At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Read online

  ‘He wasn’t hit at all.’

  ‘So what’s happened to him?’

  The scientist smiled. ‘He disappeared. He’s never been seen since.’

  18

  I BOOKED INTO The Gran Hotel, just off España. On the day I arrived, the lobby was heaped with baggage and boxes like an upturned stagecoach. A young American couple were defending it against waiters and porters and other perplexed bystanders.

  ‘We’ve gotta get out of here,’ they said. They looked grey and strained, at the very end of their tether. ‘What are you doing in Paraguay? You’re going to hate it.’

  ‘I think I like it, actually.’

  The frontiersmen looked at me sceptically. ‘We tried to settle.’

  His wife shuddered. ‘There’s no money, no credit, no drains.’

  ‘There’s gonna be a catastrophe,’ said the husband.

  ‘Real soon,’ said the wife, backing away to swat the bellhops off her bags.

  The husband turned on me. ‘What are you here for?’

  ‘I’m just a tourist …’

  ‘There’s nothing to see. Go home.’

  19

  I’D ARRIVED BACK in Asunción in the aftermath of an uprising, the coup of May 2000. It was conceived in Plaza Independencia and aborted two blocks east. I hurried down there, uncertain what I expected to find.

  Plaza Independencia had always been one of my favourite places in Asunción. Sometimes it seemed as though I was the only person that felt that way, because it was often deserted and the tree roots were beginning to barge their way up through the chequered paving-tiles. The plinth where the tank had stood was still there – now mounted with a derelict car that was regularly set on fire, stoned and beaten with twigs. It seemed to bear the entire brunt of Asunción’s anger.

  The square still had a discernibly Parisian air about it. Or rather, it looked as Paris would have looked if it had been overrun by Indians from the plains. The air was often itchy with their wood-smoke.

  The gardens had been laid out in the 1870s, when malnourished Napoleonic nostalgia was one of the few things that survived la Grande Guerra. There were marble obelisks, frilly iron benches and – rather wistfully – victory columns. In those dark days, López’s heroism wasn’t fully appreciated and so the lack of statuesque heroes was addressed in an original and – to me – delightful way. The plinths were mounted with innocent creatures – a large bronze frog, a deer and a skinny whippet. Each was stamped ‘Rue de Voltaire, Paris’ and inquisitive fingers still fondled and polished their ears and nostrils and enormous balls.

  The Indians were camped right up the other end, in front of Congress. They lived in plastic tents that seeped smoke and dissatisfaction. ‘We are the Dispossessed of Kilometre-70!’ said their banners, and that was all that was said. The Indians clustered on the grass in silence – shoeless, landless, hopeless.

  But it wasn’t an entirely hopeless place. Every now and then, kindly Asunceños came down into the plaza and fed the unhappy Indians or treated their callused feet or just stood near them, scowling at the Congress. When all the hairdressers and barbers swooped down on the city’s waifs with clippers and combs and soothing powders, I felt my eyes prickle with tiny, hot pins of shame. One of the barbers spotted me and knew immediately: ‘You’re foreign, aren’t you?’

  *

  A small memorial garden had erupted among the chequered tiles. ‘Bless the young Martyrs of March 1999! They gave their lives to make us free …’ Just as their bodies had been scattered across these tiles, so now were their names. It was a smouldering mantra, dashed off in aerosol, seared into wood and deeply cut in plaques of steel. Manfred, Tomás, Henry, Victor, Armando, Cristobal …

  No one had ever been arrested for their deaths. The bullet casings had been gathered up and lost and vital clues were hosed away with all the blood. There was never an inquiry, let alone the penetrating inquisition that the atrocity deserved. ‘A dead man,’ wrote Greene thirty years before, in a different age, ‘makes no trouble for anyone. They don’t have coroners in Paraguay.’

  So, Manfred, Tomás and Henry and friends would drift off to another world with Professor Argaña – who they’d come to mourn – never knowing who’d dispatched them.

  The flowers had withered on their little garden and another year had passed before violence bloomed again. This time, however, it would be bloodless and quixotic.

  On 18 May 2000, the Congresso was hit by a high-velocity tank round.

  It had always been a duchess of a building, slightly stooped and eccentrically swagged in brilliant flamingo pinks. An uncouth wild animal had now taken a mouthful from her flanks and poor Alan Taylor’s immaculate brickwork looked crumpled and exposed, like a torn bodice. A foxtrot of bullet holes wandered from the cloisters, across the front of the façade and up into the pediment.

  There was a lone peanut seller, out to the front, with his barrow.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  It wasn’t going to be that easy. First, he needed to know what country I was from. England. Then there were the usual preliminaries to be established.

  ‘Who paid for your ticket? How is the fog in London?’

  I told him that this was business and that the fog had miraculously cleared. He nodded knowingly, as if I’d confirmed what was already rumoured.

  ‘Two months ago,’ he began ‘this little tank came from the Chaco. The government were watching him coming. He crossed the bridge. Nobody stopped him.’ The peanut man sunk his thumbnail into a husk.

  ‘They could have hit him with a bazooka on the bridge but they let him come. He came down into town and rolled into the square over there.’ He waved his arm in the direction of the frog and whippet.

  ‘He stopped just here,’ the tank had pulled up next to the peanut barrow, ‘and just started firing.’

  ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘Of course not. It was the middle of the night. I was in bed – with my missus. But we knew this was another golpe all right.’

  ‘Was it just the tank?’

  He shrugged. ‘There were meant to be others, but they never showed up.’

  A small dog came over and started licking the mercante’s toes. I was feeling rather puzzled.

  ‘So what happened to the tank?’

  ‘It carried on down there. Only two blocks.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then it ran out of petrol.’

  The golpe too ran out of puff. All that night, units of the army had come forward to swear their allegiance to the government. By dawn, there were only a handful of rank-and-file constables locked up in their own cells. The Interior Minister – the one who’d sprung from Stroessner’s unstoppable loving – began to torture them.

  I turned back to the peanut seller. ‘Was this all Lino’s work?’

  He grinned. ‘Lino is in Brazil.’

  ‘So who was behind the golpe?’

  ‘You’re a clever man from England,’ he said, patting my arm. ‘You tell me.’

  20

  I WAS THRILLED to be back in Asunción. It didn’t matter that there was so much that I didn’t understand. I wasn’t even sure whether the Paraguayans understood themselves. I suspected that they were letting on rather more than they actually knew. This in itself simply became another aspect of Paraguay that I just couldn’t fathom.

  Most of the time, I contented myself with what I could see. It was never difficult to be satisfied. Winter was retreating, taking with it the vicious pamperos that had whipped up from Antarctica. The air was becoming warmer and mellifluous and life was slowing to just a few frames per second. Someone had painted ‘Restless!’ along Independencia, but what they really meant was listless. The oranges ripened and flopped thickly into the grass. Carts with rubber wheels carried the heavy fruits away to the viviendas, and for the rest of spring, the city’s ragged foundlings would look plump and sticky.

  There was still that old sense of intimacy. Although there were now well o
ver a million people in Asunción, it had somehow sustained the illusion that everybody knew each other, that there was a commonality of purpose, a quiet confederacy. I suppose I felt like this partly because I couldn’t interpret the Paraguayan reserve, the silence on the buses, the absence of rage.

  But there was something else as well. Many people lived out their lives on the street and I would see the same people time and time again: watchmen grilling meat, money-changers with satchels of bank-notes, tarot-card readers, shoe-shiners, Maká Indians hawking frail weapons. Somehow, their lives seemed to be so unjustifiably self-contained. They had territories and huddles and days that were rhythmical, almost ritualistic. In the stark light of hindsight, this was perhaps nothing more than a variant of poverty, but their completeness puzzled me. They seemed to have no requirement for interaction and certainly no curiosity for a foreigner – even though there were so few of us. Most of the time, I therefore enjoyed the ghostly and rather satisfying sensation of invisibility.

  But best of all, I liked the oddities of Asunción. The buses were known by fractions of numbers, like ‘30.3’, and had long chrome whiskers, as if they were going to feel their way through the traffic. Large packs of dogs took themselves for sober walks in public gardens. The Virgin Mary was a Field Marshal and her statues wore the sash of office. There were no crash helmets, and – on little notices – people were advised not to urinate on plants. It wasn’t unusual to see either ice-cream sellers with flutes, or tipper-trucks packed with soldiers of Imperial Prussia. Once, I even saw a man with a large crucifix, festooned with bags of goldfish. What was so odd was that he wasn’t even mad.

  The policemen shared machine-guns and the City Hall issued rash, intemperate pronouncements: ‘The public hospital will close!’ or ‘376,000 dogs to be inoculated!’ Some dark corners were for lepers and others were for willowy transvestites. All roads – if the signs were to be believed – led to McDonald’s. Even the graffiti was consistently impenetrable: ‘Jump with us! BOING!’ or just ‘We want the end of the world’ and a picture of a frog.

  Of course there had been a few more changes. The Hotel Guaraní had gone. The Korean pharmacies were disappearing under wreaths of wiring. The statue in Plaza de Los Héroes (angel wrestling with comic-strip hero), previously dedicated to the Anti-Communist League, was re-dedicated to the struggles against the Stronato.

  There were just as many Mercedes but the pornography had become rather more extravagant. It was even full-frontaled on phone-cards. Oswaldo the Terrorist’s kiosk on España now sold magazines about blondes coupled up to donkeys and golden retrievers. I asked the newsboys what they felt about Samoza’s assassination nowadays. Oddly, there was no change there.

  ‘It was an outrage. Those Argentines are such fucking whores.’

  I did make another attempt to try to make sense of the golpe. I had tea with a lady who, between great swoops of omelette, told me that the whole thing was a sort of dumb-show put on by the government, though she couldn’t think why they would have done that. Another teatime I spent with a very impressive and well-upholstered lawyer who thought that the coup was real enough but half-hearted. The government had allowed the tank to rumble into Asunción; this would bring the opposition out from beneath their stones.

  I asked him about Lino Oviedo.

  ‘I met him once,’ he puffed, ‘and in my considered opinion, he is somewhat mad.’

  ‘Was he behind the coup?’

  The lawyer thought he was. Then, soon afterwards, President Macchi was asked if he had himself had head-to-heads with Lino’s lieutenants, the so-called Oviedistas.

  ‘No. No,’ the President protested. ‘Estuve comiendo un asidito nomás con ellos’ (‘I only had a little barbecue with them’).

  I began to realise that my simple goal – comprehension – was probably unsustainable. Then events took a sinister and slightly surreal turn. The golpe detainees complained that they were being regularly beaten with plastic rods, blindfolded with packing tape and hermetically sealed into their cells. Unlike before, however, this time their lawyers were on the move, blasting off writs of habeas corpus and invoking the Magna Carta. It was all vaguely encouraging, I suppose, but far removed from the fishponds of Runnymede.

  21

  I FOUND GARETH on a mobile number and we arranged to meet at The Bolsi. I would rather have met at The Lido, but then I remembered that its breezy, inward-looking counters had made Gareth fidgety and tense. The Bolsi, on the other hand, was darker and Germanic and the air was slick with vapours of milky coffee and spinach. It was owned by an unctuous little drunk called Tito Valiante, who kept declaring that he was at my disposal. His mother, they say, had been at his; he’d put three bullets in her head and inherited her restaurant.

  I arrived before Gareth and threaded through the office girls to find some seats. They were pretty girls with fine, strong cheek-bones, nectarine complexions and manes of twinkly gold. Their clothes were arguably undersized, cupping little breasts upwards and making them taut and teasingly fruitesque. Those who weren’t chewing on cigarettes were busying themselves with roasted chickens. Some were working on both.

  Gareth was, as before, ebullient, and lurched in grinning and waving. The beard was slightly different and the scars had paled. He looked waxy and exhausted. I was scooped up in an abrazo and patted and cuffed. ‘Hey, John! Cómo está?’

  He stood back and studied me critically, the tip of his tongue lolling in the corner of his mouth. It was not an expression that I could make sense of. He smelt faintly gingerish.

  ‘Where’s your wife?’ he asked, and started patting me again as if I kept her in my pocket.

