‘War?’
‘The Triple Alliance.’
This was an unfruitful line. There was only one thing I wanted to know: ‘What happened to them?’
‘They just got up and left. In 1975. They had a reserve, I think, up north.’
‘How many were there?’
‘Fifty. Equal men and women.’
Edelio ploughed me back to San Juan.
Even though finding the Aché would have to wait, I had every reason to be pleased. They’d kept their secret and the killing of women had, for the time being, abated.
75
THE PERSECUTION OF the Indians, however, continued.
Their rights had progressed very little since 1537, when Pope Paul III had declared them capable of salvation. By the later twentieth century, they were in the margins, making up perhaps three per cent of the population. Even there, the Stronistas saw them as impeding progress (or, rather, wealth) with their hunting grounds straddling vast areas of forestry. There was another problem: groups like the Aché were simply unable to fathom the concept of private property. Wherever their arrows fell was game for the taking, whether it was beef or sweet horse-meat. Sometimes they hacked their meat from living animals and then fled before the outsiders arrived with their thunder, or gunfire. The hunting of Indians was an unsurprising development.
The eradication of genocide in Paraguay was, for a long time, an overambitious task. But the blunting of the Indians’ suffering is often credited to the work of one man: Leon Cadogan.
I met his grandson by chance in Villarrica.
Geraldo Cadogan was an evangelist preacher and a healer. He and his wife ran a clinic from a shed on the edge of town. They treated their patients with river mud and faith.
‘After a month of the mud,’ said Christina, ‘uterine cancers just drop away.’
The story of the Paraguayan Cadogans is one of determined tragedy.
Geraldo knew that the Cadogans were descended from Irish robber-barons who’d preyed on the Welsh. They had a square named in their honour in London. At some stage, outlawed Cadogans had wandered off to Australia, and from there they’d sailed for Paraguay, arriving in 1899 with the Utopians. Jack Cadogan declared himself a ‘revolutionary activist’, but like his forebears, he was a nomad at heart. Three of his sons drifted back to Australia and to violent deaths: killed by a crocodile, stabbed by an Aborigine and butchered by the Japanese in New Guinea. A fourth, Hugh, was drafted into a Paraguayan revolution and died of TB. Only Leon survived, born soon after landfall and named after Tolstoy.
Leon’s life took the ancestral shape, migratory and purposeless. He justified his lack of substance by declaring himself to be Irish. By 1940, he’d been a yerba-grower, a teacher, a detective, a father and a divorcee, and he was about to become an alcoholic.
‘Then something changed,’ said Geraldo.
His grandfather’s road to Damascus had been an encounter with an Indian he’d once defended in his police days (prosecution had never been his strength). His vocation, he suddenly realised, was the betterment of Indians. He wrote a dictionary for the Mbyá and defended them against the more outrageous charges. After the San Juan slaving incident, he flew into litigation.
‘It was my grandfather who had the killing of Indians banned, in 1957.’
Stroessner thought he could contain him by appointing him Director of Indian Affairs. It was a ham-fisted ploy. From the inside, Cadogan could see for himself the army concentration camps (‘Belsen for Indians’), the smallpox and the rot. He denounced them all and the generals trading in slaves. In 1964, he had the honour of being fired.
Stroessner then sent the pyragüés in. They stole Cadogan’s life’s work and left him reeling under the first of several heart attacks.
‘I remember him,’ said Geraldo, ‘as a tall man. White hair and thick glasses. I was rather frightened of him.’
In the turmoil of his life, Leon Cadogan’s family had disintegrated. His eldest son, Dick, joined the evangelists and was cut adrift by Leon. He’s drifted ever since. There was only a brief interlude of stability in Dick’s life, when he married a Paraguayan called Adelaida.
‘I was their ninth child, born in 1966,’ said Geraldo. ‘My mother died three hours after I was born, from a haemorrhage.’
Dick was inconsolable with grief. He abandoned the children for adoption and set off on his aimless wanderings around Paraguay.
‘I saw him occasionally. He called by about every five years. So did my grandfather. Neither of them provided anything towards my up-bringing. I loved them but they frightened me.’
‘Where’s your father now?’
