At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Read online

  ‘What exactly do you want?’

  Antarctica. The blowtorch man. Nazis and eczema. Your burnt ears. My mind scrambled for an answer but kept alighting on absurdities.

  ‘I’ve come to pay my respects.’

  His smile yellowed a little wider ‘Follow me please, señor.’

  I squelched up the red-carpeted stairs behind him. Above us, Carlos and Francisco López, whiskery and bemedalled, scowled down from their gilt frames. I let my trembling knuckles trail along the smooth marble of Alan Taylor’s walls and sucked in a few draughts of cool, polish-scented air. At the top of the stairs we came face to face with a bronze statue of another dyspeptic general, snarling fiercely. We turned right and walked along a terrace until we reached the General’s office. The Syrian knocked at the door and then entered, closing it behind him.

  For a moment I contemplated my reflection in the polished wood and stiffened slightly as I saw the bedraggled and bemused figure peering back at me. I quickly averted my gaze and tried to concentrate on the views beyond the balustrade, towards the sluggish grey river with its tiny bronchitic boats, and beyond, to the distant shore, where the Chaco desert began. Crushed up against the palace were the viviendas temporarias, the slums, run up out of corrugated iron and packing cases. As I watched a stringy cat tiptoe across a sheet of scalding tin, Abdo reappeared. My heart lurched.

  ‘I am sorry, señor, we can’t find him anywhere. He must have gone for a walk.’

  On the way back, I paused at the skewered tank that was bleeding oil and rust. It was of course still dying. The beggars were still dying from the wounds inflicted in the war. For a whole generation of women, family life had choked on the contumelies of widowhood. A whole generation of young men had been so piteously decimated that, for those that remained, there was not the strength or the will power to resist a German immigrant who indulged a fondness for having his opponents filleted and parcelled and yet who could take a Tuesday stroll along the quayside. Paraguayans had become mere caretakers at the tomb of their past, making do as best they could and whispering about what might have been.

  But just as there were no bodies at this centuries-long wake, for they were scattered over the Chaco desert and through the tropical forests of the north, nor was there grief. Doubtless, hot tears had been shed long ago. But now the republic was contracted in constitutional bereavement. Now the children were learning the national anthem in school, ‘Paraguayos, República O Muerte’ (‘Paraguayans, Republic or Death’), but what they were being offered was not a choice but an epitaph.

  Strangely, their neighbours, the Argentines, ever anxious for their own souls, misinterpreted this as a state of contentment. Gustavo Morales was one of the regulars round the pool at the Hotel Guaraní. He was a textile trader who’d been coming to the city for many years, but trying to identify the Paraguayan character left him exasperated.

  ‘They seem so sure of themselves,’ he said, ‘but nothing makes sense. You know what these people are buying off me now?’ He flung his hand up towards the feverish sun ‘Duffel coats! Duffel coats from England!’

  His compatriots were often less kind and were wary of the passivity of their ethnically impure Guaraní neighbours at the head of the Paraná, of whom they told stories as purple as any from Paraguay itself.

  ‘You know they come down to Argentina and steal babies,’ one told me, ‘and take them away – in truckloads.’

  5

  NATURALLY, WHEN I told Eddie and Kevin about my visit to the palace, they laughed so much they nearly passed out. I wasn’t able to find it quite so funny, because somewhere deep down I felt a little, ill-formed tremble of anger. Still, I wasn’t going to let this spoil the fun and so we all went out, to wash down our malaria pills with a good splash of Antarctica.

  Then the day came for the boys to leave. Kevin was frustrated by the failure of his skin to react to Asunción’s sunlight, and Eddy just had to keep moving. Although our friendship was necessarily transitory and predictably beery, I was sorry to see them go and to have the green dance hall all to myself. Eddy’s rucksack was so large and so wide that he had to squeeze himself out of the Hispania sideways, like a crustacean. I never saw them again, but I still laugh when I think of that departure.

  By Easter, the citizens had wearied of their own stories of the blowtorch man. Some had even doubted that he existed, although an Anglo-Paraguayan called Virginia Martin told me that she and her boyfriend, Raoul, had some news from the prison.

