THROUGH SOUTHERN ECUADOR
As susceptible Don Giovanni falls under the succeeding spell of every
pretty face, each blotting out those that went before, so the traveler
down the backbone of South America frequently concludes that he has
found at last the climate copied from the Garden of Eden. Such a spot is
Cuenca, dimming by comparison its latest rival, Quito, and I find in my
notes of the exuberant first day there the assertion: “Of all the earth,
as far as I know it, Cuenca has the most perfect climate.” Always cool
enough to be mildly invigorating to mind and body, yet never cold, it is
unexcelled as a place for dreamy loafing. The sunshine vastly exceeds
the shadow, and its situation is peerless—not in the scenery of its
surrounding mountains, which are distant and low, but in the rich
fertility of this great vale of Paucarbamba (“Flowery Plain”), as the
Incas called it. Cuenca has no fitting excuse for not being one of the
richest agricultural cities on earth. Yet its only “hotels” are dirty
little Indian eating-houses without sleeping accommodations, and the
traveler must fall back on the prehistoric system of hunting up a
friend’s friend. For once this roundabout method brought handsome
results; at the home of the Montesinos brothers I found my most
home-like accommodations south of Quito, in a highly cultured family
with no scent of the public hostelry about it. My front door opened on a
vista across the patio and the long market plaza, usually shimmering
with Indians and clashing colors, to the blue hills and a strip of
Dresden-china sky to the west; and it is only fair to the Andes to
mention that this extraordinary family had erected in a back patio a
well-appointed lavatory, stoutly padlocked against the Indians of the
household.
The Montesinos brothers, sons of a former governor of the Province of
Azuay, were lawyers, as well as professors in Cuenca’s colegio, leaders
in the intellectual life of the city, excellent examples of the best
grade of “interandino.” One was a teacher of French and English, which
did not seriously mean that he could speak either of those tongues. In
1899 this bookish, somewhat effeminate man had started a revolution
against the Alfaro government in the person of General Franco, a
bloodthirsty half-negro from Esmeraldas, who had been made governor of
Azuay. It proved unsuccessful, and the instigator had been forced to fly
to the jungled Oriente and live for months among the head-hunting
Jívaros Indians. I had hesitated to believe my own convictions on
certain conditions in Ecuador, but this frank and outspoken native
outdid anything I might have said. His attitude was in striking contrast
to that belligerent “pride” of Latin-American governments and their led
mobs and self-seeking politicians. To him the thrice-beloved
“patriotism” of his hot-tempered fellows was rubbish. What he wanted was
an efficient government and a chance to live a free life, whether he
remained a subject of the particular strip of territory known as
Ecuador, or of the gigantic “Yanqui-land” so many seemed to fancy
imminent. He asserted that the police of Cuenca were its worst
criminals; all thieves and ruffians who could not be openly convicted
were sentenced to serve as policemen. Except in the collecting of taxes
and as a place of reward for its henchmen, the central government leaves
Cuenca and the south of Ecuador virtually abandoned, and that tendency,
so general in Latin-American countries, for the more distant parts to
break away and form a free, or at least autonomous state is here marked.
The region labors under a thousand petty annoyances. For instance, Quito
has a parcel-post service with the outside world, but Cuenca has none,
nor any money-order system, and about one piece of mail in three ever
reaches an addressee in the capital of the Azuay. A package mailed from
abroad to a cuencano lies in Guayaquil until the addressee appears in
person, or appoints a lawyer, to lay claim to it, to pay the fees and
grease the wheels of the legal and illegal formalities necessary to set
it on its way to its destination.
To our modern notions Cuenca is not much of a city; yet here in the
almost untracked wilderness it seemed enormous. So rarely do strangers
visit it that, large as it is and in spite of my entirely conventional
appearance, I could barely pause in the street without all work in the
vicinity ceasing and a crowd gathering about me. Hungry to behold a new
face as the crew of a windjammer that has gazed only upon themselves
during long months at sea, their attitude seemed to say, “We can work
to-morrow, but there is no certainty that we can have the pleasure of
looking at a stranger.” It is hard for Americans, with their wide
outlook and accustomed to the complicated existence of our large cities,
to realize the narrowness of life in these placid old adobe towns hidden
away in the Andes. Virtually cut off from the outside world, the
cuencanos are a peculiarly bookish people. “We do not know,” said
Montesinos, “that there are places on the globe where men live in
freedom and decency, except from books.” Yet in spite of being rather
uncertain of their dignity, like all isolated peoples, the educated
classes were as well-meaning, as _simpáticos_, as any I met in
Latin-America. Two things only were necessary to join the upper caste,—a
white collar and visiting-cards. The former above a patched
“hand-me-down” was more effective than a new $100 suit worn with a
flannel shirt; and the man who has his name printed on bits of
cardboard, to exchange with regal courtesy and profound bows with every
upper-class acquaintance, is instantly accepted as of gente decente
origin. Indeed, visiting cards should be as fixed a part of every Andean
traveler’s equipment as heavy boots.
