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

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СКАЧАТЬ down the yellowing wall of my room, the shutters casting a shimmering tracery of dark and pallid shadow, a mobile set of bars ominously like those of a prison. I dressed and went out into the open patio. The pot plants and creepers snaked up towards the pale, faintly azured sky, still star-flecked. Leprous walls peeled and sagged, dead plaster like the mummified flesh of a long-buried corpse. Old, decrepit chairs sprawled as if cast away in some deserted, abandoned Spanish posada of a hundred years ago. Dust lay thick on the tiled floor. The shutters’ grey-ochre paint had blistered and flaked, the colour bleached away by heat and sun. The air smelt cool and earthy; I could hear birds twittering.

      The Hotel Embajador had seen better days. It felt like something out of a Graham Greene novel – a place in old West Africa, pre-war Liberia, perhaps. I seemed to be the only guest. This was the sort of place Scobie had committed suicide in, I reflected. There was no air-conditioning and the electric bulbs had no shades. The walls were smeared with squashed mosquitoes and I had itched all night; I suspected bedbugs.

      The young lad who had booked me in the night before was asleep on a couch in the foyer, fully dressed, with his shoes off. The hotel was on the first, second and third floors of a city centre building. I tiptoed to the open window and glanced out – the shutters were pulled back and the window open. The street below was deserted. A large Paraguayan flag hung idly from a 19th-century Parisian-inspired corner-building opposite, and on the top of the flagpole squatted a vulture, hunkered down, apparently asleep. Inside the hotel, on the wall opposite, above the sleeping boy, hung a gold-coloured plastic representation of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and the Don’s horse Rosinante. Windmills were the backdrop. Wherever you travel in the Hispanic world, you are sure to meet Don Quixote, not just as wall decoration, but in person, and Paraguay was to prove no exception.

      The lad awoke with a start and gave me a sleepy, friendly smile. I beckoned to the list of refreshments advertised on the wall. Coffee, rolls, cheese sandwiches, soft drinks – what was available, I asked? He looked sheepish. ‘The woman who does the coffee and rolls and sandwiches won’t be in today – because of the census. No one can move. I have to stay here all day.’ I tried to persuade him to make me a cup of coffee – surely that at least was possible? But it wasn’t. He didn’t know how, or where the things were. I settled for a Coca-Cola, then went downstairs and out on to the silent streets.

      The capital of Paraguay was as empty as if a nerve gas strike had wiped out the entire population in their sleep. Not a soul stirred, not a car, not a bus or taxi moved. It was now 6.30am. On a normal day in such a tropical city the place would already be bustling. I took my black bag with me and my cameras. The best photographs I was ever going to get without being disturbed or harassed would surely be today.

      It was by now 7.30, and the first groups of students carrying clipboards began to move about from building to building. These were the sharp-end censors who did the actual counting. On the corners of the blocks, soldiers and armed police had appeared, standing in pairs. Trucks drove around dropping them off. I noticed the soldiers were all small and dark, and when I strode by they avoided my eyes and instead looked at the ground or into the middle distance. With my purposeful air, my black bag and my camera, it was evident that they thought I was something to do with the census, and a figure of authority. Much later, when I asked Gabriella d’Estigarribia what impression I made on the local people she had smiled and said, ‘They think you are a German from the Technical Service. You stride about, and look angry, and stare at people. Johnny Walker! Very gringo and dangerous. You frighten them.’

      This was a blow, I confess. I had thought I made a slightly better impression. The Technical Service was the euphemism given to the secret police who did the torturing under General Stroessner’s regime, and who had not gone away after his fall. What was evident on this my first morning’s walkabout was that at six foot I was very tall, and also very white, and the ordinary soldiers and police were very small and dark, and that the small dark people shrank from the tall white people in Paraguay, when they thought they had power. You wear your continent’s history on your face, in your build, and in your skin colour. Whether I was Brazilian, German or British did not particularly matter: I was a white European in a country and a continent that had been conquered by tall white people, and whose descendants still largely owned, controlled and dominated it to this day, along with much of the rest of the world. It was not a comfortable realization. However liberal, however multicultural one felt oneself to be, in this continent one’s safety, even one’s continued physical existence depended upon being defended by a corrupt and unjustifiably empowered regime’s police force, of which one felt afraid oneself. It is possible to forget you are white if you live in Europe: in the Third World it never is.

