‘Si, si – lo mismo,’ he said, confirming the similarity.
There had also been an incident in the House of Deputies – the Parliament. There were graphic photographs to prove it. Four of the deputies had been engaged in a punch-up on the floor of the house, fists flying. The cartoonists, as ever, had the last word. ‘The candidates are asking for another round,’ commented one man. ‘Of the election?’ replied his friend. ‘No, of the boxing match.’
There was absolutely no news in Ultima Hora from anywhere else in the world except Paraguay, but then with what went on inside the borders of the country you didn’t really need any news from elsewhere. The drinking water in the national reservoir had been tested and found dangerously polluted, infected with many diseases. The water in the hospitals had also been tested and found to be infected with typhoid bacillus. I didn’t actually care a damn. I was going to be able to go back home, as I now fondly thought of my little room at the Gran Hotel.
We stayed the night at a quiet motel outside Ciudad del Este run by Syrians and designed for Brazilian tourists coming across the border for a dirty weekend. For a supplement of US$5 you could watch the Playboy TV channel in your room, and for another US$15 they would fix you up with a local whore, in case you had forgotten to bring one with you from Brazil. The owners assumed we were Brazilian, and spoke to us in Portuguese, which I discovered, not to my surprise, that Luis spoke fluently and convincingly. There was a pancake house nearby where you could order waffles and maple syrup, and here we had breakfast the next day. It was still raining, and we heard on the Paraguayan radio news that sections of Highway 7 had collapsed. Heavy rains all over the east of the country, drought and Indians dying of thirst in the Chaco.
I had calmed down again after a good night’s sleep. Shaved, showered and in a fresh shirt I felt human again.
The journey back to Asunción was uneventful, though there were four roadblocks manned by police: we had no problems and Luis paid them no bribes. He looked so smart, and in such an expensive car that they deferred to him visibly. He had taken the vehicle to a garage in Ciudad del Este and paid two boys to wash it down thoroughly with a hose, chamois leathers and buckets of soapy water. It gleamed silver now in the weak sun that broke through the clouds. It was a lovely car, and I left it at the Gran Hotel with a pang. I offered Luis some money for the diesel, but he waved me away with a smile. ‘My pleasure, señor!’ he said, and slid slowly away into the traffic. He was the slowest, most cautious driver I ever saw in Paraguay, which I suppose is one reason why Mac employed him to ferry very valuable contraband vehicles across the border.
My room was exactly as I had left it. I had been away ten days, or was it eleven? My brain was still fuzzy. I opened a bottle of tap water I had put in the fridge before I left. It stank of rotten eggs and I had to pour it down the lavatory and throw the bottle away.
I was able to catch up on the news from the back numbers of the papers the hotel kept. The storms had created problems with the arroyos, or watercourses, in the city. Normally these were clean, but since the rubbish had ceased to be collected people had been dumping their basuras in the arroyos. The flash floods had washed ‘pestilential’ torrents of this fermenting filth into the water system. ‘Las propias autoridades comunales se sienten impotentes,’ the papers commented – the local authorities seemed powerless to deal with the problem. In the slum quarters people were drinking from these polluted sources of water: epidemics were predicted. At the other end of the social scale there had been a ‘Mediterranean night’ of fashion at a smart restaurant, ‘con tops internacionales’. ‘Tops’, I learnt, was the word for international top models. There were mouthwatering photographs in colour in the paper, and the sub-editor who wrote the captions was obviously drooling as well: Clara Baccini, a ‘top’ from Argentina, wore a skimpy G-string and red plastic top – ‘una diosa total’ opined the paper (a total goddess) and who could disagree? Lara Bernasconi strutted her stuff in a blue miniskirt and white top, gaining rapturous praise as ‘una rubia fatal’ – a fatal blonde. For the hippy element Ona Saez wore a long Earth Mother skirt, in the ‘onda folk’ or folk wave. It was all in a good cause. The takings went to the Paraguayan Foundation for Diabetes (Fupadi), one of the world’s less well-known charities. I wondered if ice cream and candles for the saint were included. More high life had been on offer at the ‘Happy hour en el Centro Cultural Anglo-Paraguayo’. The guests had enjoyed ‘un agradable coctel’ – an agreeable cocktail – organized by the Anglo-Paraguayan Chamber of Commerce. Such well-known local Anglophiles as Joel Cano, Werner Baertschi and Juan Enrique Cabala had been in attendance, as well as notables from the British community, including my old chum the British Ambassador. Metro-fun and games.
