Cloud Road (8 page)

Like most Andean cities, Riobamba has been flattened by a natural disaster, in this case, an earthquake in 1797 which levelled much of Ecuador and killed 40,000 people.
A contemporary, González Suárez, captured the peculiar terror that earth-changing events commanded in an era when Christian men believed the earth was made in seven days, and had remained unchanged ever since:

Having been rebuilt over two centuries, Riobamba lacks the look of Ambato, that it was all built by the same company, or, worse, Latacunga, which looks as if it was all made from the same batch of cement. In the handsome main square, the old Colonial façade of the cathedral was side-lit, throwing the heavily carved columns, doors and panels into high relief. Behind it, the side-streets looked east, up to the mountains where large cumulus and cumulo-nimbus clouds were building. As the afternoon grew late, their whites and pale dove-greys were picking up tints of lemon, rose and gold, when, suddenly, as the clouds rolled back for a few minutes, I could see black dust boiling out of the crater of Tungurahua: a glimpse of a devil’s kitchen under those celestial clouds.

At 16,475 feet, Tungurahua, meaning Black Giant, is not one of the tallest Ecuadorian volcanoes but it is one of the most active, almost continuously belching out steam and dust, creating its own mantle of cloud and vapour. The latest eruption began in October 1999, and initially
prompted temporary evacuation of the entire town of Baños, on the north side of the volcano. I climbed to a small park which overlooked the whole of Riobamba. To the north, the snow and ice of Chimborazo was glazed in the delicate pink of water seeping from cut strawberries. To the south, Tungurahua poured coils of dense black clouds up into the fluffy gold and white cumulus. The Local Puruha people of Pastaza valley believed Chimborazo was male and Tungurahua female, and they were the gods who had created their people and the cosmos: no wonder. I stopped, mouth open; but no one else gave it a glance. Just another day living with volcanoes.

A few blocks above the main square, there is a famous Museum of Religious Art at Riobamba’s convent. The Andes produced some superb woodcarvers, and Riobamba had works by the very best: a native Ecuadorian called José Olmos who was active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The anatomy of his figures is superb, and the carving approaches perfection. The limbs have an eerie sheen to them, like that on a body hovering between life and death. It was produced by rubbing animal fat into the wood before painting. He ushered in a period where the limbs became a little longer and more slender, exemplifying a Christ in greater repose with his suffering. But even José Olmos’s best crucifixion has a Christ whose back is in ribbons: love is expressed by blood. Were they telling the Incas and the Aztecs anything new? Both had long known that the gods demanded the blood of the most perfect. There was simply an inversion: a religion in which people were sacrificed for the gods was replaced by one in which a god was sacrificed for people.

By contrast, the cathedral concealed a wonderful
surprise. The exterior is classic early colonial; exuberant carving romps over the whole façade. But the renovated chapel has a series of modern murals which are native in style and subversive in subject matter. The disciples at the Last Supper are modern Ecuadorians; the ordinary people who every day bend their knees at the pews. Christ is the only bearded figure – native Sierra men have little or no facial hair – and he is not central, but seated to one side. He cups a handful of soil in which a seedling is uncurling, an image central to traditional fertility beliefs. The focus of the composition is a woman in native dress, breaking bread. She is the Inca Earth-Mother: Pachamama. Around the table, next to bowls of local fruits and roast guinea pig, a lute lies ready for the dancing which will follow. On the walls are celebrations of the richness of the life of the Andes: hummingbirds sip nectar from garlands of flowers. Men and women dance in close, and mildly drunken, embrace. Small children stand on tiptoe to hug the warm neck of a favourite llama. A businessman appears as a basin-jawed pinstriped thug. One half of his face is a skull topped by a general’s hat. He is white, of course. Judas is a reporter with a cassette recorder and microphone. Resistance to the conquest continues.

I gave my feet a holiday and took a coach day trip along the road to Baños to look for living fossils of the Inca empire: the people of Salasaca. As we left the town, street vendors invaded at every junction, walking the aisle, touting banana chips, lemonade, water, apples, mandarins, four scented pens for a dollar, sweets and ice creams. A man dressed like an evangelist made a wellprepared speech to introduce us to a particularly uplifting chocolate bar promotion he was running.

