The News from Paraguay

by Lily Tuck

  “Give me that caudillo Urquiza any day. He and his band of gaucho assassins!” His mouth full of carne con cuero, Franco was discussing the struggle between the Confederados and Unitarios in the Argentine Republic and how Venancio Flores had taken refuge in Buenos Ayres from where he was conducting raids against Montevideo with the help of General Bartolemé Mitre.

  “Speaking of Buenos Ayres, Franco, chéri, Señor Varela was just describing a new Italian opera which has been an enormous success. What was the name of it, Señor Varela?”

  The talk at dinner, despite Ella’s efforts to turn the conversation toward lighter and more amusing topics, was always the same: politics.

  “Any fool can see that Mitre owes his victory over Urquiza to Flores.” Franco ignored Ella and helped himself to more red wine. “Which of course is the reason Mitre is helping Flores with the raids against Montevideo.” Franco turned to his brother-in-law Saturnino Bedoya, whom he had just appointed minister of the treasury. “What do you think, Saturnino?”

  Caught off guard, Saturnino hastily swallowed his food and stuttered, “I think our duty—”

  “Yes, yes, I agree. Our duty lies with Berro and the Banda Oriental. Until they show their good faith, I will never sign an agreement with the Argentines. And you, Venancio, did you read what that faggot Andres Lamas said?”

  Venancio Lopez had been appointed minister of war and marine by his brother. He had just spilled some of the carne con cuero gravy on his best silk shirt. Busy rubbing the stain with water, he did not right away answer Franco.

  Franco glared at his brother. “I’ll tell you what Lamas said! He said, ‘One might as well ask China to mediate as Paraguay.’” Shaking his head, Franco helped himself to more meat. “And look who they ask instead—that incompetent, rude monkey, Dom Pedro of Brazil!”

  Still wiping the stain, Venancio finally replied, “In my opinion the Banda Oriental must accept mediation or face a Brazilian attack.”

  “La forza del destino,” Héctor Varela, who continued to be a frequent guest in Ella’s house, was finally able to say.

  “Speaking of Brazil, Vincente, have you told Franco about my new parrot from Matto Grosso province?” Nudging her husband, Inocencia suddenly spoke up. “The Profesor says it is a very rare species, a species that is nearly extinct.”

  “Be quiet, Inocencia.” Frowning, Vincente Barrios turned his back on his fat wife.

  “A new parrot?” Ella smiled brightly at Inocencia. “Oh, that makes me think of my friend, Princess—”

  But Franco interrupted her. “The newspapers in Buenos Ayres print nothing but lies. They are influenced by those Spanish traitors, the Decouds, the Saguiers—and what do you people mean by liberty? The kind you have in Buenos Ayres?” Franco had turned in his seat and was shouting at Héctor Varela. “The liberty to insult one another in the press, to kill one another in the district assemblies for the election of deputies, to keep the nation divided, for everyone to do what he pleases without respect for anyone else?”

  “La forza del destino?” Again Ella tried to change the subject from politics. “Next season we must perform the opera in Asunción.”

  Under the table, Rafaela was desperately searching with her bare feet for her shoes.

  Four or five times a week, Franco rode his big mule, Linda, back and forth from Asunción to Cerro León. In the evening, when he came to visit Ella, he was tired. His body was sore, his muscles ached. Taking off his boots, lighting a cigar and setting his brandy glass on a table near him, Franco, for once, was perfectly content to stretch out on Ella’s chaise longue and listen to Ella read out loud to him:

  “I scent the Hurons,” he said, speaking to the Mohicans; “yonder is open sky, through the treetops, and we are getting too nigh their encampment. Sagamore, you will take the hillside, to the right; Uncas will bend along the brook to the left, while I will try the trail. If anything should happen, the call will be three croaks of a crow. I saw one of the birds fanning himself in the air, just beyond the dead oak—another sign that we are approaching an—”

  Looking over at Franco, Ella saw that his head was thrown back, his mouth was open and he was snoring softly. Shutting the book, Ella leaned down and picked the cigar up off the floor, she did not have the heart to wake him.

