There are rats in my room,' I said to the manager.
'Ah, yes,' he said. He was not surprised. I waited for him to say more, but he only smiled.
I said, 'Suppose we give the rats that room. They seem very happy there.'
'Yes,' said the manager in a tentative way. He didn't see my irony at all.
'The rats can have that one, and I'll move to a different one.'
'You want to change your room, is that it?'
But all the rooms in this expensive hotel (it was named after a famous rat-hunting German explorer and naturalist) smelled of rats. It was a smell of chewed clothes and droppings and damp, and it was in every corner. And one could easily see where the rats had gnawed through walls and ceilings.
I had been eager to go to Guayaquiclass="underline" I had distant relatives there. In 1901, my great-grandfather had left his village of Agazzano near Piacenza in northern Italy and gone to New York with his wife and four children. His name was Francesco Calesa, and he found New York disgusting and America a great disappointment. Twenty days on the steamship Sicilia had been bad enough, Christmas on Ellis Island was purgatorial; New York was pure hell. He had been heading for a farming job in Argentina, but a yellow fever outbreak in Buenos Aires made him change his plans. Perhaps he had hoped to do some farming in America, but he was fifty-two and had no money. His situation was hopeless. When he could bear it no longer he made plans to go back to Italy. His wife, Ermengilda, resisted and finally refused to go with him. So the marriage was fractured: he returned to Piacenza where his married daughter was living (she had fled America with her husband a year before); his wife stayed in New York City, raised the rest of the children alone, and introduced a strain of stubborn singlemindedness into the family. My great-aunt, who remained in Italy, had a daughter Maria Ceruti, who married into a Chiavari family called Norero. The Noreros were distinguished as doctors and they had risen by establishing themselves in Ecuador - in Guayaquil, where they manufactured biscuits, sweets, pasta and spaghetti. They became prominent in Ecuador, and they brought this notoriety back to Chiavari. I had no problem finding them in Guayaquil. Everyone knew the Noreros. The only surprise was that I, a stranger, should be related to this now powerful family.
I met Domingo Norero at the family factory, La Universal. It was a large building-the city had few of them. A strikingly beautiful Italian girl was with him: his sister, Annamaria, on a visit from Italy. It was not easy to explain the family connection, but the place-name Chiavari was like a password. Annamaria lived in Chiavari, Domingo too had a house there, and their mother was there at the moment.
In his third-floor office, which was penetrated with the smell of chocolate biscuits, we had a family reunion. Domingo, a tall, thin, rather English-looking fellow, remembered my grandmother's visit to Italy. His grandfather had started the factory in Guayaquil, and on the death of this pioneer the business had passed to Vicente, Domingo's father. Ill-health, and an interest in Inca history, caused Vicente to retire; now he added to his already large collection of Pre-Colombian art and he wrote historical monographs on the subject - he had recently published, in Italian, Pre-Colombian Ecuador, a history. Domingo, only twenty-seven, had married at nineteen; his wife was blonde and bird-like, their two children as handsome as princelings. His yacht, the Vayra, was moored on the River Guayas, his Chevy Impala was parked at the factory, his jeep and his Mercedes were at his villa in the outskirts of town. But he was, for all his wealth, a modest person, if a bit rueful that the running of the entire business had fallen to him.
'I had no idea I had so many relatives in the States,' he said. 'But do you know how many cousins you have in South America? There are Noreros all over the continent- Chile is full of them.'
It gave me pause. These tycoons and walled-in businessmen I had seen, and cursed, in Colombia and Ecuador - they were perhaps my own flesh and blood. The proof was the Villa Norero. It was the sort of estate I had been seeing all through Central America and this part of South America, and it had made me doubtful that the old order would change. This one was Moorish in design, with Arabian tiles and pillars, and a swimming pool in the landscaped grounds - lemon trees, palms, and formal flower beds. The motto over the door on the family crest read: Deus Lo Vulte - 'God Wishes It' or 'God's Will'.
We had a drink, and I talked with old Vicente, a dignified man who was president of the Guayaquil branch of the Garibaldi Club. Vicente was the spitting-image of Giorgio Viola, the Garibaldino of Conrad's Nostromo. Conrad, in his previous incarnation - Captain Korzen-iowski - had been here, and in Nostromo he reinvented Ecuador as Costaguana, Guayaquil as Sulaco and the volcano Chimborazo as Mount Higuereta. No one looked more at home in Ecuador than Vicente Norero, and he would not have looked out of place in Conrad's novel, either. He inscribed one of his books for me and we set off in two cars for the Guayaquil Yacht Club. The previous day I had passed it alone and had not seen a club; the rats tumbling out of bushes and screeching around the river-front path had held my attention.
Lunch lasted the afternoon. As we talked and ate I could see the river out of the window. It was wide, and great tufted mats of weed -'lettuces' the locals call them - floated on its surface, and logs and tree branches. Such flotsam and jetsam made it seem more a monsoon flood carrying the landscape away, than a river. But, though Guayaquil seemed a thoroughly nasty place, the family reunion had taken away much of its sting, even if it reminded me of my link with these adventurers. We were all profiteering in the New World, even I with my leakproof shoes and my notebooks was plundering the place with my eyes and hoping to export a few impressions.
Annamaria was in business, too. Her husband and two children were in Italy. This was a business trip, she told me, in Genoese-accented Italian. 'I do a lot of business,' she said. 'I make parts for toilets, and also disposable injections - one jab and you throw them away. And these.' She shook ringlets out of her eyes and reached across the table, picking up an empty bottle with delicate fingers. 'I make bottles. I make everything.'
'You make money?' I asked.
'Yes, money- I make money,' she said, and laughed. 'But I like to cook very much at home.'
'You haven't said why you came to Guayaquil,' said Domingo to me.
My train explanation was too complicated. I said I was giving a lecture at the local cultural centre and then planned to take the Autoferro back to Guayaquil.
'That's nice,' said Annamaria, 'if you only do it once.'
They pointed out the railway station, which was across the messy river, in Duran. They said that they had never taken the train themselves, but this did not surprise me. I had been in Latin America long enough by now to know that there was a class stigma attached to the trains. Only the semi-destitute, the limpers, the barefoot ones, the Indians, and the half-cracked yokels took the trains, or knew anything about them. For this reason, it was a good introduction to the social miseries and scenic splendours of the continent.
'I hope you come to Guayaquil again,' said Domingo, and then we parted: the Noreros to their profitable pursuits and I to profitless gassing - a lecture on American literature.
And the ticket I had been promised? 'We tried to get you a seat,' said the embassy's man in Guayaquil. 'But it's full for the next few days. If you want to stick around Guayaquil for a while we could probably get you on, but don't hold me to it.'
'Why is this train so popular?' I asked.
'It's not popular, it's just small.'
One night in Guayaquil, a middle-aged Irishman in a loud check suit said to me, 'You probably won't believe what I'm going to tell you.'