At midday the Blanca Doña docked at Porto Rosario, a jumble of huts and a broken jetty, face down in the river. Smoke from the forest-burning tainted the air and snagged my dry throat. It was deathly hot. A mutter of thunder threatened from the Chaco side. I felt my face stretched and swollen from lack of sleep; an angry little flurry of insect bites was spreading along my left cheek. Ramirez waded ashore and climbed the steep bank to the village to report the man overboard. Years of judicial death under Stroessner taught that formalities must be observed.
Small grey birds hopped among the jagged stones at the river bank, and the two Indian men, with hair cut square on the forehead, lay on each others’ arms like lovers, listening to the scratching of their Walkman. Only Francisco and the ship’s dog, a stunted little brown object with a shrill bark, seemed much affected by Ector’s disappearance. The dog kept returning to the hot cave under the tarpaulin and whining, until Francisco kicked it hard and it yelped away into the hold. Francisco was not sure where El Niño came from – Antequera, he thought, where the boy might still have a mother. Captain Ramirez had found him a year ago, hungrily wandering the Asunción docks. He wasn’t paid, but he lived on the boat and ate for free. He was a strange boy, said Francisco, one of the gente perdita, the lost people.
An ancient Indian bumped alongside in his canoe and stared up at the Blanca Doña without a word. Francisco tossed him down a packet of yerba, and he paddled slowly downriver, stopping now and then to look back.
Ramirez returned with the news, broadcast on the midday radio, that Ector’s body had been found by fishermen, about twenty kilometres downriver from where we had lost him. He had drowned, Ramirez said, and his hands and face had been gnawed away by piranhas.
For the first time I wondered whether to abandon the journey. Where last night it had been a worthwhile adventure, it now seemed obscenely trivial to hack through this cruel country in pursuit of a tribe of white people that probably didn’t exist and arguably should never have existed. Ector had fallen to his death a few feet below where I sat, probably slipping on the rotting wet planks of this infernal White Lady. He must have died watching the boat grinding uncaringly into the darkness. And, lost in my own preoccupations, I had been deafened by the forest and had heard nothing.
The peons began unloading some of the cargo, wobbling along the narrow gangplank under great bags of mandioca and sugar, and a small crowd of children, dressed in ragged clothes of identical material, gathered on the bank to watch. One played tunelessly on a reed-whistle. The sound was infuriating. Francisco soon abandoned the hard work and threw himself down on the floor of the wheelhouse next to me. ‘Fuck’, he said, ‘fuck, fuck, fuck.’
Beyond Porto Rosario, the Rio Paraguay grew wide again. To the west the country was supposedly flatter, but it was impossible to see what lay beyond the forest-lined shore. Far to the northeast, beyond Nueva Germania, between Pedro Juan Caballero and Cerro Corá, is a town which carries the indelible mark of Eliza Lynch.
President Lopez’s vain war lasted half a decade. Surrounded and outgunned, the Paraguayans for some reason fought on with suicidal determination. The remains of the white Spanish aristocracy, always under suspicion from Lopez, were pressed into the army – the 40th Battalion – and were immediately wiped out at the Battle of Estero Bellaco. It was a war fought partly over the colour of different skins. The white Brazilian aristocracy traditionally looked down on the Paraguayan mestizos as savages. There was more than a hint of racial supremacy in their genocidal enthusiasm for the war; both sides referred to the other as monkeys. Even Cunninghame Graham was inclined to look for a racial explanation for Lopez’s fanatical will to power: ‘in the blood of most mulatos, mestizos, or to whatever mixed blood Lopez belonged, there is a lust for power, but power with all the pomp of military rank, medals and crosses, gold sashes, silver helmets decked with plumes, in fact a perpetual carnival, with a brass band always a-braying to direct their people’s eyes to them, when they ride down a street.’ Like Nietzsche, Cunninghame Graham was a raging snob. The President’s mother was a mestizo, his father the offspring of an Indian–negro slave mother and Creole father, a shoemaker. ‘That Lopez, with his Indian blood, was influenced by the insane hatred of the white races that has inspired so many half-breed tyrants was not altogether strange’, thought Cunninghame Graham. Nietzsche would have called it the slave morality of rebellion, doomed to failure, the Ressentiment of the oppressed.
The allies, Brazilian, Argentinian and Uruguayan, killed the Paraguayans so fast they couldn’t get rid of the bodies. Funeral pyres were built, alternate layers of wood and dead soldiers. But the Paraguayans were so thin they would not burn, so the invading troops left them for the perros cimarrones, the wild dogs of the plain. To Madame Lynch’s fury, the expensive carpets from her ballrooms and palace were cut up and turned into ponchos for an army composed of old men, young boys and women. Measles, smallpox and cholera killed those out of range of the allied guns.
By 1870 the dictator’s army was running so short of munitions that books from the National Library were cut to pieces and used for rocket and squib cases; makeshift cannon were constructed from the hollowed trunks of the great quebracho tree. These could be fired three, at most four, times, before they shattered, tearing the cannoneers to shreds with a blast of burning splinters. Women, too old to fight, or too pregnant, were made to reinsert fuses into any unexploded enemy shells. Often they exploded too.
In the midst of the battles, Eliza Lynch gave some ‘capital dinner parties’, where, according to one English guest, ‘she could drink more champagne without being affected by it than any woman I have ever met’. The entertaining went on even as the Brazilian artillery shelled the fortifications at Las Lomas Valentinas, where the President had retreated after the fall of Asunción. Most of the foreigners who had been engaged to help Lopez had already been executed in the President’s tribunates de sangre; the remaining ones were invited to dinner. Colonel Morgenstern de Wisner selected wines to complement the gourmet food of a petrified French chef. The dictator himself sat at the head of the table, swallowing copious draughts of brandy and ordering more, to still the pain from his rotting teeth and gums. When he had drunk to excess, ‘he would indulge in the most revolting obscenity and would sometimes give orders for the most barbarous acts’.
After dinner, his mistress played the piano, while shells sang overhead. Eliza boasted that Liszt had heard her play in Paris and had tried to persuade her to follow a musical career, and she became furious when her recitals were interrupted by the sound of the army’s turututus, loud Paraguayan horns which they played to keep up their spirits. They were stopped immediately. But the allies were closing in, so the President and his mistress headed north, she in an old Spanish carriage with high wheels and leather springs, he in an American four-wheeled buggy. They took the remains of the army and 600 carts, loaded with the national archives, all the gold from the treasury and enough wine and provisions to last the dictator and his family several months. And they took Eliza’s Pleyel piano. Lopez’s mother and sisters, Raphaela and Innocencia, the vast ‘Bavarian eggs’ whom Eliza loved to humiliate, fell under suspicion of treachery and were locked in wooden cages on wheels and rolled along with the rest of the heavy baggage, just behind the piano; every so often Lopez would take them out for an airing and have them flogged, as the column wound northwards, harried by advance units of Brazilian cavalry. At a point between Las Lomas and Cerro Corá in the far north, the President’s final resting place, the Pleyel was unceremoniously dumped near the river, the horse drawing its carriage having died and been eaten.
The town is still called Piano, or Isla Madama.
The progress of the Blanca Doña was slower now. Every few miles a tiny hut, or merely a path, broke the monotony of the forested banks. Usually there was a canoe waiting, on to which the crew would load provisions. No money seemed to change hands.
