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  And we recognize at once the intense differences separating republics which—according to the North American ethos—ought to be united. Differences of stock and history, of work and climate, have been stamped all the more firmly upon these peoples by absence of communications. Uruguay is the first modern welfare state; Ecuador is remote in a feudal order; the Argentine is half modern Italian, Chile half central European; in Brazil alone the melting pot has really melted. Impossible to run the twentieth-century machine over these republics and make them all alike, even impossible to make them homogeneous within their own borders; the men of Cartagena or Barranquilla in Colombia, for example, are utterly different from the people who inhabit the highlands in the same country.

  It is true that the European atmosphere of South America is intensified by the vitality and conservative individualism of southern Europe, by immigration and the dominance, in the nineteenth century, of European capital; in the twentieth century the economic power is passing rapidly into the hands of the United States, and where Europe once educated the upper classes, this role is passing to North America also. We cannot foretell yet the personality of South America when it emerges. The profoundly American things are the dispersal of the intense European man into greater space; the melting pot; the tearing up of the old European political and social roots. Only the cultural roots are still markedly European. In this last respect Brazil is the exception; it is creating a new race with a pure Brazilian culture.

  What is the Colombian variation on the South American theme? The tourist with time on his hands takes the paddle steamer up the Magdalena River to the railhead for Bogotá, learns patience as it sticks on the sandbanks and he stares into the water for the snakes that lie among the roots of the water lilies, and for his first sight of the obscene anaconda. Bogotá is the least accessible of the South American capitals, nearly nine thousand feet up in the cold drizzle of the plateau where the Andes gather for the great snowy procession southward. Bogotá used to regard itself as a kind of Athens—a place of high-minded intellectual and political discussion in the best-spoken Spanish of a continent which has murdered the mother tongue, the place where “even the bootblacks have read Proust.” It is, or was, a fine colonial Spanish city with a steady tradition of decent behavior in politics. And then, after the war, the ideas of Franco and Hitler entered Colombia; assassination, civil war degenerating into murderous anarchy, spread over the whole country. In Bogotá there are machine guns outside the president’s palace, the free press is muzzled. Just now a General rules. His task was to stop wholesale murder and village burning. He succeeded for a time, but rather than have the traditional parliamentary parties back, he tried to found a new party on the Peronista model; the villages in the backlands have once more joined the guerrillas and there has been fighting. Colombia’s still far from the relaxing, free and dignified way of political life that was once its pride.

  There was a politico sitting in a newspaper office. I won’t give his name or the town where I met him. Gentle, cultivated, a figure typical of those who have been educated in Europe, he had survived the violent rioting and burning at the time of the International Conference of American States in 1948, the shooting in the Chamber of Representatives in 1949, the machine-gunning in the streets, the horrible massacres in public halls, and his talk recalled the shame of the liberals who had failed to stop Hitler. The fact is, as he explained, that Colombia, Peru and Ecuador have the violence in the Spanish inheritance. The other fact, which he did not explain, is that the highly developed Europeanized group in these countries is the flower of a small “white” minority. The mysterious, upheaving force around them is the mass of the mestizo population who have never been allowed beyond a certain point in political and economic power.

  Meanwhile the traveler flies with delight from one valley in Colombia to the next: to Medellín, to exquisite Popayán, and the lovely warm Cauca Valley, to the boom town of Cali, half of it white and modern among the flowering tulip trees of its romantic ravine, the other half low, pink-walled, barred and shuttered colonial Spain. The women of Cali are lovely; the town appears full of beautiful, educated girls. The people are ecstatic about each new building, each new suburb, its magnificent club, its immense hospital, its colleges and schools. Last year the electricity came on full and now the narrow Spanish streets are jazzed up with neon lighting; the cars speed along the river drive and the new roads. I was driven by a psychiatrist. “Next year,” he said, as we charged a few rival cars—“we hope to have our first traffic lights”—and next year, his profession seemed to imply, he hoped for the first crop of twentieth-century nervous breakdowns. For there is another side to this agreeable picture. I counted twenty murders in the province that weekend. “These people do not dream,” the psychiatrist complained. “If there is anything in the unconscious it comes out in action at once.”

