They were in agreement on one point: the last interesting writer that America had produced was John Steinbeck. After that, all American writing had become unreadable.
Before I could get my shovel in, Icaza said that all literature was a struggle, each word was a struggle; and he described the composition of Huasipungo.
I mentioned Borges.
'No, no, no,' said Icaza.
'Borges said that the Argentine tradition was the whole of Western culture,' I said.
'Borges is mistaken,' said Carrion.
'We don't think much of Borges,' said Icaza.
Pareja looked unsure, but said nothing.
I said, 'I've always wanted to meet him.'
'Look,' said Carrion, 'it is the sales that matter. You have to be accepted. You have to make your name known or no one will look at you.'
He enlarged on this theme, and it really was like the boardroom of a South American company which had not shown much profit lately. Icaza and Pareja deferred to Carrion who was saying that critics' praise meant nothing if no one read your books. Publishing was a business, publishers were businessmen and had to make money to survive. And of course authors had to sell their books in order to be recognized. He knew. He was on the Latin American panel of the Nobel Prize Committee. He had put forward many worthy authors, but the Nobel Prize people always said, 'Who is this fellow? We've never heard of him.'
It was a problem, said Icaza.
Yes, that was a serious problem, said Pareja. It ought to be looked into.
I wanted to mention Borges again, but I felt I would get a dusty answer. Then I realized that Pareja was talking to me. The trouble with American writers, he said, was that he always identified them with American politics - with the United States government, Nixon, Vietnam. He did not find anything of interest in American politics, so he found the books unrewarding.
I said that American novels - the good ones - were quite separate from American politics.
'To me they are the same,' he said.
'Aren't you confusing the hunter with the fox?' I said.
No, he didn't think so. The others agreed with him, so on this note the board meeting was adjourned.
'Maybe they thought you were criticizing them,' an American political officer told me the next day.
I said I had tried to be tactful and had only mentioned Borges out of an abiding admiration for his work.
'Latin Americans are funny,' he said. 'They hate to be criticized. They can't take it- so don't do it. They loathe criticism, or what they think is criticism. The Ecuadorian government is a kind of triumvirate of dictators-the army, the navy, the air force-three generals. When they think they're being criticized they plant dynamite near the critic's house and make an explosion.'
That sounded serious, I said.
'No, no,' he said. 'No one gets hurt. It's just a reminder. The only fatality so far was a critic who had a heart attack when he heard the blast.'
On this man's office wall there was a map of Ecuador. But it did not resemble in the least my map of Ecuador. The man explained that it was an Ecuadorian map and that half the territory was actually Peru. The Ecuadorian maps of Peru and the Peruvian maps of Ecuador were also radically different, each country showing itself as very large and in possession of an Amazonian province.
This man was such a fund of information, I asked him about the Indians. Well, he said, there were very few Inca noblemen and they used the Indians as cheap labour. The Spaniards conquered and replaced the Inca noblemen, using the Indians in the same way. The situation had not changed very much: the Indians were still on the bottom, and because they were mostly illiterate they could not vote.
'I'm surprised the Indians don't strangle these people,' I said.
There had been stranglings in Quito ever since I had arrived. The next day the strangler was caught. The story was in the newspaper El Universo under the title Obsessed With Ties. The murderer was a homosexual, but there were greater revelations. He found his victims by dressing as a woman (he was shown wearing an assortment of female wigs in a series of photographs). He had strangled four men. His statement to the police was paraphrased by the paper: 'When he had a sexual relationship with a distinguished person, or one wearing a tie, he had a desire to strangle him, while with other people he was perfectly normal.'
'Things are looking up,' said the American writer Moritz Thomsen. The author of Living Poor and The Farm on the River of Emeralds - two superb books that put Thomsen in a class with the Patagonian resident, W.H. Hudson - he has lived in one of the wilder districts of Ecuador for fourteen years. 'If you drive in some parts of Ecuador the Indians throw rocks at you. Lots of people get their windshields broken.' He grinned and narrowed his blue eyes. 'So I guess there's hope for a revolution.'
It was Moritz who said to me one afternoon on a Quito street, 'I don't get it, Paul. How do you write a travel book if all you do is go to parties?'
'Write about the parties?' I said. But he was dead right, and I was ashamed of myself. I vowed to take the train to Guayaquil the next day.
There was no train the next day. Mr Keiderling at the American Embassy had the solution. I would be flown to Guayaquil providing I gave a lecture there. He would cable the office in Guayaquil and ask them to get a ticket for me on the Autoferro back to Quito. 'It's the same train,' he said. 'It's just a different direction.'
That seemed all right to me, so I flew to Guayaquil.
Visitors to Guayaquil are urged to raise their eyes, for on a clear day it is possible to see the snowy hood of Mount Chimborazo from the humid streets of this stinking city; and, if you look down, all you see is rats. Chimborazo was shrouded in dense yellow-brown air which throughout the day spat discoloured rain and kept pedestrians sheltering under the shops that overhung the pavements. There were torrents of rain at night, but neither the spittle nor the downpour had any effect on the rats. Rats can swim, they can tread water for three days and gnaw through cinder blocks and climb vertical walls; they can live for days without food and can endure extremes of heat and cold; they are vicious, fearless and robust, and their breeding habits make them very nearly indestructible. They are probably alone among vermin in being noisy creatures: they have no real stealth. They don't sneak, but rather stumble carelessly with a kind of tottering half-derailed motion. Rats within thirty yards or so announce themselves: they chatter and squabble constantly, leaping at each other. They are too evil to require any cunning.
In Guayaquil, they are of the species Rattus rattus, the black or ship rat, which carried the Black Death - bubonic plague - from Asia to Europe. The plague was intermittent in Europe for four hundred years, and in the late eighteenth century it began to move back, via the Middle East, to Asia. It is thought that the plague ended in Europe because the black rats were driven out by a hardier unsociable species, but one less dangerous to humans, the brown rat (Rattus norvegicus). The black, flea-ridden rats boarded ships and in the hot, wet, port cities of Africa and South America they thrived, bringing plague, which is still endemic on these continents. I could get no figures on death by plague in Guayaquil - the question was considered discourteous - but people do die there from the bite of the rat-flea. It is a short, horrible sickness: you are bitten and two days later you die.
There was a louvred panel on the upper wall of my Guayaquil hotel room. For two nights I was kept awake by the chirp of a fan belt. It would start in the darkness, the chirping of a band slipping on an un-oiled wheel. I mentioned this to the manager.
There is no fan in your room,' he said.
I went back to the room and stood on a chair and held a match to the louvred panel. What I had taken to be an air-conditioning device was a nest of rats - there were three of them, pattering and chirping in the dirt behind the panel.