I sat in one corner of Madame Eliza Lynch’s summer ballroom, now the Gran’ Hotel del Paraguay, and listened as David Williams, a half-German-Swiss, half-Welsh Paraguayan, told me about growing up under President Stroessner.
David had spent his youth in a colony called Primavera, founded in 1941 in the north of the country by a religious sect called the Brethren, an offshoot of the Hutterites, which believes in communal living, strict rules of devotion and pacifism. David had grown up speaking English and German, as well as Spanish and the indigenous Indian language, Guaraní. His accent swung between his father’s Welsh-valley lilt and the guttural tones of his mother’s tongue. ‘Look, boyo’, he said, ‘you can’t imagine what it’s like living under that kind of ideology. Your life was controlled by the decisions of other people, and you never knew why they made them, you just did what you were told.’ Primavera had been disbanded while David was still young, but the effects of the religious regime lingered. ‘It’ll take me the rest of my life to recover, I expect’, he said cheerfully. He had lived in Europe for a while, but had returned to Paraguay. He couldn’t really explain why.
The barman brought another beer, called Bremen. All the beer in Paraguay is German, brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot, in the old German way: Bavaria, Munich or Bremen are the alternatives. Above the bar was a framed photograph of President Rodriguez, the man who, exactly two years ago to the day, had overthrown one of the longest-running dictatorships in modern history. Somewhere in Asunción, a celebration was taking place but no one was sure where. Life was better under the new President, said David, and he had promised to institute democracy. To judge from this photograph, the new President certainly smiled more easily than the old one.
Alfredo Stroessner carried out his coup d’état in 1954 and he exhibited a combination of ‘will to power’ and Ressentiment to such effect that he managed to cling to power for thirty-five years. So used had he become to dictatorship, to the daily and brutal exercise of absolute authority, that he could hardly believe it when it was over, and became largely senile. Like the Paraguayan President Bernardino Caballero, who had welcomed Elisabeth Nietzsche and her Aryan colonists to Paraguay more than a century before, Stroessner was not particularly choosy about whom he let into the country. Like flies to dung, right-wing extremists settled on Paraguay. Italian neo-fascists lectured to Stroessner’s Colorado Party, and right-wing Croatian militants trained the President’s personal bodyguard. After being ousted in 1979, the deposed right-wing dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza, was flown to Paraguay by Stroessner’s own pilot. He lived comfortably in the former South African Embassy and on a vast ranch in the Chaco, until he was gunned down in Asunción for failing, it was said, to keep up payments to the President.
Himself the son of a Bavarian brewer, Stroessner had a soft spot for his fellow countrymen, including Nazis. When Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’, applied for Paraguayan citizenship in 1959, he did not even bother to use an assumed name. It was seventeen years before his citizenship was revoked, by which time he had long since disappeared. The fleeing Nazis settled in quickly, said David. ‘The place is still full of them – oh God yes’, he said, leaning forward confidentially, ‘hundreds of them.’ After his family had left Primavera, he had been sent to the German school at Asunción. There he had completed a history project on the Nazi period and told his schoolmates many things they didn’t believe. That had earned him the nickname ‘Jew’. ‘I had a pretty bad time, I can tell you’, he said. At least a hundred thousand Germans, or descendants of Germans, are dotted throughout Paraguay, one person in forty, most of them completely assimilated into the life of the country.
As my companion talked, an asthmatic air conditioner wheezed over the cracked French windows, unequal to the task of cooling the vast room. The hotel’s German owner thought it had been built in the 1860s: Madame Lynch’s ballroom, imperial bourgeois run to seed, hallmark of the Paraguayan Pompadour. The dusty chandeliers were intact, but the murals, great trellises of fruit and flowers in pastel blues and greens, were crumbling into powder. A family of bats had set up home somewhere in the rotting roof. You could still hear them faintly arguing when the pianist started playing ‘The Girl from Ipanema’. The night before, one of the bats had fallen out of a chandelier. It lay like a crumpled mitten until a waiter in a starched white uniform with no buttons had scooped it up with tongs and put it in a bucket. ‘It’s the heat’, he explained.
Here Madame Lynch had held her bals masqués, extravaganzas designed to intimidate the potentially treacherous and impress the poor. Madame herself, crunchy in Parisian silk and with her hair in two golden loops, usually came as Queen Elizabeth I of England, while her High Chancellor Colonel Heinrich von Morgenstern de Wisner dolled himself up as Lorenzo de Medici. Francisco Solano Lopez, Commander of the Armed Forces and President-for-life, dressed as Napoleon, which came as a surprise to no one, because he always did. Madame was a dictatorial hostess. Not only did she decide who was to come and what they were to eat and drink and hear, but she even chose their costume. It was an excellent opportunity to humiliate her enemies, saving a special venom for the female members of the Lopez family, who still mocked her openly. The President’s sybaritic sisters were obliged to come as Guaraní Indian maidens, which meant they couldn’t wear their jewellery, and their mother, a spiteful mastodon with a luxurious moustache, threw a tantrum when told she must dress as Diana the Huntress. But she came anyway. Failure to get an invitation to one of Madame’s balls was social death, but turning one down could be an invitation to death itself.
Paraguay’s haut-monde raged at her impudence. The French Consul, Monsieur Laurent Cochelet, announced that he ‘would as soon break bread with a nigger as accept a morsel from that devious Irish slut’. He was still more appalled when Eliza invited a couple of colleagues from her courtesan days, Mesdames Bolet and Duport, to open a ‘finishing school’ in Asunción to raise the cultural tone of the capital. She herself taught the Paraguayan upper classes to polka, and under the gaze of her courtiers she swept around the ballroom screeching prettily in French. And when Lopez’s megalomaniac war was drawing to its disastrous conclusion, with the presidential treasury stripped bare, Eliza turned her parties into fund-raisers: the good ladies of Asunción were made to bring their jewellery and donate it to the war effort. Eliza patriotically shipped it all off back to a friend in Paris as an insurance policy.
The echoes from the piano plinked through the humid air and shimmied off the ceiling. The acoustics must have pleased Madame Lynch when she gave recitals on the Pleyel she had brought from France. The audience always clapped heartily, and when the dictator himself was present the applause was deafening. The pianist finished playing and bowed to the near-empty ballroom; through the French windows I watched a pair of small grey parakeets chasing each other over the warping terracotta tiles, and David ordered another beer, Bavaria this time.
I had been in Asunción for two sweltering days and had discovered one encouraging piece of information: Nueva Germania existed. The concierge, a mestizo, had produced a tattered map, with President Stroessner still in the corner looking sleepy. Approximately where Elisabeth’s map had indicated, it said ‘Nueva Germania’ in very small letters. The concierge had no idea who, if anyone, lived there now. ‘It’s a poor area’, he said, ‘lots of trees. You might find a bus’, he had suggested doubtfully, ‘but the road should be closed by now because of the rain. When it rains they put chains across the tracks in case they collapse.’
