FALLING OFF THE MAP Copyright © 1993 Pico Iyers PARAGUAY: 1992 - Up for Sale, or Adoption "Yes, it's very peaceful," my Aunt said, "only an occasional gun-shot after dark." - GRAHAM GREENE 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 pouring 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 "Aleman" 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 Jose' 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 F. 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 Independence, 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 Rio 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 Mercedes, 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 boom town 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 Mar- shal. 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 . 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 etceteras 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 book-store to look for volumes on the place, I found four books on Peru, four on Belize, forty-five on Mexico, one book on the Galapagos Islands, and not a single one on Paraguay. During the thirty-five-year reign of Alfredo Stroessner, in which, every sixty days, the president had dutifully renewed a state of siege, Paraguay had all but seceded from the world and turned into a kind of bad playwright's version of a sleepy, crooked military despotism, a Central Casting vision of chicanery. When Paul Mazursky wanted to make a spoof of Latin American corruption, he called his movie Moon Over Parador, peopled it with figures called Strausmann, Dieter López, and Madam Loop, and portrayed Paraguay as a kind of Shangri-la in reverse, an invert's paradise ("One day in New York is like a year in Parador," says Richard Dreyfuss). The only trouble was, reality put Hollywood to shame. As fast as the other Latin countries moved toward democracy in the eighties, Paraguay slipped ever deeper into torpor and a criminal dictatorship. In 1989, Stroessner, the longest-ruling tyrant in the world, except for Kim II Sung (whom he was coming to resemble-the one so far to the right and the other so far to the left that they almost seemed to meet), was visiting his favorite mistress for his usual Thursday afternoon siesta when he heard that he had been ousted by his protege', and the father-in-law of his son, General Andres Rodriguez. During the coup, the elite corps' tanks were unable to move because the man who had the keys to them was out of town. After the coup, the red- tied Colorado Party faithful who had previously danced the Don Alfredo Polka quickly changed their steps to do the Rodriguez Polka (with lyrics that ran: "May God help you and also the Armed Forces!"). Paraguay, in fact, mocked soap opera’s gaudiest inventions. But there was more to its mystique than simple heavy-handedness: Paraguay had the reputation of being the darkest country on the planet. Colombia, of course, was a contender, with its blue-black clouds hanging over Bogotá, its international conferences on witchcraft, its schools for pickpockets, and its second city boasting the highest murder rate in the world. But Colombia also had ruins and beaches and museums, a patina of civilization. Nigeria and Indonesia were said to be the world leaders in corruption; but they at least were huge nations with lots of oil. Paraguay, by comparison, was a kind of minor-league, farm-team, up-and- coming criminal-"like Madame Tussaud's," as one friend said, "except all the figures are living." This was the place where deposed dictators found a new home (Somoza from Nicaragua, Per6n from Argentina). This was the place where fugitive Nazis received a hearty welcome-Eduard Roschmann, “the Butcher of Riga," allegedly died here; Josef Mengele, "the Angel of Death," was a Paraguayan citizen for much of the time he was the world's most wanted war criminal; and Martin Bormann lived just across the border. This was also the place where Italian neo-Fascists gave lectures, Croatian thugs trained security details, Chinese tong kings picked up tips, and the new president himself-the "clean" one-was associated with drug kingpins who'd made $145 million in shipments of heroin. When Nietzsche's sister wanted to set up an Aryan colony with her husband, "the professional anti-Semite" Bernhard Forster (I read in Ben Macintyre's engaging book, Forgotten Fatherland), where did they come-where could they come-but Paraguay? In California, I knew of a Retirement Home for Performing Animals; Paraguay sounded like a Retirement Home for Performing Criminals. My first taste of the mutant state, across from Iguazú Falls, had not been disappointing. Throughout our visit, my driver, a friendly family man from Argentina, had darkened the afternoon with tales of Paraguayan lawlessness. "Can't the police do anything to stop the crime?" I asked. He laughed bitterly. "The police are the ones who are performing the crime!” Throughout the trip, too, he refused to leave the car, on the safe assumption that it would almost certainly be stolen. He visited Paraguay almost every day, and his wife was Paraguayan, but be was not about to take any chances. "And this is daytime," he said as I took in the unholy chaos. "At night, it is not even safe to leave your room.” Perhaps the ultimate depiction of the land of corpses laureled in orange petals, however, had come from Graham Greene. For Greene, the moral ironist, Paraguay was the end of the line, spiritually speaking, the place where all roads terminate. In Travels with My Aunt, he delivers the definitive portrait of a land where crooks wear pictures of the General, and a Czech is hoping to import two million plastic straws. "The only old beautiful building . . . proved, as I came closer to it, to be the prison," says Greene's mild-mannered narrator, Henry