At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  ‘Except you.’ She was purring.

  Was it predatory? Perhaps, but I preferred to think that she was merely marking out her territory. Escape was easy.

  ‘We get terribly badly bitten by your mosquitoes,’ I said, and showed her a thing like a glacé cherry that was erupting from my wrist.

  She took the point and with one bound I was free.

  Dinner parties presented slightly less of a challenge than I’d feared. Most houses now had door chimes, so getting in was obviously easier than it had been. Only outside Asunción did I find myself out in the street, clapping and howling for the domestics. The sofas weren’t the social encumbrances that the American Ladies had suggested and I soon got the hang of the kissing.

  I was taken to some of these occasions by Margarita Kent. She knew everybody and was happy to bring me along as a sort of English curiosity.

  Margarita’s own family were notionally English but none of them had seriously ventured outside Paraguay for three generations. Margarita’s grandfather had been Charley Kent, who arrived in Paraguay in 1904 to trap furs and trade egret feathers with the Chaco Indians. Charley was a hard-boiled, rust-haired man who believed that men should be men and that a little suffering did no one any harm. He’d been at Harrow with Winston Churchill, and in 1889, they’d carved their names next to each other on a school desk, which is still there today. Charley had despised Churchill, who he’d considered to be ‘a sissy’, and after collecting some wounds at the siege of Ladysmith, he set off for Paraguay. For the next thirty-seven years he’d hacked his way to and fro across the thorny seas of the Chaco, in slouch-hat and waxed moustache. The Kents were now a Paraguayan institution.

  Margarita had inherited something of her grandfather’s flair for the uncomfortable. She was mid-forties and painfully punctual at everything. She worked long days at the airport and then, in the evenings, she drove off to the gym to pound herself like a sprinter. For the dinner parties, she dressed in fine black silks that made her seem both sleek and angular. She was popular with hostesses and lavishly tolerated by other women. Men were powerlessly, palpably tempted by her jaunty, muscled body to speculate on the improbable prospect of holding her. But none had. And so Margarita remained athletically single.

  Madame Lynch would have been proud to see that her Paraguayans had remembered everything that she’d taught them about entertaining. Dining rooms were decorated with gilt mirrors and colourful prints of fox-hunting scenes or erotic Rome. There would be canapés in the drawing room and then, at the tinkle of a little bell, a uniformed maid would lead us through to the table. In the best houses, the maids were so superior that they even had maids themselves.

  The hosts and hostesses sat at either end of the table and pumped me for information about the London smog and ‘Lady Di’, as they still called her. One host was so delighted that I was there, taking an interest in Madame Lynch, that he produced a little lilac teacup of hers from a glass cabinet.

  ‘She was so beautiful,’ he sniffed, cradling the delicate porcelain in a meaty hand. Everybody cooed in agreement, as if – like Princess Diana – her death had been a recent event and her impress was still warm on society’s sofas.

  Usually, the food was not Paraguayan – Coronation chicken, glazed carrots, strawberries and cream – although occasionally sopa Paraguaya made its heavy appearance. It was made with cornmeal and pig fat and was always greeted with murmurs of appreciation. Finally, the desserts would be trumpeted to the table, accompanied by an escort of tiny, delicate flutes of purple liqueur called Parfait Amour.

  Madame Lynch herself could hardly have expected more exquisite taste.

  On the weekends, the servants were often away, and those who could afford to went along to their clubs. Soon after my return, I’d caught up with Virginia Martin, and she and her husband often asked me to go along with them.

  Virginia was even more gloriously red-haired than I’d remembered from eighteen years before. Her fantastic coppery tresses simply erupted – brilliant, glossy surges tumbling down her back. She was known in Asunción for her hair. To the Paraguayans, she was rather awesome, but when Virginia produced children with equally brilliant hair, they scooped up the shiny new curls in their fingertips. ‘Just look at this!’ they squealed, turning it over cautiously, as if they expected the little orange filaments to be still red-hot from the furnace.

