The great plantations that the Jesuits had organized had fallen away completely. I thought of V. S. Naipaul’s comment to Paul Theroux in Uganda in the 1960s, pointing out that the Africans never used the paved paths the Europeans had imposed on the land, but followed their own tracks or dirt roads: the European paved ways would disappear when the Europeans left, he remarked – they were not of the people or the country. The same had been the case with the Guarani; the great cathedrals, organs, violins, carved stone statuary, all the huge agricultural surpluses the Jesuits taught the Guarani to produce had all fallen away and vanished when the Jesuits had been expelled. Very little of what the Spanish had introduced to rural Paraguay had survived: cattle and horses, a few orange trees, open-air Roman Catholic chapels – Marcello crossed himself devoutly every time we passed the latter if they were on the right-hand side, but not those on the left – a curious omission, I thought. Asunción still had the ruins of a European imposed culture, falling apart daily, but the countryside had almost nothing left.
We passed a tree in impressive full yellow blossom. Among the monochrome grey-green of the rest of the foliage it stood out. ‘What is that tree?’ I demanded. There was a long and detailed discussion between Marcello and Carlos about this: eventually Marcello opined, not very confidently, that it might well be a lapacho. It was a lapacho, and I had asked this as a test question to see how much natural history they had learnt at Tourism College. Carlos also claimed to have a certificate in Tourism Studies. I knew it was a lapacho because Ultima Hora had done a recent supplement, featuring dozens of lapachos in blossom – a traditional symbol of the Paraguayan spring.
Once well and truly in the Brazilian rainforest proper, on authentically rugged dirt tracks, Marcello took us to a high point where we could see for miles – into Brazil itself in fact. The whole vista was a sea of green trees, not a house, road, pylon or any other indication of human habitation. I told Marcello that there were probably only two or three places in Western Europe where you could see so far with no sign of man, so crowded was the continent. ‘I could never live in Europe,’ he said with great seriousness. ‘In South America we are free, we do what we want, no one interferes with our personal liberty. Our politicians are corrupt, the army and police oppressive, and we are poor – but we are free.’
‘Free to be oppressed, to be unemployed, to starve, to let the rich pay no taxes, to die without medicine, hospitals, social security,’ I added.
‘But free, still, in a way Europe is not. The world you describe is a form of slavery, the slavery of the individual under a powerful bureaucratic state – a brutal master.’
I agreed with him, actually, but I thought – no, I was sure – I could not live in the Paraguayan form of exploitative freedom, the freedom of the rich to do as they liked to the poor. In Europe I was seen by many as excessively individualist, as a libertarian who disliked government regulations and controls: I realized in Paraguay that I was a child of the British Welfare State, and that Paraguayan anarchy shocked me. I had asked if Marcello and Carlos were going to be armed, before we left. ‘No,’ said Marcello, but he meant with guns. Both of them carried machetes and large knives. I had left Mac’s automatic in the safe in my room at the hotel.
The high spot of the expedition, after driving through several flooded rivers and getting satisfactorily bogged in one of them, which involved much heaving and four-wheel-drive revving and splattered mud everywhere, was a modest waterfall in a glade by an abandoned Franciscan retreat. There were beautiful blue and white butterflies hovering and fluttering by the waterfall. It was here that my boots came off for ever, and I realized the disaster of the MacGregor socks. One of the things I had read about Paraguay was the well-worn traveller’s tale of coming across abandoned orange groves, with the fruit lying at the base of the tree, free for anyone who wanted to pick it up. Oranges cost me 25 pence each in England. Yet here they were, all around the deserted Franciscan retreat, orange trees with fruit everywhere, on the branches and on the ground, rotting away. We helped ourselves: they were very sweet and juicy, with many large pips. The land all around was fertile and had been farmed: the Franciscan retreat was in good condition, with a watertight roof, yet the whole place had been abandoned. It was baffling. Here was a country with a poor, urban population which begged and stole, and fertile land was untilled and unoccupied. Stroessner had tried to deport the poor back on to the land, but it never worked: they made their way back into the cities again. The great urbanization of the world is an extraordinary phenomenon. In 1900, in France, 90% of the country’s population lived and earned their living in the country; 100 years later, the figure was 90% of the population living in the cities, only 10% living in the country. ‘Desertification’ was the term French sociologists used for the abandonment of the countryside. On a smaller scale this drift was happening in Paraguay as well.