  Modest and kind, Frederick Masterman, the apothecary general to the Paraguayan Army, was popular with the Paraguayan people. By nature solitary and by habit eccentric, he liked the freedom a foreign country afforded him. Every Sunday morning he rode off in a different direction until he found a comfortable spot under an orange or a mimosa tree, where he then sat content all day with his sketch pad and pencils. He gave most of his sketches away—if he drew a little girl he gave the sketch to her mother, if he drew someone’s house or someone’s cow he gave the sketch to the owner of the house or the cow—and he sent the rest back home to his own mother in England. An only child, he was very attached to his mother, who was a widow and lived alone. Along with the sketches, he wrote her regularly, long letters filled with descriptions of Paraguay. When he was not sketching or working in the hospital, Frederick Masterman liked to scour the countryside for medicinal herbs. He found plenty of astringents among the mimosas, the castor-oil plant grew wild, and there were many different types of carminatives and euphorbial purgatives, which he picked and transplanted in his own small garden along with a row of poppies. He grew the poppies for opium, which he needed for some of his patients—soldiers in pain who had suffered from accidents during maneuvers. Frederick Masterman also spent many solitary hours studying the native wildlife—from the fierce puma, Felis caguar, to the lowly sand flea, Pulex penetrans. (In fact the sketch he considered the most successful and lifelike and that he planned to keep for himself—his mother, he knew, preferred portraits and landscapes—was of a female sand flea. He had sketched it at the top of the page, then, right underneath, on the same sheet of paper, he had drawn the same sand flea distended to three times her size with eggs; in the corner, at the bottom of the page, as an afterthought, he also had drawn a sand flea egg).

  In the mornings, when Frederick Masterman inspected the wards on his rounds in Asunción’s General Hospital, a gloomy, damp, barracklike building that had once been the dictator Francia’s palace, the sick soldiers lying in their beds—unless a man was too ill—greeted him warmly: Buenos días, muy señor mío! They held up their arms to him so that he could feel their pulse—the soldiers thought that it was a kind of magic charm. If they got well, out of gratitude, the soldiers brought Frederick Masterman gifts—a basket of oranges, a loaf of chipa, a jar of honey. One time, a soldier brought him a huge tame heron. The heron was nearly five feet tall with a foot-long bill. Frederick Masterman kept the heron outside the hospital so he might observe him. The heron was tied with a hide rope, a heavy brick fastened to the end of it. Frightened by a barking dog one afternoon, the heron flew up and the brick hit the wall and broke off from the hide rope—the falling brick nearly hit a soldier who was having a siesta near where it fell. Hearing the clatter of wings, the crash of the brick as well as the startled yell of the soldier, Frederick Masterman ran outside just in time to see the heron fly across the Paraguay River, the hide rope trailing after it.

  “What a pity,” he sighed to himself as he watched the heron disappear in the Gran Chaco. He had hoped to sketch the big heron and now it was too late.

  When Franco and Ella went out riding together in the afternoons, Franco no longer rode his mule, Linda. The one time he had, the mule had tried to mount Mathilde. Busy talking and pointing out the site for a new paved road, Franco was riding with a loose rein and it took him a minute to recover his seat and pull in the rearing, screaming mule; meanwhile, as soon as she felt the mule’s hooves on her hindquarters, Mathilde bolted. Ella fell off. Luckily, Ella did not hurt herself. Jumping to her feet right away, she brushed off her riding habit, patted her hair back into place, retrieved her hat. Then, she went after the mare who was standing fifty or so yards away,
whinnying and shaking her head up and down in an agitated way.

  “Whoa, whoa, there, my darling.” Ella talked as she walked. “It’s all right, my love, he won’t hurt you.” In her hand, she held out a bit of sugar she kept in her pocket. “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you from that ugly old mule.” When she reached the mare, Ella picked up the reins that were dragging on the ground and gave her the sugar. Gently, she stroked Mathilde’s head and neck before she put her foot in the stirrup and quickly climbed up on the mare’s back again.

