Cloud Road (2 page)

I hiked to the modern centre around Amazonas Avenue to see the Vivarium, a private collection of snakes and reptiles in a corner house in a quiet residential side-street named Volcanoes Avenue. Behind the glass, snakes lay coiled and draped in torpor. Skeletons showed their slender construction: their ribs as fine as fish bones. The false coral snake grows up to six feet long and has a Latin name to match:
Lampropeltis triangulum micropholis
. It is striped in red and cream and white and common around Quito, and, in block capitals, HARMLESS. Unfortunately the Vivarium had no specimen of the highly venomous true coral snake for me to learn the difference. Nearby was the creature I really needed to get to know, the fer-de-lance: mottled green with darker bands on its flanks, the colour of grass in shadow. It favours cultivated fields and riverbanks. I would be passing through a lot of those. It is extremely dangerous, and, I realised, soberly contemplating its bored, lidded eye, extremely hard to see. I looked at the map which showed its long narrow range. It was a map of my route.

My spirits were not lifted by returning to the old city and touring the colonial churches. They are virtually windowless – faith is a shade-loving plant – but within them shone the wealth of the Americas. The builders commanded gold and silver by the mule-load, precious stones by the sack. Many wealthy people did not invest in
business. Instead they saved and hoarded, and when they died they bequeathed their loot to the church; that is, if death granted them time to reveal where it was hidden. Even now, when colonial houses are demolished or damaged by earthquake, treasure may spill out among the rubble and dust, testaments to misers who would not trust a wife, son, daughter or lawyer, and died with their secret hidden in their dried-up hearts. The fortunes passing to the church would have embarrassed Croesus. The gold and silver which smothers the church altars is not leaf, but plate, as thick as card. The architects’ only problem was when to stop; frequently they didn’t.

In the San Francisco Monastery, the paintings were amok with gruesome sado-masochistic scenes: Franciscans were sawn in half by devils using a rather fine wooden bow-saw, demons knelt on their chests and beat them about the face with stout cudgels. In the scenes above them, dimly visible in the profounder gloom, demons pursued their individual fascinations: lashing, flaying and amateur dentistry. However much the Spanish abused the physical welfare of the Indians, they took the saving of souls very seriously. They spread the name of Christ in a way the English and French showed no interest in doing in North America, even debating what shape a native soul might be. The endless Council of Trent, 1545–63, recommended the conversion of natives and other illiterates through the visual arts. The toiling masses took their texts from the paintings on the church wall; almost all showed Jesus suffering.

In the monastery’s museum is a display of work by the old masters of Quitan woodcarving. They delivered the party line, the orthodoxy of Catholic Spain. Christ is never
the teacher, the healer or the man of love; he is a piece of surgery, scourged and nailed. The last dark hours of his life are the only ones that mattered, when his love was expressed in sacrifice. In an illiterate society these bloodily insistent images bear a message, and it is not love, but guilt: he died for you, sin is within every baby, you are a sinner, and the church dispenses forgiveness. The Bible itself was dangerous; a rival source of authority for Spanish Imperial Catholicism. Priests boasted that they had never read the Bible and never would. As late as 1907, the Easter Week sermon of Bishop Holguín of Arequipa called for the prohibition of seditious work, naming Zola, Voltaire, Rousseau and the ‘Protestant’ Bible, meaning the Bible in translation.

The painting
Infierno
, completed in 1620 by Hernando de la Cruz, spells out the cost of sin. The unjust boil in a pot, some still wearing their crowns. A rumour-monger is in a hole with a snake. Professionally, I check to see if it is a true or false coral snake: can’t be sure, he could get away with this. The burlesque show depicting homicides looks like the night a knife-thrower took LSD. A male adulterer is suffering in the places he enjoyed his sin: in a nice touch of local colour, a monkey vomits molten lava onto his genitals. A grinning devil pours more into his mouth, using a funnel to ensure none goes to waste. Plainly he likes his work, and wants to get on.

Until recently, Santo Domingo church seemed on the edge of ruin; an emergency roof looked ready to totter and fall at the next thunderclap. Steel beams had been put across the nave and a suspended steel ceiling was in place. I edged my way by the vendors of candles, texts and icons of the saints, past the smart man hawking a luxury edition
of the Bible, past a bundle of rags with a single, brown claw extended for alms. Mass was finishing. The faithful spilled out into the square, many wiping tears from their eyes.

