Falling Off the Map

by Pico Iyer

  The famous sign that for many years showed President Stroessner’s face next to the slogan PEACE … WORK … WELL-BEING had been taken down from the center of the city, the Plaza of the Heroes, when Stroessner fled the country in 1989. But the Stroessner legacy lived on. The showcase cinema in the plaza, the Cine Victoria, was showing S.O.S. Sexual Emergency, Tension and Desire, and Bedtime Tales (with double-headers around the clock on Fridays and Saturdays) and had lurid posters of its previous hard-core offerings gazing out upon the public. Shoe-shine boys in T-shirts that said, enigmatically, CAT’S FACE LIFT were sprawled around a statue consecrated to the Twelfth Congress of the World Anti-Communist League. In one corner of the Plaza of the Heroes, a man was selling bank notes from around the world and a picture of Winston Churchill. In another stood a Seiko clock commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the Brotherhood Pact between Asunción and the town of Chiba, in Japan.

  The dominant feature of the Plaza of the Heroes, however, was a huge monument, modeled on Les Invalides in Paris, known as the Pantheon of the Heroes. Inside its sepulchral entrance, past two ramrod soldiers in full uniform, I came upon memorials to all the country’s great men: Dr. Francia, the country’s first president, who had quickly had himself named Dictator for Life and had every dog in the country executed. His successor, Carlos López, described by an English scientist as “immensely fat” and another dictator who had ruled without ministers or advisers. His son and heir, Francisco, regarded by his faithful British retainer, George Thompson, as a “monster without parallel.” And General José Félix Estigarribia, who led Paraguay to a triumphant nonvictory in the Chaco War.

  Around the Pantheon there were plaques, more plaques than I had seen in any one place since the Tower of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang. Their donors read like a roll call of the founding members of the World Anti-Communist League: there were plaques from the Taiwanese chief of staff, from peronistas in Argentina, from right-wing groups in Israel; plaques congratulating López junior on his sixtieth birthday (though he died at forty-two), plaques congratulating him on his 146th anniversary, plaques congratulating him on every one of his heroic deeds (such as executing hundreds of his own people, including his two brothers).

  Outside the Pantheon there stretched block after block after clamorous block of money changers’ stores, gold dealers, and shops peddling smuggled goods, pirated perfumes, war memorabilia, and pumas. The streets outside the shops overflowed with stalls selling counterfeit tapes, musical condoms, and copies of Playboy from around the world. A few Indians were selling bows and arrows near a bust commemorating another hero, Juan E. O’Leary. Men were circling around, muttering, somewhat hopelessly, “Cambio, cambio.” Every shop in Our Lady of the Assumption, as I’d surmised from Iguazú, seemed to be called Casa—Casa Ms., Casa Solomon, Casa Fanny; Casa Kuo Ping, Casa Porky, Casa Hung Ching. Imagine a used-car lot in a border town, and you are well on your way to imagining the center of the Paraguayan capital.

  The most conspicuous stores, though, were the money changers’ outlets. Money changing is one of the great traditional art forms of Paraguay, and almost a folkloric spectacle. I decided to enjoy this native skill in a place called Cambios Guarani. This seemed a good choice because everything in Paraguay was apparently called Guarani—the local language, the currency, the main hotel, even the soda water. It also seemed apt because Cambios Guarani was said to be owned by the country’s president.

  Inside, things were marginally less busy than on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Eighteen customers were storming the front desk, where men in ties were counting out stacks of money slightly larger than the GNP of Peru. Around the store, men with briefcases were loitering in the corners. A German woman was asking, somewhat desperately, for Hans. The signs outlining the rules for transactions were printed in six languages.

  I signed two American Express traveler’s checks and gave them over to a smart young teller. He asked for my passport and my bill of receipt for the purchase of the checks. He then went off and returned with photocopies of my passport and of my bill of receipt. Then he handed me a slip, which I took to another man in order to receive my two hundred dollars in guarani.

  A little way off the Plaza of the Heroes, just past the Internal Tax Office (a perfect replica of La Scala in Milan), was the main cathedral in Asunción: Paraguay is one country where the cathedral does not enjoy pride of place (it is also a country where, in the yellow pages, banks take up five times more space than churches; in my relatively secular California hometown, by comparison, the list of churches is three times longer than that of banks). The cathedral was a strangely disheveled place, emptier and more neglected even than its counterpart in Communist Havana. The signs describing Jesus’ passion were all in French.