Having been out of Asunción and seen Concepción and Ciudad del Este I now realized why ‘everyone’ stayed in the capital: there was nothing outside except bush and tiny cow-towns scarcely bigger than villages. It was as if in England, after London, the next range of civic entities were Shaftesbury, Tisbury and Sherborne. It made the phrase ‘el interior’ seem realistic, not an exaggeration. There were two countries – Asunción and the rest.
III
FLOWERING CANNON
‘Kennst du das Land wo die Kannonen blühen?’
‘Do you know the Land where the Cannon flower?’
Erich Kästner
‘There is no other “I” in the world.’
Don Quixote
Twelve
Rumble in the Jungle
‘I have found a man who is willing to take you into the interior,’ said Veronica from Sunny Vacaziones. ‘I cannot guarantee for him – he is an Argentine, you see. He was in the army, the Special Forces. He is making adventure tourism in Paraguay now.’ She paused and returned to her nails, which she was painting vampire-blood scarlet – very fetching. She sat at her swivel chair clad in a miniskirt, and flashed a smile at me, in between nails. ‘If you decide to go with him you can make a report for us here. You can be Mister Experimental. You will be the first from us.’ She gave a little laugh, not without a dash of schadenfreude: I would be going into the interior, not her. Alfie had traded in his Uzi for a pump-action shotgun and was sitting on his chair at the top of the stairs, as ever, waiting for someone to shoot. No luck as yet.
‘What are his qualifications, apart from being an ex-Special Forces commando?’ I enquired.
‘He has a Japanese jeep. He has a team of experts he takes with him. He has a certificate in Tourism Studies from Asunción University. And a very big, professional-sized moustache – Don Bigote!’ Veronica gave a sexy giggle, by which I assumed she quite fancied the proposed guide. I was trying to imagine what the questions in the Finals exams at the local Faculty of Tourism Studies would be like.
Question 1. If your client is shot, but not fatally, by a member of the armed forces, at a roadblock, what do you do?
Question 2. How do you get an export licence for a client wishing to send four or more underage female Indian slaves back to his home country?
Question 3. In case of vampire bat bites in the interior, can you tell rabid from non-rabid bats? Illustrate, if necessary.
Question 4. In the middle of a remote swamp near the Bolivian border your client suddenly finds a candirú lodged up his penis: what do you do? No illustrations, please.
Question 5. A group of false army in uniform are engaged in a machine-gun battle with genuine police in plain clothes over a truckload of genuine cigarettes with false tax stamps being smuggled into Brazil in a truck stolen in Argentina but with genuine Paraguayan number plates. What do you do, why, and how quickly do you think you can do it?
Question 6. How can you administer anti-bubonic plague serum intravenously in the middle of a tropical storm, in a tent, with the patient in a hammock, without electricity for light? Show with diagrams your equipment and fingerspitzengefühl procedures.
Question 7. Your client insists on wearing Authentic Radical Liberale blue clothes and scarf a
t a Colorado Party National Day Rally where everyone else is wearing Party red. How do you incapacitate him without causing offence?
Question 8. During an Oviedista demonstration which becomes violent, your group is dispersed and lost in the crowd. Later, three of them are arrested by the police for alleged anti-government insults: none of them speaks Spanish or Guarani. They have been badly beaten, have lost consciousness, are losing blood rapidly, with many broken bones. How can you help? Show useful bandage and tourniquet methods, if relevant. Give unlisted phone numbers if required.
Question 9. A nervous client insists on an armed guard with a bazooka joining the party to San Juan Caballero on a ‘Smuggler’s Paradise Booze-Cruise Weekend’ expedition. The others say this will only attract bandits and refuse to allow it: is compromise possible? Use your negotiating powers.
Question 10. For self-defence against puma attacks in the Chaco do you favour: a) sub-machine gun: b) pump-action shotgun: c) running shoes with spikes? Give evidence from past fatal and non-fatal attacks of this sort.
Do not write on both sides of the paper at the same time. Remember to answer all the questions. Students caught cheating will have their private parts excised with a machete by the Dean of the Faculty at a special, televised event – tickets available for spectators, by request. Viva el sport.
Doubtless the Tourism Faculty motto would be taken from the dying words of Mariscal Solano López: ‘Morir con mi patria’ – To die with my country. Or perhaps ‘Morir con los clientes’ – To die with my clients.