Geraldo shrugged.
Leon Cadogan died in 1973. His work had not been in vain. Asunceños were appalled at the cruelty of the countryside. Foreign investigators arrived. The new Director of Indian Affairs, Colonel Infanzon, tried to buy them off with pre-pubescent Indian girls – unsuccessfully (to his surprise). Soon the world knew.
Within a year of Leon’s death, the United Nations charged Paraguay with slavery and genocide. By then, the price of an Aché slave had fallen to a mere $2.
American support for Stroessner shrank back in disgust.
It was comforting to think that the suffering of the San Juan Aché had not been in vain either. In its own small way, it had contributed to the downfall of an ogre.
76
AN OPPORTUNITY TO visit an Aché group arose some weeks later.
My friend, the soil scientist Dr Palacios, was heading a party up into the Mbaracayú range and agreed to take me along. It was a forest five times the size of Ybytyruzú and a last refuge of jaguars, tapirs and the Aché. There were now only a thousand Aché left in the whole country.
From Asunción, we drove north-east for twelve hours in the jeep. The road, at first asphalt, turned to earth and then deep orange sludge.
‘The Brazilians own everything up here,’ said Palacios cheerfully. ‘The ranches, the forests, the towns – even the cat-pits. They are the New Paraguayans.’
We passed Curuguaty and Ygatimí, both capital cities for a day, during the retreat of Marshal López. Then, on the border with Brazil, we entered a dark forest, throbbing with insects and frogs.
For several days we were confined to the Biological Station as the sky chewed up the earth and violent orange storms exploded over the forest. Only the botanist wandered out into the bromeliads and epiphytes, oblivious of the watery chaos. Palacios held court at the kitchen table, eating jam with a spoon.
When the rains thundered off to Brazil, the forest warden, Silverio, led us deeper into the sopping woods. The Aché were camped five kilometres east, on a clearing of rammed earth.
The hunters had returned that week with a tapir and the tribe was replete and content. Slabs of black meat still smouldered in the fire. There were little brushes for licking up the fat.
The men were more powerful than I’d envisaged, packed with dense, unyielding muscle. Their faces were Mongoloid, sinewy, and though not white, there was a milky opacity to their skin. Their feet were broad, the toenails smashed away and the skin lacy with hookworm. All their body hair had been plucked or scorched away and tiny black-fly fed at their nicks and wounds.
Of course, there’d been adaptations – probably more in the last forty years than in the last forty thousand. The men wore shorts – shreds of charity – and the women shrugged themselves into shirts as we arrived. They spoke Guaraní and lived in stilted metal huts. They’d even started to cultivate oranges and cassava, and now kept a small larder of live animals: a sheep, an armadillo and a few coatimundis.
‘They’ve been here since 1982,’ said Silverio. ‘Fifty families.’
There was much that hadn’t changed. They still had no concept of money and only the haziest notion of private property. Most potently, each man carried a longbow, two metres high with a clutch of long, specialised arrows: serrated for monkeys; bladed for tapirs; a blunt punch for birds.
Palacios tri
ed to fire one. He was unable to pull the string back and the arrow flopped uselessly into the grass. The Aché can kill at seventy metres.
‘The relationship between the hunter and his game,’ said Silverio, ‘is one of love. The animal’s death is a sacrifice. The Aché will raise its orphans as their own.’
He showed us photographs of Aché women suckling orphaned monkeys.
‘They have,’ decided Palacios, ‘a union with the beasts.’
Do they still eat the dead?
‘Not in the last thirty years,’ replied Silverio. ‘Though they still think about it.’
77
THE ACHÉ MAY well have been the savages who captured Candide on his wanderings in Paraguay: the Oreillons.
Voltaire had been educated as a Jesuit, and though he’d come to be their tormentor, he was an avid reader of the Jesuits’ American adventures. Candide was written in 1758, at about the time of Father Lozano’s ‘most barbarous’ discoveries. It is not merely the fact that the naked Oreillons were cannibals ‘armed with arrows, clubs and stone axes’ that tempts this literary connection: Voltaire was intrigued by the natives’ union with beasts: ‘They found that the cries came from two naked girls who were tripping along the edge of the meadow, while two monkeys were nibbling at their buttocks.’ Candide dispatches the lewd monkeys with a few blasts of his gun. ‘“A pretty piece of work, sir!” said Cacambo “You have killed those two young ladies’ lovers.”’
