Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  ‘¿Te gusta un maté, Roberto?’ Marcello would cry out happily, and I would reply ‘¿Cómo no?’ and Carlos would get weaving in the back.

  So after a successful pit-stop we set off again, tanks full, Marcello in fine fettle and very cheerful. ‘E noble’, he said, referring to the jeep, and tapped it affectionately on the dashboard, as if indeed it was a noble, faithful steed. Suddenly, he became Don Quixote, the car Rosinante, and Carlos, Sancho Panza. I, well, I was a stray picaresque character whom they had come across in their wanderings, a foreign savant with a comical accent and outlandish notions. And this characterization as the man of La Mancha was not inaccurate: Marcello was a great romantic and a true adventurer. He had chosen to come to Paraguay from Argentina because it offered an exciting outdoor life in the tropics. He was the first person I had met in the country who didn’t constantly run the place and people down, which was refreshing. I couldn’t help feeling that in spite of the problems the country was extraordinary and the people basically decent. Marcello had travelled all over Brazil, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru and Paraguay, as well as Argentina, so he had a subcontinental scale of comparison. He was also a realist as well as a romantic: he knew the price of everything and the conditions of the countries. He was the first person I could have a sensible conversation with about practical matters, without being engulfed in a tide of rhetoric. How much did horses cost? US$45 bought a good one; a cow was about US$20, though much cheaper in the depths of the Chaco. There was hardly any crime in the Chaco, he said, and the people were the best in Paraguay – honest and friendly, helpful and practical. He had a friend who had bought 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) of land in the Chaco for US$11,000 – and he had paid too much for it at that price. He went there by motorbike. A Frenchwoman Marcello knew had a bigger rancho, in the more fertile north-east, this of 35,000 hectares (85,000 acres), which had a lake in it half the size of Lake Ypacaraí, on which San Bernadino was built. This lake had 30,000 caimans in it. She wanted to sell the property, if I was interested, for US$300,000. The price difference highlighted the fertile soils of the east with the barren, semi-arid wastes of the mineral-poor earth of the Chaco. I asked how the Frenchwoman knew she had 30,000 caiman in her lake. Because she had an aerial photograph taken from a plane, had it blown up in sections, and then had them counted. Some Taiwanese were thinking of starting a handbag factory on the property, so they wanted to know how many there were, Marcello told me matter-of-factly. But of course.

  Marcello much preferred the Chaco to anywhere else in Paraguay, though he also liked the deserts of southern Chile, and parts of Bolivia, too. He would have loved to own a property there with horses if he had any money, which, of course, he hadn’t. US$11,000 – a sum many people in England could put on their credit card – was an impossible figure for Marcello. He had been to the furthest extremes of the Paraguayan Chaco, to the National Park which was half in Bolivia and half in Paraguay. The size of this last enclave of natural, unexplored wildlife was highlighted by the time it took the Paraguayan Park Ranger to drive round the outside of his half of it – a day and a half in optimum conditions on a dirt track. This would mean a circumference of three days’ driving at least, for the whole park. The wildlife had learnt to move from side to side, exploiting the national boundaries of the two countries, in what ecologists have dubbed a ‘sanctuary corridor’: humans, too. This park was the last refuge in Paraguay of Indians uncontacted by Western culture: they were known as the Moros, and were part of the Ayoreo people. They knew whites, mestizos and tamed Indians existed, but made strenuous efforts to avoid them, for which they could only be congratulated, for contact with Western society meant slavery or death for forest Indians. The appalling abuses by fundamentalist Christian outfits such as the New Tribes Mission, exposed by Norman Lewis in The Missionaries, were still going on all over South America – slave trading under the guise of Christianization. To its credit the Catholic Church had spoken out many times against these abuses. I asked Marcello if he had seen any Moros. ‘No one has seen them – only their arrows – but I have indeed seen those. We tried to enter the forest, an equipped party of us, with machetes to hack our way in. It was impossible. We travelled one kilometre in one day and were completely exhausted. The Moros fired on us with bows and arrows, but were invisible in the forest. We retreated.’