Pulling. Later, we learn that "They don't have coroners in Paraguay" and that smuggling is a national industry. "In this blessed land of Paraguay," says a war criminal, "there is no income tax and no evasions are necessary." Greene could no more leave Paraguay than he could leave loneliness, or flight, or the question of evil. Yet it was not always so. When I went to my hometown library to look up books on Paraguay, the kind of titles I found were The Lost Paradise, A Vanished Arcadia, Picturesque Paraguay. For decades, even centuries, Paraguay-like any country, perhaps, where people can derive something out of nothing-had been regarded as a utopia just waiting to be realized, an empty space waiting to be converted into a private paradise. "When I first came to Asunción from Spain," wrote the Paraguayan poet Josefina Pla, "I realized that I'd arrived in Paradise. The air was warm, the light was tropical, and the shuttered, colonial houses suggested sensual, tranquil lives." Even G. K. Chesterton, who never saw the place, more or less rehearsed the conventional wisdom when he wrote. "Ye bade the Red Man rise like the Red Clay . . . And man lost Paradise in Paraguay." The whole of eastern Paraguay, among the best-watered areas in the world, resembled a Iuxuriant tropical Eden; the west lacked even running water. In both areas, however, Paraguay seemed a place of absolutes. Voltaire was fascinated by this notional Arcadia, which he described as both Elysium and its opposite; Thomas Carlyle wrote an entire book on Dr. Francia, who ruled over his homemade land with a kind of mythic force (decreeing that no one could look at him in the street). That Paraguay was a byword for the Possible-more Paradise than Parador-was best suggested by the fact that Robert Southey, the British poet laureate at the time, called his longest poem A Tale of Paraguay ("For in history's mournful map, the eye I On Paraguay, as on a sunny spot, I May rest complacent"). In fact, in history's mournful eye, Paraguay was perhaps the most sunless place on earth, its history a sad tale of what men will do with the prospect of paradise and what lies they visit upon a virgin land. The story of Paraguay is the story of the vanity of human wishes, one utopian chimera following another. First came the Spaniards, who promptly availed themselves of the friendliness of the local Indians, setting up harems in which each conquistador kept twenty native wives, or more (the "Father of the Nation, Governor Irala, earned the tide in part by fathering at least eight mestizos). Then came the Jesuits, who organized the artistically minded Guarani into reducciones, or crafts- based communes, which crumbled as soon as the Jesuits left. Then came the strongmen who, like Dr. Francia, scribbled their initials all over the open country. And finally there followed the steady stream of refugees from Germany or Australia or Italy who sought to build a new Arcadia here and founded their own custom-made utopias in Nueva Germania, Nueva Australia, Nueva Italia. In almost every case, the dream went sour. Dr. Francia began by sealing off all the country's borders, expelling all foreigners and committing the country to solitary confinement. Carlos López, who came next, was described as "more utterly alone than any man in the world." His son, Francisco, ended up fleeing through the countryside, to the town still known as Isla Madarna, taking along his mother and his sisters in wooden cages. By the end of the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay had lost the Iguazú Falls, and its national anthem was written by a Uruguayan. In 1932, just as the wounds from the Triple Alliance were beginning to heal, Paraguay promptly got involved in another war, with Bolivia, over a piece of land that neither of them wanted. Some 85,000 men were killed, and Paraguay found itself on the bleeding end of two of the three major wars fought on the continent (while the Chaco, over which the battle had raged, was revealed to be an entirely desolate and inhospitable scrubland without resources of any kind). A little later, the country entered a civil war, in which roughly a fifth of its people fled into Argentina. Meanwhile, Paraguay saw thirty-one presidents in fifty-years-seven between 1910 and 1912 alone-in a cycle of instability that ended only when Stroessner took over. Thus the melancholy pattern dragged on.' the country either had no government at all or a government that saw itself in block capitals. "Dictatorship is to Paraguay what constitutional democracy is to Scandinavia or Britain," says the U.S. Library of Congress survey. The Stroessner regime was the same old story, a tale of good intentions gone awry and of a man who started out industrious, instituted reforms, brought constancy to the economy-twenty-two years without inflation-but gradually became more and more caught up in power and isolation, until he ended up lost in a hall of golden mirrors, his country turned into a cemetery. The monomania, the public mistresses, the brutal elimination of enemies, the commissioning of books in which he was called "THE LUMINOUS LIGHTHOUSE" - no one could deny that Stroessner was faithful to Paraguayan tradition. If Paraguay is a paradise today, it is mostly one for ironists. For it offers absurdities almost too good to be true and schools its residents in the higher forms of sarcasm. "Anything, anything you can get here is illegal," a delightedly "polluted" academic told me. In the central market of town, he said, almost gleefully, "No one can go in, not even the police. It's entirely lawless there. The people pay no taxes, nothing is registered, anything can happen." Argentine goods are cheaper in Paraguay than in Argentina, hut Paraguayan sugar is cheaper outside Paraguay. Paraguay exports