One could not but pity these ineffectually ambitious mortals, kept down
by leaden environment and isolation. He who does not deal in “panama”
hats has hardly an opening in Cuenca, except to study medicine, law, or
theology in the local colegio; hence there is a plethora of “doctors”
who can only wear their titles and live the life of enforced bookworms,
forbidden by the rigid rules of caste even the privilege of turning
their hands to some useful occupation. As in Bogotá, the very isolation
and lack of opportunity has driven many to their studies, and Cuenca
numbers many writers among her “sons,” producers chiefly of that
languid, half-melancholy, pretty poetry, full of the “fine writing” the
divorce from life and unlimited leisure to polish their gems of thought
gives. In all Cuenca there is only one mean little bookshop, selling
religious tracts and translations of American and English “penny
dreadfuls.” The _intelectuales_ can only, as it were, feed upon each
other and form mutual admiration societies, where admiration soon palls
from too constant familiarity and lack of new blood. Few, even of the
“best families,” have ever been out of the _cuenca_, or basin, in which
the city lies, and its isolation has given the place something of the
atmosphere the traveler is always seeking—commonly in vain—of a world
wholly removed from outside influence.
Their ineffective eagerness to learn was pathetic. The most nearly
educated young men of the town had rented a second-story hall near the
main plaza and decorated its façade with huge letters announcing it the
“English Language Club.” Here the score or so of more or less
English-speaking residents of the male sex gathered together several
evenings a week.
[Illustration:
The “English Language Club” of Cuenca in full session]
[Illustration:
An hacienda-house of southern Ecuador, backed by its grove of
eucalyptus-trees. The owner or the _mayordomo_ occupies the
two-story structure, while the rest of the household string out in
regular caste gradations to the kitchen and outhouses]
For years, however, there had not been a genuine English-speaking person
living permanently anywhere near Cuenca. In their eagerness to capture
an authority the club drafted me at once, and whole delegations were
always ready to go about and show me the town and vicinity—provided it
was a not too distant vicinity, for they had as great a dread as the
quiteño of getting far from the central plaza. I was received kindly and
eagerly by the educated men anywhere, so long as it did not involve my
intrusion on the Moorish seclusion of their family life, and became a
sort of honored guest of the town, even if I was not presented with the
key to it, which by comparison with the door-keys would have been a
burden indeed. They were not “spenders”; money comes slowly and with too
great a strain in these parts, but they were ever on the lookout to do
me little kindnesses.
Barely was I settled, therefore, when I was hurried off to an evening at
the “English Language Club,” convoked in special session. For an hour I
sat like the chief buffoon in a comic-opera ensemble in the center of a
horseshoe circle that included a score of doctors—Cuenca swarms with
doctors, home-made and book-trained—the grandsons of presidents, sons of
ministers to Washington and the court of St. James, while the whole
gathering, like self-conscious school-boys, got off a sentence or two in
more or less English in regular rotation around the circle, until some
shining genius suggested that, as they had so illustrious a guest with
them, it was merely a “social evening” and not a regular meeting; hence
the rule demanding that only English be spoken was not in force. With a
veritable explosion of relief the entire club burst into Spanish, and
Alfonzo was himself again.
Later experience proved that the rule was largely a dead-letter even at
regular meetings, and only to be enforced when the arrival of an
illustrious stranger put the club on parade. The walls were hung with
several mottoes in English, and they had gathered together some belated
American magazines and a billiard table. There the members gathered
several evenings a week to play “pocar,” and to practice very
intermittently such English as they had learned from the printed page,
forming their sentences and—what was worse—their pronunciation from the
rules books had to offer, and mixing in with it a bit of a similar brand
of French, as if any foreign language answered more or less the purposes
of the club. The rules forbade the use within the club-room of any
tongue than our own, but after the first few set greetings of “goot
nig-ht, how do yô do?” the gathering settled down to an uproar of
Castilian, broken only by the few phrases of Cuenca-English which custom
had stereotyped. The majority came to play “pocar,” not so much because
of the opportunities that pastime offered for one of the
Latin-American’s chief failings—for pockets were seldom bulging—but
because it smacked of the United States, the stepmother of the “English
Language Club” of Cuenca. The son of a former Ecuadorian minister to
Washington, who had spent a year or two in “Yanqui-land,” shared with
“el Señor Doctor Montesinos, profesor de inglés en nuestro colegio,” the
position of final authority on the tongue, except on those rare
occasions when a traveler brought the real, dyed-in-the-wool article
with him. Even the authorities were not faultless. They said “díssiples”
for pupils, used habitually the expression “I can to go,” and clung
tenaciously to similar choice bits of their own convictions, and, what
was worse, drilled them into their fellow-members with that dogmatism
strongest in those who are wrong. But the minister’s son had made the
most of his American residence in learning “pocar” so thoroughly that he
was as real an authority on that art as he fancied himself in English.
Unfortunately, the combined efforts of the club had not unearthed among
all the dog-eared classics that had drifted together in generations of
Cuenca’s flirting with English the mention in print of that fascinating
pastime. Whence they had been forced to adopt their own spelling and
home-made phrases. On the wall appeared a warning placard, “Those which
play pocar are speaking English,” and each game was sprinkled with a
rapid-fire of Spanish, punctuated by fixed phrases of near-English. Thus
the expressions “You bid,” or “You open,” had been concocted by the
simple means of literal translation from the Castilian used in similar
pastimes, and became “You speak.” Amid the crack of billiard-balls and
the rattling of home-made chips the conversation ran on much as follows:
“Cordero, you are serveeng. Y hombre, ya le dije que la muchacha no
. . .”
“Fife cards; all ze workeengs, Carlos.”
