by Murray Bail
They’d seen a wristlet watch, identification discs and rows of teeth flashing, the pale divided buttocks and big balls swinging. (P——N——Airlines, Flight No. 2213.)
They were still talking about it, already embroidering it, when they sighted land, and slowly passed over what clearly was impenetrable jungle, as Amazonian as languages and cancer, the substance myths, and anacondas down there, occasional lonely smoke. At late afternoon they touched down at Quito, behind time.
‘Quito,’ Louisa repeated, ‘what a lovely name.’
‘Oh, yairs,’ said Violet swaying and rolling her eyes. ‘Quito.’ And trying to light a Benson & Hedges she dropped Garry’s lighter.
The Indian sweeping the terminal floor bent to pick it up. He had small eyes and wide cheekbones.
‘Give it back!’ Violet cried out. ‘Here! Thank you.’
The Indian watched as she lit the cigarette. Drawing in she spoke the words of one of her television commercials. ‘The right taste…the right length…yes, sir-ree!’ And with her actress tongue she made a sound like a horse galloping.
She looked around the airport lounge.
‘So this is what they call Quito?’
North cleared his throat.
‘Violet,’ Sasha said in a low voice.
The customs officers had stopped and were watching her.
Garry grabbed her elbow. ‘Come off it. Come on.’
She shook free. ‘You piss off!’
‘What’s eating her, for chrissake?’
‘All this is your bloody fault,’ Sasha hissed. She took Violet’s arm. ‘You don’t know her. You know nothing. Excuse,’ she raised her chin at the customs officer. ‘Do you have a washroom?’
He shrugged. The customs officers were eating bananas.
‘Donde están los retretes?’ Gerald asked.
A captain pointed at a door, and tipped everything out of Borelli’s bag.
Red-eyed and vague Garry stood around muttering. He turned to Phillip North; but North was talking to Hofmann and Gerald Whitehead.
At the counter, Louisa remarked to Borelli, ‘It’s quite cool for the Equator…’
‘We’re at nine thousand feet,’ came Kaddok’s explanation from behind. ‘The second-highest capital in the world.’
She looked at Borelli.
A kind of casualness as always smoothed his face, as if he had only just woken up or had recently been ill. Taking no notice of his belongings scattered over the counter, he nodded: ‘You were right before. Quito is a nice-sounding name. It must be the Q. I’ve always thought it has the most beckoning shape in the alphabet. It has essentially a feminine quality. What do you think? We say “Q” or “Queen” and have to make a kissing shape with our lips. I imagine Q would make any word beautiful, visually and orally.’
Beside them Doug added, ‘Qantas, Circular Quay.’
‘What about quim?’ Hofmann enquired; and Louisa went quiet. She had wanted to talk to Borelli alone.
Her husband and Borelli remained gazing at each other; Hofmann smiling.
‘If you like,’ said Borelli. ‘I wouldn’t quibble.’
‘What do you say?’ Hofmann asked. ‘We’re discussing quim.’
But Louisa remained watching Borelli’s mouth. Whenever he experimented, usually aloud, he pursed his lips. Sometimes he closed an eye. It was as if he forever dwelt on the letter Q.
‘Oh quim,’ Louisa answered, ‘is not a word I normally use. But I think it’s nice. It’s not derogatory. Anyway,’ she glared at him, ‘you should know.’
Borelli now closed one eye. ‘Q is conception, a pierced womb. It reminds me of that. I probably connect it with Queen.’
‘Oh, isn’t he nice!’ Louisa cried, turning to her husband. ‘Why can’t you be like that?’
Borelli quickly turned back to the counter. They were shovelling his clothes back in.
More placenames begin with Q-U in Latin America than anywhere else in the world. Arab countries follow next—include Moslem Afghanistan. But the Arab placenames do not always employ the U. So you find Qishn, Qom, Qasr Amij, Qafor on the map: those shrouded names. Many are quadrilateral words. And of course, Qu’ran itself. There are also a surprising number of Q-names in the Isle of Man telephone directory.
‘It’s all very interesting,’ Borelli turned from the counter. ‘Perhaps it is why in Latin America earthquakes are so prevalent. What comes first: the word or the event?’
