Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  However, after the secession of Lane, Tozer and their 60-odd stalwarts, New Australia started to pick up: the anti-alcohol and racist colour-bar rules were abandoned, and the land was eventually divided up into family holdings. These prospered, for many of the Australian settlers were able, experienced bushmen or craftsmen, often used to breaking new land and herding stock; and now they had an incentive to work hard – self-interest, self-improvement and profit – capitalism, in fact. Lane had, unwittingly, led his followers to a highly successful venue for exploitative capitalist endeavour and then abandoned them to their profits.

  Another two-faction conflict arose at Cosme, and in despair Lane and his wife abandoned the second colony as well. Lane was sick of the Australian working class by now, and had turned increasingly to God, the prophet in ascendant over the communist. He developed into a deeply conservative Empire Loyalist, still faithful to his teetotalism and white supremacist views. He went to New Zealand, where he became a journalist again, under the by-line ‘Tohunga’, the Maori word for prophet, and eventually edited the New Zealand Herald. He died in 1917 aged 56. Tozer had abandoned him in disgust after the alleged attempted rape incident, but had stayed on in Paraguay, having a successful career as an administrator of the British-run railways. Cosme limped on much depleted, rum and native women now the norm, and Nueva Australia thrived as a capitalist cattle-herding venture. To this day there is bad blood between the descendants of the two settlements, and many of them will not talk to those of the rival camp. Without William Lane the idea of New Australia would never have been thought of, never attempted, and surely never carried through. He was a genuine visionary and idealist, but also a disastrous leader and an impractical intellectual. It was said of the 19thcentury New England missionaries in Hawaii that ‘they came to do good and they did very well indeed’, becoming rich and powerful landowners. The same could be said of the remaining New Australians who followed the capitalist road after Lane left. Their descendants are part of the small landowning aristocracy of the country today. The jump from revolutionary agitator baying for communism to the plutocratic landowner, master of broad, well-watered acres is a short one. In the USA they talk of people going ‘from Poland to polo’ in one generation. In the Seychelles, the Creole French elite who still control the government and own much of the land are the descendants of the radical Jacobins the Directory shipped out as political exiles after the fall of Robespierre; they became rich and powerful very quickly. The economic drive behind the New Australia emigration was land hunger, not communism. The good land in Australia had all been taken. William Lane was a means to an end, not an end in himself.

  The finances of the New Australia movement were always murky: forged signatures, vanishing trustees, absconding principals and empty safes found in abandoned offices marked the demise of the movement. Many of the investors lost all they had, though Lane himself seems to have been honest – he lost all he put in as well. The winners were the Rebels who drove Lane out: when the 93,000 hectares came to be divided up, they got it for themselves, like the dismemberers of the old Soviet Union, who ‘privatized’ a whole empire into their own Swiss bank accounts and formed the new ruling class in the capitalist successor state. The people who come out of the whole sorry saga best are the Paraguayan authorities who acted with generosity, intelligence, foresight and imagination. Under a better, more pragmatic leader than Lane the colony might well have attracted many thousands, even hundreds of thousands of landless people from Australia and England. But a more pragmatic leader would never have dreamt up the whole cockamamie project in the first place. An amusing film could be made of the New Australia saga, directed by Woody Allen, and starring John Cleese as William Lane. I wonder if George Orwell knew about New Australia. It almost makes Animal Farm redundant as a satire of communism. Lenin must surely have read about the experiment – petit-bourgeois romanticism would have been his evaluation. George Bernard Shaw knew about the colony, and sent the library there copies of his books. The Manchester Guardian wrote about them wistfully from time to time as ‘arcadian idealists from the Forest of Arden’, though they did not report that Lane called in the Paraguayan army to enforce his expulsions at gunpoint, or that Tozer patrolled around with his pistol sniffing the milk to see no caña had been smuggled in, and striking down with his fists Rebels who dared to challenge Lane’s authority. Private property and the rights of individuals under the law remain the only guarantee that the William Lanes of this world do not metamorphose into the Lenins, the Trotskys and the Josef Stalins. The rise and fall of Nueva Australia should be examined by anyone who studies the communist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries: in microcosm it reproduces the whole catastrophe in which millions died for an impossible ideology.

  On the way back, we stopped at a phone call centre: Marcello’s mobile was out of action and he had urgent messages to impart. Carlos hung around outside with an embarrassed look, plucking up courage to ask me a question. He never addressed me directly, being too shy and diffident. Looking at the ground and scraping the dust with the toe of one boot, he finally asked in his thickly accented Spanish: ‘Is there much analfabetismo in England?’ This was a difficult one to answer, really, the illiteracy rate. ‘Not so much really, no,’ I replied mildly. ‘There is a lot in Paraguay,’ he responded, still looking at his toes. I wondered if he was one of them. Franz Kafka invented a Cinema for the Blind, and it would certainly not be beyond the powers of the Paraguayans to have created a university degree in Tourism for the analfabeticos. In many ways, given the conditions in the country, illiterate tour guides would probably be a plus.