The main square was a pleasant park flanked by the old cathedral, rambling down the hill on my left-hand side. Colonnades with small shops stood behind me and to my right. The top was commanded by the long, graceful Government Palace. The square is a great meeting place in the short evenings, somewhere to stroll and sit, for lovers to meet and sit on the rim of the fountain, for men to take a shoe-shine, read the newspaper, smoke a cigarette. Tonight the thunderclouds, which had been crackling over the surrounding hills in the late afternoon, had cleared, and a warm honey-coloured light bathed the palace’s stucco extravagances. The craftsmen who made them were called ‘silversmiths in plaster’. On the next bench to me were twin sisters, wearing denim skirts, pearl tights and salmon-coloured cardigans. They fiddled incessantly with their hair: combed straight back, with a single metal grip to hold up the fringe. Maybe thirteen years old, they were already stocky, with broad peasant hips, deep rib cages. Their heads were large, with heavy features. They were the shape of women who have had two children; and please-God-I’m-only-late. They have blinked and gone from children to miniature adults. Adolescence went missing; childhood, when was it? Above, in the tree’s white limbs, a bird sang sweetly; from the next, another responded.

One night the peace was shattered. Suddenly the square teemed with riot police and soldiers with automatic weapons at the ready. Orange tape barred people from the garden, and an armoured vehicle stood on the pavement. An old, blind lady, with a pyramid of black hair falling
from her shoulders, tapped her way across the street, and met a strange lump of iron blocking her usual route home: a tank. Her white stick groped its way over the armour plate, down the side and along the caterpillar tracks with a rat-a-tat-tat. Suddenly floodlights had drowned the front of the palace in light. Perhaps I was witnessing the beginning of a revolution. I asked a sergeant what was happening. ‘They are filming an American movie!’ he said.
‘Proof of Life
, a kidnap story starring Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe. We’re all extras!’

Next lunchtime San Francisco Square was again full of soldiers and military police, surrounding the ministry building next to the church. One called me over, conspiratorially: ‘Get closer, you’re a journalist, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ seemed to be the right answer, and I took out my notebook. He placed me in front of the wall of guards, with the officers. ‘Who are we waiting for?’ I asked, looking down at the waiting motorcade: two police cars, a Lincoln Continental limousine with black windows and seven Chevrolet four-wheel drives.

‘The President and Vice-President.’

In a few minutes a tall man with a grey beard but no moustache passed down the steps next to me. President Noboa was thick-waisted and moved slowly and deliberately, with a slight stoop. He wore a grey suit with a maroon tie. My overall impression was of an avuncular academic, which, in a politician, always makes me cautious. Stalin looked avuncular. Amongst other things, Dr Gustavo Noboa was actually a career academic before taking up politics; again, not necessarily good news. So was Peru’s ex-President and disgraced embezzler, Alberto Fujimori. But his quiet manner was reassuring after
Ecuador’s experience when President Abdula Bucaram celebrated his 1996 election by releasing a record of himself singing ‘Jailhouse Rock’. He was nicknamed ‘The Nutter’, and after further bizarre public behaviour he was removed from office for mental incapacity, and went to jail.

Vice-President Calvites, a smaller man in a black suit, emerged with his head bowed deeply, talking to his feet while the men around him nodded continuously. He sported the President’s missing moustache, and a ruby birthmark, splashed across his right cheek.

The problems they face are profound. Ecuador had recently suffered the collapse of its currency and
per capita
income is less than a third of the Latin American average, while it labours under one of the heaviest debt burdens. Presidential power is weakened by the prevalence of many moderate-sized political parties, who group and re-group in shifting coalitions and alliances. With some exceptions, the economy has done badly for twenty years, often going backwards. Most children will suffer protein deficiency, which, if unrelieved for the first five years of life, will permanently destroy a quarter of the intelligence they would have enjoyed. For many of Ecuador’s citizens, each day is a struggle to find food, their bodies leached of energy by long-term under-nourishment.

The demonstration of fraternal flesh-pressing with the ordinary man and woman in the street rang hollow. Doctor Noboa’s other job is being a banana billionaire. Many of his citizens survive on $1 a day. By comparison, every cow in the European Union receives a daily subsidy of $2.25.

