I passed back through the lines of police and made my way to the Post Office, which overlooked the Plaza Independencia, climbing up on to the roof: sure enough there were army and police marksmen in uniform and combat helmets, armed with sniper rifles, lining the parapet, looking down on the crowd: here was potential magnicide in the making if I ever saw it. I made my way downstairs again quietly and went back to the Gran Hotel on foot, an hour’s hot, dusty walk. I no longer trusted the buses at all – there were too many robberies and assaults on them every day now. The whole of the centre of Asunción was criss-crossed with roadblocks, police standing on corners with billy-clubs, and demonstrators still coming in from the countryside. I just knew it would all end badly. I could feel it in my bones. Either the Oviedistas would make a successful revolution that night, or they would be crushed with force. I was fairly certain it would be the latter.
Back in my room I had a shower, enjoyed a pot of Indian tea with lemon on the verandah outside, then drank half a bottle of wine, and ate a packet of Spanish olives, brand name Borges, packed and distributed by Medist Czech s.t.o. Revolucai 13, Praha, which I had bought in the supermarket en route back from town. They were nice olives, juicy and full-flavoured. I wondered if there was a brand of Czech plums called Kafka, packed and distributed by Frutaspana S.A., Avenida Libertad 12, Madrid 2. ¿Quien sabe? I now regarded Paraguay as a sort of surreal parallel universe in which almost anything might be possible, the less probable the more likely.
I turned on the TV in the late evening to see how the demo had ended. Water-cannon spouting, furious police baton charges, terrified crowds milling to and fro, old ladies clubbed to the ground, ringleaders or mere unfortunates hauled away by the cops or kicked in the guts on the ground, clouds of tear gas wafting about, fear and loathing, screaming and shouting. Long experience had taught me that police tempers started to get frayed in about the time it took for a meal to be digested and hunger pangs to start up once again. There was no magnicide this time, however, and the snipers on the Post Office roof hadn’t opened up. So, the Oviedista coup had been averted and order restored. Doubtless the police, now with cash in their pockets, had dined well in the evening after their brisk exercise. The next morning, Ultima Hora waxed indignant: ‘Carne de canon was their headline – cannon fodder. If not magnicide this had been magnassault. Several of their photographers had been beaten up. Still, no one had been killed, which for a Paraguayan demo meant that it had all passed off relatively peacefully.
The same could not be said for the ever-increasing crime situation, especially around the bus terminus. Robberies, attacks and murders here were reaching epidemic proportions. I avoided this part of town unless I absolutely needed to go there. However, one day, while buying a ticket for Filadelfia in the Chaco, I saw a Chilean, a middle-aged man with a rucksack, shot dead by a young Paraguayan street kid. The Chilean had not even got down on to Paraguayan soil yet, was still on the bus descending the steps, when the street punk rushed up, shoved a pistol in front of him and demanded his money. The Chilean, obviously a foreigner from his clothes and facial features, brushed the kid away. Several shots followed and the man collapsed on the ground, his clothes covered in blood. He was very obviously dead. The punk ran away into the crowd. He was later arrested on a bus into which he’d run and hidden, so I read in the papers. I didn’t know the dead man was a Chilean until I read that either. It was shocking and alarming to see someone gunned to death right in front of you, a few yards away. I got straight in a taxi and went back to the hotel and stayed there for three days. I didn’t feel safe in Asunción any more. I didn’t feel safe anywhere in Paraguay, in fact. I wanted to leave the country as soon as I could. I should, in fact, have followed that gut-feeling of mine and got out then. I would have saved myself a lot of grief if I had. I was asked when I came back from my trip to Albania if I would have gone had I known how dangerous it was. The answer was certainly that I would not have done. I now found myself in the same situation again – in a completely lawless country in the grip of a violent crime wave. I wished I hadn’t come to Paraguay, and I wished I could leave immediately. I was right out of my depth, frankly. I was a travel writer, not a war correspondent.
In one of those dreadful epiphanies which thankfully come but rarely in one’s life, I saw my doppelgänger the next morning as I crossed Avenida España to get my newspaper. My double was crossing in the other direction, a briefcase in his hands. He was obviously as appalled to see me as I was him. He was my exact double, but wearing a summer-weight Nazi-style light beige Afrika Corps-like army uniform, full colonel’s crowns on his epaulettes, the ensemble complete with frogging and horrible dangling fascist dagger and Luger in leather holster. We did not break pace, but gazed sideways at each other in absolute horror. No wonder Paraguayans thought I was from la technica. In this parallel universe I almost certainly was.
