At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig Read online

  Rather more lively – too lively as it turned out – was the American Minister, Mr Charles Ames Washburn. He was a strange appointment to the diplomatic post, as he was exuberant, volatile and peculiarly lacking in tact. At his core were dangerous magmas that would erupt whenever there was a crisis demanding good sense and calm. He was volcanically unsuitable. Before Asunción, he’d been a novelist, a Wisconsin attorney, a newspaper editor and a gold-prospector, skills which equipped him for dealing with most things – but not López.

  Initially, however, relations were effusive and Washburn was often to be found at the salon throwing back Tokay and singing away on the Pleydel.

  At his elbow was another drifter, Baron Franz Wisner von Morgenstern. This incongruous fop had been hounded from the Court of Vienna for offences against nature and had wandered off to South America to offer his services as a military adviser. Like President Wasmosy – 120 years his junior – he was a Hungarian aristocrat, and to prove the point, he wore fancy hussar uniforms, embroidered with green frogs and topped off with astrakhan collars. He was the only trophy that Francisco had brought back from the Corrientes campaign.

  Unfortunately, whenever war broke out, Wisner was indisposed through illness. This – and the fact that he could be relied upon not to meddle with Madame Lynch – not only placed him very close to the Lópezs but ensured his survival; his dandy presence on the Paraguayan scene would continue long after the other players were dead or in exile.

  Meanwhile, Madame Lynch was delighted to have his company; here was an utter bitch with whom she could share her scorn for the gentry.

  After the death of Don Carlos in 1862, an opportunity arose for Madame Lynch to address her tormentors. It was not revenge exactly, but it enabled her to make her point.

  She organised a ball.

  It was to be a fancy dress ball – but with a difference: she got to choose what each guest wore. Now that she and Don Francisco were in charge, no one could possibly decline her invitation.

  She herself was to come ‘in the gorgeous style of Queen Elizabeth I of England’, complete with a diadem of brilliants, a ruffed collar and a golden gown steeped in seed pearls. Naturally, she allowed Don Francisco to come as his hero, Napoleon, Emperor of the French.

  Her friend, Baron von Morgenstern, was to be Lorenzo de Medici.

  The Bishop of Asunción was tactfully given ‘the Apostle Paul’, but the first ladies of the city were required to appear as Swiss shepherdesses, Italian fruit-sellers and other manifestations of the peasantry.

  Washburn refused to dress up and fell from grace.

  For Don Francisco’s mother, who was by now a viperous old crone with a fluffy moustache, she chose Diana the Huntress. When she got her invitation, Mother López wept acid tears and swore that she’d shoot an arrow into the little strumpet’s heart.

  Her corpulent daughters were to come as ‘two emaciated Guaraní Indians’.

  But for the woman Madame Lynch loathed most of all – the French Minister’s wife, Madame Cochelet – she ordered ‘Queen Victoria’. In that lot, even this old trollop wouldn’t be tempted to steal the glitz.

  The evening was a triumph, and President Francisco Solano López ordered Congress to grant to Madame Lynch all those privileges usually accorded to a head of state.

  28

  APART FROM THE half-dead gerontocrats, there were other, more occasional guests at The Gran Hotel. Twice a week there was a small técanasta party in the lobby. I suspected that the ladies were the delicate rump of what had been a larger card circle. They arrived with silvery perms and kidskin gloves and drank tea from china cups and saucers. They conversed in Spanish and played their cards in French, and when the games were over, they slipped their gloves back on and swarthy drivers took them home.

  Things were more lively on the weekends. There were the tennis-players, of course, and every Saturday, the ballroom was tinselled up for a ball. It was usually a fifteenth birthday party for a debutante. These weren’t like the office girls, but were winsome little slips – tutored in Miami, pastured in Uruguay and heeled in Buenos Aires. They had long cataracts of courtly Spanish names – Caballero, Ibarra, Yegros, Elizeche, Espinoza – which had often been hitched together as evidence of unimpeachable pedigree. They’d be photographed with their parents – bundles of startling tuxedos and organza – and then, as the whisky flowed, they’d all polka and sing in Guaraní. It was now chic to be an Indian.