“Lindísima, hombre, pero su mamá. . . . Enriquito, you speak.”
“No, señor, equivocado, _I_ am speakeeng.”
“Caramba! Es verdad. Eet ees true. And for how much are you speakeeng?”
“No, et ees meestake. Ze doctor is speakeeng, because he is sitteeng by
ze side of Juancito, which ees serveeng ze cards,”—and with deep
solemnity the doctor proceeded to “speak” by throwing two Cuenca-made
chips on the table, the game rattling on until Muñoz broke in upon an
oratorical description of the latest event of the _vida social_ of
Cuenca with a:
“And I am nameeng you now, Carlitos; with ze house full of ze whole
kettle,” and throwing down a “full house,” he scraped the entire pile of
chips to his corner of the table.
There were two dentists in Cuenca at the time of my visit. One of those
present was not there in person, because he had gone away on a week’s
journey two months before; the other had not yet arrived, though he
appeared nightly at the “English Language Club,” because his instruments
of torture and gold-plated diploma were still somewhere on the road from
Guayaquil. Had they both been unqualifiedly present in the flesh, the
wise man would have continued to endure any degree of toothache rather
than submit to their amateurish mercies. The chief raison d’être of the
city is its commerce in “panama” hats, though virtually none are made
there. The agent sent to Azogues or other neighboring towns pencils in
some cabalistic code on the inside of the hat the price paid the
weaver—or as near that price as his conscience makes necessary—and
delivers it to his employer. In the city are many “factories of
sombreros,” from behind the downcast mud fronts of which sounds all day
long the pounding of wooden mallets, and from which exudes the constant
smell of sulphur. At the establishment of a club-member we posed for a
local photographer in acres of hats, in various stages of the finishing
process, which ranged from the huge Gualaquiza products from the Jívaros
country on the east, to those of so fine a weave as to be inferior only
to the famous _jipijapa_ of Manabí.
It is just over the range from Cuenca that are to be found the Jívaros,
the widely renowned head-hunters of the upper Amazon. Montesinos had
lived long months among them at the time of his mishap, and knew their
ways well. A proud, untamed race engaged in almost constant warfare with
the neighboring tribes, they consider the white man an equal, and treat
him as a friend so long as he does not transgress their strict tribal
laws. The Andean Indian, with his slinking air and his heavy clothing,
they look down upon as a weakling and a very inferior being. Having
despatched an enemy, the Jívaros cut off the head well down on the
shoulders, extract the skull by a vertical cut at the back, sew up this
and the lips, and, by the insertion of hot stones and a process only
imperfectly understood by any other than the tribe itself, reduce the
head to the size of an orange, with the original features easily
recognizable. In this state it is said to be of little use to its
rightful owner, even if recovered. The desiccated head must, according
to tribal laws, be kept until after the yearly ceremony to appease the
spirit of the dead man, after which it is hung up as a trophy over the
entrance to the successful hunter’s house, or, what is far more usual of
late years, traded to some passing white man for a rifle or a supply of
cartridges. One traveler I met had been so eager to obtain one of the
dried heads that he offered a Jívaro chief two rifles. The chief replied
sadly that, though he would do anything possible to get a rifle,
unfortunately it happened that the tribe did not have a single dried
head on hand. “But,” he cried a moment later, his countenance
brightening visibly, “could you wait a month or so?”
A few years ago a tall, lanky German arrived in Cuenca and went down
among the Jívaros to study their customs, and especially to find out
exactly how they shrink heads. Month after month passed without a word
from him, but cuencanos knew the Teuton way of pursuing an investigation
step by step in all its details and ramifications, and thought nothing
of the prolonged absence. Then one day, more than a year later, there
was offered for sale in the market of Cuenca a splendid specimen of
shrunken head, with long, blond hair and beard and a scholarly cast of
countenance. The investigation had been thorough; but the outside world
still remains in darkness on the art of shrinking heads among the
Jívaros.
To the stranger, perhaps the feature of Cuenca that will remain longest
in his memory is her street lights; certainly, if it happens to be his
lot to have to find his way home on a black night after a sad,
candle-lighted “comedy” in the local theater—the school-room of the
colegio. The laws of Cuenca require that every resident in the principal
streets set up a candle before his house. But as the two-cent _velas_
which are satisfactory to the law are short and not particularly
inflammable, and the wind is given to blowing its hardest during the
first hour after dusk, the city changes long before eight from long,
faintly-guessed lanes between unseen house-walls to a medieval inky
blackness. The inhabitant who stirs abroad carries a square glass box
containing a flickering candle, or is accompanied by a “link-boy,” in
true medieval fashion. The stranger who, being no smoker, chances not
even to have matches with him, feels his way homeward for an uncertain
number of blocks by counting them with his fingers, at last discovering
the plaza on which he lives by hugging the corner of it. Shivering with
uncertainty as to whether his lodging is the third or the fourth door
from the butchershop with the protruding hook, here and there stumbling
over a piece of sidewalk or into a puddle, he finally coaxes his
gigantic key to fit its lock with something far more potent than
satisfaction.
Thus life runs its placid course in this far-off city of the Andes.
Those who come there after the railway from Huigra reaches Cuenca, if
long-pondered plans some day mature, will no doubt find it different,
more blasé and less likable, no longer one of the rewards of toiling
over the world’s byways. Even electric lights are threatened, and before
them will flee one of its most nearly unique characteristics.