‘Ha, ha, yes. The chicken or the egg theory,’ Kaddok nodded from behind.
This left a bit of a vacuum. It wasn’t what Borelli had meant.
‘Leon knows a great deal,’ said Gwen anxiously, looking first at the Hofmanns and then Borelli.
He sure did; but it had been a long flight. Now he was explaining how Ecuador got its name from the Equator, which was a local landmark, and his listeners gazed around the terminal. These buildings are all the same, an Esperanto of lines, as if composed by the one cost-efficient architect (nice contract), though Quito’s possessed the odour of roasted coffee and sulphur. Standing among their luggage they soon tired of the posters on the wall proclaiming the jaguar, the tapir, the tree-dwelling kinkajou (with prehensile tail), the various macaws, and the montage of cooking pots. Gringos, come to Ecuador! But can their infrastructure handle the influx, especially the touchy blue-hairs from the North, those Brahmins with the hearing aids and the astonishingly shaped spectacle frames? It’s a poor country. Population: only 6,000,000. More than a liberal sprinkling of zambos and quadroons there. Soccer, bullfights and horseraces.
‘I say, what’s the hold-up?’ Gerald called out.
It’s an agricultural economy: bananas, coffee. The large estates owned by city-dwellers, the mestizos, operate in a time zone of slowness, of decay, few mechanical shapes and sounds. The stillness or stealth had infected the capital. They grow the carludovica tree, its fibres used for Panama hats—forests of hats, of shadows and shade. The Indian leaning on his broom had accumulated half a dozen banana skins in his sweepings.
What is a comparison?
‘After London, I thought we’d seen the last of queues.’
Garry put his elbows on the counter, looking anxious, glancing at the door for Violet, while one of the officers tested his aftershave with his finger, staring at him. They wore pistols. The one with the stained collar and mournful eyes picked up a pair of lace panties with a ruler. Shoving his sunglasses onto his forehead Garry tried grinning, man-to-man. The officer cut him short. ‘We’re a decent people,’ he said in a husky voice. ‘Understand?’ Sure! But to show indignation—because you had to—Garry stared down at the floor and slowly shook his head. Born to a different order the customs officers took this as repentance. They beamed.
The rest of the group had noticed the large clock on the wall. It had broken down. To avoid confusing travellers who had already crossed several time zones its hands had been obliterated by tape and bandages, so that Time looked impoverished, or as Borelli declared, sick and disabled, Time with time on its hands.
It reminded Sheila: ‘I don’t know what day it is.’ And the others smiled, similarly vague.
‘God, this is a dump,’ Garry said, joining them with Violet. His hands trembled which made him more unsettled. He put them in his pockets but then immediately scratched his neck. The customs officers in their flashy uniforms had looked more like army generals.
The capital of Ecuador lay in the hollow of a hand, one side climbing a slope, adobe houses in layers mercifully all prevented from slipping by churches, dammed by churches or walls of churches and sudden plazas—horizontal breathing spaces. It is the size of Adelaide, the size Adelaide was, and like that religious town its streets are laid out in graph-paper pattern. Order, order! In Quito they persisted over a terrain of gullies and jagged quebradas. It was as if the Spanish were determined to exert their will on the unstable elements, regardless, like the Jesuits drumming Revelations into the ears of stoned Indians. The slope with the houses, with the ravines, was the volcano Moun
t Pichincha. It erupted in the year 1666, year of the Great Fire of London and Newton’s theory of colours. But there were other volcanoes. They are the tourist attraction. Quito is encircled. Volcanic amphitheatre! The white towers of the churches were outlined against their dark cones and thunderclouds: a reminder of fire and boiling water, constantly pointed to with the surpliced arm from Quito’s pulpits. Even in the plazas, palms with the pineapple trunks erupted jagged fronds, which then drooped in suspended semicircles, like sparking dark metal from a distance: eruptions of a decorative sort.
And they noticed the architecture of Catholics was volcanic in essence (known elsewhere as feast or Baroque). It gushed almost in desperation here, what with the swarming doors and porticos carved in wood, the multi-layered plinths for the many (so many!) optimistic winged statues and seven-sided fountains, Plaza Independencia, and the quadrant-shaped lawns, quadrangles of lapilla, Good Lord, green cupolas and belfries capped with intricate weathervanes, so many palaces, so many cloisters, walls set with hypnotic bricks, quoining and famous bells, all commissioned and urged on by mad Jesuits, one eye on the weather (i.e. the volcanoes). While the buildings and columns swarmed and flickered the citizens were peaceful.