soya beans, but it has no soya crops. \When paychecks are delivered, receptionists routinely loot the envelopes before they can be handed out. And when the opposition newspaper ABC Color was closed down by the government in 1984, many government bigwigs came to the publisher in secret and offered to sell him paper mills on the cheap. I didn't take the celebrated "Tour of the Houses that Corruption Built," which is the first stop of almost every foreign journalist in Paraguay. But still, I found, one cannot drive around the city without receiving a crash course in the popular folklore. This was the place where Somoza was gunned down, this was the house where the Argentine hit men lived for a year while tracking him. This was the house where Stroessner's fa- vorite mistress lived-the daughter of his former mistress-and this was the house that Stroessner promised to his illegitimate daughter. This was Stroessner's own home (a massive park that goes on and on and on for more than two blocks, with a police station next door and, across the street, the U.S. embassy-"the largest in the world," by some accounts- waiting to polka with the dictator). The newest highlight of the circle tour is the home of General Rodriguez, just off Avenida General Genes, in a thicket of satellite dishes and generals' palaces, opposite a Chinese gangster s pagoda, and within sight of the Central Bank (a twenty-five-acre spread big enough to house a university, its massive buildings sitting like Titanics stranded in a vacant lot, and equipped with an Olympic-size swimming pool). Paraguay today, therefore, has the equivocal aspect of a whole country decorated like a closing sale-All Stock Must Go! Positively Last Prices!-and governed by rules that run counter to those of the world at large. "If you brought the Queen of England to Paraguay, she would run contraband too," the secretary of the new president had memorably declared. "Paraguay is full of witches," a sorcerer had told Norman Lewis. More serious charges had been brought by human rights activists and scholars, who claimed that Paraguay was home to slavery, child brothels, and genocide as recently as the seventies. At the very least, there was a sense that this was a place where anything could be bought- passports, identities, babies. Everyone had a price in Paraguay, and usually it was radically discounted. Thus the TAP "Guide to Paraguay" began, pointedly: "On visiting Paraguay, tourists may have several aims, in addition to recreation, resting and renewing energy." The only trouble was, there were no tourists in Paraguay. The "Land of Sun, and of Adventures," as its official slogan has it, maintains not a single tourist office around the world; the only office within the country consists of a sullen man sitting (occasionally) at a desk under a stairwell and telling you not to take more than two of the dusty brochures in front of him. "Asunción is home to hundreds of places worth visiting," the book in my hotel room hopefully suggested; unfortunately, even the ever-diligent Lonely Planet guide could find only three "things to see" in Asunción-and one of them was a double bill of bad American movies at the cinema. During all the time I spent in Paraguay, I met only one other sightseer-a fantastically merry peronista from Buenos Aires named Daniel Ortega, with whom I dined in the hotel where Nietzsche's brother-in-law committed suicide. ("There is a book in Buenos Aires, a best-seller," said Sr. Ortega, a student of the human comedy, "that was written by Bush's dog!" In the very next sentence he was telling me that there was a hole in Belem, in Brazil, that reached to the center of the earth-he had read this in another Argentine best-seller, by Charles Berlitz.) Yet as I spent more time in the country, I began, very slowly, to fall into its rhythm and its spell, and to see more and more advantages to being neglected by the world. I took to relaxing in the sauna of a five- star hotel with a copy of Business Week only three years old, and to inching through the side streets on a Saturday night in a '72 Chevy, which gave out at every corner, all the warning lights on its dashboard flashing at once and parts of the car rolling around beneath me while the radio throbbed, "Gonna take you into the danger zone!" And as I started to talk to foreign experts on the place, I began to find that Paraguay was a kind of cult favorite among many old Latin American hands, the hidden (costume) jewel of South America. "Oh, Paraguay, my favorite country in the continent!" said Laura López, the longtime Time bureau chief for the whole of South and Central America. She liked it? "I love it-the way you'd love an orphan, or a bird with a broken foot." Paraguay was something of an Ur-land, untamed, undeveloped, abandoned by history, wood-paneled streetcars still clattering through its streets, and electricity and running water arriving only a president ago. "It's a crazy country, wistful and surreal and forlorn," said a highly engaging American journalist who had lived there for three years. But it's magical-like Macondo in Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "The air is so pure," added her husband, a Spanish writer. "And the streets are full of orange trees and jacarandas and lapachos. When you arrive in Stroessner Airport, you feel as if you are in one of the last corners of the world." The sinister stories had been burnished by legend, the woman went on. But they never have mass slaughters in Paraguay the way they do in Chile and Argentina." Recently, she pointed out, they'd even extradited two Argentine kidnappers. Paraguay, in a sense, was like Rip Van Winkle after only twenty winks. "And if Asunción’s sleepy," she went on, "the rest of the country's in a coma." Was there anything to do