  On the mountainside outside Cali are the immense shack villages, waterless, evil, infected. Meat and bread are beyond the purses of the wretched. They work in the cane fields and on the farms; on Friday they carry their branch of bananas home to feed the family for the week. They are industrious, intelligent, imaginative people; but once the aguardiente which is made from molasses gets inside the idle, smiling man in jeans who is fingering the blade of his machete, he will use the weapon on his neighbor instead of on the sugar cane.

  Green, fertile, flowering, rich in all fruits and crops, the Cauca Valley is lovely under its mountains. The mulatto women stand knee-deep in the streams washing their linen. In the streets of Cali there is always someone sweeping the dust off the pavement with a broom. At night you see the twinkle of altars through the open doors of the churches. You see the signals of lovers from doorway to window or the couples under the jasmine-scented trees of the park by the rushing water of the ravine. The air is warm and fragrant and heavy and the villas of the rich look like wedding cakes. It is idyllic. And there is the pleasure of knowing this is a place growing carelessly. In the restaurant the saxophone player did not play to us but went out to tootle on the balcony because he hoped to see a friend; and when the couple at the next table got up primly to dance, they had to do so with circumspection; a rat was running round the tables.

  Ecuador

  I got up at six and left Cali on a damp morning for Quito in Ecuador. The clouds were low on the mountains but after a few hours we saw the green forests give way to the bare, brown, terraced mountains of Ecuador. We were entering the valley where Quito stands at one end of its famous avenue of volcanoes.

  Ecuador is a small country and, like the others of the Spanish corner, it is divided into three parts: the tropics, the tableland and the peaks. Between 10 and 15 percent of its people are white, of Spanish blood, with some central European refugees; the remaining two million odd (they guess) are Indian, mestizo, Negro or mulatto. There are also a few Asiatics. In Ecuador you stand in soundless and breathless leagues of acacia scrub, among the volcanoes and, for the first time, among Indians. From Quito to Cuzco and on to La Paz, in the Tibet of South America, you are always at ten thousand feet or more, breathing thin air, deafened by the hammers in the head, and a little mad. The skin cracks, the voice goes husky. You stare back at the expressionless stare of Mongolians who seem to have been cut out of mahogany by an imperceptible dry wind that is as fine as a knife. These men and women, sexually distinguishable only because the woman has a little mahogany baby sticking its head out of the blanket on her back, are the dispossessed heirs and slaves of the Inca empire, and now the bond servants of the feudal estates of Ecuador and Peru. (The Inca empire lasted four hundred years and stretched from Quito down to Chile, where the Araucanian Indians fought it off.)

  The Indians squat, still as stone, against the walls under the arcades of Quito, motionless in their ponchos, oddly sophisticated in their brown trilby (fedora) hats. They seem to possess the city by force of peaceable but perhaps meaningful vigil. They camp in the markets, they cry “Oh, Father” or “Oh, Mother” as they kneel b
efore the altars in the churches.

  I went late one night to the congress and, in that little parliament like a shabby and romantic nineteenth-century ballroom, with its chocolate pillars, its gold cornices and its oil paintings of generals and presidents, the Indians had turned the visitors’ gallery into a camp. The men in ponchos and hats stood in a row looking down at the black-coated politicians; the women, squatting on the floor behind them, fed their babies in a mess of sugary drinks and nutshells. Some were drunk. One drunken soldier, with only one leg, was propped against the wall, snoring louder than any oratory from below.

  “The captain,” someone said. “The hero of the revolution.” Which revolution?

  A man from Uruguay said that such homely and feudal behavior would never be allowed in Montevideo. An Ecuadorian apologized. To me it was moving.

  Occasionally the men standing at the edge of the balcony cheered and applauded. A second later, the women behind clapped their hands too. Was it the new democratic feeling for freedom and free speech for all, established by Galo Plaza, that distinguished and genial president and landowner, educated in the United States? Or was it the old feudal life of the hacienda where the servants gather with familiarity about the masters, the old human democracy? I do not know. I suppose some Ecuadorians will be annoyed when I mention the youth in jeans who yawned on the steps of the president’s dais and scratched his armpits, but I hope not. The sight of the working parliament in Ecuador was, for me, one of the most hopeful sights in South America.

  The Indians are in the streets, the Indians are in the art. There is a cult of the Indians. But they are still serfs on the huge estates where the Friesian-Holsteins graze in the lovely Andean valleys.

  Quito is the most Spanish-looking city in South America and architecturally the richest. The fine things of all this Pacific coast are survivals. Earthquakes have destroyed city after city. Travelers complain of the lack of Gothic architecture but—who knows?—there may have been Gothic brought down in a cloud of rubble three or four hundred years ago. The wonderful churches of Quito are now drenched in the Inca gold of the baroque. The Spanish artists came out here at the beginning of the sixteenth century and (it is evident) there must have been Moorish converts among the conquerors. You look up at magnificent ceilings of cedar conceived in the Moorish geometry and honeycomb. The noble doorway of the Compañía is in the full flourish of Spanish baroque; San Francisco echoes the Escorial outside Madrid; the tiled domes of churches and cathedral recall Valencia and Saragossa, and as the day ends, you hear the rancorous Spanish bells. The riches of Quito in Ecuador and of Cuzco in Peru show us that if the Spaniards were destroyers they were also builders. Pizarro, the swineherd from the tableland of Castile who became the great conquistador, the discoverer of Peru, the destroyer of the Inca Empire on the tableland of the Andes, led his men on a staggering enterprise that began as a search for gold and plunder, but the imperial and religious impulse was behind it. The Spaniards brought their fighting powers and religious fanaticism from hundreds of years of warfare against the Moorish invaders in Spain; and some of that fighting was in living memory of Pizarro’s men. The bells of Quito ought to suggest to the imaginative ear the bells of a resurgent civilization.

  In Quito there was gold for coloring the decorative orgy and there were hardwoods for carvers of pulpits and chapel rails, choirs and organ lofts; for the sculpturing of angels’ wings and climbing flowers and peeping cherubs and saints that seem to waltz like people in a painted enchantment. Fancifully they carved the nipples of fertile women or the faces of demons upon the choir stalls; with naive terror they cut the wing and eye and claw of the condor or of some mythical bird; under the severe thumb of the classical master, his Indian craftsmen copied the classical Spanish austerity. In Mexico, where the Spaniards were extirpating a bloody religion and felt themselves more violently challenged, they allowed the Indian craftsmen less freedom. In any case, Mexico felt the first passion of the Spanish impulse; South America felt the second, less exalted wave. Pizarro was not Cortés and the Indians were less bloody. The madonnas have sometimes an Indian look and are, at any rate, less fair than the Mediterranean goddesses; the Christs bleed at the knees for, no less than the Spaniards, these people delight in the sight of blood or at least do not show the usual northern aversion to it.

  A great many of the Indians in Ecuador are the tied serfs on the great estates. They live in clay-colored adobe huts which shake to dust in their earthquakes. You see the Indians at a country market like Otavalo, stirring their stewpans or eating some yellow mess, one or two eating, one or two against the wall brooding, one or two stretched out dead-drunk. They have been at the market since the hard cold dawn. They stand before their sacks of beans, their yellow and speckled corn, their heaps of newly sheared wool, the wool they have dyed and woven into ponchos, blankets and scarves, before their trays of golden-looking glass beads. These, coiled many times round the neck or dangling in great loads, indicate the wealth of the woman who wears them. The women, in their heavy, white, basinlike hats, sit and stare across their earthenware, their carven bulls, their heaps of purple pineapples and tropical fruits. These markets are crowded and silent—though you hear the loudspeaker in the modern market—and there will be no sound but the whisper of bare feet on the ground. Speak to the Indians and few can answer, for they do not speak Spanish, but they will utter an obsequious and bashful twittering.