  All visitors were monitored by a smouldering reptile in reception. Because her lair was faced – in the Teutonic style – with lumps of rock, she was often difficult to see in the gloom. However, whenever a stranger stepped into the lobby, she was quickly on the scent and her loose-skinned neck craned out of its cave. This being Asunción, most people knew exactly who she was.

  ‘She’s a terrible snob,’ one friend told me.

  ‘Her father was a minister in the Stronato,’ said another.

  ‘She’s not there working for the salary, she just wants to know what’s going on and who everybody is.’

  Meanwhile, she devoured their details, mentally weighing up their carats and boring into bank accounts, clambering into their family trees and sniffing their blood for its blueness. She was a sort of social pyragüé, mounted with crimson talons.

  She called me ‘Monsieur D’Juim au Lait’, and I didn’t care to correct her.

  29

  THE RELICS OF the golden López years were scattered around Asunción. I found bone-white statues and several baubles of Eliza’s jewellery, dispersed among factious museums. It was even said that the enormous Italian marble bath was somewhere, turning green in someone’s garden.

  The palaces of the sensual brothers, Venancio and Benigno, had survived, as slightly raffish hotels. Sadly, the glorious staircases that had carried the lechers to their seamy cots had long ago been plundered.

  Whytehead’s home-foundered cannons now lolled in the turf on Plaza Mariscal López, aiming their empty blasts at the Sodom that he’d engineered.

  There should have been an opera house.

  An Italian architect, Alessandro Revizza, had been commissioned to design one as swagged and as tailed as Milan’s La Scala. It had never been finished. ‘The only singers,’ wrote Washburn, ‘were the parrots that trilled their arias in the empty cavern.’

  What remained of the enormous, flamboyant shell had been colonised by tax officials. One day, I joined a line of debtors and clambered up into the resplendent gloom. Revizza’s lavish swoops were all bedded in concrete and his auditorium was cluttered with bureaucracy. The place should have been tingling with airs and intermezzos, but instead there was only the sinister, leafy murmur of paper. The debtors went to their forms. Barefoot children swarmed down on them, crawling among their feet, polishing shoes and sifting litter. One of the waifs had an intriguing pump. ‘Blood pressures taken’, said his sign. ‘Live happily.’

  The day after my visit, the operatic tax office was raided. The thieves turned up with a lorry and hauled off a day’s precious tax: £53,428.

  The frippery and cruets of Napoleonic Paraguay were kept at the Ministry of Defence, guarded by young conscripts with gruesome antique guns. I went up there on a day as hot as any that spring, and – once again – I found myself before soldiers, dripping and pleading to be let in. They parted like toys; the Ministry of Defence was a shrine.

  It was also thickly peopled by officials. They followed me as I threaded through the basement, through meticulous displays of despair and failure. We passed wooden cannon that had exploded on their third ignition, wiping out their crews, paintings of naked troops and bayonets thrust so hard that they’d shattered. At the far end, we came to the inner sanctum and there they left me.

  I wasn’t alone, however. There were two well-jawed females sitting at a desk, rasping at each other in what they imagined to be whispers. They were so strikingly similar to the creature that terrorised my hotel that I wondered if she hadn’t somehow replicated and sent two of he
rself down to the Ministry to oversee my visit. I instinctively apologised but they waved me forward into the room.

  I found myself standing next to President López’s underwear. They had ‘FSL’ embroidered on them and had been partially devoured by unthinking weevils. There were other remnants of his wardrobe in the same mildewed case: lacy dinner shirts, linen drawers, his pyjamas, silver-buttoned waistcoats as elegant as tea-cosies, a brass breastplate and the bicorne hat with a spray of egret feathers. Nuzzled in at the side were his little indulgences – a mint silver tea-service, some well-licked forks, three swollen wine-pitchers and the medals that he’d awarded himself for outstanding vanity and for discretion (placed well before valour).

