Paradise With Serpents

by Robert Carver

  ‘Disraeli once said, “a landed estate is a small kingdom”,’ I commented. Jurgen smiled with a smile of recognition. ‘Very good. I shall remember that. Now, for dinner, I suppose you want to eat meat?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I am a vegetarian, but of course the peons all eat meat so it will be no problem, no problem at all,’ he explained. I burst into an involuntary peal of laughter. ‘Jurgen, you are too much really – a vegetarian cattle rancher in the remotest part of the Paraguayan Chaco …’

  Jurgen looked a bit embarrassed, but did manage to give me a sheepish grin. ‘It does sound a bit crazy, but I really came here for the peace and quiet, the nature, the absence of people – not the meat. I just don’t like the stuff.’ I asked him how he managed to grow his vegetables. ‘Irrigated poly-tunnels, to prevent them being roasted under the sun. I grow citrus under shade from overhead arbours, and it all has to be fenced in to keep the animals from eating everything. We’ve got everything here though.’ I told him I would be delighted to go vegetarian for my stay – I had eaten far too much meat in Paraguay already.

  So we had a delicious supper of roast and steamed vegetables, with fresh fruit afterwards, and good Argentinian red wine which Jurgen imported directly from the grower down south in barrels. ‘It’s amazing what you can get in one of those avionettas,’ he commented. ‘There’s a surprisingly large cargo section behind the seats.’

  We were waited on by two shy, smiling Indian ladies in long white dresses who padded about silently in bare feet, and vanished as soon as we had been served. ‘They don’t see many strangers,’ he added, by way of explanation for their timidity.

  After dinner we sat outside again, drinking brandy and smoking cigars, watching the stars, very bright and seemingly very near, for we were far from any source of light pollution. ‘Tomorrow we can go for a horse ride and see a bit of the estancia,’ he promised.

  A week passed as if it was a few hours. We rode out into the Chaco on large, powerful horses, imported from Argentina especially, for the local breed were not up to Jurgen’s weight and size – he must have stood six foot four or five in his socks. We took it easy and meandered, avoiding monte and swampy bits alike, and not trying anything terribly heroic. Sightseeing on horseback really. Jurgen carried a GPS and a portable radio transmitter, in case of emergencies. ‘It is surprisingly easy to get lost out here,’ he observed mildly. He showed me how to operate the radio if something happened to him and he was incapacitated. ‘You just press this button and it sends out an emergency signal – the vaqueros will come out by jeep and find us,’ he explained. I asked what might happen. ‘Well, a snake can spook a horse and throw you – you break an arm and your shoulder and can’t remount. Or a puma sneaks up behind you and drags you off your horse, you shoot it, but again you can’t remount. Or your horse gets bogged, breaks a leg and you are stuck. It can happen, you have to be very careful out here. One minute everything is fine, the next you are on the ground with a broken limb, many kilometres from help. No one would ever find you. The vultures and foxes would finish you within a day and a night. There’d be nothing left to find. This is real wilderness, not pretend.’ It was strangely, eerily beautiful, with birds everywhere – storks, what looked like egrets, vultures, hawks, and many species I could not recognize.

  We were armed with Winchester carbines, these in leather buckets next to the saddles, revolvers on our hips, and Jurgen had a sawn-off shotgun across his back. ‘It’s not theatricals,’ he explained, ‘a bull in heat can attack you out of the monte, have to shoot it at short range with your pistol, or it will gore your horse and trample you. And the pumas are very bold indeed.’ Of course, Jurgen did not take me to any difficult or remote parts of his ranch, nevertheless, we did go to a low-lying swamp, where a large number of yacarés or alligators were lying about like so many logs, and in the distance, after a long trot into the bush, we saw a far-away flock of rheas bowling across the landscape. The vampire bats were a real nuisance, he remarked, as far as the horses were concerned. He kept his own choice bloodstock indoors at night, in bat-proof stables. Until he had built these, he told me, his mounts were getting bitten on a regular basis and several had died as a result.