We left the main branch of the river and detoured down a winding tributary, stopping at a larger estancia, the Rancho Negro, to take on two more passengers. One was a taciturn, leathery gaucho with deep, distant eyes and a heavily scarred face. The other was a live puma nailed into a wooden cage which the crew gingerly carried to the bow and then avoided. She was a pathetic sight, about five feet long with a tawny coat, spattered with her own excrement. The cage was too narrow for her to turn, and she spat and hissed furiously if anyone approached her. Except her captor. When he menaced her with a raised hand she would cower in terror, shrinking back against the slats. The hunter, whose name was Roberto, made an illegal living as a puma-hunter. This one had been lassoed with boleadoras from horseback; more often he would merely trap them. ‘They are difficult to find’, he explained, ‘but easy to catch.’ When trained and domesticated they could fetch $80 in Asunción market, sold on the quiet as the plaything of some gorged Asunción housewife. The government knew all about the trade in rare animals and animal skins, but turned an eye blinded by bribery.
I couldn’t decide which of the two new arrivals was more threatening. The puma’s cage looked distinctly unsafe, but Roberto looked more so. His skin looked peculiarly white next to the other Paraguayans. Of the two he would have been more at home in a zoo. A great knife was stuck in the back of his belt. He took it out as we left the shore, and stuck it absent-mindedly in the wheelhouse door.
The first European to set foot in Paraguay also came up the Rio Paraguay in search of a possibly non-existent tribe of white-skinned men.
Don Alejio Garcia was a conquistador, a credit to Portuguese manhood and a brave crusader for the holiest of Churches. None of which alters the fact that Don Alejio was actually a violent and greedy pirate, which he might have admitted if you had asked him. A Florentine bank-clerk called Amerigo Vespucci was Garcia’s inspiration. Vespucci was manager of the Seville branch of the Medici bank, a boring job which he abandoned after hearing tales of the wonders of a new world, to take up exploration, cosmology and geography. He crossed the Atlantic and sailed down the coast of Brazil, discovering what was later to be called the Rio de la Plata. Vespucci became convinced that somewhere on this vast coast was a strait leading through the continent to the spice islands on the other side, but he abandoned the search at some point on the Patagonian coast. There was another reason for wanting to colonise South America, apart from the money to be made. By biblical prophecy, the conversion of the ‘hidden Jews’ would be the prelude to the ending of the intermediary age, when Christianity would become truly catholic. What could these half-clad savages be other than the Jews of the Diaspora of the period of Shalmaneser? Stealing their precious metals, raping their women and converting them was all part of God’s plan, an excellent way of combining business, pleasure and piety.
Alejio Garcia sailed with Juan Diaz de Solis, pilot major of Spain, to discover the passage through the new continent, which would bring with it untold wealth. The explorers arrived at the Rio de la Plata estuary in the summer of 1515 and began to explore where Vespucci had left off. On the island of Martin Garcia, a group of Charrua Indians hospitably beckoned the pilot major to come ashore. Juan de Solis landed on the beach and, sadly for him, was immediately eaten.
The leaderless party decided to set sail for home, but one vessel ran aground near the island of Santa Catharina. Only eighteen men made it to shore, one of whom was Alejio Garcia. Garcia rapidly gained a working knowledge of the Guaraní tongue, and with it tales of a vast and wealthy kingdom, ruled over by el Rey Blanco, the White King, lying far to the west, which the Guaraní had periodically invaded over the preceding centuries. Garcia’s Guaraní informants were talking about the Inca Empire. His avarice piqued by the fabled wealth of this White empire, Garcia left Santa Catharina around 1524, with a handful of Spanish and Portuguese companions, and some Indian slaves. They headed west, discovering en route the great Iguassú falls and crossing the Paraná river. At about the point where Asunción was later founded, Garcia persuaded 2,000 Chiruguano warriors to join him in his planned raid on the riches of el Rey Blanco. They sailed up the Rio Paraguay into what is now Bolivia, before striking west through the Chaco swamps. On reaching the outskirts of the Inca Empire they settled down to some plundering, and in a short time amassed a vast quantity of booty. But the troops of Huayna Capac, the reigning Inca, fought back, forcing Garcia to retreat to protect his spoils of war.
The conquistador headed south again to the safer banks of the Paraguay and sent word to his former companions in Santa Catharina to join him and help in the plunder of the Inca riches; knowing his colleagues well, he also sent a small quantity of silver to whet their appetites. They declined the offer, sensibly as it emerged, for in late 1525 Garcia and all his companions were murdered by their Indian allies, and their loot was divided among the Indians who lived where they had died, a hundred and fifty miles north of Asunción near a place now called Antequera.
But the story of a great and rich city ruled by a white king, somewhere in the interior, continued to obsess European explorers, and from time to time it killed them. It came with many names, this lost civilisation, this Eldorado: the City of the Caesars, Meta, Omagua, Manoa. For some it was the Empire Puytita, near the Laguna de los Xarayes. At night, around a fire of bones, gauchos still talk of mystic Trapalanda; the Indians call it Tapua Guazu, the great city. Even Bernhard Förster reported rumours of a wild Aryan race, the Guana-qui:
I know not whether to believe the accounts, widespread but perhaps exaggerated, of a race consisting of wasted, blonde individuals, uncivilised in the extreme, whose different language has prevented contact with the Guaraní. They are said to live in trees, and with the help of sticks are able to walk upright, rather like monkeys. I am not in a position to say what truth there may be in these reports, which I have heard from many sides, but the existence of such a racially distinct group seems indisputable. It would surely be of anthropological interest to study their physical form, language etc.
Förster came to South America to escape the Jews; but they had got there almost four hundred years before he did. The Jews of Portugal were forcibly converted to Christianity in 1497; thousands of these ‘New Christians’ subsequently emigrated to the New World, to avoid the continued persecution. It was their financial know-how that made the New World operate: they formed the backbone of the trading class. An ungrateful Inquisition soon followed them, of course, and 400 New Christians were tried in Brazil alone on charges of Judaising, a crime punishable by burning; merely being Portuguese was usually enough to arouse the Inquisition’s suspicion of cryptoJewry. Even so, Portuguese Jews, converted or otherwise, headed to South America in numbers and some of the Portuguese explorers were New Christians. It is quite possible, for example, that Alejio Garcia, the man who opened up the interior of the New World for a prolonged burst of European missionary activity among the Indians, the ‘hidden Jews’, was Jewish himself.
Ramirez said that we should make Antequera before nightfall. The sound of Roberto stabbing his knife into the rotting woodwork, a cloud of silent black bugs (the jejen, perhaps) and thoughts of Ector’s paltry death combined to make me wonder again why I was doing this ridiculous trip. I dozed grimly, grimy with sweat and breathing diesel fumes.
It was beginning to dawn on me that most of the history of Paraguay revolved around white men chasing after other white men in the jungle, or else trying to turn the brown ones white. In Asunción I had met Jim Woodman, an American amateur explorer and epigraphicist: he said that the Europeans had been in Paraguay long before Garcia and the conquistadors. Jim keeps a house in Asunción which doubles as a museum; he stays there when not running a watersports business in Coconut Grove, Florida. When I met him he wore exceptionally tight jeans and cowboy boots with heels so large that he had to bend his knees to avoid toppling forward. He was very earnest. ‘The Celts were here ages ago, way back in the fourth, fifth century, and the Vikings and the Irish and the Africans. They were all here.’ His pamphlet said: ‘I’m also convinced the trail crossed America years ago. It, perhaps, was one taken by the bearded white gods South America’s shadowy legends say brought knowledge and culture to Andean tribes.’ The walls of Jim’s house were covered with photographs of fertility symbols and inscriptions he had found in caves around Paraguay, some not far from Nueva Germania. Most were in Celtic Ogham, which supposedly has an alphabet something like this:
The first of Jim’s inscriptions read:
From which he deduced:
Which, somehow, he translated as ‘A cave shelter: enjoy it, be of good cheer, [signed] Grim.’ There is a lot of guesswork involved in epigraphy, he said. To me they looked more like the sort of notches bored prisoners make to count off the days, similar to the marks Roberto, the gaucho, had been making in the wheelhouse door with his machete.
