In the 1960s there used to be a saying that went ‘a conservative is a liberal who has just been mugged by criminals, whereas a liberal is a conservative who has just been beaten up by the police’. I was a newly minted conservative: my sympathy for street kids and their hard lot was tempered by my recent attack. I was in OK shape, really. My head ached and I was jumpy and nervous, unable to sit still, or rest, or sleep well, and I had a marked aversion for going out on to the streets of Asunción, which made my presence in the country rather pointless. ‘You are leaving because you’ve left already’ is an old Spanish saying, and it was true – I now simply wanted to get out as soon as I could. Which was easier said than done. The planes were full up for months ahead: I wasn’t the only one who had decided that out was healthier than in the way things were going. My second visit to the Seventh Precinct police station went without a hitch. Horst provided a calm and kindly member of the hotel staff, who drove me there, took me in, and stayed with me while I collected my copy of the denuncia, he a speaker of soothing words and emollient compliments. It was always better to go into a police station with someone they knew and trusted, to make sure you came out again, and were not thrown into the cells on suspicion of something or other. Once you were in a Paraguayan police cell it was by no means easy to get out again. We stopped at traffic lights on the way, and small boys crowded up to the window to beg for coins or sweets. My companion Luis, a kindly middle-aged man, smiled at them and joked, handed out boiled sweets in wrapped twists of cellophane which he kept on the dashboard: they would grow up into beggars, as that was what they were in training for already. ‘Tomorrow’s robbers and pistoleros,’ I remarked to Luis as we moved away from the lights and he wound up the window. ‘No! No!’ he demurred, shocked at my cynicism. Well, I had been mugged, not him. ‘All will be well when the United States lends us some more money – or the IMF,’ Luis said happily. I said nothing: more begging – beggars on horseback and beggars on foot. ‘Unteachable from infancy to the tomb – there is the first and main characteristic of mankind,’ as Winston Churchill observed to Max Beaverbrook in 1928. Nothing would change in Paraguay, I now knew, any more than it would in any other Third World kleptocracy. There would be riots, rebellions, revolts, coups, military takeovers, dictators, magnicides, magnassaults, massacres, civil wars, torture and cruelty until the end of time or until a merciful set of large asteroids slapped into Earth and washed off the pond-life scuttling round on the surface, in particular the unpleasant race of killer apes which had gained temporary ascendancy, and of which I was a deeply reluctant member. Getting hit over the head with a pistol does not do anything for one’s bumps of benignity, I had found. On the other hand, it had made me remarkably positive, upbeat and optimistic. I was still alive – others, millions of them, were dead. Minor problems were shrugged away, the great thing was still to be alive when I might just as easily have been lying in a mortuary with a pistol bullet in my head. The point of life, said Kafka, is that it stops. Mine had not – I was amazingly lucky. I felt flooded with sheer joy in life, in living.
Alejandro Caradoc Evans had vanished from his usual bar stool. I hadn’t seen him for almost a week. I asked the bartender where he had got to. The man avoided my eyes and looked deeply embarrassed. He banged his wrists together at the pulse and held them together – the local sign for handcuffs and arrest. ‘¿Policía?’ I asked sotto voce. He nodded and started polishing glasses, displacement activity. I didn’t ask why: without any reason I knew it would not be a good idea.
I did manage to contact Mac on his mobile phone. I told him what had happened and that I was leaving. He thought I was doing the right thing. He said he was going to Chile for a while, to see how things panned out after the General Strike. ‘There might be a revolution, or a military golpe. There could be a lot of bloodshed – it’s why everyone with money is leaving.’ Señora Estigarribia was adamant I shouldn’t go. ‘It means they will have won! You have to get out there again walking around, and taking the buses too – it’s the only way.’ I said nothing. She never walked in the centre of town, nor took buses. Nothing is easier to give than advice you don’t have to take yourself. She didn’t offer to come and see me before I left. She had been dropping heavy hints about her ‘daily fee’ for information again. Marcello Warnes was surprised and upset to hear of my attack, but not to learn I was leaving. He offered to take me to the airport. Luis had already been delegated to do this by Horst, so I absolved him with thanks, but it was nice that he made the offer. Marcello came round to see me at the hotel to say goodbye. I offered him a drink in the bar or tea or coffee on the terrace. He declined both, but sat on a chair by the deserted swimming pool, smoking a cigarette as ever.
