Two days later, says the file, he was on his first – and last – trip to Itá.
The cemetery at Itá was built at the top of a small rise. As at La Recoleta, people here liked to stay within a few feet of the surface, in touch with those they’d left behind. I could now recognise all their different graves: the landlords in panteóns with windows and lacy curtains; the Germans laid out in iron bedsteads – as if a good night’s sleep had been suddenly engulfed in turf; the peón with his wooden cross and a crocheted shawl.
I asked at the gate if anybody knew the graves. A man with a look of practised sloth peeled himself off his seat and came to help.
‘Have you got Martin Bormann here?’ My words suddenly seemed so ridiculous.
The man had brilliant new red training shoes, too clean for work.
‘I’ve heard he was here,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know where. We’ll have to ask Ramón Sosa. He used to be the grave-digger – but he’s retired now.’
Señor Sosa was summoned and arrived surprisingly quickly. Perhaps he lived somewhere among the tombs? He appeared as if from a sleep, everything curled up: his straw hat, his shirt and his well-creased grin. He was told what I wanted.
‘We get four journalists a month coming here looking for Bormann,’ he said, wrinkled in amusement. ‘I’ll show you the grave they dug up.’
We threaded through the tightly packed tombs until we came to a clearing of red soil. Bright red, sticky muck.
‘One of the journalists,’ went on Señor Sosa extravagantly, ‘came with a head in a suitcase and asked us to bury it …’
‘There are lots of stories …’, said the other man.
I pulled my dictaphone out, but when they saw it, the men looked at it sceptically. Now, when I play the tapes back, all I can hear is them scrambling to be noncommittal.
‘I don’t know any of the stories, of course …’
‘I wasn’t working here at the time. I only started here in eighty-three.’
‘I wish my mother was alive. She knew everybody. She even knew the clothes they were buried in.’
Three heads popped up among the tombs. ‘What does he want?’ called the ladies. They were overalled in nylon flowers and twitching with curiosity.
‘He’s another one looking for Martin Bormann.’
‘Ah!’ they chorused knowingly. ‘Martin!’
So did ‘Martin’ ever live in Paraguay? There seemed to have been plenty of people who thought he did. What about the body on the Ulap Fairground? It’s his all right, they’d say, but it got there by fraud. This was no twiddling fraud either, but villainy of Jacobean complexity and – without being uncharitable – somewhat Jacobean absurdity. The champion of the theory is an English writer, Hugh Thomas, who sets it out with all its loops and whispers in Doppelgängers, The Truth about the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker. The nub of it is as follows.
Bormann did not die in Berlin in 1945. Instead, he made his way via Denmark, Italy and Buenos Aires to Paraguay. There he settled down, just as La Técnica’s file had said. Stumpfegger, on the other hand, did perish in Berlin: he was shot in the head. His body was buried secretly at a military cemetery by Nazi sympathisers and remained there for over twenty years. Meanwhile, in 1959, Bormann died and was buried secretly in Itá.
That ought to have been the end of it except that, in the late sixties, the Nazi sympathisers – Die Spinne possibly – felt that the Nazi-hunters, in their search for the dead Bormann (who was still considered to be alive), were coming uncomfortably close to other fugitives. They therefore decided to give them Bormann’s body – or at least enough of it to make them think they had it. They dug up his skull from the cemetery at Itá, took it to Berlin and planted it in the Ulap Fairground, still caked in Paraguayan soil. The teeth would confirm it was Bormann. They would also show, say the theorists, that Dr Blaschke was right as to the teeth in 1945. Bormann had simply lived a further fourteen years and, in that time, he had lost some teeth and had had work done on others.
To make the Ulap Fairground find more convincing, the Nazis retrieved Stumpfegger’s body, sawed the bullet hole out of his skull (both men were supposed to have been poisoned) and dropped him in beside Bormann. Once everything was ready, in 1972, the West German prosecutors were encouraged to do a little more digging on the fairground and the bodies were found. For the second time, Bormann was shovelled out of his grave.
