The Panama Hat Trail Page 20
About a half mile downriver we drifted up to a sandbar, and the two of them got out to push and pull the boat to its parking spot on the Dureno side of the river. We waded knee-deep across a small inlet, and Mauricio led me up a steep hill and onto a jungle path from which we could hear laughing voices coming from the village. The Cofán language, full of false starts and glottal stops, had been written and preserved by missionaries from the controversial Summer Institute of Linguistics. The only familiar word was gringo, which often as not was followed by laughter. We walked across a soccer field that had been a landing strip for the missionaries until they were formally evicted in 1981. At the end of the soccer field was a combination schoolhouse and auditorium. The houses, open-air thatched-roof homes with almost no furniture, were built on sturdy hardwood posts. Mauricio’s cousin and her five children joined us as we paraded past the last of the houses down a path to Randy’s place. He had gone out for a while, Mauricio learned. He would be back shortly.
Randy’s home, still under construction, looked like its blueprint had come from Sunset Magazine. Two-by-fours, crossbeams, a doorway, two stories—this was the Taj Mahal of Dureno. A generator nearby powered a community freezer.
Hesitant to move about too freely, I waited in a chair. As the sun sank deeper, strange sounds grew louder. Full-throated bird trills rolled through the trees. Invisible animals raced through the underbrush, leaving sudden noises hanging in the sticky air. A series of croaks in what seemed like three-part harmony punctuated the stillness. Loud mosquitoes gathered around me. Bamboo whistles played in the village. I pulled out my pocket dictionary to look up some nagging verb tenses, although from what I’d been told, these people didn’t have much of a future—their lives were strictly present tense, and conditional at that.
Footsteps approached on the path from the village and a short, muscular Indian walked straight at me. He wore a feather through his nose and carried a rifle and a machete. Though apparently confronting an Amazon savage armed to the teeth, I sensed no danger whatsoever, and in fact found the man rather friendly. He was a tribal elder, and the feather, merely decorative. Oh yes, he said. Randy should be back soon. Feathernose walked off to hunt his dinner.
Long after nightfall Randy appeared, alerted by others that a stranger waited at his home. In his twenties, my host looked like the all-American boy. By circumstance and preference, however, he was more Cofán than anything else. He had tried attending college in the States, but soon realized his life back in the Amazon made more sense. So he eats, hunts, and plays with his fellow Indians, acting as a missionary without portfolio. Guiding river expeditions for adventure travel groups from the States brings in a healthy income for himself and the tribe.
Randy maneuvered around his unfinished cabin by swinging from pole to pole, first down to the ground floor, then up and around to his sleeping loft. “Hold on, I’ll be right back,” he said as he walked out with a twenty-gauge shotgun. A couple of minutes later one shot went off. He returned clutching a boat-billed heron. “There. This bird will be put in tomorrow’s stew. It’ll feed my family.” A family of eight shared meals with their gringo.
Randy disparaged Lago Agrio and the oil camps. “When Lago had six houses, five of them served alcohol and three of those had whores. Texaco’s just asking for trouble. The contrast is becoming so great. The only reason they’ve been able to get away with it so far is that they employ so many Ecuadorans.
“Out here we live mainly by hunting and fishing. We do a little lumbering too. Before the pipeline road was built it took us a day to get to Lago by canoe. When we began to put motors on them we cut our time to two and a half hours. We’ve tried to make the most of the road without letting it affect us too much. Before, our hunting lands were much larger. Now we have ninety-five hundred hectares, all on this side of the Aguarico. I’ll show you some of the territory tomorrow.”
“Sorry,” Randy said the next morning, after a breakfast of pulped and boiled yucca with his family. “I’ve got to go out on a drug bust.” He and a dozen other Cofáns, including Feathernose, armed themselves with rifles, machetes, and a blowgun. “We’ve heard that a few of our people who live outside the village are growing marijuana and coca leaves as a cash crop. If they’re caught, they could lose it for the rest of us. I’d like to take you, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen. See that house over there? Ask for Arturo. He’ll take you back across the river.”
