That, they say, is the reason the Virgin of Caacupé is now to be found attired in the sumptuous manner of Elizabeth I of England, on the day of her Coronation.
When the Allies arrived in Caacupé, they found that López and his twinkling doxy were, once again, a step ahead of them and had fled. López had sent an officer back to Caacupé with an order that the British contractors were to follow him. Happily, the officer was far too drunk to give any intelligible commands. One of those who gratefully surrendered to the Brazilians was the apothecary Masterman.
‘Baachus,’ he wrote, with uncharacteristic religiosity, ‘to whom so many of the English had sacrificed so devoutly, laying even their own lives upon the shrine, now came to their help.’
61
THE PRESIDENTIAL CORTÈGE lurched northwards, scattering the last odds and ends of Napoleonic Paraguay in the forest. Madame Lynch rode in the American buggy and López in the landau. The Pleydel had long been abandoned in a village that is still known to this day as Piano. Then, one of the last brigades of the Presidential Guard made its final stand at Acostá-Nú. I passed their pitiful monument on the road out to Caraguatay. Here – at long last – General Caballero had surrendered. His little soldiers were not so lucky. All of them were slaughtered, most barely more than children. They’d painted moustaches on their faces.
But the most impressive abandonment of all was out in the marshes, at Vapor Cué, the Place of Steam.
From the gentle, colonnaded plaza of Caraguatay, I walked the last five kilometres out into the swamps. My pursuit of the presidential rabble had taken me right through the central cordillera and out the other side, into the flatlands. As the village bedded itself into the horizon, my world became – once again – a great green soup of well-frogged ooze. As the sun rose higher, it all began to suck and bubble.
Eventually, the track came to a sticky halt on the banks of a rivulet, the Río Yhagüy. It was just one of a number of thin red capillaries that wriggled out of the swamps into the Manduvirá, an artery of the Paraguay, fifty miles to the west. The Yhagüy must have been wider in August 1869 when López heckled the last of his imperial navy into this vast, glutinous wilderness. Six groaning steamers were flogged along the creek. Vapor Cué was as far as they got before the reptile riverbanks clamped around them. They gave the place its name and settled into the grit, now and for ever a fossilised shipyard.
Four days after the bloodbath at Pirebubuy, the Paraguayans set fire to their beloved fleet. The wooden ships had been consumed, and all that now remained were their boilers and paddle-wheels, some axe-heads and rivets and the coal and timbers that had been below the waterline. Three of them – Río Apa, Ypora and Salto del Guairá – had been built by Whytehead at the Asunción shipyard in the happier 1850s. The fourth was the carcass of the Aquitaine, which had brought the hapless French to New Bordeaux. The courage – or rather cheek – of these little ships was so brazen that at the skirmish of Riachuelo, they’d completely overwhelmed the fifth steamer, a handsome Brazilian warship called the Anhambay. She was captured along with her English engineer, John Foster (who simply changed sides and served his Paraguayan masters until the end). Being made of iron, the Anhambay had fared rather better in the conflagration.
But for me, the most exuberant of these peeling hulks was the Piravevé. Forked from the slime, it seemed as though the flames had barely touched her. She’d once served the Royal Navy – as HMS Ranger – and when she arrived in Paraguay, in 1865, she was to be the fastest in the Guaraní fleet. Her graceful, parabolic lines had now been hauled upright again and her mast and rigging restored. She was thirty-one metres long and I had to slop down to the riverbanks to take her all in: a powerful nineteenth-century war machine now harmlessly pickled in the sludge of central South America.
A snake slithered over to investigate my astonishment. We regarded each other with momentary panic before fleeing in opposite directions. My head suddenly emptied of courage and I was pelting back through the slick, to the safety of the warships. It was only when I’d recovered my breath and a little dignity that I remembered the Tacuarí. The little ship that had started it all, that had set out from Limehouse with López and Eliza and all their baubles and guns, was nowhere to be seen.
She had, I later learned, suffered no lapse of courage. A few miles upstream of Humaitá, she’d taken on the ironclads and, after a particularly vicious little flurry, she’d scuttled herself and gone to the bottom.