To sleep and copulate at the foot of volcanoes, to be surrounded: in Ecuador they cheer themselves with sad music.
Old Yank tanks—Hudsons, de Sotos—left behind by expatriates who’d long ago fled, hissed and sometimes shot out steam. Such saloons suggested the nineteen-forties and the Saturday Evening Post, as if the recent past still lay ahead. The houses in the Spanish style had iron-grilled doorways and secluded gardens.
Their hotel was the Atahuallpa, near the river, and the desk clerk stared first at the cigarette ash on Hofmann’s lapels and then the dandruff on Kaddok’s dark shoulders, and when they weren’t looking glanced behind at Pichincha.
Mrs Cathcart wrote after tea:
Who would have thought. Your father and I are on the Equator wearing cardigans. This is because—I am told—our hotel is situated higher than Kosciusko—hard to believe. Wonderful views—The food is spicy. Cobbled streets.
It must have been the jet lag. Already Doug was in bed without cleaning his teeth…
Violet hadn’t come down for tea, but first thing in the morning she was seated characteristically in the front of the bus in sunglasses and a kangaroo pelisse for their first outing. A few seats behind, Garry sat moodily and then moved further back to sit with Sheila. She had a Baedeker on her lap from a previous visit.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ Louisa cried out. ‘Look at him!’
Advancing down the aisle Borelli had on his cotton ex-air-force jacket.
‘But isn’t this the tropics?’
‘Yes and no,’ North replied. They were usually cheerful, setting out.
For some reason, North was seated alongside Doug Cathcart. As the bus began moving they both held onto the seat rail in front.
‘Did you get a good shut-eye?’ Doug put in. He had the window seat.
‘I can’t complain.’
Several times he had woken and looked at his watch. With the curtains wide open he could distinguish the dark shape of Pichincha against the lighter sky, and he thought about his lost wife.
The clapped-out Pegaso gathered speed down the cobbled street, its tall bulk and the powerful horn scattering pedestrians, women yanking their children or heavy baskets aside, for as in Africa these people preferred not walking on the footpaths.
Odd words flashed into view and swung back; words disconnected from images. NIETO PINTORA! CALLE de la RHONDA PALACIO de ESPAÑA CANI.
Fragments of. Amid impassive faces pausing from their tasks a few feet through the glass. Someone spat and brown juice ran unnoticed down the window at Sasha’s shoulder. By then the bus broke into sudden white space, one of the plazas, and the hunched driver, elbows splayed, dropped the clutch, the cylinders fired, and the crowd at a bus stop all rose from a stone bench, then slowly sat down again, mistaking the turismo bus for the municipal one. Look, women washing by a river—that’s straight out of National Geographic. The windows kept juddering down, which made them laugh, and two or three ashtrays fell off the back of the seats. Never mind.
On the edge of town squatters’ shacks appeared as picturesque landslides of tin, cardboard and hessian; and Mrs Cathcart made that single clicking sound with her tongue. Lotta Indians there. Sasha turned and smiled broadly at the others: see the Indian woman wearing a bowler hat? And another.
Violet Hopper lit up a cigarette.
‘If you watch out,’ Dr North announced, ‘you might see a monkey or two.’
They darted their heads, the way the iguana does, at the slightest movement.
Around the next corner was a light forest of balsa trees; a file of Indians wielded mattocks like helots. So this is where balsa comes from? What is it used for now? The bus kept turning. A silken camanchaca wreathed through gullies of straw grass and covered the road, fumes of dry ice or fog sculpture, and as the cursing driver changed down and sounded the horn, someone pointed above to the clear sunshine: Scottish pines and various crops of grain quilted the tops of mountains. Gorgeous, breathtaking, amazing were the words used.
‘He’s taking us the long way round,’ said Gerald. ‘The Equator is only fifteen miles from the city.’
‘This is like a museum of crops and trees,’ said North. ‘We can sit back and enjoy ourselves.’