  “Stay away from us,” Ella called out to Franco, who was watching her. “That ugly old mule of yours is crazy.” Then turning Mathilde around and making clucking sounds with her tongue, Ella urged Mathilde into a fast canter. “Faster, my darling,” Ella whispered, leaning far forward in the saddle and burying her face in Mathilde’s mane. “Faster.”

  Behind her Franco kept his distance, but he was also laughing as he shouted after Ella, “In case you didn’t know, my dear, this ugly old mule is sterile.”

  Nine

  MARQUEZ DE OLINDA

  “If we do not strike now,” Franco told Ella, “we will have to fight Brazil another time, a time less convenient to us.”

  “You are right, chéri.”

  Franco’s breath, Ella noticed, smelled sour.

  “The only way that Paraguay can gain the attention and respect of the world,” Franco continued.

  “Napoleon himself would have done the same thing.”

  A rotten tooth, Ella guessed, but Franco seldom complained.

  “Only by a show of strength can Paraguay compel other nations to treat her with more consideration. Come, let’s go upstairs,” Franco said.

  “Wait,” Ella said.

  On a November day so hot the sky looked white and the Paraguay River was the color of mud, the Marquez de Olinda, one of the regular Brazilian steamers en route from Rio de Janeiro to Matto Grosso province, stopped to coal at Asunción. On board, the new governor of the province, Camheiro de Campos, lay dozing and sweating in his hammock, which hung motionless in the stern of the ship. Several hours later and fifty miles north of Asunción, the Marquez de Olinda was overhauled by the Tacuari. The Paraguayan crew was armed and, without firing a single shot (and without giving the governor time to leave his hammock) they forced the Marquez de Olinda to turn around and go back to Asunción. The following day, the Brazilian minister received a note from the Paraguayan foreign minister saying that diplomatic relations between Paraguay and Brazil had been severed and that the Paraguay River was closed to all Brazilian vessels. Meantime, Camheiro de Campos, the crew of the Marquez de Olinda and the passengers had been sent north to a prison in the interior.

  Next, under the command of General Vincente Barrios, Franco’s brother-in-law, a force was sent upriver. General Barrios had never fought a battle and, during the voyage, he never once left his cabin. Frightened, he drank himself into a stupor. By the time he crossed the border into Brazil, he was so intoxicated that his orders were unintelligible and his men were leaderless and disorderly. Meeting with little resistance—most of the Brazilian troops were cambâs, black men and slaves, who did not want to fight and who ran away—the Paraguayan soldiers raped and pillaged their way to Corumbá, the capital of the province.

  Baron de Villa Maria, one of the richest estancieros of Matto Grosso province, owned an enormous amount of land, eighty thousand head of cattle, a fine house with valuable European furniture, and he had just enough time to pocket a handful of diamonds and get out before the Paraguayan soldiers attacked. His two sons were shot trying to escape, his wife and daughters were beaten and turned out into the jungle, where, without food, shelter or clothing, they perished. When, still drunk, General Barrios entered Baron de Villa Maria’s house, he ordered that all the curtains be torn off the windows and sent back to Inocencia, his wife; he then helped himself to furniture, paintings, china, silver—enough to outfit an entire house. General Barrios especially fancied the marble statue in Baron de Villa Maria’s front hall. The statue was of a life-sized woman lying on her back, naked (except for one leg that had a piece of cloth draped over it); the woman had just been stung by a serpent, but her attitude and the expression on her face was one of total sexual abandon. The woman was having an orgasm and General Barrios could not take his eyes off her. The moment he found himself alone in the front hall, General Barrios could not resist caressing the statue—first the woman’s marble feet, then running his hand up her marble leg, fondling her marble breasts, and wrapping his hands around her flung-back marble neck. He could hardly contain himself or keep from throwing himself on top of the statue. Even the thought of it made General Barrios feel hot, turn red in the face and come, almost.

