The end for the Jesuit Republic had been spiteful and protracted. Europe had never recovered from the spectacle of Jesuits in armed revolt. In 1759, Pombal hoofed them out of Portugal and had his revenge for Uruguay. France followed five years later. As before, Spain dithered.
For almost a century, the Paraguayan oligarchy had been besieging Madrid with their grumbles: the Jesuits paid no tax; they contributed nothing to the secular economy (but absorbed its best labour); they were sitting on a gold field; they were heretics and sodomites. Until then, Madrid had been largely unimpressed. Now she faced the possibility of an independent Guaraní state. In the spring of 1767, she gave in. The Society was expelled from all her domains. Secret orders went out to the Viceroy of La Plata, Bucareli: arrest the Jesuits, ship them to the Vatican and shut down the republic. By the following summer, Bucareli was in Paraguay with an army.
The Jesuits left without resisting. Perhaps they shouldn’t have done; their sudden departure left the impression that, in the end, they lacked conviction. To others, it was abandonment. Although Bucareli gathered up nearly $30,000,000 worth of estates, he found no feathered nests. Here is his inventory of Father Zabaleta’s worldly goods: ten shirts, two pillowcases, two sheets, three handkerchiefs, two pairs of shoes, two pairs of socks and a pound and a half of snuff.
As I surveyed the great orange shell of Jesús and its ankle-deep institutions, it was hard to feel pity. This vast building site had fallen victim to the Enlightenment. Perhaps it was none too soon. At every level of Jesuit administration, they’d perpetuated childhood. Initiative was stifled, and apart from the velvet majorettes, the Indians had never emerged as leaders. Not a single Guaraní became a priest. The reductions were like schools without education or – worse – without end.
I was sorry to have reached this point. My lack of enthusiasm would have horrified Cunninghame Graham. He was the last historian to witness the rituals of the Jesuit Republic, when he passed through in 1874. He found the Guaraní in the ruins of their reductions, still in their smocks and chanting in Latin. He lamented the senseless loss of idealism.
I console myself with the thought that had Graham lived to see more of the twentieth century and the epidemic of Utopias, he might have felt differently.
102
FOR MISIONES, THE Jesuits wouldn’t be the last Utopians. Nearly two centuries after their rapid departure, another was on his way in. He too had been something of an experimenter. Now he was contorted with ulcers, terrified of discovery and on the run. It was Dr Mengele, heading for Hohenhau.
It was an uninspired choice for a man who’d once sought to redesign the faces of Eastern Europe. Although it was handsome, with its orange trees and its soft green glades of sheep, Hohenhau was nothing more than agricultural. I almost missed it as my bus slewed its way east. Such tranquillity would gnaw at the doctor’s anxieties.
This wasn’t his only problem; Hohenhau was conspicuously German. Gemeiner Strasse was still lined with pines and the shopkeepers spoke with thick Silesian vowels. The landscape had been German since 1900 and there was a well-muscled monument to the early pioneers, dressed in the leather armour of the montes. Fifty-eight young Germans had died in the Chaco War and were remembered in roses and bronze. It was also the birthplace of Alfred Stroessner, who’d make this little Germany notorious. For Mengele, it was all too German, too obvious. He was right. Nazi-hunters would trawl the colony for years, long after he’d left and long after he’d died.
They would discover very little. I asked the grocer about Mengele, as she measured out sugar in an ancient balance of marble and brass. ‘He never lived here,’ she said. ‘We’ve never heard of him.’
I could hardly blame her for her discretion. Hohenhau was struggling to be remembered for its heroes, its fruit and its kultur – not some surly neurotic who’d skulked around in 1961.
Mengele had stayed out on a ranch belonging to the Krugs. Even today, not much happened without the Krugs. Their village house was one of the few that had survived a century of ants. It was now the Centro Histórico and upstairs was a wormy collection of pioneers’ rifles, sewing-machines and school-books given by Hitler. Hohenhau children had repaid his generosity with a large portrait over which they’d painted the words ‘El Presidente de Europa’.
