In a city of eccentricity it was inevitable that I would come across someone like Carlos Yegros. Our meeting was not however coincidental; I was channelled in his direction by his network of relatives and friends. I don't think they ever thought that Carlos would enlighten me as to the workings of his peculiar city but they knew that I would like him all the same. They were right of course on both counts. Carlos was seamlessly charming, untidily handsome and just a little disconnected from reality. I think he must have had some sort of aura because, whenever he took up machinery, it simply stopped working, telephones broke down and cars ground to a halt. But the effect on people was quite different; they seemed oddly transformed. Disappointments turned to amusement and confrontations to banter. Even the dragon in my hotel melted and the street vendors loved him; he never said `no' to them, just `Otro dia!' - `Another day!' - as if every relationship was too precious to fracture and should merely be deferred. I arranged to meet him one morning in the lobby. He strode in wearing wrap-around sunglasses and a tweed jacket bulging with broken telephones and oranges. I don't know whether Carlos ever contrived to be comical or whether being comical was just an accident - like being 47, divorced, broke and blind in one eye. These, Carlos' attributes, were - I decided - probably the equal and opposite elements of tragedy that all comedians were supposed to be possessed of. Like everybody else, I soon found myself laughing and I couldn't think why. There was only one car that worked for Carlos and fortunately he owned it. It was a hideous, gnarly Japanese thing which he locked up with giant brass padlock. It had been broken into so many times that the only way in was through the driver's door. Beyond the drivers seat, I couldn't see where the path went. "What's all this newspaper for?" I asked. It wasn't just newspaper. The car was packed with rubbish. There were shoes and boxes and pieces of fruit, another tweed jacket, some roller skates and lots of socks. Perhaps it was all propellant and any minute Carlos was going to ignite it and we would hurtle through Asuncion like a fire-work, trailing sparks and rust. "Just throw it in the back" he said. As there was no room in the back, I simply burrowed my way into the heap. "Is there a safety belt?" "You won't need it here," he said airily "In Paraguay it is the law to put on safety belts but it is only to make sure that the driver stays near the wheel." There was no danger of either of us straying far and so we sat there, held in place only by debris of Carlos' chaotic life. Eventually we set off into the Asuncion traffic. It wasn't really a tour but more a series of incidents that began and ended at my hotel. Carlos couldn't see anything on his left - his blind side - and so we lurched from near-miss to near-miss. The orange-sellers scattered before us and a man carrying a manguruyu - a sort of river monster with a beard - dived for the bushes with his gigantic fish. It was probably a good thing that Carlos didn't see these things because he was easily distracted. We stopped to buy two sacks of oranges, to visit a Canadian girl (who was out), to surf the internet in MacDonalds (and reduce it to whimpers and dandruff) and to visit three supermarkets. Carlos seemed strongly attracted to supermarkets and whenever he saw one, he swerved off the road. "You'll like this one." The first thing that struck me about the supermarkets was the fact that the glass doors were thickly sheathed in leaflets for lost dogs; lost show-dogs, missing mastiffs, retrievers that failed to return, whelps gone forever, poodles left in the park, lurchers left in the lurch, hounds, tykes, absent friends and Alsations. How could the Asuncenos lose so many dogs? And hadn't I seen them walking themselves round the parks? Now that I came to think about it I couldn't remember having ever seen a dog and its Asunceno together. Perhaps the dogs had had some sort of premonition about the city and had co-ordinated a mass break-out, to taken their chances in the wild? For the dogless, premonition-less citizens, the supermarkets and `shoppings' were a sort of consolation. They were invested with the same extravagance of hope and wealth as medieval man had lavished on his cathedrals. Whilst they didn't offer access to the afterlife, they lit the path to a place that was - in a way - even more desirable; the Americalife. These places may not necessarily have been recognisable to Bostonians and New Yorkers as home but they were not of Paraguay either. Here, bathed in cool, machined air, lit by a million pins of artificial light, the Asuncenos could communicate with another world. The shopping centres of Babel. It was a world of white skin, yellow hair, lip-gloss, Hellenistic promises ("Aphrodite Boutique") and Anglo-Saxon wizardry. Here, everything was creamy and sterile in a city that was hot and green. There were perfumeries, Swiss coffee shops, computer pods and bouncy castles for children who had never seen a real one. One shop sold nothing but Barbie Dolls and was run - apparently - by Barbie herself, in a stiff pink