  It occurred to me, as I got to know Virginia better, that her extravagant colouring was perhaps a cruel hand dealt by nature. Behind the magnificence, Virginia was wincingly private, a watcher not a performer. She shrank away from exuberance and bubbly groups at parties and seldom ventured an opinion. Despite this, she was curiously expressive, often communicating in tiny, subtle inflections, barely perceptible modulations of gesture. In a slightly voracious society like Asunción, it made her a survivor.

  It hardly surprised me at all that since we’d last met, Virginia had become a painter. In her paintings she was a shrewd observer, but more than this, she was now demonstrative and passionate. I was surprised by the depth of feeling in her work. It was always Paraguay. Paraguay expressed in the gorgeous ochres of her soil. Paraguay through soft, rich muslins of dust. Paraguayan land rumbling with great red herds of cattle. I asked her why she didn’t sell them. Her look told me that these paintings were how she felt.

  ‘José wants me to keep them.’

  Virginia had married José Franco fifteen years ago. He was a lawyer and a big, bearded man who had a tendency to regard his life as a period of pasture after glorious years on the college sports-field. Although he spoke immaculate English, it often seemed deeply threaded with anguish. When I first met him, I found this a little disconcerting.

  ‘I once went to England’, he told me when we met. ‘To look for a girl.’

  ‘Your girlfriend?’

  ‘No, not mine. She’d run away from her lover. Just as they were about to get married.’

  ‘Did she want to come back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘She was in a village in England, somewhere. We couldn’t find it on our maps in Asunción. But we still set out.’

  ‘Where was she?’

  ‘We travelled all over England. Eventually we found her near Leeds.’

  This intriguing little story didn’t have an end, or if it did, it remained – like so much of José – unsaid. As with Virginia, José was a subtle individual and, like her, he was a survivor. His father had been a minister during the Stronato, and President Stroessner had given the testimonial at Virginia’s wedding.

  José was troubled by his proximity to the Stroessner regime. On the one hand, he felt a powerful tug of loyalty towards his dead father. He even made little stabs at trying to persuade me that the stability of the Stronato justified its means. But José was also a man of integrity, and I could sense that, not far down, beneath the clutter of loyalty, was a knot of revulsion. ‘You have to realise,’ he once told me, ‘Stroessner owned Paraguay. He owned us all.’

  As I got to know him, I became very fond of José. He was patient and thoughtful and always willing to indulge my rather skittish plans. Once, I even talked him into a trip to the hipódromo, to go betting on the horses. General Rodríguez had built the stern white concrete stands, but the whole place had a smack of Irishness and spontaneity about it; the betting was reckless and the horses had names like Cold Champagne and Libre Johnny. I think José enjoyed it, and when his horse won, he was briefly possessed by his instincts and cried out in triumph.

  Much though I liked the Francos, I detested the clubs.

  ‘In Paraguay,’ said a recently departed American ambassador, ‘the poor go to prison and the rich go to their clubs.’

  This was no exaggeration. There were two that the Asunción froth used: the Centennial and the Yacht Club. There wasn’t much between them; both were ostentatious and brash, both twinkled with crystal and gold fittings and had doleful little bands or harpists tucked in alcoves for the amusement of the rich. Both had dini
ng rooms for a thousand well-spread eaters and hot-plates dripping with roasted bullocks, sausages, slabs of sopa paraguaya and the massive, unfilleted fishy wrecks of poached surubí. All the Legolanders were there: men in Versace, nautical outfits and leather; bent contractors; molls trussed up in mink, boobtubes and Dior; arms-dealers, drug-dealers, arbitrage manipulators and real-estate tycoons; girlfriends like ponies and mistresses like rocking-horses; a pimp, a hustler and the head of a dynasty eating an entire birthday cake, watched by his ruminant wife.

  I was slightly surprised that these Paraguayans didn’t seem any happier than anyone else. For me, the only feelings that these flesh-pots stirred up were bleak, ancestral rumblings of Lutheranism. But what upset me more than the surfeit of indulgence was the nonchalance of consumption; this slender wafer of Paraguayan society – now in its third or fourth generation – had come to regard a life oozing with opulence as a birthright, as pedestrian. I wondered if another stratum of that society – a third of all Paraguayans, to be precise – now regarded life below the poverty line as similarly pedestrian.