The doctor would have been among sympathisers if not exactly disciples. He started to play scat and practised a little medicine. One woman told visitors that he’d often visited her hotel, that he was very polite and that he’d played the piano beautifully. Her name was Michline Reynaers. She and her husband were Belgian, and their hotel, The Tirol, was some way out, on the road back to Encarnación. I decided to pay them a visit.
I was unsure how the Reynaers would react to more questions about the Angel of Auschwitz. When Granada Television had poked a camera in his face in 1978, Armand had retorted angrily: ‘What was this man accused of? He was a doctor in the camps. We always hear that rubbish [the murder of Jews] that was written in the newspapers.’
The Hotel Tirol was set back from the road, choked in thick, damp jungle. It was an ugly red-brick building looking down on two pools, one sludged with leaf-mould and palm husks, the other an unlikely chemical blue. Streaks of bitter smoke leaked from a boiler-house and the air was maddened with insects. I took cover in the dining room and waited for signs of life.
It had been decorated with appreciable brutality. Everything was rock, cartwheels and yokes, all slathered in dark varnish. The only decorations were the heads of a large yellow fish and a maned wolf, now almost extinct. Eventually a barman appeared and brought me kaffee und kuchen. Then there was a skittering of claws and the Reynaers came in, preceded by spaniels. As the dogs scratched themselves to sleep, the Reynaers started to play cards.
‘May I ask some questions?’ I ventured. ‘I’m writing about Paraguayan hotels.’
Armand offered me Flemish, French, German, Spanish or Guaraní.
‘Do you mind my tape recorder?’ I asked. ‘I forget everything.’
Michline’s eyes narrowed. Armand shrugged. He was well into his eighties and his skin was loose and netted with veins. He regarded me through heavy grey hoods with what I realised was bleak suspicion.
‘We arrived in Paraguay in 1950 …’ he began. I was given a speech. They’d developed this property as a starch factory. In the summer there was no cassava so they invited people to swim in the water tanks. They built rooms and eventually they could sleep four hundred. The Brazilian consul started to call it ‘the Tirol’.
Here goes, I thought. ‘What about other famous guests?’
‘Sure. We had Argentine film stars, Stroessner, Rodríguez …’
‘Dr Mengele?’
‘He was never here.’
I must have looked surprised.
‘We didn’t have a hotel when Mengele was around.’
Tiny spots of froth had erupted in the corners of his mouth. The lips were purple. I can still hear his irritation. My own voice has fallen silent.
‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘he came for a drink a few times.’
I am saying nothing.
‘It was very hot. A hundred and fifteen degrees. We had two drums of cold water. Our beer was always cold. I saw him here twice.’
Reynaers had been lying for Mengele for almost half his life. Even in the 1970s he was feeding out nonsense to the CIA: Mengele was living in Hohenhau; he was a regular customer. Such stories came at a time of frenzied Nazi-hunting and a need to believe. One rumour had Mengele heading Encarnación’s narcotics cartel. Another had him bounding round the Hotel Tirol one step ahead of the Committee of Twelve, a commando of Auschwitz survivors. Even the legendary Simon Wiesenthal fell for this one, setting it all out in a yarn that begins, ‘It was a hot, dark night …’
But Mengele had long gone. By October 1961 he was in Brazil. He spent the rest of his life in the vast, dreary suburbs of São Paulo. He suffered from shingles and depression but never remorse. The world had unfairly excluded him and
had hounded him into these revolting swamps. There were moments of satisfaction (Churchill’s death and Kennedy’s assassination) and moments when he thought he recognised his research (the first heart transplant), but he was never happy. He lived with disgruntled misfits and drowned on a swimming trip in 1979.
Meanwhile, the world continued to search. Mengele’s evasion had become a cause célèbre. He himself became a sort of Black Pimpernel, a villain of the silver screen with curdling tales like The Marathon Man and The Boys from Brazil. Even as he lay rotting, Congress was demanding Stroessner hand him over. The reward reached $4,000,000. Then his body turned up in 1985 and the experts satisfied themselves that the hunt was over. Not everybody was so sure. Even now, Mengele is deep in the Paraguayan jungle, or a transsexual living in Germany, dabbling in gynaecology.
