Falling Off the Map (19 page)

The seductions of Saigon are so loud and brazen that they tend to efface the shyer effects of the countryside; after a few days in the hurly-burly rush, I could scarcely remember what Vietnam was like. I went to Vietnam, though, to get away from noise, from sophistication, and from the state-of-the-art frenzy of much of modern Asia. And the very raciness and flash that make Saigon so exciting to many Vietnamese—the Ghosts of Bangkok Past and Future—make me, when returning to the country in my mind, take shelter instead amidst the quiet pride and unforced hospitality of Hanoi and of Hue.

I was staying in the Gran Hotel del Paraguay. It wasn’t grand, it wasn’t really a hotel, but it was certainly Paraguayan. Four dogs were sprawled out in the comfort of the lobby. A few gray-haired women from Germany were poring over a small library that offered copies of
San Juan Shootout
and
Reagan’s Reign of Error
. A fan was turning, very slowly, above us all. “We are certainly going to be the worthy hosts our clientele expects,” said the signs in every room. “Without improvising. And much more.”

The Gran Hotel was renowned as the former residence of Madame Eliza Lynch,
La Concubina Irlandesa
, an Irish courtesan brought back from the Boulevard Saint-Germain by the nineteenth-century president Francisco Solano López. He was the fat young man with bad teeth whose qualities, as listed by R. B. Cunninghame-Graham, included “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 [and] an abject cowardice that in any other country in the world but Paraguay would have rendered him ridiculous.” His great achievement, so far as I could see, was meddling in Uruguay’s civil war and so involving Paraguay in a war in which it fought against not one, not two, but three of its neighbors—Brazil,
Argentina, and Uruguay itself—and at whose end its population of 800,000 had been reduced to one of 194,000, of which exactly 2,100 were adult men. As a result of this, in the words of the
South American Handbook
, López was “the most venerated of Paraguay’s heroes.”

Madame Lynch was, accordingly, a kind of
ex officio
heroine, a goddess by association. She had helped her lover in his cause by importing two fellow trollops from Paris to start a “finishing school” and by executing many of the Asunción society ladies who felt that an Irish strumpet was not the ideal partner for the “Napoleon of the Americas.”

Strolling out of the palatial grounds of her mansion, I made my way into the heart of the capital. The place was like nothing I had ever seen before. It was not just that none of the traffic lights was working, or even that straw-haired Mennonites in sky-blue-and-white clothes—like apparitions from some seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting—were sauntering hand-in-hand across the street. It was not even the fact that every store that was not called “Alemán” seemed to have its sign in Korean hangul script. It was simply that Paraguay seemed indifferent—or impervious, at least—to life as it is lived around the planet.

The famous sign that for many years showed President Stroessner’s face next to the slogan
PEACE
 … 
WORK
 … 
WELL-BEING
had been taken down from the center of the city, the Plaza of the Heroes, when Stroessner fled the country in 1989. But the Stroessner legacy lived on. The showcase cinema in the plaza, the Cine Victoria, was showing
S.O.S. Sexual Emergency, Tension and Desire
, and
Bedtime Tales
(with double-headers around the clock on Fridays and Saturdays) and had lurid posters of its previous hard-core offerings gazing out upon the public. Shoe-shine boys in T-shirts that said, enigmatically,
CAT’S
FACE
LIFT
were sprawled around a statue consecrated to
the Twelfth Congress of the World Anti-Communist League. In one corner of the Plaza of the Heroes, a man was selling bank notes from around the world and a picture of Winston Churchill. In another stood a Seiko clock commemorating the fifteenth anniversary of the Brotherhood Pact between Asunción and the town of Chiba, in Japan.

The dominant feature of the Plaza of the Heroes, however, was a huge monument, modeled on Les Invalides in Paris, known as the Pantheon of the Heroes. Inside its sepulchral entrance, past two ramrod soldiers in full uniform, I came upon memorials to all the country’s great men: Dr. Francia, the country’s first president, who had quickly had himself named Dictator for Life and had every dog in the country executed. His successor, Carlos López, described by an English scientist as “immensely fat” and another dictator who had ruled without ministers or advisers. His son and heir, Francisco, regarded by his faithful British retainer, George Thompson, as a “monster without parallel.” And General José Félix Estigarribia, who led Paraguay to a triumphant nonvictory in the Chaco War.

