In Africa, when things got bad and meltdown happened, the soldiers roamed around the airports simply stealing the outgoing passengers’ watches, wallets and jewels at rifle point. Kinshasa, Brazzaville, the Congo massacres – this mêlée at Asunción had all the stink of an imminent collapse about it. Twelve bucks was cheap – they could have demanded a hundred, two hundred – what could we do?
We had to get out. The guns Paraguayans always carried were packed away in their cargo luggage, so no one would shoot the scammers, as might well happen elsewhere. I wondered if there would be more taxes later on, at the door of the plane even. ¿Porque no? There was another little act in this farce to be played out, though. Customs. Or was it Security? Whichever it was, two slow-moving Paraguayan girls rummaged and sifted their pudgy little fingers through everyone’s bags, supervised by an older man, who in true macho style did nothing but look on benignly. I was carrying my larger-than-life portrait of Alfie Stroessner partly hidden in a black rubbish sack. There had been no problem about me carrying this on board as hand-luggage – ex-dictators go gratis, evidently. The supervisor spotted Alfie’s face, darted forward, and gently pulled out the portrait, holding it up. He hadn’t been quite sure what it was, and his curiosity got the better of him. Now he looked shocked, startled, amazed. He held up Alfie for the searching girls to see – ‘¡Mira! ¡Mira!’ he said – Look! Look! The girls just looked bored. They were too young to be impressed, Stroessner meant nothing to them. The supervisor, who was evidently a prize plonker, started waving the portrait around, telling everyone to look, look. It was a Bateman cartoon – the man who was caught exporting the portrait of the deposed dictator. The whole queue froze and stared first at Alfie, then at me – the gringo nutcase who was evidently still a stronista.
‘¿Alemán?’ asked the supervisor – ‘German?’ ‘Inglés,’ I replied, taking the portrait back from him and reinterring it in the obscurity it deserved inside its plastic shroud. Perhaps I was actually exporting the last existing portrait of the dictator from Paraguay. I had searched high and low and this was the only one I had found.
We waited in humid tropical heat for the plane to arrive from Cordoba in Argentina. Most people had hand luggage vastly larger than the bag that the staff had insisted I check in. I realized now this was another scam. I was expected to offer them five or ten dollars as a propina to allow my bag on board with me. I kicked myself for my stupidity. In my mind I had already left this land of squeeze, graft and corruption, and so had not even thought of the obvious solution. There was nothing to eat or drink in the transit lounge, no kiosks, shops or bars. The lavatories were stinking and there was no water there, even. The seats looked as if the lepers had been at them, and possibly the vampire bats as well. We waited, and we waited, and we waited. Finally, two hours late, the plane came in. No one got off the flight, not one person.
The doors to freedom were unlocked, our boarding passes collected, and we surged out on to the tarmac to walk the hundred yards to the waiting plane, which shimmered in the heat, lines wavering and trembling in the air as if the machine might be a mirage. I put on a spurt. If anyone was going to be left behind it was not going to be this little cream-puff, as the Australians say in such circumstances. This was the worst airport scenario I had been involved in since the summer of 1967 when the Lufthansa plane taking me from Istanbul to Rome had been forced to land at Athens by Greek jet fighters to collect weeping and traumatized foreigners trapped in the coup d’état mounted by the Greek Colonels. We were the first plane in and the military were hysterical with tiredness, nerves and fear. The coup was by no means certain of success and if it failed many of the army could expect to be shot. We were herded off the plane, shunted at gunpoint into a waiting area, screams, shouts, plumes of smoke from fires all in evidence around us. When we were finally let back on the secret police came down the aisles checking our passports slowly to see there was no one there they wanted: these were the most frightening, evil men I had ever seen in my life. All of them were clearly torturers and murderers. The refugees were then herded on to the plane by men with rifles. We were way over capacity – people were standing crushed together in the aisles, you could not move. We flew like this all the way to Rome.