  To drive from the Paraguayan side of the border to San Rafael, the first town on the Bolivian side, took about two and a half hours, to Santa Cruz, a proper town with an airport and flight connections to Bogotá and Miami, eight hours, or an hour and a half by Cessna light plane, which was how the ranchers travelled, he told me. They were oriented entirely towards Bolivia and Santa Cruz, the ranchers, because it was nearer and more civilized than Asunción.

  The Chaco was the site of another of Paraguay’s insane wars, this time in the 1930s, with Bolivia, for possession of this barren semi-desert, which neither of them could really use. Reputedly, there was oil there worth fighting over, but none had ever been found. At great sacrifice and loss of life, not to mention the usual military heroism, Paraguay won this war, and so gained the Chaco, though no Paraguayan of Guarani origin ever went near if they could help it. The conscripts forced to guard the place in little fortines were said not to be given ammunition for their rifles, in case they shot their officers. Indians, Mennonites and those seeking large, open spaces, and magnificent wildlife did live there. David Attenborough’s Zoo Quest had been filmed in the Chaco, and this was probably most people in England’s vision of Paraguay. There was an air taxi you could get from your rancho to Santa Cruz – it cost US$110, Marcello told me – so you didn’t even need your own plane. You just called them up on your radio, and over they popped to collect you. You could leave your estancia in the morning, see your dentist or gynaecologist in Miami late that afternoon, and be back home the next day, having done a little shopping. For large, bulky items such as bags of cement, timber baulks, iron joists, etc., for your buildings you hired a truck in Santa Cruz, which rumbled very slowly across on the dirt tracks, taking perhaps three days to get to you, the armed driver and guard sleeping on board, locked in to foil puma attacks. Some enterprising rucksack travellers came across on these trucks, but not many. This was the real pioneering life, but with modern comforts if you wanted them – solar energy, fridge-freezers, imported delicacies, swimming pools, and even exotic wildlife.

  In Colombia, Peru and Bolivia it was a foible of the rich drug barons to import shiploads of wild animals from Africa for their ranches. Pablo Escaba of Medellin notoriety in Colombia had the best known of these, with not just lions, tigers, rhino, elephants, zebra, giraffe and all the rest, but also full-size concrete casts of various dinosaurs as well. There were one or two of these African-style dude ranches in the Paraguayan and Argentinian Chaco, Marcello told me, though he was vague as to exactly where they were. He had heard they were owned by Germans, which figured. The vast Chaco ranches were virtually small independent fiefdoms. No police or army ever went there, and the gauchos were all armed. Both the Nazi Party and the SS had bought such ranches before and during the Second War as potential bolt-holes, and transferred the ownership into the names of trustworthy Paraguayans or Argentinians of German descent and fascist sympathies. Particularly favoured were properties which straddled the borders, estancias with land in both Paraguay and Bolivia, or Paraguay and Argentina. Effectively these were immune from any sort of raid, and a perfect base for smuggling. It is on one such ranch that Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, was reputed to have lived for many years. To this day these are secretive, forbidden places, to which outsiders never go. Very easy to be disappeared in the Chaco. During the stronato the army used to take prisoners suspected of subversion up in planes and drop them over the Chaco: the wild beasts made short work of their broken bodies. The only commercial airline in existence in Paraguay was run by the army, though I had not heard of them throwing any passengers out, but you never know …

