The Panama Hat Trail Read online

  Turning south my hosts showed me where the pipeline carrying oil from the eastern jungle crosses the mountains on its way to the Pacific Coast. Gazing at the sky, they pointed out how the planets, the moon, and the stars arrange themselves above the Equator in a pattern far different from what we see in northern skies. The constellation Scorpio dominated overhead; the North Star rested just above the horizon. From our mountainside vantage point, the proud boast made of their city by Quiteños—the residents of Quito—becomes clear, that Quito is un hueco en el cielo, an opening into heaven.

  My introduction to South America made an enormous impression. On our way up the mountainside we had passed through Bella Vista, a crowded and noisy neighborhood inhabited by poor mestizos—mixed blood—and Indians who always seemed to be carrying something on their backs. In the early evening small crowds formed around street-corner stands. Makeshift fires kept the food and people warm. Most men, women, and children wore hats. Some were Panamas, others felt, still others fabric. I asked a street vendor if I might touch his Panama. It was firm, almost hard, with a shellaclike stiffness. And they are not Panama hats, I was firmly but politely told. That is a misnomer. Here they are sombreros de paja—straw—and they come from Cuenca, a city to the south.

  I wanted to linger in Quito before pushing on to Cuenca. I had read about Quito in travel journals dating back to its founding in 1534, and of the Inca settlement that predated Gonzalo Pizarro’s arrival. It was a religious city, I knew, conservative of dress and custom, with churches practically every two blocks. Until the oil boom busted the north end of town wide open in the early 1970s, Quito’s cultural and commercial life centered in a part of the city known for its narrow streets, colonial architecture, cramped quarters, and formal manners. Un hueco en el cielo, I repeated to anyone who would listen. What does this mean to you—is it really so? They believed it, everyone, fiercely proud of their ancient city and the overpowering volcanoes that dwarf it. “What does un hueco en el cielo mean to you?” an Indian from Ambato asked me. Well, I replied, that here you are so close to God, physically and spiritually, you can virtually peek into heaven. She smiled. “That’s what most North Americans and Europeans say. To the Indians it means that God can look down upon us.”

  At 9,300 feet, Quito’s air is so rarefied that the sun’s rays beat down with deceptive strength. A brisk midday walk in the equatorial Andes leaves you sweating profusely. Near dusk, garúa—intense fog—rolls through the city, limiting vision to an arm’s length. “The man who doesn’t like clouds has no business coming to Ecuador,” wrote the Belgian Henri Michaux in 1928. “They’re the faithful dogs of the mountains.” Clouds go through gymnastics at this altitude, first low hugging the ground, then high embracing Mount Cayambe or Pichincha, then settling briefly in the Chillos or Tumbaco valleys before finally returning again to ground level.

  “It has been said of Quito,” wrote Ludwig Bemelmans in his classic 1941 travel book The Donkey Inside, “that it has one hundred churches and one bathroom.” The ratio has narrowed somewhat since his time, but the opulence and ornate glitter of the city’s churches still overwhelm the adjoining plazas and the impoverished natives who walk upon them. To move among Quiteños in San Francisco Square is to sense the stability the Old City’s plazas exert and to appreciate their dominance. The San Francisco church houses a series of convents, each of which appears larger than many conventional churches. The San Augustín church includes the room where, in 1809, Ecuador’s Act of Independence was signed.

  A visitor could wander through churches for days here—the danger of becoming “churched out” is always present—but the most imposing structures share the same characteristics: skillfully crafted religious scenes detailed along the walls, gold leaf covering the more important facades, and huge paintings, solemn and lifeless, from the Quiteño school, a style of art that flourished under Spanish rule. Outside most churches a constant but low-key hubbub reigns: Parishioners beg for money, offering in return candles, religious ornaments, or blessings. The churches Ecuadorans point to most with pride were constructed with forced Indian labor.

  In 1978 the old part of town, so well preserved from its colonial days, was added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list of sites deemed to be “of outstanding universal value,” an honor that carries only one stipulation—to preserve and protect its integrity. Thrilled with its newly won international status, the Quito city government immediately violated the stipulation and constructed a brand-new municipal building in the middle of the Old City.

