In the hospitals, I had read, many of the dialysis machines for kidney patients had been stolen. No one knew how or by whom. Friends and families of patients, too, were complaining that the hospital staff stole the watches, money, clothes and shoes of accident victims brought in unconscious from car crashes: when the survivors came round, or their relatives arrived to collect them, they found they had been stripped of everything; even their underwear had vanished. There were impromptu second-hand markets of stolen clothes – and everything else – on street corners all around the city. If you had enough patience you could track down and buy back your own stolen kit. The bedsheets, pillows and medical instruments in the public hospitals had all been stolen and sold long ago: some nurses and doctors had not been paid for almost a year. The cheaper doss-houses were all said to be equipped with stolen hospital gear, much of it unsterilized and laden with a lethal cocktail of germs and viruses. The rich flew to Miami when they were ill. There were even ambulance-avionettas to whisk you there if it was an emergency. Local doctors advertised regularly in the papers – many had qualified in Roumania, Hungary, Nicaragua and even Haiti. I saw that none used ducks as their logos.
Illiteracy in Paraguay – analfabetismo – was a problem: 18% of the adult population couldn’t read, according to Ultima Hora, as well as 39% of youths between 15 and 29. Clearly, you would need to be able to read to check you were actually stealing bags of cement, rather than bags of white sand or lime. It had been discovered that Idi Amin of Uganda had bought a plot of land in Asunción, thinking of it as a possible place to retire to: in the event he had chosen Jeddah in Saudi Arabia instead, where he was a pensioner of the Saudi royal family.
From the interior came news that in Nacunday, Naranjal and Santa Rita a scam involving the sale of yet more non-existent lands had emerged. Gangsters had threatened to murder the Titular de Los Registros Publicos – the Head of the Land Registry – if he refused to recognize these phantom properties. The amount of land involved was in the region of 63 million hectares, or 154 million acres. Three more ‘mules’ had been caught on a bus, loaded with 131 kilos of ‘la hierba maldita’ – the damned weed, or marijuana. It was another red letter day for el can Willy, the famous sniffer dog, who had spotted the ‘malvivientes’ or evil-livers.
In the hotel on my return a new notice had gone up in the foyer:
Dear Passenger: The complaint and enticement book is in the Hotel Reception. For any complainted for alteration of the rates or service quality, please contact with. Secretaria Nacional de Turismo, Asunción.
I asked at reception to see this interesting-sounding book. The desk clerk denied it existed. I showed him the notice. He shrugged his shoulders, and said, ‘Espera hasta mañana,’ or wait until tomorrow. I did. The notice had disappeared when I emerged for breakfast, never to return. ‘You can observe a lot just by watching,’ as the Californian sage Yogi Berra wisely remarked.
Recalling that angels are the powers hidden in the faculties and organs of men, as the Sufi Master Ibn El-Arabi had written in The Bezels of Wisdom in 1202, after a pilgrimage or haj to Mecca on which – despite being accused of heresy and worse in Egypt – he met certain Persian mages who had welcomed him into their fold, I decided to quit Asunción for a while, and risking the bandits on the road, take a bus and seek out the Jesuit ruins in the south.
Fourteen
Southern Exposure
The Hotel El Morocco had seen better days. Once it had been the Hotel Gross-Deutschland, and before that the Hotel Adolf Hitler: each name change and management transfer had seen a slide from which one doubted the place would ever recover. The present owner was a Paraguayan of German descent who evidently had a penchant for small boys; they lay curled up like cats on sofas, rugs and in the large, crumbling armchairs covered with brightly coloured Moroccan throws that squatted like antique toads in the halls and corridors. There were round brass trays on folding wooden bases, brightly coloured tiles with geometrical patterns, water pipes and copper jugs, elaborating the Moroccan theme. As a single man of middle years, it was assumed by the management that I might well share the predilections of the patron, and a small, slim, jellaba-clad Paraguayan youth of about ten, with kohl around his eyes, was sent in to turn down the sheets in my room, and wiggle his bottom suggestively at me, hitching up his skirts in an artful display of leg, while casting soulful glances at me over his shoulder. Come bugger me, kind Sir, at your pleasure – and mine, his wilting glances declared. I hadn’t actually known this was a pederast’s palace until I had checked in, and by then I was too tired to move elsewhere. I suppose it would be too obvious to call the place Le Château de la Derrière, or The Crisco Manor for Botty-Boys: I sent off young Abdul, or whoever he was, unrequited, with his honour – if he still had any – unsullied by me, and instead searched the room for hidden bats, vampire or otherwise. My big toes were still suppurating and I wanted no more nasty suprises at night. I found none, though I did rake out a used condom from under the bed, which I flung from the window into the garden without examining it closely. The Hotel Embajador in Asunción, where I had spent my first couple of nights, had been a hot-bed hostelry, I had learnt later on, much frequented by police officers with their floozies. Now I found myself Morocco-bound in a Paedo Paradise. I examined the sheets gingerly: perhaps fortunately for my peace of mind the light was so poor I could see nothing.
