Love in Paraguay... or, Three Conversations in Five Minutes

This is what it’s really like:

My host family sat under their open-air patio, scattered about on different benches, waiting for the rain. There was a cluster of tobacco scraps around Ña Dora, who was spending the time making cigars. She sliced the long broad leaves with an old razor blade, then packed loose, crumpled leaves into the leaf. Finally, she rolled it into a tube about the length and width of a finger, and used a dab of homemade glue (paste made of flour and water) to hold it all together.

Claudia was passing around a pitcher of terere.

The bullshitting started. The day before, Ña Dora’s son-in-law had brought his sister T with him on a visit to Potrero Pucu. We had all sat around talking in the summer heat until the wee hours of the night. She was single. I was single. The jokes were going to come fast and thick today…

Almost as soon as I sat down, Claudia asked me, “Did T send you a text message?”

(She hadn’t.)

There was three minutes of scattered speculation as to whether or not I was being sneaky and T really did text me. This is one of the elements that has been challenging for me here – assigned sneakiness or mischievousness where none exists.

You get to site, and people say, “Santo is a picaflor (player), he’s got so many women!”

And because I didn’t want to come off as a player, I’d deny having a girlfriend, or say I had one in the 

states, or any other number of things. So then people started saying I didn’t like Paraguayan women, which is another piece of tricky gossip. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been walking a tightrope for two years.

But back to Claudia. She’s probably the most ribald woman in Potrero Pucu, a hair over 5-feet tall, and her belly pops out of too-tight tank tops. She always tries to shock me with her jokes –usually about how she’s going to convince one of my American friends to take her away from her husband and five children.

This is another one of those jarring culture clashes that really doesn’t go away. From where I come from, it would be really weird to make continuous jokes about leaving one’s family and one’s kids. But Paraguay has a “rich” culture built around stuff like that. In fact, it’s totally normal. And there are other things too, like the “Dia de Sombrero,” or “Day of the Hat.” So imagine: Paraguayan men have their legitimate girlfriend, right? Well some days of the week are dedicated to the “official” girlfriend. But “Dia de Sombrero” is for the non-serious girlfriend. I’d guess this probably has its roots from the Triple-Alliance War back in the 1860s. Paraguay found itself caught in a slug-fest between Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. It was a charnel-house – Paraguay’s opponents slaughtered 90% of its male population. Men became hot commodities afterward.

This has made dating and couples much more cynical, but alternately, it seems to me, also more honest. Monogamy isn’t really expected – almost every man in my site over 40 has had children with two or three different women. My host mom has had eight children, by three different men. My host dad had two children before they got together. Stateside, we frown on this sort of behavior.

But for the most part, all the children get taken care of. Family units exist more for survival than anything else – women guard the house, take care of it, and raise the children, while men do the heavy lifting in the fields raising subsistence crops.

So there are the elements like Hat Day, and also the “Jakare.” Jakare means “crocodile” in Guarani. But by custom, lonely Paraguayan women (or younger women who still have to live with their parents) left their windows open at night, a welcome to gentleman callers.

What was most infuriating when I got here was how ingrained it was. Women bought into it too, to a certain extent, even going so far as to make jokes about their husbands looking for other women when they (the men) were supposed to be working in the fields. I would tease my host dad when he make jokes that pissed me off. “Tesho, if you get a new girlfriend, you know Ña Dora is going to get a new boyfriend, right? You’re old and fat already!”

They always cracked up. I assumed that it never seemed like more than a parlor trick to them, until one day I overhead Ña Dora telling her neighbor about me and how I’d always defend her. Two years, and finally a shred of self-esteem. I’ll take it.

But let us return to my house, and the people who were ribbing me. Immediately after the joking about the text messages, Ña Dora scolded me.

“You let T sleep on the bench! That was really mean!”

(She just wants to see how badly she can make me blush. It works.)

“But you didn’t send her to my house! Had I but known, she could have stayed there!” I counter. “And you would have just slept, right?” Tesho is nodding sagely. “She’s a pretty woman, Santo.”

“Yup, we would have just slept!” I say.

Tesho shakes his head in disbelief.

For months and months I tried to avoid these kinds of conversations. But I finally embraced them. The only method I’ve found that’s even vaguely satisfying is trying to beat them at their own game. If Ña Dora and Tesho make me blush, or shake my head in surprise, they score a point. If I can make them yelp with surprised laughter, I score a point.

I continue, “Didn’t you see my window? It was open! (It wasn’t.) I was waiting to be jakare-d.” (Everyone cracks up at the idea of a woman playing the crocodile to me, especially since I’ve only dated Americans since I’ve been in Potrero Pucu.)

Then the conversation takes another turn for the weird.

“It’s not going to rain,” I said.

“Yes it will!,” my host brother, Elias, shouts. He’s six.

“No it won’t!”

Then his mother steps in. “Check your balls, Santo,” she said. This is Claudia, the most ribald Paraguayan I’ve met yet.

“If your balls fall, it’s going to rain. If they don’t, it won’t!”

I’m blushing again. Paraguay 2, Santo, 2.

“And look at you, what’s that?” Claudia is on a roll, pointing at a small zit on my cheek. “He’s really horny!”

“I am though,” I shoot back, trying to score a point of my own and catch them off guard.

But Claudia’s not about to be thrown off.

“Victorina (her sister who lives in Asuncion) should take him to a quilombo (brothel) in Asuncion,” she tells Ña Dora, who is slowly dissolving into a quivering ball of mirth.

Tesho won’t stop giggling either.

And finally, the rain starts to fall. Sweet relief, the air cool and wet after six weeks of drought.

Claudia can’t resist one more shot.

“Haven’t your balls dropped, Santo? Check! That’s why it’s raining!”

Paraguay 4, Santo, 2. I’ll give it another shot tomorrow.