Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  I strolled downtown further, to López’s wedding-cake palace, guarded by soldiers with guns and whistles. If you came too close they blew their whistles. If you ignored them, they shot you. They decided how near you could come. No one ignored those whistles, least of all me. Makká Indians hung around trying, as ever, to sell bows and arrows. No one was buying. According to Marcello, the tribesmen were actually hawking these items for Evangelical missionaries, who supplied them on tick. They procured these from yet another set of Indians in the Chaco, firmly under their control. This sounded like an urban myth to me, but in Paraguay you never knew, it might be true. Truth itself in this country was an elusive concept.

  Moored at the river bank, at the end of the palace gardens, was the Paraguayan navy’s one-time pride and joy – two elegant and deadly-looking black Italian gunboats from the fascist era, their lines redolent of Futurist chic, built in the naval dockyards at La Spezia, Italy, in the 1930s. Now these Mussolini-era antiques were floating museums, or so it was claimed. They looked to me as if they could be reactivated into service in five minutes flat. Everything was kept shipshape and Bristol-fashion. The guns on the fore and aft decks were freshly greased, the timber decks holystoned, and the diesel engines were being tested as I walked round on board. As a diesel engine owner myself I can vouch for the fact that they sounded in excellent shape. Paraguayan naval sailors in British style uniforms from between the wars – bell bottoms, flap-backed jackets, and round hats – moved about purposefully doing things nautical with coils of rope and shiny brass objects. There were triumphalist notices in Spanish and Guarani, boasting how, in their day, these vessels had been the most puissant on the Rivers Plate and Paraguay. Plucky little nautical Paraguay, 1,600 kilometres from the Atlantic, but still in there battling away. A heartbreakingly poignant girl of about three followed me about begging for money: her father, drunk in a hammock ashore, was urging her on with imprecations from a shack on the bankside favela. She was new to begging and wouldn’t give up. I felt furious and outraged at what I knew this little waif’s future fate would be: if I’d had Mac’s automatic on me I would probably have gone over and shot her father. Eventually, she gave up, and went back to the shore. It was on these gunboats that a group of Chilean and Argentinian officers had been deeply shocked in the 1960s when their Paraguayan hosts had captured some guerrillas and paraded the men in front of them. They had been castrated with knives, on the decks of the boats, and their bloody genitals presented to the foreign guests as souvenirs: the guerrillas then had their throats cut and were thrown overboard for the alligators and piranhas to eat. At the time Che Guevara was trying to get a revolution going in neighbouring Bolivia, and Marxist guerrillas had entered Paraguay in an attempt to stir up the campesinos. Stroessner, knowing his people so well, had spread the rumour that the infiltrators were all carrying large quantities of gold on them. One or two corpses were left around, with gold coins on them, to add verisimilitude to the tale. The peasants gleefully hunted down their would-be saviours and tortured them to death, demanding to know where they had hidden the gold. That was the last time anyone tried to get a popular peasants’ revolution going in Paraguay.

  Dr Francia and Solano López both tortured their citizens to find out where they had hidden their gold, and the wise modern Paraguayan hid his instead in the Cayman Islands, where no one could get hold of it. Dr Francia, like the Emperor Seth in Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, actually went round Asunción himself, demolishing houses that didn’t fit in with his newfangled grid system. He started to build a palace, a new cathedral, a theatre, an opera, a Customs house, a post office, and planned a vast block of government offices along the riverfront with an esplanade: none of these were ever finished, and they were abandoned after his death. He did manage, however, to demolish 99% of old colonial Asunción, as built by the Spanish. López completed the eradication, by exterminating the remaining descendants of the Spanish themselves.

  When I got back to the Gran Hotel I found my pocket had been expertly picked somewhere en route. This didn’t really matter, as I’d been warned by Mac always to carry a ‘sacrificial’ wallet with a large wad of local notes of low denomination padded out with a few dollars: this would suffice if I was mugged or held up on a bus. Three recent buses from the capital to Encarnación in the south-east, on the river border with Argentina on the Parana, had been held up by bandits and robbed. One man who protested had been shot dead: one of the buses had been hijacked as well, it being modern; it was thought to have been driven into Brazil to be sold, a reversal of the normal order of local auto thefts. I was going to have to take a bus to Encarnación if I wanted to see the Jesuit ruins nearby.