I got inside the Brazilian plane OK, one of the first aboard, and found a seat. I was now not going to move come what may. The people who had prevented me bringing all my luggage on board had in fact done me a huge favour. I had been able to move across the tarmac far faster than those laden with heavy bags. There was a crush at the doors now, shouts and screams. The Brazilian cabin crew pushed the latecomers back, for we were soon full up, and swung the doors shut. There was hammering and cursing on the door from those left outside. There would not be another flight out for a week, and in that time the General Strike would take place. I was on the last flight to freedom. I sat and sweated. We weren’t airborne yet. This was the time that (traditionally) the Paraguayan secret police blew up planes which had on board people they didn’t like. I could well be one of them. My attack and robbery, it had already been discreetly suggested to me, might not have been a complete accident.
Several jeeps loaded with armed military swung across the tarmac towards the plane and started chasing the unsuccessful passengers who had failed to get on board, harrying and chivvying them back to the terminal. There were dozens of these poor devils. Our flight was full up to the gills; there wasn’t a single spare seat.
We sat and waited. The cabin crew obviously knew what sort of flight this was. Once the doors were firmly locked the stewards started down the aisles handing out bottles of mineral water, ice, plastic cups, whisky and rum. The litre bottles of liquor were plonked down between the passengers to help themselves: they – we – were not slow to get stuck in. There is no nonsense about not smoking on South American airlines, and everybody including me had lit up, cheroots, cigars, pipes – and the hierba maldita, unless my nostrils were playing me false – were all blasting away as if lung cancer had never been heard of.
‘Things are bad in Paraguay, too, then?’ enquired my neighbour, helping me to a tumblerful of Scotch whisky, from a bottle undoubtedly mau. He was a businessman who lived in Cordoba, he told me, but was moving to Bahia in Brazil because the situation in Argentina was so chaotic. We swapped horror stories about our respective cities. There was very little food in the shops, he told me, fuel shortages, power outages, false police, kidnappings, the banks all closed, no money, hyper-inflation, the whole meltdown South American nightmare. I told him a few choice tidbits, morsels from everyday Paraguayan life: he was impressed, I could tell. Meanwhile, the Scotch spread through me like some miraculous ichor, life blood from a far-off, wondrous planet. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, I have Italian papers,’ he confided ‘I can always go over there.’ ‘I have British papers, so I can too,’ I added. We toasted our sagacity in being so well-prepared with yet more Scotch. I was pleased to note my Spanish had definitely improved after the last few months. I was much more fluent.
Eventually, we taxied for take-off, revved up, and then – up, up – we were away, the grey-green river glinting below us, the jungle and chaco all around the city like a ring of dark glowing emerald. The whole plane burst into applause and cheers, clapping and whooping as we took off. ‘¡Bravo! ¡Bravo!’ rang out the voices. A holiday atmosphere now gripped the flight. I let out a huge sigh of relief, the tension draining from me like air from a punctured balloon. I was out, away, free, gone – chin-chin, mau-mau – adios and vaya con Dios Paraguay … I had escaped.
I drank well over half a bottle of Scotch on that short flight to Sao Paulo, and I was one of the more conservative imbibers on the plane: happiness in such circumstances is an ice-cold Scotch, believe you me. At Sao Paulo there were the same impossibly slim and elegant Brazilian black men strolling to and fro in the airport, and serving in the duty-free shop, where any currency was acceptable – apart from all those from South America, of course. I bought a very large box of cheroots an
d two litres of Scotch whisky: I was a convert to a new religion, it seemed – Scotch on ice.
The three-hour wait for the London flight was a dream. I found an English-language newspaper from the US for sale and caught up on world news for the first time in months. I felt I had been let out of prison – exhilaration, sheer bliss, a sense of absolute freedom. I could go anywhere, safely. I could lie on Aegean beaches, motor through Gascony, travel by vaporetto in Venice. I was free and still alive. I had survived Paraguay.
I managed to lie down across three seats on the London flight and get some sleep, for the plane was not full. I was woken for breakfast by a Brazilian stewardess. She looked down at me, and as I blinked up blearily, I saw the horrified expression on her face. She gasped, ‘¿Señor, qué pasa?’ speaking Spanish as that was the language we had in common. I touched my warm, sticky face. I seemed covered in sweat. Then I looked at my hand. It was covered with blood. My head wound had burst open while I slept, and my whole face was drenched in blood. I staggered to the washroom. The guy who stared back at me from the mirror was not a pretty sight. He had aged about 10 years in a few months. There was blood and sweat all over his face, and his stubblepocked face looked like that of a derelict on Skid Row.
