At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  If the British descendants now seemed rather sparse, it wasn’t necessarily because the old engineers and ranchers had wilted under malaria and rum (although some had). Rather, most had flourished all too well and had become – through seepage and human osmosis – richly Paraguayan. As I picked my way across the Ambassador’s garden, through bunches of descendants, I realised that these were only the ones who’d remained defiantly – and rather quaintly – British.

  Some were very formal and wore old-fashioned clothes. Michael and Peter Burt (the uncles of Martin Burt, the beleaguered Mayor of Asunción) came in tweed suits and brogues, and others wore white tuxedos. Peter Beare Von Vietinghoft-Scheel (‘My great-grandfather was a Northumberland man’) sported a silvery three-piece suit and a brilliant set of bright red whiskers. He looked like Edward VII would have looked if he’d been coloured in by children.

  ‘I am British,’ declared a dark, jowly figure, through thick tropical vowels. Rodrigo Wood was clutching his tumbler defensively to his chest as if it might suddenly be snatched away under some arcane nationality rules. ‘My father served with the British army in the First World War. He was a Royal Engineer!’

  This was true, but it was only half the exotic truth; Rodrigo was the descendant of a doomed Australian socialist Utopia, established in Paraguay in 1893. ‘You must get out to the old colony,’ said Roddy, and I promised him I would.

  Others brought their own tangled memories. There was a delightful little bird called Edna Green, who reminded me of the Gossips and who – feeling the chilly draught of mortality – wanted to share out eighty years of Paraguayan history and, in particular, the parts that impacted on her love life. She was surprised by how many men called Green had wanted to marry her. In the end, she’d settled for the one that was Chief of Stores on the Paraguay Central Railway. She chattered away about her life around Sapuchai Junction as if it were the Home Counties even though (a fact that even she found hard to believe) she’d never actually been to England.

  Margarita Kent was there with her great-uncle, Robert Eaton. He’d arrived in Paraguay in 1929, an American farm boy in search of adventure. In his first week, his boss had had his head shot off in an ambush. After that, Don Roberto was always ready with his .38.

  ‘It was all real,’ he said, in tones of genuine astonishment, as if his whole swashbuckling life had been merely the cowboy fantasy that he’d hoped for.

  I merged back, in amongst the half-Britons. There were the Grahams and the Francos (of course) and the Federico Robinsons, who owned several farms each the size of Lincolnshire and just as flat; the Duncans, the Bishop of Paraguay and the Gibsons, who no longer spoke English at all. There was Don Roberto’s daughter, Tuna, now in her sixties but still pungent and gingery, Rogelio Cadogan and a beautiful surrealista called Ysanne Gayet, who was born in Cheshire and took her name from The Archers. I also caught a MacLeod, but there were others whose names I either missed or didn’t understand. Many of them now spoke Spanish, or perhaps some Guaraní, among themselves, and some – like Edna Green and Gareth Llewelyn (who was nowhere to be seen) – had never even been to Britain. The mother-country, if they had ever regarded it as such, was rapidly becoming abstract.

  *

  In fact, Britain itself was rather slipping from the Paraguayan consciousness. The islands had been marked on local versions of the world map as orange blobs almost denuded of civilisation. Paraguayan military cartographers had erased all but four of the cities and – rather mysteriously – had supplemented the survivors with Inverary and tiny, mealy Wick (‘The meanest of man’s towns,’ according to Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘situated on the baldest of God’s bays’). Of course, the British were still vaguely remembered for their railways, but once the last sleeper had been grubbed up, this memory too would be overwhelmed by weeds and forgetfulness.

  Interest in Britain had been temporarily reinvigorated by the death of Princess Diana. Her story was told in beach towels: ‘Princess Wales’ and ‘The People’s Princess’. They’d even improved on her appearance slightly by giving her big, fruity pink lips and a crown. The papers reported her posthumous love life almost daily; she had far more boyfriends now than she’d ever had time for in her life. Paraguayans were inexhaustibly fascinated, but I soon realised that the fact that the Princess was British was merely incidental. For all it mattered, she could have been Tongan. She was revered for her whiteness, her blondeness and her unbelievable, unbelieved death.