*
As the Allies watched the fires burning at Vapor Cué, they must have wondered how long the Marshal-President would go on. The next day, the provisional Paraguayan government, installed by the Allies, declared that Francisco Solano López was a ‘monster of impiety, a denaturalised Paraguayan, the assassin of his country and an enemy of the human race’. He was outlawed. The Comte d’Eu had had enough and went home. It was left to the Argentine president, Sarmiento, to express the frustration of them all: ‘The war is finished although that brute still has twenty pieces of artillery and two thousand dogs which will have to die beneath the hooves of our horses. These people do not even move one to compassion. A pack of wolves.’
But for now, López and his two thousand dogs had no intention of getting themselves ground up in allied hooves.
They simply vanished into the jungles of the north.
62
THE SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE of the monster spawned an obsession that has tormented the Paraguayan character ever since: the fixation with hidden treasure.
Perhaps the Paraguayan character had always been vulnerable to an overenthusiasm for buried gold. In a land where food flops effortlessly from cassava and orange trees, the idea of sustenance without effort had always been appealing. The idea of wealth without effort was irresistible. Paraguayans were, after all, descended from treasure-hunters. It was only natural that when the Allies discovered Asunción stripped of every carat of gold, the Asunceños assumed that their inheritance was out there, buried in the dirt. There was a certain logic in this; after all, in five years of asphyxiating siege, not much had left the country (except the loose change of Madame Lynch’s retirement). Rumours began to flourish.
The survivors of the fighting provided the bare bones of the plot. Even Thompson believed in caches of treasures scattered through the forests. Another settler, an Australian called Alexander MacDonald, got the story from his carter, Miguel Faria. The old trooper had followed the presidential cortège north, living on cats and vermin. They had with them seven carts of ‘specie’ from the National Treasury, ‘amounting to £1,000,000 sterling’. In the agony of hot pursuit, the Treasurymen buried the gold in a swamp. To preserve the secrecy of the location, López had them all shot and their bodies heaped on the bullion to protect it from thieves. Even in 1911, wrote MacDonald, ‘Paraguayan woodmen are terrified by their imaginary ghosts’.
Unfortunately, these deliciously crenellated stories had already made their appearance in European fiction some fifteen years before. An Italian writer, Emilio Salgari, had kept his fans momentarily breathless with a cowboys-and-Indians classic called The President of Paraguay’s Treasure, and in its Spanish translation, the yarn had leaked back into Paraguay. Another equally curly version had appeared in London in 1887, A Paraguayan Treasure. When I discovered that its hero was a barrister-explorer called Arthur Penistone and that the author, Alexander Baillie, was an equity draftsman up in Gray’s Inn, I began to hear imaginary ghosts of my own. It was the crew of The Falcon having the last, the lawyer’s laugh.
It was far too late to stop the Paraguayans. MacDonald reported that they were digging up the countryside. In the 1950s even Paraguay’s whelping-new dictator – Stroessner himself – joined the search and sent ‘treasure-hunting machines’ off to the Interior, in pursuit of Marshal López. The hunt, the obsession, has proved an incurable itch. It flared again in January 2000 when the magazine Reportaje al Pais published a list of another 150 possible treasure sites. Credulity erupted all over town.
‘We go every weekend,’ a rancher told me over his well-stacked lunch, ‘treasure-hunting in Vapor Cué.’
And what did the gold-diggers think about the espíritus?
Ah yes, they’d say, the ghosts that guard los tesoros escondidos del Mariscal López y su Concubina. They are out there too.
63
I TRAVELLED BACK into the swooning farmlands of the southern central cordillera.
Although I sometimes had to pinch myself at the unreasonable charm of it all – at the meadows deeply splashed with flowers, the streams, the ox-carts and the villages with their palisade fences and whitewashed tree-trunks – this land had proved grimly resistant to colonisation. Nearly every attempt to resettle it after the great war had ended in disaster. This may have been due – at least partly – to the involvement of the inexplicably durable Baron von Morgenstern. The old fop had been plucked from his bawdy house, polished up a little and installed as Minister of Immigration. It was a calling that he carried off with his own distinctive sloth.
