My own observations walking round Asunción confirmed the dereliction. In the municipal gardens there had been a man in rags sweeping leaves off the path with a cut palm branch. He wore no shoes and looked more like a tramp than a public servant. He took care not to disturb the beggars sleeping on the wooden slatted benches, on the grass, under the palm trees. There were very small children, from four upwards, who strolled about trying to sell chewing gum and sweets from cardboard trays. Lunatics from the local asylum wandered about aimlessly, cackling and grinning, dressed incongruously in old-fashioned evening dress – tailcoats, striped trousers, spats but no shoes – as a result of international charity clothing donations. The asylum had no money to feed the inmates, so they had been turned loose to wander the city and fend for themselves, scavenging rotting vegetables from the gutters, left by the Indian street sellers. They capered and loped about, these lunatics, distinctive in tailcoats stained by diarrhoea, adding a carnivalesque, grotesque note to the tropical dirt of the Central Business District. Neither the police nor anyone else paid the slightest bit of attention to them: like the vultures hunched on the telegraph wires, watching for a stray dog that had escaped attention, and the Makká Indians from the Chaco who drifted about in loincloths and painted cheeks, trying to sell bows and arrows, they were simply part of Asunción’s dusty, stinking reality. In the air hung the smell of foetid, fermenting human excrement and urine; all these people were living, eating and eliminating in public, in a hot, humid tropical climate. They, like the street children and the beggars, slept in the parks. In daylight the streets were full of European-looking businessmen and their BMWs. At dusk these vanished to the suburbs, and the town centre became an ill-lit Indian-haunted place where pistoleros and whores roamed about and the police stayed mainly inside their fortified barracks. If the police had withdrawn completely the city would be given up to looting and uncontrolled violence: and the police had now not been paid for several months, and were extremely disgruntled. If the government could find no money to pay the police they would not suppress the next pro-Oviedo demonstration. And then there would be a revolution, democracy would be closed down, and a hard-line dictatorship set up again. Liberalization led to chaos and riot and so back to dictatorship again. It was like the ancient Greek city states, an endless swing between repression and licence.
All of this swirling, picturesque, smelly chaos was kept out of the Gran Hotel by high brick walls, 20 foot or more, and an armed guard at the entrance to the grounds with a machine-gun and stern glance who kept would-be intruders at bay. I had negotiated the room-rate down from US$100 a day to $40 a day, and thought I had done well. When I told Gabriella what I was paying she snorted, and went to harangue the middle-aged woman, once an ambassador’s wife it was said, who managed the front reception. After a short altercation in Spanish, Gabriella informed me that as from today my room rate had been reduced from $40 to $30 a day, and when I went off into ‘the interior’ as the rest of the country was quite unironically referred to by the people of Asunción, the hotel would keep my room for me and all my luggage in it, ready for my return, at no charge to me. This was quite usual, Gabriella told me. ‘There is almost no one staying here. They have dozens of rooms and almost no guests. They are lucky to have you.’ The hotel was a pleasing old colonial affair in the Spanish style, with loggias and white stucco Tuscan columns, dark oxblood-red walls, roman tile roofs over verandahs. The windows had white-painted louvred shutters and the ceilings of the rooms were high, to keep the air cool. Each room opened out on to a courtyard garden planted with banana and citrus, bougainvillea and palms; ferns and bright orchids hung in baskets. The soil was dark red and the white-clad Indian gardeners moved about slowly, directing water, pruning, hoeing, weeding. When a guest passed them they stopped work, turned to face the passer-by and, smiling, said quietly, ‘Buenos días, señor’. This is how it must have been throughout much of Paraguay under Stroessner – calm, obsequious, well-ordered, the peons knowing their place. Now the Gran Hotel was an island of tranquillity in a sea of chaos and disorder. Behind the swimming pool lay a dusty tennis court, and beside this, shaded by trees, a tall metal cage which held two brightly coloured green parrots: at dusk these birds gave off terrible shrieks, as if heralding the end of the world. They were fed with cut-up fruits by the gardening staff – oranges, bananas, mangoes, and fresh leaves from tropical trees. They perched on one claw and slowly, delicately, nibbled at the fruit held in the other. There was also a large toucan in a separate cage on the other side of the swimming pool. This bird clambered up and down the wire, as if imprisoned in an adventure playground. He too lived on fruit provided twice a day, and was shy: if you looked at him, he avoided your gaze and trundled off, embarrassed, getting out of your eye line. Birds in cages always make me feel sad and depressed: not only do I feel sorry for the imprisoned birds, but it also reminds me of our own incarceration. I had felt oppressed and imprisoned in Europe, and now I felt oppressed and imprisoned in the gilded cage of this luxurious hotel and its grounds in Asunción. In Europe I could sit on a park bench in public, unnoticed and unthreatened – I was invisible. In Paraguay I felt unsafe in all public spaces. The eyes that searched me over were not friendly. It was noticeable that Paraguayans of European extraction spent as little time as possible in public spaces, passing through them in cars, usually, whereas the mestizo and Indian population, on foot, seated or sprawled on the ground, lived at ease in these spaces. My race, my pale skin made me an intruder.
Behind my room, in a small courtyard garden into which one could wander, was another prison, a small menagerie with hoopoes, cranes, two small monkeys in a cage, a couple of miniature deer of the muntjak type, and a large terrapin. As menageries go this was deluxe – leafy, calm, shady and private – but like the hotel, it was still a prison. The trees and shrubs in this small haven were dense and in deep shadow for much of the day. The birds and animals were so well hidden that you could be almost on top of them before you saw them. And everywhere, in the gardens, in the air, all around one, was Paraguay’s spectacular birdlife – on the wing, perched in trees, darting between bushes, a rich burble of song. Like Manaos in the Brazilian Amazon region, Asunción was a small city in a clearing in the middle of the jungle. For thousands of miles in every direction there was nothing but largely empty countryside – empty that is of human activity. For the birds flying across Asunción, or attracted by the food, the several acres of gardens the hotel offered to them was just more native jungle as a convenient stop-over. Living in the depleted, overpopulated Northern Hemisphere where any signs of wildlife are rare and fugitive, I found the explosion of bird noise in Paraguay startling and sobering. It was evidence of what we had lost by our overbreeding. Perhaps Europe had been like this in the Middle Ages. It was a real pleasure just to sit in a cane chair outside my room looking at and listening to the birds. The only thing I can compare it to is being inside a tropical aviary at a zoo. Tiny hummingbirds smaller than the first joint on my thumb, rainbow coloured with iridescent green the dominant shade, hovered and darted by a hibiscus plant, long thin beaks moving inside the flowers to search for drops of water or nectar. I would sit for timeless periods, completely enraptured by the sight, the wings of this tiny dynamo revolving thousands of times every second, so fast all one saw was a blurr, whirling beside the tiny body. The birds seemed completely indifferent to the ghost-clad gardeners who shuffled slowly to and fro, or to the few guests, who like me, sat outside in the shade drinking in this tranquil atmosphere. Overpopulation, pollution, the depleted environment are realities of our era; to come to somewhere like Paraguay was to realize just how much had been lost.
I walked back with Gabriella to her house, which was less than ten minutes away