  The Ambassador’s party compacted itself into a corner of the terrace, like a waggon-train under attack. For a while, all I could hear was breaking glass and splintering dishes as the waiters struggled to break out of the mêlée and then force their way back in again with fresh provisions. A large blood-red cloud of claret was spreading out across Roddy Wood’s chest and his wife was dabbing at the ruined shirt with mineral water and wads of irritation. Roddy didn’t seem to notice her and was busy summoning ancestral drinks.

  ‘Camarero! Camarero! Más Johnnie Walker!’

  Then the Ambassador made a speech in honour of HM Queen Mother, and everybody agreed that he’d delivered it with uncharacteristic warmth. Usually, everything about the Ambassador – his wife from Thailand, his silver elephants in the dining room, his sour Scottish accent and his raw complexion – said ‘I want to be anywhere but here’. The Paraguayans were sensitive to his unhappiness and accused him of depression, socialism and frugality – all unpardonable imports. In fairness, it must have been a thankless task, representing a country known only for producing people and things that fell apart or died. The only British ambassador that the Paraguayans could remember with any great affection was the one who’d turned up with his ageing mother instead of a wife. At last the British were taking nepotism seriously.

  Things were rather easier for the American Ambassador.

  ‘You buy the job,’ an American friend told me. ‘You know, party donations. That kind of thing. We get some great ones here – we’ve even had a supermarket tycoon.’

  At least they wanted to be there. The State Department had them penned up in a place the size of a farm at the portentously named 1776 Mariscal López. It was rumoured to be the biggest US Embassy in the world. It was also conspicuously close to the Presidential Palace; not much happened in Paraguay – people said – without it first going through Supermarket Man’s star-spangled check-out.

  Although their ambassadors may have found contentment doing a little diplomatic ranching, I never got the impression that Americans were very happy in Paraguay. This was partly because I couldn’t erase from my mind the image of the young couple in The Gran, nerves jangling, screaming for airports, hair coming out in clumps. It may also have been because Paraguay – as it seemed to me – was everything that America tried not to be: tribal, crafty and institutionally opaque. The British may have been rather more at home with these attributes.

  On the other hand, perhaps Americans were simply taking too seriously the advice offered by ‘The American Ladies’ in their doughty pamphlet. Some of the advice made me clammy just reading it. They suggested examining the servants every eight months for parasitic infestations and venereal disease. Worse, they recommended coatimundis as domestic pets. Coatimundis are variants of the raccoon – sweet but perfectly homicidal. They make up for their absence of pity with fistfuls of dagger-like claws. I have seen them dismember a pile of Christmas presents – mine, to be precise – in three seconds and then, in the next two, fork up an entire Christmas pudding with their murderous cutlery. Only people who want to collapse their nervous systems should get coatis as domestic pets.

  The Ambassador’s party was coming to an end. Suddenly, to my horror, I found myself standing next to Langan of the old Strangers’ Club.

  I’m not sure why I hadn’t seen him before. He was dressed in a white tuxedo with a rose on the lapel. He hadn’t changed much in two decades; there were still the matching tussocks of whiskers and the look of well-earned misery.

  ‘You’re a new f
ace around here.’

  Although I had a feeling that he was about to address me as ‘Young Man’, I was pleased that he’d not recognised me. And why should he? Gareth and I had only sustained his revolting club for one evening, many years ago. ‘What are you here for?’

  If I hadn’t drunk so much Foreign Office whisky I might have managed a lie. Instead, I told him I was doing some writing.

  ‘There’s no bloody money in writing,’ he said viciously, and started to tell me all over again about his years of spooning muck for the Daily News. ‘I used to send them stuff from Spain, but no one’s bloody well interested in Spain any more. If I want anything published, I have to publish it myself now. I get chicken shit for it.’

  He took a swig of whisky and captured a passing pastry in his livery hand. ‘And this lot,’ he was baring his whiskers at the whole of Asunción rather than just the Ambassador’s stragglers, ‘don’t bloody read at all.’

  Although Langan was now leaking bile profusely, he’d managed to absorb the fact that I was writing. Or at least he’d partially absorbed it; he’d convinced himself that I too was paparazzi. After that, I was never able to unravel this conviction, and whenever I bumped into him around Asunción, he’d palm me with mucky little titbits.