  The new section of town appears more European than Latin. It is centered around Amazonas Avenue, a spiffy shopping district filled with fine restaurants, classy hotels, quality bookstores, high-rise glass-walled office buildings, and shoeshine boys. La Mariscal, as it is called, resembles Mexico City’s Zona Rosa in many ways, catering to the top of a bottom-heavy city. I made a habit of taking morning coffee there at the Pastelería París, a sidewalk café run by an Italian named Alfonso and his wife, Isabela. Often Alfonso would show up on his black motorcycle while his wife walked in with their large and woolly sheepdog. The coffee was invariably terrible, but the morning paper was always ready and Alfonso usually had a cheerful word about the latest scandal or crisis. One morning I found the place closed without explanation. “He’s probably out of town,” another regular said. “He’ll be back tomorrow.” The next day Alfonso appeared—not on the street, however, but in the papers. He had been involved in some check-passing racket worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Police picked him up trying to slip across the border into Colombia wearing a disguise. “His long-haired blond wig made him look ridiculous,” the newspaper said.

  Parking on the side streets in La Mariscal can be tricky. Police in white gloves keep traffic moving on Amazonas, their slow, fluid arm motion signaling a light change from green to red. Each block usually has a human parking meter in a doorman’s uniform. He watches over the parking spaces, jealously guarding his turf for his regulars. When he spots a customer coming, he walks to the middle of the street like a traffic cop and stops cars so that his regular can ease into the curbside space. He watches over the car while its driver is away and expects in return a tip of thirty cents or so. One human parking meter, whose domain includes a number of Mercedes, comes to work prepared for early morning and evening chill with a scarf wrapped tightly around his face at the mouth, as if its purpose is to prevent him from speaking. He hopes some day to pass his job on to his son, he said, so that he too could oversee the parking of Mercedes Benzes.

  One day the city of Quito bought some surplus double-decker buses from London. Instead of slovenly drivers, crowded aisles, broken windows, incessant honking, jostling at the door, impromptu stops, and screeching brakes, these snazzy blue double-deckers had fixed stops, drivers in ties, comfortable seats, clean floors, and sliding windows. To ride them required a ticket, usually available at a kiosk near each stop, costing a couple of sucres more than the fare for regular buses. The imported buses traveled from Carolina Park at one end of Amazonas Avenue, to the airport at the other. The novelty and efficiency of such civilization—European yet!—rolling through town made the double-deckers a success. One morning, a double-decker drove by as I sipped my morning coffee (same lousy coffee, different café) and read in the newspaper some instructions for Quiteños on the proper way to board a bus. “At some bus stops,” said El Comercio, “users of public transportation have the good habit of forming lines for boarding buses or colectivos. Lamentably, at other stops the public crowds the bus, impeding the passage of children, women, and the elderly. This picture should be imitated by all citizens.” Above was a photo showing forty people politely lined up single-file at a bus stop. The headline read: AN EXAMPLE TO FOLLOW.

  A monument to Francisco de Orellana sits near the Hotel Quito overlooking the valley on the road to Guápulo, a semi-rural hillside neighborhood. The center of Guápulo is its Sanctuary, a popular spot to take in a Sunday morning mass. After a five-minute walk dow
n a dirt road from the church, the houses get increasingly sparse. Some appear to have had no occupants for years. At one abandoned and utterly dilapidated adobe house I found an Indian woman sitting on the cement foundation. She was waiting for the return of the owner, her patrón for many years. Did I know where he was or have any word of him? He had left more than a decade earlier.

  The Hotel Quito lies in a part of town called Gringo Gulch. Expensive homes and apartment towers line the streets, providing a habitat for embassy staff from the United States and elsewhere. Most have locked gates; some have armed guards. Workers for Texaco and its subcontractors live here as well.