  One afternoon, after my siesta, I descended to the pool a little earlier than usual, and Jurgen was still asleep upstairs. Out of simple curiosity, I wandered across to one of the poly-tunnels where the vegetables were grown, pulling back the door to peer inside. The whole tunnel was full of mature marijuana plants in large pots. I let the door swing back and hurriedly returned to the pool and dived in. I was energetically splashing about when Jurgen appeared and joined me a few minutes later. I said nothing about what I had seen. Jurgen was obviously a professional dope farmer. Witnesses to such places had a tendency to end up in shallow graves, and my welcome might have swiftly evaporated if he suspected I knew what he was up to. I was never entirely at ease after this discovery. Jurgen smoked a lot of dope himself, but privately. He would appear with the familiar red-eyed, slightly disconnected air of the zonked, and listen to rock music from the 1960s and early 1970s with great intensity. He was older than I had first thought, in his late fifties: he just looked younger because he was fit and bronzed.

  After a week I told him it was time I was heading back. He offered to take me to Santa Cruz, which was tempting, but I needed to get back to Asunción, in the opposite direction. He offered to fly me there, if I could wait another two days, he had to pick up a consignment from the airport – of what he didn’t volunteer and I didn’t ask. I gladly agreed – avoiding the sevenhour plus bus journey back from Filadelfia was a huge bonus. ‘Let me give you a gasoline contribution,’ I insisted, when we arrived on the tarmac back at the capital. ‘I would have come anyway. It’s been good to have some company. I really must get back to Ibiza for a trip next year, you’ve reawoken my appetite for the island life. Come again to visit me, and when you are ready to buy some land let me know. I can help you avoid the pitfalls.’ We shook hands and I caught a taxi back to the Gran Hotel. It had been a risk him inviting me out to his dope farm, but I guess he just got carried away – or was more lonely than he let on. I had asked him several times how far we were from the Bolivian border, but he was always vague. I suspect he owned land on either side of the border, so that he could slip across into the other jurisdiction if the heat was on. I asked him about Ayoreo Indians. It was rumoured that there were still tribes uncontacted by Westerners in these remote regions. ‘Certainly there are. I’ve seen their arrows. They fire at you from thick jungle if you come too near. But if you leave them alone they leave you alone – except for the odd cow being killed and eaten.’

  I didn’t tell Marcello Warnes that I’d been to the Chaco as I knew he was still hoping I might hire him and the ailing El Noble to take me. Instead, I suggested we go to Altos, which was just a few kilometres away. ‘You’ll like Altos,’ a lady at the hotel had said to me. She didn’t say why. Since Nueva Australia, Marcello was quite happy to go where I wanted without query – I was paying after all. We cruised around Altos asking various peons sitting in the dust in the shade where the Country Club was – this was the main attraction I had been sent to see. No one knew, so we cruised on until we eventually stumbled on it by accident, up a hill, on a bluff looking down over virgin bush and forest. You had to pay a two dollar entry fee, which was refundable on your first drink, we were told by the gateman. The grounds were neatly planted with mainly northern European trees and shrubs. The club itself was inside another planted park, at the end of a windy track through a sort of nature reserve planted with pines and full of cute wooden bridges over artificial mountain streams. There were notices everywhere in German and Spanish telling you not to walk on the plants. Marcello and Carlos were frankly puzzled. I had brought them to yet another Paraguayan mystery. What did it all mean? Marcello was my guide, but I was guiding him to places he didn’t know existed or understand.

  ‘It’s a club for Germans,’ I said. ‘This i
s the way they do nature in Germany – neat paths of sand, little wooden bridges over streams, pine trees, signs telling you not to walk on the plants.’ We strolled into the clubhouse itself, a Bavarian log cabin. The doorman looked at Marcello and Carlos with no enthusiasm at all, and at me interrogatively. ‘Who are these?’ was his unspoken question. I gave him a curt nod and said ‘Gruss,’ which will get you out of a lot of sticky social situations with south Germans, I’ve found. He ‘Grussed’ me back and we stepped inside. They weren’t actually all dressed up in Waffen SS uniforms and singing the Horst Wessel song, the clientele, but they might just as well have been. There were tables full of overweight blond beasts attacking steins of lager and outsized Wiener Schnitzels. There was a Guarani harp orchestra in full local costume serenading the eaters at the trough. This was the only time I heard the famous Paraguayan harp music while I was in the country. At the bar a line of hostile Teutonic faces, red and bloated, stared at us, evident interlopers. ‘Do you want a drink?’ Marcello asked me. I felt like Lawrence of Arabia in the 1962 David Lean film, when, after capturing Aqaba, Lawrence turns up in a Cairo bar with his Arab boys, asking for lemonade, faced with a line of outraged British officers. ‘Get the ruddy wogs out of here,’ they cried, and I could tell that’s what the bar-krauts were thinking, too.