‘It is a great pity you are leaving,’ he said. ‘Very few European sages [he used the term ‘sabios europeos’] come to Paraguay, and they – you – could do us much good. You have read all the books on Paraguay and South America and know the world, the East, Europe, Asia. We do not have the books here, they are all in Europe. We do not know ourselves at all well. We learn from people like you who come here.’
As a reply I said ‘El golpe avisa’ – the blow lets you know. He lit another cigarette. ‘I will stay because I have nowhere else to go. Things will get worse but then they may get better. I have a wife and child here.’ His son was called Rolf. I had seen him on Marcello’s computer screen: he used the child’s face as his backdrop. ‘A Viking name,’ I had remarked. It turned out he was obsessed with the Vikings, and believed, as many Paraguayans did, that the Vikings had sailed up the Paraguay River in search of timber. When I didn’t laugh at this fancy he had taken me out one day to a cliff, a set of rocks which had etched on them what were claimed to be Viking runes. I had said to him, on the spur of the moment, ‘Do you read the work of Robin Wood?’ He had looked at me sharply and replied with fervour, ‘I like this writer very, very much.’ Robin Wood was a Paraguayan success story. Born to an unknown father, thought to be a high Paraguayan officer, and a blonde mother from the Australian Utopian community at Nueva Australia, he had been brought up, by his mother only, in Buenos Aires and Asunción. After many struggles he had become a fantastically successful writer of what the Japanese call ‘mangas’ and the French ‘bandes dessinées’, that is to say serious if fantastic cartoons on historical, mythological and political subjects for adults. These are read all over the Hispanic and Latin world, though are unknown in Anglo-Saxon countries. Paul Theroux, flying to Argentina, was offered one of these ‘comic books’ as he called it by a trades unionist sitting next to him. Theroux, the ex-college professor, was disparaging: ‘Grown-ups don’t read comics’ was his unspoken response. But that was his ignorance and ethnocentrism speaking. The work of Robin Wood repays close reading by anyone interested in the Latin American mentality. His most potent creation is Monro, a tall, long-blond-haired outlaw who carries a Mauser automatic and smokes a long thin cheroot, and is somewhere in that moral hinterland between a Hemingway hero and a character from a Spaghetti Western – Clint Cantwell, or Across the River and Into the Restaurant, as Cyril Connolly wittily put it in his send-up of Hem’s style. Marcello himself was about 60% Monro in personal image. This blond giant was everything South American men fantasized about but were not. They were trapped inside lousy jobs or no jobs at all, hemmed in by family, oppressed and disempowered by an authoritarian and chaotic political world over which they had no purchase. Monro was free, effective, strong, powerful and ethical in a brutal, macho fashion. In a continent of short, dark, pudgy men he was tall, thin and blond, in a world where Jesus and the Virgin Mary were always blond blue-eyed gringos. Anne Whitehead in her excellent book on the Australian communists in Paraguay has a good chapter on Robin Wood. His cartoon strips were to be found in the Paraguayan and Argentinian papers every day, usually with pithy if simplistic political and moral content.
