At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Read online

  The Bishop’s road was a little more modest, and the bungalow sat on a small plot, on the edge of a dainty handkerchief of lawn. There were potted plants around the door and all the woodwork was syruply varnished. At the back of the bungalow was a banana tree and an even smaller hutch, which housed some Indians that the Bishop had rescued from the Chaco. Because I was five minutes late, he and his wife were already waiting by the door.

  We have since talked about this encounter. This delightful, gentle couple remember me as being rather extravagantly polite and I remember them as being rather charmingly apprehensive. There were no rings or ermine. I was led straight through to the kitchen, which was crowded with missionaries and antique appliances, for a solid dinner of mince and noodle pie with tinned peaches.

  As I worked my way through several plates of mince and peaches, listening to the missionaries, I began to realise for the first time that there was another Paraguay, far removed from its serene, sensual and slightly snaky capital. To the east was the interior – steeped in forests and feudalism – and to the west the Chaco, a great derelict sea-bed of cactus, Indian black magic and estancias big enough to engulf the little republics of Europe. ‘My country, Paraguay,’ wrote the author Roa Bastos, ‘among other strange and unfortunate factors that have marked its destiny – is, in fact, one country divided into three, each one ignorant of the others.’

  Whilst the missionaries plotted the transfer of water and bibles into these countries within the country, Bishop Milmine busied himself with another pressing concern: Britain was at war with Argentina. We spread a map of the Falklands out among the condiments and planned the campaign. He was a canny tactician, a former bomber pilot of the North African campaign, but it was his wife who was the strategic genius. Ros planned the entire relief operation, mapping it out with pepper-pots and bottles of sauce and an old armadillo shell.

  There was nothing odd about the Bishop of Paraguay taking such a keen interest in the Falkland Islands. By a quirk of ecclesiastical geography, Paraguay had – until relatively recently – been part of the Diocese of the Falkland Islands. There were still a handful of people in Paraguay who could remember the Bishop of the Falkland Islands steaming up the Paraná to baptise them. Bishop Milmine was simply minding the old parish.

  As a final preparation for war, the Bishop insisted that I send a telegram to my parents telling them where I was heading: Arica, in Chile. We composed a frugal message and released it into the ether. It reassembled itself in Cheshire as ‘Safe. Gone Africa.’ It did very little to allay my parents’ now-blossoming concerns.

  10

  AT THE END of the Bishop’s road, an event had occurred that shook ‘Freddie’ – as the Bishop called the General – to the soles of his ridiculous jackboots. For that reason alone (although it had also been an act of chilling courage), I decided to visit the sites and poke my fingers in the scars.

  A few hundred yards uptown of the turning, at number 433 España, there was a dreary, modern orange-brick blob that wasn’t really mock-anything. It had industrial gates and a guardhouse and was next door to a rather fluffy pink ice-cream parlour. It was a perfect pied-à-terre for an old confederate of Don Alfredo’s: ex-president Anastasio Samoza Debayle of Nicaragua. Samoza was cut from much the same stuff as his Paraguayan friend. After twenty-three years of putting Nicaragua through a mincer of extortion and terror, Samoza finally bade farewell to his bleeding nation in July 1979. As a parting gesture, he bombed six cities and raided the National Bank. His departure was so rapid that all he was able to take with him was an armoury, the bodies of his father and his brother (who’d both been made safe by unhappy subjects some years before), several million dollars in cash and eight tropical parrots from his private zoo.

  Samoza arrived in Asunción a month later. There, he found everything to his liking and ploughed around town with his machine-gun posse. Supermarkets had to close whenever he paid a call and he even dallied with a few of Don Alfredo’s hand-me-downs. He bought a ranch, and then, fourteen months after his carnival arrival, he himself was smeared all over España.

  Whilst there is not really space in my Pantheon of Heroes for terrorists and communists, I have to confess a sneaking regard for the Argentine Montoneros who dispatched Samoza. They were veterans of the La Guerra Sucia – Argentina’s Dirty War – three women and four men. They reasoned that the death of Samoza would send a shock-wave of anxiety through the community of dictators who, at that time, deeply infested South America. ‘We cannot tolerate the existence of millionaire playboys,’ one said, ‘whilst thousands of Latin Americans are dying of hunger. We are perfectly willing to give up our lives for this cause.’