‘Do you think he was here?’ I asked Señor Sosa. Could bits of him still be here?
‘Who knows?’ he said, and we stood around staring at the ground as if we had X-ray powers and could see Indians and Nazis curled up in the soil. For a moment, I thought he’d spotted something.
‘There are so many people in there,’ he whistled. Then he shook his head. ‘Who knows if Martin was ever there?’
For me, the theory wasn’t without its drawbacks. For a start, the whole plan failed; it did not create a diversion. Nazi-hunting has remained good sport in South America to this day. Did anybody really think they could throw the Nazi-hunters off the trail? If the plan went wrong, it would merely have provided confirmation that there was indeed a Spider’s Web in South America.
The only reason that it didn’t go wrong – if the theorists have their facts right – is that the Berlin police conducted the investigation like clowns and failed to notice the obvious: that Bormann’s head was covered in red clay and not Berlin sand; that it didn’t belong to that body; that both bodies had only been in the ground a short while and not twenty-seven years. Could the Nazis have predicted such buffoonery, which was essential to the success of the plan?
And who had buried Dr Stumpfegger secretly in 1945? And more to the point, why? Had someone foreseen that his corpse might prove useful later?
Perhaps the weakest link in the theory – and it is supposed to be its strongest – is that it relies on documents found in the litter of the pyragüés’ nest. Their information tended to come from people who were either venal or spiteful or drowning in baths of sewage. The pyragüés were not famous for getting it right.
On the other hand, there is still a £20,000 reward outstanding for anyone who can prove that Bormann did not live and die in Paraguay. It was advertised in The Times and the Independent in October 1996 and has never been claimed. It is obviously not enough to cite the Ulap Fairground findings.
The mysteries of Bormann – and Itá – seem likely to trouble us for many years to come.
48
THE GREAT LUNCH that had overwhelmed Itá followed me up the road and subdued the town of Big Dog, or Yaguarón.
I had the church to myself, the greatest church in Paraguay. It was started in 1640 and took sixty years and 4,000 Indians to complete. The walls were nine feet thick and carried a swoop of roofing – a hundred feet wide by two hundred long – over the edges to form deep, shaded arcades. The front door was twenty feet high and thick enough to withstand a determined siege. I went inside, into the darkness.
The air was fizzling with bats.
‘I’ll put the lights on for you.’
I suddenly noticed the sacristan. He crabbed his way off to the vestry, and as he crunched and ground the electric levers into place, light seeped across the ceiling. As it fanned out, it released arc after arc of paintings – scrolls, lianas, lotus leaves and colossal feathers.
‘The Indians painted them,’ he whispered. ‘The gold is from Bolivia and the green is extracted from the leaf of the yerba.’
The bats squeaked miserably as their cavern became a brilliant baroque jungle. The sacristan looked at me apologetically.
‘I don’t mind them,’ I said.
‘I do. Every now and then I smoke the bichos out.’
It was exactly this sort of casually violent authority that had made another inhabitant of Big Dog briefly famous throughout Europe. His name would become synonymous with absolute power, a torch for autocracy and a champion for those shrugging off the liberalism of the enlightenment. He ruled Paraguay for nearly thirty yea
rs, from 1814 to 1840, sealing it off from the world and meeting every whimper of opposition with unhesitating savagery. He was Dr Gaspar Rodríguez Francia, ‘the Supreme One’.
Francia was born in 1766 and raised on the main street of Yaguarón, which was now a gentle scree of sand and cobbles. His house had become a national treasure, a long, squat manor on a rectangle of clipped grass. There was a deep veranda of quebracho pillars and four heavily fortified doors. Beating on the middle door roused a ferocious curator.
‘It’s lunchtime,’ he snarled. ‘When am I supposed to eat?’
He never got over his resentment, but he agreed to show me the house.
‘This is Dr Francia,’ he said, introducing me to a portrait, horribly life-sized. The doctor was skinny-framed and bloodless, his hair scraped back from a bleak expanse of forehead. His mouth was thin but pinching and viperous and the eyebrows were furled up with bristly malice. The limbs were crabbed and spindly and yet oddly effeminate. He was hardly the superman I’d read about.
