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

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СКАЧАТЬ me, clapping her hands. The Customs men looked up at me from their deliberations, and gave me great big smiles. Unnervingly, they and their clients with the weaponry all started to applaud me, clapping their hands and calling out. ‘¡Bravo … ! ¡Bravo! ¡El embajador británico!’ I had only a small bag on wheels: I bowed to the left and to the right of me, and gave what I thought might pass as an ambassadorial benediction with my free hand, and kept on my way.

      Another man stepped forward, took my immigration card, stamped my passport, and gave me a smart salute. ‘Any firearms, Your Excellency?’ he asked in Spanish.

      ‘No, señor, nada de nada,’ I replied. ‘Pasar, pasar, Excelencia,’ he said, motioning me with his hand. I moved out into the arrivals hall, which was already all but empty. I was in Paraguay, reborn as an ambassador. I kept walking until I saw the aseos [toilets], and then darted in. I was now in a muck sweat, and it wasn’t the heat. I had arrived all right, but what the hell had I got myself into?

      The queue at the Cambio was short but the wait interminable. In front of me was a young North American banker and his girlfriend, here on business. ‘She speaks German so we should be OK,’ he told me. We exchanged cards. They were staying at Madame Lynch’s old estancia, now the best hotel in Asunción. Eliza Lynch is one of the few people connected with Paraguay known to the outside world. She was the mistress and éminence grise of the mid-nineteenth-century dictator López, who ruined the country with his insane war against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay all at the same time.

      When my turn came I asked the cashier behind the counter to change US$100 into guarani. He look at me as if I was crazy. ‘You want to change all of this into guaranis?’ His expression told me that whatever else Paraguay was going to be it was not going to be expensive. My glance fell lightly on the automatic pistol in a shoulder holster under his arm, and a large revolver he was using as a paperweight to hold down mounds of ancient and dirty bank notes from being blown all over the place by the fan. My eyes slid, unavoidably, to the security guard who was sitting on a chair, the chair high on a desk, at the far end of the room. He was in uniform and had a bazooka on his shoulder. It was pointed straight at me. There was a heavy metal grill between me and the man counting and re-counting hundreds of thousands of guarani notes, but the bazooka and the man’s stare made it hard for me to concentrate on the transaction. I did have the wit to ask for one of the ten thousand notes to be broken down into thousands. I hate the airport taxi rip-off, and always get the bus into town if there is one. I knew already the bus driver wouldn’t be able to change a thousand guarani note. The man with the bazooka wasn’t South American theatricals, I later discovered. The current method of bank robbery in Paraguay and Brazil was with an armoured car; these military vehicles simply ploughed into the banks and smashed through whatever bars were there. Bitter experience had taught the Paraguayans that a man with an antitank weapon was the only way of stopping these heists. Every bank I went into had one of these characters, as well as the run-of-the-mill fellows with sub-machine guns, pistols and grenades. Bank robberies were as common as thunderstorms and as violent. One of the current scandals in the papers, I discovered, was the use of a Paraguayan army armoured car in a bank robbery just across the border in Brazil. The Minister of Defence and the President were accused of having rented out the armoured car to the mob who carried out the raid, in return for a share of the proceeds. The Brazilians claimed they had photos of the armoured car during the raid, and then afterwards, back in its army park in Paraguay. They claimed US$15 million had been stolen, but the Paraguayan press claimed this was an exaggeration – more like $8 million, they thought. When asked why he robbed banks, Butch Cassidy had replied: ‘It’s where they keep the money.’ He had been gunned down in Bolivia, eventually, just next door to Paraguay.

      I evaded the lurking taxi-drivers who I knew might cheat – and possibly rob me – and walked out to the bus stop. A couple of obviously quite poor locals were waiting for the bus into town. They eyed me cautiously, but then looked away. A more hopeful fellow carried a briefcase, wore a smart watch and had a shirt with a tie. I fell into conversation with him, and explained I was new to the country – did one buy a ticket on the bus, from a driver, or from a kiosk? He was helpful and informative and I was pleased to discover that I understood his Spanish and he understood mine. The bus arrived, empty, and my new friend helped me get my ticket. We sat together, and I asked him about the state of things as we rolled towards town.

      Luis Gonzalves was a Customs official, just coming off duty. Mercifully he had missed my apotheosis as fake ambassador. He gave me a thorough rundown on everything. Things were very bad. Fifteen banks had gone bust taking almost everyone’s savings with them. The government was both weak and deeply corrupt. You could trust neither the police nor the army – both were corrupt and criminal. Civil servants hadn’t been paid for six months, some not for a year. The police hadn’t been paid for three months, and if they weren’t paid soon there would be a revolution. Foreigners were leaving the country in droves – every plane out was packed to capacity, every plane in virtually empty. The only people making money were the cocaleros who exported cocaine, and the mafia who stole from everyone. What about crime? Very bad, he said, and getting worse. Buses held up and the passengers robbed, even in central Asunción, every day. Shootings and kidnappings. Bank robberies and stick-ups. Everyone was sick of it. Many wished Stroessner was back in power. ‘That was a paradise then, but we didn’t know it,’ he said, a view I heard echoed by almost everyone I met. No one I spoke to stood up for what passed for ‘democracy’ in Paraguay.

      As he talked and I plied him with questions I looked out through the window, intrigued by my first sight of Paraguay on the ground. The earth was deep, laterite ochre red, the road pitted and ancient tarmac. As we came closer to the centre of Asunción the gardens grew lusher with tropical foliage, glossy green, sometimes studded with bright flowers. There were fine stucco houses of an Italianate style with red tile roofs, though everywhere was an air of decay and dereliction. The cars were surprisingly modern and the traffic busy. My premonition at the money changer at the airport that the bus fare would be tiny was correct. The fare turned out to be 1,300 guarani – about 25 US cents. Luis had told me that a 5,000 guarani note was ‘too big’ to expect the driver to change for a ticket. In the end Luis had put in 100 guaranis of his own money for my ticket, as I had only two hundreds.

      I asked Luis what he thought of the hotel I had selected. It was near the Plaza Independencia. He made a face. ‘Not good. A very bad area. Much crime, robberies, prostitution, drugs, alcoholics.’ I rapidly changed my plans. The Hotel Embajador met with slightly more approval. ‘A better area – near the business district.’ There’s nothing like local knowledge and a local warning. He was kind enough to get off the bus by the Embajador and show me where it was. We shook hands and he departed. Just before he left he said, ‘Oh, and by the way, tomorrow is the annual census. Everything will be shut – everything. Everyone has to be off the streets for the whole day. No buses run, no taxis, nothing.’ As we had been talking on the bus he had asked me casually ‘Which part of Brazil do you come from?’ I said, ‘I’m English. From England.’ He creased up his face as if in slight pain and waved his hand in front of his chest, ‘Ohh – so far away …’ First an ambassador, then a traveller from Brazil. Paraguay was very different to anywhere I had ever been before. It was quite simply one of the most remote countries in the world, about which almost no one knew anything, which almost no one went to, and almost no one came from – or indeed ever came back from. I felt heartened by this, but also daunted. I felt very much alone and friendless. If anything happened to me out here no one would know or care. Paraguay was a place in which one could disappear without trace.

       Three

       Counting Paraguay

      The heat of the tropical night faded after midnight; the dull roar of traffic СКАЧАТЬ