In spite of the cold, and the altitude that made me breathless, I enjoyed Quito. Of all the mountain-top cities in South America, Quito struck me as being the happiest, and in retrospect Bogotá seemed a cruel towering place, like an eagle's nest now inhabited by vultures and their dying prey. Quito looked altogether cheerier, a plateau of church steeples, with light-coloured houses scattered across the slopes of the mountain which rose above it, and on the higher harder-to-reach slopes of Pichincha were the huts of the very poor who could see Peru from their doorways. But Quito had subtleties that were not discernible to me; a month after I had decided that it was one of the pleasantest places I had seen, and one of the fairest (there were no political prisoners in Ecuador), bus fares were raised to six cents and every bus in the city was destroyed by rioters.
'You must not judge people by their country,' a lady advised me. 'In South America, it is always wise to judge people by their altitude.'
She was from Bolivia herself. She explained that there were fewer national characteristics than high-level characteristics. The mountain people who lived on the heights of the Andes were formal and unapproachable; the valley people were much more hospitable, and the sea-level folk were the sweetest of all, though rather idle and lazy. Someone who lived at an altitude of about 4,000 feet was just about ideal, a really good scout, whether he lived in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, or wherever.
I gave a lecture in Quito and dined out on it for days, meeting writers and teachers and Coca-Cola salesmen. Quito has one of the best bookshops in South America, but I bought no books: my new friends pressed books into my hands, and instead of catching the train to Guayaquil I read the books and stared at hummingbirds. A few days after I arrived I expressed a vague wish to see some of Quito's churches (there are eighty-six), and immediately found myself being chauffeured around to these holy places.
In the Italian-style, Jesuit church, called La Compania, there was a painting of Hell. From a little distance this mural seemed to me an accurate representation of a night-time football game in El Salvador, but on closer inspection it was pure Bosch, Hell's great amphitheatre depicted in detail. Schoolchildren in Quito are brought to the church and shown this mural, so that suitably terrified they will stay on the straight and narrow. Each sin is labelled and the sinners receive appropriate punishment: the shrieking adulteress is being eaten by a wild hog; the impure man is having fire poured through a funnel in his mouth, and a fire-breathing dog is scorching his genitals with flames; the vain woman wears a necklace of scorpions, the drunkard is made to guzzle boiling oil, the tongue of the gossip is bitten by a snake, a giant scorpion smothers the unjust man; money-lenders, with unmistakably Semitic faces, are made into mincemeat, embezzlers chopped into bits, gluttons choking on garbage, liars stretched on the rack. Lettered in gold across the top of the mural was a quotation from Luke (13:3) in Spanish: Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
The horror of the punishments is much greater than anything in Dante's Hell. The impartial beastliness more likely derives from that described by Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish nun whose Confessions include a terrifying vision of hell. Saint Teresa was canonized the same year the Compañia church was founded, 1622. I imagined that such a mural was most effective in persuading Indians to keep the faith. Indians, certainly, comprised the largest number of churchgoers in Quito, and there were Indian - that is, Inca - touches in the artistry of these churches. A quarter of the decoration in the Church of San Francisco was Inca. The church itself was built on the site of Atahuallpa's summer residence; the Inca motifs occur throughout the church - two sun gods carved on gold discs as soon as you enter the door are repeated on the walls of the interior, with fruit and flowers, the Inca harvest symbols decorating saints and crucifixion scenes. The Stations of the Cross are Spanish, the masks fixed to the walls above them are the large gold faces, some with headdresses that one sees in miniature on Inca jewellery - with exaggerated up-turned or down-turned mouths, like masks of comedy and tragedy.
These churches were filled with Indians on their knees, praying in ponchos and shawls, carrying papooses. In the Church of Santo Domingo they were lighting candles, in San Francisco they were doing the stations on their knees, and at La Compañia they were venerating the guitar of Ecuador's first saint - Saint Mariana de Jesus - who was so beautiful she went through life wearing a dark veil. It is said that a man once lifted this veil and beneath it he saw the grinning skull of Saint Mariana, which was God's way of showing him that he had trespassed. No one could explain the guitar; a guitar requires no explanation in South America. The Indians gazed on it; they were small, stout, bandy-legged, with thick black hair, like kindly trolls. They walked bent-over even when they were carrying nothing: it is a carrier's posture.
Almost half the population of Ecuador are Indians, but it seems like more than that, for the nature of their jobs makes them conspicuous. They sell tangerines and relics, cigarettes, sweets, and matches on every street; they work as cooks, gardeners, and day-labourers on building sites - living in the half-made house until it is finished, and then moving to the foundations of one being planned. In the smartest suburban street, father, mother and child can be seen gathering firewood and picking through dustbins. In a crowd of Ecuadorians the Indians can be spotted immediately: they are the burdened ones and are known by their bundles.
'Someone should do something about them,' a man said to me. 'You see a little man and he's always got a band around his head and carrying a huge bundle and walking uphill. If only there was something they could be given to help them.'
'Wheels?' someone suggested.
'Wheels wouldn't work on those mountain paths,' said the first man.
'A sort of sled,' said a woman. They could pull it.'
'Never get it uphill,' said the man.
I said, 'I suppose they could be provided with another Indian.'
My mocking suggestion was treated with the utmost seriousness.
'What you've got to understand,' said another man, 'is that as soon as an Indian puts on a pair of shoes he's not an Indian anymore.'
The Ecuadorian writer, Jorge Icaza, told me that it was the Indian-ness in Ecuadorian novels that made them Ecuadorian. Everything else was fakery and imitation. His own novel, Huasipungo, is full of Indian folklore and locutions: deliberately so, he said- he did not want to write a Spanish American novel or a European-style novel, but rather a truly South American epic. For this, he said, he had to invent an idiom and thereby start a tradition. 'I can tell you, this did not please the Academy at all.'
I had planned to ride the train to Guayaquil on this day, too, but it had not taken much to persuade me to change my plans and have lunch with three elderly Ecuadorian writers instead. Besides Icaza, who trembled and brooded and told me he had given up on North American writers ('These books say nothing to me'), there was Benjamin Carrion and Alfredo Pareja. Pareja, the youngest, looked like a Kentucky colonel and had travelled widely in the States. Carrion was in his eighties and reminded me of the actor Alastair Sim, the venerable and the gaga intermingled on his wondering face. They wore pinstripe suits and carried canes. In my drip-dry shirt and leakproof shoes I felt like a very small stockholder who had been granted an interview by the chairman of the board. Indeed, Carrion was the chairman of a daily newspaper he had founded.