Seventeen
Gran Chaco
There’s a strange unoriginality about many South American place names and informal topographical soubriquets. The Matto Grosso region of the Amazon is called ‘L’Inferno Verde’, or the Green Hell. The Pantanal region of lowland Bolivia and Brazil is called ‘L’Inferno Verde’, or the Green Hell. And the Gran Chaco of Paraguay is called … but you guessed it already of course. Why, that’s what I want to know? St Petersburg is called the Paris of the north, but few, if any, call Paris the St Petersburg of the south. Edinburgh is similarly called the Athens of the north by a few wildly optimistic Scots, but few in their right mind would call Athens the Edinburgh of the south. Tom Stoppard got it just about right when he called Edinburgh the Reykjavik of the south. Travel writers perpetuate these myths. Norman Lewis, on safari with Don McCullin, lensman of the internationally sordid par excellence, in search of human rights abuses for the Sunday Times colour supplement in an era when the liberal bourgeoisie wanted its conscience outraged over morning coffee at the weekend, refers, of course, to the Chaco as … the Green Hell. The trouble is it is neither green nor hellish, unless you are colourblind, or have never been anywhere more challenging than Hampstead Heath on a Friday night.
The Chaco is big, that one can admit, about 270,000 square miles, which is greater than Spain and Portugal combined, and more than three times the size of the United Kingdom. It has very few people in it – just 3% of the total population of Paraguay, 100,000 or so, of whom about 20,000 are Indians. It is very flat, rising at a rate of one inch per mile as it creeps towards the Andes. It is full of strange trees with spikes, armour, prickles and weird shapes that led Gerald Durrell to call it The Drunken Forest, also the title of his book about the place. Quebracho, palo santo and palo borracho are the best known trees along with algarrobo and indeterminate thorny scrub, which when dense enough to rip your flesh if you tangle with it is called monte, but not, alas, harbouring any pythons, though many other terrifically deadly snakes abound, including anacondas and rattlesnakes.
‘The whole landscape did look as though nature had organised an enormous bottle party, inviting a weird mixture of the temperate, subtropical and tropical plants to it,’ observed Gerald Durrell. In the Chaco there are also elegant, tall, rather superior-looking palm trees called caranday, which have an air of drooping, fashionable ennui about them, these the etiolated, anorexic fashionmodels of the tree fraternity. There are also original and genuinely Paraguayan types of wildlife, combining the bizarre with the vicious, such as the owl which mimics the cries of its avian prey, then swoops and devours them when they come to investigate; yacarés or alligators which drag men and cattle underwater and drown them before devouring them; and long-legged maned wolves, assertiveness-trained pumas, upwardly-mobile anteaters, herds of swirling rheas, which are feather-duster-like ostriches, and of course familiar chums such as vampire bats, piranhas, blood-drinking killer-bees and malarial mosquitoes, without which dear old Paraguay would not be the country its aficionados come back to for their holidays year after year. There is, I was assured, a Ministry of Tourism in Asunción,
but it is reputed to have been closed for as long as anyone can recall. A tourist in Paraguay as a concept is a bit like a Liberal Democrat prospective parliamentary candidate in a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan – not a happy camper at all. There is also a fictional animal in the Chaco – at least I hope it is fictional – called the Ow-Ow: this is a man-eating giant sheep, which chases its prey across the bush and up trees, follows them, drags them down to the ground and devours them. I haven’t just made this up, honestly, I got it out of a travel book on Paraguay, so it must be true. It’s called the Ow-Ow because that’s the noise its victims make when they are being eaten alive. Personally, I think the hierba maldita has a lot to answer for in South America.
However, it must be reiterated that the Chaco is just not green at all, and it certainly does not look like anyone’s vision of the infernal regions. Perhaps calling it the grey-brown-fatigued-looking-spindly-tree-and-dust-semi-desert-only-not-quite-butalmost didn’t seem poetic enough for whoever dreamt up the Inferno Verde moniker. Maybe there was a whole department in the Spanish Colonial office in Seville given over to this sort of naming thing, viz:
Don Juan-Carlos López García, Gran Jefe de Nomenclatura Imperial (Segunda Classe): (pointing at map of Paraguay) ‘Look, hombre, here – this empty bit, there, west of the River Paraguay, up to the Andes. What do you think, eh?’
