Cut to a Nation´s Quick

Paraguay is something of a puzzle, geographically the heart of South America, yet completely isolated from the world, land-locked,´an island surrounded by land,´ a country both unknown and forgotten. It´s a place with all the modern conveniences that still feels out of time, as if the entire nation has been misplaced by history and no one seems to care. If ever a country and a people could be said to sleep-walk through the future, it would be Paraguay. Everything was just as I thought it would be, and yet everything was completely unexpected.

All of this was far from my mind out in the national park, a huge swath of northern Paraguay along the Brazilian border. I never got a map, and I´m not sure there was one anyway, but I sketched a rough guide from a display at the visitors´center, and hit the trail. I was the only visitor to the park that week.

There was a mirador at the far end of the park, a thousand-foot outcropping twenty kil0meters away, that I was saving for later in the week. Until I got my bearings, I had more modest goals: a small historical monument to Mariscal Francisco Solano Lopez, and a thin jungle stream. It would be a rather pleasant hike.

As I walked up the red dirt road, I quickly became lost. Nothing really matched up to my map, and there weren´t signs, so I just had to mentally arrange the landscape with digital pictures. While I was at a crossroads, tilting my map to make it reflect reality, I saw far to my right, a white bust set upon a stone pedestal; a general staring across a dirt path south into the forest - at nothing. And then I saw them, dozens of white busts upon stone pedestals arranged at ten meter intervals in an arrow-straight line to the northwest. I followed the statues through the forest, past each simple monument, until the trail ended and I was standing in a clearing, a perfectly rectangular clearing of packed red earth carved out of the jungle. I followed that too, over a quarter mile, but it led nowhere; after a while, it just fell back into the trees.

This wasn´t a clearing, it was an airstrip.

I found the monument to F.S. Lopez at the opposite end - a soaring 60s spire encrusted with tribute plaques from each department of the country. From the monument, leading once again through the trees, a stone path ran to the tomb of F.S. Lopez - a thirty-foot cross - and the grave of his Irish mistress. Later I found the third monument to Lopez, at the site of his death, facedown in a creek with a Brazilian bullet lodged in his back.

I never made it to the river.

(Back in Asuncion, two guards smoke a cigarette beside the Pantheon, their blue and red uniforms starched, their demeanor relaxed. Inside, the bodies of Paraguay´s heroes sit in the dark beneath ¨Fides et Patria.¨ The guards toss their cigarettes into Ave. F.S. Lopez and retake their post in the afternoon heat.)

I learn about the War of the Triple Alliance. In the 1860s, Paraguay amassed a huge military under the direction of Mscal. F.S. Lopez, a dictator constantly looking to expand his influence. After Uruguay´s government fell into chaos, Lopez declared war on Brazil and Uruguay, smashing north, waiting for Argentina to ally against the Brazilians. When Argentina dragged its feet, Lopez declared war on Argentina. The Paraguayans enjoyed early success, but after a disastrous river battle against the Brazilian navy, the Paraguayan army suffered defeat after defeat. Disease and a prolonged guerrilla war devastated the population. Eventually, Lopez, his son and successor, the top generals and the leaders of the Catholic Church in Paraguay fled to remote Cerro Cora, where they staged a fight to the death against the invading Brazilian army. They lost. But the Paraguayan president flies in every year to Cerro Cora to honor the man that led to the death of fifty percent of his country.

A couple days later, I´m waiting at the bus station in Pedro Juan Caballero, waiting for the bus to take me back south. Across the street is a stadium, more like a high school gym, and it´s jumping, it´s just filled with people and energy. A banner tells me, in Portguese, that this is the world under-16 girls ´hambol´championships. I pay my dollar and go inside.

Handball, it´s called. But it´s not handball, it´s something else, some sport I´ve never seen before, a bizarre amalgamation of basketball, mini-soccer, hockey, and insanity. The crowd is apoplectic. It´s Paraguay´s best squad against the Brazilians, and the Paraguayans are down by two with five minutes to play. The Paraguayan team looks like the Paraguayan people, short and dark, thick girls with broad shoulders and flat feet. The Brazilian team is anchored by a pair of twins, blonds, probably over six feet tall; lean girls with too-long legs and small heads.

The Brazilians commit a foul, I think, and a squat girl takes a penalty shot, holding the handball and throwing it overhand. One of the twins, the goalie, blocks the shot with her forearm. The crowd groans, men leaning against the boards turn in disgust, kick the ground, and throw their arms across their bodies. Immediately a chanting begins, and a clapping, and the crowd rallies as the girls go on defense. The Brazilians score from the outside.

And then it suddenly hit me, something cultural about Paraguay, and for a moment I thought I saw into the heart of the heart of South America, into the forgotten country and unknown people. Here it is, I remember thinking, Paraguay in miniature; defeated by the beautiful Brazilians, living, dying, losing at a game no one plays, at a game no one knows. The guards and the Pantheon, the busts in the forest, and handball - it´s all the same veneration of defeat, the complete and utter inability to ever recover from disaster, the same jealousy that comes with any small victory - this is the dark weight on Paraguay´s soul, and whether I´m right or whether or I´m wrong, I don´t care. I saw something there that I can´t explain away.