He traced a thumb over the map, reading the names off slowly: San Ignacio, San Estanislao, Santa Rosa, remnants of the Jesuit missions, the country’s most famous colonists. Stroessner had built thousands of miles of road through Paraguay; it was his favourite boast. Mostly dirt tracks, perhaps the only enduring monuments to his regime, these squiggled all over the official map of Paraguay; they had cost thousands of dollars to build; the only problem was that very few Paraguayans have cars.
‘Oh yes, you can get almost anywhere in Paraguay now’, said the concierge, ‘so long as it doesn’t rain.’
‘When is the dry season?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘There isn’t one really.’
I explained that I was following the route taken by the sister of a German philosopher a hundred years ago, so I would be going by boat up the Rio Paraguay and the rest of the way on horseback or by oxcart. ‘You’re mad, loco’, he said. He wasn’t being rude, just stating the obvious.
That morning I had gone to the Floto Mercante d’Estado, the state shipping agents, to book a passage upriver.
Asunción in daylight looked hung-over, rich with odours that had been obscured by hot January rain the previous night. The newer buildings seemed half built, the older ones half decayed. Great buses rumbled blindly down the narrow streets, their bells crashing. By ten o’clock the heat was already bouncing off the cracked pavements, and the streets were raucous with market people, a bewildering goulash of races mostly selling each other Taiwanese electronic gadgetry. There didn’t seem to be much else on offer.
There is no racial type in Paraguay, no ‘pure’ races except a few thousand Indians in the remote north and west, quickly being wiped out and their forest felled. With at least twenty Indian women apiece, gifts usually from the local Indian caciques, the conquistadors had mixed their Spanish blood so fast that Paraguay was not a hundred years old before a mestizo race was a fact. One enlightened governor even encouraged the races to mix, but it wasn’t really necessary. Like ink in a bucket, the Spanish blood rippled outwards from the capital, sometimes through marriage to noble Indian women, but more often through rape and concubinage. Other immigrants added their genes to the cocktail – European adventurers, negroes and the mamelucos, fierce Portuguese-speaking land-pirates from São Paulo, part-Indian, part-negro, who descended on the Jesuit missions and carried off the Indian neophytes as slaves.
Nietzsche had applauded mixed races, using the Greeks as his example; he thought they produced the hardiest, most productive artists and minds. The racial distinctions in Europe he wanted to subsume into the model of the ‘good European’; though he spoke of a master race, he did not have a specific race in mind and certainly not the German. He envisaged a group of individuals displaying masterful qualities, not a race as we would recognise it, for it is clear that his ideal men can arise in any race at any time: no one race is supreme. For all his championing of the ‘prowling blonde beast’, the creature of conquest, he would have found in the hardy mestizo culture something admirable and enduring.
Illegitimacy carries little stigma in Paraguay. ‘It is somewhat ungenerous to speak of the morals of one’s friends’, wrote an English émigré of Lopez’s time. ‘I will only say that incontinence before marriage is not looked upon there as a serious fault.’ Far from that, it was looked on as a national pastime. Cunninghame Graham concurred: ‘The Paraguayan women were extraordinarily prolific, and nature had arranged that they should bear Eve’s burden with the least amount of pain. Chastity may have been a counsel of perfection, recommended by the priests, but certainly was little practised, even by those who recommended it.’ Lopez himself set an example, producing an enormous illegitimate brood, including several by Madame Lynch. The War of the Triple Alliance accelerated miscegenation, leaving, by one estimate, just 28,000 Paraguayan men alive and four times as many women. Society became, briefly, polygamous, as it had been in some tribes before the Spaniards arrived.
Other colonists, Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster included, came to fill the void left by the war: Jesuits, Mennonites, French farmers, Australian communists, European anarchists, Irish and German refugees, Japanese peasants and ‘Lincolnshire farmers’. The last-named were the most pathetic of all: it had been impossible to convince anyone from Lincolnshire to come to Paraguay, so the ‘farmers’ were mostly derelicts picked up off the streets of London in order to fill an official quota. Once in Paraguay they soon disappeared without trace.
Within a few generations, almost all the immigrants had been absorbed and assimilated, through death or intermarriage, their languages replaced by the versatile Guaraní tongue, their memories of home slowly blotted out by the will to survive. To remain independent required aggressive self-reliance, energetic cultural self-defence. Aggression and energy died quickly in Paraguay’s genetic soup; the distinctions quickly vanished.
It was true of most breeding experiments in Paraguay. The Spaniards had brought with them fierce Andalucian bulls, and bullfighting became very popular in the seventeenth century. But the immigrant bulls had been mixed with local cattle, and the ferocity was bred out of them. The bulls simply couldn’t be persuaded to fight vigorously enough, and the sport almost died out.
But at least one racial group stood out as I passed along the streetside stalls of Asunción market: the Mennonites, like stragglers from a hoedown in white shirts and dungarees. They sold a soft cheese, made from an imported recipe, or leaned on battered pickup trucks and burbled in a strange dialect. Like the Amish in Pennsylvania, they had cut themselves off from the modern world and its sin in the Chaco and Paraguay’s other deserted places; a hundred and sixty thousand Mennonites lived in Filadelfia alone, the Mennonite city five hundred miles along the desolate Gran’ Chaco highway towards Bolivia. They kept to themselves, locked away in their enclosed islands of belief.
Were Elisabeth and Bernhard’s Aryans so robust in their convictions, I wondered? Or had racial amnesia come to New Germany too?
A tiny Chinese man in a straw hat was selling Korean sunglasses on the corner. He spoke Guaraní, and a little Spanish. ‘Where are you from?’ I asked.
‘Out of town a little.’
And before that?
He just pointed downriver.
A friend had told me of meeting an Indian family in the far north of Paraguay, at Bahia Negra. The Indian mother had three children, two were dark-skinned with brown eyes and high cheekbones, but the third, the youngest, had blonde hair and blue eyes, a genetic reminder of a forgotten night between some ancestor and a European, a railway engineer perhaps, or a gold prospector. The family couldn’t explain why their youngest child looked so peculiar, but they were very proud of it and called him el rubio, the blonde one.
Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster had chosen to build a racially pure colony in a country where the words meant nothing, where, if you didn’t actually like your neighbour, you had no problem loving his wife or daughters, whatever colour they were. The atmosphere was sultry, after all, and the Guaraní maidens generous with their favours; white men quickly forgot to be different, lapped by a gentle tide of brown genes. In Paraguay you either mixed and copied the ways of the Paraguayans or you watched yourself dandering ineluctably towards extinction. Presumably Elisabeth Nietzsche’s tribe of Aryans had gone the same way. If any of the original settlers had survived, what could be left? Perhaps just a few pairs of blue German eyes, and a couple of surnames, mangled unrecognisably by Guaraní pronunciation.