A mere half-hour’s wait after Veronica’s phone call saw Marcello Warnes, Mr Adventure Tourism himself, bound up the steps and into the office. He looked the part: lean and wiry, clad in high boots, camouflage trousers, with flak waistcoat, and a broad-brimmed hat: his moustache alone told you he meant business. We shook hands warmly. ‘He speaks English, too,’ said Veronica proudly. ‘Birdwatching,’ said Marcello, ‘forest walks. No animals.’ This proved to be the extent of his English, in fact, but never mind. You could tell he’d be a sound man in the jungle just by looking at him.
A hitherto quite unsuspected figure, the jefe of Sunny Vacaziones, now horned in on the action, coming downstairs from a hidden office to claim all the credit and whatever commission might be going. We adjourned to the conference room, where the jefe lit a pipe, Marcello chain-smoked cigarettes, I puffed a cheroot, and Veronica was despatched to make coffee, she having done all the work: macho South America, three hombres being mucho hombre, cojones in the ascendant. It only needed a pack of greasy cards and Clint Eastwood in a poncho and you could have rolled the cameras on ‘Paraguay Zoo Quest Impossible – the Gambler’s Tale’.
We thrashed out the details, which boiled down to US$35 a day, all in, paid in advance, day by day, in US dollars, to Marcello, and no dodgy ones, matey. As the minimum weekly wage was US$30, often paid a year in arrears, if at all, this being what police, teachers and government doctors earned, Marcello was on to a good thing. And so was I, which made us all happy. Whatever commission Marcello was going to have to pay to Mr Pipe Smoker I didn’t enquire. ‘We will charge him nothing,’ said Veronica to me, afterwards, when Marcello was out of earshot: I wish I could have believed that, I really do.
‘You need clothes, boots, jungle gear,’ Marcello told me, and so off we drove in his Japanese jeep to the market to get me kitted up. The number plate was marked TF in white lettering, unlike Paraguayan plates which use Colorado red. TF stands for Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. How had a jeep from the Canaries got to Paraguay? Don’t ask – I didn’t. The vehicle was not Marcello’s, but another adventure guide’s. Possibly the owner was indisposed, in gaol, on the run or buried in a shallow grave outside San Pedro Caballero. I genuinely didn’t want to know: he might have been wrapped up in a tarpaulin in the back as far as I cared, dead of rabid vampire bat bites. Adventure tourism in Paraguay is not for pussies or big girl’s blouses, which is why I was completely out of my depth. Never mind – with Marcello anything might be possible. He had captured an anaconda in a lake, he told me, and had video footage to prove it, a-wrasslin’ the critter in the mud. This was the kind of wildlife hugging London editors would die for: I wasn’t actually going to try wrestling with an anaconda myself, but I’d be quite happy to photograph Marcello doing so, from a safe distance. What the hell, he was being paid US$35 a day, after all, which I suspect would buy you a whole heap of writhing anacondas the way the Paraguayan economy was going at present.
The market was quiet. Too quiet. We seemed to be the only shoppers. The stallkeepers positively fawned on us. ‘Falta de plata,’ said Marcello – shortage of cash. He used a heavily accented rioplatano – River Plate Spanish, which I was unfamiliar with: plata (silver) for cash, rico (rich) for tasty food, and so on. He pronounced ‘llama’ (call) as ‘chama’, and ‘yanqui’ (US citizen) as ‘chanqui’. In the back of the van were his two experts, both young Paraguayan lads, called Carlos and Hernando. Hernando stayed with the jeep to prevent vandalism, while the three of us scoured the market for my kit. All three of the adventure team wore quasi-military gear, and with the jeep we looked uncomfortably like my vision of a traditional South American death squad. It became evident that Marcello’s idea of appropriate kit for me was paramilitary – camo trousers and jacket, army boots, cowboy hat. I gave in on the boots but resisted the camouflage gear, to which I have a deep-rooted civilian aversion. Marcello didn’t insist. ‘You need proper socks,’ he claimed, and I compromised on these, buying a pair of long black efforts imported from Argentina, brand name ‘MacGregor’, fabrica nacional, worst luck. These proved to be a complete disaster: on the first outing they wore into ruinous holes, and when I took them off the dye had run all over my feet and legs, staining me with indelible dark purple, which I was still trying to scrub off months later in England: the Curse of the MacGregors. I could not convince my NHS doctor who treated my festering bat-bitten toes that the lurid, streaky discoloration was not part and parcel of the whole vampire experience. He even took some photos, saying he might give a paper on the subject at a medical conference in Glasgow dedicated to ‘Bizarre Conditions I have Treated’. The boots were also an unqualified disaster. They were made of plastic, sweated like hell, and rubbed two enormous blisters on my heels in ten minutes in the jungle. Off they came, and back went the desert boots for the rest of the trip. None of the kit Marcello tried to get me to buy was necessary: he just wanted me to look the part, i.e. macho and South American and death squad-like.
