En Quito, Ecuador

 

En Quito

Jonathan Litten

In Quito, in that shivery black, sierra dawn, the birds begin their chorus around 5:00 a.m. You awaken, not abruptly from repetitious alarm of the birds at home, but rather in a gentle yawn tickling some sleepy part of the unconscious. Gradually, the complexity of sound creates a desperate curiosity, and you arise in subtle intrigue.  Awareness begins not from outside the sounding birds, but from within, as if you have been listening all night. And in that dark, dawning womb, sound precedes sight—the creative, unconscious mind slips past the tyranny of consciousness.

But sonorous tranquility and spontaneity can only remain so long. Eventually, the becoming day is interrupted by the static and slur of local traffic. Like part of some terrible, primal ritual, man usurps bird and the effortless morning tightens and descends into the unexplainable anxiety of local driving practices.  To Ecuadorians, racing ahead of a slower car to make a heroic pass into oncoming traffic around a winding, half-paved road, is simply part of a greater roadside logic. Along with its erratic movements, the traffic also has a song unto itself. The double-tap horn signifies an oncoming car, whereas the long, drawn-out horn means “get a move on.” 

Be assured that driving in Quito, there is no tolerance for dallying and no room for the meek.  The Galapagos is not the only part of Ecuador that has proven Darwin’s famous theory; the roads themselves are a whole other type of natural selection.  For instance, when approaching a turn or circular roundabout, cars do not choose a lane, they bottleneck towards the turn and jockey like horses for the lead position.  If your cabbie is good, he shifts from first to third, takes the outside, and edges past the lingering cars on the inside lane. After this pass, he actually speeds up and makes a sudden, last minute stop just inches, or in honor of the metric system, centimeters, from the bumper of the car in front. And be warned—this brief stop might be your only chance to collect your stomach from the floorboard.  

Surprisingly, after surviving this ordeal, you see not your life before your eyes but the half-clouded, mysterious peaks of the Andes silhouetted on either side like misty, rolling screens.  The way the peaks reach up, or the way the clouds settle between, gives the mountains a false sense of gentleness, and in their proximity—a feigning restfulness. It’s easy to see how many a gringo is lured and lost by their false welcome. From within the cradle of these vast mountains, there is the knowledge of a strange dichotomy between the pulsing earth and the drumming city. While the mountains contain the passions, and secrets of poets, the city embodies the great anonymity of Neruda—the dying of little deaths.

So too, the days must die. The fading equatorial sun blows away in cool mountain breezes, not setting, but disappearing into the earth and revealing the night like a sudden thief.  The quilted metropolis of the city darkens, then illuminates like fireflies in the flickering cool of a summer night. The city of perpetual beginnings stretches over and over into seamless night, its downcast eyes, woven still and settling quiet.  Though the day began in patient, orchestral wonder, it ends in quickening dusk.

From this settling dusk, the dying embers of the day are burned, beaded and whisked away in rhythmic abandon. In totally separate, yet somehow harmonized percussions, the streets erupt in frenzied kinesis. The night thins and dizzies like some altitudinal hypnosis.  Light comes in flashes and gasps, everything knee fluttered and hip rolling like Spanish “r’s.” But within this undulate chaos emerges an impossible stillness and outstretched hands carving elegant little circles into the dark. 

Then briefly, between the last Dionysian drum pulse and the first bird call, maybe a thought of home or memory of those stretching silences between summer cicada—a vision of the place, sun-shimmering, where the river elbows and shallows just below that old, rambling mill house.  But in the end, a new vision emerges, trickling like a watery metaphor and the day unveils the final tapestry of Quito, humming in sound and pooled in silence. And within the tapestry, a single unspooled thread, taut with the tension of existence, vibrates with the awareness of possibility and unlived moments.   

 

 

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