  There is almost always at least one eccentric, if not downright insane, Pole involved in events in places such as Paraguay. I was pleased to discover there had been two involved in the War of the Triple Alliance. Lt-Colonel Robert Chodasiewicz, who had served in the Crimean War as a British Secret Service agent, found immortality in Paraguay by ascending 18 metres into the atmosphere in a hydrogen observation balloon at Tuyu-ti and Tucu-cue. Originally in the Argentine service, he had quit on account of not being paid – they owed him £300 – and taken up with the imperial Brazilian army instead, empires being in general more reliable paymasters than republics. The hydrogen and the balloon had been sent up the river by James Allen of New York – an early example of local dependence on US military technology. The Paraguayans had shot at the balloon, but ineffectually; instead they obscured their positions by burning damp grass. The second Pole was a refugee named Mirschkoffski, who was in the Paraguayan naval service. He built some torpedoes, had them strapped to a canoe, and set off to ram the blockading Brazilian ironclads. However, he hadn’t primed them, and they didn’t explode. On board the torpedo-boat canoe himself, powered by Indian paddlers, he used the opportunity to desert to the Brazilians, who were known as ‘macacos’, or monkeys to their enemies in Paraguay – or even more rudely as ‘cambas’, or blacks, which the majority of the soldiers were. It is little known that 75% of all the black slaves transported across the Atlantic were landed in Brazil, leaving a mere 25% for the whole of the USA, Central America and the Caribbean. Yet how often do we ever hear from Anglo-Saxon academics about the iniquities of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil? As for the slave trade of white Christians to the Barbary states in North Africa, that is rarely ever considered. Not only had Mirschkoffski the torpedo man not been paid by López, he had been in imminent danger of being shot by the dictator.

  Captain Manlove, a Confederate officer from the Southern States of America, now a soldier of fortune, had passed through the Allied lines into López’s camp with an original proposition. If López would be willing to issue him with letters of marque he would raise a fleet of Bolivian, Peruvian and Colombian warships, these as privateers flying the Paraguayan flag. Such vessels would then, according to international law, have been able to prey on all Brazilian and Argentine shipping in the Atlantic quite legally, taking such as prizes or sinking them. Manlove claimed to have access to two ironclad Monitors, ex-Civil War warships, in the USA, which would also join in for the prize money. This was an astute suggestion and had López taken it up he would likely have ended the war in his favour in a matter of months. He was too cautious, however, and suspected that Manlove was a Brazilian spy. He had him imprisoned and eventually shot. In the mid-19th century, mulatto rulers of ‘native states’ such as Paraguay was then seen by the European world, simply did not have white men shot: it wasn’t done. It was seen as barbaric, and could lead to full-scale invasion and regime change – as happened to the Emperor Theodoric in Abyssinia by the British. In fact, at that time, apart from Haiti, Paraguay was the only country in the Americas ruled by what was then called ‘a man of colour’. But all the shootings and tortures, imprisonment in irons and bombast and speechmaking were to no avail. By September 1867, López had lost over 100,000 men from his armies, 80% of these due to disease. According to the British diplomat Mr Gould�
�s despatches to Lord Stanley at the Foreign Office in London, López had lost the war through poor hygiene and substandard diet for his troops. ‘Espera hasta mañana’ was the motto of the country, wrote Mr Gould – wait until tomorrow. That, at least, had not changed in 150 years. I had been trying to get the Gran Hotel to repair the air-conditioning in my room: instead of cold air, it only blew hot. ‘It must come from Villarrica,’ I told the desk clerk, who smiled. Everything and everyone from Villarrica – a provincial town north of Asunción – was thought to be upside down, back to front, or topsy-turvy. There were always a thousand excuses, but the air-con was never repaired: it was still blowing hot on the day I left.

  When I got back to my hotel room I was not at all surprised to see my things had been gone through once again, and one film had been removed from a camera and taken away, a replacement of the same type put in its place, but whoever had done this had wound on only ten frames instead of the fourteen I had taken: sloppy tradecraft, George Smiley would surely have observed.

