The City Hall and the Pichincha Street in the late 1940's, about 20 years before the Robles Plaza administration
I felt miserable, I started to cry, I was looking for help, or at least for sympathy, and began to ask the people around if they´ve seen any one taking my bike. Nobody had seen anything or pretended to have not. I suspect, up to this day, that my bike was stolen by the very people I was asking if they had seen the thief to have taken it. They just seemed not to care; their answers to my desperate queries for help were fake, totally artificial. These guys were what we used to call “smugglers”, selling their goods on the floor of the walkway, right off the bank’s office. They use to sell goods which were smuggled from the vessels anchored in the river nearby.
It took me a while to recover from the shock of having lost my only and most valuable asset, I saw no point in trying to find it, it was like looking for a pin in a hay stack. I went back to the bookstore and told my story to my boss, I must have cried, I don’t remember, but what I do remember is that my boss told me: “don’t worry, Rafael, we will buy a bike for you, which they did. The following day I was driving again a brand new bike (not as nice as my own, though), and that allowed me to put aside the pain and the frustration of having lost my bike. I paid my debt; I never fell past due on any of the 12, 120 Sucre monthly notes due on the first bike. That was the beginning of a lesson I got in my life regarding how to keep my credit clean.
It was by this time that I was assigned the collection of the notes due by the Guayaquil mayor Mr. Luis Robles Plaza. Robles were a gentleman by all means. The first time I went to see him I was not allowed to get into his office. The men in charge of the door just did not think a minor should be allowed to enter this high office, after all, this was the most important office in the city, and a child (in their minds) just had no business in there. After several tries, one day I was waiting at the main gate of the majestic 19th century City Hall building, hoping to see the Mayor as he was coming in and just before he took the elevator. “Mr. Mayor”, I said, while I sneaked in front of him as he was about to enter the building; “My name is Rafael Romero and I’m the person in charge of collecting a bill from you, would you please allow me to come in”, his answer was quick, “well, of course my boy” he said as he rubbed his right hand on my head, you can come in to my office today and you can come in my office any time you have to”. I said “thank you very much Mr. Mayor, and with all respect, could you please tell the guards at the main entrance what you´ve just said to me, please?”, I must have looked pathetic, because he turned to the guards at the entrance, and started to talk to them and to the elevator man right in from of him: “listen to me very carefully, all of you, it is my order that this young kid has my permission to come into the building and into my office every time he needs to do so” and added, “am I making myself understood?”, everybody said at once, with a subservient tone: “yes Mr. Alcalde (“Mayor”), so it will be”, and they all looked down to me with a mix of admiration and respect, which they kept for the following two years. Ever since, the mayor’s office doors were wide open to me.
Mayor Robles must have been a very honest officer, because in many occasions I came to see him, he did not have the money to pay his $150 due note. When that was the case, he always deepen his hand in his right pocket and handed me a 10 Sucre bill saying “I’m sorry I don’t have the money to pay your note my boy, come back next week, will you?”, and sure enough, he would honor his word and his credit the following week. This happened at least every other month, much to my benefit, because, at the end, I pocketed the 10 Sucre bill, on top of the commission on the note´s collection. While I was clearly benefitted from Mayor Robles’ way to handle his credit, I learned a lesson I will never forget. Don’t you be afraid of talking to any one if you are exercising your right to ask, but do it with respect!
I had quite a few customers who were like a Swiss watch paying their bills, among them a young lawyer by the name of Alejandro Ponce Henriquez, whom I came to see again many years later when I became a member of the Guayaquil Country Club where he has always been a gentleman, a very respected member of the Board of Trustees and a great golfer. I also knew Judge Leopold Carrera Calvo, a man who always had his check ready on the day of the note’s maturity. I have to mention Mr. Raul Baca Carbo, who at the time, just a young engineer with an office right across the City Hall Building, but who, many years later became for several times the Speaker of the National Congress and a Minister of Natural Resources. I met many others like the above, whose names I have forgotten but whose high respect for their credit became one of the several things I came to admire, and later on to imitate in my life as a professional and as an executive.
But, there were the others, those whose respect for their credit was less valuable than toilet paper, among them a lawyer who has been reputed for over five decades as the highest ranking and most expensive criminalist lawyer in the country, a man who came to be the country’s VP, a guy whose speech in front of the masses as well as in his classes of Law at the U of G is always about justice, honor, honesty and respect for ones’ honor and people’s virtues; a man who tried (and thank God failed) many times to become the head of the Supreme Court of Justice. This very same guy never paid even one of his thirty six past due notes for the books he bought. Not only he didn’t pay his notes, he was so absurdly dishonest that he kept me going to his office week after week, month after month, year after year, just to say “I’m sorry boy, I have no money today, come back next week on Wednesday” only to repeat the story the next Wednesday. I just wonder how can a man reach so high and still be so dishonest, I guess this guy really was prime raw material to be a real politician in Ecuador, a country where up to these days, corruption and dishonesty are almost pre requisites to be a successful politician or to hold high government offices.
In my next posting: KNOWING THE WORLD OF YOUNG ADULTS
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