At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  But the police and the soldiers had yielded power with surprising grace. You could see them, in the police station, rifles slung, among the life-sized nativity scene. There, rubbing shoulders with the Wise Men, they seemed to have found a form of redemption.

  There was no denying that they’d fared better than the politicians, for whom the citizens now reserved a special contempt. Everyone seemed to hate Wasmosy, the president that they’d elected, and when I saw ‘Fuck Wasmosy’ scrawled on the wall of the Congress building, I allowed myself to think that the girl with the cloud of black hair had survived the changes intact.

  Youth had rallied, too late, to register its protest at the church, the army and everything. They’d set up a den called the Urban Cave in the merchants’ quarter, where they could loose off fusillade after fusillade of rap and self-indulgent anger. But their ideas were thuggish and irrelevant and, worse, they were imported; they wore Tarantino suits and beards and drank purple and green alcopops. No one drank Antarctica any more.

  One could only speculate as to what happened to the Nazis. I thought – quite wrongly (as it would turn out) – that I’d probably never encounter an original. I imagined they’d all be dead. One day, a trader approached me with a hardwood presentation box embossed with a knobbly gold swastika.

  ‘Three thousand dollars,’ he grinned.

  Inside was a 9mm Luger and an ivory-handled dagger, inscribed in German: ‘For long service to the General Staff’.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked.

  ‘Just some German guy down in Encarnación. He didn’t say much about it. I guess he didn’t want any trouble with the customs.’

  13

  MANY OF MY old friends were away, having withdrawn to breezy Uruguay for the summer. I did, however, manage to meet up with Gareth at The Lido. The old place was still as tangerine as ever. He limped in, half an hour late, dragging his right leg. I noticed that he too had a Tarantino beard, and that from it a meaty pink scar curled up towards his ear. He was ebullient and threw his arms around me.

  ‘What have you done to yourself?’ I asked, when I had extracted myself from his grip.

  ‘Ah, nada !’ He shrugged expansively. ‘I was in some Chevy on the way to a party. It came off the ruta. The guy driving dropped his ciggie in his …’ Gareth couldn’t think of the word and so he patted his balls ostentatiously. Some of the diners looked over in our direction.

  ‘Boom! We ran into a big tree, a lapacho.’

  ‘What happened to the driver?’

  Gareth shook his head. ‘No …’

  The boy had been at the periphery of the Stroessner dynasty. It was unsettling to think of that accursed hand still tickling up trouble in Paraguay.

  We talked and drank and slopped up bowls of The Lido’s special soup, which was made of vegetables and piranhas. Gareth had been a croupier and a cashier in a finance house that laundered cash. He’d been married and there was a child somewhere, but after the accident, his wife had left him. He’d then begun an epoch as an accountancy student.

  I noticed that his English was worse now than when we had met before, and it struck me that he’d started thinking in castillano. He still, however, had a strong Argentine accent in whatever language he was speaking.

  ‘I never talk like a Paraguayo,’ he said. ‘It’s just too fucking rough.’

  I asked him about Langan.

  ‘Langan lost everything, then it came back, and then – ciao, ciao – nothing.’

  The Strangers’ Club had died its lingering death. Langan was vehemently penniless and so he’d had a go at setting up ‘The Asunción International Arms Fair’. It flopped. Then he’d found a new and unlikely ally in Lino Oviedo, the Bonsai Horseman. In the muck of the Wasmosy government, the two of them briefly thrived. Oviedo was boosted up from colonel to general and Langan, using Lino Oviedo’s money, produced an English-language magazine called The Guaraní. It contained little but portraits of the elfin Lino, astride polo ponies and miniature horses rampant. The British community, meanwhile, continued to elude Langan and obstinately neglected to buy his snivelling magazine. Langan had to go back to Lino for more money.

  Strictly speaking, the money wasn’t Lino’s. It was the old story: Lino Oviedo had become a talented extortionist. His black demands made people blanch and crumble (‘He took $100,000 from our company each year,’ a cotton man told me, still gasping years later). There was nothing bonsai about the little man’s appetite, and once he’d filled his pockets with money, he wanted power. He wasn’t unduly concerned how he got it. He declared that it was time Paraguay was run by the army.