Around the Pantheon there were plaques, more plaques than I had seen in any one place since the Tower of the Juche Idea in Pyongyang. Their donors read like a roll call of the founding members of the World Anti-Communist League: there were plaques from the Taiwanese chief of staff, from
peronistas
in Argentina, from right-wing groups in Israel; plaques congratulating López junior on his sixtieth birthday (though he died at forty-two), plaques congratulating him on his 146th anniversary, plaques congratulating him on every one of his heroic deeds (such as executing hundreds of his own people, including his two brothers).

Outside the Pantheon there stretched block after block after clamorous block of money changers’ stores, gold dealers, and shops peddling smuggled goods, pirated perfumes, war memorabilia,
and pumas. The streets outside the shops overflowed with stalls selling counterfeit tapes, musical condoms, and copies of
Playboy
from around the world. A few Indians were selling bows and arrows near a bust commemorating another hero, Juan E. O’Leary. Men were circling around, muttering, somewhat hopelessly, “
Cambio, cambio.
” Every shop in Our Lady of the Assumption, as I’d surmised from Iguazú, seemed to be called Casa—Casa Ms., Casa Solomon, Casa Fanny; Casa Kuo Ping, Casa Porky, Casa Hung Ching. Imagine a used-car lot in a border town, and you are well on your way to imagining the center of the Paraguayan capital.

The most conspicuous stores, though, were the money changers’ outlets. Money changing is one of the great traditional art forms of Paraguay, and almost a folkloric spectacle. I decided to enjoy this native skill in a place called Cambios Guarani. This seemed a good choice because everything in Paraguay was apparently called Guarani—the local language, the currency, the main hotel, even the soda water. It also seemed apt because Cambios Guarani was said to be owned by the country’s president.

Inside, things were marginally less busy than on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Eighteen customers were storming the front desk, where men in ties were counting out stacks of money slightly larger than the GNP of Peru. Around the store, men with briefcases were loitering in the corners. A German woman was asking, somewhat desperately, for Hans. The signs outlining the rules for transactions were printed in six languages.

I signed two American Express traveler’s checks and gave them over to a smart young teller. He asked for my passport and my bill of receipt for the purchase of the checks. He then went off and returned with photocopies of my passport and of my bill of receipt. Then he handed me a slip, which I took to
another man in order to receive my two hundred dollars in guarani.

A little way off the Plaza of the Heroes, just past the Internal Tax Office (a perfect replica of La Scala in Milan), was the main cathedral in Asunción: Paraguay is one country where the cathedral does not enjoy pride of place (it is also a country where, in the yellow pages, banks take up five times more space than churches; in my relatively secular California hometown, by comparison, the list of churches is three times longer than that of banks). The cathedral was a strangely disheveled place, emptier and more neglected even than its counterpart in Communist Havana. The signs describing Jesus’ passion were all in French.

Outside, in the Plaza Independencia, a young man was urinating against the Legislative Palace, and cooing lovers were sitting on green benches, taking in the romantic view of a squatters’ slum of shacks held together by pieces of cardboard that said
PHILIPS
.

Across the plaza was the most famous museum in Paraguay, the Museum of Military History. Its first room was devoted to Dr. Francia (“El Supremo” to his friends), who, in the careful words of the sign, “governed implacably against the enemies of the new country.” Most of the rest of the Museum of Military History was given over to paintings and relics of
La Concubina Irlandesa:
her toilet was here, and her dishes, her fan, her comb, her shawl, her jug. Her music box was also here, and an album signed by 87,000 Paraguayans in homage to her (which, given the population at the end of the War of the Triple Alliance and the percentage that could write, was certainly an impressive figure). In another room were Francisco Solano López pajamas.