there? "Well, you can go to the Jardin de la Cerveza [Garden of Beer] and see women dancing with jugs on their heads." With that, she ran out of suggestions. Then she perked up again. "Oh, and they do have great hammocks there. Wonderful hammocks. You see them hanging up on the main road out of town." "Yes," said her husband. "Excellent hammocks.” Leaving the Gran Hotel, I decided to move to the Oasis Hostel, its name translated into Korean outside its entrance. The Oasis was a curious place. Just inside its firmly double-bolted doors were several color pictures of Brazil-taken from a Playboy spread and concentrating on the country's topless beauties; on the opposite wall was a huge map of Argentina. Nearby was a series of formal snapshots of a Korean couple on their wedding day, in black tie and white gown, and beside them-quite a coup, I thought-an entire brochure on Paraguay aimed at a Korean audience (and centered around a strong-looking woman in a director's chair whom the brochure identified as "Producer Kim"). There were also, in the entrance hall, some photos, snipped from Korean fashion magazines, of bedroom sets in Seoul department stores. I passed through this unlikely gallery, down a narrow ha, past another fortress of a door, and into a filthy courtyard. There I found a basketball hoop and a broken-down washing machine. A few plants were feebly protruding from some Nescafe' bottles, and a body-length mirror announced at its top, "Christ is coming." In the middle of the courtyard stood a very large Korean teenage girl with a yapping dog on a leash. She stared at me with little joy. "How many hours?" "Just one night, please." She looked at me blankly and tried again. "How many hours?" "Hours? I don't know. Maybe twenty-five, twenty-six." This was too much for her. Padding over to a red telephone, she picked it up, and I heard furious cries of “Appa, Appa . . .” Daddy apparently applied a tonic to her wounds, and she gloomily returned to our discussion, leading me off to a tiny room and fastening the dog to the door handle. The room consisted of a sagging bed, a table, and a trash can. "Do you have anything else?" I asked. She looked at me phlegmatically, then flip- flopped back to the red phone. "Appa, Appa. . .”Again Daddy worked his rare magic, and she put the phone down and led me to another room. This one consisted of a sagging bed, a table, a trash can, and one entire wall covered with flesh-colored pictures, many of them poster size, of girls in every conceivable position-sunny side up, over easy, languid in French lace. In the middle of the porno shots was a replica of the Korean flag and a picture of a Korean girl, relatively modest in a chemise. Thinking this preferable to another suite we had passed, which came decorated with pictures of male heartthrobs and some faded Kyongju beauties, I instantly accepted. As I was making myself comfortable in my new home, I began to see what services it provided. One three-foot pinup, featuring a girl climbing some stairs without benefit of underwear, was scribbled over with hearts and proclamations: "Nidi and Luis made love all night long 15-11-91." "Ramon Dermidio Iriquera and Rosa Catalino Gill made love here 1991- 1992." On the back of the door, in a fit of graphomania, perhaps, Nidi and Luis had added: "Nidi and Luis here consolidated, mutually, their love." It was, in its way, a historic site. Just as I was taking all this in, there came a knock on the door. It was Appa ("Daddy," as I now thought of him), my smiling host, a few furtive Paraguayan couples shuffling in and out of rooms behind him. He came in and blurted out something unintelligible about his life in Singapore. I responded with nonsensical protestations of my devotion to Korea. He asked me to give him some money-twenty-six hours' worth, at an hourly rate-and I assured him that I was a friend for life. Then he lurched into a brief discussion of the Olympic Games and some fairly searching questions about my marital status. Disconcerted, it seemed, by my replies, he suddenly looked deranged. "Pooky-pooky no quieres?" (Don't you want some pooky-pooky?) I looked at him dumbfounded. "Chicas," he added, "hay." (Chicks are available.) Whether or not this was an invita- tion or a mere statement of fact, I decided not to ask whether Continental breakfast was also on offer. The Koreans are, in fact, a highly visible, if somewhat shadowy, presence in modern Paraguay, subject of many rumors. ("There are 30,000 Koreans in the city," one boy in Asunción told me. "More than 1,200,000 Koreans here," another boy in Asunción said.) Some are here in hopes of migrating to the U.S. (since the quota from Paraguay is more accommodating than that from South Korea), some are here mostly to put their export-import skills to use in a country most notable for its lassitude. In either case, whole parts of the capital are flavored now with kimchi and decorated with signs for tae kwon do academies, Korean billiard halls, places like the Gimnasio Han Kwok. You can eat at bulgogi parlors here or at a place advertised-in Korean-as "Donald Kentucky Chicken." The Kims take up more than a column in the Asunción phone book, and shops are full of Lees with curly blond locks. Theirs is not a very welcoming community, however. When I went, my third night in town, into a Korean-run Japanese restaurant, I had not even sat down before the proprietor came up, asked me where I came from, and-when I said India-showed me the door. Disappointed, I went into the Hidalgo Pizza Parlor down the street. A girl with a Korean frame, a half-Korean face, and sandy light-brown hair accosted me at the entrance but looked too terrified to throw me out. Reluctantly, she led me to a table next to a picture of Jesus and as far as possible from a gaggle