  At one point, in Asunción, when I
had become frustrated about not being able to get any transport to the interior, I had suggested to Gabriella that perhaps I should buy a couple of horses and set off riding round the country. ‘You would not survive for more than a couple of hours. You would be run over by cars or trucks, or be shot,’ she commented. I now asked Marcello if this sort of horseback trip would be possible. ‘Nothing easier. You would ride from ranch to ranch, and be welcome everywhere, to stay the night, to eat and talk and sleep. You could travel for six months or a year right round Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina doing this.’ Urban Paraguay and rural Paraguay rarely met. Gabriella, I realized now, knew nothing about the interior and cared less, like most Asunceños. As with most Londoners or Parisians, she never left her suburban enclave. Asking her about the Chaco was like asking someone from Notting Hill about the Orkneys. Riding from estancia to estancia was how Cunninghame Graham and W. H. Hudson, the two best-known writers of rural South America in English, had travelled: but that had been more than 100 years ago. I wondered how much of Marcello’s confidence in horseback travel was based on experience, and how much on an ‘If only I could …’ fantasy. If he had the money, the horses and was not saddled with a wife and son in the capital, there is no doubt this is the sort of trip he would have loved to take. His other great fantasy was going to the Orient, to Turkey, India, Malaya and China. As I had been to all these places and knew them well I was able to repay his information on Paraguay with stories and reminiscences of interest to him. Perhaps most outlandish though, and in some cases downright unbelievable to both Marcello and Carlos, were my descriptions of life in ‘Socialist Europe’, as they called it, meaning the European Union. ‘Is it true that hospitals and medicine are free in England?’ Marcello asked, echoing Mac. Was it really true that black African illegal immigrants were given rent-free flats, and money from the British government to live on? I was able to tell them even more fantastic things than that. British Customs officials didn’t take propinas or incentivos, but instead seized and crushed in great machines British smugglers’ cars coming from France or Belgium – part of the EU – if they had too much alcohol or tobacco on board. Cigarettes cost nearly US$10 a packet in England (30 cents in Paraguay) and a bottle of caa US$18 (US$1.20 in Paraguay). The government took about half of all your pay automatically before you got it. Cameras by the roadsides took photos of your car number plate and you were sent a fine through the post for speeding. The police, invisible in offices, watched the citizens as they walked through the towns via thousands of hidden cameras, ready to pounce. Government officials were employed at a salary of US$55,000 per annum to encourage people to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. Unemployed single mothers got a government flat free and a sum of money to live on, plus more money for every child they produced. If you were wounded in a crime – a terrorist bomb, say – the government paid you compensation: if a hospital which treated you free made a mistake you could sue them and win millions of dollars compensation. Men who kissed girls who then complained to the police that they hadn’t wanted to be kissed could be sent to gaol for sexual harassment. You could be fired from your job for making a sexist remark to a woman in the office.

  Seen in the reflection of their astonished eyes, modern Britain seemed a combination of Kafka and Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Monty Python, which it must be said, it is, though few who live there choose to admit it, out of amour propre and simple blindness bred of insularity, and the slow accretion of restrictions and regulations over the decades.

  After a few hours the two of them were reeling under this barrage of incredible information. ‘You must have read about all this in the papers?’ I demanded. ‘Other tourists must have told you about Europe?’ Marcello was wearing a natty pair of leather driving gloves with the fingers cut off, a present from a French client. ‘We have read such things, but they appear to us as newspaper chantar. We cannot actually believe such things could really happen. It is like H. G. Wells, science fiction – cameras filming your car number plate, for example, police with spy cameras hidden in the streets. And other clients were not open and free with information, as you are, Roberto. They sit like so,’ here Marcello crouched in a timid, rat-like hunch, so redolent of the gringo tourist out of his depth, ‘and they say nothing.’ I had lived for years in Australia, and had picked up free-and-easy colonial manners. I talked and asked questions boldly, as people did in South America, too. ‘You are not like a gringo at all,’ a Mexican had told me in London, once. ‘You don’t even speak Spanish with a gringo accent, but like an Italian.’ This was because I’d learnt Italian formally, at school, but had merely picked Spanish up haphazardly, and rather poorly, living in Spain.

  There was no doubt that England and the EU were far more strange and exotic to Marcello and Carlos than what I told them of Turkey and India, which were, after all, Third World countries like Paraguay. Once out of the vicinity of Asunción, we might, in fact, have been in rural Java circa 1974, when I last travelled there. Slow-moving oxcarts, a very few Japanese pick-up trucks, dirt roads, tiny shacks by the road selling fruit and drinks and cigarettes, kids in bare feet, chickens scratching in the dirt, mud huts with thatched roofs, tropical heat and light.