As the tape finishes, I can just hear Reynaers with the last word.
‘Write what you like. You can’t prove it either way.’
He had every reason to hope that this was true. Armand Reynaers had served out his war with a body that had modelled itself on the Jesuits, all black and discipline: the doctor’s old cronies, the Waffen SS.
103
WHEN I RETURNED to Asunción, I told the soil scientist about the colonies I’d seen. Immigration was a playful subject.
‘First,’ he said, ‘we had the conquistadors. Then the contractors – English, Americans and French. After the Big War, it was Germans, Australians and Arab traders. A “Turk’s Valise” is still a box of tricks.
‘Next, there were the Italians. They’ve left us with our buildings and our good-for-nothing president. They had a revolution once. Paraguay was Italian for an hour!
‘After 1917, we started getting Russians: generals, Jews and ballerinas. In the twenties it was Mennonites. Japanese in the thirties. Then half of Eastern Europe. Then Koreans arrived – and Taiwanese – hoping to hop into the States. Instead, they bought us up and stayed.
‘Ever since, it’s been people on the run: criminals jumping justice; Frenchmen escaping socialism; Germans fleeing Chernobyl; Afrikaners fleeing Africans. Oddballs from Norway. We became a sort of last resort.
‘Now it’s the Brazilians. They already own the eastern zones. They’re going to drive a waterway through to the sea. Imagine that! It’ll turn us inside out.
‘Everything’s about to change.’
104
I ALSO TRACKED down Gareth. We arranged to meet at Zona Urbana, a bar with a crashed car on the roof and industrial scrap riveted up the walls. I wasn’t sure of anything any more. Was it a protest about industrialisation or the lack of it?
Gareth was late, greyer and more effervescent.
‘Fucking shit, this place. Qué tal?’
He grabbed hold of me. There were deep yellow pits scorched into his fingers. Perhaps he didn’t feel pain any more.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘And you?’
‘Tengo ganas de vomitar.’
‘You want to puke?’
‘All the time,’ he grinned, and made a sudden noise like laughter. ‘My money has come from Wales. Vamos a ver Asunción! A night cruise!’
An unpromising evening fell apart. Gareth’s car was emphatically post-industrial, like the thing on the roof. The back seats were glittered in glass. First we were in the docks, driving through bonfires and ordering wedges of burnt fish. Then we were throttling up Mariscal López. Gareth drained another beer and his face seemed to liquefy.
‘In Paraguay you just get a fucking truck and drive!’
Sometimes he hailed people on the pavements, as if he were crying. They regarded him with either terror or recognition, it was hard to tell which. We stopped only once, in a garden of giant concrete mushrooms. It was obviously a favourite place of Gareth’s. ‘Fantástico!’ he mushed. ‘Es arte.’
Then we were in Plaza Independencia. A pop-star in a bikini was singing to an empty square. Gareth drove round and round the stage, shouting, ‘Soy Paraguayo! I am Paraguayan!’ It wasn’t even true. Of all his failings, Gareth’s failure to belong was his greatest.
Suddenly he said, ‘I’m going to see my wife.’
The tour was over. Now it was my turn to disappear. I got out and walked back to The Itapua. An absurd thought nagged me all the way.
In this great genetic soup, Gareth was like the fly, drowning.
The Chaco
The first non-Indian visitors to the Chaco soon became primarily interested in escaping from it, with life and limb intact.
J.R. Gorham, Paraguay: Ecological Essays
On the Chaco shore … it is the utter desert as far as man is concerned, intolerable to him with mosquitoes and ague. If he penetrate it but a little way, awe seizes him to behold that gigantic network of plants that shuts him in as in a prison. In these dark depths one is oppressed by a feeling of suffocation, of restrained freedom, as in a nightmare …
E.F. Knight, The Cruise of the Falcon
The whole landscape did look as though nature had organised an enormous bottle party, inviting the weird mixture of the temperate, subtropical and tropical plants to it.
Gerald Durrell, The Drunken Forest
105
WHEN I TOLD the waitresses at The Lido that I was going into the Chaco, they scowled. ‘It’s terrible. It’s full of tigres !’
