At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Read online

  Although all that we had in common was the fact that we all slept in the same mouldering baroque cavern, we became good friends. We often ate together at the railway station, where – among the belch and hiss of steam engines – the food was the cheapest in the city. Some afternoons, Eddy led us out on illegal bathing parties to the Hotel Guaraní, a hideous concrete pillar built by the General to cope with the tidal wave of tourists that was about to overwhelm Asunción. The hotel was even featured on the bank-notes to guide the tourists home. But the wave never came and the pool attendant was happy to accept that we were all in Room 205, along with two other Eddys that Eddy had picked up in the railway station. Even eighteen years on, I couldn’t remember a time when I’d seen a group of tourists in Paraguay larger than our raiding party.

  Both Eddy and Kevin were rather older than me, in their mid-twenties, and I considered them to be very wise. When I got back from the Shakespeare, I told them about my discussion with Reynaldo and my plan to visit the President the next day. Eddy immediately became solicitous. ‘You know he pushes people out of fucking aeroplanes?’

  Together we tried to piece together the General. Our guidebooks said that he was born on 3 November 1912. His father was a Bavarian brewer and his mother a Paraguayan beauty. He served in the Paraguayan army during the Chaco War and was a distinguished artillery officer. He seized power in a coup in 1954 and was therefore one of the most enduring dictators in the world.

  ‘I also heard the old man’s a bit of a randy bastard,’ added Eddy, but there was nothing in our guidebooks about that. The maps of Paraguay were infested with his name. There was Stroessner Airport, Port Stroessner, Fort Stroessner, Camp Stroessner and a street in every town named after either him, his matronly wife Doña Eligia or his father, Hugo Stroessner. His big, saggy face was impressed on all the stamps and coins, and Paraguayans even danced a prim little jig called the General Stroessner Polka. His portrait hung in the hallway of the Hotel Hispania and in every other hotel, bar, shop, office, funeral home and poodle parlour in town. Had we looked closely at the portrait, we might have appreciated his full majesty; he was Generalissimo Alfredo Stroessner, Legion d’Honneur, Knight of the Order of St Michael and St George, Order of the Condor of the Andes, Medal of the Inter-American Junta of Defence, Collar of the Order of the Liberator and Grand Cross of the Order of the Sun (with Diamonds).

  Anyway, I thought he looked harmless enough, and Graham Greene, writing in Travels With My Aunt, had said that he looked like ‘the amiable well-fed host of a Bavarian bierstube’. I prepared for my visit.

  3

  OF COURSE, WE didn’t know the half of it. Alfredo Stroessner was in the twenty-eighth year of a rule so vile and brutish that it had been given its own ugly name: the Stronato. During the Tropical Terror, he’d extorted eight election results from the Paraguayans and plunged the country into a state of siege. Emergency measures were renewed every ninety days. A third of the state budget was diverted into ‘internal security’, or bullies and guns. Several hundred thousand Paraguayans simply fled. Opponents (as everyone was keen to point out) were hurled from aeroplanes or – more economically – simply bound up in wire, mutilated and dumped in the Río Paraguay. The General didn’t have to do that many times before the Paraguayans began to realise that the Stronato was serious and that it was enduring.

  Don Alfredo himself was invincible, the strongman to defend Paraguay against communism and other, rather less specific, dark forces. He invented a new Guaraní doublethink of ‘elected autocracy’ and ‘guided democracy’. Then, from the United States, another useful euphemism was wafted in: the National Security Doctrine (‘Get tough, the Commies are under the bed’). Don Alfredo now had all the impressive excuses he needed; Law 294 (‘The defence of Democracy’) made being a communist illegal, and Law 209 (‘The defence of Public Peace and Personal Freedom’) made it an offence to foster hatred among Paraguayans. The citizens meanwhile recognised these laws for what they were: the ley de mbaraté – the Law of the Jungle. Don Alfredo had all the guns.