  The Yacht Club was, if anything slightly more absurd than the Centennial because all the waiters wore sailor suits. On the next table was Tito Valiante, the restaurateur who shot his mother. He was typically drunk and swigging beer from a champagne bucket with a German-Paraguayan gun-dealer. Their women were sitting across the table looking rather weary.

  ‘Would your English friend like to come back to Asunción with us?’ Valiante was now suspended between the tables, blowing gas up at José. ‘We’ve got the boat outside.’

  He waved his hand towards a trim white cruiser that was moored on the Río Paraguay. The German had just acquired it in Miami. A uniformed boatman was mopping the deck.

  ‘$700,000,’ sloshed Tito, ‘and it still takes two fucking hours to get out here!’

  ‘Well, John?’ It was Virginia.

  I blinked.

  ‘I would rather,’ said this body language, ‘take my chances with pirañas than spend two hours floating along the Paraguay with this fatuous goon.’

  Virginia read it perfectly and wafted Valiante back to his table in a breeze of unlikely excuses. He soon forgot all about us.

  32

  IN A CITY of eccentricity it was inevitable that I’d come across someone like Carlos Yegros. Our meeting was not, however, coincidental; I was channelled in his direction by his network of relatives and friends. I don’t think they ever thought that Carlos would enlighten me as to the workings of his peculiar city, but they knew that I’d like him all the same.

  They were right, of course, on both counts. Carlos was seamlessly charming, untidily handsome and just a little disconnected from reality. I think he must have had some sort of aura, because whenever he took up machinery, it simply stopped working; telephones broke down and cars ground to a halt. But the effect on people was quite different; they seemed oddly transformed. Disappointments turned to amusement and confrontations to banter. Even the dragon in my hotel melted, and the street vendors loved him; he never said ‘no’ to them, just ‘Otro día!’ – ‘Another day!’ – as if every relationship was too precious to fracture and should merely be deferred.

  I arranged to meet him one morning in the lobby. He strode in wearing wraparound sunglasses and a tweed jacket bulging with broken telephones and oranges. I don’t know whether Carlos ever contrived to be comical or whether being comical was just an accident – like being forty-seven, divorced, broke and blind in one eye. These, Carlos’ attributes, were probably the equal and opposite elements of tragedy that all comedians are supposed to be possessed of. Like everybody else, I soon found myself laughing and I couldn’t think why.

  There was only one car that worked for Carlos, and fortunately he owned it. It was a hideous, gnarly Japanese thing which he locked up with a giant brass padlock. It had been broken into so many times that the only way in was through the driver’s door. Beyond the driver’s seat, I couldn’t see where the path went.

  ‘What’s all this newspaper for?’ I asked. It wasn’t just newspaper. The car was packed with rubbish. There were shoes and boxes and pieces of fruit, another tweed jacket, some roller skates and lots of socks. Perhaps it was all propellant and any minute Carlos was going to ignite it and we would hurtle through Asunción like a firework, trailing sparks and rust.

  ‘Just throw it in the back,’ he said.

  As there was no room in the back, I simply burrowed my way into the heap.

  ‘Is there a safety belt?’

  ‘You won’t need it here,’ he said airily. ‘In Paraguay it is the law to put on safety belts but it is only to make sure that the driver stays near the wheel.’

  There was no danger of either of us straying far and so we sat there, held in place only by the debris of Carlos’ chaotic life.

  Eventually we set off into the Asunción traffic. It wasn’t really a tour, more a series of incidents that began and ended at my hotel. Carlos couldn’t see anything on his left – his blind side – and so we lurched from near-miss to near-miss. The orange-sellers scattered before us and a man carrying a manguruyú – a sort of river monster with a beard – dived for the bushes with his gigantic fish.

  It was probably a good thing that Carlos didn’t see these things, because he was easily distracted. We stopped to buy two sacks of oranges, to visit a Canadian girl (who was out), to surf the internet in McDonald’s (and reduce it to whimpers and dandruff) and to visit three supermarkets. Carlos seemed strongly attracted to supermarkets, and whenever he saw one, he swerved off the road.

  ‘You’ll like this one.’

