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There seems to be a theme to every return I make to Sydney. Last year when I returned from Korea it felt like everyone was pairing up and settling down. There were more mortgages, more babies, more engagements. Returning to Sydney this time, though, the theme was catastrophic break-ups, or at least unexpected break-ups from my distant point of view. This time I wasn’t alone amongst the couples, the perennial third, fifth or fifteenth wheel. I was among peers.
Contrary to this trend, the official reason for my return to Sydney was to attend a family wedding. This was not just any wedding, though; this, my cousin’s wedding, was the first of our generation.
As the firstborn of the clan it perhaps should have been me who was first married. I, however, had long settled on the role of the prodigal, traveling cousin (although there seem to be more and more such prodigies in the family).
The bride came from a big Mormon family, and so it was to be a big Mormon wedding. Our family clustered around a table heavy with pitchers of beer and bottles of wine (and later latticed with wine stains), while the other side of the family sprawled over multiple well-dressed, tee-totaling tables.
They were an intimidating clan, not because of any unfriendliness, but simply because of the certainty that comes with their faith. An aspirant young movement, Mormonism seems to do little of the equivocating or splintering of other Christian groups. Do your missionary work at 19 (21 if you’re female), meet a partner while doing so or sooner afterwards, get married, start squiring children, raise them in the church, look good, be successful, share your success with the church so it can grow.
Of course practices like wearing very sombre ties, knocking unannounced on doors and (long-abolished) polygamy keep Mormonism well and truly untrendy, but at its core it should be attractive to more people, if for no other reason then because it more or less assures you of finding a partner and a welcoming community.
MCing the reception, stammering away in English and Spanish (the family of the bride was also Chilean, and while there were plenty of bilingual folk on their side of the room I was the only option on our side) I felt myself shrinking before all that Mormon certainty, all the pretty Mormon cousins and their confident, content spouses. I’d lost weight (not a good thing; I don’t have that much to lose) and spent most of my money in South America. My suit was enormous on me. I’d learned only half a language and contributed in only a very small way as a volunteer. My book was unpublished and I was once again lovelorn. Not enough people were reading my blog. I was tired from long and lonely nights on buses and in dingy hotel rooms, my clothes were falling apart and I was for the time living out of my parents’ fridge, trying to gain weight, dose up on vitamin B12 and taste everything I hadn’t tasted in eight months.
So, the obvious decision would have been to pack up myself and all my single buddies and take us off to a Mormon temple, to meet some pretty, modest girls, to get some wardrobe direction and some answers in life, to be forever surrounded by smiling, edifying faces, and to limit my travels to perhaps the odd missionary stint in between settling in the suburbs, making children and living the Mormon-American dream.
Instead I decided to keep doing what I have been doing, and to go live in Mexico…
Pablo Neruda believed that drink tasted better from coloured glass. He filled his houses with glass of all colours and shapes, and walking through his old rooms, passing through the fields of colour cut by each glass, it’s hard not to feel a kind of wonder and contentment. Walking around Valparaiso is very similar; the colour Neruda applied strategically to his house overlooking the city has exploded and run in all directions, and then faded and chipped and washed back over itself all over again, and all this conflicting colour gives the city a sense of fun, of vivacity and wonder.
The open air museum in Valparaiso is a collection of murals scattered over one of the city’s hills. They are grand and mostly abstracted; they look like old socialist monuments. Nowadays though they are looking awfully faded and abstract and sombre. They have been eclipsed by the vibrant flourishes of more recent artists, who with or without permission have been turning the entire city into an open air museum of clashing colours and forms.
It is not only the artists that contribute to the mad vibrancy of the city though. Geography plays its part; Valparaiso is a port city, built into a fingernail of land between ocean and steep hills. As it expanded the only place to go was up and over the hills. Impossibly steep and crooked streets loop over these. They run into each other or flirt without every meeting. Getting from A to B in Valparaiso usually involves a lot of unexpected ascents, descents, hair pin bends and doublings-back. It is not a city for people in a hurry, or for people who like to walk in straight lines.