The hope of securing an ass to stagger out of Cuenca under my
possessions had melted day by day during my week there. In what I had
been assured was the best donkey-market in Ecuador, those animals proved
both scarce and high in price. Toward the end of my stay the baggage I
had sent from Huigra had arrived, both developing tank and tray broken,
in spite of the vociferous promises of the _fletero_, though still
serviceable with elaborate manipulation. It was chiefly picture-taking
that forced me to turn packhorse; had I been able to abandon everything
connected with photography, I might have pranced along like a school-boy
under his knowledge. A pack of nearly fifty pounds remained, in spite of
a rigid reduction and a desperate throwing away which included even my
medicine case, bequeathed to Montesinos, for ever since crossing the Rio
Grande into Mexico seventeen months before I had been burdened with it,
without a single excuse to swallow one of its myriad pills. If only
Edison would take a day off to invent a baggage on legs that would trot,
dog-fashion, after its owner—just a modest little baggage of, say, fifty
pounds—it would revolutionize life.
Distinguished visitors to the cities of the Andes are, in all accounts
extant, met upon their arrival and sent on their way by a cavalcade of
horsemen including all the local celebrities. For the first time in my
Latin-American journey I was accompanied by a guard of honor as I
plodded heavily out of Cuenca on March tenth; that is, Montesinos, the
master of “English,” strolled with me across the ancient cobbled bridge
over the Matadero and a mile or more beyond, until he met the sun coming
up from the jungled montaña of the Jívaros and turned back with the
market-bound Indians to his scholastic duties. The broad highway was dry
and hard as a floor. Prepared in my heavy boots for the usual Andean
trail, I could have walked it in dancing-pumps. The great cuenca shrunk
to an ever-narrower, fertile valley, stretching southward along a little
stream called the Tarqui. A score of Indians were plowing a single field
with ox-drawn plows fashioned from forest trees. So scant is his
individual initiative that the Andean husbandman works well only in
company with his fellows, and the experienced mayordomo conducts his
farming in a succession of “bees” in which all the employees join
efforts, as in the days of the Inca.
The Andes grow higher and more mountainous to the south. Beyond the
hacienda and the hamlet of Cumbe next morning, the valley closed in and
forced the highway to scale, like an escaping prisoner his walls, the
great Andean “Knot” of Portete. Bit by bit it shrunk to a narrow road,
then to a rocky trail, like a man about to begin some mighty task, with
no longer time to consider his personal appearance, reducing himself to
the bare essentials. Through clumps of blackberries and frost-bitten
corn it climbed, then shook off even these, and split into faint,
diverging paths across another of those lofty, wind-swept, solitary
páramos of the Andes, broken here and there, only scantily covered with
the dreary dead-brown _ichu_ bunch-grass of the highlands, and low,
bushy _achupallas_.
It would have been more to the point if the sympathy the old woman of
the hacienda behind had taken the form of _fiambre_, a roadster’s lunch,
with which to follow up the coffee and diaphanous roll of an Ecuadorian
_desayuno_. By ten I was starving. By eleven I had eaten even the rose I
wore in a button-hole; during the next few hours I found three
blackberries, hard and green, and shook dice with sudden death by eating
a handful of a wholly unknown and even more tasteless páramo berry. The
one Indian I met during the afternoon misinformed me, before he sped on
out of reach, that Nabón was a bare two leagues beyond; and all the rest
of the day my imagination persisted in heaping up mighty banquets that
toppled over and faded away as I prepared to fall upon them.
Suddenly the páramo ended as if it had been hacked off with a dull
gigantic machete, and the way-worn, haggard trail stumbled blindly down
into a labyrinthian chaos of jagged white rocks, like an arctic sea in
upheaval, an earthquake section as split and smashed and broken as if
the world had come into collision at this point with another planet or a
celestial lamp-post. When at last I sighted Nabón, long after I had
entered it a score of times in imagination, it was still a mere speck on
a broken edge of the earth’s crust which I reached by dusk only by dint
of a herculean struggle.
It was a cornfield town of thatched mud huts, of universally Indian
blood. The alcalde was not at home, but the priest’s word was law, and I
was soon dropping my bundle from my grateful shoulders in the “best
room” of an Indian dwelling. My unwilling host removed the bedclothes
and piled them on the uneven earth floor in an adjoining room, for
himself, wife and child, and left me the wooden-floored bedstead. The
mud walls were embellished not merely with the gaudy colored chromos of
various “Virgins,” but with scores of the advertising pages of American
magazines, chiefly pictorial, for the family could not even read its own
tongue. I did not succeed in discovering how these exotic reminders of
home had found their way to this unknown village of the Andes. The
Indian and his wife kept me awake half the night with their alternating
prayers and responses before a candle-lighted lithograph in the
adjoining room, each prayer beginning, “Blessed Santa María, give us
this; Blessed Santa María, give us that.” One would have thought María
ran a department store.
