UP THE PARANA AND IN PARAGUAY
CONCLUDING PAPER
One day—to return to our traveler and his personal experiences—M. Forgues makes the acquaintance of a Swiss who resides at Paraguari, a small interior town distant about twenty-five leagues from Asuncion. His new acquaintance invites him to go with him to Paraguari, but before complying with the invitation M. Forgues crosses the river and rides into the territory of Gran Chaco as far as the Quinta de la Miseria, situated about two miles and a half from the river-bank. The owner of this farm, Mequelain, a French pioneer, his wife and three servants, had been surprised and murdered by the Chaco Indians a short while before the arrival of M. Forgues in Asuncion. The quinta is on the edge of a vast plain. The unfortunate Mequelain had surrounded his house with ditches and a small fence of posts. Besides this, he had built a sort of observatory from which to watch the movements of the Indians. But his precautions, as the end showed, proved useless. The farm was occupied by new tenants at the time of M. Forgues's visit, and the bodies of the five victims were buried in one of the ditches. The Quinta de la Miseria derives its gloomy name from the tragic event that had given it its melancholy prominence in the minds of the people of Asuncion. To reach Paraguari our traveler avails himself of the railroad which extends between that town and the capital. The railroad-station presents a lively scene with its crowd of savage-looking natives thronging it. In connection with this station M. Forgues mentions a curious circumstance—that in order to prevent the rush of the multitude to the cars on the departure of the train the station-master has ingeniously replaced gates and fences, which might be climbed easily, with brushes steeped in pitch and tar, so disposed as to bar the passage. As the Paraguayan women hold cleanliness to be one of the cardinal virtues, they religiously avoid these defiling brushes for fear of soiling their garments. The cars are built on the most approved American model. The train, furthermore, has two platform-cars attached to it, which are reserved exclusively for the gratuitous use of the poor, who are permitted to ride on them with as much as they can carry in the way of bundles and other goods. Sometimes the platforms are so crowded that they are lost to sight under the passengers' heads and legs. Another feature of railway travel in Paraguay—for a foreigner a sensation—is to observe a woman clad in the Arcadian simplicity of a single garment enter a car and take a seat opposite you or alongside of you with the most unconstrained air imaginable.
The train on its way to Paraguari passes Trinidad and many other stations. The station-houses are all small structures covered with tile roofs. At Luque, a village where the passengers stop for refreshments, the women of the place flock at the windows and offer for sale embroideries of their own invention worked on tulle or on a special kind of netting, while the venders of lunches appear, not with the traditional fried oysters, fried chickens or sandwiches of our own favored land, but with bottles of fresh milk and chiapa, a kind of bread made from manioc, among the ingredients of which are starch and eggs, and for which Luque is famous. The engineer of the train, an Englishman, is a person who is as important in his way as is the Brazilian minister in his. At Luque he descends from his locomotive to chat with a friend on the platform. Time—or what would be "time" elsewhere—is up, but our Englishman continues to talk, notwithstanding that after the utterance of impatient cries the passengers leave the cars in wrath to crowd around him and overwhelm him with abusive words. An admirable representative of English phlegm, he finishes his conversation at his ease, looks at his watch, climbs in a leisurely way to his position on the engine and puts the train in motion. There is no danger of collision with any other train, however, for this train is the only one on the line. It leaves Asuncion every morning, moving at an average rate of fifteen miles an hour, and arrives at Paraguari some time during the day, at the will of the engineer. Returning from Paraguari the same day, it reaches Asuncion, remarks M. Forgues, when it pleases Heaven that it shall do so.
The scenery along the road is beautiful, but the country is almost a desert. Around the stations are groups of dwellings of varied appearance, the most solidly built of which are connected with farms that belonged to the late President Lopez. At times appear palm trees, the feathery leaves of which mingle with beautiful effect with the pale or dark foliage of an exuberant vegetation. Lopez had established telegraphic communication between the mouth of the Paraguay and Paraguari, but the line having been broken between the latter terminus and a place called Cerro Leon, and nobody having been sufficiently interested in it to have it repaired, it now stops at Cerro Leon, the only telegraphic wire in the country, as the Asuncion and Paraguari Railroad is the only railroad.
As the train approaches its destination the passengers see in the distance the three cerros of Paraguari. These isolated sugar-loaf-shaped hills called cerros, covered with verdure, are a marked feature of Paraguayan scenery. They rise from the flat plains, and although their isolated situations impart to them an appearance of great height, they are rarely more than four hundred feet above the level of the plain. Paraguari comprises fifty or sixty houses worthy of the appellation, built around a square. In the outskirts are numerous mud-huts, all well populated with women and children. Its inhabitants number about three thousand, and in its quality as terminus of an unfinished railroad it has that flavor of desperadoism which usually attaches to positions of that kind. Here gather malefactors, generally of foreign birth, from Asuncion and elsewhere—refugees from the central authority and the metropolitan police—who are more free in Paraguari to prey on whomsoever chance may throw in their way. Of the sixty houses, twelve are tiendas, shops in which are sold at retail English cotton goods, Hamburg gins, etc., in exchange for the products of the country—hides, tobacco, maté and other commodities.
The Paraguayan is an inveterate gambler, and in Paraguari two at least of the houses are devoted to public play. They are crowded nightly, and often the stakes amount to five hundred or a thousand francs. Quarrels frequently arise over the play, and then the knife is brought into requisition, but the affrays are due more to the presence of the Italian, Argentine and Brazilian adventurers who flock there than to the Paraguayans, who are not, naturally, a quarrelsome race. On the night of his arrival, M. Forgues, with revolver in belt and accompanied by his Swiss friend, walks through the village. The tiendas are lighted up, but the other houses are in darkness. They look in on the gamblers. The dingy room is partially illuminated by a petroleum lamp which hangs from the ceiling and casts its rays on groups of men with hang-dog countenances seated or standing around a long table, smoking pipes and playing at cards for silver coin, or else engaged in a certain game played on a billiard-table, in which a handful of small balls is thrown on the table by the players, the end to be attained being to cause as many of the balls as possible to enter the pockets. Then M. Forgues and his companion leave the scene of the gambling orgie and look on another phase of life in Paraguari after dark. Not far distant is a lighted stable-lantern on the ground: around it, with a confused medly of ponchos and white skirts flying in the air, goes on the merry dance to the sound of an organ's whining notes. This is all that can be seen from where they stand, for the faces of the dancers, too dark to be distinguishable in the night, are invisible.
The village square is a kind of permanent fair-ground filled with diminutive booths, each one composed of four posts stuck in the ground and upholding a bit of cloth not much larger than a hand-kerchief, under which the hucksters, women and children, sit as under a tent. There is a multitude of sellers, and a pitiful lack of goods to be sold. One woman, with her four children seated near her, offers six eggs to the passer-by as her little store of merchandise: another booth is presided over by two women and three children, and a dozen ears of corn constitute their stock. There is a sad suggestion of poverty about all this which is very depressing. The day before the arrival of M. Forgues in the place an enterprising baker, the first who had ever set foot in Paraguari, began the making and selling of wheat bread. Everybody deserted his customary manioc and bought a loaf of the good fellow, who rubbed his hands with delight at the success of his speculation. The next day, not satisfied with a legitimate profit, he raised the price of his loaves. Human nature is the same all over the world, and the speculator found his bread left on his hands. Nobody would pay his price, and everybody returned to manioc.
From Paraguari our traveler's course next led him toward Villa Rica, a thriving town situated still farther in the interior, and near the Cordillera of Caaguazu. He sets out accompanied by his Swiss acquaintance.