that.

  ‘Well, he could be Jewish,’ said the old man defensively, motioning towards me.

  ‘I don’t care if he’s a ring-tailed baboon, an albino tapir or a golden-arsed macaque. Don’t come in here again, ever. I’m sick of you, Don Gustavo – understand me?’

  ‘What about my pistol?’ said the man querulously, lowering his hands now, and shuffling uncomfortably, as if he might have crapped his pants, which in fact he might well have done. I know I nearly had. I realized that although I spoke no Portuguese at all I had understood exactly what they had been saying, más o menos. Amazing. Berlitz would be fascinated: learn a language instantaneously – just get held up at gunpoint by a senile old Nazi in a smuggler’s roadhouse in the forests of the Paraguayan-Brazilian border. They could open a school up there, they could call it the Instant Terror Method.

  ‘Send your son round for it tomorrow, now get out!’ concluded the patron with a growl, and he indicated the exit in an unambiguous fashion with his shotgun.

  The old man did as he was told, shuffling out with an old man’s shuffle, looking behind at me, as if somehow it was my fault. He shut the door behind him, and after a few moments we heard an engine start up, and then a car drive slowly away.

  ‘You can take your hand off your pistol now,’ the patron said to me in Castilian Spanish. He went back to the bar and poured two glasses of caña. ‘This is on the house,’ he said. ‘My sincere apologies.’

  I drank the rum, holding the glass with shaking hands. Without asking he poured me another large shot. ‘Who is he?’ I asked, my throat very dry and hoarse.

  ‘He’s some old Nazi guy left over from the war. Lives hidden away in a rancho deep in the forest. He has a persecution complex, thinks the Jews want to kill him for something he did all those years ago in Europe somewhere. He comes in here like this with no warning when I’m asleep, and frightens the customers – most of them know him and know he’s harmless, but as a stranger you obviously didn’t.’

  ‘I was within a few seconds of shooting him dead,’ I commented neutrally.

  ‘And you would have been quite justified in doing so, señor. You had done nothing to him, and he threatened you with a gun. However, he has friends, and it would have been a bad move for you and for me also, so I stopped it going further.’

  ‘Is he really an old Nazi or a dreamer?’

  ‘Who knows? It was so long ago. I think he has senile dementia, myself. Normally, his family don’t allow him out alone, but occasionally he gives them the slip.’

  I wanted to get out of this roadhouse right now, and out of this area of ‘triangulación’, as it was called, the three borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Bolivia all being close and inviting contrabanders and criminals of all sorts. But I couldn’t. I was stuck.

  ‘Do you have a quiet place, a room at the back with a hammock where I can sleep?’ I asked.

  The patron nodded. ‘Of course – one dollar fifty, or two dollars fifty with an Indian girl.’

  ‘Just the room and the hammock, thank you.’

  ‘And there’s a cold water shower – the truck drivers use it.’

  I followed him behind the counter. The room was very small, made of wooden planking with a mud floor. There was a bolt inside to keep people out, but no lock. There were no windows. ‘Tell my friend where I am when he gets back,’ I said, then closed the door, and bolted it. I took a long slug of water, sat in the
hammock, and smoked three cheroots, one after the other. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa went my heart. I rigged up the mosquito net and crawled under it. From outside I could hear a noisy dawn chorus of jungle birds starting up. I had missed a whole night’s sleep. I felt drained, exhausted and my nerves jangled like cut piano wires. What the hell was I doing? I deserved to be killed, coming up here, into this region of the insane. Perhaps a fast, luxury bus straight to Sao Paulo was just what I needed. I felt sick: the rum had been a bad idea, also the cheroots. I lay back and swung clumsily, inadvertently, as one does in a hammock. It was cool, at least, dawn dampness creeping in through the slits in the wood. I wondered where the patron kept the Indian girls. In chains in a slave pit, no doubt. I knew I would never sleep, but I closed my eyes anyway. Perhaps this is better than Asunción in the throes of civil war, I tried to tell myself. As many as five million people may have been killed in the last civil war, before Stroessner came to power, I had read. Surely that couldn’t be right? Was it a million in five years, or five million in five years? My brain was turning to fudge.