It is only eighteen miles from Nabón to Oña, but no mere words can give
any suggestion of the labyrinthian toil that lies between them. Down in
the bottom of the mightiest chasm of this tortured section of the earth
sits an isolated peak shaped like an angular haycock. From the lowest
point of the day’s tramp I could not see its summit; when I looked back
hours later upon the immense stretch of gashed and tumbled world behind
me, the peak had sunk to a mere dot on the landscape. Yet in a way it
was an ideal tramp. A sun-flooded day in the exhilarating mountain air
passed in absolute silence without even the sight of a fellow mortal,
except very rarely a lone shepherd so far away on a bare brown
mountainside as to be merely a tiny detail of the scenery. There was one
drawback, also; for the spider-leg trails split and spread at random
across the world above at every opportunity, and for several hours at a
time I was not at all certain I was going to Peru.
At length I rounded a lofty spur, and another great valley opened out
before me. An hour later I prepared to present my note to the cura of
Oña. His two housekeepers, attractive chola girls, received me with the
customary coldness of their class toward strangers, and the information
that the padre “had gone to the mountain.” “Ya no más de venir—he should
be back at any moment”—murmured one of them; which might mean, of
course, that he would be back in an hour or a week. There was no one
else in this shelf-like hillside of mud huts around a dead plaza
surrounded by cornfields who would be likely to house me, and I could
only wait in hungry patience. Night was falling like a quick curtain at
the end of a dismal act, when one of the stupid damsels admitted
“probably he will not be back to-night,” but that they would serve “a
little something to eat,” if I could wait awhile. I was already
accustomed to that occupation. On a worktable of the earth-floored and
walled corredor, among the parrots that kept calling the cholas by name,
a chained monkey of homicidal tendencies, and other cural odds and ends,
a meal of several courses was at length set before me as rapidly as the
single tin plate could be washed and refilled. Oña does not eat bread,
but so large a helping of _mote_ was served that I succeeded in filling
a coat pocket with it, well knowing that no other provisions would be
forthcoming for the morrow’s uninhabited trail. As a food, this mess of
boiled kernels of ripe corn, chief sustenance of the Andean Indian on
his travels, is like those medicines that are worse than the ailment
they are designed to cure. Then there was a plate of black beans, a corn
tamale, and a tasteless preserved fruit, all stone-cold, but red-hot
with the _ají_, or green peppers, with which all food in the Andes is
enlivened.
Hours later a group of horsemen rode up out of the night and halted
before the casa cural. I rose from a cramped doze on a corredor bench to
find the priest dismounting. A brawny man of massive frame, more than
six feet tall, with well-cut features and a powerful Roman nose, dressed
in a black robe reaching to his spurs, and a huge “panama” hat of
exceedingly fine weave—a present, no doubt, from some fond member of his
flock among the surrounding hills—he towered far above his companions. A
cigarette smouldered between his lips, a week’s growth of dense black
beard half-covered a face that bore testimony to long and deep
experience in worldly matters, and his voice boomed like Quito’s largest
church-bell. Yet his manner was that syrupy courtesy, accompanied by a
whining speech, peculiar to the region. He fawned upon all who
approached him, addressing them with maudlin words of endearment,—“Ah,
compadrecito!” “Oh, my dearest of friends!” “Oh, Josecito cholito,
hijito mío!”—with a long-drawn, rising and falling inflection that made
his speech seem even more false and insincere than it was in reality. Me
he greeted in the same tone, like a long-lost “amiguito,” and assured me
the casa cural was henceforth my personal property, expressing his
deepest regret that he had just sent to Cuenca, where he was about to be
transferred, his two phonographs and “diez mil pesos” ($5000 worth) of
other toys. It was a typical cural residence of the Andes. The rough
adobe walls of his cluttered study, with mud benches in the form of
divans around them, were almost completely covered with large
lithographs advertising various brands of whiskey and cigarettes, more
than half of them showing nude female figures. Under his table was
spread out to dry a six-foot square patch of tobacco, and at frequent
intervals the padre reached under it for the “makings” of a cigarette,
without taking his eyes off his visitors nor ceasing the flow of his
cadenced endearments.
[Illustration:
Plowing for wheat or corn on the hacienda of Cumbe. The Indians work
best in “bees,” as in the time of the Incas. The plows are mere
crooked sticks without a vestige of iron, the yokes are fastened in
front of the horns with rawhide thongs]
Two men, chiefly of Indian blood, soon joined us, one the jefe político,
and the other what might be called in English chairman of the town
council. The former carried a guitar, the latter a quart bottle of
aguardiente, and both a stimulated gaiety even greater than that of the
priest. During an affectionate three hours the trio toasted each other
alternately in large glasses of this double-voltage concoction, after
suffering two or three rounds of which I was forced to allege a sore
throat. The moving spirit of the feast was the priest, whose powerful
frame carried his liquor well, and the evening raged on amid a riot of
chatter and the savage thrumming of the guitar, little more than the
flushed faces visible in the dense-clouded atmosphere of cigarette smoke
within the tightly closed room. The cura spoke French readily, having
been in earlier years an inmate of the French monastery of Riobamba, and
affected it with me all the evening. The jefe político was childishly
eager to hear us speak that strange tongue; the town councilor roared
with anger as often as either of us uttered a word of it, charging that
we were abusing him under cover of “that cursed Castilian of the
gringos.” The cura maliciously added fuel to his wrath, unostentatiously
keeping the bottle moving meanwhile, sending a boy to replenish it as
often as it was emptied. The enraged councilor ended at last by
staggering out into the night and across the plaza, shouting drunkenly
that he was going for a gun or a machete. The other two followed him,
and for some time a maudlin bellowing, intermingled with the wheedling
of a velvety voice of rising and falling cadence, awoke the echoes of
the night, gradually subsiding until at length silence fell. The priest
at last came slowly back without a suggestion of intoxication, which he
seemed to lay aside as he might his long black robe, reached under the
table, rolled a cigarette, and explained apologetically that, as his
recent companions were the chief civil authorities, he must keep on good
terms with them “whatever his own tastes and desires.” Then he implored
me to spend the following day in Oña, promising that we should visit on
muleback the many historical spots in the vicinity, and launching into a
learned dissertation on the history of the region. Oña, he asserted, was
the oldest town in Southern Ecuador, and the treaty of peace had been
signed by Sucre in this very house after the battle of Tarqui. In spite
of the impression that the invitation was mere surface courtesy, I
finally promised to remain. He threw his arms about me in an
affectionate _abrazo_, showering upon me endearing terms, all ending in
the Spanish diminutive _ito_, and called upon the housekeepers to spread
a mattress for me on a mud divan in the study. Then the cura, who at
least had the virtue of living his life frankly, retired with the two
comely cholas to an adjoining room in which, it is true, there were two
beds, and silence settled down over the Andes.