Arturo wasn’t home and the narcs had already left, so I wandered around the village hoping to find someone else going across the river. One man led me to another and another and another, until finally Eduardo agreed to take me across in his motorized canoe with his family of eight.
The previous morning I had been checking my map. The Aguarico fed into the Napo, and the Napo flowed all the way down to the Amazon, which eventually emptied into the Atlantic Ocean. Roughly figured, the whole trip would cover a thousand miles. At forty miles a day we’d reach the Atlantic within a month. Eduardo sensibly ignored my entreaty.
One of the innumerable problems we would have encountered along the way would have been nationality. Ecuador’s claim over the western Amazon basin, now recognized by virtually every other country as belonging to Peru, ranks among Latin America’s most longstanding unresolved border problems. The two nations have historically been at odds with each other over where the line between them lies. At both the bargaining table and on the battlefield, Peru has almost always walked away the winner. Ecuador’s contention has become a source of frustration and nationalism and has led to minor but regular skirmishes along the border. Between 1978 and 1984 the two countries clashed five times at remote outposts; the boundary remained intact.
The conflict goes back to the conquistadors, when Gonzalo Pizarro in Quito, acting on behalf of his big brother Francisco in Cuzco, sent Francisco de Orellana out to look for a lost detachment in the jungleland east of the Andes. Orellana never located the missing soldiers, but he did find the waterways intriguing, and instead of reporting back to his boss, he pressed eastward. Six months later, in 1542, he floated out the mouth of the Amazon and sailed on to Spain, where he was named governor of the Amazon region as a reward. Twenty-one years later King Philip II put the Amazon territory in Quito’s domain.
Over the years Peru has nibbled away at Ecuador, once even occupying Guayaquil. In 1941 its military superiority overran Ecuador’s profoundly underequipped army and claimed most of Ecuador’s land east of the Andes. (The U.S. Consul General in Guayaquil asked Washington for “two tear gas guns in the event of disorder to be expected if Peru should occupy Guayaquil.”) Humiliated, Ecuador limped to Rio de Janeiro, and at the urging of “disinterested third parties”—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States—signed away the disputed territory. The treaty, signed in 1942, was called the Protocol of Peace, Friendship, and Limits, although it was none of those. By taking the land away, Peru effectively denied Ecuador access to the Marañón River, hence a direct route to the Amazon River and the Atlantic Ocean.
Ecuador never really accepted the protocol, insisting that it had signed the treaty with a gun to its head. In 1960 Ecuador’s President Velasco Ibarra unilaterally declared the eighteen-year-old treaty null and void. Ecuador maintains, at least cartographically, the notion that Iquitos, that most Peruvian jungle outpost, is part of Ecuador. A dotted line on Ecuadoran maps begrudgingly acknowledges the reality of Peru’s land grab, and even then it insists that about forty-five miles of the 1942 border is impossible to ascertain. All maps published in Ecuador must show the country in its pre-1942 bulge, rather than as the rest of the world sees it.
In Peru the dispute fuels enmity. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian author, has written that when he mocked his country’s military in his first novel, a general claimed that he had “undoubtedly been paid by Ecuador to undermine the prestige of the Peruvian Army.” Journalists in Peru unleashed venomous attacks upon a Mexican television personality when, during an international broadcast in
1984, he said that Ecuador was the birthplace of the Amazon. A “pro-Ecuadoran ignoramus,” wrote one columnist.