  At one end of Gringo Gulch rests a monument to Winston Churchill; at the other, one to Abraham Lincoln. The Churchill statue was a gift to the City of Quito from Great Britain; the one of Lincoln, a gift from the United States community of Quito. During Great Britain’s little war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982, Sir Winston got a regular paint job—each week a bucket of a different bright color was dumped on his head and dripped down his clothes. Every now and then a new slogan appears on Lincoln’s monument—GRINGOS GET OUT! was the last one I saw—but usually it stays unmolested. Anti-Soviet graffiti is not uncommon. RUSSIA—MURDERER OF PRIESTS was a recent one, a few streets down from GORBACHEV—OUT OF AFGHANISTAN.

  Gringo in Ecuador means not just someone from the United States but from Europe as well. It is a generic word and, unlike many other Latin American countries, here it is more often neutral and benign than contemptuous and challenging. In Ecuador norteamericanos experience little of the overt animosity we have earned elsewhere.

  The official residence of the United States ambassador adjoins the Hotel Quito on an estate equipped with a pool, a clay tennis court, and Marine guards. The British Embassy faces the Quito, and next to it, El Pub—Bar Inglés. The Pub caters to British and United States expatriates who eat fish and chips, swap stories of Ecuadoran inefficiency, and tell tales of hunting for gold in the jungle. “The oil field trash stays out,” says Pub co-owner Machete, his nickname earned during his years as a South American salesman for the company that manufactures machetes. “They know they’re not wanted.” Conversation glides from W. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene to poorly laid fantasies to resurrect the Inca Atahualpa, stage a coup, capture the shrimp export market, or lead the Auca and Jívaro Indians in revolution.

  An illegal alien from Scotland explained her plight to the goalie on The Pub’s soccer team. “My situation is impossible here,” she said. “I can’t stay, and I can’t leave the country either. Do you suppose this means I’ll forever remain in Ecuador? I’m the wrong color! But I’m beginning to think I’m Ecuadoran. Maybe one of my students can help me. I teach English to Ecuadoran police. They’re so slow. Why, I had better luck teaching English to Vietnamese refugees in Canada! Reading Lewis Carroll is really the only way to make sense of this place. I’m thinking of writing Through the Andean Looking Glass.” She quoted from The Snark and Alice: “‘What I tell you three times is true.’ ‘Jam to-morrow and jam yesterday—but never jam to-day.’ Living in Quito is like that.”

  International traveling salesmen selling heavy machinery to Texaco or the government relax at The Pub and chat about the Miami airport, what government official in which country needs his palm greased, and where to find a good meal in La Paz, Bolivia. White-collar dreamers, expatriates down on their luck, and failed mercenaries drift through with regularity. It’s a great place to practice your English, especially if English is the only language you know.

  I packed for Cuenca on a Sunday to look at the Panama hat trade, preparing to take the forty-minute, thirteen-dollar flight the next morning. “I wouldn’t do that,” a Quito businesswoman advised. “Monday’s when all the accidents happen on the Quito-to-Cuenca run. It may be superstitious, but I never fly to Cuenca on a Monday.” She handed me a copy of Vuelo Sin Retorno (Flight without Return), a best seller in Ecuador about the plane crash that killed Jaime Roldós. Roldós had been the first president elected after a military junta yielded to civilian rule for another stab at democracy in 1979. He was flying not to Cuenca but farther south to Loja when his plane went way off course and crashed into a mountainside. Since then a number of other flights south through the Andes, usually to Cuenca, have also lost their bearings and crashed. Vuelo Sin Retorno prompted a healthy round of conspiracy theories about whom to blame for the president’s death—the Peruvians (another battle in their intermittent border war), the missionaries (Roldós had just evicted the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the country’s leading North American Bible-thumpers), Cuban-backed guerrillas (Jack Anderson’s theory), or the CIA. The CIA theory gained instant credibility, first on general principle, and second because a large part of Inside the Company: CIA Diary, Philip Agee’s account of his years with the CIA, devotes itself to his clandestine activities in Ecuador.

