Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. Robert Carver
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in a few years, if you drove people hard enough. Stucco was made for this style of rule. It looked like marble, or stone, or whatever you wanted to have it look like. And it went up so quickly – you just laid mudbricks or rubble walls, and then coated it and smoothed it down and painted it – presto! It looked just like ancient Rome. Peter the Great, another imperial arriviste, had used stucco to create his own fantasy of European civic grandeur, St Petersburg: take a dash of Venice, a draught of Amsterdam, add some London, and some Rome – and there you have it. In a few years, with enough slave labour and a few second-rate European architects – for who outside Russia has ever heard of Rastrelli, Hamilton or any other of Peter’s experts – you had a brand new ‘European’ capital on the Gulf of Finland.
Against all the odds the adventurer Napoleon III had actually erected another ramshackle empire in France, a country that had completely lost its way after the revolution of 1789, which would try all and every system of government, one after the other, in case one might actually work for more than a few years. Solano López had been immensely impressed with the Second Empire in France, which he had seen for himself on his European Grand Tour: Madame Lynch was a product of its frenetic decadence, its squalid energy, its sense of nervous excess and self-conscious cultivation – the bombastic new opera houses, the Baron Haussmann-designed avenues in Paris, the braying brass bands and the opulent uniforms of army officers; and the Zouaves, that orientalist military fantasy in baggy pantaloons, floppy fezzes and curled-up slippers – a corps just made for Verdi opera, harking back to Napoleon I’s Mamelukes from Egypt. All this López admired deeply and tried to imitate in Paraguay, where he could. If there were not enough men to enslave to build his new palace, well then, he would use child slave labour. To see what López and Lynch had in mind for Asunción it is only necessary to go to the spa town of Vichy, in France, for here Napoleon III, with his foreign architects, many of them English, created an eclectic, imperial yet Ruritanian pleasure-capital, small but with the flamboyance and grandeur of a capital city, right in the middle of nowhere, well away from cities such as Paris with revolutionary mobs. If López and Lynch had simply stuck to Paraguay, forgoing the dreams of conquering Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina, they would have created a complete mid-19th-century tropical-Gothic version of Vichy, and very extraordinary it would have been, too. Imperial overreach on a massive scale meant nothing was ever completed. What does remain – the Parisian-style parks, the ruinous stucco palazzi, the defunct railway station – are impressive enough: no Grand Tour ever bore such strange fruit, so far from anywhere. There are doubters, of course. Alwyn Brodsky, the American biographer of Eliza Lynch, among others, claims that the Gran Hotel was never Madame Lynch’s country residence at all, that the whole story has been cooked up as a publicity stunt by the hotel’s owners. Hard facts on which everyone can agree were always in short supply in Paraguay; more or less everything was up for debate. There were versions of events, narratives, claims, counter claims, refutations. The outsider became embroiled in these arguments, willy-nilly. What one person told you the next would vehemently deny. Reality was slippery.
Madame Lynch was the mistress and éminence grise to Mariscal Francisco Solano López, the third of Paraguay’s dictators after his father Carlos Antonio López (el fiscal – the magistrate), and the founding father Dr Francia (el supremo – the supreme one). All of Paraguay’s dictators had earned soubriquets: Solano López had been el mariscal (the Marshal) and Stroessner was el rubio (the blond). If Oviedo ever came to power he would inevitably be el bonsai – people called him that already – unless it was el loco which he was called, too. Beyond simple description no one could agree about anything Madame Lynch had done. For the Colorados she was a national heroine, whereas the Radical Liberals saw in her a manipulative exploiter who bled Paraguay white, along with Solano López, whom they viewed as a criminal lunatic. Both of these ambiguous historical figures had been co-opted by Stroessner and his regime, and the cult of their heroism promoted assiduously. Madame Lynch’s remains had been brought back from Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and buried in La Recoleta in Asunción. The man who had organized this transshipment, a Lebanese-Paraguayan, had profited from the occasion to import a large quantity of hashish in the coffin with the remains of Madama.