      As I roamed about taking photo after photo, I wondered whether I, too, was supposed to be indoors along with everyone else. No one challenged me, but if they did I had a feeling that simply saying I was a gringo turista was not going to be a good enough excuse. But I wasn’t challenged, far from it – I was obviously avoided and ignored, and so I wandered about with increasing confidence. There simply were no tourists in Asunción, I realized, so my movements were interpreted as being in some inscrutable way official. Better not to ask, they would be thinking – I might make trouble for myself.

      I had spent a long time looking for a café that was open where I might be able to get a coffee and some breakfast, but the whole city was completely shut – not so much as a kiosk or corner store open. Later, the next day, in the newspaper Ultima Hora, I had seen a cartoon of a shivering Paraguayan family indoors trying to hide from view their smuggled TV set, fridge, freezer, hi-fi and so forth. Outside was a burglar wearing a black mask and carrying a swag bag, knocking on their door. ‘No thank you – we know who we are,’ the head of the household was saying. In Paraguay, as in Turkey, the censors actually entered every house and counted the people in every room, and noted down all the things they possessed. Each property had a sticker pasted on the outside door to prove they had been inspected. ‘Smuggling is the national industry of Paraguay,’ Graham Greene had observed, when he visited the country in the stronato, as the Stroessner years were called. ‘Contraband is the price of peace,’ Stroessner had stated, defining it as official policy. With the second lowest per capita income in South America, Paraguay imported more Scotch whisky than all the rest of South America put together. It was almost all immediately re-exported to neighbouring Brazil, Bolivia and Argentina. Paraguay was sometimes known as ‘the Switzerland of South America’ not because of its non-existent mountains or ski slopes, but because it was the regional haven for hot money, millionaires on the run, shady enterprises of all kinds, numbered bank accounts and smuggled luxury goods. As in Switzerland, there were a lot of cows and a lot of pastureland – but you didn’t make much of a living out of those. ‘Switzerland is where all the big criminals come together to hide the profits of their swindles and thefts,’ Juan Perón, dictator of Argentina had said in the 1950s, before being ousted. He should have known: he had sent Eva Perón across to Europe in 1947 to bank their own ill-gotten gains in Geneva. The bankers had put on a special celebratory dinner for her. The British government had refused her a visa and denied her entry as a harbourer of fugitive Nazis and handler of stolen Jewish gold. It was estimated by the Allied Enemy Property Bureau after the Second World War that the Nazis laundered 80% of the loot they had stolen from the Jews and the countries they occupied through Switzerland, with the full knowledge of the Swiss, and the remaining 20% through Argentina, Paraguay, Egypt and Syria, all sympathetic to the Nazi cause. It was the Swiss authorities who had suggested the Nazis add a ‘J’ on to the passports of German Jews before the war, so the Swiss could tell who they were and refuse them entry. ‘Few things have their beginnings in Switzerland,’ observed Scott Fitzgerald, ‘but many things have their endings there.’ Seedier, poorer, more evidently corrupt and oppressive, Paraguay was a downmarket latino, South American tropical version, more like Albania in ambience. Already in my strolls around the city centre I had seen the empty shells of many monumental steel and glass banks, their doors locked and shuttered, beggars sleeping on cardboard under their massive porticoes. Inside you could see the desks and tables covered in dust, with empty cartons on the floors from where the computers and office equipment had been taken away. Like desecrated cathedrals, СКАЧАТЬ