Valparaiso isn’t for everyone, and for those who do prefer straight lines, as well as proper beaches, hotels and malls, nearby Vina del Mar would no doubt seem like a lot more fun. Valparaiso advertises itself as the Bohemian heart of South America, and with that comes a certain atmosphere. When it rains the tortuous streets become steep torrents of water; drains flood and turds float themselves down towards the port; the many street dogs get soggy and share awnings with stranded students; the city’s cats clamour and yowl their misery. The prettiness of the city is of a dingy, scruffy kind. Spray paint on corrugated iron and concrete.
I returned to Valparaiso, squeezing in a few more days there before I flew out of South America. I did nothing appreciably different from what I had done on my first visit. If anything I explored less and stuck to the known areas. Even so I found new streets, new art, new houses clinging to the precipitous hills, new street dogs. Every little wander brought new corners to explore, new cafes and bars to be frequented, new people to know. Two trips to Valparaiso proved as inadequate as one; the many twists and quirks of this labyrinth need serious time to explore in detail. New murals and characters appear, old ones fade and are worn away. The colours shift, glow and dim like the ordered rows of glass in Neruda’s house. Always there is colour in the labyrinth though, and after two jaunts through the city it really does feel as though brightly painted streets, like tinted glass, produce stronger human responses. Valparaiso, for all its ongoing change and permutation, remains a city of constant wonder and fascination.
When Pablo Neruda’s heart stopped in 1973 it could have signified the death of poetry in Chile. Augusto Pinochet’s coup was smothering the country in fear, silencing voices of dissent, ushering in a terrified philistinism. Neruda was the country’s most beloved poet, their recently-crowned Nobel Laureate, who had survived past proscription to captivate his country with fifty years worth of poems. Then Pinochet broke his heart.
The country’s love for their poet, however, could not be snuffed out by the dictator. At the poet’s funeral mourning mixed with protest. Although his works were banned they were smuggled into the country from Argentina. His three houses – in Isla Negra, Valparaiso and Santiago – were shut up with their treasures until the reign of the dictator ended and it was safe to adore the poet again.
Once the dictatorship had ended these three houses were restored and eventually opened to the public. When they were, the wealth and vibrancy of the poet’s life was put on display for all to enjoy; poetry, if it ever had really been run out of Chile, was returning in triumph.
Neruda’s houses – La Sebastiana in Valparaiso, La Chascona in Santiago, and his favourite Isla Negra house – share similar stories. The tours that wind constantly through all three of them point out the same traits. Neruda loved the ocean but was scared of sailing. Instead he designed his houses to resemble ships, with low narrow doorways and pegged wooden floors. He decorated the houses with ships in bottles, maps, and ships’ figureheads. An enthusiastic antiquarian, Neruda’s houses are filled with knickknacks and curiosities: African and Asian masks, Easter Island heads, stuffed animals, a narwal horn, shells and coloured glass, figurines, hats, shoes, erotic postcards, giant shoes, lanterns, bells, indigenous and colonial art from all over Latin America, a full-sized model horse in a full-sized stable, ship’s furniture, anchors, hats, pipes, photographs and paintings of himself and his third wife (I don’t remember seeing any of his earlier wives), traditional musical instruments from Asia and the Americas, photographs of other poets (Whitman, Rimbaud, Baudelaire featuring prominently), his awards and of course many, many books.
The size of Neruda’s collections and the anecdotes attached to them – how he thought drink tasted better out of coloured glasses, how he loved entertaining but prohibited his guests from entering his kitchens, how he wanted to always feel himself to be at sea on dry land, how he would ring the bells to inform the neighbours when he arrived back in town, how he would decorate rooms to look like scenes from his childhood, how he would buy up favourite objects (such as the full-sized model horse) from his childhood – testify to the vivacity and exuberance of the man, to the passion and sense of fun that come through in his poems.
And beyond their coloured walls and dense gardens, these houses testify to influence of the poet over his country. Out from these repositories of life and art have spread Chile’s most colourful communities. The grey shores of Isla Negra are scattered with pretty, colourful beach houses, the trendy village scattered with sculptures and artistic flourishes. Below the Valparaiso house spreads the city’s bohemian labyrinth. Around the Santiago house has sprouted one of the hippest and liveliest neighbourhoods in the metropolis.
