Robert Carver - Paradise With Serpents - Travels in the Lost World of Paraguay

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by Harper Perennial 2007

Copyright © Robert Carver 2007

Map © HarperCollins Publishers , designed by HL Studios, Oxfordshire

Robert Carver asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780002570961

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2016 ISBN 9780007370351

Version: 2016-01-12

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From the reviews of The Accursed Mountains:

‘A memorable debut. Robert Carver has fulfilled the dream of every travel writer to find somewhere strange, remote and unvisited, and to pin it to the printed page. The Accursed Mountains is a tale at once endlessly diverting and profoundly tragic’

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

‘One of the most exciting travel books for a generation’

Spectator

‘A classic’

JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT, Books of the Year, Observer

‘A dazzling account of a journey – always bizarre, often comic, and increasingly nightmarish – through one of the most dangerous backwaters currently to be found anywhere’

PETER HOPKIRK

‘A splendid account of a courageous journey’

DERVLA MURPHY

‘Required reading’

PATRICK LEIGH FERMOR

‘Enviable writing skills … fresh horrors on every page’

JUSTIN WINTLE, The Times

‘A gripping account of Albania in the 1990s’

JAMES OWEN, Daily Telegraph

Dedicated toSt Antony of Padua

Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes

Unhappy is the nation in need of heroes

Bertolt Brecht

Cada uno hace su propia aventura Everyone makes his own fortune

Miguel Cervantes de Vedra

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Map

I VOICES IN THE DARK

1 The Silver of the Mine

2 An Ambassador is Born

3 Counting Paraguay

4 Du Côté de Chez Madame Lynch

5 Paraguay, Champion of America

6 An Ambassador is Uncovered

II PLOUGHING THE SEAS

7 The Gigantic Province of the Indies

8 MAMBFAK

9 Piranha Soup

10 Up River

11 Smuggler’s Paradise

III FLOWERING CANNON

12 Rumble in the Jungle

13 The Book of Complaint and Enticement

14 Southern Exposure

15 Du Côté de Chez Voltaire Molesworth

16 The Strange Case of the Missing Pictures

17 Gran Chaco

18 Sol y Sombra

19 El Día de la Virgen de la Merced

20 Endgame

21 Charlie Carver’s Gold Watch

Some Sources and Further Reading

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

‘When I first came to Asunción from Spain, I realised that I’d arrived in paradise. The air was warm, the light was tropical, and the shuttered colonial houses suggested sensual, tranquil lives. At night we’d go out walking the streets and I’d be aware of two things; the smell of jasmine and the sound of voices in the dark. But like any paradise, this one had serpents.’

Josefina Plá, Spanish poet

In the closing years of the 19th century a forgotten man returned to his home town in the Midlands of England, after an absence of more than thirty years. He had long been given up for dead. His father had been a wealthy man, an industrialist who owned lace factories and coal mines. This man had two sons, one who stayed at home and entered the family businesses, the other who went off to seek his fortune in the United States of America; he was never heard of again, and when the head of the family died his great fortune was left to both of his sons, in equal parts, though one of them had vanished, apparently for ever. In his will he had specified that advertisements in every English-language newspaper around the world should be run, each week, for a year, to inform the lost son of his new fortune, so that he could return to claim it, if he was still alive. At the end of that period, if the missing son had not appeared, his half of the family fortune was to go to charity, to found a theatre and a public hospital. His will was done. No one stepped forward to claim half of the great fortune. As a result, at the end of the year, the Nottingham Playhouse and the Nottingham Free Hospital came into being, founded and funded by half this man’s wealth.

Then, years later, sensationally, a man returned from abroad, claiming to be the missing son. My grandfather Roy, at the time a schoolboy, recalled this event vividly. In his sixties, in the 1950s, Roy told me about this prodigal returned: a tall, massively built man who dressed in ‘the American style’, with broad-brimmed hat, long coat, embroidered high-heeled boots, silver Mexican spurs, and a fancy multicoloured waistcoat. He spoke with a marked American drawl, though spoke little but listened attentively to what others said. This man was Charlie Carver, my great-great-grand-uncle. He had returned home, at last, and he had a very strange tale to tell.

He had left England as a restless young man, determined to seek his fortune in the post-1845 gold and silver diggings of Western America. He had taken ship for San Francisco, and had arrived safely. Several letters had been received by the family back in England. Then nothing – silence for over thirty years. What had happened was as follows: in a bar-room brawl Charlie had been hit over the head, and was knocked unconscious. When he came to he could not remember who he was. He had been robbed and had no papers or possessions to give him any clues as to his identity. He found that he had been shanghai-ed and was on board a sailing clipper bound for Australia, enrolled by persons unknown for a bounty, as a common seaman. For the next five years he served, first as an ordinary seaman, then as ticketed mate, on board the big sailing vessels that crossed the Pacific. For all this time he still had no idea who he was, nor where he came from. He acquired an American accent and mannerisms. Then, tiring of the sea, and taking his savings, he disembarked in the States, determined to seek his fortune on land. He tried many trades and moved from town to town, one of the legion of homeless men drifting around the West in the 1970s and 1980s as the frontier closed in. Finally, he found a good position as a mining supervisor, south of the border, in Mexico. He still had no idea who he was, and was known to many simply as ‘Jack’, or