  ‘The trouble started last April,’ said Gareth.

  By April 1996, Lino was head of the army, and when Wasmosy tried to trim him back, Lino threatened to bomb everything. Wasmosy fled to the American Embassy. He offered Lino a job as Minister of Defence and then, when Lino had calmed down, there were hugs and speeches of reconcilation. But when Lino stood for office, Wasmosy snapped him in jankers and had him charged with insurrection and bolshiness.

  ‘There was no coup,’ said Gareth. It surprised me.

  This was, however, what most Paraguayans believed: Lino Oviedo had just popped the President on the head with a whisky glass. Wasmosy had asked for it. The Americans sorted it all out.

  ‘So where’s Lino now?’

  ‘In jail, I suppose.’

  ‘And Langan?’

  Gareth smiled. ‘Who gives a shit?’

  One of the orange ducks waddled by with a dog-fish on a plate. Gareth watched the fish as it passed.

  ‘How’s your leg?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got a piece of metal here and a piece of metal here. And I’ve got another one here.’ He jutted his jaw out at me.

  ‘You know, when I go out dancing, it all vibrates at once. Everything’s vibrating. Todo! Todo! It’s driving me mad, John. I’m going mad.’

  I didn’t think he was mad at all. And then he just disappeared.

  14

  IT HAD OCCURRED to me, whilst we were sitting in The Lido, that there was another figure on the Paraguayan landscape. He was everywhere. He clustered at every crossroads. He was at the airport and on the bridges that led to Brazil. He nuzzled into his clones, making his bubble-gum-pink rubber body squeak obscenely: the inflatable pig. He’d come from overseas and the citizens had received him, joylessly and yet, it seemed, with fervour. I’d asked Gareth what it all meant.

  ‘Only God knows us,’ he’d said, enigmatically.

  For all their concrete and beards and cocktails, the Paraguayans’ mourning was not yet over. The tank was gone but the stones where it had stood were stained red. Some thought it had gone back to Bolivia, but no one could agree on that. But then the wars themselves had a remoteness about them now, as the definition drained away. A painting on Independencia tried to claw back the images of the Chaco War in limpid acrylics; a little aeroplane was neatly trickling bomblets on to a Bolivian position. The bomblets looked like goat droppings. Paraguayans were beginning to forget what it was they were mourning for, and yet still the streets fell quiet at midday and still the diners munched their chicken in silence. Was it for a past that had been lost? Or was it for a future that could only be cheap and brutish and brash?

  Now suddenly alone, I gazed out of the window of The Lido, past the Panteón de Los Héroes where Carlos and Francisco López lay among their generals, and into the plaza. At that moment I felt the weariness of incomprehension. A land obsessed with its own demise. A Napoleonic paradise in the age of alcopops. The tomb of the inflatable pig.

  15

  THREE MONTHS AFTER I returned to England, General Rodríguez was consumed by his cancer and died.

  Because I’d never seen the General in all his flesh, I decided that the next best thing was to go and seek out his mortal remains, and, so when I was next back in Asunción, in spring 2000, I paid a visit to the Cemetery of Recoleta.

  At Recoleta, the dead were not entombed within the soil but l
aid out on the surface, where they had a better view of their heirs. Well-shod, marble-arteried Asunceños made their final homes in little mansions not dissimilar to the ones that they’d enjoyed in life. The cemetery was like Asunción in draft. There were Lilliputian palaces, mausoleums scrolled like miniature banks, stuccoed crypts with doors for dwarfs and panteóns with riveted copper roofs. One sepulchre even had a full set of chimneys and another had squirting fountains and two tiny lily ponds. No stone was left unfrilled.

  It was often possible to tell who was at home in each bantam residence. If they’d been famous, the walls would be studded with little brass plaques or homenajes. Poets had bunches of copper laurels. National heroes had concrete footballs or clumps of heroic statuary. One panteón exuded magic, and so the sick and the dying had taped votives and bouquets of their hair to its walls. ‘Thank you, Holy Cross!’ read their sad and grateful missives.