  Outsiders marvelled at the control that Don Alfredo exercised over his generals. Usually, they were the first to apply a new broom to any president who wavered or faltered (Paraguayans had seen thirty-four presidents swept away in the fifty years before the Stronato). The secret was simple: Don Alfredo simply employed the toughest of them on the board of Paraguay Incorporated, which became the greatest smuggling outfit in the world. Surrounded by countries with excruciating import tariffs, the pickings were rich, and Don Alfredo divided the territory up among his General Staff. Engorged with cash, no one would trouble to rock the boat. This easy patronage – known rather quaintly among social scientists as ‘sultanism’ – kept everybody in medals and Scotch for thirty-four years. If Don Alfredo was ever asked about the army’s involvement in smuggling, he’d simply shrug. ‘Ah,’ he’d say, ‘that is the price of peace.’

  Even now, I struggle to understand the scale of this, Paraguay’s most productive industry. Suddenly, Asunción had more Mercedes than any other city in South America, and Paraguay became the greatest importer of whisky per capita in the world. In 1977, around 350,000 gallons a year were being sloshed around Paraguay in old Dakotas and army trucks, most of it heading for the borders. By 1993, it was 1,273,000 gallons. By then, however, operations had also expanded to cover heroin for Miami and guns to South Africa.

  The Smuggler-in-Chief was General Andrés Rodríguez, who counted among his business associates the French heroin magnate Auguste Ricord. Ricord had a monstrous mansion in Asunción and later had his business success story told in less than reverential terms in The French Connection. Rodríguez himself was a man almost as shiny and plump as the President. Their families intermarried and the two cronies grew impressively rich. One American magazine even fêted Don Alfredo – fancifully perhaps – as the ninth richest man in the world.

  Whether rolling in it or not, Don Alfredo kept a low profile. There was no presidential Rolls-Royce, and Stroessner took modest, woolly-cardigan holidays in Patagonia. He never gave rallies – because he kept fluffing his speeches – and often just bellowed at people in meetings (‘He treated us like twelve-year-olds,’ one of the country’s greatest ranchers later told me). The Old Sultan was at his happiest bantering in Guaraní, the language of his bombardiers. It didn’t pay for him to be ostentatious; that might have prompted demands from the boardroom hoods for a greater slice of the action.

  For the army’s rank and file there were splendid period uniforms of hussars and lancers and the officers were even encouraged to do a little business of their own. Paraguay was in danger of becoming a sort of interactive Pirates of Penzance, but with headless corpses bobbing around on the river.

  The small problem of an impoverished and potentially complaining populace was taken care of by Pastor Coronel, the head of the pyragüés. Whilst he was neither hairy-footed nor even fleet of foot (an Argentine secret agent once described him as ‘a refrigerator with a tennis ball on top’), he was an enthusiastic interrogator. People were pulled in on the slightest of pretexts. An Australian writer, Gavin Souter, was arrested for taking a photograph of the bullet-riddled lamp-post by the Municipal Theatre, and after a day in the cells found himself in front of Pastor Coronel. He was almost smothered by Coronel’s charm. There had been a terrible mistake. He was discharged with all the Inquisitor’s warmest blessings and good wishes.

  Other guests of the pyragüés had a rather different smothering. Pastor Coronel – distinctly less charming on these occasions – liked to conduct his interviews with the subject immersed in the pileta, a bath-tub of human excrement. If, after that, they still had wits or dignity, Pastor Coronel’s warmest blessings were inserted up their rectums with an electric cattle prod. Some, miraculously, made it home, deaf (like the anthropologist Chase Sardi) or with a mind now permanently scrambled. They, in a sense, were the fortunate ones; Pastor Coronel had the Secretary of the Paraguayan Communist Party torn apart, screaming, with a chain
saw – to the accompaniment of a pretty polka. In order that his master missed none of these noisy details, the entire transaction was relayed to Don Alfredo down the telephone. To most, it became obvious that further resistance was futile, and Terror, in the words of one horrified onlooker, ‘became internalised’.

  As if black could get any darker, there was an even blacker side to the Stronato which Eddy had accidentally stumbled upon: Don Alfredo had an omnipotent’s appetite for exotic sex. For a while, the demands of his liver-spotted, dew-lapped burgermeister body were met by a line-up of women, and Doña Eligia stood dutifully to one side. He even spawned a litter of little priglets, but as the Stronato gained awful momentum, Don Alfredo took his adventures to the playground. It was said that he employed a procurer – a child-snatcher on the general staff. The President liked his girls no riper than fourteen, and after that, well, his official Snatcher could share them out among the crew. There was one lucky exception – a girl that he dandled long into her adulthood, possibly because he enjoyed the irony of her name: Legal.