In his houses the spirit of Neruda survived the oppressions of the dictator, and emerged to continue to inspire the country he loved. Today Chile is Neruda’s house, filled with his friends and admirers, his quirks and idiosyncracies, with colour and poetry; just as he always wanted his houses to be.
Life in Paraguay is essentially life lived one-handed. The conductors on the buses as well as most of the passengers, the pedestrians in downtown Asunción, the motorcyclists in Concepción, the police, the shopkeepers, the idle knots of men in the plazas all manage to go about life using only one hand. Their other hand is forever occupied in clutching a tereré or maté cup; the accompanying thermos is always close by, wedged in armpit or crook of elbow.
Maté is not unique to Paraguay. In northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and in every street in Uruguay people sip on the strong infusion of tea through metal sieve-straws called bombillas. Paraguay, though, is the home of tereré, the same infusion served iced, sweet and packed with medicinal-or-otherwise herbs.
The prevalence of tereré, especially given the inconvenience of relinquishing forever the use of one hand for the sake of lugging it about, defies logical explanation. At all hours and in all situations, tereré is sucked upon in an almost preconscious, unintentional way. It reminds me of the relentless consumption of coca in Bolivia. It reminds me of a child fastidiously, resolutely dragging his security blanket with him at all times.
Perhaps because of this one-handed lifestyle, or the assurance gained by the touch of the tereré flask, or the properties of the tea and herbs, Paraguayan life takes place at a permanently sedate pace. It is a land in which hours and decades disappear easily, where things change slowly and horsedrawn carts still clack along the uneven paved or dirt streets. It is also a place in which people can hide, a haven of obscurity where people can do things they wouldn’t do elsewhere. In the 17th century the Jesuits set up camp here, building their reductions, their missions, and melding their culture with that of the indigenous groups to produce successful, syncretic communities utterly at odds with the exploitative style of other colonial projects in the Americas. In 1767 the Jesuits were expelled from Spanish territories, and their little utopia came to an almost overnight halt.
Later Paraguay became the site of New Australia, an attempt by Australian leftist outsiders to build a socialist Utopia, This project in time also fell apart, as its members bickered and formed factions and breakaway communities. Eventually the Paraguayan government put an end to the project, dividing up the land among the community members. Apparently Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister tried to start an all-Aryan New Germany shortly after this.
More successful and showing no signs of disappearing or being disappeared are the Mennonites. The promise of unsettled land and complete seclusion drew them groups of Mennonites from the persecutions of the norths down to the wilds of Paraguay, where they could and can practice their religion in peace. Other groups (eg Japanese, Korean, Jewish refugees, Nazis, the Moonies) have also found their havens down in the obscurity of Paraguay.
The country is not always a sanctuary, though. A long history of dictators-acting-with-impunity has kept Paraguay a paradise of corruption, and at times cruelty and barbarism. It has long been a haven of contraband and cut-throat, cut-price shopping for big brothers Brazil and Argentina. Most of urban Paraguay hugs its river-borders, as close as possible to potential customers and commerce. Paraguay’s largest export is hydroelectric power, of which Brazil and Argentina enjoy vast amounts at criminally low prices.
The isolation of Paraguay has also preserved pockets of wilderness and wildlife, and perhaps most curiously of all, a language. Prior to European colonisation, Paraguay was inhabited by many small indigenous groups speaking a variety of languages, many completely distinct form another. Today though, Guaraní is the language of choice, and is more widely spoken than Spanish, with which it shares official language duties. This is the only case in the Americas of an indigenous language being adopted on a widespread scale by non-indigenous speakers, and stands in awkward discord with the plight of indigenous people and culture at large. Several indigenous groups today are on the brink of extinction, their entire remaining populace living in roadside shanties that look out across land they are legally entitled to, but still are powerless to inhabit.