But the Aryan myth is a strong one. According to an influential nineteenth-century essay on the ‘Inequality of Human Races’ by Arthur Gobineau (whose work Elisabeth read and much admired), the Arya were an ancient, gifted people who migrated from their homeland to settle Europe: according to the myth, ‘everything great, fruitful and noble in the work of man on this earth springs from the great Aryan family’, and that included the ancient cultures of Egypt, Rome, China and Peru. Social Darwinism helped to turn the notion that races were unequal into the biological fiction that some were more fitted to survive than others. The German embryologist Haeckel and his Monist League told the world, and in particular Germany, that ‘the whole history of nations is explicable by means of natural selection’. Hitler and his twisted theories turned this pseudo-science into politics, attempting to destroy whole races in the name of racial purity and survival of the fittest.
Förster had left Germany before the establishment of the Monist League, but he was clearly influenced by the views of Ernst Haeckel, which had already gained a large following in Germany during the 1880s; Monism, part-philosophy, part-science, was by definition the belief in one central idea (i.e. Darwinism) but was actually an explosive cocktail of many: racism, nationalism, anti-clericalism, eugenics and misapplied evolutionary theory. For men like Förster (and Hitler) such notions were immediately attractive: Haeckel stressed the evolutionary dominance of an Aryan master race, and warned that racial mixture was leading to ‘biological decay’. He followed Gobineau in positing an evolutionary ladder with the white races at the top, yellow in the middle and the black (or Jewish) ones at the bottom. Those at the top were there by a natural evolutionary process; those at the bottom were destined to die out. Hitler called his book Mein Kampf, ‘My Struggle’, echoing Haeckel’s translation of Darwin’s phrase ‘the struggle for survival’. The myth of Aryan dominance, initially an attempt to trace the lost language of the Aryas, began as a set of undemonstrable racial assumptions, and ended in a colossal, perfectly unscientific lie: ‘I decide who is Jewish and who is Aryan’, announced Goebbels. That is what the Nazis meant by natural selection.
It took me an hour to fight my way through the market crowds to the shipping office. Outside a man was selling New York Jets baseball caps. He pronounced it in Spanish, ‘Newyorkhets’. New York, New Germany. Adapt and survive. In his stifling and windowless office, the jefe of the Floto Mercante d’Estado was engrossed in a battle with his own nose hair and didn’t want to be disturbed. With intense concentration, and the aid of a mirror and a large pair of tweezers, he was carefully rummaging around inside a vast Roman nose, which seemed to be melting. By his elbow, a cloud of flies avidly attended to the remains of a lamb chop, and a wooden ceiling fan barely moved the hot air. The only decoration was another map of Paraguay, but a photograph of President Rodriguez had been tacked over that of President Stroessner. I asked him for the time of the next boat to Antequera, the port on the river due west of New Germany. He didn’t look up – which was sensible in the circumstances since the tweezers would almost certainly have entered his brain. ‘It’s gone’, he said, without taking his eyes off the mirror.
After a pause of several seconds, and a little more excavation, he tugged violently and extracted something from his left nostril, and laid down the tweezers with triumph. He patted the side of his nose. ‘It’s gone’, he repeated and picked up the mirror again. ‘Why do you want to go to Antequera anyway?’ he asked, checking out his nose in profile. ‘There’s nothing there. The Iguassú falls are much more beautiful, and there’s a hotel.’
‘I’m trying to find a place called Nueva Germania. Have you heard of it?’
The jefe repeated the name, rolling it around his mouth. ‘No.’
‘Please just tell me when the next boat goes upriver.’
With obvious reluctance he laid down his mirror and pulled a piece of paper from the desk drawer and studied it. ‘March’, he said with finality, and returned to his nose.
So much for the Posadas, which left every Wednesday. It was two months before the next boat.
I sat on the crumbling waterfront at Asunción and looked over to the Chaco side. Parched, I bought a bottle of something cold, green and fizzy from a stand; I drank it too fast so that it bubbled back out of my nose. The old woman sitting next to me on the wobbly bench screamed gently and stalked away. When I had finished choking, I saw there was something black at the bottom of the bottle.
The City of Our Lady of the Assumption. Assumption was right; I had assumed it would be easy to get to New Germany, that it would be worth getting there. The city itself had been founded on an invalid assumption: that it would be the centre for exploration of fabulous silver mines in the interior, that it would be somewhere important. On a hill looking out over the vast Chaco plain, it marks the meeting of the Rio Paraguay and the Rio Pilcomayo, where they travel together down the Rio Paraná to Buenos Aires and the great river of silver, Rio de la Plata. There wasn’t any silver, of course. Once Asunción was to have been the centre for the great conquest of South America, the first great city of the La Plata. But the Chaco Indians and the Indian river pirates had been too hostile, the climate too cruel, and the capital had moved to Buenos Aires, where the air was better.
You could see the rain from a hundred miles away, rolling in off the Chaco, a great grey blanket, blotting out the forest on the far bank. I took shelter under the walls of the Presidential Palace, obscenely whitewashed amid the surrounding mildew. Just a few feet below it on the banks of the river was the shanty town, roofs beaten out of rusting Volkswagen car bonnets with smoke drifting through the cracks. A Colorado Party anthem blared through a distorting wireless. I leaned on the balustrade and watched two children throwing mud at some scrofulous chickens pecking in the rubbish. The vast building was Lopez’s last great folie de grandeur. Designed by an English architect, Alonso Taylor, it looks like an English country church with delusions of grandeur. Those delusions made Elisabeth’s racist dream possible; perhaps if the Paraguayan people had not been so brutalised by their own leaders, they would never have let Elisabeth into the country. The palace was conceived as the imperial seat of Lopez’s South American empire. The work was slow and dogged with difficulties. An Irishman, John Moynihan, did the original sculpture work, but Lopez considered the results to be in poor taste, so he put it in the basement. Taylor himself got only halfway through the building programme before, like most of the dictator’s foreign advisers, he fell under the suspicion of his xenophobic employer and was thrown, along with Moynihan’s sculptures, into a cell under the palace where he was excruciatingly tortured.