  The necropolis was divided into ghostly neighbourhoods. Here were the dead Russians, next to the Lebanese, and here the police. The Air Force kept their caps in glass cases and went to their deaths with teddy-bears and charms. The army had a heavy steel cross, wittily appliquéd by armour-piercing bullets, and the English had poetry by Tennyson and Keats. There was even an equivalent of Legoland, where the smugglers could get their roasting.

  In some places, the streets crumbled away – just like real life – and in others, yew trees had reclaimed the neighbourhood for grasshoppers and birds. Sometimes, the worlds of the living and the dead seemed to merge and intertwine; people taking picnics with their long-gone grandfathers and a palsied, failing child curled up at the gates, a foot in each world. I watched with awful fascination as the twin facets of our fate – existence and non-existence – wrestled and coalesced. In the distance, a barefoot boy, gripping a stolen vacuum-cleaner, was being pursued by policemen in and out of the sepulchres. The mourners hardly looked up from their meat and pickles.

  I found the mausoleum I was looking for without much difficulty. It was the largest in the cemetery, something comparable to St Patrick’s in New York, though reluctantly smaller. Curiously, there was only one homenaje screwed to its gothic elevations – from the general’s friends at his tennis club. I peered through the stained-glass windows. Glittering among the holy sunbeams were brand-new Persian rugs, padded armchairs and a Paraguayan tricolour, tailored from satin.

  A grave-digger with a brush scuffed his way in my direction.

  ‘Who’s buried here?’ I asked. ‘God?’

  The grave-digger grinned. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Much richer. General Rodríguez.’

  In the next dead street was the tomb of another politician, the cement rather fresher. In its blue-glass, detergent gloom lay all that remained of Professor Luis Maria Argaña, raised to the high office of vice-president and brought down again by bullets. His death was so mystifying that, in the absence of the impressive pyragüés, the Paraguayans had called in Scotland Yard, London.

  Paraguayan politics, up until then quaintly Venetian, had become Byzantine.

  16

  LITTLE LINO HAD been dangerously busy in my absence. Unable to run for presidency from his prison cell, he got his friend, Cubas, to contest the 1998 election on his behalf. To roars of public approval, Cubas ran on a single ticket: the release of Lino Oviedo. To roars of disapproval, Cubas then released Lino when he won.

  Wasmosy left office, to be confined in his own fortress in the suburbs. As his retainers left the presidential palace, they harvested it for every light bulb and every door handle they could carry.

  Lino’s preening didn’t last. There was a shrill voice of protest but it wasn’t mistaken for righteousness. It came from Vice-President Argaña, himself suspiciously overnourished. It didn’t last either; six months after the election, Argaña was swimming in his innards. On 23 March 1999, three masked and uniformed men jumped out in front of his Mercedes and shredded it with machine-guns. They lobbed two hand grenades into the smoking scraps but they failed to go off. The attackers then vanished.

  Asunción over-boiled. On Plaza Independencia, nine harmless demonstrators were cut down by mysterious automatic gunfire. Things were too hot now – even for Lino. He and his lap-dog president, Cubas, fled to Argentina.

  That only left a non-entity called Gonzalez Macchi. A few days later, he took over the presidency by dint of an ancient constitutional blip. The only clever thing that he’d ever done in his life was to marry Miss Paraguay. He now installed a cabinet that included two of Argaña’s legitimate sons and one of General Stroessner’s little bastards.

  Meanwhile, as the fiddlers fiddled, Rome burned. In 1999, the Paraguayan economy simply seized up and wouldn’t budge a single per cent. More than half the adult population had no work, and of the little bits of tax collected, only a third made it past government pockets to government coffers. In a country of abundant water supplies, barely a third of its inhabitants had it piped to their homes.

  For every old Paraguayan that was carted off to his panteón, six piping, pink new ones were bouncing into the world – and an uncertain future. There were now five and a half million Paraguayans. Seventy per cent of them were too young to remember the Stronato. There might soon be no one to stop things sliding backwards.

