Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay

‘You cannot fire public servants in Paraguay,’ Gabriella had told me. ‘Once appointed, it is a job for life. Under Stroessner, the administration of the city of Asunción was carried out by 400 civil servants, who worked from 8.30am to lunchtime, then finished. They were all members of the Colorado Party. Although they worked slowly, and very easy hours, they did actually turn up and did actually work. Everything was kept in good repair, and new roads were laid, parks maintained and basic services ensured. Then, after Stroessner was ousted, the Radical Liberal Party managed to get into power in the Asunción local government. They could not fire the 400 Colorado Party civil servants, but they could hire 1,000 new civil servants – all Radical Liberal Party members. These are known as “gnocchis”. There is a tradition in the River Plate countries, Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina, that civil servants eat gnocchi, the Italian potato-based pasta, on pay day every month, usually the 29th of the month. It’s an old tradition. In time, the civil servant who is purely a political appointee and merely turns up every month to collect his salary, became known as a gnocchi. This is how the political parties fund themselves – they reward their followers with civil service jobs when they are elected on the understanding that the party gets a kickback of between 50% and 90% of the placeman’s salary. The gnocchi can have several jobs of this sort as all they have to do is turn up once a month to get the salary. Well, the Colorado civil servants naturally didn’t turn up for work any more – they couldn’t be fired, and Stroessner didn’t frighten them now he was in exile. And the Radical Liberals didn’t turn up because they were gnocchi and paying much of their salary back to the Party. So there was no civic administration and nothing got done and things started to fall apart. The disgusted citizens of Asunción voted out the Radical Liberals after this happened, and voted in a minor party who immediately appointed 1,000 of their own members on the same gnocchi principle. The local government now has 2,400 employees, none of whom turn up except to get their salaries. And none of them can be fired. As a result no maintenance work is done, no local taxes collected, and the infrastructure of the city is falling apart. And as there are no taxes collected, none of the civil servants have been paid for at least a year, sometimes longer.’ The logic of all this, I had to admit, was inescapable.

A wave of nostalgia was now spreading for the ‘good old days’ of Stroessner when the firm hand had meant a degree of order and efficiency, and a level of corruption that now seemed positively moderate. ‘Ya seria feliz y no sabia’ I had seen as a printed car rear-window sticker all over the city – ‘then we were happy and we didn’t know it’. Liberalization brought street crime, robberies, rapid inflation and a collapse of the infrastructure as well as the banks. Diphtheria, cholera, malaria, yellow fever, dengue and leprosy were all on the increase. There was no foreign exchange to import necessary drugs and medicines. Even the water supplies in the hospitals were polluted. ‘Will you stay in Paraguay or go abroad again?’ I asked Gabriella. She thought for a long time and gazed away from me into the middle distance. ‘I don’t know. We’d like to stay. It’s much easier here than Europe. But if the chaos grows … I don’t know.’ ‘Easier’ meant cheaper, with servants, in a pleasant climate. ‘Where would you live if you could?’ I asked. ‘Miami,’ she replied without hesitation. ‘It’s a terrific city – culturally Hispanic but run by Anglo-Saxons, so everything runs properly. And so safe.’

Everything is relative. In England, Miami is a byword for violent crime, drugs, gangs and disorder. But from the perspective of Asunción it seemed as appealing as Switzerland. ‘We need a government of honesty, austerity, and lack of corruption,’ one Paraguayan had said to another in an Ultima Hora cartoon. ‘That is to say, a foreign government,’ his friend had replied. Gabriella gave me a list of useful contacts, people who would help give me an insight into the country – a radical priest, a German settler, a US drop-out living with a Paraguayan girl, and many others. ‘Don’t get too hopeful,’ she cautioned me. ‘You will be promised many things in Paraguay, and none of them will come to pass. There is much talk and almost no action. Everything that works here is run by foreigners – it has always been the case. This hotel is an island of German efficiency. If the Germans left Paraguay – and one in forty are of German descent – the country would go back to the jungle. And they are leaving, the foreigners, for Brazil, and Bolivia, those who can. The civil service wages bill consumes 87% of the government budget even when they have any money, which at present they don’t. What the private sector doesn’t provide simply doesn’t get done. Government here equals a parasitic class which provides nothing.’