In the morning I turned over for another nap. An hour later the priest
and his unofficial family marched in upon me, and it was some time
before I could get sufficient privacy and liquid mud to shave and dress.
From that hour until night I had little more than silent suffrance from
the cura and his household, and heard not a reference to those “many
points of historical importance” he had painted in such enticing terms
in his ardent condition of the night before. Tomás á Kempis says: “A sad
morning often follows a merry evening,” or words to that effect, but the
cura of Oña had evidently overlooked that particular quotation. An
almost constant stream of Indians and half-Indians came to inquire in
soft cadenced voices for “tayta curita,” who sat in his fly-swarming den
smoking countless cigarettes and whining unlimited endearments and
blessings on all comers, but resolutely squelching all applications for
coin of the realm or the material things of this world, and reaching at
frequent intervals for the replenished quart bottle. About eleven the
two of us, and a “carpenter” who had been pottering about the house all
the morning fitting together two boards that were destined never to fit,
sat down in a corner of the wide back corredor of the casa cural to a
substantial dinner at which cat, dog, parrot, and monkey helped
themselves to every dish as freely as we. The meal was adorned with a
jar of _pulque_, a drink which the cura had taught his cholas to make
after reading of it in an account of Mexico. The rest of the day drowsed
slothfully away amid the screaming of parrots, the barking of dogs, the
shrieks of the monkey rattling his chain in all but successful attempts
to rend and tear some unwary visitor, and a swarming of flies that
sounded like a distant waterfall,—a typical parish-priest life of rural
Ecuador, punctuated by the occasional chanting of the velvety, singsong
voice in the mud church next door, as my host hurried through a mass for
some departed soul. Toward sunset the household was augmented by a third
plump and youthful chola who had been home on a visit to her parental
mud hut among the hills. It seemed strange that the casa cural was so
ill-kept and slatternly with so generous a supply of housekeepers.
At the summit beyond the chaotic chasm into which the world falls away
below Oña, the nature of the country changed. From an endless vista of
barren and often soilless rocks, the entire landscape was transformed to
a heavily wooded region of hardy undergrowth, somewhat like small, bushy
oaks, at times almost approaching a forest, a shaggy world rolling away
as far as the eye could follow in every direction. Here and there was a
larger bush completely covered with pink blossoms. Then the
half-forested mountain-top took gradually to rocking, like a ship
approaching a tempestuous sea, until all at once it spilled itself, like
the cargo of an overturned freighter, into another enormous hole in the
earth, hazy with the very depths of it. The trail pitched over the edge
with the rest, like a bit of flotsam from a wreck, helplessly at the
mercy of the waves. Thousands of little green farms, chiefly of corn,
with an Indian hut set in a corner of each, hung at sharp angles about
the enclosing walls of the valley. I had reached the famous Vale of
Zaraguro, the Land of Corn,—_zara_ is Quichua for maize—to climb at last
into the scattered grass-grown village itself.
Ensconced in the great _hoyo_ of Jubones, dividing the Azuay from the
province of Loja, Zaraguro is a little world of its own. The great
majority of its population is Indian, but a new type of Indian, of
darker skin and more independent manner than those to the north, still
humble to the gente decente when facing them singly, but verging on
insolence when gathered in groups with chicha at hand. Here each owns a
little patch of land and refuses serfdom. His dress is somber, in marked
contrast to the gaudy colors of his quiteño cousin. In place of the
loose white panties, he clothes his legs to the knee with a
close-fitting coffee-hued woolen garment, and covers all the rest of the
body with a poncho of the same color. He wears an immensely thick,
almost white, felt hat of box-shaped crown, the brim drooping about his
face, and his long, jet-black hair, instead of being confined in a
tape-wound braid, is commonly flying about his head and shoulders. He
buys nothing from the outside world—except masses and indulgences—shears
his own sheep, the wool of which, usually black, his women spin and
weave into the heavy cloth that provides the somber garments of both
sexes. Besides supplying its own wants, the valley of Zaraguro exports
by way of Puerto Bolívar a bit of coarse cascarilla bark, basis of
quinine, at about five cents a pound.