  We stopped after a couple of hours at a wooden, steep-pitchroofed Bavarian chalet, run not by Germans, but by Paraguayans, who had simply liked the German style and copied it. It was a simple rustic café. Marcello had pointed to the pines planted all round German-owned estancias we passed. I told him the pine was a typically German tree, and that they probably made them feel more at home. He hadn’t realized this, never having been to Germany. We had chipá and coffee, and sat out on wooden benches in the garden. There was a view, down across forests and bush. We had climbed up a little bit, and there was a vista. I asked if we could buy fruit, but we could not. I had, so far, not seen one of the orange trees for which Paraguay had once been famous. There is often one thing you say, something you tell people in foreign countries, that they flatly do not believe. Recently, in Australia, I had told friends that in England now, when you rang up your bank, say, or a large corporation with a query, you would often not be speaking to someone in England, but to an Indian in a call centre in Bangalore or Madras. All of these friends had been to Europe, to England, were educated people, but they just didn’t believe this: they thought I was bullshitting them – that was their word for it. Nothing I could say would change their minds. Now, at this short coffee break, I told Marcello something I knew instantly he did not believe. We had been talking about fruit. ‘In England,’ I said, ‘in the supermarkets, much of the fruit and vegetables are sold already packaged up, in plastic, sealed close. The packets have dates on them: when the date expires, the supermarket throws this food out, regardless of whether or not it is rotten. They reduce the price first, but if no one buys by the time the shop closes, it is all chucked away.’ Marcello and Carlos both looked stunned at this. Shops throwing away food? Impossible!

  ‘Why,’ Marcello asked, ‘if the fruit is sometimes still good? They could sell the good fruit.’

  ‘The developed West works according to sets of rules, complex sets of rules devised by small committees of people. These rules are then carried out by junior staff who do not question them at all. That is not their job: they don’t think, they just do what the rules tell them. If asked, they just parrot what they have been told. There need to be clear dates to show when produce should be replaced on shelves: so when the date expires, the food is thrown out, regardless. The shops could not have people going round guessing if food was OK or not. Bread, pastries, cakes, they all have these dates – out they go when the date expires.’

  ‘But it is a form of madness,’ said Marcello, still trying to grasp the idea of good food being thrown away by shops. I could see in his eyes he was trying to believe me, trying to work out a reason he could believe in. ‘Surely poor people will come and take this food that is thrown away?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Sometimes, when it is thrown away into skips or du
mpsters at the back of the supermarket, a group of people called “Freegans” come and search through for food they can take away and eat. But often the thrown-away food is taken immediately to the rubbish tip and buried.’

  Marcello and Carlos looked at each other and then looked away into the middle distance: I could tell they thought I was bullshitting them. The conversation died.

  The countryside was scantily peopled. After Villarrica, a small town with oxcarts and turn-of-the-century stucco houses painted in faint colourwash, we entered a zone, on small roads, tracks really, which was virtually unpopulated. From time to time, once every half an hour, say, we would pass a horseman in a cowboy hat, riding on a saddle made of a sheep’s fleece, his stirrups worn very long. They always saluted us with a casual wave, these riders, as they cantered loosely along. We never passed any motor vehicles. I kept asking Marcello, ‘Have we entered the National Park yet?’ ‘I don’t think so,’ he would reply. The term ‘National Park’ in European or North American terms implies a firm boundary with the outside land, park rangers in uniform, noticeboards with rules and regulations, information displays, camp and picnic sites, scenic views and panoramas, snack bars, restaurants and lavatory facilities – and hordes of tourists in cars. Not in Paraguay. It became evident as we advanced into virgin bush and then rainforest that ‘National Park’ was just a notion someone or other once had in Asunción: the land was exactly the same as the surrounding countryside; there were no signs, no rangers, no rules, no facilities – just the occasional squatter who had built a shack and was farming a hectare or so in a desultory fashion. There was no government presence at all. Much agricultural land had been abandoned, Marcello told me: much had not been farmed since the end of the War of the Triple Alliance, which had depopulated the country. A few people came in and squatted: no one bothered to move them off the land. There was no police or army presence, scarcely any human occupation. The difference between grazed land and bush was hard to tell. There were cattle here and there, then long stretches of bush, then more cattle, then a few scratched fields, the odd bitter orange tree – the fruit used to season meat, Marcello told me. I assumed the land must be infertile or lack water, but this wasn’t the case. Could you grow avocados, lemons, sugar cane, pineapples and so forth? Yes, you could, Marcello replied, but no one bothered. Even on the cultivated land few crops were grown – a little mandioca, some bananas, tomatoes and peppers, maize for chipá, sweet potatoes, that was it.