A loud hooting made me sit bolt upright, banging my head painfully on the low roof. Ramirez was sounding the ship’s horn repeatedly, urgently. Dazed, I staggered out into the sunlight, thinking that the impossible had happened, and miraculously Ector had been found alive. The crew had gathered at the side of the boat and were pointing excitedly into the undergrowth. From somewhere Roberto had produced a rifle. Mborebi, a tapir, had come down to the water’s edge and had narrowly escaped being turned into supper. I was pleased it had escaped, although I would have liked a close look at one of those extraordinary animals. Having that professional animal-killer Roberto on board was already enough of an affront to the Guaraní goddess, Caaguy Pora, the guardian of the animals, birds and streams. She was the protector of the ecology, the main Green god of the Guaraní pantheon. The man who killed for pleasure or profit incurred her implacable wrath. It was thanks to her that the streams continued to flow when man dammed them, and that the animals continued to reproduce when man killed them without reason. Caaguy Pora could take the form of any animal; if you killed an animal for food, she forgave, but if you killed or captured wantonly her punishment was grave.
I went over to where the puma was panting in her cage. As I approached she hissed demonically; perhaps that was Caaguy Pora’s fury in her eyes. I hoped she would devour the first Asunción millionairess she came across. They are unreliable household pets, on the whole. The Rev. William Barbrooke Grubb was almost killed by one in 1891. This leathery missionary was lying asleep in a hut in his mission at Waikthlantingmangyalwa, about one hundred and twenty miles due west of Antequera in the heart of the Chaco, when the incident happened:
A tame tiger cat had also gone to sleep on one of the beams overhead. What really happened to it I do not know. At any rate, it lost its balance and fell down from the beam, unfortunately right on my chest, and I woke up with a great fright, to find it viciously spitting in my face. In my weak and nervous condition I sustained a great shock, and the cat was made to pay the penalty of death for its unintentional fall, the owner being afraid it might annoy me again.
The good man was in a febrile state because he had just had to crawl about a hundred and ten miles through the jungle after being shot in the back with a seven-inch poisoned arrow, fired by a disgruntled convert. The man responsible for this attempted murder suffered a similar fate to the puma, and had his brains ritually removed with a machete by the elders of his tribe. Which was odd, and a sign of the changing times, because as Barbrooke Grubb admitted, ‘an Indian who killed a foreigner was looked on by his people as a hero, and worthy of all respect’.
Barbrooke Grubb arrived in Paraguay in 1886, within a few months of Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster. In addition to being brave to the point of insanity, pious and chaste, Barbrooke Grubb was a gifted amateur anthropologist. His portrayal of the life of the Lengua Indians, of whom now only a few thousand remain, is a rare in-depth study of indigenous peoples in Paraguay. Yet his assumptions of racial superiority were little different from those of many other white men who came to Paraguay. For twenty years he survived among the Indian tribes, by following a simple set of rules:
That attitude was briefly this: to assume at all times and under all circumstances superiority and authority … perhaps a few general instances given here will best illustrate the way in which I carried out this policy. On arriving at a village, I insisted, as far as possible, upon all the people ministering to my personal comfort. I ordered one to prepare my resting place, another to make a fire, a third to bring me water, and another to pull off my knee boots. When the heat was great or the flies troublesome, I made two sit by me with a fan. When on foot and having to cross a swampy patch, I made one of them carry me across – in fact, I avoided doing anything myself that I could persuade them to do for me …
Under the circumstances, it is amazing that someone didn’t try to shoot him earlier, but his attitude was echoed by almost every European traveller to the country. The early Jesuit missionaries professed amazement at the weak but biddable Indian character: ‘They had’, wrote the feisty French missionary François-Xavier de Charlevoix of the indigenous tribes, ‘extraordinarily small intelligence, more or less stupidity and ferocity, an indolence and distaste for work, and absence of provision for the future, that had no bounds.’ As further evidence of their cultural inferiority, early travellers gave lurid details of the Indians’ loose morality, licentiousness and cannibalism.
A Dutch mercenary, Hulderilke Schnirdel, who was present at the founding of Asunción in 1537, is typical of the combination of moral disapproval and straightforward titillation:
The men and women both in this Countrie goe all naked, as they were created of God. Amongst these Indians the Father sels the Daughter, the Husband the wife. Sometimes the Brother doth either sell or change the Sister. They value a Woman at a Shirt, a Knife, a Hatchet, or some other thing of this kinde. These Carios also eate mans flesh, if they can get it. For when they take any in the warres, whether they be men or women, young or old, they fatten them, no otherwise than wee doe Hogges. But they keepe a woman some yeeres, if she be yong, and of a commendable beautie, but if in the meane time, she apply not herselfe to all their desires, they kill and eate her, making a solemne banquet, as marriages are wont to be celebrated with us.
Only later does Schnirdel coyly admit that ‘I for mine owne person did possesse about fiftie men, women, and children.’
In fact, if the Guaraní did indulge in cannibalism, they seem to have made it as pleasant an experience as possible for the intended victim. According to Pero Hernandez, in Cabeza de Vaca’s Commentarios,
they eat the flesh of their enemies whom they take captive in war, bringing them to their settlements and making great merriment and rejoicing with them, dancing and singing till the captive grows fat. They give him their wives and daughters, in order that he may have every pleasure. It is these wives who take the trouble to fatten him. Those held in the greatest honour among them admit him to their couches, adorn him in various ways according to their custom, and bedeck him with feathers and necklaces of white beads and stones, which are much prized among them. When he begins to grow fat they redouble their efforts; the dancing, singing and pleasures of all kinds increase. Then the men come; they adorn and make ready three boys of the age of six or seven, placing a little hatchet in their hands …
The infants then dice up the fattened, contented captive and the women cook him in earthenware pots. Even the babes in arms had a little broth.
Early arrivals to the Terra Incognita ignored, or more often demolished, the subtle social structures of Indian tribal life; in Guaraní religion, rich with natural myth, they saw only heathen superstition. A German Jesuit who travelled the wilderness in the second half of the eighteenth century left a remarkable account of one foray to convert the ‘hidden Jews’. From his mission at San Estanislao, Father Martin Dobrizhoffer set out barefoot to convert the Indians of the M’baevera forest, the very area that Elisabeth Nietzsche later colonised. It look twenty days of wandering before the priest found some convertible material. Cunninghame Graham described this Indian tribe as ‘a community of seemingly quite happy sylvans, whom he proceeded to convert … hapless, harmless folk, as innocent of God and devil, right and wrong, and all the things which by rights they should have known, as they are said to be implanted in the mind of man, no matter what his state, seem to have lived quite happily in their involuntary sin’. Father Dobrizhoffer, touched or possibly infuriated by ‘their unregenerate state’, burst into tears. ‘My friends’, he said in Guaraní, ‘my mission is to make you happy.’ He played the viola d’amore, as they sat in a circle around him, and then he berated them for their nudity, their savagery and their ignorance of God’s word. He told them of heaven and hell, salvation and damnation. The Indians seem to have thought it was all terribly funny, and sat around smoking long cigars and giggling. Then Father Dobrizhoffer took the expedient of presenting the tribe with knives, glass beads, axes, mirrors and fish hooks, which more or less instantly converted them to Christianity. ‘I seem to have borne down all before me because I mingled my oration with a copious largesse’, he admitted. In return the cacique of the tribe offered his hilarious and generous guest his prettiest daughter and invited him to stay in the forest for ever. The priest declined, but managed to persuade one of the tribe to return to the mission with him, where he was baptised.