Nor was there much encouragement in anything I’d read. My guidebook said it was ‘interesting for two days’. For an area of our planet the size of Poland, this was a bleak thought. Father Dobrizhoffer wouldn’t even have given it two days; it was a ‘theatre of misery’. Even Knight wrote it off as an ‘immense prison’, never venturing beyond The Falcon’s field of fire.
Most discouraging of all were the Paraguayans. For centuries, the Chaco was simply L’Inferno Verde, or ‘the Green Hell’. Quite apart from blood-drinking Indians, it was a place of unimaginable thirst. In summer, the temperature reached forty-two degrees and a man could boil in his skin. Rivers vanished and the water underground was briny and foul. ‘Only the salty breezes of an extinct sea blow here,’ wrote Roa Bastos. It was hardly surprising that, though the Chaco covered two-thirds of the country, only three per cent of Paraguayans chose to live there.
‘It is,’ said another writer, ‘a plain with the soul of a mountain, motionless and hard as rock.’ Even this was generous: there are no rocks in the Chaco, no stones for building and the wood is as hard as iron.
I studied it on the maps. Its flatness was stupefying. My bombing chart was unable to discern any change in contour at all (in fact, the Chaco was rising towards the Andes at a microscopic inch per mile). There appeared to be just one road, the Trans-Chaco Highway, bolting straight for Bolivia. Halfway along were freckles which I realised were the Mennonite colonies. I also saw that as the desert sprawled towards Bolivia, the colours changed. In the east, there was some rainfall and swamps, then there was scrub and then there was nothing. Paraguay’s western flanks were defended by hot clouds of dust.
Early Europeans thought they’d find monsters in this strange, long-lost ocean. There would have been plenty to surprise them: prehistoric lungfish that survived summer by tunnelling in the dirt; three-foot gun-metal lizards and vampire bats; owls that mimicked their victims and lured them to their deaths; a wild pig believed to have vanished in Pleistocene times – until it emerged from the thorns in 1975. There were even thought to be Ayoreo tribesmen who’d never seen modern man.
In this barbarous world, the trees were pot-bellied and crooked. Gerald Durrell called it ‘the drunken forest’ but the trees were in earnest. Almost every one was said to be plated in armour. Many had weapons – like the tuna cactus, covered in three-inch poison needles, or the algarrobo, bristling in stilettos.
Perhaps the waitresses were right. The embassy in London had shared their view of the Chaco.
‘Doan go there,’ said the cultural attaché. ‘Ees only esnakes an espiders.’
106
I DID GO – not with rifles and glass beads but in a silver Land-
Rover bought on Park Lane.
‘It will be the Chaco for beginners,’ promised my host. He was a tall, thoughtful man with a jacket full of machines. Some calculated, some trilled, some chattered to Outer Space. It was all very reassuring. Into the swamps with robo-farmer Antonio Espinoza.
There have been Espinozas at almost every momentous event in Paraguay’s history: a commander with the conquistadors; a guide on the Guairá exodus; a commander under López. Antonio’s father had been the Minister of Finance and had co-signed Paraguay’s declaration of war with Germany. Antonio himself was widely regarded as a man of integrity, and in a moment of startling saintliness, General Rodríguez had appointed him ambassador to London.
He brushed it aside. ‘My mother was English.’
We crossed the Remanso Bridge and I was back in Villa Hayes.
‘It’s the only city outside America to be named after a US President.’
It was hardly a flattering tribute. Villa Hayes was dust and itchy dogs.
‘Welcome, Fat One,’ said the sign.
Perhaps Rutherford Hayes deserved no better. He is mostly remembered as the first presidential candidate to bribe a voter by telegraph (his opponent was still using the Pony Express). It served him well: he became the nineteenth president, with a majority of one. He’d be known for ever as ‘Rutherfraud’.
His greatest moment came in 1878 when he was asked to arbitrate on Argentina’s claims for war reparations. Buenos Aires wanted the Chaco. ‘Hayes had never visited Paraguay and never would,’ said Antonio, ‘but he read the papers carefully and decided in her favour.’
At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Page 37