The word Amazon is constantly bandied about Ecuador to boost morale over a cause that is irrevocably lost. Official government stationery proclaims: “Ecuador has been, is, and will be an Amazonian country.” In Quito one day I was having lunch with an acquaintance when a friend of his showed up. She was introduced as the granddaughter of the president during the 1941 war with Peru and the subsequent treaty. “Oh!” I blurted out rather undiplomatically. “Your grandfather was the one who signed away half the country!” “Well, yes,” she quickly admitted. “But if he hadn’t, they’d have taken it all. We’d be in Peru right now, not Ecuador.” Although Ecuador’s claim is well taken, Peru won’t give back the land it stole until the Amazon River dries up, and not before.*
* * *
* In October 1998 the two countries formally and finally signed a peace treaty resolving the border conflict—in Peru’s favor.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
MADELINE IN QUITO
“To the Europeans,” said the doctor in Gabriel García Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel, “South America’s a man with a mustache, a guitar, and a gun.” Such stereotypes are born of observation, superficial and redundant. By the time they get back to the observed, they are usually skewed, corny, and insulting. Seldom do people see themselves in the words of others. Ecuadorans were well-disposed toward my own task, but also wary. Too well do they remember Ludwig Bemelmans.
Bemelmans published forty-two books, best known among them his Madeline series for children. Illustrations by the Austrian-born New Yorker enhanced his writings. In Ecuador his name means foreigner-who-makes-fun-of-natives, all because of his 1941 book, The Donkey Inside. “‘We have a revolution here every Thursday afternoon at half past two,’” Bemelmans quotes a native, “‘and our government is run like a nightclub. We owe some two hundred and fifty million sucres; but who pays debts these days?’” About the food: “The cooks are not very good in Ecuador, but then you have two of them.” Of fashion and beauty: “Of all the women here, perhaps a half dozen are beautiful and four of these dress with taste.” With gloved jabs, Bemelmans mocked clerical pomposity, official hypocrisy, and anything else that struck him as ludicrous and comical. He was game for adventure, both high and low, and obviously enjoyed himself: “Quito is kind of a penal colony for diplomats. In some cases they are banished to this high capital for minor indiscretions, alcoholism, badly conducted affairs of the heart or the state. . . . This makes on the whole for a group of likeable, outspoken, and refreshing people. Not being persona grata with their own governments, they get along well with their hosts, tell well-flavored stories, and are usually excellent companions.”
When his book was published the same year in Ecuador, El Burro por Dentro caused a sensation, denounced from the pulpit and the soapbox. It was sold under the counter. “Bemelmans ridiculed us in an amiable way, but few people understood,” said author Nicolás Kingman when I met him at his bookstore. Kingman recalled that the intellectual class liked Burro. “It was authentic and realistic. You must understand we had many prejudices then. There was intense nationalism. It was the same year as the border war with Peru. We were very Catholic and the Church often intervened in daily life. The upper class was offended. In order to change things we needed something like Bemelmans’s book.” A commentator in Quito wrote at the time, “many Ecuadorans have had to dance the conga of pure indignation.”
The literary scandal has not yet abated. Bemelmans is still seen in Ecuador as a twentieth-century Baron Munchausen, the legendary German who told tall tales of foreign adventures. More than four decades after The Donkey Inside was published, and more than twenty years since the author’s death, a Quito bookseller told me, “I can stock Philip Agee’s book about the CIA in Ecuador, but to carry El Burro por Dentro could be suicidal.” In El Comercio, columnist Jorge Ribadeneira uses Donkey as a point of departure to write of changes during the intervening years.
For all his mockery, Bemelmans’s warmth and affection for the land and its people burns through: “For those who still dream, the jungles, the seacoast, the tropic isles, and the mountains of Ecuador offer all the scenery, every variety of climate, and they are the ideal proving ground for adventure and escape. . . .” Virtually unknown to Ecuadorans, however, are two other books Bemelmans wrote about their country: for children, Quito Express, about a little Otavalan boy who rides the train to Guayaquil; and Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, a novel about a general living in European exile who returns to his Ecuadoran hacienda. In the United States, Bemelmans’s legacy can be seen at New York’s Carlyle Hotel, where his artwork still covers the walls of the bar bearing his name.