of young Korean girls hiding their mouths with their hands. Luckily, they knew nothing of my interest in the works of Kim II Sung. The Koreans, though, are only one element in the improbable Paraguayan stew. One of the other main ingredients is simple, gaudy affluence. Drive down the length of Avenida Mariscal López and you pass stores shaped like castles, car showrooms dressed in four-color neon, mansions made up to resemble the White House, Arabian castles, and Tara from Gone with the Wind. Up and down the cars prowl on Saturday nights, in one never-ending stream, past ice cream parlors offering "dietetic" snacks, past tanning centers and solaria. Much of the city, in fact, feels as if it were decorated by Judith Krantz: the streets are lined with hand- painted copies of famous Bennetton and Calvin Klein ads, and everywhere you go you see familiar names-Sony, Burberry, Eastern Airlines; Lloyds Bank, Visa, Hyundai. Even the villages in the Brand-Name Republic are draped in Wranglers ads, and a huge banner hangs above the main street in the lakeside resort of San Bernardino: LUCKY STRIKE WISHES YOU A HAPPY SUMMER. It is often said that the border between San Diego and Tijuana (and continuing along) is the only place on earth where the first world meets the third. The same claim could be made, however, for Avenida Brasil in Asunción, which divides this abandoned bastard child of Tijuana and La Jolla down the middle: on one side, the bargain-basement commotion of downtown; on the other, the jasmine-scented quiet of the mansions. What can one say about a city where the four-star hotels offer no direct-dial phone service-even within Asunción-while the taxis are Mercedes? Where women carrying baskets of fruit on their heads walk past ice cream parlors that accept eleven international credit cards? Where the per capita income is half that of Mexico, yet twenty-first-century arcades abound? At the very least, it seems fair to say that Asunción enjoyed a radical facelift in the seventies, when billions of dollars poured into the town from President Stroessner's construction deals-and it now seems only fitting that the main features of the suburbs are "facial" salons, makeup parlors, and plastic surgeons. At the very least too, Paraguay seems to live by laws (or no laws) of its own. Officially, the country claims only 34,000 passenger cars, about as many as Suriname (Brazil, by comparison, has 14 million, or 400 for every one in Paraguay). In a country full of two-car garages, whose streets are jammed with Volkswagens and Peugeots, this is a little strange. Now I understand, I thought, what people mean when they talk of wealth as "obscene," as I cruised one day along Avenida Generalisimo Franco with an affluent Paraguayan, amidst nouveau mansions and Ralph Lauren kids, their BMW's disappearing behind electronic gates. "These people are rich," I said, trying not to look at the ugly scar across my young host's hand. "Not rich," he said sagely. "But they know how to take it." Soon he was pointing out sites of local interest: this was the house where Stroessner's son lived (the gay son, not the drug addict), this was the house where the general sold passports. "Every cent of highway tax, every penny of gasoline tax," he said, with some relish, "went straight into President Stroessner's personal bank account. Coca-Cola alone brought him forty thousand dollars a day in the summer." The minister of education, he went on, had diligently raised funds for seven hundred schools around the country, none of which existed; one colonel had been hired entirely to find nubile schoolgirls for the president. All of this has ostensibly changed, in the era of President Rodriguez. Thus the walls are alive now with signs crying. "Enough repression of the campesinos!" and "Long live the struggle of the peoples of Iraq and Palestine!" and "Busch is an assassin!" And the newspapers seethe with discussions of a new constitution, the legalization of abortion, and the importance of a people's voice. Che Guevara is almost as ubiquitous today as the Marlboro Man. Yet a country whose heroes are all military tyrants is not ideally suited to democracy. The opposition, during the Stroessner days, used famously to sip mate' at "demonstrations, to invite their government tails to come to the movies with them, and to wait for foreign journalists to tell them what to shout. If you visited the opposition leader's house, I was told, you would find a few men in ill-fitting suits, sipping iced matte and saying nothing. Come back three days later, and the same men would be in the same seats, sipping the same pipes. Occasionally, a fly would land, and someone would swat it away. One day in Asunción, I saw a bright banner above the cathedral. "We too, it proclaimed in red and blue, inviting people to come to a rally outside the church to discuss the new constitution, at 8:00 p.m. on Thursday. At 8:00 p.m. on Thursday, the rally consisted of myself, looking somewhat bewildered, alone in a light rain. "There are good politicians, yes," a seemingly liberal man assured me. "But the trouble is, a good politician has many enemies. A bad politician is ringed with friends." This man supported abortion and was opposed to the dictates of the Church. But he also supported dictatorship. "We need a strong government here," he said. "If there isn't one, there is only chaos. And if we have a civilian president, there's nothing but trouble with the military." The general feeling in Paraguay seemed to be one of "Plus ça change . . ." The Colorado Party men were still shouting. "Long live Stroessn-I mean, Rodriguez!" and the phone book still listed three Alfredo Stroessners. I could not help dusting off a few of my apprehensions when I went to the Jardin Botanico, formerly an estate