  ‘Raoul and I go up there every Friday to take dinner for some friends of Raoul’s. (They fell out with the government over some land deal and Raoul’s friends can’t get the right judge. They all want so much now.) We bring these guys food from restaurants all over Asunción but it isn’t like home, is it? Anyway, we get all the gossip from them. They say the police have got a lead and they’re expecting a breakthrough any day.’

  And so on. Asunceños were spared the next instalment by the war in the Falkland Islands. General Stroessner offered some half-hearted support to the Argentines and I sought the advice of the British Embassy.

  ‘You are only eighteen. You should go home,’ said the clerk behind the plate-glass. Her coffee was cold in front of her.

  ‘I bet you’ve been busy since this all started,’ I teased. She was Anglo-Argentine.

  ‘Yes,’ she snapped, and took off her glasses and laid them on the desk in front of her. ‘This morning over one hundred Paraguayans have telephoned in asking if they can fight for the British.’

  ‘I presume you told them that that was absolutely fine.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  That night the young Paraguayans packed out the Shakespeare and whooped and howled until the rafters shook. I sensed the beginnings of change.

  6

  I SPENT EASTER Sunday with Virginia’s parents in a wealthy suburb of the city. It was a world apart from the crumbling, oven-baked downtown area that I lived in. Here were lawns and sprinklers and shaven-headed Americans chopping tennis balls at each other behind heavy iron railings. There were gleaming brass carriage lamps and doorbells that could chime water music. Most of the mansions up here really were (to borrow Burton’s words) ‘Utter Absurdities’. Every architectural whimsy that had ever been conceived was given expression up here – in coloured bricks. There was mock-Georgian, mock-Victorian, both rococo and mock-rococo, Spanish hacienda, Tibetan pagoda (with parking for two Mercedes and a Pontiac Firebird), Swiss Alpine, Swiss cheese, Wild West and igloo. Very often there were combinations of all of them. One house even had ‘Tudor’ half-timbering, a deep straw thatch and a sentry box, all redolent, I supposed, of an English country cottage. I loathed it, and when my Paraguayan friends told me that the whole area was seething with smugglers and Don Alfredo’s unsavoury cronies, I made a pointless (and slightly sanctimonious) promise to myself that I would never stay in the area perniciously known as ‘uptown’. It is a promise that I have – broadly speaking – kept to ever since.

  When my friends said ‘seething’, they weren’t exaggerating. Up here, there was a real and horrible possibility of running into the Whisky Generals or some Serbian neo-Nazis. There were swindlers and robbers from all over the world – the Bartons from Australia and others from Italy, France and America. Don Alfredo’s son, Freddie (who was, as it happens, a gibbering cocaine addict), was building himself a full-scale replica of the White House up here, and Georges Watin – one of Frederick Forsyth’s anti-heroes (the assassin from The Day of the Jackal) – had a little mock-something around the corner. There were countless others.

  ‘Pinochet’s got a retirement home in Carmelitas,’ offered one of the exuberant drinkers at the Shakespeare.

  ‘And Idi Amin’s got a plot somewhere,’ added another.

  In the middle of this waxworks of nasties lived Virginia’s parents. They must have seemed very incongruous here because it was difficult to imagine nicer people living among such grotesque neighbours. The Martins have, over the years,
become a sort of fixed point, a safe harbour in the shifting uncertainties of my Paraguay. They have fed me often enough, and – more recently – Virginia has rescued me from a hotel where, had I stayed a moment longer, I would have been completely consumed by bed-dwelling insects. The first problem, however, was to find them.

  I got a taxi up from Plaza de Los Héroes, but once into this ghastly Legoland, we became lost. None of the streets had names and no one, not even a garden-boy clipping a bush, could say exactly where we were. My taxi-driver gave up and abandoned me. Eventually, I got a fat, bald man out of his swimming pool and we both climbed, rather damp, into his oven-like Mercedes. He drove me thirty yards up the road to the Martins’ house.

  Virginia’s father had been kidnapped some years before and I was warned to expect a surprise: his ordeal had turned him completely grey. The only colour in Ian’s face was the red rim around each eye. He introduced himself and said that he’d just purchased a new semi-automatic, so that now a weapon was at hand in every room of his dazzling suburban home. By contrast to him, his wife, June, was brilliantly coppery and vivid. The thought occurred to me that they’d had some sort of colour transfusion.