Nietzsche thought that ‘for youthful, vigorous barbarians Christianity is poison; to implant the teaching of sinfulness and damnation into the heroic, childish and animal soul … is nothing other than to poison it’. For even the most enthusiastic Indian convert, life in the missions could be a slow death. ‘They died like plants’, admits another Jesuit, ‘which, grown in the shade, will not bear the sun.’ It was the fallacy of every white person who came to the New World correctly to identify the people they found as different, and incorrectly identify this as wrong. It was what Nietzsche again would have called the will to power, ‘which was in former times inflamed by the belief that one was in possession of the truth and which bore such beautiful names that one could thenceforth venture to be inhuman with a good conscience (to burn Jews, heretics and good books and exterminate higher cultures such as those of Peru and Mexico) … what one formerly did “for the sake of God” one now does for the sake of money’.
Bernhard’s and Elisabeth’s racism and cultural superiority were little different from the ideas of earlier European arrivals in Paraguay, except that their racism was blended with notions of biological purity. They found their Paraguayan neighbours feckless, idolatrous and deceitful, of use only as domestic servants. In Förster’s view:
The principal characteristics of the Guaraní are indolence, sluggishness and indifference. The Paraguayan is content with little, but this contentment is a vice rather than a virtue. A paradisiacal situation, of living without labour, which might seem ideal to the work-shy Jew, is achievable in these tropical and semi-tropical zones. The Indians exist without doing any real work … and the excessive use of alcohol will gradually ruin the country and the population … The Paraguayan is passive and without initiative; he is perhaps the most biddable man on earth, even more so than the German, whose patience and governability is exemplary in Europe … but you can’t trust the word of a Paraguayan.
Elisabeth agreed. Paraguayans she described as ‘a harmless race with certain childlike traits that one must never forget in dealing with them … the best method of keeping Paraguayan servants is to treat them firmly, but kindly, like children, to let them keep their own ways in eating, drinking and working, and to give them little presents from time to time…’
Actually Elisabeth was not content to let people get away with eating whatever they wanted, and they were both scornful of the Paraguayans’ carnivorous habits. According to Förster, ‘Throughout Paraguay, there is the belief that so long as meat is available, every other sort of food is unnecessary. “Give us today our meat for tomorrow.” Just as a German farmer will roast a pig for a party, and want no other food than this anti-Semitic dish, so a dish of beef is a meal in itself for the Paraguayans.’ Elisabeth echoed this fanatical vegetarianism and backed it up with some bogus medical theorising. Meat-eating is a mistake, she wrote, ‘for it heats the blood, which must be avoided in this country … my husband, myself and all our vegetarian servants have escaped acclimatisation illness, an ailment which consists of sores on the hands and feet … in every case a vegetarian diet would be beneficial and bring about a speedy recovery.’
*
It was late afternoon when we reached Antequera, the point at which I would leave the Blanca Doña and head east to Nueva Germania. It was hardly a port, as Elisabeth had described it, merely a row of one-storey houses made from adobe bricks, lining the riverbank. Some of the houses had been painted pink; a sign hung outside one, with Yerba painted on it. We made fast at a dilapidated pier as the sun was setting an angry red over the river.
The Blanca Doña and her crew planned to spend the night before going on. I shook hands with each in turn. ‘I hope you find lots of Germans’, said Captain Ramirez, slapping my back and joggling a farewell eyebrow. ‘If you want to go back downriver we’ll be back in a week.’ Francisco had said I would find a hospedaje on the front. ‘Just ask for Yolanda.’
In the gloom I dragged my equipment up the hill, pink mosquito net dragging in the dust. Two heroically fat women were sitting on the porch of one of the huts, eating nuts. Both appeared to be called Yolanda, and both agreed that the mosquito net was the funniest thing to happen in Antequera for about a decade. ‘Yolanda will put it up for you’, said Yolanda, and her namesake grabbed it and rolled off into the inner recesses of the house, laughing heartily.
Yolanda I, who appeared to be in charge by virtue of being marginally more obese than her partner, went off to cook, leaving me to sit in front of the house with a warm beer, Bremen again. Antequera seemed to be deserted. In the heavy dusk, an anorexic chicken plucked absent-mindedly at the dirt road around my feet; after about a quarter of an hour, a gloomy-looking cow wandered down the street. I knew how it felt.
The clank of the Blanca Doña’s diesel still buzzed in my head, joined now by a great orchestra of cicadas, fizzing and popping overhead, but the beer began to relax me. Yolanda II returned with a plate of bori-bori, chicken stew, and chipa, small flour pancakes. She cantilevered from side to side as she walked, like a sumo wrestler. I ate it fast, under the beady eye of the chicken, possibly a close relation of my meal, and certainly a potential cannibal. I watched the river change colour and a fishing canoe steering gently towards the Chaco side.
Sebastian Cabot, the famous chief pilot of Spain, had heard the story of Alejio Garcia, the first conquistador in Paraguay, and of el Rey Blanco from Portuguese in Pernambuco and from Garcia’s companions left on Santa Catharina. In 1526 he decided to find out what had become of Garcia and to make another assault on the wealth of the white city. In 1526 he headed up the Paraguay with four ships and six hundred men. Some hundred and fifty miles upriver from Asunción near the spot where I was eating my boribori, he came on a Guaraní tribe by the river who had quantities of silver in their possession, the remains of Alejio Garcia’s treasure. Cabot stole it back and named the Rio Paraguay, Rio de la Plata, the river of silver, but he didn’t find the City of the Caesars or el Rey Blanco.
There is one more chapter of the story of Alejio Garcia. It was rumoured that when the Indians of Antequera had killed Garcia and stolen the silver he had previously stolen from the Incas, one Spaniard had survived: Alejio Garcia’s son. The Governor of Asunción in 1543, Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, heard reports of a white captive held by the tribe that had killed the Portuguese adventurer, and he decided to liberate him. Cabeza de Vaca had good reason to feel sympathy for the plight of the younger Garcia, having himself spent ten years a captive of American Indians in Florida. When he heard of Garcia’s plight, he sent messengers to the tribe, ordering them to relinquish their captive. But the leader of the tribe, whose name was Tabaré, killed all the Governor’s emissaries except one, whom he sent back to the Governor with the message not to despatch any more.
So Cabeza de Vaca sent a huge army north with three hundred Spanish soldiers and over a thousand Guaraní warriors. Tabaré’s tribe was massacred; three thousand were slain and four thousand returned to Asunción as slaves, but they found no trace of Garcia’s kidnapped son. Perhaps the Indians had hidden him in the forest or killed him. Or perhaps he had decided to stay, mixing his own white blood with the brown forest maidens. Cabeza de Vaca was an anti-Semite. I fell asleep wondering if he would have gone to the trouble of massacring all those Indians if he had thought Garcia was Jewish.
I awoke to the sound of someone playing Guaraní pop music on a radio. It was a peculiar sound, gurgling and repetitive, a sort of cleft-palate Cajun. In the mud-floored kitchen an unspecified Yolanda was frying tortillas.