  The next thing I knew was a faint, polite knock on the door. I jumped straight out of the hammock, fell on the floor, and grabbed Mac’s pistol from my day pack.

  ‘No, no, señor, nada mal, seguro – tranquilo, tranquilo,’ came the voice of the patron, from the other side of the door, but well to the right, out of any direct line of fire. He had perhaps heard the safety catch of my automatic flick off, or else guessed, or heard my tumble to the ground. ‘My’ automatic, note. It was no longer Mac’s, on loan, it was mine, and I jumped for it as a reflex.

  ‘Your friend has arrived and has had a small sleep, and now wishes to continue his journey, if it pleases you, señor.’ He was very polite and courteous, the patron. The wooden walls of the room wouldn’t do much to stop any bullets, after all.

  ‘Unos pequeños cinco minutos,’ I replied, with some pleasure, getting up from the mud floor. I took a cold water shower, drank some more water, cleaned my teeth, scraped a razor over my chin, and then went out into the roadhouse, blinking in the sharp daylight. It was after midday. The place was empty, save for Luis, who was shaved, showered and wearing a fresh set of clothes, no longer a trucker, but a smart tourist type in colourful Brazilian shirt and smart slacks. He looked ready to take on Copacabana single-handed. We shook hands and I sat opposite him. He was eating fried eggs, ham, tomatoes, chipá and drinking coffee. I realized I was hungry and ordered the same.

  ‘What news of Oviedo?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing. There is nothing in any of the Brazilian papers, I looked. It means nothing, of course. We’ll take back roads and tracks to Ciudad del Este – slower but safe.’

  I didn’t ask him how his business dealings had gone, and he didn’t mention my contretemps with the old Nazi, if that’s what he had been. Perhaps the patron hadn’t even bothered to tell him. Up here these sorts of things might indeed be the small change of everyday life, mere bagatelles. My food arrived and I ate hungrily. The day was hot, I realized, and I was sweating mightily: that’s what I told myself anyway. Better for the self-esteem than to admit I was in a steaming great blue funk. I was right out of my depth in all this. I’m a nicely brought up English middle-class travel writer, I pleaded to myself, get me the hell out of here! To Luis I mentioned nothing of my fears. Cojones for breakfast, as a side order, well-done, easy over.

  We smoked a couple of Luis’s Brazilian cigarettes, as a novelty for me, with more coffee. ‘What do you think of them?’ he asked. I thought they tasted disgusting, but I wasn’t about to say so.

  ‘Genuine or false?’ I enquired.

  ‘The cigarettes are genuine but the Brazilian tobacco tax seal on the top is false. It means they can be sold openly in kiosks and cigarette shops across there,’ he indicated his thumb over his shoulder, meaning the border.

  The light was very bright outside and hurt my eyes. My sunglasses were in Asunción, in the burnt-out ruins of the Gran Hotel, the waiters and reception staff all lying dead in pools of their own blood around the swimming pool, where they had run to hide from the rampaging soldiery, drunk on caña and slaughter. I looked around the parking lot, which was red earth pitted and tracked. No sign of Luis’s truck, just a brand new luxury Mercedes-Benz with highly improbable Paraguayan number plates on. The car was covered in red mud, the number plates pristine. It was obvious the old, Brazilian number plates had just come off, probably in this very parking lot.

  ‘Nice,’ I commented.

  ‘For Bolivia,’ said Luis, ‘the market is completely flooded in Asunción.’ This meant we would be heading for Corumba, surely, across the border, and probably then on to Santa Cruz and Bogotõ. Hey, hold on, wait a minute … my fuzzy brain was creaking slowly. This didn’t make sense. Ciudad del Este was in the opposite direction …

  ‘First Ciudad del Este, then Asunción if it’s safe, then the Chaco route to Bolivia,’ he explained.

  ‘And if Asunción isn’t safe …?’