  17

  IT WAS NOT always easy to follow all the gossip that was tossed around among the Paraguayans, but over the next few months I assembled an intriguing collection of theories as to who’d assassinated Vice-President Argaña.

  The truth was that no one had any idea. Scotland Yard had recognised that there was very little appetite for establishing what had really happened, and the case rapidly became a domestic matter.

  Lino Oviedo was the obvious culprit. Having just been released from prison, he was poised to take over the Colorado Party. Argaña brought a court action to eject Lino’s mob from the party headquarters, but within a day, he was dead. Lino didn’t help his cause by fleeing the country. Then two of his goons were arrested in Buenos Aires and thrown in jail.

  All this ought to have been the end of any further interesting speculation. It wasn’t. No one seemed very happy with the conclusion that Lino was to blame.

  ‘Lino was too smart for this,’ people insisted.

  ‘Argaña was no threat to him – and was probably better to him alive than dead.’

  ‘Lino was crazy, but he wasn’t stupid,’ said others.

  ‘It was the sons.’

  Sure enough, the bloated old toad had had eight children. Nelson was now Minister of Defence and Félix was after his father’s old job as Vice-President. There was also a massive personal fortune to be soaked up by the heirs. ‘As your Scotland Yard people say, always look first at those who have the most to gain. It was the sons.’

  ‘That’s shit!’ another would protest. ‘It was the Colorado Party that got rid of Argaña. He was selling out to the liberales.’

  ‘Never!’ came another theorist. ‘It was the government itself. They killed Argaña – to dump Lino Oviedo in the shit and put Macchi in charge!’

  This began to sound plausible when it emerged that, within three minutes of the assassination, there were two government ministers on the scene, including the Minister of Public Works.

  ‘Isn’t that a bit fishy?’

  The theory got another helpful shove when the suspects in the Buenos Aires top-security prison announced that they’d been bribed: ‘We were told to say that Lino was behind it.’

  Then they said they’d been tortured.

  Then they escaped. In fact, they were the first prisoners ever to have escaped from that prison in all its history. The Argentines were in no doubt that such a feat couldn’t have been managed by two yokels from Paraguay and insisted that someone had let them out. They had a point – but who?

  A fifth theory emerged. This one needed a few bottles of caña to get it up and running, but it was soon all over Asunción like a grass fire: Argaña’s death was suicide.

  ‘Argaña had cancer,’ went t
he new line. ‘He knew that he was dying. He staged his own death to achieve immortality and to throw his enemies into permanent chaos.’

  Was this the famous pó-caré – or ‘twisted hand’ – of Guaraní political thinking? It was a concept familiar to the Paraguayans. One writer, Arthur Bray, wrote of the attractions of politics to his fellow-Paraguayans:

  In politics he can give his imagination full rein, also his instinct and art of deceiving and confusing, making of his Twisted Hand an extremely subtle art which consists of overthrowing his adversary and then enjoying the crumbling of the latter’s illusions and aspirations. His ñé-ñanducá – the dénouement – constitutes his seventh heaven of happiness …

  If true, this was surely the ultimate in pó-caré; a government collapsed, a president – Cubas – forced into exile, two Oviedistas in prison, Oviedo himself hounded abroad, a demonstration in Plaza Independencia and nine young lives splashed across the tiles.

  *

  But even this version wasn’t quite good enough in the end. Among educated Paraguayans, I discerned a drift towards a new, a sixth theory: Argaña wasn’t shot at all. He was already dead when the gunmen opened fire on his car.

  ‘He died a natural death from cancer,’ a soil scientist told me. ‘His family were heard crying the night before the shooting.’

  ‘The Argañistas then staged the assassination to get rid of Oviedo,’ said another.

  The idea soon gained momentum. ‘It’s true, there was no blood on Argaña’s corpse. We all saw the photos in the press. A dead man doesn’t bleed, does he?’

  ‘The body was slumped forward,’ said the soil man. ‘He’d not been shot up by machine-guns.’ He paused. ‘The tragedy was that one of the bodyguards had to die as part of the scam.’

  ‘What about Argaña’s driver? Did he survive?’ I asked.