During the night my right hand had slipped outside the mosquito net. A symmetrical row of white dots ran along my knuckles, each one of which had been bitten with pinpoint precision. ‘No one who has become acquainted with the Paraguayan mosquito in all its industriousness’, wrote Förster, ‘and suffered its attentions on a hot, still summer night on the Rio Paraguay, will ever forget the experience.’ The pain was spectacular, and I could barely bend my fingers.
The path through the forest from Antequera to Nueva Germania and beyond was made by the soldiers of Lopez’s army as they retreated from Las Lomas. By the time of the colony’s foundation it was little more than a mud track, barely negotiable by oxcart and liable to surprise flooding. When the band of German pioneers led by Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster arrived here in 1886, the men rode on horseback, and the women, children and furniture were taken in oxcarts, carreteras, painfully slow, jolting and impossible to stop. In order to put the brakes on an oxcart, it is necessary to run to the front and wave your arms, by which time you have almost certainly run over or hit whatever you were stopping for. I decided to go by horse.
For two hours I wandered around the tiny village trying to borrow one. The fact that I wanted to go to Nueva Germania was already well known: the Yolandas had seen to that. But, perhaps not unreasonably, no one wanted to see a complete stranger wander away with their horses. I even tried a bit of Barbrooke Grubbing, by simply ordering them to lend me a horse but they just laughed, and so did I. I ate a lunch of stringy meat in broth and lay in the shade of the porch, trying to calculate how long it would take me to walk to Nueva Germania. Yolanda said there was one person left who could help, who was known to have lots of horses: Castellano, the town butcher in San Pedro. Why did a butcher have so many horses, I wondered; put more precisely, what had I eaten for lunch?
In the mid-afternoon, a man stumped into the hospedaje, dressed in leather riding chaps and with one withered foot sticking out at right angles. His black T-shirt was rolled up over a swelling stomach covered in dense black hair, and an unlit cheroot was wedged between a gap in his teeth. Castellano looked like a caricature bandito. Except he spoke no English and precious little Spanish. His cuticles were caked with dried blood.
Nueva Germania, he said, was about seventy kilometres along the track towards Santa Rosa between the Aguarya-umí and Aguarya-guazu rivers; three days’ ride, two if we rode hard. He patted his stomach gravely with one hand and scratched his testicles with the other. It could be done, but, he shook his head, it would be expensive. We negotiated over Bremen in a cloud of cheroot smoke. Castellano explained that he needed the horses to work his chacra, the little farm he kept out of town; if they were away for several days he would be losing money. And then what about his family? What if they needed to get stores from the town? They would have to walk. Also it was very hot, he said, taking off his large straw hat and fanning himself by way of explanation; the horses would need to rest often. And I would need a guide because you never knew who was out there, he waved vaguely. ‘The montes can be dangerous at night.’ He was too busy to come himself.
He peered doubtfully at my knees, which were turning a delicate salmon pink in the sun. ‘Do you know how to ride a horse?’ I had ridden as a child in Scotland, I said, and was sure I could remember how. Castellano took out his cheroot and narrowed his eyes. ‘I could take you for a ride around my house’, he said, brightening. ‘How about that instead?’ I explained that I was trying to find the remains of a German colony, not improve my dressage. He nodded and ran his tongue over the gums where his front teeth should have been. ‘Las rubias, the blondes, eh?’ Then he laughed, a great booming guffaw. ‘I get it, you like blonde girls.’
Once Castellano had decided that my motives were basically sexual, the deal was as good as done: ‘My nephew will be your guide. He knows how to get to Nueva Germania, and he can bring the horses back. Four thousand Guaraní dollars per horse per day and food for Roberto. And if you fall off and die it’s not my fault. You can pay me now.’ Castellano folded the notes, a vast quantity of money, into the pocket of his T-shirt and hitched up his breeches. ‘Good luck.’ We shook hands. ‘I hope you find lots of blonde girls’, he shouted over his shoulder as he stumped off down the street.
Yolanda and Yolanda, who had been standing in the doorway pretending not to listen, looked happily scandalised.
Castellano’s nephew, Roberto, arrived at dawn the next day, mounted on a beautiful bay mare; being pulled along behind it was an animal which, if it wasn’t actually a mule, could certainly claim a bit of mule (or possibly hinny) in its putative ancestry. One of Cunninghame Graham’s favourite sayings was from Kim: ‘The wise man knows that horses are good.’ All very well if you have a good horse; mine seemed to have distemper, and a rash of leprosy on its bottom.
Roberto took my luggage, which on Castellano’s orders I had packed into bolsas made out of two grain bags, and loaded them on to the back of the beast in front of the saddle. The animal already had a fairly serious hunchback; with my luggage on top it looked like an equine Quasimodo, or a shrunken camel. My guide sensibly pointed out, in Spanish, that if I put the bags in front of the saddle there would be no room for my legs, and I would have to ride facing backwards. It was a good point; while I was tying my bags on to its rump my horse shat violently and extensively. Clearly a case of too much Rio Paraguay water. I empathised.
Roberto was about seventeen, with a sharp Indian face under a baseball cap. He was clearly unhappy at having to spend several days taking an obvious lunatic on a pointless riding trip. I wondered what tiny percentage of Castellano’s fee he had been promised, as I gingerly mounted the horse and waved goodbye to the Yolandas, who suddenly seemed to have lost interest and didn’t wave back. With a languid flick of his leather whip, Roberto jerked his horse into a trot and we left town at a jangling clip; it was immediately painful. Roberto rode ahead, not looking behind.
The forest closed in almost at once, a great bank of creepers on either side. It was silent in the cool dawn air. For the first few miles, the wall of trees was broken occasionally by a small house, often with goats and a cow grazing outside. Paraguayan faces peered out of the doorways into the bright sunlight as we passed. A few fields had been carved out, which became fewer as we rode. At a bend in the track a little child ran after the horses, dressed in nothing but a T-shirt. Unsmiling, she reached up to hand me a gift of a chicken’s egg and ran away before I could say anything. Flocks of bright-red birds shrieked out of the bushes at the sound of the horses.
My nag appeared to be waking up, presumably relieved to have escaped from certain death at Castellano’s hands, and so did Roberto. ‘You like las rubias, eh?’ he said, expertly reining in his horse alongside mine.
‘Are there many Germans in the town?’ I asked.
‘Some’, he said with a frown, ‘but they are shy. They live mostly in the forest.’
‘Are they friendly though?’ I sounded like something out of Rider Haggard.
Roberto laughed, and clicked his horse on. ‘They will talk to you, I think, el Rubio.’
By ten it was getting hot again. A pair of gauchos appeared ahead, whipping on a herd of cattle with shrill whistles and flailing whips. They turned their horses at sharp angles, riding one-handed. We pulled off the track to let them pass at a dusty gallop. I noticed for the first time that our horses seemed to be sweating almost as much as me. Roberto, on the other hand, seemed bone dry. The horses and I plunged our faces into a little stream.
‘We will stop and rest.’ Roberto thrashed the long grass by the track with his whip, before throwing his saddle down and lying back on it, with a traditional pre-siesta groan. ‘In Paraguay there are many snakes’, he said.
I asked him if he knew of the macaguá bird, which attacks poisonous snakes. It is said to use one wing as shield, while attacking the snake with its long beak. If it is bitten, it searches out and eats the seed of a particular forest plant called the macaguá. It soon recovers. The Indians followed the bird’s example and found an antidote for snakebite.