  Mac had returned from Argentina, and came round to collect his automatic. He always appeared at dawn, unannounced, when no one was around except the desk clerk, asleep in the front foyer. He wore rubber-soled suede boots, I noticed, and moved quite silently, like a cat on patrol. He was living on his nerves: he looked pasty and ill. I paid him back the US$20 he had given to Don Octavio for half my fare on the boat to Concepción as well as his pistol and ammunition. I asked him how Argentina had been. ‘Worse than here, actually, if you can believe that. Food running out in the shops, no kerosene, electricity cuts for up to 20 hours a day, queues at petrol pumps. Don’t think the Oviedistas have given up here, by the way. Lino is out of house arrest, and will try again. The Paraguayan government are trying everything to get the Brazilians to deport Oviedo to Europe. He, for his part, has said to the Brazilians that he will clamp down on the gun-running and dope and cigarette smuggling if he gets into power. That’s an attractive proposition for them. He won’t, of course, he’ll just organize it all for his own benefit, but they don’t know that yet. If the chaos gets worse they may let him across to have a go. He’d walk in over here. If I were you, if you want to see a bit more of the country, I’d make it snappy. I got an entry visa for Australia while I was down in BA. You never know. It’s getting hairy.’

  I had been trying for weeks to get Mac to go with me to Cosme, the breakaway Australian communist colony, or else Nueva Australia, now Nueva Londres, the first and original founder-colony, but he had been reluctant. There’s nothing there, at Cosme, just a tiny village. As for the other place, he couldn’t even bear to say it by name, so bitter were the antagonisms between the two groups to this day. ‘My mob never has anything to do with those sell-outs. They all became rich rancheros, the Kennedys and so on.’ If I was going to go to these places I realized I was probably going to have to go on my own, and do so pretty quickly. Democratic Paraguay looked as if it only had a very short time left before it collapsed into revolution and bloodshed.

  Thirteen

  The Book of Complaint and Enticement

  Once upon a time, the railway had snaked down across the southern part of the country, from Asunción to Encarnación. Across the Parana river from Encarnación lay Posadas, once Paraguayan, but Argentinian since the end of the War of the Triple Alliance. From Posadas there had been a train to Buenos Aires. From Bogotá, via Santa Cruz in Bolivia, the train ran to Corumba on the Brazilian border: the land between Asunción and Corumba was flat and easy to lay tracks on. In theory, with a minimum of effort and capital, a train link between Buenos Aires and Bogotá, via Asunción could have been made, with a branch leading off at the Brazilian side to Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. This never happened, through local and national rivalries which led to wars, and the abandonment of southern South America as a place where sensible investors put their money. Sensible South Americans only ever invested outside their own continent from earliest times, like sensible Africans.

  I did go to the San Francisco railway terminus in Asunción, one quiet Sunday morning, when few people were about. The ancient British steam trains with their tall black funnels sat where they had been abandoned on the rusting tracks outside the terminus, now surrounded by tropical vegetation and shanties. Indians had moved into them, living there as squatters. Inside the station itself I found the guardian of the train museum washing his motor car: it was parked on the railway track, in front of the exhibits. The steam trains and carriages in the station were kept Indian-free and in good condition. All of them had been manufactured in the north of England in the mid-19th century, as had all the wall clocks, ticket punches and wrought-iron benches which made up the museum. There was a marshalling yard down at Sapucai, south of Asunción, this a graveyard of abandoned, unrepaired trains and carriages: for almost a century this had been the place where the railway machinery had been put right and maintained, first by the British, then by Paraguayans. Now nothing was repaired, everything was left to rot. The Asunción train terminus was a palace, a secular cathedral with vaulting ceilings and wrought-iron buttresses, expressing the mid-19th-century confidence in progress and technology. It was a blend of French and English architectural styles, with a mansard roof and oeil de boeuf windows. All of this had come from outside Paraguay, brought in by foreigners who had designed and invented it: when the English and French left, the Paraguayans had simply let the whole enterprise decay and fall apart. One day, when the oil ran out or the spare parts no longer came up the river there would be a museum to the motor car. Toyotas and Mercedes would be lovingly kept and polished in garages, artefacts from a past era. With a few thousand labourers and a few hundred thousand dollars a complete railway network could easily be set up in Paraguay: the country was very flat and virtually empty. But it never would be; it wasn’t in the culture to produce such things. As Dorothy Parker rightly observed, ‘You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.’