The five-hour bus journey from Asunción to Encarnación had been uneventful, which was fortunate as eventfulness on this route consisted of being robbed and possibly shot. The bus companies had started sending their vehicles down with two armed guards on board, to discourage the bandits. We had a brace of these characters, armed with a pump-action shotgun and an AK-47 respectively. They were in their late teens, clad in the usual death squad attire of camo trousers and bulletproof waistcoat, with large cowboy hats perched on their noggins. They didn’t look to me as if they had doctorates in philosophy, though I could, of course, have been wrong. However, they did have an ample supply of the hierba maldita with them, and wiled away the hours rolling and smoking enormous porros, or joints. They were soon so stoned that they fell asleep, and would have been fairly useless if we had been attacked.
Into the River Parana, with a bridge and ferries crossing over to the larger, more modern Argentine city of Posadas on the opposite bank, old Encarnación was sinking: the original town, with some pleasing colonial buildings, was decayed and subject to frequent flooding, due to a dam which had been built nearby. More modern buildings had been constructed on the heights above the river, which were not subject to inundation. Normally, Argentine tourists came across to buy duty-free electrical goods and multicoloured tat from the bazaar: now there was nobody about – falta de plata, the same old story. There were bright yellow horse-cabs in the streets, but no passengers. Encarnación was cleaner than Concepción, and less run-down – though no more prosperous, it seemed. The money, in all Third World countries, gravitates to the capital – and usually stays there. Paraguay was no exception.
It wasn’t hard to discover the Hotel El Morocco’s equivocal past as a Teutonic chauvinist outpost, because although overpainted by subsequent owners, one could quite easily read ‘Hotel Gross-Deutschland’ and ‘Hotel Adolf Hitler’ under more recent paintwork, evidence of the palimpsest that was modern Paraguayan history – pro-Nazi until the last possible moment and then some. The electricity was off, and there was a shortage of kerosene, so that the oil lamps were burning low, and we in the hotel were reduced to a few candles. We, because besides myself and the lugubrious owner, an elderly pederast with a droopy moustache, a paunch, and a drip on the end of his nose, there was actually another guest. This was a thrill – someone to talk to at last.
‘You are, if I am not entirely mistaken, an Australian scholar, studying the Utopian communities of New Australia and Cosme,’ he said to me, when I entered the hotel lounge after my day spent out at the ruins of the Jesuit missions, 30 kilometres or so from Encarnación. This was a
pretty good guess, actually. His voice was deep and mellow, and had traces of both Oxford University and the American Deep South in it, but the core was educated West African. He sat in almost complete darkness, only the whites of his eyes showing, and his clerical collar underneath. The blackness of his face and hands was so profound that they blended invisibly into his black suit and shirt: he was a talking pair of eye-whites and matching ivory dog collar.
‘And you are Dr Booker T. Wilberforce, originally from Monrovia, Liberia, but now resident in the Southern United States, where you teach at a college, and you are here researching the Jesuits,’ I countered, sitting down opposite him, my eyes adjusting to the deep gloom of the lightless atmosphere. He gave a low, short laugh, and said, ‘Touché, Watson.’
‘You have also studied at the University of Oxford, are married, and enjoy drinking beer,’ I added. He laughed again. This wasn’t so difficult, as he wore a gold wedding ring, and had a chrome wine-cooler in front of him with three bottles of Brahma beer in a pool of rapidly melting ice, from the kerosene-powered fridge. Another bottle, I could now see, sat in front of him with its cap off. It looked almost empty, or perhaps I imagined this. It was a matter of some interest to me as the proprietor had told me gloomily that Dr Wilberforce had the last four beers in the hotel. It was a hot evening and I was very thirsty. I knew his name because he had written it, with his degrees, in a fine copperplate hand in the hotel register, and had given his address as Smegma College, Georgia, USA, or something very close to that. So the only really daring guess of mine had been the Liberian origins, and the sojourn at Oxford University bit: a doddle this Sherlock Holmes and Watson stuff, when you get into the swing.
‘You are not Australian, then, but an ironical Englishman,’ he rumbled in his basso profundo. ‘And I cannot quite guess what you are doing here, now. Perhaps researching the train, the old British train? It used to terminate here. There is still the station but no engines.’
‘Jesuits – the ruins,’ I said, eyeing the three beers, hoping he might offer me one.
‘My post-graduate doctoral thesis, which I spent one year at Oxford researching, as you cleverly guessed, was a comparative study between the Jesuits’ Reducciones of Paraguay and the post-Second World War Welfare State in Britain,’ he remarked mildly.
‘I imagine that made you very unpopular indeed among the left-leaning dons. I’m surprised they allowed it. The idea alone would be deeply repugnant to most British academics.’
‘You are right. It was. They had no choice, since I was enrolled at a US college and was merely over there using their facilities for my research. I was cold-shouldered. It confused them mightily. They take a pride in being hospitable to blacks from Africa, and they had to be cool to me because of the seeming right-wing slur on the political status quo in their country, still largely unchanged in spite of the short Thatcherite interregnum, which altered neither the corporatist basis of the economy nor the Statist, syndicalist system of education and social control,’ explained Doc Wilberforce, eyeing the three remaining beers with evident relish.