  ‘See him? Covered in red wine? Never been the same since his kid blew his head off with a revolver. Just messing around with other kids.’ Langan’s fishy eye was already swimming greedily among the party stragglers. ‘Terrible business …’ he murmured. ‘Terrible bloody business.’

  I tried to protest, too late.

  ‘And that one? He once got so drunk that he fell out of his bedroom window.’ Langan was concentrating his malevolence on an elderly man in a charcoal suit. ‘If he hadn’t got tangled up in his telephone wires, he’d be dead.’

  Tempted though I was by the sheer improbability of this one, I managed to change the subject. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Where are you staying, young man?’

  I told him.

  ‘The Gran Hotel!’ He leered. ‘Full of Nazis! We could do something good on that.’

  I was troubled by the word ‘we’. I now realised that merely by standing next to Langan, one could be sucked into his human form of quagmire. I heaved myself away.

  ‘Get in touch.’ His vile invitations were swirling along after me. ‘I run a little discussion group. We get some good speakers. It’s twenty dollars a go.’

  ‘How do I find you?’ I said, nearly clear.

  ‘We’re called the Strangers’ Club.’

  Apart from extracting paltry sums from dupes, Langan now survived by house-sitting for the absent rich. The little extras he charmed out of his lady-friend, a tragic woman who managed the car parks at the Shopping del Sol.

  On the way out, I had to pass through the dining room full of silver elephants. I was making reasonable progress when I was ambushed by a night predator with a bulbous pink nose and a head of stiff white bristles. His glasses were so thick that they made his eyeballs huge and meaty, like Angela’s unfortunate whale.

  ‘It’s like The King and I, non?’ He waved a furry paw over the outlandish furniture.

  ‘You’re not British, surely?’ I didn’t mean it to sound rude. Generous draughts of whisky and surrealism had made me feel rather disorientated.

  ‘No. I’m Breton, and don’t ask me why I’m at the Mother of the Queen’s party. I don’t know!’

  The Queen’s Mother of Parties. The Mother’s Party for Queens. I had to escape. But first I had to extricate myself from this French badger.

  ‘What are you doing in Paraguay?’ I tried.

  ‘I have two adopted children.’ The eyeballs were gleaming with pride. ‘I wanted to live somewhere where they would not be called niggers.’

  35

  THIS WASN’T THE first time that Frenchmen had sought heaven on Paraguayan earth. Weakened by López’s flattery, Napoleon III had agreed, in 1854, to participate in the establishment of a French colony across the river from Asunción, in the Chaco. He dispatched a ship called the Aquitaine, a quantity of agricultural hardware and five hundred trusting settlers, mostly Basques and unanimously ignorant. Their corner of heaven was to be a hard-baked rectangle of desert, devoid of not only moisture but also nutrition. The only encouraging feature about the site was its name: New Bordeaux.

  The antecedents for the French colony were even less encouraging.

  Some years before, a grizzled Rhode Island entrepreneur called Charles Augustus Hopkins had sailed up into Paraguay, with the single aim of extracting as much for his own pocket as possible. He was a vindictive man with hooded eyes and mean, turkey-buzzard features half hidden in a dark thicket of beard. His determination to misinterpret the Paraguayans was admirable, and when his spiteful memoirs emerged many years later, his contemporaries were surprised to find that they contained ‘nothing remarkable except a seasoning of childish jealousy of everything English’.

  Hopkins bought himself the job of US Consul in 1852. Using money raised in the United States and a loan from President Carlos López, he then set up a cigar factory and an ambitious industrial colony. But the Paraguayans had grossly overestimated Hopkins’ abilities and he’d grossly underestimated the President’s pride. Hostilities commenced when Hopkins refused to doff his hat at Don Carlos. At first, the two skirmished in the courts and all the Yanquis were expelled. Then things got out of hand. Hopkins persuaded the commander of an American gunboat, the Water Witch, that the pride of the United States had been insulted, and they steamed back up the Río Paraguay to demand from the savages a little respect. The Paraguayans responded by peppering the Water Witch with cannon-fire, crippling its steering gear and forcing it to float limply back to Buenos Aires. Unsurprisingly, the first industrial colony was closed down and the cigar factory abandoned.