From behind his hat Roberto said that birds were, on the whole, not stupid enough to attack snakes – at least he had never heard of it; he had, however, heard of Madonna and hummed ‘Like a Virgin’ as he dropped off.
Bernhard and Elisabeth advised their colonists: ‘The snakes are dangerous, and there is no shortage of poisonous species. You are advised to keep an antidote with you at all times, failing that immediately suck the wound and burn it.’
I leafed through my History of Paraguay, much of which is about snakes. Most poisonous of all is the nandurie, which kills quickly unless an antidote is made from a liana, icipo. Then there is the coral snake, and the frailesca, a grey viper about a foot long, and its sister snake, which wears a crimson badge at its throat. The one that I was most unenthusiastic about meeting was the cinqo minuto, the five-minute snake, so called because that is exactly how long you have to think up some really terrific last words.
At about five that afternoon, we descended into a wide valley. The forest had been cleared, and the red-earth track wandered across a broad expanse of plain. The sight lifted my spirits after the forest gloom, and Roberto cranked his Madonna recital up a notch. Weaver birds flitted in and out of dangling nests in the long grasses. For the first time we crossed a tributary of the Rio Jejui, the river into which the Aguarya-umí and the Aguarya-guazu flow. We splashed water on our heads. It was tepid, but refreshing. Even here in the shallows it flowed fast, winking and rippling in the weakening sun.
Roberto became almost talkative. ‘You came on the Blanca Doña?’
‘Yes.’
‘Ector was killed.’
‘Yes.’
‘Qué tristeza.’
As soon as we were out of the water, the sweat began to prick my scalp again. Back in the saddle, I could feel a trickle of sweat moving slowly down my back; on reflection, it felt more like an insect, probably the dreaded picá. I hit myself very hard on the back with my whip and fell off my horse. It was the first time I had seen Roberto laugh.
The path was steeper now, twisting up into another patch of forest. Behind, the little valley was cross-hatched with tiny streams, all leading back eventually to the Rio Paraguay. Somewhere in the latticework of waterways, as intricate as nanduti lace, is the final resting place of los tresorios escondidos del mariscal Lopez y su Concubina, the cartloads of looted gold and silver, precious jewels and baubles that Lopez and Eliza Lynch took with them on the final march. Between Las Lomas and the last stand at Cerro Corá, the first couple of Paraguay decided they could move faster without their spoils; like the Pleyel earlier, the cartloads of treasure were pushed off the bank of a river and allowed to sink to the bottom to be retrieved when the war was won. Fourteen witnesses to the hiding place were executed.
By February 1870 Lopez and his ragged army (numbering 409 old men, children and women) were finally surrounded in the woods of Cerro Corá, a few miles from the Brazilian frontier. For several weeks the Brazilians built up their forces for the final assault, and Lopez, too, kept himself busy: he had a special medal designed to commemorate the imminent victory, tried and executed a number of his leading officers and signed a death warrant for his mother. They had never really got on since Eliza Lynch had come to Paraguay.
On 1 March the Brazilian cavalry attacked in force. Lopez tried to escape on his cream-coloured charger, but the horse stuck fast in a bog and the President was overtaken by a unit of enemy horse. They called on him to surrender, and Lopez replied by shooting at them with his revolver, wounding one. He was unhorsed by a lance thrust and wounded in the stomach, but he still managed to stagger to the far bank before a rifle volley twisted him into the mud. It was a long way from County Cork to Cerro Corá, but Eliza Lynch was always thorough. She buried Lopez on the riverbank, scraping a shallow hole in the earth with her finely manicured fingers; then, under courteous Brazilian escort, she returned to Europe and exile.
On the profits from her stolen jewellery, she lived in London’s Thurloe Square and sent Lopez’s sons to boarding school in Croydon. She gave some terrific parties, but eventually the money ran out. She went back to Paris; malicious gossips said that, her looks barely impaired by middle age and the horrors she had witnessed, she took up where she had left off, as a courtesan.
Her life ended as obscurely as it had begun. She died on 24 July 1886, on what would have been Lopez’s sixtieth birthday, in a rooming house for impoverished but genteel ladies in the Boulevard Pereire; and the secret of where, in which of Paraguay’s myriad rivers, lies her stolen fortune died with her. The Paraguayans say it is guarded by the espíritus of her victims. Elisabeth was unconvinced. She told prospective colonists, ‘In a lagoon near the path through the forest, the fleeing Lopez is said to have left behind his gold-filled war chests, although the Germans are sceptical of this story. Certainly treasures are buried in New Germany, but no one need search for them secretly. The fertility of this wonderful red earth is our treasure …’
The track topped another ridge above a smaller valley. On the horizon a light flickered through the dusk.
‘We will stay there. I have friends.’
After journeying for nearly twelve hours, the horses were exhausted, their coats matted with sweat and dead flies. I felt little sympathy. They would probably recover. I, on the other hand, would not. My horse had developed an extraordinary knack of trotting, in a violent and irregular way, at all times, even when standing still. In order to ease some of the astonishing pain in my buttocks, I had tried sitting side-saddle and immediately fell off again, this time crushing the egg in my breast pocket. Most of it I had scraped out with a twig, but the remains had stiffened unpleasantly in the heat.
It was dark when we reached a small cluster of huts. A group of men sat in a circle outside, talking in low voices, and a single kerosene lamp cast their lumpish shadows across the road. The talking stopped abruptly at the sound of our horses and Roberto called out a greeting in Guaraní before dismounting and handing me his reins. He seemed suddenly tense.
One man got unsteadily to his feet, and they spoke earnestly in Guaraní. Roberto walked back. ‘Caña’, he said, ‘they are drunk. But we can stay here.’ I couldn’t see the men’s faces, but I could feel their eyes as we unsaddled and tied the horses to a tree. The air fizzed with cicadas, and fireflies flickered luminously through the grass. A radio was playing from somewhere inside the main hut.
I approached the circle and ventured a warbling ‘Buenos tardes.’ The man who had spoken to Roberto muttered something and looked away. A couple of the other men grunted. One, I saw, was staring dead ahead in a stupor. They had the same taut, faraway expressions as Roberto the puma-catcher; not quite unfriendly, but fierce. Some wore riding boots and one had a pistol holstered to his waist. A single glass of caña was being passed around, maté fashion, from drinker to drinker. They seemed embarrassed, angry almost, to have been disturbed in their cups, which were, I noticed, strewn on the ground around them. I decided not to buy a round.
I walked over to the hut, which Roberto had already entered. An older man, very drunk, swayed out of the door and, seeing me, thrust a whiskery face into mine and breathed something loudly in Guaraní. He repeated it and cocked his head to one side, then staggered off into the gloom. I sat on the porch and tried to massage some life back into my aching legs; the insides of my knees were raw, clearly damaged beyond repair. Roberto re-emerged with some food, cold beans and a lump of meat in batter. While we ate, the group went back to their hushed conversation. Every ten minutes or so one would lurch to his feet and dive inside the hut, to return with another brimming cup full of caña. Why didn’t they bring out the bottle? Perhaps they were drinking it straight from the still.
Caña is a drink of terrifying alcoholic properties, made from distilled sugar-cane syrup, a sort of nuclear rum. Elisabeth Förster was sniffy about it, arguing that it compounded the Paraguayans’ already manifest racial inadequacies and even threatened to disrupt the strict moral code she had imbued in her colonists. Roberto brought me a glass, and I drained the viscous yellow liquid with my eyes closed. It was like swallowing the bar on an electric fire. When I stopped weeping, I saw that Roberto and the old man had dragged an entire bed out of the hut, complete with straw mattress and a rough blanket. Presumably the owner of the caña shop had decided that the hundred Guaraní dollars I had given him to pay our board and lodging included giving up his bed. I felt a flood of gratitude and collapsed on it. Roberto erected a hammock for himself.