  Back at the Gran Hotel I noticed that in Ultima Hora the question of the day was, ‘Do you believe that the government bureaucracy should be severely reduced?’: 99% agreed, 1% disagreed. The police still hadn’t been paid and were getting even more restive. A general strike was being planned by 60 trades unions. They intended to paralyse the whole country. Diesel prices, which had been increased, had just been reduced again, after a violent demonstration. After the War of Independence, Simon Bolivar observed, ‘We have not had time to learn anything because we have been too busy learning.’ That could be yet another national motto for Paraguay, where every attempt to bring in Paradise always imported the Serpents as well.

  Sixteen

  The Strange Case of the Missing Pictures

  All Asunción was talking about the daring theft of the collection of oil paintings from the National Gallery. There were many different theories but the facts were hardly in dispute. The thieves had rented a vacant shop on Calle Iturbe, formerly occupied by the Foundation of Piety, a charitable institution. The shop faced the side of the Gallery across Iturbe, a narrow side street running off the main road. Without anyone noticing them at work, the criminals had dug a tunnel down into the basement of their rented shop, under the road, and up into the cellars of the National Gallery. One weekend, when the place was closed to the public, they had removed every single painting through the tunnel, taking not just the pictures themselves but the frames as well. The ‘caso cuadros’, or case of the frames, had the police baffled. There had been a ‘testigo clave’, or key witness, one Raul Hernan Diaz: unfortunately he had been gunned down in the street, shot dead, it was assumed, to stop him singing like a canary. The police had no idea who had shot him, according to the fiscal, or investigating magistrate, Victor Hugo Alfieri.

  One theory was that the robbery had been carried out by the government itself, to get collateral which was required by the IMF for the much discussed loan Paraguay was trying to arrange. Another theory held that these pictures, which formed the National Collection, had, in fact, been stolen over the years already, and copies had been substituted in their place, one by one, the forgers having been a team of experts imported specially for the job from Sicily, where they had been trained in a mafia art-forging academy. This theft was thus simply a cunning way of getting the insurance money, for now the worthless fakes had been stolen, the New York
insurers would have to pay up as if for the ‘real’ ones, which had long ago been sold to collectors overseas. Another theory held that Oviedistas had carried out the raid, and that the paintings had been pre-bought by wealthy Argentinians and Brazilians from the catalogue: the funds would be used to buy weapons and suborn the army, paintings into magnicide. The most simple solution proposed was that the police had themselves carried out the heist, and that they had already communicated to the government that they would only get the pictures back when they had paid the police all their arrears of salary.

  A plaintive note was struck by the Curator, who said that the fabric of the Gallery was now in danger, for the tunnel had seriously weakened the foundations. The building was a fine stucco mansion from the mid-19th century. There were, of course, no funds for the filling in of the tunnel or the repair of the foundations. The Curator expressed the view that the building would shortly fall down as a result of the damage, unless something urgent was done. This unleashed the further theory that the robbery was a blind – the paintings were worthless anyway – and the whole scam had been carried out deliberately to weaken the building so that it could be knocked down and the land sold for development. The real cynics claimed that the Gallery staff themselves had arranged the robbery – their salaries hadn’t been paid for months either. The pictures had never actually been taken out through the tunnel, the staff had smuggled them away in a van: the digging was just a blind. You could see the tunnel, crudely filled in by the police, and the newspapers were full of photos of the inside of the underground passageway. There were also accusations in the press that President Macchi was implicated in the disappearance from public funds of 16 million dollars: his wife, it was alleged, had several unexplained foreign bank accounts. None of this could be proved or disproved, but no theory was too wild to gain some credence in the current atmosphere of cynicism and despair for the country’s future. The President of Argentina was claiming, in the same papers, that Argentina was ‘a good debtor country’ because although it had defaulted with interest repayments on its loans it ‘intended to pay them in the future’. In this part of South America, evidently, the intention to repay made you a creditworthy debtor.