tutu. It was like a nightmare that it was nice to find oneself immersed in. I half-expected to come across a boutique full of inflatable pigs but the Paraguayans were now both more and less coherent. One glassy floor up, there was the New America household store where they could equip themselves as New Americans with 94-piece Sheffield-steel cutlery sets, assault rifles and Louis XV electric hostess trolleys. Nobody was buying anything of course - just touching, stroking, genuflecting. "Who paid for all of this?" I was trying to keep up with Carlos. The floor was so marbled and polished that I had to skate along behind him like the Reverend Walker on Duddingston Loch. "Nobody," he said. So it really was a heavenly gift? Or an inter-galactic trading post? "Yes" I insisted "But somebody must have built it" "It's a dollar-wash" said Carlos. His good eye was wrinkled up in amusement. The other one looked stonily unimpressed. I imagined that he felt rather as he looked. I had heard the expression `Dollar-wash' many times before. Every time something twinkly and new went up in Asuncion it was greeted with sneers of "Dollar-wash". As to who was laundering what kind of money, people were rather unspecific. This was hardly surprising; despite - or perhaps because of - the most gluttonous corruption in the world, no-one has ever been successfully prosecuted. Most people, on the other hand, saw the trail leading back to General Rodrigues - now tucked up in his mini-cathedral - and ex-President Wasmosy - now confined to his luxury bunker. The democracy that they had so assiduously nurtured had served them well, putting a pleasing veneer on a social structure so unequal and imbalanced. Sultanism had been replaced by neo-sultanism and the palaces of the new regime were its shopping centres and lustrous malls. The supermarkets only differed from the shoppings in that they spread out like fields of eager landfill rather than climbing glassily upwards. Carlos and I wandered up and down the aisles, looking - he said - for the Canadian girl. She wasn't with the champagne or the garlic sausage nor did we find her among the 100's and 1000's and the chocolate milk. When I came upon a rack of copies of the Maquis de Sade's "Filosophia en el Tocador", I suffered a temporary loss of reality. Where exactly was I? I was revived by the sight of an Indian child, mottled with dirt, pedalling through the aisles in a plastic play-jeep, trailing price tags and high-pitched store-assistants. I felt an unsaintly urge to encourage him but all I could think of was winking. He looked at me blankly and then reversed away as fast as his little, eighteen-inch legs would pump him. When I saw that all the Pokemon packets had been eviscerated and their cards scattered around like a fox-raid, I credited the tiny driver with leadership skills. He gave me hope that not all Asuncenos were held spell-bound by the shopping malls. Carlos was wriggling free of the spell and had forgotten about the Canadian girl. "I'll take you to the Botanical gardens," he said. I was impressed: our little adventures were beginning to show signs of turning into a tour. Actually, Carlos was dandling a rather different idea; her name was Lucy and she was a goddess of science. I would have been quite happy if we had never reached the Botanical gardens. I was enjoying spluttering around Asuncion in Carlos' self-propelled waste-paper bin. He kept me constantly drip-fed with intriguing gobbets of information that he had gleaned, mostly from Paraguayan newspapers. "Did you know, John, that in your country MacDonalds are trying to burn people by serving the coffee very, very hot?" Whenever he told me any local political gossip, he made a little beak with his finger and thumb and his hand chattered in time to his words. It was a sort of disclaimer; it's only what he'd heard from a funny little bird called `The Gossips'. I asked him about his family. It seems that Carlos was born to a family rich in vicissitudes. His father was a conscientious objector during the Chaco War but had earned extraordinary respect for his courage in carrying water to the front-lines. Carlos' brother on the other hand was a general in the Paraguayan Marines, an entity which is in itself amazing for a country that doesn't have a drop of sea-water. The brother had died from unhealthy over-indulgence and so Carlos' life was dedicated to healthy self-restraint; he was a trader of herbs and minerals. "That's Freddie Stroessner's house." Carlos' car was scraping along a kerb on his blind side. Beyond the grinding and gnashing of hub-caps, was an area of wasteland, thickly forested with tall, crackling grass. Beyond it, I could just make out the outline of The White House, Washington. It looked dejectedly different from the original; there was no glass in the windows and it appeared entirely hollow. A group of boys were playing football on the terrace. "It was never finished." I noticed that this was The Gossips talking, telling tales from its perch on the steering wheel. "When Stroessner heard that Freddie had stolen all the money from the bank," The beaks paused and jabbed in the direction of another concrete blob, the National