Marcello and I talked very frankly, more frankly than we ever had before, for now I was leaving and we would never meet again. I aske
d him why there was no leftist opposition in the country. ‘It was crushed and wiped out in the long years of the stronato. And Cuba is an unattractive model – no one wants that sort of regimentation. Paraguayans are too individualistic, too anarchic and also too respectful to authority, paradoxically.’ I asked him if he wanted to see the small zoo in the hotel gardens. He didn’t. I had told him about it before. ‘It is illegal,’ he had commented. ‘But not prohibited,’ I had riposted. He agreed. There were laws but the rich and powerful ignored them. I asked him about the rich, the numbers. ‘There are perhaps two hundred families who are very rich, then perhaps two thousand who are well off, comfortable, and then the rest are poor, owning more or less nothing or in debt.’ He said this without bitterness. He was a man who lived in the margins, right on the edge of society, an adventurer and a romantic. He had warmed to me after all my tales of the East, of the Cathars in medieval Europe, of the Celts and their myths and legends. He asked me many questions and was interested in my point of view. ‘¿El líder maximo de la iglesia en Inglaterra es la reina, no?’ he had asked me on one of our trips. It sounded strange to hear the Queen described as a ‘líder maximo’ but it was true, she was head of the Church in England. I thought this showed a considerable depth of knowledge in Marcello. ‘Cacique’ the word Señora Estigarribia had claimed not to know the meaning of was printed in Ultima Hora in almost every edition somewhere. How could a journalist not know it? Why had she pretended to me that she did not know what it meant? Paraguay and its people still baffled me.
‘Will you come back?’ Marcello asked. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I shall never come back.’ There was no use pretending. I was finished with Paraguay for ever now. He made no comment. I walked with him back to the mud-bespattered El Noble which was parked amid the Mercedes and BMWs. He had been to the Chaco over the weekend, he had told me. He loved the Chaco more than ever. We shook hands and said our goodbyes. I thanked him again for his help and wished him well. He nodded seriously, and started up the engine. ‘Safe journey, then,’ he said, and slid away down the drive and out of my life. He was the best person and the most sympathetic I had met in Paraguay, and I was sorry to see him depart.
Getting my plane ticket changed was not easy. I had to pay a forfeit of US$100 but that was nothing – it was getting on a flight to Sao Paulo that was the problem. I shamelessly played on the heartstrings of the Paraguayan lady in the travel agency booking office.
‘I have been attacked in Asunción and robbed,’ I said, bowing my head to show my elaborately stitched wound. ‘My wife and children are waiting for me in England,’ I lied, a half-sob creeping into my voice. ‘They are anxious to see me. I telephone them every night. “Papy, Papy, when are you coming home to us, Papy?” they cry, my little ones. And my wife, she is not well, she is sick in fact. She needs me by her side …’ All of this in my most pathetic-voiced Spanish. The lady melted, and jiggled and joggled at her computer. ‘Asunción is a very dangerous place,’ she said, concentrating on the screen. ‘My wife will offer up prayers for your salvation,’ I threw in. It sounds less corny in Spanish, somehow, and it was the Day of the Virgin of Mercy. In the end she bumped someone off a mid-afternoon flight in three days’ time, and only charged me US$77 instead of 100. ‘God will bless you for your kindness, señora,’ I intoned with liturgical fervour. Feminists – and others – will not be surprised to learn that it was always the women in Paraguay who helped me out, and always the men who got me into hot water.
I went back to the hotel and packed, repacked, unpacked and packed again. I wanted to leave right now. I tried to read and couldn’t concentrate, paced around the grounds, glanced at the newspapers, swam in the pool, ate long over-copious breakfasts, smoked and drank much too much. I looked at the animals in the small zoo with new eyes: I was in a little zoo now with them. I didn’t go out. I didn’t feel safe. Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, who fed his enemies to the sharks down a blow-hole, was reputed to have a special torturer who was a dwarf. His piece de resistance was to jump up and bite off the testicles of his victims with his teeth. I felt my balls had been bitten off, too. I had completely lost my nerve. I was also very angry and full of violent feelings – a not uncommon reaction after being attacked, or so I have read. I looked with complete suspicion on everyone now, and if anyone came too close to me, or did anything I interpreted as even vaguely threatening my head started to pound, my mouth went dry, my heartbeat raced and my veins flooded with adrenalin ready to fight or fly. Man is by origin a flight-orfight predator, and these responses occur at the deepest primeval levels. I was a bear with a sore head all right. I was killing time, and time was slowly killing me, too.
