During my first and recent visit to Ecuador, I did in a few days the return trip between Guayaquil, the large port metropolis on the Pacific Coast and Cuenca, a colonial city in the southern highlands. In a few hours on the road, we left the coastal heat and humidity and the banana and cocoa plantations, we quickly climbed, through the clouds, on the mountain and we emerged above 4000 meters in the rough but beautiful landscape of the Cajas National Park where lamas are grazing before leisurely going down towards Cuenca discovering the profile of its churches’ cupolas in the plateau’s hollow.
It seems that Ecuador’s geography and history are marked by this contrast between a dynamic coastal region, open to the world and for business, a melting pot of races and cultures and the more isolated, traditional and Catholic highlands where the dichotomy between the Spanish colonizers’ descendants and the indigenous population is part of the fabric of daily life.
Alicia Yánez Cossío’s novel, « The Potbellied Virgin » illustrates well this contrast. The story takes place in an unnamed small town in the highlands which could look like a smaller version of Cuenca. The town is proud of its baroque cathedral sheltering a venerable potbellied virgin. A sisterhood of patronesses, headed by the Benavides, a patrician family of Spanish extraction, cares for the statue and for dressing it. Each of the girls of this lineage, provided she preserved her virginity, gets the honor to give to the Madonna her blond hair. On the main square, sitting on a bench, the old men from the Pando family, of indigenous origin, comment and observe the scene of the city submitting to the Benavides moral order.
The show becomes a comedy, highlighted by the author’s humor, when modern and even revolutionary ideas arrive from the Coast and stir up the minds. Some of the Benavides girls lose themselves and elope with Pando boys. Doña Carmen Benavides, the dowager, ends up having to use provocation to bring the army in town to crush the tumult and restore order and authority.
