The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  A four-foot-tall woman wearing two shabby fedoras insisted I drink from her cup of chicha. Her bare feet were grossly enlarged from a lifetime of nothing between them and the ground. A sip of chicha convinced me that it was superior to pulque, the phlegmlike Mexican drink made from the maguey cactus. I broke away before she could offer me more and found a group from Cañar, the province that includes Biblián. Broad white felt hats covered their heads, blood-red ponchos covered their white shirts and pants. Playful Indians with painted-on mustaches and beards followed, and after them a group holding aloft a wooden platform on which rested a bottle of whiskey and a lemon. Their leader, in a clown outfit and dunce cap, walked over to offer spectators some aguardiente from a wooden cup that had just made the rounds of his group. I politely declined. “But sir,” he said, “won’t you have a copa de ruina?” A cup of ruin. Two men playing metallic flutes decorated with cigarette packs came next.

  “Pssst, señor—un tango?” A sip. “Una copita?” All day long friendly people offered me drinks from their home brew. “Shall I dip my cup for you?” This particular man carried a pail of chicha. After each stranger swallowed a trago, the man returned to his spot on the curb and cleaned the cup by dipping it in a vat of rinse water and drying it with his sleeve. Then he offered more chicha to the next fellow.

  Two men rode side by side on horseback holding a long pole between them. Live roosters hung from the pole, tied by their feet. An itinerant photographer set up his camera in the plaza displaying dozens of pictures in which no one smiles. Next to the photographer sat a mother nursing her baby boy. Her two daughters busied themselves delousing each other’s hair. One woman set up a stand to sell grapes and strawberries; another served Ecuador’s national dish, papas con papas—potatoes with potatoes. Boys wearing chaps rode ponies, somber men in gray suits walked in formation, girls in stylish waist-length ponchos giggled by, and a boy clutching a bottle of aguardiente shouldered some fruit that had empty Jell-O boxes tied to it. The parade was full of oblique symbols and derision, joyful sacrilege and desecration.

  I ran into Sr. Olmos, the ceramist, on his way home from the parade, and we went to his studio a few blocks from the plaza. I had requested that he sculpt a few writers and photographers, some male, some female. I left to him what they were to be doing and what they should look like.

  All figures were European-looking with styled blond hair. They stood four inches tall, colored with enamel paint. The women wore full-length dresses, and the men, checked shirts and Edwardian jackets. The writers held pens, actually tiny tacks, and wrote on copies of newspapers that Olmos had dated Corpus Chirsti Day. The photographers—how did he know?—were obnoxiously thrusting their cameras forward, as if into some unwilling subject’s face.

  The crowd drifted from the plaza to a dirt field a few blocks away, where cooperatives and neighborhood groups had erected poles about thirty feet high, topped with wooden frames from which hung prizes for the masses. Each pole was supposed to be rooted at least three feet into the ground. To get at prizes, all the young boys had to do was shinny up the poles. The catch was that the poles were thoroughly greased. Those who reached the top were rewarded with toys, pots and pans and other kitchen utensils, clothing, fruit, beer and liquor, and items useful around the house. Suspended from a few of the castillos—castles—as they are called, were live sheep, rabbits, and guinea pigs. The animals had been tied by their feet and hung upside down, swaying in midair.

  By late afternoon the happily sotted crowd engulfed each pole while determined kids, intoxicated with booze and bravado, climbed closer and closer to the tops before sliding back down. Eventually enough boys had tried the dozen poles that most of the grease had begun to wear off; one by one each castle was scaled, and its prizes tossed down to dozens of arms straining upward to snare a gift. Two, sometimes three, boys at a time tried each pole.

  One particularly challenging pole induced about ten boys on it, each resolved to reach the top. With so many bodies shinnying up it, the pole quivered, then began a barely perceptible wobble, and slowly circled wider and wider. Dozens of people below, hungry for free knickknacks, ignored the impending disaster and kept yelling encouragement to their favorite sons. Finally the pole swayed so widely that it passed the point of no return. The crowd shrieked in horror. Terror covered the boys’ faces. Some leaped desperately into the panicky mob. Others stayed put, wrapping their arms and legs around the failing pole. The pole seemed to descend in slow motion, as if to give everyone time to prepare for his fate. For one brief moment after it hit the ground, the world was silent. Then pandemonium reigned.