‘Yairs,’ said Doug, the way he talked on the phone. ‘Yairs, it opens your eyes.’
Well, he’d been using his binoculars; and Kaddok had clambered down the back to photograph the receding view.
Pointing to a plantation Phillip North said to Cathcart, ‘I think you’ll find that’s where your tablets come from!’
‘What? Where?’
‘Those are cinchona trees.’
‘Ar, the old quinine tablets. Go on, eh?’ They were used to each other but were essentially strangers, speaking in fragmentary bursts, comments mainly, thrown down like cards. Half-listening, the other person would respond by nodding and then going off on a tangent with some piece of knowledge, an anecdote just remembered, unrelated but taken from his own experience; a kind of ready balancing act. It was the talk of nomads.
Something had reminded Doug about cloves.
Yes on television the other day he’d seen a film documentary about cloves. Very interesting. These are grown in Zanzibar. Hang on—Tanzania? Anyway, Africa somewhere. Funny-looking tree. They pick them by hand and dry them on the footpaths… Apparently a multi-million-dollar industry.
North could hear other comments around the bus. Brief, broken observations. ‘That’s a…’
‘Look at the…’
And Doug again, speaking in Ecuador, ‘Bloke in Melbourne, good friend of mine, has a…’
North nodded.
The bus slowed down and stopped at a boom gate painted like a goal post. A carabineer in an overcoat poked his head in, then spoke to the driver. He waited near the door and used a twig to clear something stuck in his teeth, pulling a variety of faces.
Without turning the driver yelled some Spanish back at them.
Gerald went down and asked with histrionic hand movements a series of questions. The driver merely shrugged.
Poking his glasses back on his nose, Gerald translated. ‘He’s after baksheesh. Not the driver, but his charming friend out there, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have any authority.’
‘Of course he hasn’t!’
‘It doesn’t matter. We can afford it,’ said Borelli towards the back.
Irritation swept through the bus. It was like tiredness on an empty stomach.
‘That’s not the point. It’s the principle!’
‘Yes, it’s people like you,’ Gwen turned with surprising venom, ‘who keep the beggars and that on the streets. You encourage them.’
‘I hate being fleeced.’
‘Right, I don’t think we should.’
‘Tell him, no!’
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‘Well I doubt whether we’ll get in,’ said Borelli simply. ‘Isn’t it a fact of life here, a custom?’
The driver had his elbows on the steering wheel taking no notice of the debate. Gerald asked him something else.
‘He says twenty sucres. What’s that? Two each. All right?’
‘We don’t seem to have much choice.’
‘This happened last time I came here,’ Sheila smiled at Garry. ‘I can get yours.’
Garry wasn’t happy. ‘They’re rotten crooks. No wonder the whole show’s falling apart.’
A few yards in, the bus stopped.
Doug rubbed his hands and looked around. ‘It’s good to stretch the legs.’
There were stone benches and kiosks. Families had spread cotton rugs on the ground. It was a favourite picnic spot.
‘Why the barbed-wire fence and everything?’ asked Sasha.
‘Because it is our most important asset,’ an Ecuadorian answered. He’d been standing nearby, watching. He had dark combed hair; good English.
They ignored him and strolled over to the Equator.
It was a metal rail a foot or so off the ground. It wandered in a fairly straight line over the bare ground of the valley and up the other hill, as far as the eye could see, clearly indicating the divisions of the hemispheres. It appeared to be of stainless steel. Either that, or it shone from people constantly touching.
Resting one foot on it Garry said, ‘Two beers, please.’
It made a few laugh. But they were more conscious of the shape of the earth. It seemed to begin here, spreading in a massive curve of great weight on either side. Neatly illustrating the point, concrete chairs had been set up several inches apart, and a man and his wife were sharing a thermos of cocoa, the man naturally in the Northern Hemisphere, a Panama hat on his knees, his spouse to one side seated in the Southern Hemisphere.
Slippery dips had been set up. Children and even adults could slide from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere in a matter of seconds.
Kaddok tripped over the Equator.
He’d been manoeuvring to take some colour slides, and now visualising his own position, legs tangled in the Equator rail, he called out for someone to quickly photograph him. Irrefutable proof, this would be, that he had seen the Equator.