I cleaned myself up as best I could, and vowed that the next travel book I wrote would be an in-depth personal account of the gastronomic restaurants of the Côté d’Azur.
Twenty-one
Charlie Carver’s Gold Watch
I had seen this fabulous item when I was small boy, at my grandparents’ house in Gedling Grove, Nottingham. Like the elephant’s foot wastepaper basket, the oriental brass tray bought at Port Said, and the set of eight Arts and Crafts ladderback dining chairs with rush seats, it formed an integral part of the wonderland of adulthood which was their house. My grandfather Roy had a shed at the end of the garden where he used to do his stamp collection, and craft items out of wood: I used to love sitting down there watching him at work, gouging out a wooden bowl with his lathe. He used to read The Times every day from cover to cover, and could – and would – quote long passages of Shakespeare, Swinburne, Browning and Tennyson at long family Sunday lunches, where much burgundy was drunk, and when the roast was getting close to being finished my grandmother would whisper ‘FHB’, which meant Family Hold Back.
It would be nice to be able to recount that my grandparents had promised me Charlie Carver’s watch, a fascinating heirloom, but, of course, they didn’t. The stamp collection was sold to a shark of a dealer after Roy’s death, the ladderback chairs went into an auction, and Charlie Carver’s watch was borrowed by some Carvers from South Africa, who promised to pay for it to be regulated and cleaned, but then never gave it back.
Charlie Carver had interviewed the young Fawcett for his final, fatal expedition to find Paititi. Fawcett had been a personal friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author, as well as of the celebrated Sherlock Holmes stories, of The Lost World in which Professor Challenger and his expedition find a plateau in the South American jungles on which the dinosaurs and pterodactyls are still alive and well. Challenger and his team are following in the footsteps of a previous expedition which has vanished without trace, led by Maple White, an American. At the base of the plateau Challenger finds the skeletons of two white men with shreds of clothing left on them and boots. They had been killed by Indians and thrown off the plateau. Conan Doyle wrote:
A gold watch by Hudson, of New York and a chain which held a stylographic pen, lay among the bones. There was also a silver cigarette case with ‘J.C. from A.E.S.’ upon the lid … ‘Who can it be?’ asked Lord John. ‘Poor devil! Every bone in his body seems broken …’ Professor Challenger replied ‘Maple White was not alone … there was a friend, an American named James Colver … I think, therefore, that there can be no doubt we are looking upon the remains of James Colver.’
Charles Carver, who spoke with an American accent and wore American clothes, had metamorphosed into the American James Colver – complete with gold watch from Hudson of New York. ‘Anything, surely, is possible in South America,’ Conan Doyle had observed, and Charlie Carver’s fictional alter ego had discovered the lost world and paid for it with his life.
The past is a foreign country, as we know, and its language is notoriously open to corruption and distortion. Looking on the various websites dedicated to my ancestor John Carver, first governor of Plymouth Colony and Master of the Mayflower, I discovered that there is a dispute ongoing among genealogists about his relative and companion on the voyage Robert Carver. Some claim he was John Carver’s brother, others his nephew – the facts are in doubt. Already the same doubt and imprecision has overtaken Charlie Carver. Andrew Johnson, a second-cousin of mine and an amateur genealogist who has done much research, informed me that the brother who had vanished in South America was in fact Bertie Carver – Charlie had stayed behind in England and inherited all the money. My grandmother, then, must have mixed up the brothers’ names when she told me the story – that’s what my Uncle James thinks anyway. I find it highly appropriate that even the name of the ‘man with no name’ who vanished, reappeared, then vanished again for ever should even now be in doubt. Perhaps it is all in the archives of long-forgotten provincial newspapers somewhere: I prefer the imprecision, the doubt; it is more suitable to Paraguay and to South America, themselves locales of fantasy, dream, vagueness and misinformation – and of the disappeared, let’s not forget.