Zaraguro assured me that the road to Loja was “todo plano”; but level
has strange meanings to a people accustomed from birth to the steepest
of mountains. One of the best engineered highways in Ecuador looped ever
higher to the “realms of eternal silence” of the Acayana-Guagra-uma
“Knot,” but from the dense-forested summit, where I had looked forward
to the corresponding pleasure of looping as leisurely down the opposite
flank, an atrocious trail stumbled headlong downward to the narrow
valley of a small river. From the hamlet of San Lucas a long day,
pouring incessantly with rain, followed the stream, the trail mounting
and descending rocky headlands with the monotonous regularity of a flat
car-wheel. Even where the landscape opened out again at last, the plain
was calf-deep in mud, and it was only by dint of a constant struggle
that I dragged myself, mud-caked and drenched, on the second evening
into the southernmost city of Ecuador.
Loja, 380 miles from Quito and capital of the province least in touch
with the central government, lies exactly on the fourth parallel south,
in the delta of the little Zamora and Malacatos rivers, insignificant
bits of the Amazon system. It is a low, flat, rather featureless town,
surrounded by a fertile, fruit-producing soil, and though 7000 feet
above sea-level, of a humid, semi-tropical climate that is kindly even
to bananas. Birds, among them one much like the robin, make the place
reminiscent of American summers. There are only rolling hills near at
hand, though not far off is that “labyrinth of mountains” of Prescott’s
fancy, blue-black now with the rainy season, high up among which,
according to local assertion, are still to be found remnants of the
great military highway of the Incas. Lojanos seemed a dull, torpid
people, laborious of mind, and the town has little of the picturesque,
even in costume. The pure Castilian type is well represented, but Indian
blood, chiefly in the mestizo form, is still supreme, though by no means
so general as to the north, and the population includes a few negroes
and more _zambos_,—mixtures of Indian and African blood. More than
eighty lawyers hover in their mud dens, ready to pick the bones of the
8000 inhabitants, largely poverty-stricken illiterates. There is some
weaving of “panama” hats, and in an attempt to stimulate that industry
“profesores” of the art have been imported from the Azuay to teach it,
particularly in the orphan asylums. But it remains at best a dilettante
occupation, foreign to the soil. The chief industry of the region round
about is the raising of mules and cattle that are shipped chiefly to
Peru. Lima subsists largely on Loja meat, which is, no doubt, the reason
she gets virtually none herself, even when it is not some Catholic day
sacred to starvation. Zaruma and Portovelo, two muleback days to the
west, boast the chief American mines of Ecuador, but gringos are seldom
seen in her streets.
In one matter the town is in advance of more populous Cuenca,—it has
electric lights. As long ago as 1897 Loja brought in, by way of Peru,
the first dynamo known to Ecuador, a sign of “progreso” of which her
inhabitants never tire of boasting. Scattered in sixteen-candle-power
bulbs here and there along the streets, the system did not reach as high
as the littered lumber-room in which I spent the nights on a platform on
legs, where the customary candle winked weakly through the humid
darkness. I was overjoyed, however, to come upon a placard announcing
that the municipal library was open to the public even at night! As it
promised to open first at one of the afternoon, I was not surprised to
find it still locked when I arrived at two. I waited a half hour,
peering greedily through the bars of the reja at the long shelves of
books and maps. Then I began inquiries. The adjoining shopkeeper
expressed unbounded surprise that there were persons so ignorant as not
to know “the government is so poor it cannot pay the librarian any
more,” and that the institution had been closed for months.
Loja was once the center of the commerce in _cascarilla_, the bark of a
tree not unlike the cherry in appearance, that abounds in the ravines of
the mountains to the eastward of the city. Nearly three centuries ago a
missionary to the region found the Indians grinding the bitter bark in
their stone mortars and swallowing it as a specific against intermittent
fevers, as they do to this day. When the wife of the Conde de Chinchón,
viceroy of Peru, lay ill of a fever in Lima, the corregidor of Loja sent
to her physician a parcel of the powdered bark. Upon her return to
Europe the condesa carried a quantity of the magic powder with her,
whence it was for a long time known as _chinchona_. Meanwhile Jesuit
missionaries of Brazil had sent parcels of it to Rome, whence it was
distributed among the brotherhood, nothing loathe to add to their
reputation for miraculous powers and to the income from their
drug-stores, and the name “Jesuits’ bark” became widespread. The tree,
however, has always been known to the Indians by the Quichua name of
“quinaquina,” and in time the refined product took on its modern name of
quinine. The tree in its original habitat has been ruthlessly treated,
being often felled merely to avoid the labor of barking it standing, and
to-day, with large _chinchona_ plantations in India, southern Ecuador
has but a fraction of the income it might have from one of its most
valuable indigenous products. It is typical of Latin-American conditions
that a capsule—or more commonly an _oblea_, like two saucers stuck
together—of quinine, reimported from Europe and paying heavy custom
duties, costs four times as much in the boticas of Loja as in the United
States.
In one of the quaint two-story houses with an air of decayed gentility,
facing the main plaza and grazing ground of Loja, lives Augustin
Carrión, inventor of the “celífono,” by means of which a piano can be
played by electricity and given the soft, long-drawn notes of an organ.
He is the chief “sight” of the region, yet held in a certain
ill-concealed disdain by the mass of his fellow-townsmen, even while
they are basking in the sunshine of his fame; a striking example of
those rare mortals who struggle to raise themselves above the low level
of their deadening environment in these buried cities far from the
moving modern world.