  Outside, in the Plaza Independencia, a young man was urinating against the Legislative Palace, and cooing lovers were sitting on green benches, taking in the romantic view of a squatters’ slum of shacks held together by pieces of cardboard that said PHILIPS.

  Across the plaza was the most famous museum in Paraguay, the Museum of Military History. Its first room was devoted to Dr. Francia (“El Supremo” to his friends), who, in the careful words of the sign, “governed implacably against the enemies of the new country.” Most of the rest of the Museum of Military History was given over to paintings and relics of La Concubina Irlandesa: her toilet was here, and her dishes, her fan, her comb, her shawl, her jug. Her music box was also here, and an album signed by 87,000 Paraguayans in homage to her (which, given the population at the end of the War of the Triple Alliance and the percentage that could write, was certainly an impressive figure). In another room were Francisco Solano López pajamas.

  Behind the Museum of Military History, along the Río Paraguay, was the Government Palace (a homage to the Louvre, which, due to the chaos of the War of the Triple Alliance, had taken sixty years to build and had to be constructed, in part, by boys of six). Half a block away was a store selling coats made entirely of endangered species—jaguars, ocelots, and the like—bright with rhinestone buttons. Around the shady parks, the local citizenry was deep in such local publications as Crónica, a weekly paper that consists of almost nothing but pictures of bodies, ravaged (if male) and about to be (if female). Through the swarming, narrow streets cruised cool blondes in Mercedeses, not always observing the speed limit (which was 6 ¼ miles per hour).

  At night, the streets of Asunción were hopping—quite literally: two little girls dressed from head to foot in a Philips cardboard box were jumping down the block. A woman was picking lice out of her daughter’s hair. Young boys were cadging lifts on the backs of garbage trucks. Here and there, night-school typists were tapping away at twenty or thirty words an hour.

  Occasionally, the traffic lights even came to life.

  Deciding to pass up the Bolero Chinese Restaurant, I went instead to the Kung Fu. At the entrance, an expressionless Chinese couple ushered me into the main banquet hall, and a friendly Syrian boy who could not speak Arabic led me to a table with a rose. The Syrian boy removed the rose, the Chinese couple closed the door so they could sing along with the Muzak, and I found myself alone in an elaborate chamber of red lanterns and mock T’ang dynasty paintings. From the kitchen, a dog barked plaintively.

  After deciding that I would avoid “Wong Ton Fritos,” I asked my hosts where the bathroom was. They ushered me into a room that was indeed perfect for a bath: it included a large tub, an electric shower, and a bidet.

  Walking back to the Gran Hotel, I strolled along Avenida Mariscal López, the grandest street in Paraguay. It would be the grandest street in almost any country, with its block-long houses, its boomtown malls, its ghostly mansions hidden behind iron gates. Like the main highway in Paraguay—in fact, like almost everything in Paraguay—it is named after Francisco Solano López, who decided to award himself the title of Marshal. One intersection was dominated by a statue of the country’s great hero atop his charging steed.

  Back in the
Gran Hotel, the receptionist greeted me in Hindi, a cockroach was waiting to welcome me in my bedroom, and a sudden thunderstorm turned the hotel corridors into rivers, a few dead leaves floating past my door. In the beautiful dining room, where La Madama had once held masked balls and taught le tout Asunción to polka, four men in ponchos were putting on a show of Paraguayan culture, featuring songs from Mexico, songs from Cuba, and songs from Peru. One of them made deafening bird noises which echoed round and around the painted ceilings and linoleum floors. Much of the music was drowned out, however, by the squawks of babies.

  For the Gran Hotel del Paraguay was crawling, quite literally, with the things: there were more babies here than you’d find in a maternity ward—babies seated in strollers at every table, babies in the garden, and babies in the lobby, dark-skinned babies most of them, being clucked over by excited couples from England, Germany, and most often, America. It seemed a fit tribute to La Concubina Irlandesa (though when his first son was born, Francisco Solano López had ordered a 101-gun salute, and eleven buildings were destroyed). On every side, I heard talk of paperwork, trips to the embassy, court cases. The babies screamed, the parents cooed. Finally, I got it: this pleasant residential hotel, with its lavish gardens, its playground, and its unreasonably reasonable rates, was the center for a lucrative adoption trade. In Paraguay, where everything could be had for a price, the latest boom market was in babies.