Twenty
Endgame
The airport had an air of imminent, looming disaster about it – milling crowds loaded down with luggage, crying, fractious children, anxious womenfolk, shouting, pushing, angry men gesticulating and shoving. I wasn’t the only person desperate to get out of Paraguay. Armoured cars stood parked in the sharp sunlight outside. Heavily weaponed police and army were everywhere. There were queues for everything, mobs rather, trying to get foreign currency, tickets, water, food. It took me over an hour to check in. I was convinced that I would not get on the flight. Luis had dropped me off earlier and I had given him a fistful of dollars in spite of his protestations. I was sure I would be bumped off the flight and be forced to get a taxi back to the Gran Hotel again. There might not even be a room for me. Ahead of the General Strike, hundreds of senior labour leaders and trades unionists had been pouring into Asunción: many had booked into the Gran Hotel on the principle that nothing is too good for the working class – and especially for their tribunes. Señor Horst had told me confidentially that he had given them ‘special rates’. This might be good tactics if there were to be a revolution. I began working out how much it would cost me to get a taxi to the Brazilian border at Foz do Iguaçu: I was really desperate to leave.
In among the milling crowds wandered a solitary Indian child of perhaps six or seven, trying to sell bows and arrows to the waiting would-be passengers. If there was one item a departing – fleeing even – citizen of Paraguay was unlikely to want to buy just as he was making his exit surely a miniature Indian bow and arrow set was just about top of the list, along with perhaps a 19th-century hardwood wardrobe or a complete set of leather armchairs and sofas. The boy kept on circling and offering, circling and offering. I was in no mood for Indian boys or bows and arrows, and he got some heavy-voltage don’t-mess-with-mesunshine glances when he approached. I was ready with my bag to swipe him aside or club him to the ground if he looked like attacking me. Maybe his arrows were tipped with curare: I was willing to believe anything now in my paranoia. He gave me a look of open fear, the poor devil, and scuttled away out of range. I had joined the clan of gringos driven plumb loco by South America – a substantial fraternity.
I had a long and futile argument with the check-in staff, who insisted I put my grip in the hold. Sao Paulo was notorious for luggage thieves who ransacked bags in transit – all the guidebooks warned you not to check luggage through. I expostulated, argued, explained, cajoled all to no avail. My bag had to go in the hold. Cursing, I unpacked it and took out the silver bombillas and maté holders, camera and lenses, vital books and other things I didn’t want to vanish, loading these into a small handgrip. Then I had to queue to go through passport control. A woman in a glass booth demanded US$12 as an exit tax – cheap at the price you might think – but the sign printed in front of her read quite clearly ‘Exit Tax US$5’ with another notice next to it reading ‘Help Stamp Out Corruption – Do Not Offer Bribes’.
‘It is five dollars,’ I said. ‘Look – it says so here.’
‘It has gone up,’ said the woman. ‘It is now twelve dollars.’ She showed me the receipt book which had printed on it ‘US$5’. This had been crossed out in biro and ‘US$12’ written by hand next to it. Hardly the most sophisticated forgery project in the world, but simplicity in c
ertain circumstances reaps dividends.
‘This is an estafa – a swindle,’ I said. ‘I refuse to pay more than five dollars.’
‘Then you can stay in Paraguay for the rest of your life, señor,’ she said. The people behind me were becoming restive. If I lost my place in the queue I would miss my flight.
‘Call the manager,’ I demanded.
‘I am the manager,’ she replied with no irony.
‘Call your superior,’ I demanded. I was getting ready to strangle someone. My head was throbbing dangerously. I was about to reprise the Monty Python sketch about the dirty fork with me playing John Cleese, the manic chef with the war-wound. She rang a bell and a middle-aged man came over. He obviously knew what the problem was.
‘The tax has gone up, señor, I assure you. It is not an estafa. It is now twelve dollars,’ he said without even having the matter explained to him. I didn’t believe him. On the other hand he was wearing a large automatic pistol in a waist holster, and also had a pair of handcuffs attached on the other side. Any argy-bargy and one could well end up arrested, beaten, in gaol and the whole cycle would start again. I bit down my anger and bile, paid over twelve dollars, and was given a receipt. As I moved forward into the transit lounge I could hear the man in the queue behind me start to argue, insisting he would only pay five dollars. It was a smart little scam – the immigration staff must be making hundreds, even thousands of dollars out of this swindle.
Paradise With Serpents Page 37