I found him in his rambling parlor, of undusted efforts at grandeur, its
walls decorated with large maps of Paris and New York, both of which he
had once visited in an effort to patent and place his invention,
interspersed with the customary inartistic family portraits draped with
aged mourning crêpe. A member of one of Loja’s chief families, of pure
Spanish blood, speaking a cultured Castilian with the diction of a man
of books, he was in appearance a ludicrous mixture of the typical
inventor of the comic supplements and of the Latin-American stickler for
formal dress. Scraggly gray whiskers pursued themselves about his
unimpressive face; a hair-cut months overdue emphasized his narrow
shoulders and flat chest. His hands, thin almost to transparency,
suggested something weak and harmless in need of protection. His once
stiff white shirt was innocent of buttons, and with his energetic, or,
more exactly, nervous movements, frequently opened to disclose a flaccid
skin and a Catholic charm hanging low about his neck. A collar, buttoned
only at one end, was adorned with a cravat that was not a cravat, but
only a strip of black ribbon that floated here and there about his
throat. His frock-coat, sine qua non of Latin-American respectability,
was gray with dust, trousers unacquainted with the pressing-board were
spotted with the mementoes of laboratory accidents, and the slender
aristocratic shoes, possessing in common three buttons, had been worn
completely heelless. Here, in the bosom of his disdainful family, he
wore a greasy old cap; later in the day I met him promenading under the
portales of the plaza in the same costume, but for the added glory of a
“stove-pipe” hat of at least twenty years of harried existence.
His _taller_, or workshop, overlooking the main square, was a chaos of
odds and ends gathered by a man who had given his life chiefly to the
study of physics, and who was alternately tinkering at a score of
inventions. In the absence of a real source of supply his apparatus was
almost entirely home-made, or, as he himself put it, “Loja-made,” a
collection fashioned from cigar boxes, string, tin cans, and whatever
makeshifts fell in his way, resembling nothing so much as the playthings
of some isolated but inventive farmer’s boy. A shoemaker’s needle, on
the plan of a sewing-machine shuttle, that was designed to revolutionize
the making of footwear, had been constructed from the shell of a rifle
cartridge. Of as plebeian materials he had built a little transparent
box to place above the needle of a phonograph, to do away with the
metallic sound of that instrument—but in Latin-American fashion his
phonograph was out of order and did not “function.” Another crude
apparatus he pointed out as a proof that “a sphere _can_ revolve on two
axes at once,”—a ball of yarn representing the earth was twirled by a
tiny dynamo, and at the same time given a rotary motion by a string
belt—and so on through all the realms of physics, which he taught here
in his taller several times a week to the boys of the local colegio. The
Loja-made original of his most important invention was out of order, and
I was not favored with a test of the “celífono” on which he had tinkered
intermittently more than thirty years.
His inventiveness did not confine itself to merely physical matters.
Before I left, he pressed upon me a pamphlet of which he was the author.
It was entitled “The Virgin María in America before its Discovery by
Columbus,” wherein the writer “proved beyond question,” to use his own
words, “that the Blessed Virgin was not an unknown personage in America
when it was discovered by the Spaniards.” Beginning a visionary journey
in Canada, he descended step by step through all the western hemisphere,
“proving” by shaky tradition, by the doctored yarns of early
missionaries, and by personal lucubrations that “all the Indian tribes
had the tradition of Adam and Eve, of the serpent and the apple, of
‘original sin,’ and of a god born of a virgin.” The fact that the city
of Loja had published this masterpiece fully describes its mentality.
I had known him three or four days before the inventor took me into his
confidence and whispered that the invention of the “celífono” had been
merely a means to an end; that he had taken it to New York and Europe in
the hope of raising funds to pursue his “really important invention,”
which he had thought on for forty years and already perfected “in his
mind,” though he had not yet begun its construction. This was a “flying
machine that is neither balloon nor aeroplane, perfectly safe and
commercially practicable.” As nearly as my unmechanical faculties
grasped the situation from his elaborate explanation, it was a close
replica of that of “Darius Green,” whose fame has never reached this
corner of the Andes. Fortunately there is no building in Loja high
enough to bring the inventor to serious grief, should he ever succeed in
collecting the materials essential to the actual construction of this
perfected child of his imagination. But his hope was still youthful, and
he besought my advice as to how a poor inventor could get his
masterpiece before the world without being despoiled of the fruits of
his labors, as in the case of the “celífono,” by the “practical business
men” of that great universe beyond his mountain-bounded horizon. I
regretted my ignorance of any panacea for that condition.
Carrión is but a type of those “closet” geniuses who live, toil, and
fade away unknown in the dim recesses of the Andes, men in some cases
who might have ranked high among modern inventors, writers, or artists,
had their lot been cast in happier climes than in this leaden
environment of impracticability, burdened by enervating superstitions,
denied the simplest materials for their purposes in a land where even
twine and wrapping-paper are commonly unobtainable, and so lacking in
that grasping self-assertiveness so necessary to front modern society
successfully that even the scant fruits of their labors go to swell the
already swollen pockets of more “practical” men of the world, while they
dream on like this gray-haired boy pottering among his home-made toys.
[Illustration:
The church, and the dwelling of my host, the priest of Oña]
[Illustration:
Loja, southernmost city of Ecuador, backed by her endless labyrinth of
mountains]