Pedro Domingo Luis Calderón, el mozo inferior: ‘Hmm … says here [consults his notes] snakes, crocodiles, lions, tigers, swamps, palms, cannibal Indians who drink your blood, vampire bats, lungfish which live in mud, mosquitoes, jaguars …’
Don Juan-Carlos: ‘How about … Sangre de Cristos Mountains? … Or Arizona?’
Pedro Domingo: ‘No mountains, and not dry enough. Anyway both are already taken, as is, well, let me see on the list … California, already taken, Montana, that’s gone, too, and Florida and Labrador. I see the Indians call it charqui, or chaco, this blank space, which is the Quechua for “good place for hunting”.’
Don Juan-Carlos: ‘Not exactly catchy, is it – charqui or chaco? Let’s be frank, we’re running out of place names, aren’t we? New Granada – taken, New Carthage – gone; how about New Extremadura?’
Pedro Domingo: ‘Are you taking the Michael, squire? That’s where I come from, Extremadura.’
Don Juan-Carlos: ‘Ooops, sorry, well how about … L’Inferno Verde?
Pedro Domingo: ‘The Ports have already used that for the Amazon.’
Don Juan-Carlos: ‘Yes, I know, but we haven’t … have we?’
Pedro Domingo: ‘Well, I suppose not.’
Don Juan-Carlos: ‘Right that’s it then, settled, done and dusted, matey – the Green Hell it is. Now this bit inland from Labrador, right up north by the icebergs, where there’s sweet fuck-all, absolutely nothing – aquí nada – how about – Canada?’
It takes seven hours to get to Filadelfia by bus from Asunción, and that’s not counting the roadblocks with morose, exhausted-looking soldiers who wave you down, clamber on board and check your papers, and then after relieving the driver of some local currency, wave you through angrily. You can understand their point of view – you are going somewhere, they are staying where they are. It is said the officers do not dare to issue ammunition to these conscripts, as in the past they have used their bullets to shoot their superiors and flee into the bush. In 1979, I was once stopped at a roadblock in the Egyptian desert between Alexandria and Cairo, which was manned entirely by members of the Egyptian Navy, each clad in World War II British uniforms, complete with bell-bottom trousers and round white hats. They were all completely stoned out of their minds on hashish, and were handing enormous joints back and forth while giggling uncontrollably. I asked the driver of the car, an old Egypt hand, why the navy were being used. He thought for a while. ‘Well – ships of the desert, I suppose – it makes a kind of sense.’ The same kind of sense as having the Paraguayan army make roadblocks in the middle of the Green Hell: doing it in central Asunción, where all the crime was would be more to the point.
There is a lot of dust in the Chaco: it gets in everywhere, through closed windows, into your socks, boots, hair, eyes, nose. When it rains, apparently, the dust all turns to mud and the roads become impassable. It hadn’t rained for a long time. There were some boggy, emerald green patches with reeds and scum on the top, and these, after storms, turned into lagoons and swamps. You could buy bits of the Chaco for a few cents a hectare, and now I saw it for myself I wasn’t surprised. There were cattle there, with Paraguayan cowboys or gauchos, who raised one languid hand in salute as we churned past them, showering up clouds of dust. Some of the cows had humps and big horns: these were a cross between Indian cattle from India and Herefords, or so I was told, combining meat with drought resistance. They were called Brahma, after the well-known local beer, which had a picture of a cow on the label. I doubt if Mahatma Gandhi would have approved. Most of these animals are turned into hamburgers or stock cubes.