of the presidential Lópezes and now filled with the saddest and thinnest elephants and tigers I have ever seen. ("The little zoo," says the South American Handbook, in its inimitably tight-lipped way, "has inspired some unfavorable comments.") Around them were groups of children held together by circles of string behind their backs, and moving from cage to cage in what seemed to be portable cages of their own. Nearby, in the Museum of Natural History, I finally cracked, amidst its hundreds of beetles and spiders pinned up in elaborate patterns on the wall, its staring pumas and stuffed albatross, its six-hundred-year-old preserved corpses, its skulls and its snakes like homunculi in jars. It looked like the workplace of some demented Frankenstein, and I could not help but think back to the stories of Dr. Mengele, who famously kept rows upon rows of eyes pinned up on his wall. Yet such macabre scenes are in many respects the exception in Paraguay. The people here are generally amiable and attractive, and nicely turned out, if only because clothes and cosmetics are so inexpensive in this tax-free zone (even the schoolgirls here wear Dior and Worth). The license plates on the Alfas and Chevys, in the American way, give nicknames to every city-"Spiritual Capital," "Heroic City," "The Frontier of Friendship," "The Young and Happy City"-and the main post office is a lovely colonial building, with rooms radiating out from a sunlit, fountained Andalusian courtyard and upstairs, one of the sweetest views in the capital (not to mention a bust of Marshal López at its center and pictures of him around the walls). Bank tellers walk down the street with the straight-backed dignity of applicants for the Paraguayan Bottle Dance. Paraguay is not without its shady charms. And there is something engagingly unpretentious about the place's openness and its apparent freedom from illusions about itself: the aerobics show I watched on TV seemed to be called "Kleppomania," and a jeans store (offering, as they all do, "Instant Personal Credit") called itself, nicely, "Credi-billy." Though a few cunningly angled photos present Asunción as a thoroughly modern city full of skyscrapers, the truth of the matter is that there are only about five or six high-rises in the entire place and they are topped by signs for Marlboro, Lucky Strike, and Philips. The governing principle of Paraguay, indeed, seems to be one of languid illegality, and the country shambles along with an inimitable kind of slow-motion hustle-quick kills played out at a tropical pace. For all the talk of negocios, Paraguay has none of the huckster's usual energy or determination, none of the con man's tenacity; by Saturday noon, all the money changers have gone home for the weekend, and the bankers are drifting into the No Problems bar. The guidebooks always point out that offices here open at 7:00 a.m. or even 6:00; what they neglect to mention is that the banks, for example, close at 11:00. This is the land of the four-day siesta. If there were a prize for the world's least persistent touts, Paraguay would surely win lying down. ("How much for this?" "Twenty thousand Guarani" "I'll give you five thousand." "Okay.") In Paraguay, there’s no business like slow business. For me, then, the essence-the spiritual heart-of Asunción was the Plaza Uruguaya, a leafy park just a few blocks from the center. Old men sipped mate under trees, and younger men pitched coins along the sidewalk. Hot- pants girls winked lazily at every passerby, next to the statue of the Virgin donated by the Lions Club of Asunción. A small crowd formed to watch men playing checkers in the shade. On one side of the square stood the quaint yellow railway station, whose construction, like much else, had been cut short by the War of the Triple Alliance. A sign proudly reported that it was the first train station in South America-neglecting to add that it was now the last to receive steam engines. In the empty portico outside the station, raspy voiced old women of nineteen and twenty hissed "Pssst!" at every unaccompanied male, while girls under umbrellas flagged down passing cars with lottery tickets. Within the plaza itself there were two huge transparent tubes that looked like cellular greenhouses made of cellophane. Inside were stacks of books-though this seemed an unlikely spot for literateurs-with titles like Absolution for Hitler?, My Cat Speaks ("A Book of Mediumistic conversations between a human being and two cats"), and Read the Future in Grounds of Coffee. The works of Lobsang Rampa, the "Tibetan lama" later exposed as a fraudulent Englishman, seemed especially popular in Paraguay. I took to spending a few moments each day in the square, watching the world go by-or not do so. The plaza seemed like the echt Paraguay, fragrant with the blessings of a place that time has left behind. From the Oasis I moved onto a NASA bus for a trip into the Chaco, the vast, impenetrable scrubland that takes up two-thirds of all Paraguay, a place so hellish that the average temperature (allowing for many 750 days) is 980 Fahrenheit, a place so primitive that a wild hog believed to be extinct since the Pleistocene era was found there less than a generation ago. On the bus, I and the driver were the only ones without blond heads Hausfrauen with yellow buns were chattering away in Plattdeutsch with old German men in farmers' caps. A family of four very blond Californians was sitting in one row transporting boxes of Frosted Flakes to fellow missionaries in the interior. The driver, in any case, was often not visible, except for his legs, which dangled in the aisle from a hole in the roof, where he was hacking down branches with an evil-looking machete. The Brazilian-made bus had symbols on its side of TV, Video, Music, Drinks, Playing