  The leader of the cadre, code-name ‘Ramón’, who’d cut his teeth blasting his way out of a military prison in Patagonia, led them first to Colombia. There, hidden away in the mountains, he toughened up the team. He’d even brought a little library to toughen up their minds; there was The Spy who Came in from the Cold, The House on Garibaldi Street and – rather symmetrically – The Day of the Jackal. In a country so deeply bedded in contraband, it wasn’t difficult to get their work tools into Asunción. They buried two assault rifles, two automatics, two Ingram sub-machine-guns, an RP-7 bazooka with two rockets and four fragmentation grenades under their rented patio, and awaited their moment.

  I walked back along España in the downtown direction. At the junction with Avenida Santisímo Sacramento, some newspaper boys were camped out in front of their kiosk, pawing over some magazines. Back then, one of the terrorists, ‘Oswaldo’, had joined them, disguising himself as a vendor but all the time watching the gates of 433.

  Further on, the gang had hired a rather plain-looking mansion that had – since then – been converted into a strangely liver-green Chinese restaurant called La Union. Their cover story this time was musical; they were in town with Julio Iglesias, making a film about Paraguay. This wasn’t such a pantomime excuse as it might seem; Julio Iglesias had already released two songs about Paraguay and the landlady was so steeped in flattery that she held her tongue until the big day, 17 September 1980.

  As Samoza and his cavalcade set out, Oswaldo sent a radio signal to the men in the house, who formed up in the front. Samoza’s Mercedes purred towards the mansion, and as it passed, the rocket-man pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Ramón started desperately pumping bullets into the car, and the metallic gale that he unleashed took most of the driver’s head off. The Mercedes, now unpiloted, veered into the pavement. The rocket-man extracted the dud projectile, fitted the spare, dropped to one knee and fired.

  Even eighteen months on, the asphalt still showed the ripples gouged by the explosion. The Mercedes had opened up like a tin of peaches. Samoza and his rodent lieutenant could count themselves immediately departed, and most of Samoza’s economic adviser followed, through many holes torn in the metalwork. The bewildered Nicaraguan primitives in the car behind were firing back, but the Montoneros had gone.

  Once again, Pastor Coronel’s pyragüés swung into action. This time, they were barking up the right sort of trees, but too late. All the birds had flown and – with one exception – had made it back to Barcelona, their rendezvous. The one exception was Hugo Irarzún, the rocket-man, who was easily picked out for his blond beard and who died in a blizzard of Paraguayan bullets. The survivors disappeared and never came forward to claim any glory. ‘I left Paraguay with a bleeding ulcer,’ wrote one of them in an anonymous memoir many years on. ‘It took me three months to get it under control. That isn’t a romantic experience.’

  The General hadn’t found it an easy experience either. The cabal behaved exactly as the Montoneros had hoped they would; they reacted with wibbling funk. All the borders were sealed. No one came in and no one left the country. Nothing moved – not even the National Geographic team who’d arrived to put a glossy face on Paraguay. The President started to abandon sleep, and filigrees of eczema began to nibble their way up his arms like a scourge. He took to ringing divisional
headquarters in the night, desperately trying to gauge their loyalty. Like Faust, he’d left himself with little room for manoeuvre.

  11

  NEARLY FIFTEEN YEARS passed before I visited Paraguay again, in December 1996. The changes that I’d sensed stirring then had indeed occurred, although not quite in the way that I or anyone else had ever really expected. Asunceños had enjoyed a rare moment of pleasure with the Falklands War, and when, later that year, the Argentines toppled their own general, the Paraguayans began to see that they too didn’t need to accommodate a general in the palace. In 1988, marchers took to the streets, and Don Alfredo suddenly found that those who challenged him were too numerous to be bundled out of aeroplanes

  But the crunch came, as so often in Paraguayan politics, from behind. The General, who was now so raddled with nervous afflictions that he could hardly put his bumpkin signature on a warrant, began to make plans for his succession. Freddie Junior had put himself out of the running because his mind only functioned on a spoon of cocaine (eventually, after a particularly heavy scoop, his cardiovascular system simply imploded). That left the other son, Gustavo, who the army loathed partly because he was an air force boy and partly because he was loudly homosexual. That is when Don Alfredo’s old buddy, his tippling friend and Minister of Smuggling, General Andrés Rodríguez, saw a chance to make a break.

