“What can the government do with them?” I asked, innocently.
“Burn them, of course,” replied the clerk.
Luckily the laws of Ecuador are not so inexorable and incorruptible as those of some other lands, but I passed a far from pleasant hour before I discovered that saving fact. Just where the line is drawn between “manuscrito” and mere letters, I was never able to learn. At any rate the sender of the offending notes is still “wanted,” I believe, to serve a year in the penitentiary of Quito.
I had not been three days in the city of the equator when I began to feel the necessity for exercise. The “best families” lead a very sedentary and physically idle existence, virtually spending their lives at the bottom of a hole in the ground, for such the central plaza and the few adjoining squares about which it is customary to stroll might be called. Yet there are innumerable views and picturesque corners to reward him who will climb out; and climb he must, for the city lies in a fold of the skirts of Pichincha, out of which almost every street mounts more or less steeply.
The main plaza is the heart of Ecuador. In its center, instead of the “handsome brass fountain” of Stevenson’s day, rises a tall, showy monument topped by a bronze Victory or Liberty, or some other exotic bird, while at its base cringes an allegorical Spanish lion with a look of pained disgust on his face and an arrow through his liver. Much of the square is floored with cement, blinding to the eyes under the equatorial sun and only mildly relieved by staid and too carefully tended plots where violets, pansies, yellow poppies, and many a flower known only to the region bloom perennially. Its diagonal walks see most of Quito pass at least once a day. But neither Indians nor the ragged classes pause to sit on its grass-green benches; nor may anyone carrying a bundle pass its gates—unless the guard chances to be doing something other than his appointed duty. On the east the square is flanked by the two-story government “palace,” housing the presidency, the ministry, both houses of congress, the custom-house, Ecuador’s main post-office, and considerable else, yet still finding room for several cubby-hole shops under its portico. To the south, siding on, rather than facing the square, its towers barely rising above the roof, is the low cathedral, in which are the tombs both of Sucre and his reputed assassin, Flores, the “Washington of Ecuador.” The third and fourth sides are flanked by the archbishop’s palace and the municipality, both with portales, arcades beneath which are dozens of little den-like shops, and filled from pillar to pillar with hawkers and their no less motley wares.
Every street of the city is roughly cobbled, with a row of flagstones along its center for Indian carriers and four-footed beasts of burden, and on either side a narrow, slanting slab-stone walk on which the pedestrian whose appearance suggests the lower social standing is expected to yield the passage. Rambling over a rolling, at times almost hilly site, every street is due sooner or later to run off into the air on a hillside, or to fade suddenly away into a noisome lane.
Quito has no residential section. Its chiefly two-story buildings are, with rare exceptions, constructed of mud blocks on frames of chaguarquero, the light, pithy stalk of the giant cactus, with roofs of the familiar dull-red tiles. Whitewash and paint of many colors strive in vain to conceal this plebeian material, and many a façade is gay with ornamentation. Well-to-do people, who are commonly the owners of the building they dwell in, occupy the second floor. The lower story of the city is the business section. That portion of the house facing the street is almost certain to be given over to from one to several shops, the patio serving as a yard for the loading and unloading of pack-animals, while the bare adobe cells opening on it house the family servants and Indian retainers. To dwell almost anywhere in Quito is to live in the upper air of a combination of slums and business houses, and whatever the wealth or boasted aristocracy of a family, it is certain to come into daily contact with the unwashed gente del pueblo that inhabits its lower regions and performs its menial tasks.
There are shops enough in Quito, to all appearances, to supply the demands, if not the needs, of all the million and a half inhabitants of Ecuador. These are, for the most part, small, one-room dungeons without windows, flush with the sidewalk, with no other front than the doors that stand wide open during business hours, and present at other times their blank faces ornamented with several enormous padlocks. The quiteño puts no trust in the small locks of modern days. Many a shop, the entire stock of which is not worth a hundred dollars, is protected not only by bolts and bars within, but by half a dozen of those huge and clumsy contrivances that the rest of the world used in the Middle Ages. To “shut up shop” is a real task in Quito, of which the lugging home of the enormous keys is by no means the least burdensome. Naturally, if a real burglar cared to take the trouble to journey to Quito, he would find far less difficulty at his trade than in a city ostensibly less secure.
Besides the establishments of hundreds of men who would rather wear a white collar than work, there are innumerable little holes in the wall, run by “women of the people” in conjunction with their scanty household duties, where chicha and stronger drinks, and the few foodstuffs of the Indians and the poorer classes are displayed—and sometimes sold, though there are barely customers enough to go round. Clothing stores, or more exactly, cloth-shops, are perhaps most numerous, countless useless duplications of the selfsame stock, with hundreds of bolts of as many different weaves piled high in the open doorways. Every merchant, however meager his supplies, announces himself an “importer and exporter,” and after morning mass manto-wrapped women wander for hours from shop to shop, haggling for a fancied difference of a half cent in some purchase which, in the end, is more apt than not to be abandoned. Business is petty at best; its ethics low, and the native quiteño is a weak competitor of the foreigners that swarm in the city. Italians, especially the wily Neapolitan, and “Turks,” as the ubiquitous Syrians are called in all South America, capture much of the trade. A foreigner remains a foreigner in Ecuador, for the country has but weak powers of assimilation.
A unique note in the life of Quito are the “Propiedad” signs. Revolution, with its accompanying looting, is ever imminent. The native shopkeepers are frankly at the mercy of the looters, who only too often are the Government itself. But the foreigner despoiled of his wares can always lodge a complaint with his home Government; reparation may follow, and even the punishment of the looters is conceivable. To warn these of their peril, and to induce sober thought in times of anarchy, the foreign merchant paints on his shop-front a huge flag of his country, similar to that used by neutral steamers in wartime, with surcharged words conveying the same information to those unacquainted with the colors. Thus the German’s place of business is distinguished with a: