At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig by John Gimlette

Author:John Gimlette
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446494479
Publisher: Random House

52

AFTER AN HOUR, the taxi lurched over the long ripple of sand that was all that remained of the outer trenches. ‘Welcome to the Heroic City of Humaitá’ said a sign, but there was nothing there. The track simply curled away into the grass and cactus. Then, after more slewing and retching of sand, the track uncurled itself and bolted straight for the Río Paraguay. In the verges were the shacks and cottages of the Humaitá that had survived – all that remained of a fortress that had been a mile long, three miles wide and home to 24,000 skinny troops.

Although I was to become fond of this relic of nineteenth-century warfare, it is almost easier to think of Humaitá in terms of what it wasn’t rather than what it was. There were no cars, no trucks, no children and no sounds but for the river and the birds. There was no glass in the windows and no stone on the paths. The horses grazed without boundaries on great scrapes of spiky emerald grass, on the football pitch and on the Square of the Heroes. There was no rubbish, no advertisements, no writing, no frivolity. Boisterous gardens of sunflowers and dahlias were restrained by neat, white picket-fences. No one looked up as we passed, no one knew if the village had a hotel and no one had shoes.

‘I’ll leave you at the shop,’ said the taxi-driver. I could tell that he resented the sand and the strain on his engine.

We churned on, down the last half-mile towards the river. There were other shops along the way: a sewing machine clacking busily in a dark doorway; a cave of unguents and potions; a bicycle-man with a tray of parts but nothing to ride.

The river widened in our strange blue windscreen. It would not be long before the Río Paraguay lost itself for ever at its confluence with the Río Paraná. After its magnificent south-bound roll, 1,700 kilometres down from Brazil, it seemed to have made one last effort to save itself and to loop north again. On the outer curve of its hopeless U-turn stood Humaitá. Half a mile away across the water was the fearsome Chaco desert. There was still nothing there – just a tangle of reeds and thorn. The Chaco had played little part in the siege; it’d still been dangerously infested with Guaycurú tribesmen. For a while, the Brazilians tried to recruit them, but the Guaycurú would not be owned; they sold their new weapons to the Paraguayans and then returned to the Brazilians for their scalps.

‘This is the shop,’ said the driver.

The taxi slumped into the sand, a short distance from the waterfront. The sun was scattered across the water and brilliant shivers of light escaped into the trees and played among the dark silhouettes of cattle on the shoreline. Long-tailed swallows scribbled their whirling crescents in the blue, all gone before the ink was dry. I paid the driver, and in a glorious cumulo-nimbus of dust, he flogged his taxi back to Pilar.

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