Fashion follows power in authoritarian societies. Jewish prisoners in Belsen copied the kneeboots of the SS in blackened cardboard, because they were ‘smart’ according to Bruno Bettelheim. The Jewish Police in the Warsaw Ghetto tried to look as much like the Nazi German troops as possible: in the Ghetto Uprising they fought with rifles alongside the Germans, against their fellow Jews. In Paraguay, where the army had power and status, poor, marginal operators like Marcello and his crew copied army style: it helped them with police roadblocks, as a peaked hat and chauffeur’s uniform helps professional drivers with the cops in England – men in uniform sticking together. I am resolutely non-uniform and anti-militarist, so I stuck to my civvies, which was actually worse. I looked like the German torturer from la Technica, and the cops all asked Marcello, ‘Are you working for him?’ meaning me, chief torturer, the beast staring out of the window, pretending the cops weren’t there. Marcello said ‘Yes’, of course, and didn’t even have to pay any bribes. They never dared ask me for my ID papers, either, though they insisted Marcello and his crew showed theirs. I was about the same age as the President of Paraguay, after all, and fleshy with obviously evil living, accoutred with a thick, grey torturer’s moustache in a land where the Indians had no facial hair; I was white, European and wore blue clothes: probably a high up in the Radical Liberales, who were now maybe in alliance with the Oviedistas: Better leave him alone, they obviously thought. I had my own death squad, in semi-uniform, driving a foreign-registered jeep. Their e
yes told it all – they were afraid of us. We were always waved on hastily, and sometimes saluted into the bargain.
There was a new piece of graffiti on the walls of Asunción, new to me anyway: LIBERALES + OVIEDISTAS = KILLER TEAM. Another read ‘Tenemos dos tipos de politicos – los incapaces, y los capaces de todo’ – we have two types of politicians – incapables and those capable of anything.
The plan was to head for a tract of tropical Brazilian rainforest far to the south-east of Paraguay, which was now National Park, and therefore notionally protected: here I might see birdlife, butterflies – for which the rainforest is famous – and perhaps small animals. We would take tents and cooking gear. If this expedition was a success, more ambitious endeavours in the Chaco might be undertaken, weather permitting. Once the rains came in the west of the country, the Chaco turned from a dustbowl to a quagmire, and movement of any sort, even in a four-wheel drive would be more or less impossible. This first trip would just be for two nights and three days, to see how we got on. The Chaco expedition would be a major undertaking, requiring, Marcello claimed, two vehicles, and many of his team, perhaps half a dozen, to avoid getting bogged down in the mud which by then we would find everywhere. On one thing Marcello was adamant: he had to be paid his US$35 in advance, in cash. Without this he wouldn’t budge. I suspected a dispiriting history of non-paying clientes lay behind this intransigence.
At 6.30am prompt he appeared at the hotel with his jeep, camping gear in the back, along with Carlos: for 35 bucks you only got one of his team. In the early morning light I counted out his first 35 dollars: he counted it too, with much satisfaction, and away we rolled out of the city and into the country, heading east. One of the few compensations for getting older is that one develops a sort of prophetic power about how events will pan out. I had noticed when shopping in the market that the needle on the fuel gauge of the jeep was almost touching empty. It was obvious from Marcello’s general comportment that he was completely broke: the 35 dollars I had just given him was all the money he would have on him. The fuel needle was still touching empty when he collected me. Within half an hour it became apparent that he was desperately looking for a petrol station that was open at 7am. He found one, eventually, but, as I suspected, he had no guaranis to pay. No use looking at Carlos – he wouldn’t have a bus fare on him. There was nowhere out here beyond the city to change the dollars I had just paid Marcello. I had foreseen all this, and brought 35 dollars’ worth of guaranis, and a local paper giving the current exchange rates. My offer to change the money back was accepted with alacrity, and my dollar notes came back to me again; so we were able to fill up on fuel, and the two of them re-equip with a carton of cigarettes each. Both were chain-smokers. Maté they had in plenty, and Carlos was the matero in the back with the thermos of hot water: in fact this was his only role.
Paradise With Serpents Page 24