My own observations walking round Asunción confirmed the dereliction. In the municipal gardens there had been a man in rags sweeping leaves off the path with a cut palm branch. He wore no shoes and looked more like a tramp than a public servant. He took care not to disturb the beggars sleeping on the wooden slatted benches, on the grass, under the palm trees. There were very small children, from four upwards, who strolled about trying to sell chewing gum and sweets from cardboard trays. Lunatics from the local asylum wandered about aimlessly, cackling and grinning, dressed incongruously in old-fashioned evening dress – tailcoats, striped trousers, spats but no shoes – as a result of international charity clothing donations. The asylum had no money to feed the inmates, so they had been turned loose to wander the city and fend for themselves, scavenging rotting vegetables from the gutters, left by the Indian street sellers. They capered and loped about, these lunatics, distinctive in tailcoats stained by diarrhoea, adding a carnivalesque, grotesque note to the tropical dirt of the Central Business District. Neither the police nor anyone else paid the slightest bit of attention to them: like the vultures hunched on the telegraph wires, watching for a stray dog that had escaped attention, and the Makká Indians from the Chaco who drifted about in loincloths and painted cheeks, trying to sell bows and arrows, they were simply part of Asunción’s dusty, stinking reality. In the air hung the smell of foetid, fermenting human excrement and urine; all these people were living, eating and eliminating in public, in a hot, humid tropical climate. They, like the street children and the beggars, slept in the parks. In daylight the streets were full of European-looking businessmen and their BMWs. At dusk these vanished to the suburbs, and the town centre became an ill-lit Indian-haunted place where pistoleros and whores roamed about and the police stayed mainly inside their fortified barracks. If the police had withdrawn completely the city would be given up to looting and uncontrolled violence: and the police had now not been paid for several months, and were extremely disgruntled. If the government could find no money to pay the police they would not suppress the next pro-Oviedo demonstration. And then there would be a revolution, democracy would be closed down, and a hard-line dictatorship set up again. Liberalization led to chaos and riot and so back to dictatorship again. It was like the ancient Greek city states, an endless swing between repression and licence.

All of this swirling, picturesque, smelly chaos was kept out of the Gran Hotel by high brick walls, 20 foot or more, and an armed guard at the entrance to the grounds with a machine-gun and stern glance who kept would-be intruders at bay. I had negotiated the room-rate down from US$100 a day to $40 a day, and thought I had done well. When I told Gabriella what I was paying she snorted, and went to harangue the middle-aged woman, once an ambassador’s wife it was said, who managed the front reception. After a short altercation in Spanish, Gabriella informed me that as from today my room rate had been reduced from $40 to $30 a day, and when I went off into ‘the interior’ as the rest of the country was quite unironically referred to by the people of Asunción, the hotel would keep my room for me and all my luggage in it, ready for my return, at no charge to me. This was quite usual, Gabriella told me. ‘There is almost no one staying here. They have dozens of rooms and almost no guests. They are lucky to have you.’ The hotel was a pleasing old colonial affair in the Spanish style, with loggias and white stucco Tuscan columns, dark oxblood-red walls, roman tile roofs over verandahs. The windows had white-painted louvred shutters and the ceilings of the rooms were high, to keep the air cool. Each room opened out on to a courtyard garden planted with banana and citrus, bougainvillea and palms; ferns and bright orchids hung in baskets. The soil was dark red and the white-clad Indian gardeners moved about slowly, directing water, pruning, hoeing, weeding. When a guest passed them they stopped work, turned to face the passer-by and, smiling, said quietly, ‘Buenos días, señor’. This is how it must have been throughout much of Paraguay under Stroessner – calm, obsequious, well-ordered, the peons knowing their place. Now the Gran Hotel was an island of tranquillity in a sea of chaos and disorder. Behind the swimming pool lay a dusty tennis court, and beside this, shaded by trees, a tall metal cage which held two brightly coloured green parrots: at dusk these birds gave off terrible shrieks, as if heralding the end of the world. They were fed with cut-up fruits by the gardening staff – oranges, bananas, mangoes, and fresh leaves from tropical trees. They perched on one claw and slowly, delicately, nibbled at the fruit held in the other. There was also a large toucan in a separate cage on the other side of the swimming pool. This bird clambered up and down the wire, as if imprisoned in an adventure playground. He too lived on fruit provided twice a day, and was shy: if you looked at him, he avoided your gaze and trundled off, embarrassed, getting out of your eye line. Birds in cages always make me feel sad and depressed: not only do I feel sorry for the imprisoned birds, but it also reminds me of our own incarceration. I had felt oppressed and imprisoned in Europe, and now I felt oppressed and imprisoned in the gilded cage of this luxurious hotel and its grounds in Asunción. In Europe I could sit on a park bench in public, unnoticed and unthreatened – I was invisible. In Paraguay I felt unsafe in all public spaces. The eyes that searched me over were not friendly. It was noticeable that Paraguayans of European extraction spent as little time as possible in public spaces, passing through them in cars, usually, whereas the mestizo and Indian population, on foot, seated or sprawled on the ground, lived at ease in these spaces. My race, my pale skin made me an intruder.