  In the middle of the night, Frederick Masterman was awakened by loud knocking and by someone shouting, “Vamonos, Señor!” After dressing quickly and packing his bag with medicine and instruments, he mounted the waiting horse. Luckily it was a clear night with nearly a full moon and the road was plainly visible. On the way, in spite of himself, he thought miscarriage. More accustomed to tending sick men, he tried hard not to picture Ella, whom he had last seen resplendent in a ball dress, a glass of champagne in her hand, lying in the bloody mess of her torn placenta. He shut his eyes but even so, the word in his head blended in with the rhythmic pounding of his horse’s hooves: malparto, malparto, malparto.

  Ella—not so resplendent, for she too had dressed hurriedly—met him at the front door. “Quick. President Lopez,” she whispered.

  “Is he ill?” Frederick Masterman tried to ask.

  Franco was lying on Ella’s bed; his head was propped up against several pillows and wrapped in wet towels. The lower part of his face had swollen to nearly twice its size and Franco’s lips were so distended, they had split and were bleeding. The smell of rot coming from his mouth filled the room. When he caught sight of Frederick Masterman, Franco tried to sit up; he tried to say something but his words were unintelligible. To calm him, Ella tried to take his hand, but Franco drew the hand away. To reassure Franco, Frederick Masterman leaned over and started to tell him how once the tooth was pulled the pain and swelling would quickly subside, but midsentence he stopped and stepped back. He felt he was looking into the eyes of a wild animal. It took several men to hold Franco down, but as soon as Frederick Masterman extracted the tooth, a bicuspid, the huge abscess surrounding it burst. Groaning and cursing, Franco sat up and spat a cheesy, puslike liquid into the basin that Ella held out to him. In spite of herself, the reek made her draw away and some of the cheesy, puslike stuff fell on Ella’s silk shoe. Kneeling down at Ella’s feet, Frederick Masterman tried to wipe away the stain on her shoe, but he only made the stain worse.

  At the front door, Maria Oliva was able to stop Frederick Masterman on his way out. Before she could speak, Maria Oliva began to weep. Putting his hand on her arm, he spoke to her kindly in Spanish. Still weeping, Maria Oliva tried to describe her headaches, how debilitating they had become, how she could hardly walk because her joints were sore. Frederick Masterman listened and when Maria Oliva finished, he told her that he recognized the symptoms and that she should come see him at the hospital and he would give her medicine. Relieved, Maria Oliva tried to get down on her knees to thank him but he would not let her. Maria Oliva, Frederick Masterman guessed correctly, had syphilis.

  From Villa Franca, Gaspar and Fulgencio had been sent downriver to Humaitá. The fort lay slightly north of where the Paraná River divides into the Paraguay River and slightly north of Corrientes, Argentina, a most strategic and crucial spot where huge iron chains had been placed across the river to prevent ships from sailing. Damp and humid, Humaitá was built on a malarial swamp, and each day, along with the twenty thousand other soldiers, Gaspar and Fulgencio had to march for eight to ten hours in marshland and mud that often reached up to their knees. The drill was made more arduous by having their accustomed weapons, knives and lances, replaced with heavy French bayonets (a part of the large store of ar
ms, gunpowder and ammunition that Franco had ordered and that had been shipped from France).

  Padre was how the two brothers always had to address their superior officer. In turn, the officer called Gaspar and Fulgencio mis hijos—my sons. If, for a reason or for no reason, Gaspar was flogged, he consoled himself by telling Fulgencio, “If my father did not flog me, who would?” A corporal, the brothers knew, carried a cane and could give a soldier three cuts, a sergeant, they also knew, could order a soldier to receive twelve blows, and an officer could order as many as he wished. Typical of the fortitude of the Paraguayan soldier, neither Gaspar nor Fulgencio ever complained.