I entered the silent haven of a barber’s shop and
stepped back thirty years. From the linoleum beneath my feet to the bevel-edge mirrors, it was a double for Blenkinsop’s in Falmouth. I picked through the old sports magazines and last week’s papers, while two men in white coats snipped away the shocks of hair around the ears, and whispered the news. When my turn came, my hair, falling as if sound was suspended, was brown and grey like my father’s nearly four decades before, when I first put my finger to the picture of Machu Picchu and wished the impossible wish.

I stood outside fingering hair clippings from my collar. It was time to hit the road. I decided, to neaten things up, that I would bus north out of the city to the equator itself, and begin my long journey south at the earth’s middle.

You would have thought the equator was a difficult place to lose. One hundred feet below me, the circular lawn was laid out as a giant compass with paths leading along the four cardinal points to the pyramid on which I stood. Above me was a bronze globe fifteen feet across. A plaque on the monument told me I was standing 78° 27′ 08″ west of the Greenwich Meridian, and my latitude was 0° 0.0′ 0.0″. I was on top of the monument in Ciudad del Mitad del Mundo, the City at the Centre of the World, admission 50 cents. It is not a city or even a village, but a collection of modern tourist shops and cafés, single-storey whitewash with pantile roofs the colour of pencil lead. Further away, below the sprawling car park, ice-cream coloured buses growled over the smart grey paviours of
the new boulevard and up the belly of the earth, to deposit their passengers on its imaginary belt. Ecuador is only one of twelve countries on the equator, but for two reasons it has prime call on it. Firstly, it is named after the line, and, secondly, it was here that a famous and bitter argument about the shape of the earth was finally settled.

It may seem strange that some of the greatest minds of their day spat feathers over whether or not our planet is fatter round the middle or the poles, but, firstly, the answer had a vital theoretical significance, and split the scientists of two great rival nations, more or less on national lines. In the British camp was a good candidate for the title of the greatest intellect that ever lived, Isaac Newton, or rather his ghost, as he had died eight years before the expedition set sail. He argued, from his own gravitational laws, that the rotation of the earth would flatten it at the poles and fatten it at the equator. Newton had shown that the gravity of a large object, like the earth, behaves as if all its mass were located in a single point at its centre. Since gravity diminished with distance, if gravity was less at the equator, it was because it was further from the centre.

In the French camp was the cantankerous shade of Jean Dominique Cassini, a talented but conceited Italian,
headhunted
by Louis XIV to be head of his new Observatory in Paris. He had an impressive pedigree, having discovered four more moons orbiting Saturn, plus the gap in its rings which bears his name. Cassini argued, from measurements taken in his adopted France, that the size of a degree of arc diminished as you went south.

Egos aside, the shape of the earth was also of great practical importance. Despite improvements in maps and
instruments, mariners still made lethal errors in their navigation. If the earth wasn’t round, the length of a degree would vary, getting bigger the further you were from the earth’s centre. To settle the matter, an experiment spanning the globe was devised by the French Académie des Sciences. One expedition, under the mathematician Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, would go to Lapland to measure the length of a degree in the far north. A second was sent to the equator, and, since most equatorial land was unexplored rainforest, the most practical place to conduct the survey was in highland Ecuador, then a part of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. The snag was that Spain had let no foreigners enter her New World possessions for two hundred years, unless they were fighting in her armies. But political fortune was with them. The King of Spain was Philip V, put on the throne by his grandfather, who happened to be Louis XIV of France. Permission to enter Ecuador was obtained, but on condition that Spanish overseers would work alongside them. The man chosen to lead this expedition was Charles Marie de La Condamine, a 34-year-old geographer.

Arriving in Quito in 1736, they first took readings to establish the exact position of the equator, then measured a base line along it with surveying chains. It required the utmost care; every subsequent measurement would depend on the accuracy of this first one. They then began to work south, to measure the distance over the ground of three degrees of latitude, over two hundred miles. The terrain was rough and the mountain climate uncomfortable, freezing them at night and cooking them by day. The work was brutal, hauling heavy but delicate equipment up mountains, then taking precision readings
from temperamental instruments. It was two years before they finished, using the church tower at the town of Cuenca as a final triangulation point. To test the accuracy of their work, they calculated the length of the final side of the last triangle, before actually measuring it, on the ground. The discrepancy was just a few feet.