  Over lunch, we discussed the impending crisis in the Falkland Islands and June asked me if I’d been disturbed by the earthquake the night before. I’d been at the Shakespeare.

  ‘No, I didn’t hear a thing.’

  No one ever mentioned the kidnap. It wasn’t something the Martins ever discussed. I only came upon it years later when looking through some old Paraguayan newspapers. It’s a heartless tale.

  7

  IN AUGUST 1973, Señor Ian Duncan Martin was a manager at Liebigs, the meat processing giant, in Asunción. Liebigs made, among other things, Bovril and – in the days before the European Union – lots of money. In the idyllic, frangipani-scented state of Paraguay, where crime was the monopoly of the military, it didn’t occur to anyone that a British businessman might be kidnapped. It therefore came as something of a shock when Señor Ian’s car was hijacked and he disappeared.

  His abductors were clownish first-timers who turned up at the abduction wearing plastic noses and false moustaches. They were also dangerously nervous, and after that, there were no more jokes. Señor Ian was stuffed into the boot of a car and driven out to a deserted farm in the lonely hills that surround Altos. Everywhere they stopped, the kidnappers left little clods of cigarette butts, each smoked down to the filter. They put Señor Ian in an outside shed with some sacks and then set about trying to raise some money. Señor Ian meanwhile was working up a case of pneumonia.

  The kidnappers asked for two million American dollars and two million Argentine pesos. Such a sum of money would have been an appreciable fillip to the tiny, wheezy economy of Paraguay. Liebigs were told to gather the money and – a nice touch this – to fly the Union Jack at half-mast over their offices when all was ready. Liebigs had little choice and employed two Pinkerton detectives to courier the money to Paraguay. The Pinkerton boys never got off the plane (they didn’t want to put a toe in this mad-dog country), and a man from the meat plant had to go and pick up the purse.

  The pyragüés hadn’t been idle either. Unfortunately, the file was handled by none other than Pastor Coronel himself. He announced that the kidnap was the work of left-wing Argentine terrorists and, with a conspicuous lack of justification (everything about Pastor Coronel was conspicuous), he started to make arrests. He even arrested the Martins’ maid and subjected her to unspeakable pain. She survived (and was still working for the Martins many years later), but she will not easily forget her eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with the Grand Inquisitor.

  Then things started to fall apart for the kidnappers. Their hideout became known to the police. The official explanation was that an estate agent from Altos had spotted the gang going in and out of a house that should have been empty. Given that Pastor Coronel was later able to appear in the press holding up the clowns’ seven plastic noses, this sort of ineptitude was entirely plausible. On 23 August 1973, the gang beat up their weakened captive as the police closed in. Unable to muster the courage to actually kill Señor Ian, the gangsters blasted away at his outhouse. The police meanwhile mowed two of them down like sheep. Three others were caught and two got away.

  Señor Ian was free and the money went back to London (less £150,000, which lingered in the police benevolent fund). Pastor Coronel was ticker-taped for his brilliance. Then came the surprise: one of the kidnappers was a Montanaro – a nephew of the Minister of the Interior, Dr Sabino Augusto Montanaro. The minister was not a man known for indulgence; he’d once been excommunicated for torturing priests.

  Everyone smelt rat and the foreign press went to print. Ed Harriman of The Sunday Times raised the awful prospect that Pastor Coronel had set the whole thing up himself – as revenge. He’d fallen out with Dr Montanaro over an American magazine article (revealing that he and General Rodríguez had just embarked on an enterprising narcotics venture). The Grand Inquisitor blamed Montanaro for the leak and sought to embarrass him. He had little difficulty in persuading the Minister’s feckless nephew to join the kidnap jaunt.

  The nephew and the other two idiots went to prison. They were released after just less than three years.