Bank, nestling in equally long and rank grass some distance away, "He put a stop to the building." "How long ago was that?" "Stroessner left in '89" Carlos whistled though his teeth "It must have been in about the early 80's. It's been abandoned for nearly twenty years." "Why is it just left like this?" The Gossips were on their perch again, twittering "Freddie's dead - drugs. No-one knows who owns the land. It was all fake companies. Now no-one will touch it." It was the last and most enduring monument to the stronato - a wretched eyesore, built with plunder, abandoned in haste and recriminations, ensnared in a tangle of law and weeds. When we got to the Botanical Gardens, we didn't go straight to see Lucy. Instead, we walked through the grounds and the little zoo. This had, until 1862, been the summer estate of Carlos Antonio Lopez and - however sweaty and ballooned-up on his own fluids he may have been - I had to admire him for the park he chose to rest in when the mercury lurched into the upper nineties. I had been here before, in summer, but now - in spring - the grounds were feathered in pink lapacho blossoms and cool, sweet clumps of frangipani and jacaranda. It was all achingly attractive and I would have been happy to sprawl out on the grass all day, admiring a cocktail-party of ostriches and parakeets. But, Carlos tugged me away - on through the zoo, to cast an eye over a giant ant-eater, six jaguars and, of course, Lucy. In order of their excitement value, Carlos would have put them in that, ascending order. I would have put them the other way round. The giant ant-eater was exorbitantly exciting. It had a tail that fanned out like a great cloud of ash and its tiny (but brilliant) brain was encased in a strangely conical velvet head like a Womble from Wimbledon. But this was no Uncle Bulgaria; any dog that ventured to attack it would have found itself admitted into the arc of the beast's paws and then two sets of claws - each like tailors' scissors - would scythe into the dog's back, take a purchase on the attacker's flesh and pull it apart. Dogs, it was said, simply opened up and spilled themselves like ripe fruits. By comparison, the jaguars looked rather plump and tranquil - or was it tranquilised? Lucy was already clamped within the arc of Carlos' paws by the time I got up to the curator's building. She was looking neither plump nor tranquil but bore an expression which said that, though she was very fond of Carlos, she wished he was a little less demonstrative. A slender, vigilant hand was already slapping away The Gossips that were nibbling their way across her thigh. "You like her, John?" Lucy was very pretty and I had to admit as much, in a way which I hoped didn't sound even fleetingly demonstrative. She offered up her lovely face to be kissed. She had cool, creamy skin, deep black tresses and deep black spectacle-frames that ought to have been unappealing but which made her seem inquisitive and paradoxically alluring. It was only when I found out what she did with her days that she plummeted in my league-table of tingles. I had felt slightly awkward, standing in front of Lucy and Carlos, she rather formal and zoological and he uncomfortably natural, and so I slid imperceptibly into the next room. It was Lucy's laboratory. I was horrified at what I found. Hundreds of dead, chemical eyes were staring at me from their bell jars and tanks, creatures swimming in poison, frozen at the moment that they had yielded up their lives to science. There was a sickening reek of formaldehyde and the walls prickled with butterflies and scurvy moths speared onto cemeteries of cork. Here were stuffed monsters too; monkeys leaking straw and stockings from their fatal wounds, the gangly aguara guasu - the maned wolf - now grotesquely deformed by taxidermy and a capybara that had been so plumped up with enthusiastic stuffing that it looked like a clawed cushion. I wiped a little scurf from one of Lucy's pickling jars. The eyeball of a whale, the size of a croquet ball but veiled in white, lacy tissues of meat. His brain in the next jar. Above them, armadillo foetuses, curled up like armoured roll-mops. In the remaining jars, were Lucy's prize specimens - the freaks in a collection of horrors; a calf foetus with two heads, each regarding the other with bleached, unbridled loathing; finally, a pickled puppy with a horn like a unicorn. I returned to the others. It was now impossible to regard pale Lucy without gagging on a tiny, phantom hiccough of formaldehyde. I unhooked Carlos from his specimen and towed him back out into the sunlight. I had surprised myself with the volatility of my perceptions. Perhaps I shouldn't have been all that surprised; pickling freaks all day puts even a pretty girl deep into the territory of the weird. It can't do anybody any good to direct their life's energies solely to the preservation of pain, deformity and death. Anyway, my perceptions were going to be nothing compared to those of Asuncion's children; their entire appreciation of the animal kingdom was based on an anteater, six dopey jaguars, the runaway dogs, a unicorn and half a dozen other marinated curiosities. Back to the Books page.