There were shacks all over these hills, in the most unlikely places, built against boulders and cave entrances, and at the bottom of sand pits. I came to fear them, because at each one there was a mangy dog which ran out and yapped at me, snarling into its paws. I was genuinely frightened of being bitten by one of these mutts: they had a crazy rabid look, and a bark from one excited barks from other dogs hidden all over the stony hillside. Giving these dogs a wide berth, I strayed from the mule-tracks; and then my map was no help. I guided myself back to Cali using the crosses on Golgotha as my landmarks.
I mentioned the dogs to a Colombian that evening. There seemed to be a lot of mutts in the hills, I said. Were they dangerous?
'Some of the dogs are dangerous,' he said. 'But all the snakes are deadly poisonous.'
'I did not see any snakes.'
'Maybe not. But they saw you.'
To celebrate my departure from Cali, I went to an expensive Sunday-night buffet at one of the fancy restaurants. There was a group of American missionaries in the place, perhaps spending a weekend away from their mission. There were two enormous men, and two fat women, a pot-bellied boy and some smaller children; they were the sort of Bible-punching Baptists who are sometimes found bristling with poisoned arrows on a tributary of the upper Amazon, meddlesome mid-westerners groping and preaching their way through the blankest part of the South American map, only to meet, just in time for the church newsletter back home, a peculiarly grisly martyrdom. But tonight they were having a whale of a time: they made repeated trips to the buffet table, seconds, thirds, and then dessert. That pie is scrumptious!' The waiters looked on in bewilderment and incredulity as they were asked to dismember another chicken or hack another cake apart. I wanted very badly to talk to the missionaries, but they kept to themselves - all ten of them, at a long table. In Costa Rica, on the Mosquito Coast, I had found the setting for a story about castaways; here, across the room at this hotel in southern Colombia, I saw who those castaways might be. God had sent them here.
The centrepiece of the buffet was a three-foot ice carving, a lyre-shaped object which melted slowly and dripped onto the tablecloth as the evening passed. It was interesting, because in the Cali slums and in the villages I had seen that afternoon there was no ice, and in some places nearby no water. Here, ice was frivolous decoration, and I found its foolish shape objectionable. Studying this piece of ice sculpture, I was accosted by a fat woman. At first, I thought she might be one of the missionaries. But no, she was speaking Spanish.
'What do you call these in English?' she asked.
'Oranges,' I said, feeling once again that my moustache was a failure.
'Narrishes,' she said, and in Spanish, 'I want to learn English. You can teach me. These?'
'Grapes.'
'Crepes.'
'Good evening.' It was a man in black, with a dog-collar - a priest. 'Get your food, Maria,' he said. The woman smiled at me and then walked to the far end of the buffet table. 'She talks to everyone,' said the priest. 'You must forgive her. She is retarded.'
The woman was heaping her plate with food. She had a broad plain face and pale eyes, and the sort of unusual bulk, the benjy-fat you see in the mad and housebound, who do nothing but stare out of the window.
'Her father was very rich. He died two years ago,' said the priest. 'Extremely rich.' The priest made a noise, a slurp of pity.
'Is Maria in your parish?'
'Ah, no. She is all alone,' said the priest. 'I look after her.'
The priest had a matador's thin face and dark stare; he glanced at Maria, he glanced at me. He had an anxious smile and lines of suspicion set this smile in parenthesis. We were soon joined by a solemn man in a blue shirt.
This is Father Padilla,' said the first priest. 'He is a Capuchin. Father Padilla, this gentleman is an American. You must excuse me while I see to Maria.' He hurried to the buffet; Maria had begun to talk to another stranger.
I turned to Father Padilla and said, 'You are not dressed like a priest.'
'We do not wear those clothes anymore,' he said. 'In Colombia it is not the custom.'
'Capuchins?'
‘All.'
'But your friend,' I said, indicating the man in black, helping Maria with her plate, 'he is wearing his collar.'
Father Padilla frowned. 'He is not a priest.'
Strange: the priest in a sports shirt, the layman in a dog-collar. I said, 'He seems to be one.'
'He is a sort of helper, but not in my parish.'
The black-suited man looked up. Seeing that he had stopped filling her plate, Maria scolded him. The man jerked the tines of his fork into a slab of ham.
'She is rich?'I said.
'Very rich,' said Father Padilla. 'But in my district everyone is poor. They have nothing.'
I told him what I had seen in Armenia - the children in the doorway. How could such a situation be allowed to continue?
He said, 'It is incomprehensible to me that some people in this country are so rich and others so poor. It is a terrible situation. There are tens of thousands of children who live like that. Why is this so? I cannot explain it.'
The bogus priest came over with Maria. He guided her as if he was a zoo-keeper with a rare clumsy animal. He said, 'She wants to ask you a question.'
Maria was drooling. She held a silver implement in her hand. 'How do you say this in English?'
'Spoon.'
'Boon.' It was an infant's utterance. 'Come with me. You must eat with us at our table. You can teach me English.'
'I am sorry,' I said. 'I have to go.'
The bogus priest led her away.
Father Padilla watched them go. Then he said, 'I want you to know that I do not come here often. This is perhaps the second time. You understand?'
'Yes,'I said.
'Good luck on your travels,' he said. 'God be with you.'
15
THE AUTOFERRO TO GUAYAQUIL
In Central America and Colombia I had met a number of people, who were travelling north, who told me of the excitements of the Guayaquil and Quito Railway - the 'G and Q', or 'the Good and Quick', as it is known to those who have not ridden on it. It had taken thirty-seven years to build (it was finished in 1908), although it was less than 300 miles long. From an altitude of over 9,000 feet at Quito, the Auto ferro - a converted bus welded to a railway undercarriage - rises another 3,000 feet at Urbina and then drops down a series of confined switchbacks and loops (the Devil's Nose double zig-zag! the Alausi Loop!) to sea-level at the steamy southern port of Guayaquil. I had no difficulty getting information about it; the station was nearby, service was frequent and a ticket cost no more than a few dollars. I was confident that this trip would be easy; confidence made me procrastinate. I agreed to give a lecture in Quito; people at that lecture invited me to parties; I went to the parties and tried to be amusing. The train could wait: I would be on it any day now.
The weather in Quito was a source of wonder to me. It made ceaseless adjustments throughout the day. There were times when the cloud hung so low over the city that it seemed as if I could reach up and peel wisps of vapour from the ceiling of the sky. I lived on a hill and could see a zone of clear air and, just above it, this lowering cloud. The mornings were often sunny, the afternoons grey, and in the evening some cloud settled and another tide of it rolled across the city, putting out the lights in houses, blurring the neon signs, and finally obscuring the yellow street-lamps, until Quito seemed an uninhabited place, or less, merely a chute of air down which whorls of opaque fluff tumbled. One morning it drizzled, and very tiny birds - the size of cuckoos in cuckoo clocks: but they were hummingbirds - crouched in the branches of a bush, each bird requiring no more than the shelter of a small leaf to keep it dry.