Behind my room, in a small courtyard garden into which one could wander, was another prison, a small menagerie with hoopoes, cranes, two small monkeys in a cage, a couple of miniature deer of the muntjak type, and a large terrapin. As menageries go this was deluxe – leafy, calm, shady and private – but like the hotel, it was still a prison. The trees and shrubs in this small haven were dense and in deep shadow for much of the day. The birds and animals were so well hidden that you could be almost on top of them before you saw them. And everywhere, in the gardens, in the air, all around one, was Paraguay’s spectacular birdlife – on the wing, perched in trees, darting between bushes, a rich burble of song. Like Manaos in the Brazilian Amazon region, Asunción was a small city in a clearing in the middle of the jungle. For thousands of miles in every direction there was nothing but largely empty countryside – empty that is of human activity. For the birds flying across Asunción, or attracted by the food, the several acres of gardens the hotel offered to them was just more native jungle as a convenient stop-over. Living in the depleted, overpopulated Northern Hemisphere where any signs of wildlife are rare and fugitive, I found the explosion of bird noise in Paraguay startling and sobering. It was evidence of what we had lost by our overbreeding. Perhaps Europe had been like this in the Middle Ages. It was a real pleasure just to sit in a cane chair outside my room looking at and listening to the birds. The only thing I can compare it to is being inside a tropical aviary at a zoo. Tiny hummingbirds smaller than the first joint on my thumb, rainbow coloured with iridescent green the dominant shade, hovered and darted by a hibiscus plant, long thin beaks moving inside the flowers to search for drops of water or nectar. I would sit for timeless periods, completely enraptured by the sight, the wings of this tiny dynamo revolving thousands of times every second, so fast all one saw was a blurr, whirling beside the tiny body. The birds seemed completely indifferent to the ghost-clad gardeners who shuffled slowly to and fro, or to the few guests, who like me, sat outside in the shade drinking in this tranquil atmosphere. Overpopulation, pollution, the depleted environment are realities of our era; to come to somewhere like Paraguay was to realize just how much had been lost.

I walked back with Gabriella to her house, which was less than ten minutes away on foot: it was a small, neat semi-detached building with a thin strip of garden in front and a larger one behind. Workmen were engaged in some maintenance at the front. The whole neighbourhood was tidy and prosperous-looking, with well-kept gardens, lush shrubbery, and clean streets. It reminded me of middle-class parts of Los Angeles. I asked Gabriella which suburb of London it most resembled, as she knew both cities well. ‘Kensington,’ she replied immediately. ‘It is where the embassies are and where the wealthy live.’ I asked her what her house would be worth. ‘Normally US$60,000, but because so many people are trying to sell, you could get a place like this for $40,000 – even for $30,000. People are only paying about half the asking price at the moment.’ To put this in perspective, Gabriella was paying her maid $25 a week: ‘and my mother thinks I am paying her too much – she only pays $15.’ High unemployment, low wages, few people, inexpensive land and property, high crime and insecurity, imminent risk of political violence and revolution – it was a familiar Third World equation.

Gabriella invited me in to meet her husband Hugo, and their two small children. Hugo told me he had invested some money in a cigar-making concern, a factory dating back to the turn of the century. ‘Paraguayan tobacco is good – not as good as Cuban, but close. We use Javan leaf for the wrappers, the rest is all local product.’ How much did the local cigars cost? I asked. I had seen none on sale anywhere. ‘That is because they are too expensive for most Paraguayans to buy now,’ he replied. ‘About US$2 each.’ Cigarettes cost US$7 a carton of 200 even in my local supermarket. I assumed the smuggled items, or false brands were even cheaper. Paraguayan men were ferocious smokers. The local brands I had seen advertised promised exotic pleasures. There was ‘Boots’ (not, alas, ‘Old Boots’) featuring a US style cowboy. There was ‘Palermo’ (a wealthy suburb of Buenos Aires, as well as a city in Sicily). The slogan for Palermo was Paraguayo y con orgullo’ – ‘Paraguayan and with pride’. The poster showed a racing car, and a racing driver, fag in hand. Then there was ‘Derby Club’ a contentious blend, much copied, imitated, falsified and smuggled, a favourite of the contrabanders trade, according to press reports. Truck-loads of ‘Derby Club’ were frequently discovered crossing the Brazilian border, without the required tax stamps on them. There was also ‘York’ and ‘US Mild’. In the local whisky line I particularly liked ‘Olde Monke’ and ‘Gran Cancellor’. Close inspection of the labels of the locally manufactured whiskies indicated that they had been made from a base of sugar cane – in fact were really rum dressed up as whisky. The local rum, called caña, was a working-class peasant tipple with macho associations. Alcoholism among the peasants and Indians was a serious problem; drunken all-male rum sessions often ended in knife fights and death, 80% of all killings in Paraguay were caused by armas blancas – knives or machetes.

