To our modern notions Cuenca is not much of a city; yet here in the almost untracked wilderness it seemed enormous. So rarely do strangers visit it that, large as it is and in spite of my entirely conventional appearance, I could barely pause in the street without all work in the vicinity ceasing and a crowd gathering about me. Hungry to behold a new face as the crew of a windjammer that has gazed only upon themselves during long months at sea, their attitude seemed to say, “We can work to-morrow, but there is no certainty that we can have the pleasure of looking at a stranger.” It is hard for Americans, with their wide outlook and accustomed to the complicated existence of our large cities, to realize the narrowness of life in these placid old adobe towns hidden away in the Andes. Virtually cut off from the outside world, the cuencanos are a peculiarly bookish people. “We do not know,” said Montesinos, “that there are places on the globe where men live in freedom and decency, except from books.” Yet in spite of being rather uncertain of their dignity, like all isolated peoples, the educated classes were as well-meaning, as simpáticos, as any I met in Latin-America. Two things only were necessary to join the upper caste,—a white collar and visiting-cards. The former above a patched “hand-me-down” was more effective than a new $100 suit worn with a flannel shirt; and the man who has his name printed on bits of cardboard, to exchange with regal courtesy and profound bows with every upper-class acquaintance, is instantly accepted as of gente decente origin. Indeed, visiting cards should be as fixed a part of every Andean traveler’s equipment as heavy boots.
One could not but pity these ineffectually ambitious mortals, kept down by leaden environment and isolation. He who does not deal in “panama” hats has hardly an opening in Cuenca, except to study medicine, law, or theology in the local colegio; hence there is a plethora of “doctors” who can only wear their titles and live the life of enforced bookworms, forbidden by the rigid rules of caste even the privilege of turning their hands to some useful occupation. As in Bogotá, the very isolation and lack of opportunity has driven many to their studies, and Cuenca numbers many writers among her “sons,” producers chiefly of that languid, half-melancholy, pretty poetry, full of the “fine writing” the divorce from life and unlimited leisure to polish their gems of thought gives. In all Cuenca there is only one mean little bookshop, selling religious tracts and translations of American and English “penny dreadfuls.” The intelectuales can only, as it were, feed upon each other and form mutual admiration societies, where admiration soon palls from too constant familiarity and lack of new blood. Few, even of the “best families,” have ever been out of the cuenca, or basin, in which the city lies, and its isolation has given the place something of the atmosphere the traveler is always seeking—commonly in vain—of a world wholly removed from outside influence.
Their ineffective eagerness to learn was pathetic. The most nearly educated young men of the town had rented a second-story hall near the main plaza and decorated its façade with huge letters announcing it the “English Language Club.” Here the score or so of more or less English-speaking residents of the male sex gathered together several evenings a week.
The “English Language Club” of Cuenca in full session
An hacienda-house of southern Ecuador, backed by its grove of eucalyptus-trees. The owner or the mayordomo occupies the two-story structure, while the rest of the household string out in regular caste gradations to the kitchen and outhouses
For years, however, there had not been a genuine English-speaking person living permanently anywhere near Cuenca. In their eagerness to capture an authority the club drafted me at once, and whole delegations were always ready to go about and show me the town and vicinity—provided it was a not too distant vicinity, for they had as great a dread as the quiteño of getting far from the central plaza. I was received kindly and eagerly by the educated men anywhere, so long as it did not involve my intrusion on the Moorish seclusion of their family life, and became a sort of honored guest of the town, even if I was not presented with the key to it, which by comparison with the door-keys would have been a burden indeed. They were not “spenders”; money comes slowly and with too great a strain in these parts, but they were ever on the lookout to do me little kindnesses.
Barely was I settled, therefore, when I was hurried off to an evening at the “English Language Club,” convoked in special session. For an hour I sat like the chief buffoon in a comic-opera ensemble in the center of a horseshoe circle that included a score of doctors—Cuenca swarms with doctors, home-made and book-trained—the grandsons of presidents, sons of ministers to Washington and the court of St. James, while the whole gathering, like self-conscious school-boys, got off a sentence or two in more or less English in regular rotation around the circle, until some shining genius suggested that, as they had so illustrious a guest with them, it was merely a “social evening” and not a regular meeting; hence the rule demanding that only English be spoken was not in force. With a veritable explosion of relief the entire club burst into Spanish, and Alfonzo was himself again.
Later experience proved that the rule was largely a dead-letter even at regular meetings, and only to be enforced when the arrival of an illustrious stranger put the club on parade. The walls were hung with several mottoes in English, and they had gathered together some belated American magazines and a billiard table. There the members gathered several evenings a week to play “pocar,” and to practice very intermittently such English as they had learned from the printed page, forming their sentences and—what was worse—their pronunciation from the rules books had to offer, and mixing in with it a bit of a similar brand of French, as if any foreign language answered more or less the purposes of the club. The rules forbade the use within the club-room of any tongue than our own, but after the first few set greetings of “goot nig-ht, how do yô do?” the gathering settled down to an uproar of Castilian, broken only by the few phrases of Cuenca-English which custom had stereotyped. The majority came to play “pocar,” not so much because of the opportunities that pastime offered for one of the Latin-American’s chief failings—for pockets were seldom bulging—but because it smacked of the United States, the stepmother of the “English Language Club” of Cuenca. The son of a former Ecuadorian minister to Washington, who had spent a year or two in “Yanqui-land,” shared with “el Señor Doctor Montesinos, profesor de inglés en nuestro colegio,” the position of final authority on the tongue, except on those rare occasions when a traveler brought the real, dyed-in-the-wool article with him. Even the authorities were not faultless. They said “díssiples” for pupils, used habitually the expression “I can to go,” and clung tenaciously to similar choice bits of their own convictions, and, what was worse, drilled them into their fellow-members with that dogmatism strongest in those who are wrong. But the minister’s son had made the most of his American residence in learning “pocar” so thoroughly that he was as real an authority on that art as he fancied himself in English. Unfortunately, the combined efforts of the club had not unearthed among all the dog-eared classics that had drifted together in generations of Cuenca’s flirting with English the mention in print of that fascinating pastime. Whence they had been forced to adopt their own spelling and home-made phrases. On the wall appeared a warning placard, “Those which play pocar are speaking English,” and each game was sprinkled with a rapid-fire of Spanish, punctuated by fixed phrases of near-English. Thus the expressions “You bid,” or “You open,” had been concocted by the simple means of literal translation from the Castilian used in similar pastimes, and became “You speak.” Amid the crack of billiard-balls and the rattling of home-made chips the conversation ran on much as follows: