At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Read online

  The only peculiar thing about this was that she wasn’t French at all. She was Irish, born in Cork in 1835 and weaned in poverty just a few, skinny years before the Great Potato Famine.

  Her name was Eliza Alicia Lynch. She was about to become the most enduring and undeserving heroine in the history of Paraguay. In her own lifetime she was both loved and loathed, a pattern which has continued more or less unchanged ever since. But if it were possible to clamber into the Paraguayan psyche, one would still find her there, in brilliant white ball-dress – armed, bloodied and erotic – rising above the wreckage of the nation as Delacroix’s Greece had risen above the ruins of Missolonghi.

  The truth was more prosaic, but no less startling.

  24

  SOME YEARS BEFORE Don Carlos Antonio López drowned in his own bodily fluids, he sent his heir, Francisco Solano, to Europe. The young Francisco had begun to make a nuisance of himself by violating the daughters of the gentry, and so, in September 1853, Don Carlos sent him off to purchase the tools of imperial grandeur.

  The trip was a success. Francisco arrived in Paris with a cast of forty and found himself delighted. He planted a willow at the tomb of the heroic poet Alfred de Musset, and when he saw Les Invalides, he decided that Paraguay should have a copy. He got a tailor to fit him out like his champion, Napoleon Bonaparte, and had the magnificent uniform topped off with a few flourishes of his own – some lace, some ostrich feathers and a huge pair of silver spurs.

  Now gloriously attired, he strutted the Paraguayan national purse among the merchants, scattering cash around a coterie of sycophants and opportunists. He bought himself seventy pairs of patent leather boots and several trunks of outlandish military costumes.

  Francisco Solano even had an audience with Bonaparte’s nephew, the deflated Napoleon III. Here accounts of López’s Parisian adventures – particularly among Mr Washburn’s American disciples – become a little overheated. They have López squeaking before the Emperor in clothes so obscenely tight that he could hardly walk. Their Empress Eugenie vomits when López plants a kiss on her. Whilst it is true that López’s teeth would one day become so putrid that his agonies could only be soothed with schooners of brandy, for the moment he had the ability to raise a little charm. There would be plenty of opportunities for the monster in him later.

  That is not to say that the French appreciated his charms. They found him frankly distasteful, and behind his fatty back, they called him the ‘half-civilised monkey in the mountebank attire’. The Paraguayan retinue was blissfully unaware of the ridicule and set off on holiday.

  They went to Spain and then on to Rome, where they bought a presidential dinner service. Then they set off again, cruising down to the Crimea to watch the Europeans tear each other limb from limb with exciting new weapons. Francisco was deeply impressed by the grandiosity of annihilation – and by the technology that could deliver it. He had to have some.

  He set off for England, but its government was unimpressed by ‘the man from Paraguay’. López was disappointed that Queen Victoria was unable to see him.

  ‘I am,’ she instructed her staff, ‘quite too busy to see the little savage.’

  There was only one other setback: Francisco had hoped to visit the armourers of Manchester, but when he heard a rumour of cholera, he decided that a trip to the north wasn’t worth the risk to his health. He found what he wanted in Limehouse in the East End of London. Alfred Blyth & Co. sold him several thousand muskets and a gunboat which he called Tacuarí. They also provided him with a body of engineers, who would, it was hoped, haul Paraguay into the nineteenth century.

  Francisco had not been neglecting his ravenous sexual urges, and back on St Germain, he was hauling himself on and off selected courtesans. Then one of them stopped him in his sweaty tracks.

  She was a young woman of slender and translucent beauty. All through her life she’d have a devastating effect on men, stripping them of their better judgement and fomenting dangerous urges and unruly bravado. The effect on López – and ultimately Paraguay – was disastrous, but he was by no means the only man bewitched. Even that sniggering Argentine hack Varela was left gibbering. His prose simply jellified:

  She was tall and of supple and delicate figure with exquisite and seductive curves. Her skin was alabaster. Her eyes were of a blue that seems borrowed from the very hues of heaven and had an expression of ineffable sweetness in whose depth the light of cupid was enthroned. Her beautiful lips were indescribably expressive of the voluptuous, moistened by the ethereal dew that God must have provided to lull the fires within her, a mouth that was like a cup of delight at the banquet table of ardent passion …

  This heaven-sent vision was of course Eliza Alicia Lynch, or – as she was known professionally – ‘Madame Lynch, Instructress of Languages’. Although López would never restrict his ardency to Eliza, she’d be his soul-mate, the mother of seven of his children and the survivor of his madness. It was she alone who was with him at his agonising death.

  She was his most dazzling acquisition so far.

  Eliza would have said that it was she who acquired López. She’d been considering how to secure her future for some time. She was now eighteen and couldn’t rely on her looks to keep her in truffles indefinitely. For some years she’d been living dangerously close to penury, surviving on a series of connections negotiated between expensive sheets.

  On reflection, she’d been keeping only one step ahead of poverty ever since the Lynches fled the Irish famine in 1845. She’d found brief respite in a marriage when she was fifteen. A French army vet called Xavier Quatrefages had whisked Eliza over the Channel to take advantage of both her and the indulgent Common Law. The couple were married at landfall, Folkestone, in the parish church. It was a short-lived match spent in blistering army camps in Algeria and it all ended when Eliza caught her eye on a Russian. That too had proved an insecure tenure, and she was now begging – to borrow Varela’s words – with her cup of delight at the banquet table of ardent passion.

  When this slightly exotic, explosively potent sultan dandled her on his fleshy knee and murmured of his empire in South America, the future began to map itself out in front of her. When she discovered that she was pregnant with his baby, the way offered became the only way out. There would be little future for her in Paris with a hungry runt, half Irish, a bit Spanish, a bit Guaraní, a tad negro and goodness knows what else. She agreed to accompany him home on the Tacuarí.

  25

  ON 11 NOVEMBER 1854, the Tacuarí set sail. Paraguay was 13,000 miles away.

  Eliza Lynch had no idea if she’d ever see Europe again and was determined to take as much of it with her as the Tacuarí would carry. In the hold was the hardware and the flummery of the new Paraguay. There were the boxes of guns and bayonets and sabres. Then there were the seventy pairs of boots, each with raised heels and silver garnishes, and the presidential dinner service. Best of all were the things that she and Francisco had thrown in after a delirious flurry round Paris: crates of Tokay and French brandy, bolts of muslin, satin and lace, gauzy parasols, matching sewing-machines and several jewelled coiffures, perfumes, perfumed gloves, vials of essences and sandalwood fans, makeup pomades, a Venetian mirror, a chiffonier, heaps of exquisite porcelains, two more dinner services (one Sèvres, one Limoges), a Pleydel grand piano, a presidential landau and an American buggy.

  It took nearly three months to heave this cargo and its spooning owners across the ocean and up the Plate, the Paraná and the doleful Paraguay, to Asunción.

  The Asunceños were on the quayside to watch them dock. Here was Paraguay’s first-ever metal gunboat delivering her first-ever blonde.

  As eager as they were to see her, Eliza Lynch was keen to review her new subjects. She’d already sailed through the territory of the Guaycurús, who would have happily ripped her pretty scalp off if she’d put so much as a satin toe on the eastern bank of the river.

  The sight that greeted her on the quayside was not encouraging;
her admiring citizens were roughly dressed in a sort of toga called a tipoi, that left one breast exposed. They were puffing on foul cigars and had some of the most extravagant hookworm in the world. An English traveller, arriving three years earlier, had reported that, of the ladies he saw, ‘only one is good-looking (and many of them have goitre) but she is very handsome …’

  Don Carlos was also on the quayside. He didn’t look encouraging either. He was furious. His spies had warned him that Francisco was returning with a fancy lady who was neither diplomatically useful, nor rich, nor virgo intacta.

  ‘What,’ he sloshed, through angry folds of oedema, ‘is my son doing with this ramera Irlandesa?’

  It became all too clear what Francisco had been doing with ‘the Irish Strumpet’ when she stepped on to the gangway, blooming in lilac gown and matching bonnet. Don Carlos blubbered with rage and ordered his buggy away. He managed not to address a civilised word to Miss Lynch for the next – and last – seven years of his pusillanimous life.

  There was hardly a more civilised reaction from the so-called Asunción gentry. They’d never held their rutting, greasy-pawed Infante in great affection, and when he returned with this hoity-toity little filly, they were green with admiration.

  The diplomats articulated their contempt. The British Minister declared Eliza Lynch to be ‘an Irish Pompadour’. The French Minister, Monsieur Cochelet, was less oblique.

  ‘I would,’ he announced, ‘as soon break bread with a nigger as accept a morsel from that devious Irish slut.’

  Eliza could expect even less charity from the patricians themselves. They went to great lengths to ignore her. But she knew – because she’d hired her own pyragüés – what they called her. It was the same old slings and arrows; the Whore, the Irish Hussy, La Concubina Irlandesa …

  In hindsight, Eliza wasn’t helped by the fact that her old professional name had survived the voyage. She’d seldom been ‘Miss Lynch’, occasionally ‘Mrs Lynch’ and never ‘Madame Quatrefages’. For now – and for ever – she’d be known among her uncertain minions, the Paraguayans, as Madame Lynch.

  López’s own family were hardly any warmer in their reception. Don Carlos was, of course, maintaining his wall of watery silence. His wife, Doña Juana, joined him in his determined spat, rocking backwards and forwards in her crib, babbling, ‘I will not accept that woman! I will not accept that woman!’

  Their other children – Francisco’s siblings – were as repulsive as their parents and equally as determined to be vile to the girl from Cork. There were two sisters, Innocencia and Rafaela, who – according to the waspish Varela (he’d regained his grip) – occasionally appeared in public ‘decked out like Bavarian eggs’. Then there were two brothers, Venancio and Benigno – both lush, elephantine and probably syphilitic. Venancio had grossly underdeveloped sexual organs and busied himself trying to stuff them into unwilling young virgins. He continued to make a pest of himself in this way until Francisco found him a more profitable position, as the admiral of the nonexistent Paraguayan Fleet.

  They all refused to speak to La Concubina Irlandesa.

  Madame Lynch would in due course have her revenge.

  The Argentines watched the developments upriver with a sense of helpless, breathless hilarity. ‘Big chief Francisco,’ ran the Buenos Aires press, ‘now has a ridiculous Indian squaw.’ Asunción had become ‘a dismal collection of wigwams’.

  It wouldn’t be long now before they too found their smirks spattered across their faces.

  26

  THERE WERE ONLY a handful of other guests at my hotel and they were all very ancient. In fact, they were all so old that, every other day, an American doctor came up to The Gran to see how much longer they’d be. The doctor had a stoop and an old-fashioned instrument bag and a silver pocket-watch, as if he’d just popped out of a nursery rhyme. He left his patients with small brown envelopes of pills which, at breakfast time, they obediently poured in their tea.

  I was intrigued by these elderly gentlemen, but they stubbornly refused to register my presence. Their obduracy was admirable. I tried saying good morning to them in a range of languages. Each morning, at breakfast, I tried a different one – Spanish, German, English, French – and I even looked up the Guaraní (‘mba’ eichapa ne ko’e, karai’). There was not a flicker of response.

  I’d pinned all my hopes on the German breakfast. The hotel was, after all, owned by the Weiler family. Old Bobby Weiler had been an energetic Nazi in the thirties, and the hotel dining room had been a rallying point for Germans and Austrians who saw the future in Prussian field-grey. Their numbers – it was said – were swelled by the crew of the Graf Spee, who’d wandered up the River Plate after their battleship was scuttled.

  ‘Guten Morgen!’ I trilled. Not an eyelid moved.

  That left only two options: dementia and disapproval. When I saw one of them give another a bottle of chocolate brandy, I was forced to the conclusion that it had to be disapproval.

  My fellow guests, I decided, were the noble heirs to Asunción’s old patricians. Or perhaps even their ghosts.

  27

  MADAME LYNCH SET ABOUT establishing her court.

  First, she and her paramour took separate houses to maintain a semblance of decency (though no one can have thought the storks were bringing all those babies). To maintain an aura of sophistication, they addressed each other only in French – even though Madame Lynch was soon proficient in Spanish and Guaraní.

  Then she installed a French hairdresser, Monsieur Henry, and ordered a massive marble bath from Italy to freshen up the malodorous López. She even managed to work a few gastronomic refinements upon her snuffling admirer. She weaned him off ‘meats and stuffings’ – at least in company – and he and his coarse friends learnt to sup up sauces and custards from the best Sèvres.

  Her attempts to refine the gentry were less successful. The ‘French Academy’, set up to produce a Paraguayan Delacroix or Liszt, flopped for lack of attendance. When Mesdames Balet et Dupart – two old poodles from Paris – arrived to start a finishing school, the Asunceñas were defiant; they weren’t leaving their daughters with that pair of powdered French sluts. The two cocottes took to their heels and howled their way home.

  Francisco had been delighted by the arrival of an heir, Juan Francisco, and had ordered an artillery salute. In the American accounts, there were 101 guns blasting off from the roof of the palace, destroying eleven houses and wiping out an artillery troop. In reality, there probably weren’t that many cannon in the entire Plate region, and the Government Palace didn’t yet have a roof. Anyway, Francisco was undoubtedly delighted and it is highly probable that something, somebody’s property, was blown up in celebration.

  These were heady days. López ignited his Napoleonic ambitions and Madame Lynch fanned the little flames. López now looked for an opportunity to win his spurs. When a row broke out in Argentine Corrientes, he marched down to add his considerable bulk – and that of his piffling army – to an imbalance of power. Although not a shot was fired, the matter resolved itself triumphantly and López returned to Asunción as ‘the Hero of Corrientes’. He was compared favourably with Alexander the Great by the hookwormed rabble – and by some of his own, bleating pamphleteers.

  The imperial build-up began.

  Packed in among the powder-puffs and sewing machines on the Tacuarí were the Blyth & Co. contractors. They were faced with the awesome task of building a railway system, an armoury, an army, a shipyard, waterworks, roads and even an iron foundry. Remarkably, they would have achieved all of this if the imperial goulash hadn’t over-boiled.

  Chief among the engineers was William Keld Whytehead, a rather desiccated Scot who’d lived in Whitechapel on the Mile End Road. There was always a niff of tragedy about Whytehead, and in Paraguay he was a lonely, bookish character, appalled by women and, in any event, emotionally uninhabitable. He had an invalid mother and a sister who’d been forced by her circumstances into the service of a widow in E
ccleston Square. He sent them money and they returned his kindness with packets of seeds, to plant on his little quinta.

  Whytehead’s smallholding was on a hill some way out of Asunción. The track that ran past the quinta was – to his disgust – a lovers’ lane known as Tapé yaú nde yurú – ‘the path where my kisses eat your mouth’. He lived at the farm with a large collection of books, an English servant called Amos Eaton, two pet capybaras and an ostrich that kept him in eggs. His only other luxuries were sent to him from England: some hams, a telescope and bottles of his favourite sauces.

  Frugally installed, he applied his energies to the construction of Paraguay, destroying – as he did so – his own brittle sanity.

  Madame Lynch had not been idle. Her mansion was now a picture. Schooners had been ploughing busily backwards and forwards across the Atlantic with her delightful manifests of bronzes, porcelain, French tapestries and oriental carpets. The ensemble was now lavishly complete.

  Varela, purring with pleasure, was asked to visit Madame Lynch in her salon. With one eye to the decor, he reported back to his readers. ‘Everything,’ he panted, ‘was laid out with the most excellent taste, making it a delight to look at.’

  Several times a week, Madame Lynch held soirées of poetry and music. The invitations became an important barometer of regal favour. Initially, Whytehead was asked, but he tended to mop up any gaiety and so Madame Lynch later restricted their intercourse to exchanging packets of seed.