Hugo was a fan of Paraguayan dolce far niente. ‘You cannot imagine how pleasant it is, Robert, for a man just to lie back in a hammock in the garden with a cigar all afternoon, just looking up at the clouds passing in the sky.’ While your wife and the maid do all the work, I thought, but did not say. The work ethic appeared to have scant appeal to Paraguayan men. All across the city they were sitting, sprawling, lounging or completely prone, in a state somewhere between sleep and coma. What little work was being done seemed to be entirely by women, who looked as if they monopolized about 95% of all available energy – men slumped, women bustled. Hugo invited me to visit his cigar factory. ‘You can buy the cigars at the special reduced employees price,’ he told me. Like most other promises I was made in Paraguay this invitation came to nothing. Despite several requests neither the visit nor the cigars materialized. Did they exist? Was the whole thing a fantasy? Perhaps he just did spend all his days in a hammock, gazing up at the sky. More concretely, Gabriella cooked macaroni cheese for supper, which I shared with them, along with a bottle of Argentine red wine called ‘Borgoña’, which tasted nothing like Burgundy. ‘Believe no one in Paraguay,’ Gabriella had told me, ‘believe nothing you cannot see or touch – this is a land of make-believe and fantasy – of chantar.’

I walked back to the Gran Hotel through the warm, velvety, shadow-strewn tropical night, the scents of the flowers and shrubs rising from the gardens around me along my way. Above hung the Southern Cross, that constellation which reaffirms that one is truly in the Southern Hemisphere. The petrol station at the crossroads at Avenida España was still open, and a lone soldier, the night shift, stood on duty, rifle at the ready, guarding the pumps. I turned off down a side lane, and walked a hundred yards away from the main road, the wine and the soft air having relaxed me. It was a mistake. The lane became dark, the surface under my feet was pitted and potholed. From a group sitting under a clump of trees a hundred yards further on, a man rose and lurched towards me. I was coming from the light of the main road and would be silhouetted clearly. He started to shout incoherently, angrily, at me, stumbling as he tried to run towards me. Out of the shadows I saw he had a machete, which he waved at me from above his head.

I turned abruptly, and made a fast trot back the way I had come, back towards the main road, and the petrol station with the lone soldier. I could hear the drunk behind me yelling and shouting at me now in incomprehensible Guarani. The lights of the main road grew nearer. I put on speed. I was sweating now, from the heat of the night and from fear. I was running. I could hear the man behind me, still coming on after me. If I slipped and fell, I would be done for. I ran really fast, faster than I had run for years. I got a sharp stitch in my side. I gasped for breath. Still I could hear the drunk lumbering behind me, breathing hard. The petrol station came in sight, well-lit, the soldier standing at ease, leaning on his rifle. I turned. The man was behind me, in shadow: he had stopped. He had seen the soldier, too. To chase a man at night in the streets of Asunción, waving a machete, was an invitation to be shot dead by anyone in uniform. The drunk mouthed angrily at me, but in silence, waving his weapon over his head, but he didn’t come on any further. Now would be the time to shoot him, I thought, if I had a gun. But then, of course, the soldier would shoot me. The drunk took a swig of rum from the bottle which he still held in his other hand, swallowed, and then spat at me silently, in disgust. I turned back and ran on, more slowly. In a moment I was under the arc of light by the petrol station forecourt, a recent model BMW being filled up by the uniformed attendant, a European-looking man in an expensive suit sitting at the wheel. I paused, slowing to a walk, and caught my breath. I turned to see what my pursuer was up to. He had completely vanished, swallowed up in the shadows behind me, invisible. I walked slowly back to the Gran Hotel now, keeping in light the whole way, my chest heaving. The margin between safety and danger in Asunción was just a few yards.

In spite of the tight-meshed flyscreen covering the windows of my room, some insects always managed to get inside. Tonight was no exception. On my pillow was a magnificent golden and black bug, crawling slowly about, lost on the great white pasture of cotton. I put this intruder in a matchbox carefully, so as not to damage it, and ejected it into the night. I felt a humanist European completely out of place in the teeming South American interior.

