Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. Robert Carver
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Название: Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay

Автор: Robert Carver

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Хобби, Ремесла

Серия:

isbn: 9780007370351

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ my book on Albania had been published the distinguished author and former Times foreign correspondent Peter Hopkirk, who had been instrumental in getting my first book published, asked me ‘Where are you going next? You can go anywhere now, you know.’ I replied that I was going to go to Paraguay. ‘Why?’ I explained to him about my great-great-grand-uncle Charlie Carver. ‘To do an “in-the-footsteps-of” book, then?’ he asked skeptically. ‘The trail will be a bit cold after, what, a hundred years.’ No, I replied, not at all. I had no interest in ‘in-the-footsteps-of’ travel books. Besides, Charlie’s footsteps were only too well known – he walked into virgin jungle and was killed by Indians, end of story. What I was interested in were the half-made, half-abandoned places in the world, like Albania and Paraguay – and one could see Paraguay as a sort of South American Albania – lawless, piratical, bandit-ridden and corrupt, where neither tourists nor travel writers usually penetrated. And there was something else. South America had attracted the Spanish and countless other European adventurers who hoped to make their fortunes out of the river of silver and gold that had flowed, at such cost in human misery and suffering, after the Conquest. Yet quite another vision of America had also seized the imagination of the European mind. America could become a place of redemption, a place where the human spirit could be reborn, remade and refined. From its first discovery America had been a realm where imaginary Utopias could be set, and a place European dreamers could actually set sail for, arrive in and set up ideal communities which would, it was hoped, become beacons to mankind. Paraguay, from the first, had been a place which attracted Utopians and idealists. First the Jesuits had experimented with their Reducciones, theocratic communities of Christianized Indians ordered by a multinational caste of Jesuit priests; later 19th-century German nationalists, fin de siècle Australian communists, Mennonites, Moonies, and even renegade Nazis had all tried to set up their colonies in Paraguay. You could make a case that what New England was to Cotton Mather – a place where the exiled English Puritans could attempt to build the City Upon a Hill, which would be a light to lighten the gentiles – so was Paraguay the South American equivalent. In a strange sense the bifurcation of the human mind was reflected in the European’s Manichean obsession with America – a place from which to loot and steal gold and silver, to pillage, rape and plunder, and a place to found ideal communities which would redeem mankind, straighten the crooked timber of humanity, and to build the Perfect City.

      Both Charlie Carver and I were heirs to this dual, paradoxical, contradictory tradition, for we were both descended, after all, from John Carver, a Puritan gentleman from the English Midlands who in 1620 procured a vessel in Holland that was renamed the Mayflower, and who was then elected Master of the company of Pilgrims for the voyage, and on arrival in New England was elected first Governor of Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts. Though the English settlement eventually prospered, the first Governor did not. He was shot with an arrow by an Indian while out ploughing the land and died of his wound, leaving behind his wife and children, and his brother who had accompanied him on the Atlantic crossing, one Robert Carver. His descendant, Jonathan Carver, a captain in the Massachusetts Militia, had taken the Union flag of Great Britain to its furthest point west in the years immediately before the Revolution of 1776. He had been the first anglophone to overwinter with the Lakota Sioux, had made detailed plans to cross the Rockies and reach the Pacific coast, and whose travel book – published in London on his return – had proved a sensation all over Europe, translated into at least seven languages. He became a figure in literary London and at Court, and never returned to America. He was a disciple of the French philosophes, and in his tolerant appreciation of Indian culture and moeurs was a century and a half ahead of his time. Our family, I argued, had made a habit of going to America on quests – mine would be in the tradition.

      I explained all this over several cups of cappuccino in a London coffee bar to Peter Hopkirk. He thought about it and gave a slight smile of approval. ‘It does sound like an interesting quest. But remember, two Carvers have already been killed by American Indian arrows. Just make absolutely sure you are not the third. Always remember, you can’t write a book if you are killed while researching it. Jonathan Carver is clearly the one to emulate. Steer well clear of silver mines, I should.’ This was very good advice, and I often thought about it later when I found myself in much hotter water than I would ever have thought it possible to get into – and then get out of alive.

       Two

       An Ambassador is Born

      At Sao Paulo airport the passengers in the transit lounge slumped forward like the dead, eyes shut, their heads resting downwards, caught in metal and canvas cradles, motionless, their arms hanging limply beside them. Above, around, and all over them hovered lean, lithe, intense young girls dressed in white t-shirts and jeans, with bare suntanned midriffs, their fingers, fists and elbows kneading their clients’ skulls, backs, shoulders, torsos and feet. This service, unlocking flight-tautened muscles and imparting spiritual calm, cost five US dollars, and took place in full view of everyone; a whole line of these modern penitents were slumped as if in prayer between the coffee stall and the newspaper stand. The newspapers and magazines on sale were all from the Americas – from all over Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia and Venezuela, as well as Mexico and the US. There was nothing from Europe – and nothing, of course, from Paraguay: sometimes known optimistically as the Switzerland of the continent, it was more like the Tibet. You could get no information on the place anywhere. I was in a new continent, a new hemisphere, and a New World – and one in which my destination was as invisible as it had been in England.

      The transit passengers, mostly Brazilians waiting for internal flights, whether upright, prone or at all angles between, were uniformly young, elegant and beautifully dressed. Wasp-waisted black men, ranging from double espresso to palest café au lait, drifted past me dressed in impossibly stylish suits of pastel hues. They were shod in elegant patent shoes which looked like Milan goes Carnival in Rio. There was a calm, almost Zen atmosphere to this hyper-modern airport, hi-tech tranquillity, luxe, calme and volupté. By definition, only the richest could afford to fly in this huge but deeply divided society. The chaos, the colour, the poverty of the favelas was nowhere in evidence. Problems? What problems? you might ask yourself. But the newspapers reminded you every time you glanced at their headlines. Argentina, Brazil, much of South America was in deep crisis. Argentina had withdrawn from its commitment to value the peso on par with the dollar. Foreign currency reserves had vanished in unexplained circumstances. The banks had shut their doors. Now outside the angry protesters, already known as los ahorristas, hammered at the roller-shutter doors with sticks and batons, while the police looked on sympathetically – they too had lost their savings: this was a middle-class and middle-aged protest. They wanted their money back. They had trusted their government but their government had, in effect, stolen their money, promising to honour an exchange rate, then reneging, then closing the banks by fiat, refusing to allow savers access to their own money. Who would ever trust their money to an Argentine bank again? How could you run any sort of economy when the banks were untrustworthy and closed the doors on their own customers? Argentina could not, would not service its international debts. It had borrowed and borrowed and borrowed, but the money had all been stolen or wasted. No new loans could be negotiated until the country agreed to start repaying the interest on its old loans. There were already food shortages, medical supplies running out, layoffs and bankruptcies. Kidnapping and gunlaw had proliferated. The demonstrations in the streets against the government were turning ugly. One of the richest – in theory at least – countries in the world was behaving like one of the poorest. In Brazil the situation teetered on the edge of crisis. And what of Paraguay? It was hard to find anything out about that secretive and isolated country. I would simply have to go and find out for myself.

      Initially, I had favoured the classic approach into the country – via Argentina – to Buenos Aires, and up the River Plate and River Paraguay to Asunción. It was the route everyone had always taken from the СКАЧАТЬ