  “¡Dios mío!” wailed a woman. My God! “What has happened?”

  “My son!” sobbed another. “Where is he?”

  “Everyone’s dead!”

  Small children cried. Ice cream vendors renewed their chant:

  “¡Helados! ¡Helados!” Prayers in Quechua and Spanish floated up.

  “They’re supposed to limit these poles to three boys and no more,” said an angry man. “Why did they let so many get on?”

  “Quick! Get them to the clinic!”

  “Four of them died,” claimed a man who knew nothing more than the rest of us. “Of that I am certain.”

  Lifeless bodies were crammed inside a makeshift ambulance. Musicians continued playing songs where they had left off.

  A crowd formed around the fallen pole, inspecting its jagged end. The part that remained rooted appeared no more than a foot in the ground.

  Friends and next of kin traded nervous words outside the Pujilí clinic, where some fifty people crowded around the door. “The two most seriously injured youths were taken to the hospital at Latacunga,” said a nun wearing a beatific smile. “At Latacunga,” twenty minutes away, “they may get better treatment.”

  Then again, they may not. Either way, as I recounted the tragedy in the days that followed, I was assured that if any of the boys had indeed hemorrhaged to death, which seemed very probable, they were the lucky ones, because now they didn’t have to grovel and suffer for the rest of their lives, and they probably went straight to heaven because they died during the Fiesta de Corpus Christi. Their families now had one less mouth to worry about feeding, and only one more tombstone to lay flowers upon—in all, a considerable savings.

  Dios mío.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CRUISING WITH OLGA

  After the tragedy at Pujilí, I returned to Quito where I visited with Olga Fisch, at whose artesanía shop some of Kurt Dorfzaun’s finest Panama hats were sold. One of the unacknowledged facts in the artesanía trade in much of Latin America is that without the admiration and marketing skills of North Americans and Europeans, many handicraft skills would be virtually lost to us now. Indigenous products in Ecuador, like the people who make them, have generally been of little interest to the rest of the country. Most of the shops and galleries—in the folklore trade the two are often the same—are run by or cater to people from other continents. Hungarian-born Olga Fisch, one year younger than the twentieth century, pioneered this phenomenon. Since 1943, four years after she took refuge in Ecuador from the war in Europe, her shop, Folklore, has developed an international reputation for its wide assortment of indigenous arts and crafts. Collectors and researchers from abroad visit frequently to pay homage. The Smithsonian Institution regularly seeks her advice and exhibits her collections, including her priceless Corpus Christi dance costumes. Through her knowledge of Indian customs and her close association with their practitioners, she has become the grande dame of Ecuadoran folk art. Still spry and alert, Olga Fisch received me at her home behind the shop.

  She is a pack rat of the highest order. Works from four centuries line the walls of her house, from imitation Spanish religious art dating back to the late 1500s in Quito to hand-carved musical instruments made recently in the highlands. Woolen rugs, for which she is especially known, employ her original patterns based upon subtle and handsome elaborations of native designs in pa
inting, pottery, and textiles. They are made exclusively for her, and can be identified by o. FISCH woven into a corner.

  We sat on a patio lined with exotic flowers and vines, facing a tidy garden where a barefoot Indian shoveled dirt. Her silver hair had been treated to a permanent, and her right hand sported a turquoise ring from New Mexico. She lighted a Marlboro and poured some Kirsch of Eger, a liqueur from Budapest.

  “Where shall I begin? My first trip to South America was aboard the Graf Zeppelin in 1935. I was the first woman to ever ride it across the Atlantic. They made a big fuss about me when we landed in Rio. I had been an artist in Hungary, Austria, and Germany, then Morocco and Italy. When my husband and I were forced to leave Europe for good because of the Nazis, we went to the United States, where the immigration officials told us the quota for Hungarians was filled for the next eighty-six years. They had forgotten the words to their national anthem, ‘sweet land of liberty.’