Cards, and a WC. As far as I could see, it did have a WC. Still, it seemed the best vehicle to take: the other two daily buses arrived in the desolate Chaco at 2:00 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. respectively. Within thirty minutes of leaving the capital, we were in oblivion: just trees, greenness, space, greenness, here and there a small white grave beside the road. We drove past the Rio Confuso, the town of Benjamin Aceval, the departamento of Presidente Hayes. There are wonderful birds in the Chaco-birds with transparent wings, birds with pink feathers, birds in the colors of Brazil. There is not much else. The population density here is less than one person per square kilometer. As darkness fell, there was marginally less to see. Driving through the Chaco at night is like walking through the dark with your eyes shut. About sixty kilometers from the last light, the bus might stop and two elderly Germans might get off and disappear into the dark. Then the bus would resume its straight-line path. "When can we get off?" bawled one of the missionaries' sons. Are we having fin yet? The Chaco is not an ideal honeymoon location. Finally, after nine o'clock, we arrived at Filadelfia, the main Mennonite settlement in Colonia Fernheim. I got out and started walking down the huge, unpaved red road, broad as the Champs-Elysees. "Filly," as the Californians affectionately called it, is like an empty, one- lane, red-mud version of the Wild West. On all sides, you can see the town end and the nothingness begin. There is a used-car lot here and a Toyota showroom-this is, after all, still Paraguay-but not much else. One pickup truck; three straw-haired boys on Yamahas. I wandered into the Hotel Florida, on the corner of Avenida Hindenburg and Calle Unruh, just two doors down from the Reiseburo, and was greeted by a very polite young Uruguayan boy who looked like Boris Becker. "Kann ich diese Zeitung nehmen?" I asked him, "Of course, " he said, in flawless English. "But will that be enough for you?" On the walls of the hotel were daily rainfall tables (whole months passed by without a single marking, and then, on some days, it said 204, 131, i89). There was also a map of the area: the Chaco is so deserted that the maps show every house and shop. I went into the courtyard to have dinner and met two young Brits who had lost their way, on their bicycles, in the middle of the Bolivian part of the Chaco. We established that we were from the same country, and then ate at opposite sides of the empty garden. What the Mennonites have achieved in this inhospitable "Green Hell" is quite remarkable. ("In the summer, the temperature's about one twenty- five," a man in Asunción had told me. "But with the humidity, of course, it feels much higher.") When first the German settlers arrived, fleeing Russian Communism in 1930, they found an ungodly wilderness peopled only by a few Indians, and swarming with poisonous snakes. Many caught typhoid and died. Two years after they arrived, the Chaco War broke out all around them. Yet somehow they hung on to erect an astonishingly clean and well-managed community, with its own schools, buses, laws, and enormous cooperative stores. The supermarket in Filadelfia was spotless and better stocked than a store in Orange County and offered Japanese Super GummiCumin candies, Chinese Perfect Cube boxes, Jordache jeans, and tapes of Fips Asmussen. Nearby, a Christian bookstore ("The Messenger") sold Indian statues of turtles and owls, and a video store promised James Bond and Mad Max, as well as special tapes in German, of the Bombing of Baghdad and the Paris-Dakar rally. But the most exciting thing to do in Filadelfia, for me, was simply to watch the Mennonite women clean my room every morning. A task force of three stormed into the small, immaculately maintained chamber, scrubbing floors, beating rugs, picking up shoes, whisking off wastebaskets and then storming out three minutes later, leaving the place born again. My first morning in town, I went for a ride through the red-rutted emptiness with the proprietor of the hotel, a wonderfully hospitable Mennonite named Hartmut Wohlgemuth, accompanied by a sweet-smiling young Paraguayan proselyte. We bumped over tire-muddied paths, the roads around as empty as airstrips (which often they are), the cries of "Danke schön" as frequent as in a Cuban police station. "Before, the Indians could not sleep at night," my host explained. "They believed in spirits, ghosts, things almost satanic. They were afraid of the night, of things that moved in the dark. It was terrible. Now they believe in Jesus. And this is better. Whoever you are-Paraguayan, Brazilian, German, Indian- you can believe in Jesus and find salvation. I am not just saying this. It is the truth." Not everyone here could keep up with such fervor. "It is a big problem," Herr Wohlgemuth admitted. "The young do not want to live like this. They want excitement, the modern life. They want money. They want drink." Did many of them marry the Indians? "Not really," he said, and then went on, with characteristic straight forwardness, "They have sexual relations, of course. But marry, no. We drove into Indian settlements famously appointed with basketball courts, prayer halls, and Bible schools: they looked like rough drafts of the Mennonite communities. "Some Indians have TV’s, radios," Herr Wohlgemuth informed me. "Some even have cars. "Do they want all this?" "Yes. They all want them." A few Indians clattered past on a horse-drawn cart, like latter-day replicas of the early Mennonites; others played volleyball, or stood inertly by their huts in Minnesota Vikings T- shirts. We got out, and an aged Indian man, in lucid Spanish, gave us an account of the missionary's life. "El Senór was