‘Did you like the beer in England?’ I asked, desperately.
‘I can’t say I did. I found it warm, sticky and and oversweet. What do you think of the Paraguayan brews?’ he replied, giving me my opening at last.
‘At this moment, for me, any brew at all would be welcome as I am very tired and thirsty – but alas you have the last four beers in the hotel.’
Dr Wilberforce looked pained, and leaned forward. ‘Really? How inconvenient …’
‘Would you kindly allow me to buy a bottle, please,’ I asked, as politely as I knew how.
‘No, no – impossible – you shall have two as a gift. I have drunk one already, so we will have two each.’ He moved with sudden catlike vigour, grasping a bottle by its neck, and nipping off the cap with an opener he had on the table in front of him. A satisfying gasp came from the top of the bottle, and pale foam was just visible, coursing down the sides.
‘There’s a very Christian offer, sir,’ I ejaculated, ‘and I shall be proud and pleased to accept. I would expect nothing less from so distinguished a “been-to”.’
He chuckled again, and thrust the opened bottle across to me. ‘You are well-informed, sir. There can be few English – or Australians – who know that particular expression. Not entirely accurate in my case, as it usually refers to one from West Africa who has not only “been-to” England or the States, but who has also returned, which I have not.’
I drank the beer with every effort not to appear greedy. It was nectar to my soul. Christianity, I decided, was a very wonderful religion. I doubted if even a Zoroastrian or a Parsi could have been more spiritually generous, let alone a Sufi master.
‘Billy Lane, the New Australia prophet, was an enthusiast of the Jesuits, as their theocratic communism resembled his own mightily. Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, too, praised their work, for he was a radical Socialist. You will have read his book on the subject, A Vanished Arcadia? The title is indicative, bathed in retrospective romanticism. The Jesuits did not see their Reducciones as Arcadias at all, but as the forefront of the Counter-Reformation. They had two enemies: the Protestants, and the nationalist Catholic kings. The latter were more dangerous to them than the former, for these were jealous of the black-robes’ power, and were intent on taking more and more independence from the Papacy. There were more Indians under Jesuit control in Paraguay than under secular Spanish rule. When the Fathers were at last given permission to train the Guarani with modern weapons – artillery as well as muskets and swords and pikes – they were a stronger military force than anything in the Americas. Another 20 years, another 10 years even, and they could have swept away the secular powers of the Spanish and Portuguese entirely. Imagine, a whole continent under the power of a militarized religious order, implacably opposed to modern capitalism, nationalist monarchy and the Reformation. The Jesuits in control of, what, a million, two million, three million armed and trained Indians, with artillery and muskets, holding the gold and silver mines of Peru, controlling the exports of sugar, tobacco, oranges, precious metals and stones – what chance would Spain and Portugal have had? And then the rest of Europe and North America …’ His voice had taken on an incantatory tone, as if he were preaching to a small congregation.
‘It doesn’t sound much like Clem Attlee and Stafford Cripps to me, with their snoek and utility furniture, the East Africa ground nut scheme and the nationalization of coal, rail and steel,’ I put in. More than half my first bottle of beer had gone already. I was going to have to do some post-war austerity rationing myself.
‘Fabianism and the Webbs,’ he continued. ‘The intellectual elite had exactly the same aims as the Jesuits in Paraguay. To supplant the old property-owning classes, install a Platonic Guardian class of managers and intelligentsia, drawing all the productive forces of the economy into their hands, and providing an elite to dominate, control and exploit – the word is chosen with care – the British working classes for their own moral improvement. The British Labour Party, like Lenin’s Vanguard, intended to be a selfperpetuating ruling elite; it was not intended that the Tories would ever be allowed to regain political or economic control, once they had been ousted. Even force was not ruled out to prevent this happening – it is explicit in the Webbs’ own writings. The difference with the Jesuits lies in the fact that the British Socialists were as spectacularly incompetent in running a modern, complex industrial economy as the Fathers were effective in organizing a simple, agricultural one. The Tories were as useless an opposition as the secular Spanish were to the Jesuits in Paraguay. Labour defeated itself, eventually.
‘The wealth generated by the Jesuits was immense. Objective Spanish historians have calculated that they had US$28,000,000 of capital when they were ejected and despoiled by the King of Spain in 1767, egged on by the secular white Creole elite who resented the economic power of the black-robes. This great wealth had been amassed in less than 100 years. The
British Socialists, by contrast, were reverse Midases. Everything they touched withered and failed, ruining the economy and causing even worse food rationing than during the War. So the Tories returned, and the history of post-war Britain has been a see-saw of incompetence under the Welfare State Socialists, leading to economic collapse, at which the Tories are brought back in to balance the books and sort out the economy, so that the Socialists can come back again and ruin it again, essentially always doing the same things – increasing the non-productive sectors of the economy, raising taxes, and driving productive capital abroad. Every Labour government ends in a financial crisis.
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