The most pitiful of these fiascos occurred at Itape, where my bus stopped briefly, to disgorge three sleepy cowhands. The new arrivals in 1873, Lincolnshire farmers sponsored at $5 a head by the Paraguayan government, were about to discover that they hadn’t arrived in Arcadia. The Paraguayan government was about to discover that it hadn’t acquired ‘Lincolnshire Farmers’.
Instead, the conman who’d packaged them up had sent the Paraguayans 1,400 London scruffs, scoured from the East End. There were matchmakers, costers, Polish Jews, blind men, acrobats, cripples, minstrels and general dupes. The insects weren’t fussy and spared the government its litigation. Warble-fly laid their eggs in subtle London flesh. The jiggers burrowed upwards from their feet. At dusk, the polvorinos settled on their skin and in their hair and clothes, as fine and maddening as pepper. There was no refuge but rum, and when that was done, the colony was swept with typhoid. A few escaped, fleeing south to merge with the rot of Buenos Aires.
Ten years later, Edward Knight met one of them, a former jockey and a melancholic wreck, digging the railways, way out in Tucuman, Argentina.
‘Here I am,’ said the shadow, ‘less of a Lincoln Farmer than ever, I guess.’
I stayed that night at one of the more enduring colonies. It was established by Japanese peasants and was called La Colmena: The Beehive.
64
I WAS THE only guest at the Hotel Fujimi. It was tucked into a garden of trumpet flowers, bonsai and orchids. There was a pool of carp, neatly defined by an ornamental bridge and neatly tick-tocked by a chorus of water-pipes. Behind the bar were silk flowers and bottles of Chivas Regal, nipped and drained at different rates and busily scored with pencil marks. The landlady, Mrs Matsui, ate her breakfast of beef and eggs with chopsticks and a gulp of green tea. A large poster of Mount Fuji reminded her of a homeland that she’d never known.
At sundown, Mr Matsui came in from his orchards, kicked off his boots and billowed himself in fresh cotton. His daughter approached, with cold beer and slippers. He began the story of the Matsuis in Paraguay:
My grandfather had a small farm in the highlands of Honshu. For three months a year it was buried in snow. In 1935, a government department – the Yika – offered him the chance to come and grow his fruit in Paraguay. The Yika would support them, they said. My grandparents accepted and arrived here in 1936. There was no road through the jungle but the Yika bought them a good truck. After the conquest of Manchuria there was no more money from Japan and the Yika abandoned us. The first years were the worst, before the land was cleared. Many died of malaria and several were attacked in the forest by tigres. Then, when everything was planted, there was a plague of locusts that lasted seven months. They left us nothing. Perhaps one in ten abandoned the colony and went home.
My grandfather and my father worked all the time. There wasn’t even time to teach us Japanese. I learnt jopará with the cowboys. We even became Catholics (although Grandfather was always a Buddhist). Then in the seventies I went to study in Japan. Although I looked Japanese, they couldn’t understand me. At first I felt ashamed but then I told them I was Paraguayan. Of course, they didn’t understand this but it made me feel very proud. I am Paraguayan. I feel Paraguayan.
Nowadays, we get some help from Japan. They built us the road to get our fruit to Asunción. A few years ago, we had a visit from His Highness Prince Hitache. There are only seventy families here. It was a big moment for us.
The air became fizzy with insects and Mrs Matsui laid out a supper of beef, potatoes and noodles. Some more Japanese fruit-farmers arrived, muscly men with spiky hair and gargantuan thirsts. They sprawled out in chairs below The Last Supper and the daughter relayed backwards and forwards with beer. All evening, Mr Matsui and the farmers joshed and snapped at each other in jopará and Guaraní and everybody ripened like peaches. Understanding nothing, I slipped away, but Mr Matsui caught up with me in Spanish.
‘The young have it easy now,’ he said. ‘My grandfather was three months under snow. You always had to be ready. Now they stick mandioca in the ground and have three years’ food! They go to Japan and they have money!’ There was a spark of indignation. ‘And they won’t even buy me a tractor.’