  That night, Kevin and Eddy watched as I prepared for my visit to His Excellency the President. Reynaldo and his friends had advised me to wear the school blazer, the crumpled-up tie and the pair of thick black corduroy trousers that I’d crushed into my luggage. I pulled them out and laid them on the bed and set to work, scouring and scraping at the stains and picking off the bits of fluff. Kevin and Eddy howled with laughter. They doubted that anyone could cross Asunción in that lot without dying of heat. They were still clutching each other and yelping with delight when I set out the next morning, muzzy-headed and leather-mouthed, for the Government Palace. Overnight, the lapels of the blazer, protesting at the soap and mauling of the night before, had curled up like crisps.

  ‘Seriously,’ said Eddy, his face now deadpan but the tears still dripping off his nose ‘don’t shake hands with him. He’s got something funny about disease. He doesn’t like it.’

  4

  GOVERNMENT PALACE HAD been commissioned by newly independent Paraguay’s second leader, who also happened to be its second dictator. Carlos Antonio López was born in 1790 to a Creole father and a half-Indian, half-negro mother. In the years before he was appointed to the junta, he practised as a lawyer, accumulating enviable wealth, cunning and girth. By 1844, his chops had begun to roll over his cravat and he’d become too obese and unwieldy to sit on his horse. His physical appearance had become so inflated and hideous that even his colleague on the junta, an old trooper called Alonso, became anxious. When Don Carlos turned on him one day and roared, ‘Andante, barbero!’ (‘Get out, you dolt!’), Alonso – overwhelmed by the spectacle of a fantastically fat man apparently about to explode – simply fled. Don Carlos then held the cudgels of power for the next eighteen years until he drowned in his own dropsy in 1862.

  In power, the President continued to engorge and enlarge. He had a misty idea that Paraguay might one day be an imperial power as great as Napoleonic France, and took to wearing a bicorne hat. This, unsurprisingly, triggered helpless titters among the neighbouring Argentines. Enraptured, they sent their most weasel reporter, Hector Varela, up the River Paraná to watch ‘The Monarch of the Jungle’ open a theatre.

  One rarely sees a more impressive sight [sniggered Varela] than this great tidal wave of human flesh. He is a veritable mastodon, with a pear-shaped face, narrow forehead and heavy pendulous jowls. During the entire performance, the president ostentatiously wore an enormous, atrocious hat quite appropriate to him and equally suitable for either a museum of curiosities or for the Buenos Aires carnival.

  Despite his porcine appearance and the fact that he was only able to conduct affairs of state from a robust armchair, Don Carlos was a surprisingly capable leader. Paraguay became the first country in the Americas to outlaw slavery. Torture was abolished (for a while) and a newspaper was started. Don Carlos even dabbled in a little diplomacy with his neighbours, who until then hadn’t been allowed in (or out) of Paraguay for twenty years. He sent to England for surgeons, engineers and mechanics, and among those who came was a builder from Chelsea called Alan Taylor. Don Carlos wanted a Government Palace.

  Alan Taylor arrived in Paraguay in 1858 and built himself a house which he fitted with Paraguay’s first chimney. It started something of a fashion and soon chimneys were popping up all over Asunción. Once settled, he began work on the Palace.

  In the excitement, no design was spared, and Don Carlos and his builder incorporated every whimsy of authority: classical pediments, wings like Versailles, an Oval Office like the White House and even a lumpish tower like the Palace of Westminster. Although like all Guaraní-baroque it had been miniaturised, it was to be the culmination of Paraguay’s imperial ambition and would trumpet her emergence into the Industrial Age. The American Minister, Mr Washburn, predicted that the Government Palace would be ‘the finest building in South America’. Captain Richard Burton, who steamed up here many years later – and who, incidentally, loathed Americans and Mr Washburn in particular – disagreed and thought that the whole building was ‘an utter absurdity’. Although I would come to agree with Burton about Mr Washburn, he was wrong about Government Palace; I have always regarded it as an absolute wedding cake, a cool, deliciously iced fantasy on the banks of the steamy Paraguay.