‘Tomorrow we will find the Germans’, he whispered.
The caña drinkers carried on through the night. The hum of their conversation, and the occasional raucous shout, wafted in and out of my sleep.
I woke, cold and stiff, in the early dawn. The drinkers had gone, leaving behind a small hillock of glasses. Roberto, too, had disappeared. A fine mist hung above the ground and among the boughs of the surrounding forest, the tears of the izapi tree. Izapi was the beautiful but stony-hearted daughter of a great Indian cacique. Nothing made her weep; she could watch devastation and death without emotion. The tribe was plagued by a series of dreadful calamities, floods and storms and disease, and still Izapi watched it all dry-eyed and austere. The tribe dwindled, and only a few were left alive. ‘It is Izapi’, said the remaining elders. ‘Our sorrows will continue until she learns to cry.’ The tribe’s witch doctor, the cuñatai, called on Aña, the moon dweller, to help them. Aña turned Izapi into a tree, which weeps all night, its leaves producing a fine, refreshing vapour that suckles the cracked earth and makes the streams run clear. Izapi was not unlike Elisabeth Nietzsche; she never cried unless she needed to.
Roberto returned with a gourd of yerba maté and a flask of hot water. The scalding, musty liquid was immediately refreshing. Roberto sang under his breath as he saddled the horses.
‘What is the song?’
‘It’s a song about the morning’, he said. ‘The morning is the best time. Come, we must ride before the heat comes.’
Even with the pain of remounting, the first few hours’ ride was glorious. A sweet air cooled my lungs and made me want to shout. In the brightening morning the forest seemed crazily welcoming; tiny hummingbirds hovered over the bushes by the track and the horses’ hoofs made a soft sound in the damp earth.
The landscape can hardly have changed since Förster described it over a century before: ‘We travelled through fertile areas, interspersed with woods and waters. Occasionally one would come across large herds of cattle grazing, or a lone ñandú, the South American ostrich, in the cultivated land that cropped up between the forest and the swamps. The indescribable rural charm of the magnificent scenery is lit by the clear atmosphere.’ There were fewer dwellings now, although every few miles a shack would peer out from the forest. Even Roberto seemed less saturnine, urging his horse along with affectionate clicks and shouting out the names of the trees. ‘That is the quebracho’, he said, pointing to a towering specimen, ‘the hardest wood in the forest. It means breaking axe.’ Boiled, the bark of the quebracho is said to cure VD; it was used to build the best houses and could last hundreds of years.
Elisabeth had built herself a vast house in Nueva Germania, the most magnificent house in the colony. She called it Försterhof and described it in a letter to her mother: ‘It is grand, with high ceilings, spacious and cool. You have no idea how hot it is here … the roof reaches far down, which keeps it pleasantly cool at all times of day. The three rooms in the centre are very large and almost eighteen feet high … We own a magnificent property.’ I wondered if it still stood. And her furniture, which came from the house of her grandfather Superintendent Dr Nietzsche in Eilenburg. ‘Clearly the carpenter used excellent wood for the esteemed Superintendent’, she boasted, ‘and it is just as solid now as it was eighty years ago.’ And her piano, on which she had played Wagner’s music – had that, like Eliza’s, been unceremoniously abandoned?
Late in the afternoon, we stopped at a roadside store-hut underneath a huge spreading tree, selling sugar, yerba, key rings and warm Coca Cola. Roberto said that we were now just ten miles from Nueva Germania. It was cooler in the shade of the tree. The owner was haggling with two Paraguayan girls over some maize flour and shaking her head vigorously from side to side. The girls were pretty, thin and taut, with dark, thick hair and high cheekbones. Until they smiled. One had no front teeth, and the other merely one blackened stump and two shiny gold incisors.
A chicken hurtled out from behind the hut and ran squawking off down the road, pursued by a boy of four or five. He stopped dead in front of where I sat and stared at me. He had ash-blonde hair and deep-blue eyes. His skin was so pale it seemed almost translucent in the bright sunlight; a Milky Bar Kid in mid-jungle. I felt my pulse racing. He ran for cover in the skirts of the laughing Paraguayan girls. Roberto was laughing too. ‘There you are, el Rubio, a blonde one.’ Roberto talked to the girls in Guaraní, and I took photograph after photograph of the little white face, peering out from behind a swathe of patterned skirt.
Elisabeth had observed with pride ‘the radiant German children as they walk to their German school’, and added that ‘the climate is so excellent, men and animals blossom in it. One could easily send the children born here to a baby competition … they delight everyone with their freshness and health …’ The little white face did look healthy enough, except for his nose, which was raw from sunburn. ‘He is not the child of these people’, Roberto explained unnecessarily. ‘They are just looking after him for another family. They say there are many Germans further on. Come, we must go, before it gets late.’ We trotted away, and the blue eyes of the little boy and the still-merry brown eyes of the Paraguayan girls watched us intently down the track.
The heat was beginning to recede when, half a dozen miles further on, we descended into a small, fertile valley dotted with houses, but still with patches of forest on the high ground. Beside each house was a patch of neatly cultivated ground, with oranges, mandioca and sugar cane. A river ran through the middle of the valley, and Roberto pointed to a cluster of houses on the opposite ridge, behind which the clouds were gathering.
‘That is Nueva Germania.’
I put The Ride of the Valkyries on my Walkman, full volume, just to get myself in the right mood. We cantered down the slope past the ruins of what must once have been a brick factory, and splashed through the shallow Aguarya-umí. As we clattered past, some Paraguayan women washing clothes in the stream shouted and waved. At the entrance to the village was a large house, with a mule and cart standing outside. Someone had painted in red and yellow, with elaborate care, a large sign which read, in English: ‘GERMANY POP DISCOTEC.’
Twenty yards further on was another: ‘Gustav Neumann. Yerba maté purveyors. Nueva Germania, Paraguay.’ We dismounted outside the village shop, a whitewashed building with a tin roof. My knees buckled at once and I sat down heavily, and narrowly avoided crushing a duck.
The woman who emerged from the shop could not have been less German. She was round and olive-skinned, with thick glasses and a bright pink shirt with bows on it; her face was creased from her siesta. She was screaming quietly and volubly in Guaraní. Roberto kissed her politely on the forehead and introduced his ‘auntie’ Gregoria. While I dusted myself off, she and Roberto talked. I heard the word ‘rubio’ repeated several times.
‘You are hungry’, she turned to me, ‘and thirsty.’ Roberto had disappeared and Gregoria arranged a plastic table under the orange tree in her yard, returning within minutes with a plate of food, meat in breadcrumbs and a potato salad.
‘Wiener schnitzel?’ I asked hopefully.
‘Milanesa.’
‘Where are all the Germans?’
‘No no, but he will come’, she said reassuringly and settled back in a plastic chair to watch me eat.
Gregoria’s was the largest of a row of perhaps a dozen single-storey houses. Most were whitewashed adobe. New Germany seemed deserted. As I wiped potato salad off my chin, I heard the sound of a horse. A tall, fair-haired man reined in an enormous chestnut stallion at Gregoria’s gate and dismounted. He wore high black riding boots and carried a leather riding whip. He smiled broadly and strode up to the table and inclined his head, bringing his heels together. In English with a heavy German accent he announced, ‘My name is Christoph Schubert, and I am the doctor.’