Salasaca straggled aimlessly along the dusty main road, then stopped abruptly because it had run out of ideas. The very first man I saw was wearing a broad-brimmed white hat, white shirt and trousers and a soft black woollen poncho. It is a traditional outfit that the people in this small area still wear, but it is not from Ecuador, or even neighbouring Peru. He is a political exile, and his ancestors were brought here from Bolivia over five hundred years ago by the Incas, as part of their imperial policy for pacifying newly conquered lands.

For as far back as we can see, Andean history has always gone through cycles of unification and disintegration. Major cultural expansion and empire building were only favoured when rainfall was reliable. Otherwise, the huge vertical changes in climate, and therefore agriculture, encouraged small cultures closely adapted to local conditions. Occasionally, opportunism and ambition united them. The most astounding expansion was that of a small hill tribe. In little more than a hundred years, the Incas expanded from their heartland around Cuzco to create what was then the greatest empire in the world, stretching 3,400 miles from the south Colombian border to central Chile. They did not, like the Mongols in Asia, operate as a purely military force. Where possible, they preferred to absorb rather than conquer, and exercised considerable diplomatic efforts to avoid outright war. Where they met military resistance, they responded with two main strategies: either conciliatory negotiation, assuring the enemy of the Inca’s kindly future intentions, or a savage assault to annihilate resistance.

The Romans kept citizenship as an honour, not a right. As long as respect was paid to key Roman deities,
conquered people could fill out their pantheon with other gods as they pleased. Likewise, this expanding Cuzco tribe knew they could not make everyone Incas, nor did they want to: that was a privilege they guarded jealously for themselves. As long as the authority of the Inca and his father, the Sun, was respected, local culture could continue. Indeed, conquered peoples were required to maintain their original dress so their identity could always be seen. When people from newly absorbed nations were brought to Cuzco, they were allocated separate precincts to live in, arranged so the map of the city slowly became both a microcosm and a map of the empire. To absorb new tribes smoothly into empire, people from older,
well-integrated
regions of empire were moved to freshly acquired territories. This was called
mitimaes
, and was devised to ease the tensions and dangers of rapid conquest and expansion. If new subjects absconded and were caught, they were tortured for a first offence, and killed for a second. The man in white clothes and black poncho was a living record of this exchange. It is clothing from the shores of Lake Titikaka, 1,150 miles away as the condor flies, and Salasaca’s people are of Bolivian descent.

The Bartolomé de las Casas Secondary School spilled out its pupils at lunchtime, all the boys wearing traditional Bolivian dress. They stood chatting in front of the motto on the school wall:

I asked Ramiro, a fourteen-year-old with huge teeth and bigger hair, if he knew the history of the clothing. He said ‘Certainly!’ and told the story well.

‘Do you feel Bolivian?’ He and his friend Mariano smiled bashfully, ‘No, Bolivia is backward!’

I did a small walk south, to the village of Punín. Soon, I was over a small hill, Riobamba was out of sight, and I dropped into a steep-sided green canyon. It was humid, and the air was practically crackling. Still on tarmac, I was tracking up the hairpins with my head down, a bad habit that I was cured of the next minute. Suddenly, just five feet in front of me, there was no tarmac, no road, no land, just fresh air. Had I been carrying a full pack my momentum would have carried me right up to the edge, which was snaked with fissures and highly unstable. A strip fifty yards long and several yards wide along the side of the road had fallen into the valley below, leaving a vertical cliff a hundred and fifty feet high.

The whole of the rest of the walk was a depressing reminder of one of the problems facing Ecuador today: soil erosion. This is not the gradual depletion of surface soil, but the complete re-forming of the landscape. The valley floor to my left was once flat agricultural land sloping gently down to Riobamba. Now there is a V-shaped gorge cut hundreds of feet deep into it, whose sides are so steep it is uncrossable in most places. In a single river basin, you would measure the lost soil in cubic miles. Deforestation, regular burning and poor farming techniques are the main culprits. In this parish of Punín, families farm small plots and suffer many other problems, including poor soil fertility and an extreme range of temperatures. Few people have access to affordable credit,
and the traditional way of life is under threat as family incomes fall. Many have gone to the towns seeking, but seldom getting, work. Catholic Relief Services are working with five hundred families in the area, teaching new methods of cultivating crops, and raising small livestock such as guinea pigs, rabbits, chickens and sheep. They are also setting up community banks to offer micro-credit: in a severely cash-poor rural economy, small sums make the difference between survival and failure.