  By midday they will be drunk on chicha, the sugared alcohol made from maize, or on the alcohol that has been collected in a hole cut in the stems of the aloes which stand along the roads of the wilderness like swords. A pole with a white rag sticking out of a doorway is the sign of a chicha seller; a red flag denotes not the Communist party but the butcher; a bunch of flowers, the seller of coca leaves. There are sacks of these dried leaves in the market. They are bitter-tasting and the Indians add lime leaves to sweeten them. The coca comforts, but the lime dries and draws the mouth. Out comes the flask of aguardiente and the marketplace is harmlessly drugged and drunk at once—harmlessly because the Indian, unlike the mulatto, does not get out his knife, but rolls stiffly about with the innocence of an uncoordinated marionette.

  There is continual controversy about the evils of coca chewing and the wickedness of the landlords who grow it and the governments that allow it to be grown. The Incas knew the power of the coca leaf. The rulers controlled its use. They reserved it for soldiers; for the wonderful runners who carried news and royal commands along the mountain highway from Quito to Cuzco; and for their priests. To the soldiers and runners the coca leaf gave energy in the thin and exhausting air of the high mountains; in religion, the leaf was used only in those annual ceremonies which required religious ecstasy. The coca leaf was rare and valued. The Spaniards broke the monopoly and allowed it to everyone, and now it has become the general drug that takes the mind of the Indian off his continual hunger.

  No one can say whether the passivity of the Indian is the result of life at high altitude—it has obviously affected his voice—or how far the drug has induced it. One can only watch him stagger home, his tarry pigtail wagging, across the plain where the blue and yellow acacia shrub grows on the burial mounds of his great ancestors, to the little hut on the great estate. Cotopaxi and Chimborazo, those two volcanoes with the starch-white peaks; green Coliachi by its cold lake where the flocks of white herons rise and the women beat the clothes with frothing aloe leaves—all the volcanoes of Ecuador stare at him as he tumbles into the ditch or a friend props him desperately against a wall. Will it matter to him that the Fascist party is on the decline, that Galo Plaza has given friendly lessons in Western democracy, or that the rich traders of the tropical plain at Guayaquil are troublesome to the well-educated rulers of Quito? What does he think of the rich dancers and the excellent band at the nightclub outside the city? And does he know that down in tropical Ecuador thrive his red-painted cousins, the Colorados, who paint their bodies with the dye of the achiote seed? We cannot tell. He i
s simply one of the millions of violently disparate human beings in South American life.

  The Inca highway ran from Quito down to Cuzco. You can sometimes see it scratched and zigzagging up the flanks of the mountains—miles of it are still paved—and imagine the relays of royal runners who brought the news of the Spaniards’ arrival over a thousand miles in a day or two to the emperor Atahualpa, whom Pizarro captured and murdered.

  But Cuzco was still to come. I sat eating cold lobster in hot peppery sauce and drinking beer at midday at the airport in Quito, waiting for the international plane to take us down to the tropical port of Guayaquil, where the sea was white in the heat; and then on to Lima in Peru. We would arrive in the evening. It was the first of the superb Pacific flights.

  Peru

  In Ecuador, even in that valley called the avenue of volcanoes, you know the Andes only by one or two peaks that stand up like white strangers in a sky that is as blue at the zenith as it is at the horizon. Now, flying down the coast over the sea’s edge, you can survey at leisure the full splendor of the cordillera, hour after hour. Whether to look at the Peruvian mountain or desert is the difficulty. Between twenty-five and forty miles wide, the desert runs for fourteen hundred miles of bleached, blinding, waterless sand and continues into the chemical-and-copper desert of Chile. Occasionally a short Pacific watercourse brings a stain of vegetation, but, in the main, the desert is picked as white as a skeleton by the ferocious sun. At sunrise, there is the sound of drums: it is the curious music of the sand grains being blown against the dunes. From this flat desert floor the Andes rise abruptly, so that for the first time in our lives we see mountains from top to bottom, from sea level to their peaks.