hit by a bow and arrow. The arrow went into his side. There was no blood. Three hours later, he was dead." We got back into the pickup, and my beaming host, patting me on the back, pointed out serpents, tucutucos, and, mostly, doves. I thought it might be imprudent to ask him about the Ache Indians, a small Stone Age tribe of hunters and gatherers who, according to many reports, have been virtually eliminated by missionaries. (Norman Lewis, only a few years ago, wrote of a man selling his own son for seventy-five cents, down from the going rate of five dollars.) Better, I thought, to discuss the most famous reported settler among the Mennonites. "Do you know Dr. Mengele?" "Mengele? No! People say that he lived among the Mennonites, but that is a lie! A complete lie! He was never here, never! They found his bones in Sao Paulo!" "Yes," piped up the Paraguayan from the back seat, unschooled yet in the party line. "He was with another group of Mennonites, in another part of Paraguay. He was a doctor among the insane. "Another group?" said Herr Wohlgemuth, a little taken aback. "Really?" "Yes. He was a doctor before." "But a rustic doctor only." "He was a friend of Stroessner," the boy from Asunción went on. I was about to ask what this said about Stroessner-the madman responsible for up to 400,000 deaths was said to be the president's personal physician-but then the smiling boy went on: "He was a good man, Stroessner, a very good man. He returned to Paraguay last week." Herr Wohlgemuth was the perfect host, a thoroughly likable soul who roared with joy when he saw a motorcyclist do a wheelie. He stopped in Lomo Plata, the largest Mennonite settlement in Menno, and he bought us ice creams in a Mennonite shop decorated with posters about how cholera could be caught from ice cream. "It is difficult," he said, now contemplative. "Between our culture and the Indians' there is a Mediter- ranean. That night, he screened for me a video of the Indians singing a hymn, in Spanish, to the tune of "Red River Valley." When I returned to the capital, everything was still ambling along in its state of lazy illegitimacy. A black magician was holding court in the Plaza of the Heroes, performing tricks before a huge circle of admirers with a spitting snake and a reptile in a box. The camera artists were doing a roaring trade snapping prints of excited young girls in from the countryside, and touts in UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA COLLEGE OF LAW T-shirts were palming bank notes above shirts that said OAKLAND ATHLETICS 1954 WORLD CHAMPIONS (BASKETBALL WORLD SERIES). The Cine Victoria had a new double bill: Deep Throat II and The Night of Penetrations. In the Plaza Uruguaya, the same girls in the same polka-dot dresses were standing against the same trees. Occasionally, they snuggled up to distracted-looking businessmen on park benches and talked in numbers ("Fifteen thousand." "Ten!" "Why not fifteen?"), before shuffling off together to the nearby Casa Reina, or House of Queens. I asked a girl if she was not worried about AIDS. It was a lie, she said, it didn't exist (and in Paraguay, you could almost believe it: anything could be true on this distant planet). At night a blood-red fountain began to play in the Plaza of the Heroes, and children went round it solemnly on tricycles. The parking space outside the Hotel Guarani was still reserved for the Embassy of South Africa. On TV, messages about cholera were flashing across the screen during advertisements for the Miss Universe contest. Booming above me, from the "Dancing Restaurant," there came the sound of a band doing "My Way." The next day was a national holiday - Workers' Day-which was a strange notion in a land where 60 percent of the people have no real work at all. Yet for all the slow-business as usual, I could see why so many visitors had a soft spot for Paraguay. For there are very few shadows in Paraguay, and the capital at least is one of the safest places on the continent. In a country where crookedness is above ground and official ("Legalize Crime" might almost be the national motto: "Just Say Yes!"), people have more lucrative ways to redistribute income than by taking advantage of visitors. One could, in fact, make a Wildean case, after seeing Paraguay, for saying that if crime were made legal (as it is here), petty crime - pickpocketing and mugging and assault-would be all but eliminated. The only things I was robbed of in Paraguay were my malign preconceptions: I never looked over my shoulder here, or thought twice about taking a walk, or left my valuables in the hotel, as I would have to do in fun- loving, free-and-easy, murderous Rio. At night, there was a policeman-or a prostitute-on every street corner, keeping the peace in a kind of way. Before I left Paraguay, I returned to the Gran Hotel. The golden kids of the generals were practicing their forehands, and the babies were squawking and whistling like birds. "Too many babies," whispered the friendly receptionist, the cosmopolitan daughter of a diplomat, and an amateur historian. "But what can we do? We cannot refuse them rooms. Maybe we can set up a special room for them where they will not disturb the other guests?" "Yes," I said. "After all, this is a place with a special history." "No it isn't" "I just mean Madama Lynch and all that." "She never lived here." "What?" "I tell you, I don't know where that rumor started. It's a lie!. The truth must be told!" There was a long and uncomfortable silence, "This house belonged to an Italian family. They lived here. Madama Lynch lived near the Jardin Botanico. I think they just started that story to bring in guests. Fact or fiction, truth or gossip? Who could tell? History, like everything else, was on special discount here in the orphaned land.