Paradise With Serpents: Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay. Robert Carver
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Third World smell of sweat, smoke, excrement and spices. By day I had been in Franco’s Spain, but by night it was Java or Malaysia. There were small children everywhere, ragged, energetic, vociferous and hungry. The Lido had two private armed guards in khaki uniform, one inside by the cash desk, the other outside by the door. The children begged for coins as the customers left. There was a charity box by the cash desk which bore the printed label: ‘Give generously for the lepers of Paraguay’. I just hoped none of them worked in the kitchens. In England, I had asked my local medical centre what diseases were on offer in Paraguay, and what injections were required. It’s hard to impress a British National Health doctor, but Paraguay did it for my GP. ‘I say … malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, blackwater fever, cholera, typhoid, jiggers, tropical sores, dysentery, plague, HIV, sleeping sickness, bilharzia … by golly, they’ve got the lot out there … it’s a complete Royal Flush. Why are you going, if I might ask?’
I muttered something about work. ‘Oh, and the llamas all have syphilis, due to the lonely herdsmen taking advantage of them in the altiplano …’ Surely not llamas, in Paraguay? I queried faintly. ‘Oh, sorry, my mistake, that’s Peru, next paragraph down. Oh and meningitis, leprosy, river fever, Lhasa fever … you know I think it’s easier to say what they haven’t got in jolly old Paraguay,’ he added jovially. ‘Ebola – they haven’t got that, it seems – yet.’ I’d had to go three times to his surgery for various shots over a couple of weeks. ‘Do please come back and see us again if … or I should say when you return,’ the doc had said cheerily. ‘The tropical medicine boys up in London like us to send up stool, blood and urine samples from people coming back from these sorts of places – you might pick up something really interesting, something new, even.’ Carver Fever, I thought, a hitherto unknown infection, carried by mosquitoes, incurable, causing paralysis, catalepsy, raging insanity, multiple organ failure and agonizing, lingering death by multiple spasm, also known as the Black Twitching Plague, after its gruesome effects. First brought back to Europe from tropical South America by the late travel writer Robert Carver, who was its first known victim, and whose body had to be cremated in an isolation hospital to avoid contaminating southern England … I could be famous: dead, and famous. I said I would stagger in on crutches, somehow, so he could apply his leeches to my depleted carcass. I thanked him, finally, after the last jab session, with thinly disguised insincerity and turned to go. ‘Oh, and I should take a plentiful supply of condoms – just in case any of those syphilitic llamas stray across the border … ha, ha, ha!’ His laughter echoed tinnily round the surgery. I gave him a weak smile, but I felt perhaps the joke lacked a certain good taste, or just simple fellow-feeling. On my first evening’s stroll in Asunción I was not particularly reassured to see a large sign with a vicious-looking mosquito on it in the Plaza Independencia, warning of dengue fever. ‘No hay remedio’ ran the Goyaesque rubric underneath – there’s no cure. Later, I was told that the dengue mosquito was slow and stupid and operated in Paraguay only by day, whereas the malarial mosquito was fast, intelligent and operated by night. The infectious dengue mosquito was male, the malarial female – make of that what you will. ‘Women are just as good as men, only better,’ observed D. H. Lawrence, who probably knew. The other Lawrence, T. E., contracted malaria while cycling in the south of France before the First War, while studying medieval castles. I had a great sack of anti-malarial and anti-every-other-damn-thing in my bags. If I had anything to say in the matter I was determined to avoid being immortalized in the medical history books.
The centre of old Asunción did have a certain faded elegance, reminiscent, especially after dark, of post-Baron Haussmann Paris, with tropical excrescences such as vultures perched on the telegraph wires, and impassive Indian women smoking coarse cheroots, squatting on the doorsteps. The park sported French 19th-century style wooden benches, white wooden slats held together by elaborate wrought iron, these boat-like contrivances designed for amatory ooh-la-la, even, perhaps, for complete copulatory performance, their arched backs swooning towards the grass. The palms rustled in the faint breeze, rats of impressive size scampering up and down the trunks with complete lack of pudeur, and groups of Indians in costume hunkered down for the night amidst the shrubbery, grouped around small, glowing fires on which they brewed their evening potations. By day, I later discovered, these impassive indigenos strolled about the town in loin cloths, amid the BMWs and Mercedes, proffering handicrafts, bows and arrows, and beadware, with very little evident enthusiasm or hope of a sale. These, I was told, were the Makká people, who had come in from the Chaco, the Paraguayan Outback that lay just across the river.
The old Post Office was the finest 19th-century stucco building I found, with a charming interior patio full of carefully tended tropical plants, and an elegant stone staircase up to the flat roof, where there was a café and an unrivalled view down across the square to the river beyond. Flags, of the Paraguayan variety, of all sizes, flapped energetically from many buildings in the strong evening wind that rose off the river, bringing the stink of the poor up into the centre of town. It was evident already that there were many poor, and they surrounded the city proper in their slums. A few of them slunk about furtively in the shadows, watched intently by armed police who carried shotguns, machine-guns and assault rifles, and wore six-shooters in black special-forces style low-slung holsters. I had been greeted jovially by a police officer as I walked about the square below the Post Office. He smiled elaborately and said that, with my permission, as I was evidently a foreigner, I would not mind if he gave me a few words of friendly advice. Under no circumstances was I to wander down the steps and into the favela – he used the Brazilian word for a shanty town – below us. The centre of Asunción was safe, he said, relatively safe even at night. The favela was not. I would be attacked, robbed and perhaps killed within minutes of going down there. It would be best if whenever I wandered around I kept an eye out for police and soldiers. If I could see police and soldiers I was probably all right – no one would attack me. If I couldn’t, then I was not safe. There was a great deal of crime at the moment, he told me, due to the unsettled conditions in the country. Not only foreigners were at risk, ordinary Paraguayans were attacked every day, even here in Asunción. I asked if everyone had identity papers, even the poorest of the poor, even in the favela. Everyone had papers, he said, absolutely everyone. Not to have papers was a criminal offence in itself. He wished me a good evening, smiled again and then strolled away. His warning and the slight chill in the air had suggested I should now retire for the night. I made my way back to the hotel and shuttered the windows tight. There were many mosquitoes on the wall and I spent half an hour killing them before turning in. I couldn’t really tell if these were the fast, intelligent variety or the slow, stupid ones. I rigged up my mosquito net, purchased in London, and crept under it. The bed was hard and uncomfortable. My room cost US$5 a night. I determined to move upmarket and out of the centre of town after the census was over.
Gabriella d’Estigarribia sat in the shade under a palm tree by the swimming pool and sipped her grapefruit juice delicately. She had a wide-brimmed straw hat on, her face in deep shadow, yet already the sun had caught the pale, fair skin of her face.
‘Foreigners come to Paraguay, find they can do nothing with the people, become angry, then give up, eventually, and go away again in disgust,’ she said evenly, not looking at me, but rather at the hummingbird which hovered like a tiny helicopter over the swimming pool.
‘Why is it so hard to get things done, for foreigners?’ I asked.
‘Not just for foreigners, for everyone. Some say it is the mentality of the Guarani people, who used to be called “Indians” before they were converted to Catholicism by the Spanish. Then, by a sort of unexplained miracle they ceased to be Indians and became Paraguayans. People say the Guarani live entirely in the present – the past is forgotten, the future unimagined. Remembering things and making plans for the future are both of no interest to them. Promises are made, events planned, but nothing happens – inertia sets in. From the first the Europeans had to use authoritarian means – force,