I would feel more comfortable defending Bemelmans had I not learned of his anti-Semitic impulses from two people who met him back then. Benno Weiser Varon, then a newspaper columnist and a leader of Quito’s Jewish community, remembered that Bemelmans urged the Quito Tennis Club to exclude Jews. Olga Fisch recollected that the author convinced expatriate photographer André Roosevelt, a distant cousin to Franklin, to start a club called La Cucaracha Alegre (The Happy Cockroach) and not admit Jews. The club, according to Olga, went broke within a week.
“You will write well about us, won’t you?” Over and over the question was asked by people fiercely proud of their country yet understandably cautious. Travel literature is full of Ecuador seen mainly in terms of other countries: Salinas is “the Miami of Ecuador” and Cuenca “the Athens of Ecuador”; Esmeraldas has “African black richness”; there are “Tibetan-like herds at the base of Mt. Chimborazo”; and Cotopaxi is “the Fujiyama of Ecuador.” Ecuadorans were naturally amazed to learn that the equation has once been reversed: In Colorado, there is a tiny town called Cotopaxi, named by a well-traveled miner who noticed a striking resemblance between a distant peak in the Rocky Mountains and the volcano south of Quito.
The loss of national identity is not limited to tourist literature or straw hats: The writer Ben Hecht contributed to Ecuador’s image with his 1937 play To Quito and Back, about fervent revolution and unfulfilled dreams. “I mean nothing disrespectful toward Ecuador,” Hecht’s patronizing Britisher tells a naïve girl, “but you can’t take a country seriously one of whose major political problems is a firm stand against head-hunting and cannibalism.” At the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, ABC television anchorman Peter Jennings briefly praised each country as its standard-bearer entered the Memorial Coliseum. When Ecuador’s yellow, blue, and red flag came on camera, Jennings found fourteen words: “The conquistadores stopped in Ecuador. They didn’t find enough riches, so they moved on.”
The best English-language books about Ecuadorans coping with life at the bottom are Living Poor and its companion, The Farm on the River of Emeralds, both by Moritz Thomsen. His accounts, moving and funny, tell of the wrenching frustrations and unexpected rewards that occur when the First World meets the Third. For three years a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador in the mid-1960s, Thomsen now lives—and writes—on a small farm near the Esmeraldas River. For a number of years he lived in Quito, where he could usually be found holding literary court at a neighborly seafood café. He is the only English-language writer who has captured Ecuador from the inside looking out. He would agree, I am sure, with Robert Byron, who in The Road to Oxiana defends traveling writers whose books insult their hosts: “Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interest of human reason. Business can’t. Diplomacy won’t. It has to be people like us.”
To me, Ecuador had been a country with its head in the clouds, its heart on its sleeve, and its groin to the ground. Columnist Jorge Ribadeneira’s reassuring words accompanied me as I prepared to leave the country: “Not everything is perfect, and there is still material for another ‘pollino por dentro,’” a little donkey inside.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CROSSING THE LINE
The hats from Cuenca had already ar
rived in New York, where they waited for Karl Dorfzaun to forward them on to Resistol in Texas. I was still in South America, having strayed too far from the trail. It was certainly time to return.
Few passenger-freighters dock on Ecuador’s coast anymore, but one was due soon at Puerto Bolívar, south of Guayaquil. By taking it I would follow the old trade routes that bananas, coffee, cacao, and straw hats once took. In fact, except for the hats, the S.S. Santa Maria seemed to be still loading all these things. I climbed the steps to the main deck, tiptoed around the snoozing immigration officer who was to stamp my passport, and found my room. I was the only passenger who boarded in Ecuador.
The ship’s five top decks housed and fed passengers; the four decks below carried freight. It measured 180 yards long and weighed 20,000 tons. Some eighty passengers were aboard, most of whom had begun their voyage in San Francisco or Los Angeles. Their eight-week cruise took them south to Colombia, through the Panama Canal, and along South America’s east coast and through the Strait of Magellan. From there they called at Chile and Peru, and finally Puerto Bolívar, the Santa Maria’s last stop before returning to the United States. The average age of the passengers was seventy-three, down slightly due to the onboard death of an eighty-two-year-old man and my arrival.