THE TRAIN RIDE

The train stopped a few minutes in every single little station in its way to the coast, the first four stations were minuscule towns ever higher in the mountains, mostly inhabited by mountain Indians wearing multicolor dressings almost always including red or blue ponchos, dirty dark brown hats made of sheep´s wool that once had been bone white, and dirty brown sandals made of a cactus-like fiber which grows in the high dunes, or simply bear footed.

The people from each town had their own distinguishing characteristics mostly noticeable trough the color of their clothing. As soon as the train stopped, Indian women and children entered the train’s passengers’ cars loudly voicing what they had to offer, going from roasted pork with hot potatoes on a slightly spicy hot salsa with lots of onions and cooked old bread, hot coffee, salty and steaming hot green beans called “habas” a hot and sweet alcohol beverage made with sugar cane alcohol, cinnamon, sugar and lemon, called “canelazo”, which adult passengers happily drank “for the cold”. They also offered whatever little other things they could offer, which would help their ends meet. This day, however, they had nothing I would be interested in, nor would I be able to buy, as I was immersed in my own world of fear and anxiety, thinking about what would happen as I arrive in Guayaquil, besides, I had no money. I ignored as nonexistent the loud voicing of the vendors as they passed by me

The four to five minutes the train stopped in each little town, was the “window of opportunity” for this people to try to make a living. Of course, there was another “window” in the afternoon, when the train from the coast was coming up to Riobamba. After the fourth station located up high in the mountains, we arrived at a twenty five house Indian village in the middle of a desert, called Palmira, where temperatures are either cold, colder or coldest, and the wind owls like wolfs in heat, throwing dusty sand on everybody’s face. The train soon arrived to the highest point in the route and started its journey down the cliffs with intermittent thrilling twists and turns, offering spectacular views of the surrounding mountains till it arrived to the “Devil's Nose”, a 45-degree gradient where the railroad actually descends about two thousand five hundred feet and advancing almost no distance as it goes zig zagging in forward and reverse down the mountain until it reaches the Chan Chan river level at the bottom of the canyon, where the village of Tixan is located.

From here, the railroad continues descending the mountains for another 30 miles, going sometimes parallel and sometimes crisscrossing the river base, en route to the tropical lowlands where the small town of Bucay lies at only 200 feet above sea level. From here the railroad takes an almost straight line to Guayaquil, another 60 miles down the road, on the other side of the Mighty Guayas River, and only 40 miles away from the Pacific Ocean.



At about one O’clock in the afternoon, the train arrived in Bucay, the first station in the lowlands, where in a matter of thirty minutes, the train changes locomotive and crew, both to better suit the tropical lowlands and the normally higher temperatures and humidity of the tropics.

After a series of stops in small villages in the middle of nowhere, at about four O’clock in the afternoon, we stopped in Milagro, the fourth largest city in Ecuador, a town whose economy evolved around two large sugar mills giving employment to more than five thousand peasants who, machete at hand, were in charge of cultivating and harvesting the sugar cane which would then be taken to the mills in small privately owned and operated railroads. The sugar cane would then be loaded to mammoth milling machinery, to be squeezed dry and conveying the sugar cane juice to be cooked at high temperatures, then mixed with small volumes of sulfur, passed through a vacuum system for “whitening” and then deposited in large bulk sugar silo type compartments to be bagged and shipped to the train station for further shipment to the markets.

Milagro-The Pinaples´kingdom

These were manual, labor intensive mills providing employment directly or indirectly to about 80% of the population of Milagro. Besides sugar, Milagro has always been known as one of the finest pineapples’ producing towns in the world. In fact, it still is. These pineapples are the sweetest most delicious pineapples that one can think of. They are large fruits (averaging four pounds each) and one of them can be the most delicious desert for an entire family of five. As soon as the train stopped in Milagro, an invasion of serrano ladies offering with their unique accent “a pair of pineapples” was happening in the train’s passengers’ cars. Their loud voices offering their merchandize could not be ignored by anyone, not even by me, so much so, that I spent the last five Sucres I had in my pocket to buy a pair of these pineapples to bring them as my present to my big sister Letty, whose house in Guayaquil my parents were expecting me at. With that, I exhausted my cash reserves. At the time of this story, mom and dad were visiting Letty in Guayaquil.

When my sister Letty got married, in 1942, the year I was born, she moved there from our village, and lived in an old three story wooden apartment house in downtown Guayaquil which was owned by her mother in law. My sister, who lived in the first floor, allowed us to use one of the rooms in her apartment whenever we were visiting, which happened once or twice a year and for only about two weeks each time.

Letty was a beautiful, 5’6” brunette, 120 Lbs, big brown eyes with long nicely curled eyelashes, 33 year old girl, whose husband of 13 years, an uneducated, unmannered and lazy as a snail, taxi driver, had repeatedly cheated on her because “she could not give him a child”, in spite of which, she not only continued to be faithful to him, but she adopted the child girl he had procreated with another woman. She cared for this child with the same love as if she had been her own daughter. Years later her husband repeated the doze by bringing home for Letty to up bring, a baby boy whose mother, “did not have class, and was not willing to raise the kid” as the unfaithful husband put it to my sister. Not only Letty did not throw away father and son, but she again adopted this second child and cared for him with the same love as a real and caring mother would have.

I believe what was behind all this, is the fact that Letty may have felt psychologically guilty for not being able to bear a child in her own womb, therefore, she saw the upbringing of her husband’s children as a kind of compensation as she was able to do it with all that monumental mother’s instinct and love she had inside her own self.

In spite of all her husband’s misdoings during almost fifty years of marriage, my sister Letty, while in her dying bed in 1993, asked me to look after her old husband when she passed away. God forgive me, but I did not feel like saying no to her at that moment, but, I did not feel like looking after this bastard afterwards, and I didn’t, but what’s more, I don’t feel a bit of guilt for not having done so. I just repeatedly ask my dead sister to forgive me. Her cheating husband passed away only a couple of years after my sister died, in the mid nineties.