  Madame Lynch’s bric-a-brac also fell under the watchful eye of the clawed guards. For all the shiploads of fancy ballast, she’d left her subjects with very little – a few bustles and velvet shawls, some baby-pink porcelain, a surviving piece of Sèvres and a book signed by 87,000 people who still adored her when the fight was done. That was impressive – 87,000 was rather more than the number of literates that had survived the carnage.

  Such niceties wouldn’t have troubled Madame Lynch and her consort. In their portraits they looked supercilious and indestructible. Francisco’s daguerreotype had been taken when he was younger and – whilst hardly lissom – still capable of getting his legs around a horse. In his own mind he was already a man of destiny.

  Madame Lynch, on the other hand, looked middle-aged. Her pearled skin had yielded its delicate features and her bosom was now luxuriously pillowed. Her gaze, however, still gave nothing away. She could have been happy or bitterly angry, she could have been exhilarated or chronically weary. She was the consummate courtesan, deeply, fascinatingly impenetrable.

  The photographer had clearly found her picture uncomfortably chilly and had tried to warm it up with pinks and oranges and ridiculous yellows. The effect was not only tawdry, it was something else; it made his subject seem strangely fictional.

  Madame Lynch’s town house had been designed by Revizza around a courtyard on Estigarribia.

  It was now stripped bare. Gone was the silk and gone the gilt. The housekeeper took me through the rooms, throwing open the shutters, allowing sunlight to seep in among the clammy shadows. It’s a law faculty now, she explained, but everyone’s away.

  She let me wander around. The doors had stiff, wincing hinges and the ceilings were furred with dust. All the rooms were empty – except for a curious stack of cooking oil in a chamber upstairs. It was no longer a house of possessions.

  Stripped of its lavish purpose, this great yellowing carcass stood hollow and ugly, like a stage-set at the end of a very poor run.

  Thinking back on it, I’d wanted to find ghosts in the Asunción of Eliza Lynch. But there was nothing, just a few artefacts, a few props. It was as if she’d never existed. Rather, it was as if her life had been merely a role in a cruel burlesque or – less charitably – a dreadful penny-opera.

  30

  ‘WHAT DO YOU think Madame Lynch gave to the Paraguayans? Anything?’

  I was having tea again with the lady who believed in theatrical coups d’etat. Her name was Cinthia and her family made wine that had the reputation for being virtually undrinkable. She was very sweet and never encouraged me to try it.

  Having friends to tea at The Gran was a useful way of tackling the vagaries of a Paraguayan social life. Often, if I tried to meet people in the evening, they would try and shuffle the appointment towards midnight. They thought the idea of meeting at eight was ludicrous. It was a sort of reaction to the passing of the Stronato; nobody went out until the time when – previously – they should have been in. If I suggested eight, they’d protest: ‘But there are still people walking around out there!’

  I didn’t mind waiting around until ten, but there was no guarantee that they’d show up. No one ever wanted to organise anything more than three days in advance and there still had to be an elaborate system of confirmations. Even if our arrangement survived that, there was a good chance of cancellation on the final day. The disappointment of cancellation was, however, always softened by the lavishness of the excuses.

  ‘I can’t come. I’ve been standing in the wind too long.’

  ‘Sorry, John, I can’t make dinner. I’ve got to be sterilised.’

  ‘Can we make dinner another night? I’ve just bought a sack of oranges and I want to clean my stomach out. Did you know that you’ve got eight metres of intestines?’

  It was polite to be half an hour late, customary to be an hour and not unusual to be two.

  Somehow, I didn’t mind all this if it was teatime rather than in the small hours of the morning. Besides, the Paraguayans liked tea at The Gran. The teatime menu was long and inspiring. One day a girl from a conservation group came up to talk about birds. She studied the menu.

  ‘I’ll have a plate of biscuits, a litre of strawberry milkshake and a large steak. I’m lactating.’

  Cinthia thought about my question.

  ‘Madame Lynch,’ she said, ‘made a great contribution to our lives.’

  She paused to dab some cake away from her mouth.

  ‘She brought us nice shoes. Before she came, we were barefoot.’

  I made an impressed noise.