  “We spent a year in limbo in New York. While I was there I was offered a job at Vogue magazine paying four hundred dollars a week. In 1938! I couldn’t take it because we had to leave the country. We decided on Ecuador after hearing about it from friends and seeing pictures of it in a book at the library. We took a ship, then came overland to Quito.

  “Pardon me. I have to give something to my viejo.” She called over to the gardener. “Manuel? Would you like your drink now?” He smiled and bowed slightly.

  “Ah, sometimes it is so difficult to find the right employees,” she said after pouring a noonday shot of vermouth for her gardener. “There are three ways of doing things: the right way, the wrong way, and the South American way. I suppose I have been lucky. I’ve had five cooks in forty years. Each has raised a child with my support. I’ve had to teach each one how to cook Hungarian dishes, and I am such a bad cook myself.” A long-distance call came for Olga. Erlinda, the current cook and house servant, walked over to hand her patrona the cordless telephone.

  “Anyway, a little while after we arrived here I got a job teaching art. I was paid eighteen dollars a month. The people here didn’t know what a Jew was. One of my students asked, ‘Are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?’ I started going out to the countryside to see the folk art and meet the Indians, and I gave in to my impulse of collecting everything that appealed to me. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

  Erlinda called us to lunch: brisket of beef, spinach, yucca root, and bean salad. “Here, try some maracuya. It’s a passion fruit, almost like marijuana.”

  Her mention of marijuana allowed me to ask about a psychedelic from the Amazon: “Have you ever tried ayahuasca?”

  “Once, yes. I had the feeling that one leg was way up here, and the other was way down here.” She waved her hands slowly up and down. “I only had a little, but I couldn’t walk from here to there,” she said, indicating a distance of ten feet. We concluded the meal with a sweet Hungarian wine, Tokaji Szamorodni. “I get it from someone at the Hungarian Embassy,” she said impishly. “Now, please. It is time for my nap. Can you come tomorrow for breakfast?”

  The next morning the watchman let me in the back door and I was taken upstairs to Olga’s bedroom, where Erlinda brings breakfast and El Comercio while la señora barks out orders for the day to her staff. Morris, a middle-aged Swedish expatriate, joined us. Guerrilla activity in the Peruvian Andes dominated the newspaper’s front page.

  “Ecuador is like an island in South America.” Olga boasted of her adopted country. “It is very peaceful.”

  “Yes,” Morris added, “but sometimes there is trouble even on islands.” When I related my impressions of Cuenca’s rigid class structure and its “nobles,” he nodded. “They fancy themselves as puro castellano,” purebred Spanish, “but everybody has a little tarbrush on them. They all have some Indian blood but they refuse to acknowledge it.”

  “There is a legend about how the ‘Cuencano type’ evolved,” said Olga, warming to the subject. “Many years ago a governor of Azuay Province had a Czechoslovakian wife. She slept with their Indian servant, and the result was the Cuencano type. I love Cuenca and its people, but the upper class is rather inflated, isn’t it?”

  Just then Erlinda entered with our breakfast. Olga erupted. “Why are you a half hour late?” she yelled. “You know I eat at seven-thirty sharp. I have guests! Now put the tray here on my bed.” Accustomed to such tirades, Erlinda bowed her head slightly and murmured apologies before quickly retreating. The outburst was as surprising for its trilingualism as for its abruptness, because it came in Spanish, Hungarian, and English. A twinkle crept into Olga’s eyes as Erlinda descended the stairs. “I do have these explosions,” she admitted quietly, “but I will never get an ulcer. I always let out my anger.”

  “Then she returns to her sweet self,” Morris added benignly.

  “For my worst words I use Hungarian. No one can understand me then.”

  A problem had developed over a carpenter’s work on a downstairs door. “It has taken him so long. On the salary I pay my workers they all go to the university, and then I have to adjust their work assignments to fit their class schedules. It’s crazy, ¿no?”