  ‘She had to work.’

  He was satisfied with this but bitterly disappointed that we still had no children.

  ‘We’re happy that way,’ I protested, but he waved this aside. Every man should have lots of niños, he insisted, especially an Englishman. He kept returning to the subject and casting his eye among the girls, picking out any that he thought I should impregnate.

  ‘How’s life, Gareth?’

  ‘Fantástico! Siempre fantastic!’ he said. He still didn’t have a job and his exams had become a Sisyphean endeavour; every time he neared the end of the course, a momentary lapse of effort or attendance would roll him back to the beginning. His mother supported him and he had a smelly flat near the port.

  ‘Do you live alone?’

  He made a half-hearted noise that was supposed to indicate that a trail of lovers came and went. Otherwise, yes, he lived alone.

  ‘I am sure you have a dog,’ I tried.

  ‘No, mice,’ he said. ‘I hunt mice.’

  22

  LINO OVIEDO WAS ARRESTED in Brazil.

  When the police burst into his sensuous apartment in Foz do Iguaçu, they found him holed up with a revolver and a magnificent ladies’ wig of auburn hair. He’d been using ten mobile telephones. ‘We have over ninety hours of recorded telephone conversations,’ said a weary spokesman from the Shock Police. ‘The man just couldn’t stop talking …’

  His arrest triggered a whole new range of problems. Whether he was a terrorist, a transsexual or just a trumped-up little cavalier, he would have been the Paraguayan choice in a straight election. The government asked the Brazilians to return him, but it was the last thing they wanted.

  Gareth had become an Oviedista.

  ‘He is the only one. Solamente Lino. Todos los otros son mafiosi. He is fuerte – really fuerte. He can take those bastards. Puede, puede … he can stop mafiosi.’ He bailed some sugar into his coffee whilst I tried to disentangle his languages. He never touched beer nowadays, he said.

  I was surprised at Gareth. ‘I heard that Lino is a homosexual.’

  ‘Who cares who you fuck? No me importa.’

  It occurred to me that Gareth might also have a Stronista tendency. I wondered how to broach the subject.

  ‘Do you think Stroessner fucked children?’

  Gareth looked surprised ‘C
hildren?’

  ‘You know – niños. The fourteen-year-old …’

  Gareth laughed. The sound was crackled and dry.

  ‘Listen, John. If she’s got thirty-two kilos, she’s ready.’

  23

  THE GRAN HOTEL had once been out in the countryside and it had captured a last little bit of jungle within its walls before Asunción swarmed up the hill and surrounded it with mansions.

  The jungle was held in small courtyards of red and white cloisters. The ferns and palms were flecked with parakeets and were so dense that, after dark, they hissed and rattled with eerie and vaguely disconcerting noises. All the rooms, which were cool and shuttered, smelt faintly of forest.

  Surprisingly, there were clearings in these miniature forests. One contained a brilliant blue scoop of swimming pool. In another, there was a tennis court with a crimson surface that glued itself to everything. Tennis shoes turned pink and players were drenched in vermilion. By ‘one set to love’, they’d be lobbing clods of fluffy red clay back and forth across the net.

  At the far end of the gardens was a dire warning in several languages. ‘Don’t go in there,’ said the English effort, ‘in where an he animals may hit you very badly.’ A tiny deer with a nose of shiny toffee was pressed up against the wire. Beyond the harmless menagerie, there was only the hit-you-very-badly city.

  There were woodlands of a different nature in the ballroom.

  Here, the creepers and vines weren’t of muscular, fertile Paraguayan stock but were neatly dabbed on walls with sable brushes and tiny mops of gold. Here were faux trellises of pretty, pale fruits – grapes, peaches and juiceless apples – and trompes of plump game and loping fawns. The patron of this art had been homesick for Les Tuileries of 1850, for Paris in the autumn and for the delicate shades of the Bois de Boulogne. She’d brought with her strange imaginings: weird creatures – grouse, pheasants and lobsters – and the peculiar trimmings of imperial power – swords, drums and coronets. Then she’d put her astonished Guaraní artists to work, recreating the salons of St Germain here in the stifling, tropical folds of central South America.