Breakfast was a buffet served in the grand ballroom, its ceiling painted with frescos of tropical birds and foliage, 19th century in style and execution. Sicilian painters had been imported by Madame Lynch, I was told, to carry out this work. It would take a sophisticated, European sensibility like Eliza Lynch’s to think of reproducing what was just outside the ballroom – tropical foliage and birds – inside the ballroom, on the ceiling. It was an artifice of nature present a few feet away outside: only to an émigré European’s eyes would such a ceiling decoration seem exotic. Madame Lynch was the first person in the post-colonial era to see the immense possibilities of Paraguay. To Francisco Solano López, her lover and protector, she promoted the idea of the country as a place to improve, to embellish, to make chic and elegant. No one had conceived of Paraguay in this way before, it had simply been a colony to exploit. Under her influence all the imposing buildings, self-consciously imperial, were begun – the opera house based on La Scala, Milan, the copy of Les Invalides, the huge Presidential Palace, the tropical Gothic railway station. Most of them were never finished – she and López were people in a hurry, new people, on the rise, imitating that tornado of newness, Napoleon Bonaparte, patron saint of all pushy, power-hungry arrivistes who have decided to live by will power and naked force. Napoleon had proved you could do it all, come from nowhere – Corsica, to be precise – seize power with a whiff of grapeshot, eliminate your rivals, rule by sheer energy and dash, conjure an empire out of thin air, become a king maker and breaker, institute an aristocracy of merit and favour, these all new people who had more energy and more to lose than the old aristocracy of blood. And you could do it all in a few years, if you drove people hard enough. Stucco was made for this style of rule. It looked like marble, or stone, or whatever you wanted to have it look like. And it went up so quickly – you just laid mudbricks or rubble walls, and then coated it and smoothed it down and painted it – presto! It looked just like ancient Rome. Peter the Great, another imperial arriviste, had used stucco to create his own fantasy of European civic grandeur, St Petersburg: take a dash of Venice, a draught of Amsterdam, add some London, and some Rome – and there you have it. In a few years, with enough slave labour and a few second-rate European architects – for who outside Russia has ever heard of Rastrelli, Hamilton or any other of Peter’s experts – you had a brand new ‘European’ capital on the Gulf of Finland.

Against all the odds the adventurer Napoleon III had actually erected another ramshackle empire in France, a country that had completely lost its way after the revolution of 1789, which would try all and every system of government, one after the other, in case one might actually work for more than a few years. Solano López had been immensely impressed with the Second Empire in France, which he had seen for himself on his European Grand Tour: Madame Lynch was a product of its frenetic decadence, its squalid energy, its sense of nervous excess and self-conscious cultivation – the bombastic new opera houses, the Baron Haussmann-designed avenues in Paris, the braying brass bands and the opulent uniforms of army officers; and the Zouaves, that orientalist military fantasy in baggy pantaloons, floppy fezzes and curled-up slippers – a corps just made for Verdi opera, harking back to Napoleon I’s Mamelukes from Egypt. All this López admired deeply and tried to imitate in Paraguay, where he could. If there were not enough men to enslave to build his new palace, well then, he would use child slave labour. To see what López and Lynch had in mind for Asunción it is only necessary to go to the spa town of Vichy, in France, for here Napoleon III, with his foreign architects, many of them English, created an eclectic, imperial yet Ruritanian pleasure-capital, small but with the flamboyance and grandeur of a capital city, right in the middle of nowhere, well away from cities such as Paris with revolutionary mobs. If López and Lynch had simply stuck to Paraguay, forgoing the dreams of conquering Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina, they would have created a complete mid-19th-century tropical-Gothic version of Vichy, and very extraordinary it would have been, too. Imperial overreach on a massive scale meant nothing was ever completed. What does remain – the Parisian-style parks, the ruinous stucco palazzi, the defunct railway station – are impressive enough: no Grand Tour ever bore such strange fruit, so far from anywhere. There are doubters, of course. Alwyn Brodsky, the American biographer of Eliza Lynch, among others, claims that the Gran Hotel was never Madame Lynch’s country residence at all, that the whole story has been cooked up as a publicity stunt by the hotel’s owners. Hard facts on which everyone can agree were always in short supply in Paraguay; more or less everything was up for debate. There were versions of events, narratives, claims, counter claims, refutations. The outsider became embroiled in these arguments, willy-nilly. What one person told you the next would vehemently deny. Reality was slippery.