  ‘And she introduced hairdressing.’

  I found that harder to react to.

  ‘And she taught us to dance indoors. Before she came to Paraguay, we only danced outside.’

  31

  BEFORE RETURNING TO Paraguay, I’d gathered together some advice as to how I should conduct my social life. The best – or perhaps the most enjoyable – source of advice was a pamphlet published by ‘The American Ladies’ in Asunción. Your problems, they explained, may well begin before you’ve even entered the house of your host; there may not be a doorbell. ‘Do not be disheartened,’ soothed the matrons. ‘It is customary to clap your hands together several times, as loudly as possible, and in no time a maid will appear to announce your visit.’

  Once inside, there were other traps for the unwary. It was necessary to sit on the correct part of the sofa; the right-hand side was reserved for the guest of honour. Then, in relation to conversation, The Ladies had even more alarming news: ‘After a particularly congenial talk a Paraguayan man or woman may embrace you lightly, touching cheeks and kissing into the air.’

  As to what we might talk about, my Paraguayan friends in London issued a stern warning: ‘You must be careful what you say. The Paraguayans will express their views forcefully. There have been many years of repression …’

  As if the threat of being besieged with kisses or pounded with strong opinions wasn’t enough, the news about the women was equally disconcerting. I was taken aside and given another strong warning.

  ‘They know,’ said the London Paraguayans, ‘exactly what they want.’

  I assumed this meant that they were predatory. In a country where men had attained a certain scarcity value through two devastating wars, it hardly surprised me that women had developed a tendency to take the initiative. On the other hand, Paraguayan women were among the most disempowered in South America: they were the last to get the vote, in 1961; until recently, husbands who killed their wives on the grounds of adultery were spared prison. Paraguay called itself ‘The Land of Women’ (mostly at times when all the men were dead), but who were these powerless, predatory beings?

  I turned to the work of earlier travellers to see what they’d gleaned. Ruiz Díaz de Guzman provided the conquistador analysis: the women were ‘virtuous, gentle and of a gentle disposition’. By the 1880s, a Scottish traveller thought that their ‘virtue is so largely a matter of convention that it is generally wisest to leave such matters uncommented on’. An English lawyer, writing at about the same time, was more forthright; he was delighted by the ladies, with their ‘soft, supple, panther-like tread’ and tunics that revealed ‘the statuesque shoulders and breasts rather more than would be considered delicate in Europe’. T
hirty years later, another Scotsman reported back that the ladies were:

  Just a little bit unconventional – as all unspoilt daughters of Eve might be expected to be in a land where the bread and butter question does not exist; fond of pretty things, and loving to flit about in the sunshine like humming-birds, rarely taking life seriously … If not frequently blessed with classic features, they have always smiling faces, splendid dark eyes and a wealth of glossy raven tresses, which might grace the head of a Queen in Fairyland.

  So – fairy queens, humming-birds and ample-breasted panthers – the women of Paraguay seemed to have satisfactorily defied rational generalisation. As to whether they were predatory, it was hard to tell.

  *

  One evening, a sugary blonde who called herself ‘Fluff’ came up to The Gran to cart me off into town in her white jeep. She was the fluffy end of my little network of contacts and had a husband who’d vanished in Central America (or had fled there). Fluff wasn’t really fluffy at all. She tossed back two gins and then hurled us into the traffic on España. One minute she was solicitous and insisting that I wear a safety belt and the next we were taking a roundabout on two wheels or throwing the jeep down Mariscal López – in reverse. In slightly less than three minutes, we were in a rather velveteen Italian restaurant where the pasta managed to be both gooey and raw. When I told her that my mobile phone wasn’t working, she offered to smash it there and then, and I was only able to restore order by splashing our glasses with fierce draughts of Argentine wine.

  ‘English men,’ she announced, ‘are so contracted, so unemotional.’

  I was perplexed by this; Fluff didn’t speak any English and had never been to England. As for me, she’d only seen me drink two gins and then bury myself in her dashboard during three minutes of terror. I realised, however, that it was merely a vehicle for what was coming next.