'Abundance is the rule in the campo –
nature gives in basketfuls and cartloads'
Margaret Hebblethwaite, author of Paraguay
This article originally appeared in The Tablet, September 2009
© Dorota Sakwerda
It must be the effect of the spring, just officially beginning in Paraguay. No, it's not just that, it's Paraguay itself, this wonderful country, that makes me so full of enthusiasm. In these past months I have been writing flat out to get a guidebook delivered to the publishers in time. I write at night until I cannot stifle the yawns any longer, and then wake before dawn, bright and keen to carry on writing. The more I write, the more I love my adopted country.
A new volunteer has just arrived to help in our English-teaching programme, and that has given another boost to sharing the joys of Paraguay. He came round today, just as I was about to say goodbye to Marcos Lucena, one of the best harpists in the country and our teacher here. So I asked Marcos as a favour to get out his harp and play. And he did, with his top pupil, Victoria Oviedo, now beginning to be a professional harpist herself.
'Tren lechero' ('Milk train'). Wow! And there, captured in the virtuoso notes of the harp, were all the steam and puff and clickety click and whistles of these old 'chuffa chuffas'. People everywhere are so nostalgic about steam trains – we have still one working in Paraguay.
© Margaret Hebblethwaite
Then they played Mangoré's 'Danza Paraguaya', which must be the most addictive music ever written. Da, da, dum-de-de-da, etc. And then it begins all over again, over and over, and you want it to go on forever. Mangoré was the most talented guitar composer of all time (or so said the English guitarist John Williams) and he grew up right here in Misiones, in San Juan, the capital of our departamento. He was baptised Agustín Pio Barrios, but he loved his country so much that he took as his professional name the name of a historic indigenous leader, and preceded it with his Christian name spelled backwards, so he became Nitsuga Mangoré.
Marcos' taxi came, but he kept it waiting, as he and Victoria were absorbed in their art, playing on and on. Zipoli's 'Allegro' came next, and the spirits of the past came alive again, the spirits of the Guaraní that built Santa María de Fe, with its adobe houses surrounded by long colonnades. (We have one still standing, and two replicas on the square, of which one is my house.) The Jesuit-Guaraní Reductions – which have inspired some 1,500 books and academic articles – are known as the 'lost paradise'.
And there are Franciscan Reductions too. The beautiful carvings of the retablo in the Franciscan church of Caazapá left me speechless. I never knew it was there, and could not understand why no one had ever told me that there was a work of such simple and subtle loveliness in that far-off village.
© Margaret Hebblethwaite
There are so many joys of Paraguay, like the mburucuyá fruits (passion fruits, you say in English) with their hard yellow skins and tangy flavour, which transforms any fruit salad. The mburucuyá flower is the Paraguayan national flower, and its rose-like petals are carved in stone and wood all around the Reductions. The avocadoes are just coming into season now: a friend came round with a big bag of them, and no, he did not want any money.
Abundance is the rule in the campo – nature gives in basketfuls and cartloads. And of course the cart – the one that comes to my house once a week with vegetables – is horse-drawn.
© Fernando Allen
Birdwatchers have a field day here: the estancia of Laguna Blanca, with its mixed landscape known as the cerrado, is said by the birders to be 'one of the best preserved reserves you can find in the south of South America'. You can relax on the white sands of the crystalline lagoon, or go on horseback through the woods, and be enthused by the number of species of birds you will find. And I have been writing about the 'effortless bilingualism' of Paraguay. How we English struggle to learn a language, as though to speak two languages were a feat beyond the normal. And here anyone can do it without thinking.
Then I have been writing about the folk dance, with the men snapping their horsewhips and stamping their boots, and the girls in their swirling ñandutí dresses, with their swinging plaits and the flowers in their hair, charming and enticing the men, and certainly in the end having the upper hand of the romance. And the intricacy of the best ao po'i cloth, such that a large tablecloth, if made by one person single-handed, would take her a year and a half. And people are still making such things!
'A lost paradise?' People should rather say 'a paradise waiting to be discovered'.