  No two Paraguayans will agree on what had come over Rodríguez. It may be that, by reason of his daughter’s marriage to senseless Freddie Junior, he’d felt that he’d acquired some sort of arcane right of succession.

  Gareth Llewelyn would have another theory that involved a vicious little dwarf in the cavalry called Colonel Lino Oviedo.

  ‘He put Rodríguez up to it. He put a granada to the old boy’s face.’ Gareth was pressing an imaginary hand grenade to his nose. ‘And he said: “Either we have a golpe de estado or we both fucking well go pop!” That’s what happened.’

  Certainly, Oviedo – ‘the Bonsai Horseman’ – would, from now on, be more than just a little pip on the Paraguayan political landscape, but Gareth’s version didn’t have that patina of authenticity. I favoured the idea that Rodríguez was seeking beatitude (after all, he had everything else), because only this explains what he did afterwards.

  Whatever the reason, Rodríguez cleared it with the two bodies that mattered – the Church and the American Embassy – and then, on 2 February 1989, started letting off the guns.

  Don Alfredo was caught – quite literally – with his pants down, round at Miss Legal’s love nest. Buckling himself back in, he hurried off to rally his Praetorian guard, and the two generals fought a bad-tempered artillery duel over the city. It was a muddled fight; years of indolence had rendered the leaders incapable of giving sensible orders, and the Praetorian tanks couldn’t be deployed because the man who had the keys was with his mistress in the country. By the morning it was all over, and three days later, Don Alfredo was on a plane to exile in Brazil. He must have seen something coming, because he had a private air-strip and a retirement home all ready and waiting for him.

  After thirty-four years, Stroessner’s tyranny – the most enduring in the western hemisphere – had come to an end. It had been the second-longest dictatorship in the world, outlasted only by that of Kim Il Sung. Now, suddenly, the Stronato was over. Or was it?

  At first, the signs weren’t encouraging. The ‘General Stroessner Polka’ wasn’t heard again, but it was replaced by the ‘Rodríguez Polka’ (‘God bless you, General Rodríguez and the Armed Forces’). The Rodríguez family then appeared on television, shoulder-to-shoulder with the starry-eyed Freddie Junior; it made the golpe – or coup d’état – seem like nothing more than the resolution of a family tiff.

  But then – extraordinarily – General Rodríguez announced that he’d done what he’d done ‘to defend democracy, for the respect of human rights and the defence of our Christian religion’. What had got into him? Perhaps he’d become a saint – or perhaps he’d felt the sinister nuzzle of his cancer and was trying to buy himself a cooler spot in Purgatory?

  Either way, changes began. The President, who’d once been banned from the United States for heroin trafficking, signed a human rights treaty. The death penalty was abolished. Martial law, which had been in force since 1929, was gradually lifted. The intelligent organ of the pyragüés – known as La Técnica – which for a while had trundled on, gathering files as if nothing had happened, was wound up. After some judicious pruning, the files were made public. They were the work of an admirable bureaucracy; there were files on Indians, files on Nazis, files on informers (including a Catholic bishop) and even files on those who’d died under torture, marked ‘empaquetado’, or ‘packaged’.

  To everyone’s surprise, Rodríguez instituted some gentle investigations into the activities of the ancien régime (though his saintliness fell short of allowing anyone to peer into his own past). The great bulk of Pastor Coronel was rounded up and carted away. The court jester, Abdo, was also arrested, although the circumstances were more peculiar. He’d been in Brazil when the golpe happened and only returned after it was over. To the Paraguayans, this was vintage Abdo.

  ‘Why did you come back?’ he was asked.