Eventually, if you go on long enough across the Chaco you get to Bolivia. This can take about three days or even a week, depending on pumas, bandits, the army, cocaleros, rustlers, punctures, getting bogged down, rainstorms, floods, vampires, etc. It is said that no one who has ever done this journey ever repeats it willingly. Filadelfia is about halfway and quite far enough for anyone not either completely insane or a professional cocaine smuggler. It is the capital of Fernheim, or ‘Far-home’, one of the three Mennonite colonies which were granted a priveligium by the Paraguayan government, as an inducement for them to settle in this uncompromising region. This means no taxes, no military services, their own schools, laws and administration – a state within a state in fact, on the New Australia model. Mrs Thatcher once observed that the only free lunches are those on offer in mousetraps, and the gift of this Chaco land to the Mennonites certainly comes into this category. Firstly, the land was already occupied by Lengua and Toba Indians, sometimes called Guaicurus by the Guarani, which some say is derived from the name for a medicinal herb ‘yerba del diabolo’. Norman Lewis, ever keen to criticize the Guarani, claimed it meant ‘rabid rats’ in their language: like the Ow-Ow, everything is basically up for semantic grabs in the Chaco. Secondly, the whole of the Chaco was claimed by Bolivia, so the Paraguayan government were actually giving away something their neighbours didn’t agree they owned. Pacifists and believers in adult baptism, the Mennonites were oldfashioned Anabaptists who had been driven from pillar to post since the 17th century in an attempt to keep their own faith and their children out of other people’s schools and armies. Some of them managed to sneak out of the Soviet Union, that well-known paradise of tolerance, good sense and multiculturalism in the 1920s, and ended up in the Chaco. Others winged in from Canada and Mexico, both of whose governments ratted on their agreements to let them alone. In spite of all the odds these plattdeutsch-speakers in their old-fashioned clothes made a roaring success of their settlements. Filadelfia is not going to win any architecture competitions, but it does have a modern hospital, shops, a hotel, a co-operative, lots of ice-cream parlours, and is the centre of a thriving beef and dairy industry. It does not run to paved road, however, and dust is the central motif, along with gaggles of Indians squatting against corrugated-iron walls waiting for Mennonites to drive in and employ them on their farms. It could easily be a cow-town in the Northern Territory of Australia, except for the lack of drunkenness.
The main drag is called Hindenburg, on account of the German General and President having negotiated the Mennonites out of the Soviet Paradise in 1927: it’s also called the Hauptstrasse, or High Street. There are a few other streets on a grid, Trebol, Bender and Unruh, but all the action happens on the Hauptstrasse. This consists of Mennonites in pick-up trucks moving very slowly down the street, parking outside the co-op, and coming out with groceries, barbed wire or branding irons after an hour or so. The best thing to do in Filadelfia is drink milk shakes, eat yoghurt and lick ice creams. It is very hot and all the cows mean there is a plenti
ful supply of dairy products. Supposedly, you can buy beer and tobacco in Filadelfia, which is regarded as the fastest and most decadent of the Mennonite townships: maybe there is even a speakeasy there. I didn’t find it, however. You can get a good meal at the Hotel Florida, with steaks and grills an obvious favourite, and their rooms are clean and air-conditioned. It was a great relief not to be taken for German, at long last – except by the Indians, who kept coming up to me and asking in German if I wanted any labourers for my finca, mein Herr. At least that’s what I think they were offering – it could have been their wives or daughters, as I don’t speak German, least of all 17th-century plattdeutsch. There must be some Guarani Paraguayans somewhere in Filadelfia, I suppose, but I never saw or heard them. I had an introduction to a Japanese-Paraguayan general in the army, but no one had ever heard of him, and so I suppose he was in the other parallel reality. I might as well have left Paraguay and been in another country. I was very tired after the long dusty journey, and so was pleased to collapse into a bed with clean sheets at the Hotel Florida. There was even air-conditioning that worked and a private bathroom, though I was too exhausted to have the cold shower I really needed.
In the morning, after a luxurious shower and a copious breakfast in the hearty German manner, heavy on wursts and black bread, yoghurt and cheeses, with strong black coffee, I rambled around the village, chatting to the shop assistants, who spoke rather better English than Spanish. Times were hard in the Chaco, it seemed, as elsewhere in the country. Many of the settlers were leaving or thinking about leaving. The Paraguayan government was suspected of contemplating revoking the privilegium, as the Canadian and Mexican governments had done before them. Modern government is an immensely expensive activity. There is a constant demand for cash, for fresh taxes. The underclass everywhere – all with votes – demand jobs, housing, healthcare, schools, leisure facilities. The rich, even the prosperous are few, with few votes. To tax them, to confiscate legally their assets is always a temptation, often overwhelming. The Mennonites had arrived with nothing, and in under 80 years had turned a desert in a war zone into the most prosperous and orderly part of Paraguay. Naturally, the government in Asunción now cast envious eyes on this asset.
Paradise With Serpents Page 33