Lopez was an imaginative man, particularly in the ways of inflicting pain. Taylor described the dictator’s favourite torment, the Cepo Uruguyano, from personal experience:
I sat on the ground with my knees up, my legs were first tied tightly together, and then my hands behind me with the palms upwards. A musket was then fastened under my knees; six more of them tied in a bundle were then put upon my shoulders and were looped together with a hide rope at one end; then they made a running loop on the other side, from the lower musket to the other, and two soldiers hauling on the end of it forced my face down on to my knees and secured it so. The effect was as follows: first the feet went to sleep, and then a tingling commenced in the toes, gradually extending to the knees, and the same in the hands and arms until the agony became unbearable. My tongue swelled up and I thought my jaws would have been displaced. I lost all feeling in one side of my face, for a fortnight afterwards. The suffering was dreadful. I should certainly have confessed, if I had had anything to confess …
Taylor somehow survived the Cepo Uruguyano and the construction of the palace, which is more than most of its builders did.
Like everything that Lopez and Madame Lynch built, the palace conformed to the latest European taste. The ceilings were high and the windows large, to admit the breeze off the river to cool the sweaty President and particularly his mistress, more used to the misty rain of Ireland. It was built by an army of child slaves, boys between six and ten years old, just too young for Lopez’s army. The foundation was to be of freestone, Lopez decreed, dragged from Empedrado, thirty miles away, and the upper storeys would be of brick with a stucco frontage. The child labourers died in scores building the palace, the National Theatre, the National Library and Eliza’s several ballrooms. Charles Ames Washburn, a gold prospector, novelist, lawyer and newspaper editor sent by President Lincoln to be American Ambassador in Asunción, described Lopez’s infant construction workers: ‘It was a sad sight to see the little fellows made prematurely old by the labour to which they were condemned. They were constantly watched, that they should never idle away a moment, and in passing through the grounds, where they wrought, they appeared like worn out slaves, in whom all hope is so utterly extinguished that they never looked up or ceased a moment from their labour.’
But for the dictator’s own children no extravagance was too great. When Eliza Lynch provided Lopez with an heir, Juan Francisco, he ordered a 101-gun salute to be fired off the palace battlements: eleven buildings were destroyed in Asunción and half a gun battery perished because one of the cannons backfired. Lopez, however, was delighted. As the rain eased, I wandered through Alonso Taylor’s intricate gardens. Half a dozen soldiers, teenage boys with outsize rifles, lounged in the shrubbery smoking cigars. The President no longer lived there, but in a larger residence which was easier to defend. Further along the riverbank was a bronze statue of Francisco Solano Lopez on horseback, put there by Stroessner to commemorate the man he had declared a Paraguayan hero. There was a votive shrine at the base but it was empty. Nietzsche noted that ‘he who wants to live on after his death must take care not only of his posterity but even more of his past: which is why tyrants of every kind (including tyrannical artists and politicians) like to do violence to history, so that it may appear as preparation for and step ladder to them’.
Under Lopez’s statue a couple of prostitutes whistled and primped. In the old days they called them the peinetas de oro, for the gold combs they wore in their hair. Towards the end, when Eliza Lynch was really down on her expensive handmade uppers, she herded together the prostitutes of Asunción and made them give up their combs.
Madame Lynch left Asunción, still elegant but now under military guard, fifteen years before Elisabeth Nietzsche arrived, but they had much in common. Both were courageous, resourceful and utterly determined to get what they wanted. But they were also ambitious and ruthless, and were born, moreover, into an age when women were expected, as a point of good taste, to be powerless. Both had greatness in them, as well as greed and cruelty. Both realised early in life that the only hope for fulfilling their ambitions was through men; they both enjoyed men, as profoundly as they disliked women, and with their intelligence, beauty and determination, they played with them like puppets.
Eliza Lynch was nine years older than Elisabeth, born in a little town in County Cork. Although she claimed to be descended from Richard I’s favourite catamite as well as the royal executioner who beheaded Charles I, it was not an encouraging start for an ambitious girl. She set off for England at the age of fifteen, and married a French army vet, Manaud Xavier Quatrefages, in Folkestone. The life of an army wife in Algeria did not appeal to her; it was both hot and boring, but at least it wasn’t County Cork. She stuck it for a year or so, before running away, it was said, with a Russian cavalry officer called Mikhail, who installed her in the Boulevard Saint Germain. Mikhail soon disappeared but other men took his place, lots of them, usually rich and always influential; for Madame Lynch had found her métier as a professional courtesan; it was hard work, but she was good at it, advertising herself as an ‘instructress in languages’.
Her popularity was understandable. ‘Her eyes were of a blue that seemed borrowed from the very hues of heaven’, said one admirer, ‘and had an expression of ineffable sweetness in whose depths the light of Cupid was enthroned.’ But at nineteen Eliza began to look for something more permanent than the wealthy strangers who trooped in and out of her bedroom on the Boulevard Saint Germain. Her opportunity arrived in the bulbous shape of Francisco Solano Lopez, who came to Paris in 1853. He had been despatched from Asunción by his father, President Carlos Antonio, who vainly hoped a stint in Europe might knock a little culture into the youth and raise Paraguay’s reputation abroad.
Cunninghame Graham gave a brief character sketch of the younger Lopez: ‘Sadism, an inverted patriotism, colossal ignorance of the outside world, a megalomania pushed almost to insanity, a total disregard of human life or human dignity, an abject cowardice that in any other country in the world but Paraguay would have rendered him ridiculous, joined to no little power of will and of capacity, were the ingredients of his character.’ At twenty-seven, he already had that ‘gross animal look that was repulsive when his face was in repose. His forehead was narrow and his head small, with the rear organs largely developed. His teeth were very much decayed, and so many of the front ones were gone as to render his articulation somewhat difficult and indistinct.’
Lopez, then, was not an ideal language student, but Eliza was enchanted by her new pupil. After twenty-four hours, which cannot have been too pleasant, she informed the landlord she was leaving France to become Lopez’s mistress. They may even have fallen in love. ‘Even the meanest intelligence and the coldest heart still feels something of the lustre of this word’, thought Nietzsche, ‘the shrewdest woman and the commonest man think when they hear it of the relatively least selfish moments of their life, even if Eros has only paid them a passing visit.’
The young Lopez’s tour of Europe was, he thought, a triumph, even though Queen Victoria had announced she was ‘quite too busy to see the little savage’, and there had been a sticky moment during his audience with the French Emperor Napoleon III in Paris. The Emperor himself was formal but welcoming; after presenting Lopez with the Légion d’honneur, he murmured, ‘J’espère que vous vous amusez à Paris.’ But the Empress Eugénie seems to have reacted less politely; it was said that when the hideous Lopez bent over to kiss her hand, she vomited all over the Emperor’s ormolu desk and had to retire. But Lopez was delighted with his imperial reception: then and there, he decided to model his clothes, his life and the uniforms of his army on those of the French Emperor. He and his new mistress went shopping. He bought seventy pairs of leather boots with high heels and silver trim, and she bought silks and glassware and a Pleyel piano; after a brief visit to the Crimea to watch the European armies massacring each other, they set off for Paraguay with the avowed determination to create a new domain, over which they would reign as Emperor and Empress. Their imperial designs were not so different from those held by Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster, twenty years later.