  ‘I think not,’ I said, and headed back out of the door again, into the fresh air. If anywhere was ever a lair of Nazis that place was. It made me feel physically sick.

  ‘What was it?’ Marcello asked me, as we drove back to the capital. He was genuinely puzzled.

  ‘A colonial-era German country club,’ I replied, but of course in Paraguay it was still the colonial era.

  The estancia stay with Señora Dellabedova was off, Veronica told me, when I rang her. She had gone to Miami for an indefinite period of time. She wanted to avoid the General Strike and the tractor sit-in which were shortly to bring the country to its knees, so the organizers hoped. The tractor-in was a Paraguayan wheeze whereby all the tractors in the country were driven into inconvenient places in towns at the same time, to block the traffic and cause paralysis. This was to protest against fuel hikes, as well as everything else. The Argentinian Finance Minister, one López Murphy, had said he was ‘hopeful’ that the IMF would lend his country money again, very soon, even before any repayments of interest had restarted. I wondered if having a Finance Minister called López Murphy was really such a good idea in South America, all things considered.

  Eighteen

  Sol y Sombra

  I finally ran out of luck at 11.30am one Sunday morning. I was walking into town, had just passed through Plaza Uruguaya, turned off Calle Estigarribia and into Calle Iturbe – where the notorious art-thieves’ tunnel was still visible, crudely filled in with earth. I had my smallest camera with me cupped in the palm my left hand. I carried no bag and was dressed as normal, in blue slacks, with a pale, nondescript shirt, no wristwatch, no rings, grubby desert boots on my feet, Mr Ordinary personified. I had taken a photograph of a closed bank façade while in Plaza Uruguaya, and in retrospect that was probably what attracted my attackers: it marked me out as a stranger – no Paraguayan would have ever taken such a photo. The camera was as small and discreet as such an item could be without arousing suspicion of being a ‘spy camera’. I had used it successfully all over the Third World, including Albania. When covered by my hand it was virtually invisible. But someone had seen me use it.

  Suddenly, from out of my right-field of vision, a small, dancing figure darted in front of me, waving a very large, old pistol at my head. He was a child, or at least a very small, dark, young teenager, somewhere between 12 and 15, I guessed. He danced about in front of me, whispering, and indicating that I hand over my camera. The pistol was moving all the time, deliberately, to avoid me striking at it, but it was always pointing at my head or torso. My attacker kept whispering, ‘Dame, dame, dame’ – Give me, give me, give me.

  Without thinking I veered sharply to the left, back towards the relative safety of Calle Estigarribia, the main, central artery of Asunción, the Oxford Street in London terms. I was only about ten paces from this major thoroughfare, which was crowded with cars and people. Then, from out of nowhere came another attacker, on my left, who pushed me sideways sharply. I stumbled and fell towards the ground, putting out my left hand with the camera in to break my fall. As I did so, the punk with the pistol in front of me brought his gun down with a sharp crack on the top my skull. Had I not been falling anyway, this blow would have done me serious damage, perhaps knocking me out, or cracking my skull. As it was, the barrel caught the front of my head and skidded off. I felt a gout of blood spurt out from my head and splash down my face. I was in trouble, big trouble. Fortunately for me, I had seen the Chilean tourist gunned down by just such a punk: I took the attack seriously now. ‘¡Coño!’ this one hissed at me, still in a whisper. ‘Dame, dame …’ The next move would be several bullets inside me, I knew. ‘¡Si, si si!’ I shouted, and thrust my camera at him. It had taken the full weight of my fall, and I could feel it was damaged beyond use – he was welcome to it. He pocketed it without looking, his pistol still pointing at me. ‘¡Otro! ¡Otro!’ he whispered – Another, another. I had a sacrificial wallet prepared, in my right pocket, secured to a belt loop of my trousers with a leather thong, this against a simple pickpocket. I had bought this cheap wallet in Athens in 1976 and carried it for well over a quarter of a century as a potential sacrifice, in case I was attacked. Now, at last, it proved its worth. ‘¡Si, si, si!’ I shouted out. I was up on one knee now, getting the wallet out and handing it to him, still attached to my belt loop, which I knew made it look valuable. ‘¡Coño!’ whispered the punk again, grabbing the wallet, which felt satisfactorily full. He wrenched it and the leather thong came away tearing off the belt loop. Satisfied with this, he and his sidekick now ran away down Calle Iturbe, in the direction of the barrio by the river. They were wearing flip-flops and couldn’t run very fast. Now would be the time to gun them down if I’d still been carrying Mac’s automatic: until they turned their backs on me a pistol would have been no earthly use at all. Now, though, they would have been an easy target, slow moving and still near. It was a good job Mac had got his pistol back, because if I’d had it then I might have used it, which would have been idiotic.