We camped nearby, Carlos and Marcello preparing a supper of pasta, tomato sauce, corned beef and maté – gaucho fare – on a small portable iron stove which was fired by wood. We sat around the fire afterwards and talked. It had been a good day, the best I’d had in Paraguay. The sheer emptiness of the countryside still surprised me. Marcello had no explanation.
Before leaving England I had asked an old Paraguay hand about the climate. ‘Sometimes it’s very hot, sometimes very cold, it depends,’ he had told me. This was less than helpful. Being the tropics, in spring, I had not brought a thick jumper: I now realized this was a mistake. Instead of camo trousers and plastic boots, Marcello should have pointed out that it gets cold at night in the bush. As soon as the sun went down I began to shiver. I borrowed an extra t-shirt from Marcello but this wasn’t enough. The sleeping bag was fairly useless. It was a cold night, close to freezing: I hardly slept. The other two shared a tent. I had one to myself. I was up before dawn, stamping and walking about to get the circulation going. There were no birds and no animals: I expect they had heard and seen us, and made good their escape.
The coffee and biscuits with yesterday’s bread and some jam was our breakfast. Then came the problems. The jeep wouldn’t start: we were in the middle of nowhere. I thought it was probably the damp, or else the battery was flat. Marcello fiddled with the motor for an hour, then two. Eventually, we tried push-starting it. After a long time the engine coughed sadly into action and we headed away. The most urgent task was now to find a garage – the nearest one turned out to be three hours’ drive away, and Marcello didn’t dare stop in case he couldn’t get the jeep started again. Then, as it started to spit with rain, the windscreen wipers failed. This was not a vehicle that was ever going to make it to the Chaco and back, I had decided, so this trip had prevented a costly mistake. We made our way back on to the main Brazil-Asunción highway, just two lanes, grandly called an ‘International Route’ and found a small wayside garage with one bay in a tin shed. All along this highway were the remains of horrendous Third World car crashes – piles of mangled metal. Trucks rumbled along slowly, and pick-up trucks of ancient vintage slid about in the mud. The garage owner and his attendants dropped what they were doing and immediately fell to inspecting the Japanese jeep with foreign number plates, driven by, they assumed, a genuine Spaniard. Marcello corrected them, an Argentine, actually, but they were still fascinated: foreigners evidently never came to these tiny places. I kept in the background, and listened in to the conversation. The bonnet of the jeep was taken off and the windscreen wiper motor examined: it was defective and would need replacing. This meant a return to Asunción. The failure to start might be the alternator – the power in the battery was low – or it could be the battery itself. We spent at least an hour and a half at the garage, and the staff were as helpful and obliging as you could possibly want, albeit they could do nothing for us. They charged Marcello nothing, nor did he offer anything. The bonnet was screwed back on again, and we drove away, the battery starting us OK this time. It was obvious that the Guarani had a real feeling for machines and a light, dexterous touch with t
hings mechanical. And they were so helpful and obliging. I thought of England and English garages – the rudeness and disobliging service, the slowness and poor workmanship, the vastly inflated bills: all these were a direct result of the acute shortage of skilled labour in Britain, and the century-old tradition of working-class bloody-mindedness, due to high wages and high demand. Even a lousy mechanic could quit and get a job anywhere the next day. Why bother being polite?