I spent a good deal of time not quite sure of what to do in Paraguay. Its only superlatives, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and the world’s largest aquifier – a huge underground source of freshwater – are not the most thrilling prospective destinations. This is not to say that Paraguay is short on things-worth-looking-at; they are just little known or publicised outside of the country. I spent much time on buses or in plazas watching one-handed life trickle by me. The people I encountered were both shy and eager to help; they would point me in the right direction, pause as though to say more, and then quickly slip away. Although Paraguay has long been a haven for outsiders, these have tended to keep to themselves. The volunteers and tourists that turn up in Paraguay, hoping to find rather than lose themselves, are curious specimens for locals. Even the owner of my hotel in Asunción asked me what was keeping me there (for four nights).
Sometimes the cautious hospitality was incredibly helpful; in Encarnación I was eventually escorted by police patrol to the house of a friend of the couchsurfer I was supposed to be staying with but couldn’t contact. Other times the best-intentioned help didn’t work out; trying to leave Ybycuí I was told that Paraguayans always stop to offer a ride to anyone in need. This is true, but most Paraguayans aren’t on long-hall journeys from town to town. The few available rides on that empty road were mostly over the next hill to the next farmhouse.
The languid pace of life slows even further out there in the suburbs, the towns, the villages, the little concrete houses lost among overgrown gardens and herds of long-eared cows. On that night when I couldn’t find my couchsurfer I stayed in the poorest house I will probably ever stay in, a thing of corrugated iron and crooked-fitting wooden pailings and dirt floor. This was also where I received the warmest welcome fo Paraguay, where I was given a bed and plied with traditional food (including the chicken that had just had its neck wrung). It was here in this least probable of settings that I was finally, fully welcomed into the world of the one-handed, sipping on hot maté to counter the rain drumming on the iron roof and staining everything with brick-red mud.
I had few demands of Paraguay, but one of them was that I see elegant old buildings, their once-colourful facades now peeling, fading, flaking and crumbling. Asunción didn’t disappoint; its historical heart is full of buildings clinging to their faded grandeur, even as their windows are boarded up and they are abandoned to urban decay.
Downtown Asunción is a strange place, the streets are full of civil servants, money changers and shoe shiners. Everyone else, it seems, has moved out to the suburbs. One of the central plazas has become a tent city; people came from out of town to protest and got stuck here, huddled beneath tarpaulins and around smouldering fires. The presidential palace, the senate and the congress (which is a gleaming new thing built with ‘thanks for believing in us’ money from Taiwan) buildings look out across a sluggish curve of the River Paraguay, but between them and the river has sprouted a shanty-town that now shares a back fence with the palace.
Needless to say the palace is well-maintained (and heavily heavily guarded), as are a few other monuments of national pride, like the Pantheon of Heroes where unknown soldiers and dictators lie coffined side by side. Around these proud edifices the downtown is crumbling. Some of the more significant historical buildings are being restored by various cultural centres – Spain, Catalonia, France, Germany and Japan are all involved in preserving Asunción – but these are well outnumbered by the buildings doomed to obscurity. It is a strange feeling, walking the evening streets and realising just how many of the buildings are uninhabited or underinhabited. It was just as strange realising I was the only guest for four nights in a three-story hotel.
Where once the city might have clustered around its palace and cathedral, now it centres itself around the malls. Giant shopping compounds, skirted by drive-through everything (including the first McDonalds I’d seen in seven months) are scattered around outer-Asunción, and these are a far far better place for sampling the contemporary culture of the city. The centre of the city might be decaying, but out around the malls everything is fresh and hip and glossy.
I inevitably cringed, as most backpackers will cringe, at the idea of spending too much time among the malls. The old downtown was full of fantastic, free galleries and museums and cultural centres. The malls were full of people. The old downtown was full of crumble and decay that for whatever reason attracts me so, but the malls had places to eat, supermarkets, bookstores. For any Paraguayo the choice must be easy; grub around among the emptying shells of the past, or hang out with your friends and meet people among the foodcourts and cinemas of new-Asunción. It is a shame for the city, and after visiting the malls the centre feels all the more forlorn and lonely, but this was exactly what I demanded to see. So the malls and the McDonalds, the SUVs and the siliconed wives, the enormous parking lots and air-conditioned foodcourts, maybe they’re all just the inevitable consequence of my search for elegantly crumbling architecture.
