In a meaningless world he had devised ways to give his life meaning. Sensuality was meaningful; desire and the act of creation gave him purpose. The trip he had embarked on now in Ecuador was an expression of hope and, though he hated the word, his quest.
At the church entrances were Indian women, some with bags, others carrying babies — impossible to say whether they were selling something or just begging, but they were rooted there, looking immovable in their importuning. A blind woman whined at him, “No sea malito/” and superstitiously he pressed some money into her hand, making her smile. Black men hollered in Spanish, selling lottery tickets and newspapers. Stylish warmly dressed women slipped out of chauffeur-driven cars and hurried into shops. None of these people looked as though they were affected by the altitude. Steadman and Ava, exchanging an exhausted glance, were breathless and suffocated.
Pausing to rest, for even their plodding pace wore them out, they saw two people from the plane, Wood and Sabra. Wood nodded brusquely and seemed to mutter something to his wife, as if finding this chance meeting just as awkward as they did, for hadn’t Ava promised “We’ll never see them again”? Husband and wife were wearing new Panama hats.
“Janey’s been robbed — her bag ripped right off her arm,” Wood said. That was his greeting, as though he planned to deflect any pleasantries by introducing a note of drama — the theft. “All her credit cards. Her passport. Quite a lot of money. And she’s been in the country — what? Three hours?”
“Maybe that’s some kind of record,” Ava said.
“It was a beggar, a blind woman!”
“Robbed by a ciega. That’s a neat trick.”
“Where was her husband?” Steadman could not remember the husband’s name, and he did not want to say the wrong one because he recalled that the name was ridiculous.
“Hack was actually looking for her,” Sabra said.
As though reproaching Ava for her callousness, Wood said, “Anyway, all her medicine was in the bag, as well as her valuables.”
“I’ll write her una nueva prescripción,” Ava said.
Sabra said, “You speak Spanish.”
“Obstetrical Spanish. Abra sus piernas, por favor,” and she smiled at the woman’s confusion.
She knew she was being offensive — she intended it. She did not like bumping into these people. She had not come all this way to chitchat with tourists. She seemed to enjoy the fact that the big bossy interior decorator with the English accent and the cell phone had been mugged. Not harmed, just taught a useful lesson. Meeting these other travelers from the flight was a shock, though. They had never thought they would see them again, and here they were, two of them on their first excursion from their hotel room.
“You got a hat, too,” Wood said, tugging the brim of his own. “This is at least a grand back in the States. Maybe two grand.”
They parted as clumsily as they had met and, heading for a church shown on the small map in their guidebook, Steadman and Ava took a wrong turn and entered a plaza, which was set up as a market area. Three more passengers from the plane, nameless gringos in newly bought Ecuadorian garb, Indian-made sweaters, one wearing a crisp-brimmed Panama hat like the one he had just bought, were haggling over trinkets at a stall. The sight of these people drove them from the market, and yet they saw others from the plane in the museum and in the Indian market and in the narrow streets of Old Town.
What was the point in coming this distance if all you achieved was that disgusting flight and the company of these timid adventurers? Steadman felt he had so far accomplished nothing. They were stepping over beggars, entering the church of La Merced, their original destination — lots of Todos los Santos activity here, in the shape of reverential women carrying lighted candles or slender flaming tapers.
The large soot-darkened paintings in La Merced depicted soldiers in armor and settlers in flowerpot hats, the history of the country from the Spanish point of view, unintentionally showing plunder and bamboozling priests and grateful baffled Indians. In one painting a blind priest was being led by a young boy acolyte, Jesus smiling down from the heavens. The text under it read:
A los ciegos tit siempre iluminaste,
Testigo el sacerdote que curaste.
“‘You always illuminate the blind — witness the priest who’s cured,’” Ava said, translating. “But it rhymes in the original.”
The tall gold altar was as high as the church ceiling, with tiers of twisted columns, all thick pasty gilt and dazzling gems. A gigantic fatuity, this jewel box, looming among ragged people, some of them prostrate, others on their knees.
“But I had a strange encounter this morning at the hotel,” Ava said. She kept walking, did not look back, slipped into a pew at the side of the church.
Steadman followed her. He sat and listened to her describe how she had taken her clothes off and a man had come from behind and slipped a mask over her face; how he had made love to her; how it had happened in silence — she told Steadman in an even voice, as though confiding to a stranger.
“You liked it,” he said.
“I’ve never done anything like that before,” she said.
He wanted her again, and seeing a masked woman pass up the aisle and drop to her knees, a supplicant at a side chapel, only aroused him more.
The masked woman was praying, her words remorseful and audible: “Perdona nuestras ofensas como también perdonamos a los que nos ofenden — no nos dejes caer en la tentación…”
“Tell me,” he said, his tongue thick with desire.
“All this way.” She spoke in a whispering mystified voice that trailed off. They were near enough to the chapel to feel the heat from the rack of small candles, a hundred flames lighting the jewel-crusted crucifix on the gilded altarpiece. “And all that expense,” she said. “We’re in these mountains, among all this gold and these cross-eyed Indians, and at best we are blindfolded.”
“So what?”
“Did we have to come to Ecuador to find that out?”
“Obviously,” he said.
“That’s not why we came.”
“I forget why we came.”
They left the church and walked some more in the noisy clammy city. They came to a market and hoped to find handicrafts but saw only old-fashioned women’s underwear, piles of men’s shoes, stacks of brown trousers, folded blankets, and Chinese-made cooking pots. All this ordinariness in front of an ancient scribbled-on walclass="underline" ¡FUERA GRINGOS! Near the sign was a café, where they were greeted by a cheery woman who welcomed them, Ava saying “Huevos” Steadman felt sick before he had eaten much of his omelet. Ava said the beer she had drunk to quench her thirst made her feel dizzy. Was it the thin air? Steadman asked the waiter to take the beer away.
Throughout the morning walk in Quito he had felt they were getting on well, like an old married couple, but here — at rest, at the café table, dazed by the altitude and the indigestion it seemed to cause — Steadman realized that perhaps this apparent congeniality and easy company was the result of their decision to separate. Once they had said it was over, they had nothing to argue about — they had no future. They could be friends again.
Still, they sat at the café not speaking, not touching. The conversation in the church hung over them, the nagging echoey weight of unanswered phrases.
Rain came again, first like blown grit, then like pebbles tapping and softening in the gusting wind until the sound was more like a lash. Darkened by the weather, they were isolated and lost any desire to see more of the city. Steadman paid the bill and they caught a taxi that was parked near the bus terminal.