  That wasn’t the end of Hopkins’ war. In 1859, he was back, with a squadron of fifteen warships, to enforce the rights of his American shareholders. The whole adventure cost the US Government $3,000,000 (which was a hundred times the value of Hopkins’ investment). In the face of such overweening firepower, the Paraguayans sensibly compromised and agreed on a mixed commission to investigate Hopkins’ claim. The commission found in Paraguay’s favour. It appeared that the US Navy’s mighty manoeuvres had been in vain. Hopkins didn’t think so and ungraciously resurrected his claims ten years later, against an economy emasculated by war. Even Paraguay’s enemies, Brazil and Argentina, became weary of Hopkins, and in 1871, they sent him packing.

  Madame Lynch was determined that the New Bordeaux venture should be a success, particularly because it was French. She had a vision of her noble Gallic peasants tilling a luscious Eden, transforming the dust into bountiful mulch. French society would blossom in the agricultural colony and the benefits would trickle down among the Paraguayans, bringing both culture and much-needed delicacies. Madame Lynch began to see the future in whipped creams and chicory, courgettes and petit pois. On matters of farming, she’d inherited all the elegance of Marie Antoinette – and unfortunately much of her insight.

  She persuaded Don Francisco to allow her to host a reception on the day of inauguration in 1855. All the dignitaries and diplomats were invited, along with the surly gentry and an unsavoury complement of inflated relatives. She even invited the French Minister, Monsieur Cochelet, and his sniffy wife, and went so far as to make her the guest of honour.

  The men were to ride and the women were to travel upstream in a small ship. A barque was found and decorated with streamers, bunting and lanterns. Madame Lynch had her cooks prepare a fine lunch of roasted game, hams, poached trout, pickled fruits, custards, Tokay, French brandy and baked dainties. The State Military Adviser, Wisner von Morgenstern, offered the benefit of his éclat in the choosing of liquors and sweetmeats. Everything was then set out on deck, on trestles dressed in damask and trailed with fresh flowers.

  It should have been perfect. Every spoon, every burette was in place. Madame Lynch had only overlo
oked one small detail: her guests still regarded her as an Irish whore.

  Almost exactly one hundred and forty-five years after this vaguely promising start to the colony, I was setting out to join another battleship on a jaunt to New Bordeaux – or, as it was now called, Villa Hayes.

  The excursion had been organised by a slightly overwound gallant called Oscar, who wore a suit of crushed peach and shoes of delicate ruby calf. He was extravagantly regal on these occasions and had managed to garner an impressive array of dignitaries to attend the opening of a museum. It was generally accepted that no one was interested in the culture that would be dolloped out in the Chaco, but it was otherwise a tempting day out. For the ambassadors, it offered a welcome respite from the ennui of a city that was, to put it delicately, diplomatically serene. For the Great and the Good, it was a chance to shake their feathers out and drink the Paraguayan Navy’s whisky.

  The Itaipú was not, I suspect, as pretty as the vessel that Madame Lynch had commandeered for her trip to New Bordeaux. The gunboat had taken up three hundred tons of Brazilian steel and was designed, it seemed, to appear conspicuous rather than daunting. When I first saw her belching up the river, she looked like a block of flats taking swimming lessons. But closer to, she had a certain appeal. Her crew obviously adored her, and she was lavished in glossy coats of battle-grey and all her brass bits gleamed like jewellery. The crew themselves were dressed in the uniforms of the Imperial German Navy circa 1910 – dark-blue serge, black silk cravats and shiny patent boots. The whole glorious operetta was preceded by a launch that was so fat and so forested in heavy machine-guns that there was some concern that she’d capsize.

  The midday sun had roasted the decks of the Itaipú, and her departure was delayed for an hour by the late arrival of the American Ambassador (as well as the Italian and the Ecuadorian – but she could easily have left without them). Even before they’d set off, the guests were mottled and sticky, but this didn’t affect the frothiness of the occasion. The first ladies had turned up in silk gowns and satin shoes and the ratings had hauled them, squealing and rattling with jewels, up the narrow companionways. I spotted Monsieur Cochelet’s successor, the French Ambassador, among them, resplendent in a cream suit and a fruity tie. The only shadow on the dazzling grey ship was the British Ambassador, on time and shrivelled with unhappiness.