Often called ‘Irish’, Eliza Lynch claimed to have been born in County Cork of Ascendency, Protestant parentage, and educated in Paris. She was a woman of cultivation and taste, speaking French, Spanish and Guarani with fluency, and played the piano, sang and danced with distinction. She had attached herself to López in Paris when he had been Ambassador at large in Europe, arriving with a substantial entourage and ample funds, the first the independent Paraguay had sent across to Europe. López had made the Grand Tour through France, Italy, England and the Crimea, where he observed the war in progress. In France he collected Napoleonic uniforms for his army officers, and from England guns and steamships supplied by the London firm of Blyth Brothers, who were also to send out a stream of technicians to Paraguay which enabled López to build up his army, navy and arsenal quickly enough to take on the three other regional powers all at once, very nearly beating them. López and Lynch returned to Paraguay with a complete kit for DIY imperial splendour – Sèvres and Limoges china sets, a Pleyel piano, fabrics, sewing machines, books, pictures, manuals of etiquette and court ritual, ladies’ maids and dancing masters, curtains, furniture and antimacassars. López actually went as far as to have a golden crown designed and sent out from France, but it was intercepted at Buenos Aires, and he never managed to have himself crowned Francisco I – even though he was referred to as such in some outlying provinces of Paraguay. Considered a great beauty, Eliza Lynch was the first modern career-blonde to arrive from Europe in South America with a mission, and a protector with enough money and political clout to make her ascent possible. Eva Perón, native-born South American, trod very much in the footsteps of Madame Lynch. Both of them were reputed to have been common whores working in brothels in their youth.
Madame Lynch created a sensation among the Guarani Indians, to whom she seemed an embodiment of the Virgin Mary. To the Creole elite of old Spanish blood she was an interloper, and a putana – a whore. They refused to recognize her, and eventually, when López got into his stride, were exterminated for their pains. López already had a wife and children established before he left for Europe and the new, big ideas he imbibed over there. Madama, as Lynch became known, was set up in style by López in Asunción, and formed her own alternative Court in her houses, which she decorated and furnished in the latest Parisian style. She was the cynosure of wit, elegance and art in a backward provincial capital that was nothing more than a village by a clearing in the jungle on the river. She came into her own when López senior died and Francisco Solano took over supreme power. López and Lynch turned the Pygmalion story upside down – Dr Higgins the rustic hayseed instructed by the sophisticated Parisienne Eliza Doolittle. Paraguay has always been, it would seem, a country of strong, capable women and weak, vain, indolent, incapable men. Whatever small quantity of sense Solano López may ever have had seems to have been provided by his mistress, though her detractors claim that it was her evil genius which spurred him on in his disastrous military and imperial ventures. The idea of becoming Emperor of Paraguay was not particularly absurd; there were in existence two new-minted empires – Brazil and France – as well as the older Russian, British, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish imperia. The fall of Napoleon III’s empire saw the creation of a German empire to replace it. Nor was defeating Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil particularly ambitious. They were all weak, poorly led and disorganized. The problem was that Solano López was consumed with vanity and egotism, trusted no one, and set about killing off his family and anyone in Paraguay of any ability and competence. Had he done nothing, and let his generals, British technical experts and brave soldiers simply attack the enemy, there is little doubt he would have defeated them and become Emperor of southern South America.
What is not in doubt is that Madame Lynch introduced into Paraguay an element of courtly style, of elegance, of well-dressed chic which had never been seen before, and which among the upper classes, survives and flourishes to this day. Paraguay, under her aegis, became a place of masked balls, river-boat picnics with brass bands in attendance, elaborate full-dress evening dances, classical music concerts, theatrical and opera performances, and champagne suppers. Everything had to be shipped up the river, and before that across the Atlantic from France, but neither time nor distance was any hindrance to the dandies and belles of either the 18th or 19th centuries. The details of