Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  Nevertheless … a possible Dellabedova suggested to me a possible leg-over. Was Señora Dolores, as she was properly called, a great beauty, I asked Veronica – a sultry siren of the South, a passionate embodiment of the gringos’ fantasies about the Latin American female?

  ‘Well, she has had her problems, the Señora,’ Veronica replied in measured tones. ‘Her husband is a naughty boy. He has many mistresses. And her son went to the bad – he became a cocaine addict. And her ovaries have been removed. So she is depressed, sometimes.’

  I liked the ‘sometimes’: it showed precision.

  ‘It would be good for her to have a paying guest at the Estancia Agua Amarga. It might cheer her up a little bit,’ she concluded, lighting a long, slim cigarette: no nonsense about not smoking in the workplace in Paraguay, everyone smoked everywhere, including doctors on their hospital rounds, dentists drilling your teeth, and priests hearing confessions. I’d seen one of the latter coming out of a confession booth with a curly Sherlock Holmes pipe on the go, clouds of smoke billowing up, as if from a chasuble.

  Hmm. A visit to her estancia might indeed cheer her up, but would it depress the hell out of me? I wondered. The Bitter Water Ranch didn’t sound a bundle of fun, somehow. If I wanted to write a feature for ‘The Sunday Toff’ that would have to be changed to the Sweet Water Ranch, I suspected, and the Señora’s ovaries would have to remain a closed book. ‘Mankind cannot bear too much reality,’ as T. S. Eliot rightly observed, and above all in Sunday travel features.

  ‘It is not certain, yet,’ Veronica concluded. ‘The Señora may be going to Miami to consult with her psychiatrist. He is orthodox Freudian – very strict.’

  Buenos Aires is reputed to have the highest number of psychiatrists in the world, beating even New York. Why did Señora Dolores Sin Ovarias choose to go north rather than south, I asked.

  ‘The orthodox Freudians in BA are not so orthodox, it seems,’ Veronica replied evenly. ‘The Señora found one analyst there who was living with a lady who was a Jungian, and to whom he was not married. Their children were very, very confused – primal confusion. So she doesn’t like. Also she hate all Argentinians, basically, as artists of chantar – you know this word?’ I said I did – to bluff, con or bullshit.

  I contacted Marcello and suggested we go on another short excursion, one from which we could get back in case El Noble blew a gasket. He was all for it: business was bad. He was trying to get some money together to shoot some more wildlife movies for TV, but so far no luck. He had shown me some of his work already and asked me if I thought the BBC might be interested in buying it. On the small screen, with his long hair, greasy stetson, sinister moustache and goatee, Marcello looked as if he had just murdered the producer in a fit of dementia, and buried him in a nearby swamp, facedown, after conducting a Black Mass. I saw the famous grappling-with-an-anaconda-in-Lake-Cacapipi sequence, too. The anaconda was truly huge, and quite repulsive, writhing and twisting like a cornered New Labour Deputy Prime Minister caught with his extremities round a civil servant at an office party. Marcello wasn’t so hot either, up to his boot-tops in liquid gunk, with that yucky lakewater full of you-know-what running down his hands, arms and body. There was typhoid in the lake and I wasn’t at all suprised. I thought it would probably make the BBC wallahs feel rather ill: it did me. It also occurred to me that if a novelist invented a lake which had filled up over the years with human excrement, produced by émigré German Nazis who lived in luxury villas on the lake shore, his editor would probably accuse him of absurd, melodramatic overstatement and blindingly obvious symbolism.

  The Virgin Mary enjoys the rank of field-marshal in the Paraguayan army. The many statues around the place showed her sorrowful and compassionate, as you’d expect, but also with her military medals pinned to her chest, and a broad, brightly coloured marshal’s sash across her shoulder and down to her waist. No sword, though, alas – that would have been the piece de resistance. The Lourdes of Paraguay, dedicated to excesses of Mariolatry, is Caacupé, where several centuries ago a miraculous statue of the Blessed Virgin was washed ashore after some floods, and the town has never looked back. A shrine, then a church, then a large St Peter’s-like basilica were built: pilgrims from all over Paraguay made their way there to pray, beg for intercession, and stock up on religious kitsch, much of it doubtless smuggled into the country from Brazil. We bowled down Highway 2 from Asunción, Marcello at the wheel, Carlos in the back brewing up as ever.

  ‘¿Te gusta un maté, Roberto?’ cried Marcello gaily, lighting another cigarette from the butt of his last.

  ‘¿Cómo no?’ I roared back over the engine noise.