  The first thing that struck me about the supermarkets was the fact that the glass doors were thickly sheathed in leaflets for lost dogs: lost show-dogs, missing mastiffs, retrievers that failed to return, whelps gone for ever, poodles left in the park, lurchers left in the lurch, hounds, tykes, absent friends and Alsatians. How could the Asunceños lose so many dogs? And hadn’t I seen them walking themselves round the parks? Now that I came to think about it, I couldn’t remember having ever seen a dog and its Asunceño together. Perhaps the dogs had had some sort of premonition about the city and had co-ordinated a mass breakout, to take their chances in the wild?

  For the dogless, premonition-less citizens, the supermarkets and ‘shoppings’ were a sort of consolation. They were invested with the same extravagance of hope as medieval man had lavished on his cathedrals. Whilst they didn’t offer access to the afterlife, they lit the path to a place that was – in a way – even more desirable: the Americalife. These places may not necessarily have been recognisable to Bostonians and New Yorkers as home, but they were not of Paraguay either.

  Here, bathed in cool, machined air, lit by a million pins of artificial light, the Asunceños could communicate with another world. The shopping centres of Babel. It was a world of white skin, yellow hair, lip-gloss, Hellenistic promises (‘Aphrodite Boutique’) and Anglo-Saxon wizardry. Here, everything was creamy and sterile in a city that was hot and green. There were perfumeries, Swiss coffee shops, computer pods and bouncy castles for children who’d never seen a real one. One shop sold nothing but Barbie dolls and was run – apparently – by Barbie herself, in a stiff pink tutu. It was like a nightmare that felt good to be lost in. I half expected to come across a boutique full of inflatable pigs, but the Paraguayans were now both more and less obscure. One glassy floor up, there was the New America household store, where they could equip themselves as New Americans with ninety-four-piece Sheffield-steel cutlery sets, assault rifles and Louis XV electric hostess trolleys. Nobody was buying anything of course – just touching, stroking, genuflecting.

  ‘Who paid for all of this?’ I’d shout after Carlos. The floor was so marbled and polished that I had to skate to keep up.

  ‘Nobody!’ he replied.

  So it really was a heavenly gift? Or an intergalactic trading post?

  ‘Yes,’ I insisted, ‘but somebody must have built it.’

  ‘It’
s a dollar-wash,’ said Carlos. His good eye was wrinkled up in amusement. The other one looked stonily unimpressed. I imagined that he felt rather as he looked.

  I’d heard the expression ‘dollar-wash’ many times before. Every time something twinkly and new went up in Asunción, it was greeted with sneers of ‘dollar-wash’. As to who was laundering what kind of money, people were rather unspecific. This was hardly surprising; despite – or perhaps because of – the most gluttonous corruption in the world, no one has ever been successfully prosecuted. Most people, on the other hand, saw the trail leading back to General Rodríguez – now tucked up in his mini-cathedral – and ex-President Wasmosy – now confined to his luxury bunker. The democracy that they’d so assiduously nurtured had served them well, putting a pleasing veneer on a social structure so unequal and imbalanced. Sultanism had been replaced by neosultanism, and the palaces of the new regime were its shopping centres and lustrous malls.

  The supermarkets only differed from the shoppings in that they spread out like fields of eager landfill rather than climbing glassily upwards. Carlos and I wandered up and down the aisles, looking – he said – for the Canadian girl. She wasn’t with the champagne or the garlic sausage, nor did we find her among the hundreds-and-thousands and the chocolate milk. When I came upon a rack of copies of the Marquis de Sade’s Filosophia en el Tocador, I suffered a temporary loss of reality. Where exactly was I? I was revived by the sight of an Indian child, mottled with dirt, pedalling through the aisles in a plastic play-jeep, trailing price tags and high-pitched store assistants. I felt an unsaintly urge to encourage him but all I could think of was winking. He looked at me blankly and then reversed away as fast as his little eighteen-inch legs would pump him. When I saw that all the Pokémon packets had been eviscerated and their cards scattered around like a fox-raid, I credited the tiny driver with leadership skills. He gave me hope that not all Asunceños were held spell-bound by the shopping malls.