  8

  AS THE PARAGUAYAN summer drew to a close, the city was frequently sluiced down by hot torrents of rain. At first, these came as something of a respite from the heat but the water that tumbled down the streets was warm, like bathwater, and when the rain stopped, clothes became hot, clammy poultices and my room sprang to life with fresh, luxuriant clumps of mould. During these storms, the shops shuttered themselves against the spray from the buses and an impressive cataract burst through the roof of the Hispania, crashing noisily into the stairwell.

  It was in one of these hot, frothy gales that I took refuge in the Strangers’ Club. I’d been meaning to avoid this place, as it had the reputation of aspiring to be the British Club. This wasn’t a bad aspiration, but there simply weren’t enough English people in Asunción to make it a reality, and those there were – the precious few – were far too genteel for candles on beer mats and the Embassy’s cast-off copies of The Times. For the Americans, the place was just too sordid for words. The Koreans were banned. The Germans had their own place and the owner, Norman Langan, wasn’t keen to encourage Paraguayans.

  Langan was wringing the water out of his shirt. ‘Bastard weather,’ he muttered.

  These were his first miserable words to me and the beginning of a series of chance encounters which I hope no one will ever interpret as friendship. He was a lugubrious, basset-like man who sprouted a tuft of crinkly whiskers from each cheek. He’d enjoyed a series of nasty little jobs around the world that usually involved preying on others – his favourite being that of a paparazzi on the Costa del Sol. The strangest thing about him was that he wasn’t British at all, but a sort of Austrian-Argentine mongrel called Langer-Strausser. He just happened to have gone to the British school in Buenos Aires and this had left him with the enduring misconception that the British would accept him as one of their own. ‘That,’ as the girl with the squall of hair would have said, ‘makes him fucking Paraguayan.’

  Langan stamped off to find a dry shirt.

  ‘It’s a shit-hole, isn’t it?’ came a thick Argentine accent. Sitting alone at the bar was a lad of about my own age. He was a big, rangy individual who’d sprawled himself out along the counter in a way that I imagined was designed to irritate Langan. ‘The Bank of Boston took the snooker table back last week and next week they’re coming for the fridge. Bit by bit, they’re closing Norm down!’

  ‘Are you Argentine?’

  ‘Nope, Welsh.’

  ‘Ah.’ I scanned his face for traces of mockery. It was open and whiskery, quite incapable of deceit. ‘What part?’

  ‘Well, I’ve never actually been to Europe.’ He smiled. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Yes, I’m from Cheshire.’

  Gareth Llewelyn shook his head
. He didn’t know Cheshire. In fact, he’d been born in Paraguay but had never been further than Buenos Aires (‘lovely chicas’). His father was an engineer from Prestatyn and his mother was from Argentina.

  ‘I went to school in BA. The same one as dick-head here – only thirty years later.’

  United by the amusement we found in Langan, Gareth and I became allies. We drank six bottles from Langan’s dwindling stocks of Antarctica, and I promised that if I ever returned to Paraguay, I would look Gareth up. It now seems strange that in the space of a few minutes – in a place which aspired to be British (and wasn’t) – I should have met two individuals who aspired to be British (and weren’t) and who would both recur in my life over the next eighteen years. With this unhappy joint being shut down limb by limb, like financial gangrene, the portents for at least one of them were not good.

  9

  I’D TOLD GARETH that I had one more visit to make before I left Asunción, to see the Bishop of Paraguay. Although he’d been a colleague of my uncle (who was a missionary in Paraguay in the sixties), we were in two minds as to whether or not I should kiss his ring.

  ‘Has he got a palace?’

  I said that I didn’t think he had; he was an Anglican bishop. Even though I was clear about this, I still half expected him to be swathed in purple and ermine.

  The Bishop’s palace was in fact a little bungalow in a road off España Street. It wasn’t ‘downtown’ but it most definitely wasn’t ‘uptown’ either. España belonged to old Paraguay and it therefore fell within the boundaries of my affections. Most of the mansions had been built by Italian merchants at the beginning of the century and were now occupied by minor Latin American embassies, gynaecologists and Chinese restaurants. All day, lines of Mercedes rumbled up and down the street, ferrying the wealthy between their money and their Lego homes. At each of the crossroads were kiosks selling newspapers, General Alfredo lapel-pins and copies of the Paraguayan Constitution. España was the stiffly-asphalted spinal column of the city.