He wore black, as he always had, and next to him was a small tobacco case, a candlestick and a pewter sweet-box. These same objects now lay next to the portrait and were his only possessions. His meanness was congenital. His contempt for his fellow man took a little longer to develop.
Dr Francia had seized power by telling Congress that Paraguayans had been ‘humiliated, oppressed, degraded’, but that ‘these times of oppression and tyranny have ended at last’. He offered them a choice: anarchy and Argentine hegemony, or himself. Congress was bewitched. They agreed that not only should he rule them but that he should rule alone and with absolute power, El Supremo.
But far from being the end of oppression and tyranny, Dr Francia’s accession was merely a beginning. He was deeply impressed by Rousseau’s Social Contract and believed that people – had they the intelligence to realise it – would be happy to forsake personal liberty for the sake of order. Autocracy was the only safeguard against chaos. There were few heroes in his world – just Robespierre and Napoleon – and no place for education. All the colleges were closed. Then the post office was shut down and all the newspapers. Fiestas were banned.
At first, opponents of his philosophy found themselves merely stifled with heavy fines or confiscation of land. Then Dr Francia established the Paraguayan secret service – the pyragüés – and sent them out, sniffing for dissension. Those accused could expect to end their lives in Francia’s prison on Independencia. The ceilings were so low that a man would never again know what it was to straighten his back. Loaded with chains, he could do nothing but await putrefaction. Dr Francia, who was rather previous with totalitarian doublethink, called the prison his ‘Chamber of Truth’. The luckier prisoners were dragged beneath his windows and bayoneted.
Eventually, the entire country was shackled. The borders were closed. Control of trade was so tight that when an English merchantman arrived in Asunción, Francia had the ship impounded until he’d learnt enough English to determine exactly what was on board. The Church’s property was seized and monasteries converted into barracks. Although Francia had once trained for the priesthood, he was more attracted to Voltaire and Diderot and abandoned his vocation. He humiliated the bishop and had himself appointed head of the Paraguayan Church. Then he invited the Pope to come to Paraguay – to take up a position as an altar boy. To his delight, he was excommunicated.
Next, he set about rebuilding the gene stock of his terrified people. He decreed that the Spanish could not marry amongst themselves. The mingling of the races which had started under the conquistadors as a matter of lust now became a matter of law. Spanish bloodlines came to an end. He toyed with the idea of outlawing marriage altogether, but this was overambitious. Instead every marriage was subject to his consent and heavy taxation. These laws were strictly enforced. When his sister married without consent, he had her seized, together with her husband and the priest who’d married them. All three were shot.
The curator pointed to two claws in the wall. ‘These are the hooks where he hung his hammock.’
It had been an ascetic life, just whitewash and stone flags. Francia avoided relationships with any smack of friendship. He kept a ledger of the women he slept with and saw no offence in consorting with prostitutes. He had at least one child, a daughter, by an Indian woman. The child grew up to become a prostitute herself and worked a patch near his residence in Asunción. Though Dr Francia never recognised her as his own, he demonstrated his own peculiar affection by declaring prostitution an honourable profession. From then on, Asunción’s whores were to wear gold combs in their hair; the peinetes de oro. The name has stuck.
As if reading my thoughts, the curator took me to another portrait, in gouache. ‘This is his daughter,’ he said. ‘Ubalde García de Cañete.’
Ubalde was as gaunt and loveless as her father. The curator licked his tooth, ‘Her family still own a lot of property.’
Eventually, the rivets of cast-iron power began to pop. Absolute authority, having enfeebled his people, now began to enfeeble El Supremo’s mind. He ordered all dogs to be shot. Large areas of Asunción were pulled down on the grounds that they were pestilent. Everybody was ordered to doff their hats as the President passed (those naked Indians who had no hats were made to carry little brims, which they were to raise in salute). He developed paranoia and had all his food tested for poison. He became obsessed with security, trusted no one with his keys and locked himself in at the end of every day. When he ventured into the streets, troopers went ahead of him hustling people indoors and beating those who lingered with the flats of their swords.
