On the last morning we woke at two to find the moon brilliant, and pulling on our soggy garments, pushed eagerly forward. On the right the Southern Cross stood forth brightly whenever a fleck of cloud veiled the moon. Away in the forest monkeys wailed their everlasting plaint. Great masses of green vines, covering irregular giant bushes, looked like German castles in the moonlight. The first flush of day showed in the V-shaped opening ahead the shoulders of the advance horseman, cutting into the paling sky and blotting out the bright morning star. Then dawn “came up like thunder” out of the endless wilderness, and somehow it seemed wasteful to keep the moon burning after the tropical sunshine had flooded all the scene. Tall, slender palms, and all possible forms of trees, festooned and draped with vines in fantastic web and lace effects, stood out against the sky. Masses of pink morning-glories quickly shrunk under the sun’s glare; brown moor-hens, flicking their black tails saucily, foraged about mud-holes and flew clumsily, like chickens, with little half-jumps, as we passed. Beyond the pascana of Tacuaral, with its myriad of slim tacuara palms, the country that should have been flooded at this season was utterly waterless. Hour after sun-baked hour we jogged on, our thirsty animals stumbling in the enormous sun-dried cart-ruts. An occasional hut with a banana-grove appeared in a tiny space shaved out of the bristling forest. In mid-afternoon we sighted through the heat rays ahead a wide street, with red-tiled buildings and open water beyond, backed far away by low wooded ridges, and the Port of Suarez and the end of Bolivia was at hand. It was two months to a day since Tommy and I had set out from Cochabamba.
Dawn was just beginning to paint red the humid air between jungle and sky across the lagoon of Cáceres, a backwater of the river Paraguay, when I descended to its edge and, by dint of acrobatic feats of equilibrium, managed a bath and left behind in the mud and slime, like fallen heroes of many a campaign, the remnants of my tramping garb. As I climbed the bank new-clad, there persisted the feeling that I had heartlessly abandoned some faithful friend of long standing. The gasoline launch chugged more than two hours across the muddy lagoa before there rose from the jungle, on a bit of knoll, the modern city of Corumbá, in the Brazilian State of Matto Grosso, to the residents of which the appearance of a lone traveler from out the ferocious wilds and haunts of bugres beyond the lagoon that ends their world was little less wonder-provoking than the arrival of one from a distant planet. Here at last was civilization,—expensive civilization—and steamers every few days to Asunción and Buenos Aires.
CHAPTER XXII
SOUTHWARD THROUGH GUARANI LAND
With a deep blast from her ocean-going whistle the Asunción of the Mihanovich Line swung out through the shipping of a crowded port and was off down the Paraguay. The steamer was easily the equal of the best on the Hudson; its officers and stewards, all argentinos, were as white as you or I, though the passengers ran to all shades, and it was little short of startling to see white waiters serving and kowtowing to haughty Brazilian half-Indians and negroes. Green jungle, occasionally broken by prairie-like stretches studded with dainty palm-trees, like wheels of greenery on the ends of broomsticks, sped rapidly past. We stopped at several towns and estancias, now in Brazil, now in Paraguay; here and there a lone passenger, standing erect in his boat, was rowed out by a pair of peons, and picked up as we slowed down for a moment. On the second morning we halted at the estate of an Irishman on Brazilian soil, the passengers going to inspect a jaguar and a huge wild-cat in home-made cages, while cow-boys roped a steer and, dragging it down to the edge of the bank to spare themselves the labor of carrying the carcass, slaughtered in plain sight of all what was served as beefsteak that noon and evening. Now and again we put in at a little Paraguayan town, swarming with barefoot boy-soldiers in faded khaki, with a reputation for shooting on the slightest provocation. Old women came on board with bread, watermelons, and clumsy native cigars, scorning Brazilian money, and demanding the ragged and all but worthless bills of their own land. Here a new language appeared, the palatal Guaraní sounding on all sides. The evening of the second day brought us to Villa Concepción, one of the six incorporated “cities” of Paraguay, which might easily be mistaken for a village. An occasional estancia along the bank had a little railroad, with screeching toy locomotives and an electric lighting plant of its own. The Paraguayan gaucho, or cow-boy, had the independent air of men who will not be imposed upon. He wore a large straw hat, a colored kerchief about his neck, the chiripá, huge, baggy cotton trousers with a puckering-string about his bare ankles as a protection against the gnats and climbing insects, and in most cases a blacksmith’s leather apron with a long fringe, a necessity for riders through the thorny undergrowth. Over this all wore a wide leather belt, with several buttoned pockets bulging with their probably not great wealth, and a big knife in a leather scabbard stuck in carelessly behind, as if ever ready to be drawn on the instant.
On the morning of the fourth day I was awakened by a long blast of the whistle, and peered out of my hammock to find the steamer anchored among extensive docks. It was that soft moment of dawn when the sun is just trembling in stage-fright below the eastern horizon, the lower sky streaked with delicate colors, the air of that velvety texture known only at such hours in the tropics. Then the day blazed forth in all its brilliancy, putting the night breeze to ignominious rout, and disclosing a low city, its chief square lined by two-story buildings, the largest of which I recognized, from photographs, as Paraguay’s government palace. One of a score of hirsute, piratical-looking boatmen, neo-poetic names painted in gaudy colors on the poops of their crafts, rowed me ashore with a few strokes, and at the wooden steps of the custom-house answered my “How much?” with a “What it pleases you, señor.” Either the boatmen of Asunción are unlike their tribe elsewhere, or my face had lost that innocent, childlike air of earlier days. I rewarded his honesty with two Paraguayan dollars,—that is, about eleven cents,—and marching through my trunk-burdened fellow-passengers, thrust my bundle toward a pompous cholo in a cream-colored suit. He peered through the slit in my deerskin kodak-cover, asked a question about the bundled developing-tank, waved a hand with a regal-toned “Puede retirarse,” (“You may withdraw yourself”), and I stepped ashore in Asunción del Paraguay.
The capital of the Inland Republic is its only real city, claiming some eighty thousand inhabitants, or one tenth the present population of a land that once, with nearly two millions, ranked with Brazil and the Argentine as the most important of South America. To-day, thanks to revolutions; anarchy, Lopez and his French mistress, and the consequent stagnation, it is in the far background of modern progress. It spreads over a considerable space of what is really rolling ground—though to one fresh from nearly two years in the Andes it seemed monotonously flat. Across the river, on a curve of which it halts abruptly, lies the sea-flat, trackless chaco, the abode of nomadic Indians, dense-blue by day, and fading to purple under the setting sun. Unfortunately, Francia, “El Supremo,” dictator for a third of a century, sought to “beautify” the town by filling its lagoons, straightening its jumble of tortuous lanes, and reducing it to a featureless similarity to all other capitals of its kind and size. Travelers of past centuries are agreed that the chief charm of old Asunción was due to its delightful irregularity. Certainly its ancient fascination is gone, and to-day it is nothing but a languid little capital of a stagnant country, the least interesting of any I had seen in South America.
The time-worn assertion that the population of Paraguay is wholly Indian in blood is a decided overstatement. In Asunción one sees at least as many whites as in La Paz. Nor is it true that there are nine women to every man. True, Francia wiped out the old Spaniards for conspiring against him; forty years ago, in the days of Lopez, the wars reduced the proportion to seventeen to one. But time and migrating males have all but repaired these ravages, though many a man still lives on the exertions of his harem, one of the several women of which is his legal wife, and the majority of children born in the country are illegitimate. In general the place has a different atmosphere, a blasé air little like the towns of the Andes. Among these less simple people, particularly the denizens of the “Centro Español,” where I was “put up” during my stay, one got the feeling that conventionality was not morality; there was something about their suave, well-bred manners that made one feel that deep down they were no such sticklers for honesty and justice as for the urbanities of life. Or would the artificiality of any “civilized” place have struck a discordant note to one coming suddenly out of a long stay in the wilderness?
It is in Asunción that the traveler from the north notes the first advance of the immigration that is to increase to swamping proportions in the Argentine, as he moves southward. Paraguay is making strenuous, though not very tactful, efforts to increase immigration, under an immigration bureau in the hands of a German. Commerce and government are largely in the hands of foreigners, at least of the second generation, even the president being a Swiss in blood and name. Paraguay’s civilization is not strong enough to absorb the newcomers; one hears German, Italian, or Catalan almost as often as the native Guarani. This latter is the real speech of the country. Spanish is spoken only in the cities, and even there the people use among themselves the remnants of the aboriginal tongue. Teachers in large villages often cannot speak Castilian; the few Paraguayan countrymen who know it are “afraid” to use it for fear their fellows will ridicule them for trying to show off. There has been more than one movement on foot to make Guarani the official, as well as the actual, language of the country.
The money of Paraguay has fallen to low estate. Step into a bank and throw down an English sovereign, and there will be thrust upon you some $90 in native currency, bringing the peso down to little more than the value of our nickel. Metal money is unknown; the paper bills made in London and New York are in universal use, the smaller denominations being ragged and dirty to the point of illegibility, and often patched with scraps of newspaper. “The nation,” runs the device on these tattered billetes “recognizes this bill as fifty strong dollars,” which is quite different from saying it will be redeemed at that rate. Street-car fares, now 75, had been 67½ centavos, and the company had found it necessary to print its own change in 2½-centavo pieces, worth—well, let fractional experts figure it out. Eggs sold in the market at $7 a dozen; a hair-cut cost $5, and it was not a five-dollar hair-cut. On the other hand, postage is the cheapest on earth, evidently because the rates had been established and the stamps printed before the money depreciated.
After the first investigation I put off replenishing my wardrobe until I should reach Buenos Aires. It was not merely because the tailor showed me shoddy stuff and demanded $350 for a suit of it! The local styles were even more startling than the price mentioned in so offhand a manner. The trousers demanded by custom, for example, be they made by a local tailor or imported from Europe, are built up as high as trousers could by any stretch of the word go; then on top of this comes an enormous belt-piece, so wide that it requires three buttons to fasten it, clamping the garment up about the armpits. If only they would use a couple of inches more, they could button the trousers about the neck, fasten a collar on them, and dispense with the expense of a shirt entirely. In the olden days, it is said, the Inca tribes gave the inhabitants of this region the name of “guara-ni” (breechless ones). The bloomer-like amplitude of the trousers of the countryman, and the height of those of his city cousin, suggests that they resent the implied insult keenly, and have resolved to leave no opportunity for its repetition. Somewhere around this uncharted expanse of trouser every one, from merchant to peon, wears a leather belt at least six inches wide, a combination of coin and revolver carry-all, held together with several buckles of the size of those on a horse’s saddle-cinch.