  One reason Olga’s shop has maintained it reputation over the years is her periodic trips to indigenous villages. Her contacts among the Indians in small towns were so legendary that I suspected it was more myth than fact. El Día de San Juan, Saint John’s Day, was upon us, and Olga offered me the opportunity to test the legend. “I’m getting too old to drive. Would you like to come with me this Sunday to look for fiestas in Imbabura Province? There are supposed to be some near Otavalo.”

  The Volkswagen bug proved easy to maneuver around church traffic, and soon we were motoring through the Andes along the two-lane Pana, as the Pan American Highway is called, nearing the town of Cayambe. Whenever we asked about fiestas that day, however, people would reply that there was certainly one a few towns away, but never in their own village. When we arrived “a few towns away,” we’d get the same response. We felt as Alice must have in Through the Looking Glass when her repeated attempts to climb a hill always brought her back to the beginning.

  “Pull over there,” Olga instructed as we skirted Cayambe. “Over to that lady.” She rolled down her window to speak to a woman who wore a dark blue shawl around her head. “Excuse me, señora. Your blouse—it is from Zuleta, ¿no?” Zuleta is a town on the hacienda of Galo Plaza, Ecuador’s president between 1948 and 1952, who remains the country’s bona fide international statesman.

  “Why, yes it is,” replied the woman, surprised and flattered that this elderly European lady could pinpoint the origin of her clothing. “I am from there. Yes.”

  “I thought so. I could tell by the embroidery.”

  By noon we had struck out, and we stopped for a bite in a restaurant at Lake San Pablo. In the distance a family fished for its dinner from a canoe. “You see that mountain?” Olga pointed to one of the peaks surrounding the lake. “The legend goes that a giant who lived in this lake reached out and grabbed at the top of the mountain, and that’s how those indentations were formed.” She walked over to the wall and rubbed her hands along a six-foot by eight-foot textile wall hanging. “They don’t make these up here anymore. I’ve seen a few around Cuenca, though. Maybe they’ll carry it on.”

  Back on the road we detoured into village after village, depressing in their squalor. “You see underdevelopment so often here,” Olga said, “and so much of it, that after a while you don’t see it anymore.” We drove farther, and noticed the name Lenin on a few posters. “People called their children by names they saw in the newspapers and heard on the radio. They didn’t know what they stood for. Names like Lenin and Adolph are not uncommon,” Olga explained.

  “Quechua names are almost always two syllables. I met an Indian couple once, and their little guagua,” their baby, “was named Washco. ‘What a pretty Quechua name!” I said. It turned out it was short for Washington. I repeated for Olga a story I’d heard about the pol
ice in Quito who once found a dead body on Jorge Washington Street. When they got to filling out the report, one cop asked the other, “How do you spell Washington?” “I don’t know,” his partner replied. “Let’s move the body to Loja Street.”

  “This part of the Pana was paved about twenty years ago. All the Indians were so excited about it. They had never seen such a big, flat surface to lie down on, and at the opening they were all sprawled out drunk on the highway. I came up for the inauguration with Rolf Blomberg. We had to pull a few of them off the road like cadavers. Everyone had such a good time.”

  Finally, about five miles north of Otavalo, on a dirt road in the soft, hilly countryside, we arrived at the town of Peguche. “I think this is the house I want. No—pull up to that one over there. Wait. I’ll ask these boys.” Four youths walked by in homemade costumes, obviously on their way to some festivities. “Yes. Park in front of that pickup.” Set back from the road was a ramshackle house. We walked through a doorway into a courtyard and up some rickety steps. The sounds of a wooden flute wafted from a room, and soon we were surrounded by an extended family of fifteen Otavalan Indians who greeted Doña Olga as one of their own.

  Of sturdy build and aristocratic bearing, the Otavalans are known worldwide for the intricacy of their weavings and the expanse of their marketing. The men’s long black braided hair and calf-length cotton pants, and the women’s heavily beaded necklaces and colorful blouses, are seen in major cities the world over as they sell goods woven in Imbabura Province. Schooled in universities overseas, many Otavalans have escaped the bonds that shackle other Andean Indians.