Marcello was now worried about the jeep, but we had another two days to go and he was not about to forgo his 70 dollars to come. So we made for a Scout Camp he knew, near the main road, where we could sleep in wooden huts, and where there were people who could push us in the morning if we got stuck. We cooked by oil lamp in the kitchens, and went to bed early. There was no electricity. They jeep did start in the morning, though slowly and sluggishly. We ambled back towards Asunción, stopping at San Bernadino, the German resort town on Lake Ypacaraí, where Marcello had caught the anaconda. The real estate in San Bernadino, a neat bourgeois town of well-kept gardens and pleasant villas, was the most expensive in Paraguay, Marcello thought. All was not well, however: the local robbers had been stealing the pumps from the swimming pools, and the local police patrol car was out of action as thieves had taken its wheels and tyres, leaving it up on bricks. There were photos in the paper. On the outskirts was a large imitation Arabian Nights palace, now abandoned: it had been a casino, a folly of the stronato years. If I was forced at pistol point to live in Paraguay I would probably choose San Bernadino. Or would I? We sat at the lakeside and had a fish and chip late lunch, Marcello’s treat. We had seen no birds and no animals except a small peccary or tapir that had run away when Marcello and Carlos had tried to chase it, deep in the jungle.
There were pedalos moored by the shore, those two-person pedal-boats I remembered so well from my childhood days in Italy. Pedalos had been banned in the EU, I had read, because of ‘safety concerns’. A steamer ploughed slowly across the lake from Aregua on the other side. As it approached, I was aware of a terrible sewer stench rising from the lake waters.
‘The lake drains nowhere. And the settlers simply run their sewer pipes straight into the lake,’ Marcello told me, matter-offactly. Our fish and chips arrived. ‘Is this local fish?’ I asked, before touching mine. ‘No, it is all imported from the USA – and the chips,’ Marcello replied, tucking in. And it tasted bland enough to be true. Lake Cacapipi, I renamed the place silently. San Bernadino, home to émigré Nazis and the cholera morbus – a winning combination surely? Most expensive real estate in the country, too. Up shit creek with Dr Mengele – great selling point, you’d have to agree. I’d love to hear a local real estate agent’s pitch. ‘God repairs at night all the damage that the Argentinians cause during the day’ is a traditional porteño saying, to excuse their polluting ways: but, of course, He doesn’t, never mind what the Paraguayans get up to. God, as they say, has retired, abandoned humanity, and is now working on a much less ambitious project.
The traffic was heavy as we approached Asunción in the early evening rush: cars, jeeps, motorbikes, trucks all jockeying madly for right of way, egos high, common sense way down low. Like competitors in a demented paraplegic Olympics, the city’s cripples, on crutches or in wheelchairs, darted out in among the mayhem at the lights, begging for alms. ‘Does this happen in Europe?’ asked Marcello, which showed that he suspected it might not. I had to think. ‘In northern Europe, no. In Italy, in the south, possibly – in Naples, say. In Spain, maybe, in a few places, but maybe not even there any more either.’
A few months later, in Milan, on the way to the airport in a bus, I saw exactly the same thing: beggars in wheelchairs and on crutches at the lights. I asked the Italian guide on board why people gave alms. ‘Because Italians are still Christians, at some level, and also because cripples are famous for being able to cast the Evil Eye, the jettatore. If they don’t give, people fear they will be cursed.’ He made the Evil Eye sign, at the ground, to avoid contamination, small finger and index finger extended, the others held down by the thumb.
