Falling Off the Map (21 page)

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 Jardín 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 alleyway, 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 Nescafé 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 invitation 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 Il 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 Benetton 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 Mercedeses? 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 Generalísimo 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 Rodríguez. 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 maté 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 maté 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, Rodríguez!” 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 Jardín Botánico, formerly an estate of the presidential Lopezes 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 unfavourable 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.