  I had discovered a rich vein of fascinating if useless junk in the antiquary shops in the old part of Asunción. These lay behind unprepossessing shopfronts and were always empty of people apart from their suspicious, hostile owners, who sat cradling their pistols waiting for someone to just try a robbery and thereby make their day. Paraguay had been looted of its gold, gems and jewellery by Marshal López and Madame Lynch, of its archives and libraries by the victorious Brazilians at the end of the Triple Alliance War: to this day all pre-1864 records of the country are held in Rio de Janeiro. As a result, everything in these shops dated from after the 1860s, and most of it from the 1920s onwards. There were vast, well-built wardrobes made of fine local hardwoods in a late 19th-century French style: no Argentine or Brazilian tourist would have wanted to ship such heavy items down the river with them. There were piles of broken, deformed and often limbless plaster angels, putti, friars and Madonnas from a period of greater piety than today. There were treadle sewing machines, dismal prints in cracked frames, and mounds of simple junk – broken dishes, ashtrays, forks, spoons, featureless lumps of metal, and so on. You could not have given this stuff away to a charity shop in the poorest part of Britain. There were also quite a few ancient guns – a French chassepot, a battered British Brown Bess musket and a Brazilian copy of a Winchester carbine were on offer. Inevitably, there were pistols and automatics galore in various stages of disrepair – Lugers, Webleys, Smith & Wessons among others. The best find was a Paraguayan officer’s sword in scabbard, made in Germany, and engraved with ‘Vencer o morir’ – Victory or Death, the army’s motto. This was only US$50 and I was tempted to buy it, but the current paranoia about weapons and hijacking in the UK suggested I probably would not get it past the Customs. One shop led to another, the owners pointing out on my map – usually incorrectly – where their cousin’s, brother’s or uncle’s shop was. The stock was similarly hopeless in all of these establishments. Because they thought I was German, I was always approached at some point or other with a whispered ‘Kommen sie her, mein Herr …’ and led off into a secret lair where the Nazi memorabilia were kept. Signed photos of Adolf, sheets of mint stamps with his head on, SS daggers in sheaths, Luger pistols in wooden presentation cases, photos of Party rallies, it was all here, if you wanted it, which I certainly didn’t.

  I did find an attractive small oil painting of St Anthony of Padua, patron saint of hopeless causes. It had been executed in a painting factory in Peru in the 1920s, according to the owner of the shop. It wasn’t old, certainly, for the canvas had machine-made printing on the back. I haggled the owner down from US$25 to US$20, which he didn’t like, but accepted. I rolled it up in old newspaper and carried it away under my arm. Walking round the capital with an oil painting was probably not a good idea in view of the National Gallery robbery. I also managed to find a huge photo of Alfie Stroessner in dress uniform that had been handtinted in colour. I felt the US$10 asked was too much, and demanded why. The frame, came the answer. How much without the frame then? A much more reasonable 50 US cents was the reply. I also bought a large Alfie-era Paraguayan flag at the same time: it is the only national flag in the world, apparently, where the two sides are different from each other. ‘Because we are a two-faced nation’ was a common jokey Paraguayan explanation: low self-esteem in this country extended even as far as the flag. What had happened to all the photos of Stroessner, I asked? They had been thrown in the wastebasket immediately he had been ousted, I was told. When in power his photo had been on display in every office and shop, hotel and business. So now I knew the cold market value of a time-expired South American dictator – 50 US cents.

  I wasn’t the only one in a spending mood. Miraculous to say, the police had at last been paid their wages. I actually saw a long line of them, each holding his pay cheque in his hand, waiting to get into one of the few banks still operating, looking forward to handling some cash at long last. The government had left this crucial move until the last possible moment: that afternoon and evening, the big Oviedista rally and demonstration was to take place outside the government buildings in the Plaza Independencia. No pay would have meant no police, and the government buildings might well have been stormed, occupied, and a revolution effected. Clutching my huge unframed picture of Alfie, wrapped loosely in a black plastic sack but clearly visible to anyone who peeked inside, and my outsize Paraguayan flag, I passed the cordon of soldiers and police who were frisking anyone who wanted to enter the Plaza Independencia. I was searched politely, but my equivocal souvenirs excited no comment from the policeman: perhaps these were just the sort of things one would take to an Oviedista rally. The demonstrators were overwhelmingly Guarani, campesinos and ordinary working-class Paraguayans. There were almost no white faces to be seen in the crowd, only on the dais where a rock band belted out songs about corruption, and politicos who had thrown in their lot with the Oviedistas making speeches about corruption in between the music. It was early and the police were still polite and good-humoured. They had been paid, and had obviously eaten a good lunch. But it was hot and they would now not eat or drink again until the demo was over: their tempers would inevitably fray as the hours went by. The crowd were drinking caña and beer, a carnival atmosphere in the ascendant. This wouldn’t last either: they would get drunk, aggressive and violent – that was what happened when Paraguayans drank too much caña. The police had confiscated hundreds of small Paraguayan flags stuck on to small but stout hardwood sticks: these could easily be sharpened into daggers and dirks by the knives all the peasants carried in their pockets. Women moved around selling chipá and beer. There were small stalls with roasting kebabs and sausages. It was all good-natured, peaceful and non-threatening. But it wouldn’t last. It would certainly end in tears and bloodshed.