  ‘Well,’ Abdo replied, ‘the boss always told me that if ever there was trouble, I was to head straight for the border.’

  In the end, only seven of the old cabal went to prison – not a prison with the common criminals, of course, but a pad called ‘The Special Group’, where they could dial out for drinks and pornography.

  The greatest surprise of all was that free elections were held. The first was rushed through so quickly that nobody except the General’s old party, the Colorado Party, was ready. It was therefore won by the egregious Rodríguez. The second was won by his choice, Juan Wasmosy, who claimed to have been descended from Hungarian aristocracy. Wasmosy was also – blue blood notwithstanding – a civil engineer, and had become suspiciously sumptuous whilst mixing concrete on an expensive dam project. In the end, he too ended up on multiple criminal charges, but for the time being, many old stronistas were surprised – and no doubt delighted – to find that they still had a place in his government.

  Graham Greene had ended his travels in the ‘sad and lovely land’ of Paraguay in 1961 by promising himself that he would never return there whilst Stroessner and those that guzzled with him still lived. Sadly, the Stroessner Set all outlived Greene, who died in 1991. I was certainly not capable of assuming such a noble and ambitious resolution as Greene’s. Besides, there was the grim prospect that the Stronato might, in different guises and new skins, just rumble on for ever. I couldn’t wait any longer, and so, at the end of 1996, I returned to Asunción, on a flying visit.

  12

  I STAYED AT the Hotel Guaraní. It was not a great success. The hotel flunkies seemed if anything slightly less interested in my contentment now than they had been when I was an intruder. To get across the swimming pool, I now had to nose my way through a froth of flies. Sometimes, I got lost in the gloomy upper floors of the hotel and found myself in rooms that had been abandoned long ago and that were heaped with dirty plates and sheets and dusty scraps of food. Some years later, the hotel was abandoned altogether, and when I next saw it, it was wreathed in soot and was being slowly devoured by tropical succulents.

  I paid a visit to my old hotel, the Hispania. The Mennonites had long gone. Appalled at the new liberal order, ‘Mexicans’ tried to avoid Asunción now, and besides, the new Korean owners of the pensión had painted it white, like an old bridesmaid, and decorated it with parrot feathers and a large photograph of the docks at Seoul. The Anabaptists had drifted elsewhere.

  The rains came early. Hot, bright-red water foamed through the streets. An oil tanker crashed in the Plaza de Los Héroes and a guard was mounted over the wreckage, dressed – I thought – like the Afrika Korps.

  I took a bus up to Carmelitas to see the house that General Rodríguez was living in. The bus conductress was wearing tig
hts patterned with elongated tigers, leaping up into her knickers. The rain got hotter and more intense.

  Rodríguez’s house was a worthy tourist attraction because it was the nearest thing that South America had to a Palace of Versailles. I stood in the long wet grass gaping up at the crenellations and turrets. It had a turquoise roof that had been flown in, tile by tile, from France. When someone once asked the old emir how he could enjoy such lavish bijoux on $500 a month, he’d wafted away their impertinence: ‘I gave up smoking.’

  Too late, it seems. Cancer was now gnawing its way through the sainted smuggler. Meanwhile, the map of Paraguay had been de-Stroessnered, and Don Alfredo’s statue had been chopped up and set in concrete so that now, just one cold bronze eye peeped out, and a finger, harmlessly admonishing the drunks in the new Plaza de los Desaparecidos – the Square of the Disappeared.

  Gone too was the Shakespeare. It had served its function and had succumbed to the vagaries of the new order. The Korean pharmacist now used it as a store for his roots and bones and jars of jaguar’s paws.

  I looked up Reynaldo Gosling and found that he’d made good and moved to Legoland, but I couldn’t bear to see him there and so I let our friendship go.

  The beggars too had succumbed, as everybody knew they would, to their war wounds and to whisky-tipo. The drunks were different now: handsome, russet-faced mestizos who babbled merrily in Guaraní. They railed at the pornography in the Plaza de Los Héroes, and at the plump prostitutes who possessed Uruguaya by night, and at the policemen, taunting them because their rifles were so old and their boots too big.