  Roldós became an instant martyr. Posters of him went up throughout the country, and, as the suddenly deceased youthful president in a newly formed democracy, he was afforded John Kennedy status. The government investigated the crash with outside help and convincingly ruled out sabotage. This was disappointing to those of us who love a good conspiracy, but by then we had run out of theories anyway.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CUENCA BY NIGHT

  “Of all the earth, as far as I know it, Cuenca has the most perfect climate,” wrote Harry A. Franck, whose meanderings through South America in the early twentieth century led to the book Vagabonding Down the Andes. “Always cool enough to be mildly invigorating to mind and body, yet never cold, it is unexcelled as a place for dreamy loafing.”

  These last five words heightened my anticipation months before I first arrived. Franck stayed in Cuenca long enough to learn its charms and frustrations, both extremes still in abundance. I took his advice to get some business cards made up before leaving for South America. “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,” he wrote. “Indeed, visiting cards should be as fixed a part of every Andean traveler’s equipment as heavy boots.” One cannot even accidentally bump into a stranger on a bus without the ritual exchange of cards, I quickly found. Mine included my name, home address, and the word escritor, writer. Although it showed no business or institutional affiliation, it gave me immediate credibility with all classes, for in a land where literacy is still a distant goal, foreign writers are welcomed as highly respected oddities.

  This notoriety garnered me an invitation to give a talk before a class at the Universidad Estatal de Cuenca my second day in town. The course, an advanced-level seminar, was called Culture and Civilization of the English-Speaking Countries and met in the late afternoon. It was taught by an expatriate from the States who had been in the country for more than a decade. He was one of twenty-five United States citizens living in Cuenca, a city of 130,000. “This semester they’ve been studying Jefferson and Hamilton. They know they are at the start of their own democracy, and they study U.S. history intently. Although their country goes back centuries, they sense they are at a new beginning.”

  A dozen students sat at small desks in a small classroom. While I was being introduced, scores of students, then hundreds, hurried by the room. The teacher stuck his head outside. “Well, class is over for the day,” he announced. “They got a permiso.” Everyone stood up and filed out.

  “What happened? I don’t understand.”

  “Sometimes I don’t either, but I just accept it. What happened is that a student group got a permit from the administration to call off classes and hold a rally in the main auditorium. They can do it practically anytime they want. It wreaks havoc on my lesson plans. These things take place almost every week.”

  I went outside and joined the throng. As I walked into the auditorium a student leader was inveighing against the government for a recent rise in the cost of living while poor people starved. “Everything
costs more now—bread, sugar, gasoline. The government wants it this way. So do imperialists and the rich. It’s in their interest!” His speech was punctuated by shouts of approval, applause, and wolf whistles at the women on the platform. “Considering the misery and exploitation that the working class lives in, devaluation has raised the cost of living too high. The government has brought the country to virtual bankruptcy and total indebtedness.” The national currency was in the middle of an alarming slide, losing two-thirds of its value within about a year. “And the Malvinas Islands belong to Argentina,” he put in as an afterthought, integrating South America’s burning issue of the day into his speech. “The United States is to blame!”

  Evidently I was the enemy in their midst, and I glanced around nervously. Friendly faces from the Culture and Civilization class grinned back. “Students have demonstrated in Quito,” the speaker went on. “Students in Guayaquil have also marched through the streets.” He paused for dramatic effect. “We should do the same!” Thunderous applause greeted his suggestion, followed by rounds of chanting.

  The group left the auditorium and slowly marched through the streets, yelling slogans in rhythmic cadence and blocking traffic. I moved along its outer fringe. We were for the poor, against the rich; for “the people,” against imperialism; for justice, against the United States. We wanted lower prices on basic necessities, and accused the government of promoting starvation. A splinter group broke away as we crossed over a bridge spanning the Tomebamba River. They burned tires in the middle of the street; then they burned a U.S. flag and ran it over with a four-wheel-drive Chevy Trooper. Dusk approached as the main body, thinning but still vocal, joined up with a group of workers and campesinos just finishing up its own protest rally at Calderón Park in the heart of town. “Considering the miserable exploitation that exists in the Ecuadoran working class,” the workers’ leader shouted, “the cost of living has reached its limit!”