Punín village was a few poor adobe houses around a huge square. A massive church occupied all one side of it; a school and convent took much of two others. Sad shops with empty shelves made an effort to make the town seem half-alive. Although there was no hostel, a rusting old sign welcomed me to ‘The Tourist Capital of the Central Country’. The church was shut, and there was no reply at the convent. The main occupation seemed to be waiting for a bus to get out of town. I stayed ten minutes and joined the queue.

Back in my room, black eyes stared back at me from the mirror. My skin was dry, and I looked very tired; there were lazy droops at the corner of my mouth. I shaved. Removing my beard takes five years from me so I shave when I need cheering up. My exposed face shone, naked and exposed, like a peeled egg. The person in the mirror, whom I only saw every week or so, was a stranger to me: a photograph of a long-dead relative I had never met. I couldn’t imagine how this fellow-traveller fared in the world; I had no more skill to read his heart than if he had sat beside me on the bus. I pushed the wrinkles about. I remembered, on one of the rare summer’s days when my father sunbathed, casting a teenager’s cold eye over his
slim, milk-white body, cuffed by neck and hands sunburnt deep brown from gardening. I resolved that the lack of attention which had let his body grow old would not happen to me. I am now older than he was then. My eyes, hazel like his, have begun to lose their intensity. My grandfather, a tough old sailor, and still a belligerent man in his eighties, also ambushed my reflection with his fleshy, aquiline nose and prominent ears. I stripped for the cold water shower; my neck, face and hands were sunburnt, everything else ivory. With the white soap I stroked the backs of my hands: tide-washed skin crossed by turquoise veins, dry fish-scale skin.

Next day, feeling a little better, I bussed back to Punín. The walk up out of the village was a pleasant, even climb on a dirt road. The map showed a walk of about four and a half miles to the next village, Flores, but I had my first experience of one of the difficulties of walking in the mountains. At eleven o’clock, after five miles, there was no sign of Flores. I was on the right road, everyone assured me, but the village was
‘¡Más arriba!’
, higher up, making a loose shrug with their arms. Although the map indicated a few broad curves in the ascending road, the actual track over the ground was an endless sequence of ever steeper hairpins clawing their way up the mountain. My planned walking for the morning was three times the length shown on the map, whose curves were just the cartographer’s equivalent of the local’s forearm shrug: a general indication; a loose idea of what was there. By cutting down on rests, I made Flores by half past twelve. The streets were nearly empty. The owner of the corner shop was a slim, very upright woman wearing a hard, brown traditional felt hat in the shape of a bowler. Her
front teeth were fashionably edged with gold, and her Spanish was a pleasure to listen to. I told her what I was doing. She laughed and said, ‘I am as old as you. Tell me what you eat to make you so strong!’

As I gained height, I left a lush, narrow valley of smallholdings below me. When I next stopped to drink, a pretty little girl with a filthy face, bare feet and miniature oysters of snot on her top lip stood five yards off, staring with eyes old beyond her years. I gave her some biscuits. She took them the way a wild animal might, coming close enough to snatch, and darting back. When I stood up to leave, she held out a hand that was nearly black with dirt, ‘
¡Plata!
’ – money.

I seldom gave money for nothing. It is a hard but necessary policy. Tossing a child fifty cents might make you feel good for five minutes, but it teaches the child that foreigners provide something for nothing and it’s okay to beg. It can also belittle the money adults make from their work; a porter might get fifty cents for ten minutes of heavy work. I would pay for photographs or tip someone who walked with me to show the way. But sometimes you look into the eyes of the person asking and your hand goes to your pocket and pushes your principles out of reach.