  …

  I suppose I had always been drawn to Paraguay. It is one of the forgotten corners of the world, one of the unplumbed shadows, one of “the et ceteras in the list of nations,” as Isabel Hilton quotes someone calling it. No one seems to know exactly where the landlocked, time-bound hideout is, though those in the know will tell you that Uruguay is the good angel of Latin America, and Paraguay, the dark; that one is a resort, and the other a refuge. Certainly Paraguay is in some sense a country off the map. When I asked my travel agent about flights to Asunción, she told me I could either go by LAP (the airline founded by Stroessner) or by Ladeco (which seemed to translate as “Kitchen Utensils Airways”). When I went to my local bookstore to look for volumes on the place, I found four books on Peru, four on Belize, forty-five on Mexico, one book on the Galápagos Islands, and not a single one on Paraguay.

  During the thirty-five-year reign of Alfredo Stroessner, in which, every sixty days, the president had dutifully renewed a state of siege, Paraguay had all but seceded from the world and turned into a kind of bad playwright’s version of a sleepy, crooked military despotism, a Central Casting vision of chicanery. When Paul Mazursky wanted to make a spoof of Latin American corruption, he called his movie Moon Over Parador, peopled it with figures called Strausmann, Dieter Lopez, and Madam Loop, and portrayed Paraguay as a kind of Shangri-la in reverse, an invert’s paradise (“One day in New York is like a year in Parador,” says Richard Dreyfuss). The only trouble was, reality put Hollywood to shame. As fast as the other Latin countries moved toward democracy in the eighties, Paraguay slipped ever deeper into torpor and a criminal dictatorship. In 1989, Stroessner, the longest-ruling tyrant in the world, except for Kim Il Sung (whom he was coming to resemble—the one so far to the right and the other so far to the left that they almost seemed to meet), was visiting his favorite mistress for his usual Thursday afternoon siesta when he heard that he had been ousted by his protégé, and the father-in-law of his son, General Andres Rodríguez. During the coup, the elite corps’ tanks were unable to move because the man who had the keys to them was out of town. After the coup, the red-tied Colorado Party faithful who had previously danced the Don Alfredo Polka quickly changed their steps to do the Rodríguez Polka (with lyrics that ran: “May God help you and also the Armed Forces!”).

  Paraguay, in fact, mocked soap opera’s gaudiest inventions. But there was more to its mystique than simple heavy-handedness: Paraguay had the reputation of being the darkest country on the planet. Colombia, of course, was a contender, with its blue-black clouds hanging over Bogotá, its international conferences on witchcraft, its schools for pickpockets, and its second city boasting the highest murder rate in the world. But Colombia also had ruins and beaches and museums, a patina of civilization. Nigeria and Indonesia were said to be the world leaders in corruption; but they at least were huge nations with lots of oil. Paraguay, by comparison, was a kind of minor-league, farm-team, up-and-coming criminal—“like Madame Tussaud’s,” as one friend said, “except all the figures are living.” This was the place where deposed dictators found a new home (Somoza from Nicaragua, Perón from Argentina). This was the place where fugitive Nazis received a hearty welcome—Eduard Roschmann, “the Butcher of Riga,” allegedly died here; Josef Mengele, “the Angel of Death,” was a Paraguayan citizen for much of the time he was the world’s most wanted war criminal; and Martin Bormann lived just across the border. This was also the place where Italian neo-Fascists gave lectures, Croatian thugs trained security details, Chinese tong kings picked up tips, and the new president himself—the “clean” one—was associated with drug kingpins who’d made $145 million in shipments of heroin. When Nietzsche’s sister wanted to set up an Aryan colony with her husband, “the professional anti-Semite” Bernhard Förster (I read in Ben Macintyre’s engaging book, Forgotten Fatherland), where did they come—where could they come—but Paraguay?

  In California, I knew of a Retirement Home for Performing Animals; Paraguay sounded like a Retirement Home for Performing Criminals.