Eventually, on Christmas Day 1840, he throttled himself in a massive attack of apoplexy, refusing medical treatment for fear of assassination. He died during an extravagant thunderstorm at the age of seventy-four. No Paraguayan priest was prepared to officiate at the funeral and so one had to be brought from Argentina. Most people hardly dared to believe that he’d died at all. They couldn’t even bear to mention his name, and from then on he was referred to only as El Difunto, the Defunct One.
On his death, Ubalde burnt her father’s furniture to drive out his spirits. Others, who’d worked up twenty-six years of resentment, got hold of El Supremo’s corpse and had it dismembered. They then tossed the pieces to the alligators in the Río Paraguay.
Elsewhere, there was no shortage of admiration for El Supremo. He’d presided over an unprecedented quarter of a century of peace, ruling with energy and vicious impartiality. His ‘National-Revolutionary’ regime had relieved the church of its cumbersome land holdings, and in the National Farms, food was churned out with almost sickly abundance. There was no debt, no crime, no frivolity. It was almost as if Dr Francia had regarded the country as the personification of himself.
In Europe, there was admiration too. Men like Thomas Carlyle, who were always on the look-out for paradigms of autocracy, literally overflowed. Francia’s death coincided with the most astronomical phase in Carlyle’s thinking, and he lavishly accommodated El Supremo in his thunderings on heroes and hero-worship. Power was delivered by means of fear, he thrilled, to ignorant savages who knew no other form of governance. In the cult of heroes then prevailing, the eccentric Paraguayan dictator became – strange as it now seems – a champion. Insomuch as Carlyle ever influenced British political thinking, it’s a curious thought that this influence derived in part from the spindly doctor who kept a sweet-box and had people whipped for looking at him.
Carlyle and the caretaker who’d not had his lunch were among El Supremo’s greatest admirers.
‘These were good times for Paraguay,’ rumbled the old man.
49
CARLYLE’S TYPE WEREN’T the only people beginning to look admiringly in Paraguay’s direction. A handful of other writers had started to take an interest in this strange, forbidden Paradise perched high in the headwaters of the Paraná. Voltaire was intrigued by what he’d heard, and sent Candide to a land of gold plates and caged humming-birds and natives that
were pleasured by the monkeys. Robert Southey, the English poet laureate, had little more to go on when – in 1813 – he named his longest poem A Tale of Paraguay and dreamed up an Arcadia:
For in history’s mournful map, the eye
On Paraguay as on a sunny spot,
May rest complacent; to humanity,
There, and there only, hath a peaceful lot
Been granted, by Ambition troubled not,
By Avarice undebased, exempt from care …
Southey was to be better known for ‘The Three Bears’.
With the death of Dr Francia and the opening-up of Paraguay, the literary world had an opportunity to think again about this, its lost Elysium. Among the first to go was one C.B. Mansfield of the Philological Society, in 1852. Although, until then, his only published work was The Constitution of Salts, he considered himself the right man to rekindle public imagination. He reviewed the travel literature: the English marooned adventurers, The Robertsons, had been ‘amusing’ but their book was got up to sell; the account of Rengger, the Swiss physician, was ‘dreary’; Hopkins, the American, was unspeakably boring. Mansfield would better them all. With hindsight, he was over-laden with preconceptions. ‘I went to Paraguay,’ he wrote, ‘to gratify a whim … to see the country I believed to be an unspoilt Arcadia …’
His more pressing problem was that he was profoundly deaf. This, he admitted, was ‘a Great Drawback’. He couldn’t understand anybody at all. His hopes that Queen Victoria would make him the first British consul in Paraguay were always rather over optimistic, but at least when she appointed someone else it gave him the excuse to go home. His travels (which never got beyond Asunción) were to be seamlessly disappointing. This was a shame, because everything had started well enough.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 21