Back in Eliza Lynch’s ballroom, Dai Williams was practising his Welsh on me as the electricity flickered and the pianist started to play ‘La Palomita’, a jaunty habañera which had been the favourite tune of Francisco Solano Lopez, who liked to have it played during executions.
The next morning I wandered down to the dock, where a variety of ramshackle craft – canoes, punts and a couple of larger boats – jostled for position at the tiny jetty. Mestizo porters, bare-chested and mahogany brown, staggered up the slipway under their loads. Others sat in the shade drinking yerba maté or flirting with the women selling river fish and fried mandioca root, a vegetable so full of starch it is used to stiffen petticoats. Some naked children played happily in the sewage at the water’s edge, and tiny fish plucked at the oily surface.
A huge barrel-chested man in frayed cotton cut-offs and a peaked sailor’s cap was directing two peons as they painfully manoeuvred a freezer wrapped in plastic across a narrow gangplank on to one of the larger boats.
‘That is the man’, said a grizzled Indian under a straw hat. ‘Captain Ramirez, he goes to Antequera.’
Ramirez doffed his cap and pronounced himself not only happy to take me to Antequera, about a hundred and thirty miles upriver, but positively honoured. ‘Welcome to my ship’, he said, and bowed. He had a huge red face, covered in odd lumps from which sprouted thick tufts of black hair, and he spoke Spanish almost as badly as me. Over one eyebrow was a particularly large protuberance, which jumped up and down when he laughed. If you half closed your eyes he looked like a sunburned Hans Holbein. His feet, which were almost broader than they were long, with crenellated toenails, inspired immediate confidence.
Which is more than could be said for his boat. A converted barge about forty feet long, it was massively overloaded and plainly rotting. The wheelhouse perched on top looked like one of those too-small party hats the boss puts on at office parties, wonky and out of place. The engine was making a tubercular grunting sound, like a large animal in pain, and a small diesel slick spread out from the stern. The legs of a tall Paraguayan hung out from the innards of the engine, the rest of him having been completely swallowed. He was hitting something with a hammer, irregularly and very hard. He extracted himself briefly to flash a wide, oil-smutted grin, and went back to his hammering. A mountain of food had been stashed in the hold: onions, mandioca, sugar, potatoes, flour and crates of empty beer bottles. A three-piece suite, upholstered in algae-green, was arranged at the bow, along with a small oil-tanker on wheels. With the addition of the freezer, the boat sank still lower, leaving perhaps three inches between the lapping brown river and the gunwale.
The trip would take two or three days, Ramirez said, barring unforeseen circumstances, and the cost would be whatever I deemed appropriate, payable now. His personal chef, Ector, would be ready to provide me with whatever I wanted in the way of victuals, or I could bring my own. He pointed to a small Paraguayan boy slicing strips off a carcass hung over the stern.
‘Is there a bed?’ I asked.
‘Yes’, said el Capitán, slapping a sack of onions and winking at the boathands. The lump on his eyebrow shrugged.
Once again I explained that I was looking for a group of German peasants who had been settled in the northern forest a century ago by a white woman called Elisabeth. He paused, then broke into a grin. ‘Then you will certainly want to travel with us’, he said, pointing to the wheelhouse, ‘it is a good sign.’ A painted board had been nailed on to the roof of the wheelhouse bearing the boat’s name: Blanca Doña, the White Lady.
That afternoon a small crowd assembled on the slipway to see us off. Francisco, the engineer, seemed satisfied with his repairs, even though dense clouds of black smoke billowed out of the ship’s funnel, at one point completely obscuring the Presidential Palace as it retreated behind us. Within minutes everything was covered in a thin film of diesel smuts. We rounded Nanawa point at a walking pace, the white of the palace stark against the skyline. The half-built skyscrapers behind were another of Stroessner’s legacies; most had been projects owned or controlled by the Stroessner family. After the coup, work had stopped, and the process of transferring ownership into the hands of the Rodriguez family, according to the more cynical Paraguayans, was still under way.
Here the river was at its widest, a fast-moving sliver of grey. As we moved into mid-channel, the clumps of detached waterhyacinths, camelote, grew thicker and more numerous, interspersed with neñufares, floating islands of water lilies. Snakes and monkeys sometimes travel downriver on these natural rafts detached by the rain. Lopez’s more daring soldiers used to hide in them with incendiaries in order to catch the Brazilian ironclads unawares. Sir Woodbine Parish reports that a tiger once floated all the way to Santa Fé by this method, where it disembarked, prowled the streets of the town and finally devoured a Christian. Sir Woodbine, former British minister in Buenos Aires, later helped to restore the Bourbon dynasty in Naples after the fall of Murat, and personally handwrote the peace treaty of 1815 between Britain and France. He was also a member of the Royal Society, so his tiger tale must be true.
‘It will not take more than three days’, Ramirez assured me, although we seemed to move impossibly slowly against the current. The Rio Paraguay is as dangerous as it looks; even in the broader reaches, fast undertows can pull you down in minutes. ‘The colour is generally that of grey mud’, wrote the great explorer Richard Burton, ‘full of vegetable matter, it never strains clear and colourless; some say it is good to drink, others, myself included, that it causes trouble.’ The Indians claim that the waters of the Paraguay clear the throat and purify the voice. I would soon find out; in the intense heat, I calculated that my stock of drinking water, stolen from the fridge at the Gran’ Hotel, would last a day at most.
To our left, the Gran’ Chaco wilderness, a dry Pleistocene sea, stretched away to the Bolivian border, largely uninhabited, fertile, dangerous and damp. Cunninghame Graham described it, and from what I could tell it had changed little:
As a steamer slips along the bank, nothing for miles and miles is seen but swamp, intersected by backwaters, in which lie alligators, electric eels and stinging rays. Far as the eye can reach are swamps, swamps and more swamps, a sea of waving pampas grass. After the swamps come thickets of tacuaras (canes), forests of thorny trees, chañares, ñandubay, jacarandas, urundey, talas, and quebrachos, each one hard enough to split an axe, some, like the black canela, almost like iron … the climate [is] heavy and humid, the air dank with vinchucas [Conorhinus gigas, a smelly, triangular bug], mosquitos and the little black infernal midget called the jejen; no roads, no paths, no landmarks, but here and there at intervals of many leagues, a clearing in the forest where some straggling settlement exists …
I listened to Wagner’s Tristan and thought about Wagner’s peccary. Quite recently a zoologist by the name of Wagner (no relation) discovered a species of pig unique to the Chaco. If Wagner’s peccary could stalk Paraguay undiscovered for millennia, there seemed every likelihood that all sorts of other beasties, discovered and undiscovered, were wandering around waiting for the arrival of a tender European, already basted in suncream.