  I was up off the ground immediately. I ran, crouching low, back into Calle Estigarribia. The whole attack had taken perhaps two minutes, maybe less, but in that time Iturbe and Estigarribia had completely emptied of cars and people, as had the nearer half of Plaza Uruguaya. In a street hold-up or shooting, everyone made themselves scarce for fear of further robberies, or a violent reaction from the armed police when they arrived.

  I was pumping blood from my head wound. It was spurting out and running down my face, all over my shirt and down on to my trousers. The wound itself didn’t hurt at all. My left hand hurt, where the palm carrying the camera had hit the tarmac of the road. I was alive and able to run and I kept running, weaving and dodging about, in case the thieves decided the sacrificial wallet was not the real one, and came back to finish me off. In a minute, maybe, I was back in Plaza Uruguaya, a large square with palm trees, planted gardens, the San Francisco railway station on the side nearest the river. I was aiming to get somewhere where there were people, maybe police, which would discourage a further attack. On this one day of all days there were no police about in the square. Usually the whole central district was crawling with them. Later, I learnt that this was because there was to be another big demo the next day, and many police had been given leave to rest up and prepare themselves for the confrontation on the morrow. A perfect time for muggers to strike, of course. I had no handkerchief or anything to stop the blood from my head. It just kept spurting out, made worse by my exertions in running as fast as I could to get as far as I was able from the scene of the attack.

  I was now in the dead centre of the square. A Paraguayan woman who was chatting to a taxi driver gave me a look of absol
ute horror. ‘¿Qué pasa, hombre?’ she gasped. I could tell from the shock on her face that I must look a mess. By now the whole of the front of my shirt was covered in blood, as were the top of my trousers. My face was streaked with blood and I could feel the stuff coming out of the open wound on my scalp. I held this closed as best I could with my left hand. I explained, rather breathlessly, dos pistoleros – a robbery … in Iturbe … my wallet and camera stolen … not shot but hit on the head. She led me over to a taxi, the unhappy driver following, and she sat me in the back seat. A newspaper was found and put under me to catch some of the drips, and I thrust a large wad of the stuff on my head wound to absorb the blood. The poor old taxi driver looked most distressed at what this was doing to his nice cab, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. ‘The hospital or the police station?’ the Good Samaritan lady asked me. ‘Policía,’ I said immediately, and off we drove, she beside me in the back, voicing her outrage that such attacks could take place in daylight Calle Iturbe – the equivalent to a side street off Oxford Street.

  Why did I say police and not hospital? Because firstly I knew I was not seriously hurt. Head wounds look dramatic, with a lot of blood, but the fact that I had been able to run a hundred yards or so with no ill effects, was conscious and thinking quite clearly meant that all I had got was a superficial cut on my scalp. The blood was bright red, not dark red – no artery had been severed. Second, of course, was the notorious condition of Paraguayan hospitals, with no medicines, filthy water, viruses galore, and pilfering staff. I still had my passport, credit cards and travellers cheques hidden away in a money belt next to my skin: all that would vanish if I went to hospital. Most importantly, I had lived in Latin countries for long enough to know that if you can crawl and breathe, your first move after an attack is to go to the police and make a denuncia. Not to do so is to put yourself in the wrong, and perhaps be arrested and charged yourself.