  It was quite like old times. To our left a large group of young men in military uniform, but without weapons, were walking slowly in bare feet down the road. It was a tradition that after you ended your National Service in the army, you made your way on foot as a pilgrim to Caacupé to give thanks for surviving the psychopathic officer corps. The real keen-os did it in bare feet, even from the Chaco. Did they imbibe maté en route, I asked Marcello. He looked at me scandalized – certainly not! How about self-flagellation, then? He thought for a minute, then admitted there might be a bit of that. I wondered where they slept and what they ate and drank. I guessed they trusted to the kindness of strangers. We parked opposite the police station, as pilgrimage towns are notorious for car thefts – the villains can go straight to a church and get instant forgiveness, after all. The small town, quite dominated by the huge stucco basilica, was prosperous and orderly, smart villas in well-kept gardens. There was obviously falta de plata – lack of money – here too: the stalls of kitsch were loaded high, but there were no buyers. The basilica was empty, except for some pigeons; sunlight shafted in through high windows, bold streaks of light staining the walls. The people were all outside, at an open-air religious service being given by a rock band of truly Satanic quality. The lead singer, who caterwauled into a screeching mike, was a pastor of some sort. The style and presentation was US Evangelist, but it was a Catholic knock-off, or so Marcello informed me. The gringo Evangelists had made such inroads into the flocks of the faithful that the Catholic clergy had been forced to follow suit. Apparently only Catholics had to serve in the armed forces, Protestants and animist Indians being exempt.

  All was not well in this bastion of Popery, however. The Bishop of Caacupé, Monseñor Claudio Gimenez, had threatened several of his ‘fieles católicos’, or faithful Catholics, with excommunication for producing ‘desorientación y escandalos’. He had decided to prohibit the activities of three curanderos, Valentin Santabria, and Rufino and Catalino Benitez, who had been soliciting bribes (‘limosnas’) from their clients for certain occult services not recognized by the magic-and-miracles section of Mother Church. They were falsos, in fact, without the correct tax stamps on, therefore contraband. Furthermore the Bishop forbade Ermuelinda Farina from ‘realizar reuniones, celebraciones y oraciones de curación en nombre de la iglesia’, in other words from conducting freelance, unrecognized pirate services, claiming to be kosher Catholic but in fact being falsos. The Guarani genius for copying, imitation, faking, piracy and falsifying extended even into religious worship. The Bishop warned that if these characters persisted in their naughtiness, they would be excommunicated from the real, as it were, Catholic Church. In Spain, a renegade Catholic priest has broken away from the Church, built his own Vatican, and declared himself the Pope and the only true Catholic authority on all matters. If he set up shop in Paraguay he could have a rosy future, a false Pope being about the only thing the Paraguayans have not, yet, thought of, invented, or forged. I asked Marcello how much South American Catholicism was penetrated by curandería. ‘A great deal, especially in Paraguay. You see the campesinos are not really Catholic at all. They revere the priests deeply – but as curanderos. All the women you see selling roots and herbs in Asunción will prepare you potions, spells and medicines as well. Some of them are very effective – I have tried them. The Indian –
the true Indian, not the half-breed – is a sabio, a wise man.’

  It was on this trip that Marcello told me one of his grandmothers had been a Quechua Indian. He was proud of this, in a quiet way, which was nice.

  As we drove out of Caacupé I sprang my surprise on him.

  ‘What, Australians – in Paraguay? No! I would have heard about them,’ he exclaimed. I persisted, though. The settlement was only a few dozen kilometres from Caacupé. He stopped in at a little booth housing the Touring Club y Automobil de Paraguay by a service station. The man was asleep at the desk. Marcello woke him up and interrogated him. After ten minutes or so he came back to the jeep. ‘These days it’s called Nueva Londres,’ he said. ‘During the stronato they changed the name from Nueva Australia to Colonia Stroessner, after the dictator’s father. Some idiot stood up in the Parliament and said: “Why should we honour these kangaroos when the Saviour of the Nation’s Father is not honoured with a town named after him?” No one dared oppose him. After Stroessner was thrown out they changed it to Nueva Londres.’ Marcello was intrigued. He was actually interested in Paraguay – the only person apart from me who was, it seemed. We rolled along on a good road through flat grazing country. The cows were often Herefords, big, fat and slow. When the Australian pioneers arrived here by oxcart in the 1890s from the railhead at Villarrica this had been jungle and virgin bush, thick with parrots and monkeys, jaguar and wild deer. The settlers had cleared the land, built their wattle-and-daub houses and tamed the land: now it was level fields that stretched on for ever, prime grazing territory. The little village was not noticeably Australian in style, being low villas with red tile roofs surrounded by well-tended gardens, though a line of ancient silky oaks, imported as seeds from Queensland and planted by the first fathers and mothers, cast their shade across the main street in a distinctly un-Paraguayan fashion.

  We parked, and proceeded to stroll around. I asked a couple of children if there were any of the families of the original Australians still in residence. ‘Si, si – Australianos – los Smeets …’ they chorused, and led me to the comfortable modern bungalow of Victor Smith and his now mainly Guarani clan. They were taking the air on their front verandah, and I introduced myself as someone ‘from London and Australia’ who had come to see Nueva Australia.