I re-read the relevant parts of Bernhard Förster’s book. On the subject of the piranha, an orange fish with a Habsburg chin and sharp teeth, he becomes almost excitable: ‘A large round fish, it uses its jaws set with long, pointed teeth to rob the bather with the greatest deftness of pieces of flesh or a limb. But I wish to say that anyone who thrashes strongly in the water is fairly safe from this thief.’ Then there is the rana fish, which has ‘a long tail with a pointed spike about the length of an index finger. If wounded with this poisonous shard, the victim suffers the most indescribable pain and the wound is hard to heal.’ He is dismissive, however, of the crocodile, or yacaré. ‘They flee on the sight of human beings, and the Lengua [Indians] of the Gran’ Chaco eat their flesh.’
The forest, which grew thicker as we left Asunción, is said to house a positive menagerie of mythical beasts: swine-like creatures, which grow navels on their backs and hunt in packs, and the unknown animal with a ruby stuck in it which, according to my History of Paraguay, shines ‘with marvellous splendour through the darkest of nights. No one ever saw this elusive creature, since exposure to its eerie light caused one to lose all sense of direction.’ And the quirquincho, ‘a hoggish-appearing animal protected by a hard shell … so fond of deer meat that it would lie on its back, make a trough of his belly to catch rain water, then seize and kill any deer so unwise as to drink from this improvised tank’. Travellers all agree on avoiding the mboya jagwa, or dog-snake, a thirty-foot-long water serpent, which has the head of a dog and yelps like a puppy. Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, one of the earliest Jesuit missionaries, who in his own words spent thirty years in Paraguay ‘in order to find Indians and bring them to the true sheepfold of the holy Church’, described its anti-social habits. An Indian woman, who was ‘carelessly washing some clothes on the banks of the Paraná, saw one of these beasts and it unexpectedly attacked her for the purpose of violating her. The woman was speechless with fright on seeing the huge snake so licentious, and the latter, carrying her to the opposite bank of the river, carried out its lascivious purpose.’ The snake guarded her for three days as she lay dying on the riverbank, until Father Montoya appeared, and, like the good journalist that he was, got an exclusive on her story before administering the last rites.
This riparian rapist was bad enough, but it was the ow-ow which made the blood run cold. Alexander Macdonald, an Australian settler who had come to Paraguay at the turn of the century as part of a failed communist colonial scheme, describes it as ‘a white, long-haired animal about the size of a sheep, which hunts in packs and attacks human beings’. I have always lived in fear of a hilarious death. Being mauled to death by a mutant South American merino comes into this category. Nor was I safe on the boat. Father Montoya calls it ‘an amphibious animal … like a sheep, but with the difference that its teeth and nails are like a tiger’s, which animal it equals in ferocity. The Indians never look on it without terror, and when it sallies from the marshes where it lives (which it does ordinarily in troops), they have no other chance of escape but to climb up a tree, and even then sometimes they are not in safety, for this terrible creature sometimes uproots the tree, or sometimes stays on guard until the Indian falls into its jaws.’ I asked Captain Ramirez about the ow-ow. ‘I’ve never seen one’, he said, ‘but the Indians say they exist, up by the Brazilian border and in the Chaco.’ He jerked a thumb towards the tangle of lianas on the left bank. Later Francisco, one of the peons, approached me where I lay in the bow under the shade of the oil tanker. ‘There are ow-ow here in the forest, I know because a man in our village was killed by them.’
‘Why is it called an ow-ow?’
He gave me the sort of look reserved for distracted people in airports who mistakenly try to walk the wrong way up escalators.
‘Because that is what you say when it eats you.’
Francisco was the most sociable of the four-man crew. He had a pencil moustache, pot belly and shoulders like a gorilla. He wanted to talk in English, but knew only one word, ‘fuck’, which he repeated constantly with different Guaraní intonations. His opposite number was called Alberto, a great bullock of a man who took pleasure in torturing Ector, the cabin boy and cook.
Ector was the most intriguing of the boathands. Fourteen years old, he had the eyes and slightly simian face of an old man. Ector, I felt, had seen ugly things. His muscular arms and legs seemed stunted, almost dwarfish, as if he had been stopped in the process of growing up and suddenly aged for the purpose of being put to hard work. I offered him a piece of melted chocolate as he passed me in the wheelhouse. He grabbed it as if expecting to have it taken away again and stuffed it in his pocket. Only later did he shoot me a sly grin of thanks. He was the butt of the crew’s humour, which made him scowl and retreat with the ship’s dog to a cubbyhole he had constructed under a tarpaulin.
There were some half a dozen other passengers. Two young Indians who listened to Guaraní music on a Walkman as if in a trance, each taking one half of the headphones; an amazingly old woman, with a parchment face and dewlaps like plucked chicken skin, and her blonde granddaughter, a couple of Paraguayan campesinos, and Captain Ramirez’s mother. Señora Ramirez was in charge of ship’s discipline. Every so often she would hit one of the crew extremely hard on the head with a piece of wood. They didn’t seem to notice.
By late afternoon the heat had begun to slacken. The chacras and fields that had dotted the river’s east bank became fewer, and the river narrowed; tributaries darted off to left and right. The fishermen, an old man and a young boy in pairs, had started to pull in their nets, held up by bobbing plastic bottles, and make for the shore. Tiny yellow birds darted across the water in pursuit of dragonflies. We slowed, and the drumming of the engine seemed to slacken a little. On the Chaco side, a plume of yellow smoke rose where the forest was being burned.
I sat in the wheelhouse with Captain Ramirez. He wore my hat, and we shared some yerba maté. It was my first taste of Paraguayan tea, or Ilex paraguayensis, the herb indigenous to the country which is drunk all the year round, all day, by everybody. It is also the main topic of conversation, the social glue that holds the country together. Masterman, one of Lopez’s personal physicians, wrote a short treatise on the subject:
Sipping the infusion of the yerba maté was the great excuse for idling time away. Early in the morning and after the siesta were the legitimate hours for indulging in it; but those who had plenty of yerba and, as usual, little to do passed half their waking hours maté in hand. Yerba is the dried and powdered leaf of the Ilex paraguayensis, a tree in size and shape resembling the orange (that is, as the latter grows there, thirty feet high) and with small white clustered flowers. It belongs to the holly family but contains a bitter principle similar to, if not identical to, theine, the alkaloid found in tea and coffee. It is taken in a somewhat singular way. The maté, a gourd stained black, which would hold three or four ounces of water, is nearly filled with the coarsely powdered yerba. The bombilla, a silver tube with a bulbous end pierced full of fine holes, is then inserted, the gourd filled with boiling water, and the infusion sucked through the tube immediately, exactly as one would take a sherry cobbler except, of course, that it is scalding hot.