Back in my little magnolia room, I leafed through the writings of one Reginald Thompson. It was the best and the worst of travel writing. It was the best because – if travel writing is merely the soul-baring of the traveller – Reginald was often startlingly naked. In this state of exposure, I caught glimpses of the traveller that I’d become myself – bewitched, confused, nearly always lonely, at once enchanted and then candidly homesick. For the time being, Reggie was a soul-mate, even though we’d missed each other in La Colmena by over sixty years. He’d stumbled through here at about the time that the Matsuis were being stripped down by locusts, in 1937.
He was the worst of writers because these, his best bits, weren’t intended at all. They simply slipped out. What Reggie had intended, at least originally, was a book to encourage the great British working classes to emigrate to Paraguay (ideally before the Germans had the same brilliant idea). What he ended up with was a warning to the world that the Germans were already there and that they were about to march out and overwhelm the continent. As the thrust of his manifesto veered off in this new direction, the ‘terrifics’ and ‘tremendouses’ fell like plums from his prose.
Things hadn’t gone well from the start. His research brought him nothing but hangovers and saddle-sores (which had to be lanced by an old Indian). He had a punch-up with a leading French settler called Naville and then – quite understandably – his wife (who he’d left in Asunción) had a nervous breakdown. Reggie was forced to cut short his trip and haul Patricia back to England, where he promptly divorced her before settling down to pen his excruciating memoirs.
Even that didn’t go well. Although he was the first English writer to address Paraguay for perhaps thirty years, he was unable to make his jottings nutritious. Worse, the only aspect of Paraguay that he’d really admired was the Japanese at La Colmena (‘silk dressing gowns … cigarettes in long holders … terrific caña’. He doesn’t seem to have noticed their suffering or the plague of locusts). An admiration for the Japanese was hardly a selling-point at a time when Britain and Japan were squaring up for a fight – and so Reggie stitched a few new bits in, saying how beastly they were. By the time this Frankenstein script was laid before the publishers, the two countries were doggedly at war. Reggie’s book emerged as Germans and Japs in South America and immediately flopped.
‘I never made any money from my books,’ he wrote in 1963 on what he assumed would be his death-bed. It was his twenty-third book and the failure of each of them had been a life-long source of surprise.
Reginald did, however, express an abiding hope for Paraguay. Perhaps, he said, it will prove ‘a kind of ark, into which the bewildered, harassed and oppressed peoples will march to seek shelter; maybe to establish the nucleus of a new civilisation and a new race …’ It rathe
r sounded as if he was blundering down a familiar path, the path of Dr Förster, the Lincolnshire Farmers and the Australian Utopians. Poor Reggie, he’d had a nose for dead-ends.
But had the Japanese of La Colmena found the nucleus of anything?
I thought about this as I walked through the colony in the morning. The police station looked Paraguayan enough, with its typewriter, its rack of carbines and a shrine to the Virgin. So did the stores, with their pioneer stocks of barbed wire, shovels, tinned milk and axes. It was only when I saw a barefoot peón ride into the plaza, floppy-hatted and gun-belted, and saw that he was Japanese that I realised that this great green country had simply absorbed these, its most exotic colonists. Far from nucleating, the Japanese had been roundly engulfed.
65
CURIOSITY FOR THE Australian Utopia landed me by the side of the great east–west road, Ruta Dos, at the dead of night. The bus dropped me at the sign for Nueva Londres.
‘It’s up there,’ said the driver. ‘Eleven kilometres.’
Up where? The road leached away into the darkness. There was a mercanta hurriedly packing up her stall.
‘No,’ she said, ‘there are no hotels, no taxis, no buses. At this time, the only people out on ruta dos are bad ones.’
Faced with conspicuously bleak options, I shouldered my pack and groped my way towards the junction. I stepped into the black. I could just feel the camber of a road beneath my feet – so at least I could distinguish forward from ditchwards. These were grasslands. I could tell by the seething of the straw. There were frogs, too, chuckling and sucking and (I soon decided) groaning in horror. Nightjars added their own texture to my burgeoning apprehension. The locals described the noise (aptly I now realised) as the dying screams of the Old Lady of the forest. Then, the last streaks of light from Ruta Dos flickered out, depriving me of every sense except hearing and, of course, terror.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 28