Conan Doyle’s friend and fellow author Rider Haggard was given a small black stone statuette by an explorer who had come back from South America, where he had found it in a jungle ruin. Rider Haggard took it to the British Museum for identification. All their South American antiquities experts were in unanimous agreement: they knew nothing about the statuette or its origins. They could not even tell what type of stone it was carved from, for they had never seen that before either. It belonged to a completely unknown civilization. Rider Haggard believed it was from Atlantis, or a South American offshoot of that culture. Fawcett believed Atlantis had a lost colony in the South American jungle and that was what he was looking for when he disappeared.
The Incas enslaved many peoples and forced large numbers of them to move from the lowlands and jungles to the uplands of Peru, there to work on state construction projects. When the Inca empire collapsed many of these slave workers fled back to the lowlands they had originally come from, founding, it is claimed, Inca-style cities in the jungles, complete with gold and silver mines and cyclopean architecture in stone. Lost Incan-style cities are still being found in the jungles, covered with lianas and trees. East of Titicaca in Bolivia, a city called Iskanwaya was discovered as recently as 1976. And in 2002, Mark Thomson and others found a hidden city which had not been visited since it was abandoned in about 1572. In 1971, settlers in Todos Santos were attacked by previously unknown Indians who emerged from the jungle and then disappeared back into it again. According to Dr Carlos Ponce Sangines, Director of the National Institute of Archaeology in Bolivia, ‘there are still communities of the descendants of the Incas living hidden in the jungles, which certain archaeologists know about, in the north of the country, in the mountains of Apolobamba.’ It was also said that these hidden people knew of an old Inca Road which led to the City of Gold – to the Paititi which Colonel Fawcett claimed to know.
Could there still be communities of people hidden in the jungles living a neo-Incan way of life? While I was writing this book there appeared an article in the British press about a previously unknown tribe of Ayoreo Indians who had emerged from the jungle in the Paraguayan Chaco to seek the help of the whites, whom normally they feared and shunned. They had only come out because they had seen these huge, new beasts, enormous, violent, and making frightening noises. Suddenly they had appeared, and were now knocking down trees and ploughing up the earth. The Indians wanted the whites to help them destroy or drive away these monsters – which were, of course, great earth-moving bulldozers. No one had even suspected the existence of thi
s tribe before. They had known all about the whites, but the whites had not known about them.
Paraguay is much better known and explored than Amazonian Bolivia, Peru or Brazil. Aerial photos tell you nothing of the land, for it is covered with jungle, and any ruined city would be hidden underneath the foliage. Exploration in these areas is very difficult: the remains of the Fawcett expedition, like the Carver expedition, have never been found. ‘East of Sacapampa are Indians living in cities of stone who guard their territory jealously and kill other Indians who approach: these have armies of soldiers because they produce food surpluses,’ wrote the explorer and author Ross Salmon in My Quest for Eldorado.
Myth, fantasy, romance, or a future reality waiting to be discovered by some intrepid explorer, some latter-day Carver or Fawcett? We do not know. 150 years ago Schliemann had yet to excavate Troy – the Trojan Wars were believed to be simply myth and legend by all serious historians. And 100 years ago the whole Minoan culture of ancient Crete was completely unknown – 1,000 years of Mediterranean history still waiting to be uncovered by Arthur Evans, a dilettante amateur, like Schliemann. Both of them, incidentally, were firm believers in Atlantis as a lost antediluvian culture. In the middle of the last century, the farming and obsidian-carving proto-urban culture of Çatal Huyuk in Anatolia was not even suspected. I often think how amazed Lord Byron would be, or Percy Bysshe Shelley, to be whisked to our world and shown round the museums – whole cultures on display from the ancient world which they had not even suspected existed. What odes and ballads they would compose!
What hidden wonders await us in the jungles of South America or buried under unsuspected mounds of earth as yet untouched? What will mankind know of ancient cultures 100 years from now? Is there a new Machu Picchu out there somewhere? Does Paititi, or Eldorado, actually exist? For myself I am not sure. But I am certain that Charlie Carver would say ‘Yes they do’, and set about equipping yet another expedition to find them.
Paradise With Serpents Page 38