The European writers’ presumption of bestiality was, however, too hasty. Clastres would reveal that, to the Aché, carnality with animals was well beyond the pale. His group told him that they’d once found a man with a tapir. They hacked him open with their axes, and then, of course, they ate him.
78
MY JOURNEY BACK to Asunción was a protracted reminder of the remoteness of the Aché. I waited a day in the mud-bath of Ygatimí for a truck – or anything – to emerge. Eventually, a tiny Fiat decided to make a break for it and the boys agreed to take me. We got about five kilometres before the sludge was up at the windows. The Fiat whined for a moment, glugged and then fell silent. It was now archaeology. I completed the next four hours in a petrol tanker, a beautiful monster that churned through the slime all the way to Curuguaty.
‘We stop here,’ said the crew. ‘There are too many bandits in the dark.’
There was no bus until midnight. The Brazilians here were feverish and on the frontier. ‘Have you tried the Paraguayan girls?’ they kept asking me. I booked into a hotel that had all the expectations of a whorehouse except that it was derelict. I dozed on an itchy bed until I could hear the Asunción bus, raring to leave.
79
I WAS BACK in time for the Grand Caledonian Ball.
This exotic institution is the gift of the British Ladies to Asunción’s rich and curious. It is held every year at the slightly foxy Golf Club. This club – in defiance of golfing convention – is one of the world’s only floodlit courses. At night, it glows like a strange green planet.
Every year the tropical ballroom imagines itself to be Scottish, with banks of baronial shields and the banner of St Andrews fluttering among the palms. Twelve pipers are flown in from the nearest little Scotland – Buenos Aires – and they arrive with all their swords and kilts, daggers and jolly Glengarrys. After 170 years in Argentina they no longer speak English, but they can still pipe a mighty concurso de eightsome reel. They also bring their own dancers (little pixies in tams and woolly socks) because, historically, the Paraguayans have often been unable to move, paralysed with astonishment.
We were received by The Ladies’ Presidenta, Señora Gibson, also struggling with her English but magnificently ball-gowned in taffeta, with a sash of Hunting Campbell. All around her, waiters in brilliant drill were fighting their way into the tartan throng, with trays of frozen whisky. I joined a table of half-Britons, an Italian rancher and a Paraguaya. She began her interrogation immediately.
‘Who are these Scottish? Is it a British colony?’
We ate piraña soup, roasted beef and schooners of whisky mousse. The band marched in and the half-Britons marched after them, flailing and whooping. The Paraguayans barricaded themselves behind their tables and watched with unravelling perplexity. Then, at midnight, there was a distant diplomatic incident and the ambassadors rushed out in a flurry of limousines. The band carried on, wailing and marching until almost dawn.
‘Where are you going next, John?’ It was Rodrigo Wood, drenched with Scottishness
‘To Concepción,’ I said, ‘on a little boat called Guaraní.’
‘You must visit my brother, Enrique. The last of the Australian socialists!’
Federico Robinson was more interested in the Guaraní.
‘So they’ve refloated her?’ he said. ‘She hit a cattle barge last year and sank. I lost a jeep and fifteen kilometres of plastic hose. Still, they get things back. The Río Paraguay is only shallow.’
‘Am I mad?’
‘Only one man drowned.’
80
FIVE HOURS LATER I was standing, a little unsteadily, on the quayside next to the Guaraní. She looked like a long wooden dish, her gunwales just out of the water. There was a stack of ugly sheds up one end.
As all the boat’s food was cooked in river water, I went off to rummage the port for two days’ supplies.
Asunción’s docks had, it seemed, been conjured from the deeper recesses of Conrad, a place of indeterminate sex and imponderable intentions. Drinking-shops had hopeless, landlocked names like ‘Geneva’ and ‘Zurich’ and great finned monsters sizzled and hissed on the cobbles. The brothels were open to the street and divided up in pens, like piggeries. Stiff Imperial Prussian marines swaggered off the gunboats, ready to fill and ready to discharge.