  My first taste of the mutant state, across from Iguazú Falls, had not been disappointing. Throughout our visit, my driver, a friendly family man from Argentina, had darkened the afternoon with tales of Paraguayan lawlessness. “Can’t the police do anything to stop the crime?” I asked. He laughed bitterly. “The police are the ones who are performing the crime!” Throughout the trip, too, he refused to leave the car, on the safe assumption that it would almost certainly be stolen. He visited Paraguay almost every day, and his wife was Paraguayan, but he was not about to take any chances. “And this is daytime,” he said as I took in the unholy chaos. “At night, it is not even safe to leave your room.”

  Perhaps the ultimate depiction of the land of corpses laureled in orange petals, however, had come from Graham Greene. For Greene, the moral ironist, Paraguay was the end of the line, spiritually speaking, the place where all roads terminate. In Travels with My Aunt, he delivers the definitive portrait of a land where crooks wear pictures of the General, and a Czech is hoping to import two million plastic straws. “The only old beautiful building … proved, as I came closer to it, to be the prison,” says Greene’s mild-mannered narrator, Henry Pulling. Later, we learn that “They don’t have coroners in Paraguay” and that smuggling is a national industry. “In this blessed land of Paraguay,” says a war criminal, “there is no income tax and no evasions are necessary.” Greene could no more leave Paraguay than he could leave loneliness, or flight, or the question of evil.

  Yet it was not always so. When I went to my hometown library to look up books on Paraguay, the kind of titles I found were The Lost Paradise, A Vanished Arcadia, Picturesque Paraguay. For decades, even centuries, Paraguay—like any country, perhaps, where people can derive something out of nothing—had been regarded as a utopia just waiting to be realized, an empty space waiting to be converted into a private paradise. “When I first came to Asunción from Spain,” wrote the Paraguayan poet Josefina Plá, “I realized that I’d arrived in Paradise. The air was warm, the light was tropical, and the shuttered, colonial houses suggested sensual, tranquil lives.” Even G. K. Chesterton, who never saw the place, more or less rehearsed the conventional wisdom when he wrote: “Ye bade the Red Man rise like the Red Clay … And man lost Paradise in Paraguay.”

  The whole of eastern Paraguay, among the best-watered areas in the world, resembled a luxuriant tropical Eden; the west lacked even running water. In both areas, however, Paraguay seemed a place of absolutes. Voltaire was fascinated by this notional Arcadia, which he described as both Elysium and it
s opposite; Thomas Carlyle wrote an entire book on Dr. Francia, who ruled over his homemade land with a kind of mythic force (decreeing that no one could look at him in the street). That Paraguay was a byword for the Possible—more Paradise than Parador—was best suggested by the fact that Robert Southey, the British poet laureate at the time, called his longest poem A Tale of Paraguay (“For in history’s mournful map, the eye/ On Paraguay, as on a sunny spot,/ May rest complacent”).

  In fact, in history’s mournful eye, Paraguay was perhaps the most sunless place on earth, its history a sad tale of what men will do with the prospect of paradise and what follies they visit upon a virgin land. The story of Paraguay is the story of the vanity of human wishes, one utopian chimera following another. First came the Spaniards, who promptly availed themselves of the friendliness of the local Indians, setting up harems in which each conquistador kept twenty native wives, or more (the “Father of the Nation,” Governor Irala, earned the title in part by fathering at least eight mestizos). Then came the Jesuits, who organized the artistically minded Guarani into reducciones, or crafts-based communes, which crumbled as soon as the Jesuits left. Then came the strongmen who, like Dr. Francia, scribbled their initials all over the open country. And finally there followed the steady stream of refugees from Germany or Australia or Italy who sought to build a new Arcadia here and founded their own custom-made utopias in Nueva Germania, Nueva Australia, Nueva Italia.

  In almost every case, the dream went sour. Dr. Francia began by sealing off all the country’s borders, expelling all foreigners and committing the country to solitary confinement. Carlos López, who came next, was described as “more utterly alone than any man in the world.” His son, Francisco, ended up fleeing through the countryside, to the town still known as Isla Madama, taking along his mother and his sisters in wooden cages. By the end of the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay had lost the Iguazú Falls, and its national anthem was written by a Uruguayan.