Behind the Museum of Military History, along the Río Paraguay, was the Government Palace (a homage to the Louvre, which, due to the chaos of the War of the Triple Alliance, had
taken sixty years to build and had to be constructed, in part, by boys of six). Half a block away was a store selling coats made entirely of endangered species—jaguars, ocelots, and the like—bright with rhinestone buttons. Around the shady parks, the local citizenry was deep in such local publications as
Crónica
, a weekly paper that consists of almost nothing but pictures of bodies, ravaged (if male) and about to be (if female). Through the swarming, narrow streets cruised cool blondes in Mercedeses, not always observing the speed limit (which was 6 ¼ miles per hour).

At night, the streets of Asunción were hopping—quite literally: two little girls dressed from head to foot in a Philips cardboard box were jumping down the block. A woman was picking lice out of her daughter’s hair. Young boys were cadging lifts on the backs of garbage trucks. Here and there, night-school typists were tapping away at twenty or thirty words an hour.

Occasionally, the traffic lights even came to life.

Deciding to pass up the Bolero Chinese Restaurant, I went instead to the Kung Fu. At the entrance, an expressionless Chinese couple ushered me into the main banquet hall, and a friendly Syrian boy who could not speak Arabic led me to a table with a rose. The Syrian boy removed the rose, the Chinese couple closed the door so they could sing along with the Muzak, and I found myself alone in an elaborate chamber of red lanterns and mock T’ang dynasty paintings. From the kitchen, a dog barked plaintively.

After deciding that I would avoid “Wong Ton Fritos,” I asked my hosts where the bathroom was. They ushered me into a room that was indeed perfect for a bath: it included a large tub, an electric shower, and a bidet.

Walking back to the Gran Hotel, I strolled along Avenida Mariscal López, the grandest street in Paraguay. It would be the grandest street in almost any country, with its block-long
houses, its boomtown malls, its ghostly mansions hidden behind iron gates. Like the main highway in Paraguay—in fact, like almost everything in Paraguay—it is named after Francisco Solano López, who decided to award himself the title of Marshal. One intersection was dominated by a statue of the country’s great hero atop his charging steed.

Back in the Gran Hotel, the receptionist greeted me in Hindi, a cockroach was waiting to welcome me in my bedroom, and a sudden thunderstorm turned the hotel corridors into rivers, a few dead leaves floating past my door. In the beautiful dining room, where La Madama had once held masked balls and taught
le tout Asunción
to polka, four men in ponchos were putting on a show of Paraguayan culture, featuring songs from Mexico, songs from Cuba, and songs from Peru. One of them made deafening bird noises which echoed round and around the painted ceilings and linoleum floors. Much of the music was drowned out, however, by the squawks of babies.

For the Gran Hotel del Paraguay was crawling, quite literally, with the things: there were more babies here than you’d find in a maternity ward—babies seated in strollers at every table, babies in the garden, and babies in the lobby, dark-skinned babies most of them, being clucked over by excited couples from England, Germany, and most often, America. It seemed a fit tribute to
La Concubina Irlandesa
(though when his first son was born, Francisco Solano López had ordered a 101-gun salute, and eleven buildings were destroyed). On every side, I heard talk of paperwork, trips to the embassy, court cases. The babies screamed, the parents cooed. Finally, I got it: this pleasant residential hotel, with its lavish gardens, its playground, and its unreasonably reasonable rates, was the center for a lucrative adoption trade. In Paraguay, where everything could be had for a price, the latest boom market was in babies.

…

I suppose I had always been drawn to Paraguay. It is one of the forgotten corners of the world, one of the unplumbed shadows, one of “the et ceteras in the list of nations,” as Isabel Hilton quotes someone calling it. No one seems to know exactly where the landlocked, time-bound hideout is, though those in the know will tell you that Uruguay is the good angel of Latin America, and Paraguay, the dark; that one is a resort, and the other a refuge. Certainly Paraguay is in some sense a country off the map. When I asked my travel agent about flights to Asunción, she told me I could either go by LAP (the airline founded by Stroessner) or by Ladeco (which seemed to translate as “Kitchen Utensils Airways”). When I went to my local bookstore to look for volumes on the place, I found four books on Peru, four on Belize, forty-five on Mexico, one book on the Galápagos Islands, and not a single one on Paraguay.