I bought three tins of fish and boarded the Guaraní.
There were pirañas gnashing round the stern. Some of the passengers were hauling them aboard on bits of string and they lay on the deck rasping and clacking. They were only small but this wasn’t the point; they ate you in their thousands. Even alligator skin is no protection; they will pile themselves on the creature and hollow it out in minutes.
‘They are,’ wrote the writer-diplomat Cecil Gosling, ‘the most dangerous inhabitants of Paraguayan waters.’ In 1926, his friend, a police inspector, had run into a shoal; he was so badly mutilated that he swam straight back to his revolver and blew his brains out. To the Guaraní, the piraña is the piraí, which happens also to be the word for ‘leprosy’.
This was not a comforting thought as I placed my life aboard. This skiff had already once taken the short plunge to the bottom, and judging by its load, it might easily do so again. The foredeck was heaped with cargo: a hundred crates of fizzy drinks, ten pallets of cement, a seed-drill and ninety-eight leaky drums of petrol. If we weren’t barbecued first, it would be a glutinous shipwreck.
I clambered into the crumbling stack at the rear. On the lower deck was the galley and the engine room, packed to the bulwarks with eggs and sacks of oranges. The majority of passengers – a dozen Indians and peóns – never got any higher, and after a few hours they had rattly coughs and sump-coloured skin. On the top deck was the wheelhouse and the more refined elements of upriver society: a horse-dealer, a man who dug holes in Argentina and a quack doctor.
‘A storm tonight,’ he kept saying. ‘God help us.’
The crew worked in bare feet. Although the mate could make engine parts with a horse-file, only the skipper had shoes. He was a slightly awesome character, lean and scrubbed and predatory. His T-shirt described him as ‘Foxhound’.
He took my fare: five dollars to Concepción and half as much again to sleep on a mattress in a cupboard. The Indians slung their hammocks over the engine.
On time, Foxhound gave the order to leave.
The Guaraní clattered into the middle of the river, shivering the glassy surface. Asunción, still balmed in pink, slid down to the east. We passed through a graveyard of rotting steamers and th
en out under a thin white arc linking the eastern horizon with the west: the Remanso Bridge. The river widened; a vast, inert sea sliding imperceptibly south. It was like vitrified sky. In all its 1,700 kilometres, the Río Paraguay drops only thirty centimetres, maybe the length of a child’s arm.
Eastern Paraguay was now way off to the right, a lustrous, smoky-blue ribbon of hills and forests. The other way, to the left, the horizon was a thin strip of bitter reeds and backwaters, swamps and stunted black trees, each hard enough to crack an axe. This was the Chaco.
After the scandalous expulsion of Cabeza de Vaca in 1546, the Spanish were never again able to muster enthusiasm for this, the western shore. To those grown fat in the sensual, undulating east, the Chaco was simply an endless, salty desert of spines and poisons. It was hardly tempting. Worse, it was infested with the most savage tribes of the Americas. These bravos had faces streaked in purple and ears stabbed with vulture feathers. Their lances were plumed with human scalps.
‘War,’ it was said of the Guaycurús, ‘is the only occupation they consider most honourable.’
When confronted with matters of native honour, the conquistadors reacted as they always did: they cheated. In 1677, they invited 300 Guaycurús to a feast and then fell on them and killed them. It was merely the low point in a struggle that hardly ever began and certainly never ended. Lacking the technology to move fast over waterless territory, the Spanish could do nothing. The Chaco was sealed off with a line of fortlets along this river. Whenever the savages came within range, they were met with enfilades of grape. Stalemate ensued.
The Jesuits played a more enterprising hand. For a while their missionaries pressed deep into the margins of the Chaco, living in dens like fortified ant-hills. However, few of the holy fathers would find beatitude or even old age. Herrera was speared; Osorio was eaten by the Pajaguas: Rodríguez was sacrificed on an altar; Lizardi was pinned to a tree with arrows (it was an unhurried end; he was found with his breviary open at his own funeral service). By 1760, even their maps were suffused with despair.
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 31
