In 1954 the government of
Ecuador imported a string quartet from Barcelona. I spent the last years of my
childhood in Quito, in a house that my father, my mother, and I shared with the
three other players.
In those pre-pollution days, we
all woke up each morning to the sight of five active volcanoes around the city:
Chimborazo, Cotopaxi, Cayambe, Rucu Pichincha, and, the most apt to shower cars
and sidewalks with ashes, Guagua Pichincha. After exclaiming about the beauty
of the view and speculating on which volcano would erupt next, the quartet would
rehearse.
This began with a lengthy
session of meticulous tuning which the cellist, who had studied with Casals,
insisted on. My father would play his A string, and the second violinist would
try to match it exactly. This took a while. “Maybe it’s a touch flat,” the
cellist would say. Then, “Perhaps you need to bring it down, just a hair.” The process was repeated with
the viola and the cello, and finally the real playing would begin—Haydn,
Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and what my father called a “piece of
candy” for the audience: the Tchaikovsky quartet, Op. 1, with its saccharine
second movement.
In the afternoon the
musicians practiced individually, and my father gave violin lessons to the
children of Quito’s Jewish community. On the weekends, we went adventuring—and
in those days, the moment you left the capital you were sure to have
adventures.
Only my father and the
cellist knew how to drive. The cellist had a tiny blue Fiat, and my father drove a 1944 Dodge with a wonky second gear (my mother had to hold up the gear shift with a forked stick whenever we descended from the high Andes to a lower altitude).
We would pile into the two cars and set off for the páramos, vast
barren plateaus so high above sea level that, even having grown accustomed to
Quito’s nine-thousand-foot altitude, we would gasp for breath at the smallest
exertion.
Time and time again we would pull off the stone-paved road, a legacy of the Incas, and everyone
would get out and gaze with wonder at yet another set of volcanoes (Imbabura! Tungurahua!
Sangay!). Everyone but me, that is. The more my parents exhorted me to
appreciate the beauty all around, the less I saw to admire. If at least there
had been some interesting animals, but other than the occasional high-flying
condor or a herd of llamas haughtily ignoring us, all I could see was an
endless expanse of beige barrenness.
The trips to the jungles of
the Pacific or the Amazon were more entertaining—someone was always foisting a
parrot or a monkey on us, and there were almost-naked Indians with painted
bodies. We spent one Christmas as the only whites in a village populated by the
descendants of shipwrecked African slaves. They were tall and majestic, very
dark skinned, and dressed in immaculate white. All night long, on Christmas
Eve, they drummed and chanted in ways that sounded just like the sound-track of
King Solomon’s Mines.
Hotels were beyond rustic. On
one trip to Puyo, in the Amazon jungle, the viola player, a courtly, balding,
bespectacled Catalan, addressed the hotel owner. "Madam," he said, "would you be so kind as to direct me to the bathroom?" She led him to an open window and gestured with silent dignity to the verdant
vista stretching uninterrupted all the way to Brazil. In the morning it was
raining and, since there was no running water, my father and his three
colleagues shaved under the downspout in front of the building.
Did I mind living with five
adults? As an only child, in Spain I had made my aunts, my uncles and my grandfather
into playmates. Now I did the same with the members of the quartet.
I didn’t much care for the
cellist, whom I found vain and affected, with his upturned nose, his little
mustache, and his obsession with tuning. But the viola player, despite his
thick glasses and his jowly face, made an excellent playmate. Our bedrooms were
adjoining, and at night we would communicate by knocking on the wall between
our beds. My favorite, however, was the second violin, because he was the
best-looking of all--tall and aristocratic, with an elegant Roman nose. Also,
he had an ocelot kitten, named Pepita, that I coveted.
Not only did I find these men
entertaining, I did my best to entertain them. I made jokes and invented games,
one of which consisted of appending Italian endings like -ella
and -etto to Spanish words, which I
found hilarious as well as clever. I showed off, sang loudly out of tune, giggled.
They in turn teased me and called me Unita, which translates roughly as
“Onesy,” referring to my only-child status. If they ever found me annoying,
they didn’t show it.
I burst into puberty like one
of the volcanoes that periodically erupted around us. There was no graceful flowering
into demure young womanhood. Overnight I grew breasts, pimples, and hair on my
legs. But my mind lagged behind my burgeoning anatomy, and I persisted in my
childish ways. Or perhaps those ways weren’t so childish, and my fondness for
the violist and the second violinist was more of an adolescent crush than the
reaching out of a lonely child.
After a couple of years, the
second violinist packed his bags and returned to Spain. The violist married his
Catalan fiancée, a woman in her mid-thirties, by proxy. (This had to be done
because her parents would not allow her to cross the Atlantic alone as an
unmarried woman.) My parents sat drinking brandy with the groom on his
brideless wedding night, and months later, when his wife finally arrived, I lost my remaining playmate. But by then I didn’t care: I had met a boy my age at a bar
mitzvah, and fallen in love.
Me being kidnapped in the Amazon by the viola player (holding knife and using my braid as a mustache) and the second violinist