  ‘Don Mac will know.’

  I got in the front passenger seat. The car was very comfortable and smelt of expensive cigar smoke. Some luckless executive in Sao Paulo would at this very moment be filling out his insurance claim for theft. Luis drove slowly and cautiously. The car had to be kept in good shape, no dings or scratches. The air-conditioning purred softly and lush Brazilian music seeped from the stereo. The track was slick with greasy mud: it had been raining while I slept. We passed through dark green jungle on either side, occasional tracks leading off to where loggers had cut timber. It lay stacked in piles ready for collection. Although it wasn’t raining we had to use the windscreen wipers all the time, with the squirter jets, to get the mud off the front glass. After a couple of hours we were completely covered in red goo. We stopped for a piss and some maté: before we left, Luis sluiced a whole bottle of mineral water down over the windscreen to clear it of mud. Twenty minutes later the heavens opened and washed us clean, but turned the track into a mudbath. We slid about hopelessly, the brakes useless. We were crawling in low gear, the wheels spinning up gouts of mud and water.

  ‘I’m going to risk the highway,’ said Luis after several hours of this. ‘We’ll be here until eternity otherwise.’

  ‘Have you got the right papers?’ I asked quietly, meaning for the car.

  ‘Of course, Mac is a professional, not an amateur.’ I shouldn’t have doubted it. After 20 minutes more we emerged from the forest tracks on to a metalled road. The only traffic was slow-moving timber trucks, far apart, some of them hauling a trailer laden with logs as well. I was expecting roadblocks, police checks, army patrols: nothing, nothing at all. We made good time. We had no breakdowns, punctures or visitations from old Nazis. Luis refilled the car with diesel from a plastic jerrycan in the boot. ‘I thought we’d be on forest tracks and nowhere near gas stations,’ he explained. ‘And anyway, they adulterate the diesel up here.’

  ‘Who do?’

  ‘They say it’s the Chinese mafia who control the diesel trade up here, but I don’t know. I’ve heard it clogs up the injectors, the stuff they sell.’

  False cigarettes, so why not false diesel?

  We made excellent time. There was one police roadblock outside Ciudad del Este, but we passed with flying colours. It was pouring with rain again, now, and the town looked dismal, a low garish collection of tawdry shops and stores run by Lebanese, Syrians, Taiwanese, Indians and Koreans: 11,000 businesses had closed here in the last few years, I had read. The Arabs were leaving for Lebanon, Angola and Sao Paulo. The money had flown from Ciudad del Este which had been Ciudad Stroessner during the stronato, when it had been in its prime, a profitable smuggler’s town.

  We ate in a Lebanese restaurant with pictures of Baalbec, and cedars under snow on the mountains of the north on the walls. Felafel, humous, pitta bread, red wine, stuffed vine leaves – incongruous here, for me, right on the border with Brazil, in the middle of the South American jungle. Luis tried to phone Asunción, but the lines were
down, we were told due to the storms. There was a pile of old newspapers in the restaurant, and I went through them slowly. In a week-old copy of Ultima Hora I found a lead article – Lino Oviedo and a hard core of dissident officers from the Paraguayan army had attempted to cross the border, but had been arrested by the Brazilian authorities before they even got anywhere near the crossing. Oviedo was being held under house arrest. The Brazilian police had discovered more than 20 mobile phones in his flat: he had been in direct communication with army officers all over Paraguay. The coup plot had been foiled. All was calm in the country. I checked through the more recent papers – nothing untoward had happened since the arrest, as far as Oviedo was concerned at least. In the north-east, where we had just come from, a group of ‘false army’ in stolen uniforms, had held up a taxi driver and robbed him of US$160,000. The paper didn’t say what a taxi driver had been doing with that sort of money in his cab in the most dangerous smuggler’s zone in the country. There was also a successful capture of a truckload of contraband cigarettes, imported from Brazil, with false Brazilian tobacco tax seals on. I showed this to Luis, who nodded and tapped his own packet, which was identical to those shown in the paper.