Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. Robert Carver
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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, I thought, these were modern temples of money that had failed, abandoned by their priests, acolytes and devotees, who now worshipped abroad, in Miami and the Cayman Islands.
The night before, although tired after my 18-hour journey from London, I had gone out into the city centre, curious and impatient to get some first impressions. The broken pavements, sandy soil spilling out, potholed streets and grime-stained walls suggested a city down on its luck, and slipping into dereliction. Closed shops, broken windows, beggars, dirt, unpainted walls, shutters falling off their hinges: no one had spent any money on this city for a long time. There were armed police everywhere, hanging around, and the 19th-century stucco buildings suggested a derelict Andalucian provincial town in Spain during the early years of General Franco, just after the Civil War. But the Indian women crouched on the pavements selling tropical fruit and vegetables, herbs, potions and unknown fruit drinks were from the New World, not the Old. I had been recommended the nearby Lido restaurant by the hotel clerk. Right opposite the Pantheon of Heroes, this was an atmospheric 1950s-style soda fountain, with pink granite counter top at which one sat, huge fans churning the air above one’s head. The place was run by capable, sensible Paraguayan women of a certain age, who wore pink uniforms with little pink caps. I ordered a veal escalope à la Milanese, with salad and bread, and a Pilsen beer. I had inwardly groaned when the waitress had appeared carrying the beer, and a bucket of ice with a glass inside it. Ice in beer is a favourite – and disastrous – tropical invention I had experienced in Malaysia and Indonesia. But I need not have worried. The glass rim had not touched the ice, and the bottle of beer was opened and thrust into the bucket in place of the glass, up to its neck in frosty coldness, as if champagne in an ice bucket. This was a hot country where they understood cold beer. I had last tasted an iced beer glass straight from the freezer in Australia, a country where they also understand the needs of thirsty, heat-choked men. The Paraguayan beer, brewed to a German lager recipe, was very cold and very good. The food was excellent too: the salad had a flavour completely unavailable in Europe today unless you grow your own vegetables without pesticides and fertilizers. Native pessimism led me to abstract about a third of the escalope and secrete it inside a paper napkin in my bag, together with a couple of slices of bread. I had a feeling there would be no food available on the morrow for any price. I was right, too. Together with an apple I had left over from my flight, and some boiled sweets, this was all I had to eat until the day after the census.
It was dark by 6pm. The night fell suddenly, like a curtain. Wood fires started