I had told Gabriella d’Estigarribia that I was going into the interior with Marcello, and she had predicted all manner of disasters, none of which had come to pass: so I was pleased to be able to visit her and tell of my successful little expedition. I described Marcello and his merry men as a ‘feudal equipage’, citing Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and giving a little demonstration of the whole maté ritual, with Carlos in the back as the matero – ‘¿Te gusta un maté, Roberto?’ etc. This was a wild success: Gabriella burst into such peals of laughter that Hugo came in from his hammock in the garden to see what the fuss was about. ‘Is so funny the way you say it! Say again for Hugo!’, so I had to do the whole thing again, and he thought it was screamingly funny, too. This was the first time I had really entertained Paraguayans, and I wondered why. They made jokes about their politicians, but the narrative satirical tale on local themes with starring local characters was quite absent in their conversation. They were used to being entertained by Europe and the USA on TV and cinema, passively. The idea that people in Paraguay could be characters resembling Don Quixote or Sancho Panza was quite new to them; such a perspective evidently needed a foreigner to imagine and describe it. I never saw Paraguayans dramatize their own lives, their country or their culture. There was no fantasy, satire or ironic representation, except, of course, with regard to their politics. There were Paraguayan novelists and very good ones like Augusto Roa Bastos, but I had met no one who had ever read them. Entertainment was made elsewhere, by foreigners. I had tried to meet Bastos: he had returned to the country after decades in exile in Toulouse, France, where he had taught at the university, and London, where he had worked for the BBC. He was said to like sweet pastries and red wine, according to Gabriella, who claimed to know him, and was willing to effect a meeting. Like most other things planned in Paraguay this never happened. Two men I found asleep at their desks in the Ministry of Culture had differing stories: the first was that he had died, suddenly, in Boston, on a trip abroad, the second that he had returned to France for good – in any case a meeting was out of the question.
My growing familiarity with the Asunción street scene led me increasingly to be taken for a native of the place. Walking into town, bound for the Post Office one morning, I was accosted by a blond fellow with a beard driving a large, beaten-up American pick-up truck, with Argentine number plates. In the cab with him he had crammed an Earth Mother wife with pendulous breasts, and at least four straw-haired children, who gawped in authentic hayseed fashion, hicks from the sticks up in the big smoke for the first time. They looked like Okies on the way through the dustbowl to California circa 1932, but I guessed they were probably Mennonites in from the Chaco. I was wrong: they were refugees from the mounting chaos in Argentina. There was no food left in the shops across much of the north-east of the country, where they had come from. The woman had a sister living in Asunción somewhere, married to a local, and they were looking for her house. They hoped I would know where it was. I knew why they had stopped by me: I was white, but looked as if I knew my way around, swinging my local supermarket plastic bag confidently. The street was full of Paraguayans who looked very small and dark beside the blond Argies. I didn’t know where the sister’s street was – it wasn’t on the map I showed them. They were absolutely delighted to learn I was English and a visitor: it validated their decision to come to Paraguay – things must be OK if English tourists were here. The English still enjoy a certain esteem in Argentina in spite, or perhaps, in part, because of the Falklands-Malvinas contretemps.
The paterfamilias went on to say: ‘Nothing here could be as bad as the catastrophe in Argentina.’ He echoed Marcello who, when I had asked him, had replied ‘Argentina has no future’. I suggested he ring the sister up from a service station nearby; an idea he took up.
I had no real faith in the Post Office. There were five impressive boxes marked ‘Argentina’, ‘Brasil’, ‘Los Otros País
es en America’, ‘Europa’ and ‘África, Asia, y Oceanía’ with slits in them for letters. I bought gaudily printed stamps from the counter, happy, chattering females tearing them off large sheets and shovelling my change back to me without breaking rhythm. I stuck these on my cards and letters and slipped them into the boxes thinking: ‘This is a complete waste of time – none of them will ever get there.’ I was wrong. Every single card and letter arrived. Other parts of the government might not be working, but the Post Office was in great shape. In the entrance hallway a woman had started a bit of free enterprise by renting a small booth and selling magazines, sweets and old postcards. I ended up buying all her stock of the latter: many were in black and white, dating back to the stronato and beyond. It was interesting to see the well-painted, prosperous streets in the 1950s, full of European men in double-breasted suits, and hats. I now knew these streets as tatty places of dereliction, full of Indians selling vegetables, the buildings rotting and unpainted.
Paradise With Serpents Page 26