  By the time I’d walked this far, rivulets of sweat were trickling down the inside of my shirt and the corduroys were becoming mushy and tangled. I gulped at the air but it was burnt and used up. Little spots were dancing among the cobbles.

  Perhaps Carlos’ greatest fault was that he died and, in so doing, made room for his son, Francisco Solano López. The gossips said that Francisco wasn’t Don Carlos’ natural son at all but was the product of his mother’s dalliance with a sweaty farmer. Whatever the truth, Francisco inherited from Don Carlos two dangerous traits; the first, his fondness for greasy food (which made him swell up), was inconvenient and vaguely repulsive for those around him, but the second, an obsession with Napoleon, was to prove fatal not only to him but also to Paraguay.

  ‘There are many questions to be settled,’ gurgled the dying Don Carlos through his dropsy, ‘but settle them with the pen rather than the sword, particularly with Brazil.’

  But within three years of his accession (no one challenged this, a second mastodon), Francisco had picked a quarrel with not just one neighbour but three: Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Although the fight that followed tore the smile off the face of the Argentines, it was a catastrophe. Paraguay lost a quarter of her territory and up to four-fifths of her population. ‘Only women, children and burros remained,’ it was reported at the time.

  Alan Taylor continued his work on the Palace, but by the end, he was forced to work with gangs of six-year-olds. ‘They were constantly watched,’ wrote Mr Washburn, ‘that they should never idle away a moment … They appeared like worn-out slaves, in whom all hope is so utterly extinguished that they never looked up or ceased a moment from their labour.’ Alan Taylor eventually made it back to Chelsea, utterly broken. He’d been imaginatively tortured, his wife had died of starvation, and their thirteen-year-old son had been conscripted and then executed. Alan Taylor was last heard of, a skeleton, begging the Foreign Office for work. Later, I would come to appreciate how fate came to deal the Paraguayans – and her visitors – such a shocking hand.

  By 1870, Paraguay had been dragged down almost as quickly as she’d emerged from her medievalism. She wouldn’t resurface again until the twentieth century and then only to be dragged under again by the next catastrophic war, the Chaco War, starting in 1932. The sons of the orphans perished in their thousands, mainly through thirst, and a new generation of orphans emerged.

  The Paraguayans who emerged from this war, shattered but, arguably, victorious, dragged a Bolivian tank home with them. They had captured it using only hand grenades. It was placed in the Plaza Independencia, next to the Government Palace, where its rust and diesel oil fanned out like a psoriatic rash. The civic leaders, anxious to
deal the final blow, plunged a telegraph pole into the body of the tank, pinioning the whole machine to the concrete and linking the police station up with the military school.

  I skirted the Plaza, pattering damply down Independencia until I reached the Palace grounds, where – as there were no gates – I turned in. Although I could hear my heart drumming in my chest, I felt bloodless and clammy. A truckload of soldiers were parked under a jacaranda tree. They all wore sunglasses and had sinister humps of ammunition bulging around their tureened bellies. I tottered across the Palace lawn and their eyes followed like a little nest of crocodiles. One of them, who I presumed was the officer because he had mother-of-pearl grips on his revolvers, stepped out.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve come to see the President,’ I croaked, and immediately, a heavily built brown suit appeared in the front hallway and, removing his mirrored lenses, waved me inside.

  Reynaldo had warned me about this ogre. He was Mario Abdo Benítez, half Syrian, half Guaraní and the President’s Personal Secretary. Abdo was loyal, obedient and dangerously stupid. He played court jester to Pastor Coronel’s chief executioner. Paraguayans told a story about how he once burnt his ear by answering the phone while he was ironing his master’s trousers. I can understand how you burnt this ear, the doctor had said afterwards, but how did you burn the other one? ‘Well,’ replied Abdo, ‘I had to phone for an ambulance, didn’t I?’

  At that moment, I wasn’t finding this story amusing. Abdo’s face was pressed up against mine like a cartoon bulldog. It was, I noticed, pocked with tiny scars. Suddenly the whole thing sliced itself up into a yellowy smile.