The protocols of maté–drinking are simple, but strict:
If the ceremony be conducted in the accepted and timehonoured fashion, the same maté and the same bombilla will be made to serve for two drinkers, or half a dozen. Like the pipe of peace of the departed Redskin warriors, it is passed from hand to hand, and each sips his fill, while the bowl is replenished as often as may be necessary. In the more populous centres of these modern days it may occur that two or three maté enthusiasts, drinking together, may each be provided with a separate bowl and bombilla. But this, from the hardened maté toper’s point of view, is the rankest degeneracy. It is most emphatically against all the ethics of maté sociability …
We passed the maté cup back and forth, Ramirez refilling it from a flask. The faintly narcotic effects of the drink seemed to calm him. The eyebrow wiggled less frequently and the gales of laughter blew less fiercely. Ector came and sat at his feet, dangling his legs over the side of the wheelhouse and staring wordlessly at the bank. Ramirez rested the maté cup on his head.
The taste of the maté was not unpleasant, smelling slightly of marijuana and freshly cut hay. It was first drunk by the Indians, who collected it from the wild plantations, yerbales, which grew in the forest. Ramirez pointed out the different varieties as we chugged past the west bank. The Spaniards had taken to it quickly, and the gauchos drank it to alleviate the constipative effects of a diet of meat. Even Bernhard Förster, never much of a one for foreign customs, had only praise for it: ‘the effects of yerba maté are not only beneficial to the stomach, but all complaints can be cured by it and it has a pleasant effect on the nerves. As is supposed, this custom was found among the Indians by the first immigrants, and taken over from them.’ The Paraguayans claim it has medicinal powers, relieving rickets, beri-beri, malaria, piles, diphtheria and impotence. The only effect I noticed was an almost instantaneously laxative one. Its magical properties are enshrined in the complex religion of the Guaraní Indians. Ramirez and the crew embarked on a lengthy religious discussion about yerba and the gods. Catholics all, they talked of Guaraní gods as if they were only marginally less believable than the Christian God, second-rung deities which could be invoked if the Catholic God failed to deliver. Nietzsche held that polytheism was a sign of individuality and thus applauded it:
The one god was not the denial of or blasphemy against another god! It was here that the right of individuals was first honoured. The invention of gods, heroes and supermen of all kinds, together with that of fictitious fellow men and submen, of dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons and devils was the invaluable preparatory exercise for the justification of the selfishness and autocracy of the individual: the freedom one accorded the god in relation to other gods one at last gave oneself in relation to laws and customs and neighbours.
Ramirez talked of the Guaraní pantheon as of old friends; their names cropped up regularly in his blasphemies. The Guaraní creation goes something like this: first there was Tupa, who created the forests and the streams and the animals, and his enemy Aña, who lived with the goddess Yaci in the crescent moon and who visited misfortune and devastation and death when he felt like it; a sort of devil, only funnier. Tupa made man last, from red earth brought to him by I-Yara, master of waters. He made two brothers, Pitá, who was red in colour, and Moroti, who was white, and he gave them two sisters as companions. Pitá and Moroti, the red man and the white man, were made to be brothers, yet they fought with the lances they had made to spear meat for the pot, and Tupa summoned Osununu, god of thunder, with a storm to ravage the forest for three days and nights. When the sun reappeared, his emissary I-Yara came again, disguised as a dwarf, and ordered the brothers to embrace. They merged, and became the lily of the forest: red blossomed in summer, turning to white with the winter. Like the mixed race of the mestizos, the men of different colour became one.
I wondered what Elisabeth and Förster would have made of this man’s casual approach to his gods. ‘The population is Christian by name’, said Förster archly, ‘but I doubt there are many people in Paraguay who are actually Christian.’
Ramirez sucked on his bombilla happily. Caa Yara, he thought, is the goddess of the yerba, young and blonde, who wanders the forest, protecting those who gather the plant. It is said that Tupa was wandering the country he had made when he came across an Indian hut where lived an old man who was so poor that he had only a beautiful daughter and a hen for company. The Indian sacrificed his hen to make a meal for the sake of his divine guest, who repaid him, rather ill, by granting immortality to his daughter and turning her into the yerba tree.
Francisco said that was nonsense. It was Yaci the moon goddess who, like Caa Yara, takes human shape as a beautiful fair-haired maiden and walks the forest at night with only her white handmaiden, Arai, for company. One night they were cornered by a jaguar which threatened to devour them. But an arrow sped through the night air, striking the beast in the side. Enraged and dying, it lunged at the attacker, an old Indian hidden behind a tree, who plunged another arrow through its heart. That night Yaci and her maiden visited their protector and made him a gift of the yerba, in thanks.
Ector produced a meal of soo-yosopy, or tough meat and noodles. It took rather longer to digest than it did to prepare.
Captain Ramirez sat in front of the wheelhouse and clipped his spoon-like toenails by the light of an oil lamp. The others lounged around him drinking maté and smoking, oblivious to the sharp fragments which occasionally whizzed off his feet like shards of glass. Guaraní conversation clicked and buzzed around me. Father Dobrizhoffer, a German and the first Jesuit to leave a full account of this time in Paraguay (printed in Latin in 1784), claimed ‘that the sounds produced by the Indians of the Chaco resembled nothing human, so do they sneeze and stutter and cough’. But it is an extraordinarily robust language that has somehow survived the marauding Spanish tongue largely unchanged: of the South American countries Paraguay alone can claim to be truly bilingual, and in the wilder areas Guaraní is the first, indeed the only, language. It is truly disconcerting to hear. In every sentence there seems to be an English word that couldn’t possibly be there. My notebook contains this bemusing phonetic exchange.
CAPTAIN RAMIREZ: ‘Ootunondumi rabo Caaguazu.’
FRANCISCO: ‘Bokinmaginum sinking.’
RAMIREZ: ‘Help.’
I learned my first Guaraní blasphemies: Añan me buy (mother of the devil), Aña ra quo (devil’s arsehole) and A Kam bu ce ndet titire (I want to suck your tit). My rendition of the last phrase seemed to cause particular mirth. Ramirez laughed so hard his eyebrow threatened to detach itself. Even Ector grinned, though Señora Ramirez brandished her piece of wood menacingly.