  ‘Come in! Sit down! You are very welcome!’ they cried, getting up from their recliners to examine me more closely. Marcello and Carlos faded into the background now I had found some ethnic kith and kin: they’d wait for me in the jeep, they said. I was patted down into a recliner myself: the beaming Smith family clustered round me, and I was debriefed in Spanish. The soporific calm of rural Paraguay has to be experienced to be believed. Nothing happens very slowly for year after year out in the campo. Evidently, I was the most exciting thing that had happened to los Smiths for a long, long time. Coffee and a cake were brought, glasses of water as well, and my journey so far discussed and marvelled over.

  ‘From London and Australia … all the way from London and Australia …’ echoed Victor Smith, a blue-eyed gent in his late sixties, the head of the family and the only gringo. ‘Where do your family come from originally in Australia?’ I asked him in English. ‘I really couldn’t say … no se nada de nada,’ he replied, fading away again into Spanish immediately. All his English had gone, he told me, his father had spoken it well, but not he himself. The family spoke Guarani now. He had been born in Paraguay, but his father and grandfather had both been born in England, somewhere, and his grandmother was an original communist from Australia. Today, he told me, Nueva Londres was overwhelmingly a Paraguayan village, which had just a few old families of Australian or British origin. Victor’s father had been to England a few years before he died, and had brought back with him a right-hand-drive Mercedes-Benz. Victor’s wife was Guarani, and their children spoke no English at all. Victor himself had been ill recently, had had a serious brain operation. He moved slowly and hesitantly. After I had drunk my coffee he insisted on taking me around the village himself in the family car, his son at the wheel. Whenever we saw someone he would indicate for his son to slow down, and he would say proudly to them, ‘See, a visitor for me, all the way from London and Australia.’ Clearly, I was something of a boost to the Smith status.

  We parked by another modern bungalow with a pleasant garden, and I was ushered to the front door, which was rapped on by the son. ‘El cura …’ said Victor, and he shuffled forward to do his piece about a visitor from et cetera et cetera when the door finally opened.

  It was late siesta and Father Jim Feenhan, el cura, made a valiant attempt to show he wasn’t too seriously irritated by our visit. We weren’t exactly invited inside, but rather hovered, somewhere between being inside and out. Father Feenhan had been in Paraguay for 25 years, he told me, but came originally from near Dublin. He still had an Irish accent, and had not forgotten his English but spoke it fluently and well. I mentioned the original Australian settlement, and he remarked that the Kennedy family from the colony, now wealthy landowners with 13,000 hectares of prime grazing land, were parishioners of his. Father Feenhan kept scratching himself nervously, with his right hand, around behind him up in the small of his back; I think we had disturbed him from sleep, or perhaps he had just been confessing some local lepers and was trying to remember if he’d washed his hands afterwards or not. There was a faint figure of a Paraguayan female housekeeper lurking behind him in the shadows – her indoors, in fact. Graham Greene would have loved the whole set-up, and could have based a novel on just such an Irish Catholic priest exiled for 25 years in a remote parish in Paraguay, ministering to the half-breed descendants of a failed Anglo-Saxon communist Utopian settlement. He could have entitled it ‘The World and the Flesh’ or ‘A Padre in Paradise’.

  We were clearly not going to be invited inside formally, probably because I gave off invisible ancestral Protestant vibes, so I made an excuse and said goodbye politely, and our ever-so-slow tour of Nueva Londres by large Mercedes with steering wheel on the wrong side continued. At the end of the afternoon I could have run for Mayor. The whole village knew who I was and where I came from – London and Australia, in other words the far side of the moon. I doubted if many of these people had ever been as far as Asunción.

  During our stately, six-mile-an-hour progress, I became aware of a large number of well-groomed horses being ridden down the main street by Paraguayans in full gaucho rig – high Spanish saddle with sheepskin undercloth on the horses, bombachas, boots, sombreros and colourful shirts and scarves on the men and women. What was going on? I asked Victor.

  ‘Oh, it is just the Day of the Horse. Every year they have it, you know, people dress up and ride around in a ring.’

  ‘Like a rodeo?’ I asked. ‘Yes, yes, that’s it, a rodeo,’ he replied in bored tones. I had chosen by hazard the one day of the year when something was actually going on in Nueva Londres. I persuaded Victor to take me down to the showground, which was guarded by a pistol-wearing fellow in full costume. We were let into the guests’ enclosure after Victor had done his long explanation about where I came from. His son was sent away with the car, and Victor and I stood in the shade and watched the rodeo, or at least I watched it while Victor waylaid everyone he could see and told them about his visitor from …

  In the middle of the showground, on a large four-wheeled trailer decked out with festive bunting a band in cowboy clothes and sombreros were playing amplified music, a cross between Mexican mariachi and country and western. The same tune went on and on and on, never seeming either to stop or get anywhere, musically speaking the electric equivalent of Victor Smith’s conversation. What were they playing, I asked Victor? He thought for a moment. ‘A polka, I think,’ he suggested eventually. If that was a polka my name was Johann Sebastian Bach. Never mind, it was festive and noisy and it didn’t seem to bother the horses.