  The swindles of Paraguay – estafas – continued unabated: 78% of all the money that had been deposited in the local savings bank Fondos Mutuos Banaleman had been lost – stolen and transferred abroad by persons unknown. Would you have ever put your money in a Paraguayan bank called Banaleman, and if so which psychiatrist are you seeing? Multibanco had a new slogan: ‘Cree en el factor humano. Multibanco también’ – You believe in the human factor. Multibanco likewise. Had they read Graham Greene’s South American novel The Human Factor? I wondered. They were also getting into the culture game, sponsoring El Grupo Maximo Lugo in a stage presentation of La Tempestad by W. Shakespeare, for the benefit of the restoration works on the Municipal Theatre, which was derelict and in danger or falling down. What did Caliban and Prospero have to teach the Guarani, I wondered?

  For the alphabetically challenged, in all local elections Presidential candidates had a sign as well as a name, as in India. Emilio ‘Baby’ Cubas chose an apple with a bite taken out of it, a star superimposed on top. The message was clear: vote for me and you’ll get a bite of the starred apple, too. The apple, in Paraguay as in West Africa, was an exotic imported fruit, a luxury, like a mango or pineapple in Britain.

  There had been a youth protest in Asunción, young, well-dressed middle-class kids with brooms sweeping the streets symbolically, to get rid of the corruption; ¡Paraguay limpia! (Clean up Paraguay!), they had cried, and blown whistles and horns, making rough music against the governing classes. It was almost certainly the only time in their lives when they had held brooms in their hands. They might as well have stayed at home and demonstrated in front of their parents, since it was they who were stealing all the money. More than 20 Customs officials were under investigation for allegedly having taken millions of dollars in bribes: their vast mansions, built on the riverside, complete with huge motorboats on private jetties, were shown in newspaper photographs. There had been more than 2,000 denuncias of these corruptos, but no one had any confidence that they would be brought to book.

  A readers’ survey in Ultima Ho
ra had indicated that 97% of those asked believed that the IMF loan being negotiated would not result in the creation of the 10,000 new jobs claimed by the government. Some put their faith in mysticism: a new graffito had gone up in bright pink paint on a crumbling, French-style 19th-century mansion. It read:

  No one I asked had any idea what it meant. The mansion was in terminal decay and had a sign outside advertising it for sale. After the War of the Triple Alliance, Asunción had almost become a ghost town, with grass growing in the streets: I wondered if it could happen again.

  In the centre of the business district, in the main shopping thoroughfare, the equivalent of Oxford Street in London, I saw a strange sight while walking back to the hotel. An open truck was parked by the side of the road, with several bags of cement inside; a group of workmen nearby were shovelling up the sandy soil under the pavement and resetting it with concrete slabs. There was a foreman in charge, armed with a shotgun, to stop anyone stealing either the cement or the truck. This was the first time I had ever seen any sort of repair work going on in all the months I had been in the country. I paused for a rest – the day was hot. I squatted on my heels in the shade of a building, leaned back on a wall, and discreetly watched the process unfolding. I had heard of the Potemkin village, but never the Potemkin sand-and-cement mix. But here it was: there was water, there were shovels, there was sand, there were men mixing up the muck, and then laying pavement slabs on top of the mix, but the bags of cement remained in the truck, unbroken and unviolated. I stayed there for almost an hour, taking my ease in the shade, drinking terere or cold maté like everyone else, waiting to see some cement, even a dribble, being added to the mix: it never was. The sidewalk was being dug up and relaid using just sand and water. The foreman had evidently indented for 20 or so bags of cement – there they were in the back of the truck. He would sell them later, and pocket the cash himself, giving the workmen a kickback to ensure their silence. The pavement would buckle again after the first tropical rainstorm, held down by nothing but dry river sand. There had been a long newspaper campaign to get this pavement relaid; it was so broken and pitted that people kept falling and twisting their ankles. Around the corner, in one of the private parking lots where the businessmen kept their BMWs and Mercedes, I saw one of the grimy lunatics from the defunct asylum, still in evening dress, taking his ease on the ground. He lay basking in full sun, his face wreathed in a beatific smile. He was lying outstretched on his side, sandwiched between two expensive black limousines. He had his flies open, and his erect, purple-headed penis stuck out prominently and was being slowly and rhythmically masturbated by his right hand. He was the only genuinely happy-looking Paraguayan I ever saw.