I asked them whether they knew about the colony established by Germans about seventy kilometres east of the river at Antequera. Los Mennonitas? Certainly there was a large community not far from Antequera, Colonia Volendam, where they grew pineapples, but a German colony? They looked doubtful. There had been Germans this far north, sure enough. Francisco said his surname was Eisenhut and that he was descended from a German. He didn’t know where, or when, but his great-grandfather had crossed the sea in a big boat, much bigger than the Blanca Doña. But he had been born in the south, he said, near the Argentine border. Señora Ramirez joined in. Yes, she said, she knew about Nueva Germania: it was through the montes on the way to Santa Rosa. There were many rubios, blonde people, pretty girls with long, fair hair, and people who spoke a language no one understood. It would not be hard to find. I plied her with questions, but that was all she knew; she had been told by someone, but she had never been there. I should ask in Antequera, they would know. Embarrassed, she hit her giggling son on the head with her truncheon to signify that she had had enough questions.
Yaci, goddess of the moon and protector of Aña, the death-bringer, had risen above the Chaco shore. I leaned on a box of empty beer bottles in the stern and watched our churning brown wake. It was suddenly gloomy, and cold.
We were hugging the east bank now, an unbroken cliff of tangled creepers, leaning over the water and rising thirty feet overhead. The mangroves curtsied in our wake, and the lily leaves bobbed. The crew and passengers had spread out in the hold on bags of onions, or with their heads resting on their arms. Above the engine’s throb, someone was snoring. I lay by the wheelhouse, feeling my body cool at last, but couldn’t sleep.
So Nueva Germania did exist. And if Señora Ramirez was right, I would eventually find the human remnants of that bizarre racist experiment. If they were still there, in the middle of this inhospitable wilderness, did they have any notion why? Was there even a faint recollection of the racial theories and poverty that had propelled their ancestors from their homes? And, if there was, did they know what the Nazis had done with those ideas half a century after they had departed Germany? Did the name Nietzsche mean anything to them?
More likely the people of Nueva Germania had eaten the fruit of the great aguabirá tree Ramirez talked of. One bite of its yellow fruit, says the Guaraní myth, and the traveller will forget his own people and be content to stay for ever in the forests of Paraguay, a natural racial amnesia.
Guabira was an Indian girl who wanted to be a sorceress. A favourite of the gods Tupa and Yaci, she had been given supernatural powers. She had to fast, remain chaste and finally drink the jugo de muerte, death juice, made from herbs and yerba maté and a liquid distilled from the bodies of Indian warriors decomposing in their funeral platforms in the trees. She passed all the tests easily, and became a medicine woman, a cuña-tai. If she inhaled enough tobacco smoke, Guabira could understand the present and see into the future, and she could tame the most dangerous snakes in the forest. One day she ran away with a Spaniard whose life she had saved with her magic, on his wedding night. They disappeared into the forest and enjoyed their passion for many years. But the Spaniard grew restless. He longed for his homeland and the pretty white maidens of his youth. He left the brown-skinned Guabira, and returned to Spain to marry a white woman.
Guabira was broken-hearted and an outcast now for having broken her vows of chastity. But Tupa took pity and gave her immortality too, in the shape of the aguabirá tree. Once a person has tasted the fruit, he will forget all about the land of his birth. I somehow expect Elisabeth Nietzsche banned guabirá from her vegetarian menus.
It was now pitch-dark, though I could just see the outline of the far riverbank by the flickering light of the brush-burning on the Chaco side. We had moved into mid-channel again, Ramirez seeming to know instinctively our position in the current, needing no light to see the way. To our right you could feel rather than see the forest. A bat darted overhead, chattering angrily, and I remembered the words of the explorer Christopher Gibson, on his first night in the Chaco: ‘Sleep was out of the question. Vampire bats, obscene, evil creatures, kept fluttering round, clinging to the mosquito net, trying to force an entrance. As they attack man in the big toe, or above the eyebrow, I was careful to keep these portions of my anatomy as far from the net as possible.’ Perhaps that explained the shape of Captain Ramirez’s eyebrow. I pulled my hat lower, and wrapped the poncho around me.
From the shore strange night noises wafted across the water. Pombero, the boozy Guaraní gremlin-god of starless nights, was somewhere out there. Working by the light of the firefly, Pombero was a nuisance, never seen but heard all around on the night breeze. He was short and squat, with a dwarfish shape and an impish face. He had soft hair on the palms of his hands and feet, and he could run upright or on all fours at the speed of an idea, to let your horses loose or unlatch the gate on your cattle pen. Like his allies the river snakes, he could glide across the water, to untie your boat and leave you at the mercy of the swift water. He liked to panic lonely people on long journeys with blood-chilling screams on hot nights. Pombero’s voice echoed across forest and river, for he could make himself invisible as the night gnat, but throw his voice behind your back to startle the uneasy, like the caraya monkey, or howler. Keep Pombero happy, by putting a plug of dark tobacco in a hollow tree, and he would guard your sleep and protect you on dangerous night excursions; but annoy him, and he would happily visit you with disaster.
The air over the water seemed so clear that my hearing suddenly became perfectly acute. I thought I could hear the heart of the forest beating.
Nietzsche called the ear ‘the organ of fear’, and believed that the sense of hearing ‘could have evolved as greatly as it has only in the night and twilight of obscure caves and woods, in accordance with the mode of life in the age of timidity, that is to say the longest human age there has been: in bright daylight the ear is less necessary. That is how music acquired the character of an art of night and twilight.’
I was jolted from my half-sleep, propped against the back of the wheelhouse, by an angry revving of the engine and a lurch as the boat picked up speed and turned sharply. Someone, Ramirez I think, was shouting orders in Guaraní from the wheelhouse. His voice was urgent and frightened. The passengers and crew were all awake, shouting and staring intensely over the boat’s side and beyond into the murky night. From somewhere, Alberto the bull-peon had produced a spotlight. Attached to the ship’s battery, it cast a pale spot on the water about twenty feet beyond the bows, as we sped back downriver with the current behind us.
Ector had disappeared and, like most of Paraguay’s river people, he couldn’t swim.
He had last been seen washing dishes from the stern, half an hour before, perhaps more. His cubbyhole had been found empty, except for the ship’s dog now furiously barking at the noise. The boat slowed suddenly, and we strained to see through the night, the spotlight hopelessly panning across the empty water’s ripples. But Ramirez was already shaking his head and muttering in Guaraní under his breath. Francisco whispered: ‘El Niño fell off the boat once before, but then it was daylight and we managed to find him. Now it is too dark. There has been rain upriver and the water is fast.’ He stared back over the bow.
For hours we trailed the river bank, looking for a flash of clothing or an ancient little boy’s face illuminated by the feeble spotlight. Ramirez turned off the engine, and we strained to listen. Only the whistles and hoots of the night forest, the mocking voices of Pombero, drifted back from the tangled bank.
See notes on Chapter III: Up The Creek