Gregoria, beaming, produced another chair and some cold beer. ‘Es aléman’, she said proudly. Dr Schubert drained his beer in three great gulps.
How do you begin a conversation with a representative of a lost tribe of Aryans? I chose the traditional approach.
‘What are you doing here?’
Dr Schubert sighed and motioned to Gregoria for another beer. ‘Well, you see’, he looked around at the forest trees and the tall palms swaying in the evening breeze on the other side of the road, ‘the thing is, I love Nietzsche.’
A large diaphanous insect flapped hard in the pit of my stomach and for a moment I thought I might faint. This was it. Here, in the middle of the Paraguayan jungle, was a Nietzschean, whose ancestors had been brought here by the great philosopher’s sister. Perhaps in this wilderness there had grown up a Nietzschean cult, based on his writings. But, if that was the case, he could know nothing of what Elisabeth had done to her brother’s philosophy, how she had linked his name to the fascists and encouraged men like Hitler and Mussolini to use his poetic, arcane brilliance to back up their evil creed. It was my duty to put this original Nietzschean Man right. I took a deep breath and hit him with everything I had in the Nietzsche armoury. How did he interpret the idea of the Übermensch? Did everybody in the colony believe in Nietzsche’s ideas? How did they reconcile Nietzsche’s proclamation about the death of God with the Lutheranism they had believed in back in 1886? What about Nietzsche’s ‘blonde beast’?
He looked blank.
Of course, I was talking about Nietzsche’s later works, which Elisabeth could not have brought with her and which he, therefore, must never have heard of. I would have to limit the discussion to Nietzsche before 1886. ‘What do you think of Thus Spoke Zarathustra?’
Dr Schubert laid a calming hand on my forearm. ‘I don’t think you heard me correctly, mein Herr.’ He pointed towards the forest. ‘I love nature.’
Dr Schubert, it transpired, was an amateur naturalist; he had left the Munich suburbs for Nueva Germania three years before, to grow plants in the Paraguayan jungle. We talked late into the evening. Gregoria and her tiny, ferrety little husband Avalo brought beer and caña, and the fireflies blinked in the orange tree.
Dr Schubert had heard about Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster from talking to his patients. Many of the early settlers had apparently died, he said, worn out by the climate and the parasites and the unyielding clay-like earth; some had just moved away, south to Argentina, where the land was more fertile and the life easier. Some had married Paraguayans and adapted to the local way of life. Here in the village, he said, you could see the German genes reflected in the children, whose skin was usually dark, but whose eyes were blue. Other families, mostly German, had moved into the area after the war. But many of the descendants of the original settlers, the fourteen mostly peasant families that had come with Bernhard and Elisabeth in 1886, had refused to mix with the Paraguayans. They lived in the forest, away from the village, in an area called Tacarutý, which meant ‘place of the anthills’.
‘They tend to keep to themselves, marrying only Germans and sticking to the old ways’, said the doctor. He was almost the only person apart from the parson who ever went there. ‘They speak an old Saxon dialect, which even I don’t really understand’, said Dr Schubert. ‘To hear them talk, it gives me goose pimples …’
‘What are they like?’ I pressed him.
‘You will see for yourself.’
We shook hands in the deepening dusk, and Dr Schubert swung himself into the saddle and trotted away.
As it grew darker I sat under the orange tree trying to collect my thoughts, while a variety of farm animals, ducks, chickens, cats, a dog and a balding goat, wandered around the floor of Gregoria’s house, which also turned out to be Nueva Germania’s bar. One by one, or in small groups, the men of the town came to drink caña, eyeing me carefully and talking in hushed voices. An older man with heavier European features and popping blue eyes with red rims came in and stood by the bar.
‘Deutsch?’ he asked after staring at me intently for several minutes.
‘Nein.’
He turned back to his caña, shaking his head when I began to talk.
‘Es loco’, explained Gregoria in a whisper, ‘too much caña.’
I was too tired to pursue it. In fact I could barely keep my eyes open. Gregoria had made a bedroom for me by clearing out the chickens from a straw-roofed building at the back of her house, part hen coop, part shrine; one wall was covered by a gaudy poster depicting the Ascension. On a wooden shelf, above the reach of the hens, were four small tin crosses. The names of Gregoria’s dead relatives had been imprinted on them with the point of a nail.
‘Buenos noches, Jasmine’, said Gregoria. ‘Keep the door bolted or the chickens will come back.’ Gregoria had decided to call me Jasmine. We had tried Ben, but the pronunciation proved too much, and then Benjamin (which isn’t my name). She could get her tongue around the Jamin bit, but decided Jasmine sounded nicer. I collapsed on the straw mattress and fell asleep smelling the scent of oranges and chicken feathers, and dreamed about a tribe of white savages with distended blue eyes.
*
Waiting for Dr Schubert at dawn, I ate a meal of bread and bitter instant coffee, turning down Gregoria’s offer of a special yerba maté pick-me-up. I had decided to cut down on the stuff, which I was beginning to crave and which was clearly affecting my subconscious. Breakfast was only slightly marred by the rooster apparently attempting to make love to an irritated duck under the table. So much for racial purity.
The winding six-mile track to Tacarutý was far narrower than the one from the river, with thick foliage on either side. We passed only one building, apparently deserted. An armadillo hurtled across the path, an armour-plated rat. ‘They are good to eat’, said Dr Schubert. I asked him if the Germans were still vegetarians and he shook his head. ‘No, they mostly eat meat, but they eat more vegetables than the Paraguayans. The constipation in Paraguay, it’s amazing.’
It had rained in the night, and bright-blue butterflies swooped and feinted over the muddy puddles. We turned off to the right, through a patch of dense forest. Someone had been clearing quebracho, logs were carefully cut and stacked by the track. We came out of the trees on to a plateau looking out over a small valley; the sun was blinding after the gloom of the trees. A small brown house with a thatched roof peered out of the forest’s edge.
Heinrich Schütte, myopic and seventy-four, was attending to his neat garden surrounded with a wooden fence. ‘Guten Morgen’, he said, straightening with difficulty and adjusting his pistol holster. We drank cold yerba, tereré, in the shade of a vine arbour. His wife Marta, her hair in a tight grey bun, folded her loose-skinned white arms in disapproval as her husband talked. Their clothes, shapeless and baggy, were made from the same blue material. A parrot screamed in the trees behind the house. ‘Elisabeth Nietzsche, yes, she was a fine woman.’ Heini spoke as if he had known her personally, even intimately. His reverence made me shudder, this friendly old man with the photographic inherited memory. ‘Wait here.’
He tottered inside and returned with a dusty etching of Bernhard Förster, the one I had seen in the front of his book, all bristles and bigotry. ‘This was Förster, the husband. He was a rude man. My grandfather was a locksmith, he came here from Chemnitz in 1886 on a boat from Hamburg. I have the very squeeze box he brought from Chemnitz, although it doesn’t really work now.’ I wondered if he knew that Chemnitz had been changed to Karl Marxstadt and back again in the intervening years. Marta refilled the maté gourd.
Elisabeth and Bernhard (he called them Luisa and Bernardo) were still remembered by the German families. ‘The older ones that is. My grandfather and his friends came to found a new Germany’, said Heini, spitting extravagantly and wiping the picture with his sleeve. He tapped it with an ancient forefinger and added, ‘It was very sad about Bernardo, but Luisa, she was always the real leader.’
See notes on Chapter IV: The White Lady And New Germany