My first meeting with Jorge is not smooth. My Spanish is rusty, his English vocabulary is limited to a handful of words, and neither of us can think of anything to say in our shared smattering of phrases.
‘How are you?’ I ask in Spanish.
‘Fine’, he replies. He launches into a question, which I pretend to understand.
‘Yes’, I answer. ‘It is very hot.’
He is clearly puzzled. Wrong answer, I think. I try again.
‘I like to dance’, I say, and then, as my grand finale, I finish up with the last phrase I can remember in my jet lag-induced panic. I try to wish him congratulations on his engagement. ‘Feliz Navidad.’
He nods, pleased. Only later do I remember that this means Merry Christmas.
We pile into two white vans and head to Latacunga, where the wedding will take place. The wedding is here because it is easy to reach from Quito and because the groom’s family lives here, but not because it is one of Ecuador’s top ten tourist destinations. The Best of Ecuador website sums up Latacunga pretty well: ‘This is not an invigorating town’. It’s muddy and built of concrete, and our hotel/motel is on the highway leading out of the city. Latacunga’s highlights are two volcanoes in the far distance that are spewing smoke. I can see Leah’s mother estimate their distance, hoping they might explode, scattering the guests like ashes to their far corners of the world.
The next morning, we are determined to tour at least part of the southern hemisphere before the evening wedding, and take off again in our two dirty white vans to explore the villages outside of Latacunga. We drive along a winding road full of potholes while a nasty wind stirs up the pebbles on the ground.
I am not sure who I feel more sorry for – the driver or myself. He is stuck navigating country roads with a van full of Americans who have funny accents and a deep determination to stop and see everything – and I mean everything – we pass.
‘Look at the mountains. Have you ever seen mountains like that?’ my mother begins. ‘Let’s stop and take a picture.’
‘Signs in Spanish! I wonder what they say’, delights the bride’s aunt. ‘Stop – we need to take a picture.’
‘Look at the poor woman with her children and a goat! Are they naked? She only has one eye! How charming’, says aunt number two. ‘Let’s take a picture.’
We stop at every farm and village we see, buying trinkets and wandering around the chilly landscape. We drift into churches and food stores, through empty courtyards, and snap photos of toothless men drinking cola out of glass bottles with straws.
I feel sure that we are on the other side of the equator now. It’s nothing tangible, such as seeing the toilets swirl the other way, or recognising a different set of constellations, but is instead a growing feeling that we are more tourists and outsiders than we are wedding guests. We navigate the dirt roads, discussing wedding presents and conferring about Leah’s suggestion that we buy the groom’s family a medium-sized pig as a goodwill gesture. Instead of selecting china from the registry of Bed, Bath & Beyond, I am in a white van in the Andean mountains cringing as my parents take pictures of women dressed in wool and buy exotic souvenirs that they will take home and hang on the wall. My world has been turned upside down.
We round off the afternoon with a trip to Latacunga’s famed market. Every Saturday and Tuesday, people journey from far-off villages to sell cow heads, Nike sweatshirts and old cassette tapes to the Latacungians and those hapless tourists who got on the wrong bus or in a white van and suddenly find themselves in a decidedly not invigorating city in Ecuador.
I join the father and brother of the bride to ostensibly eat but really just stare at cuy, an Ecuadorian specialty. Cuy is what Americans know as guinea pig; it looks like a rat that has been zapped by a stray electric wire and frozen in time. It is served on its back, four legs raised with paws desperately in need of a manicure. I can’t help but think of Leah, who at this minute is getting her nails done in preparation for the wedding, and wonder if she too is a guinea pig in some sort of bizarre cultural experiment.
As the sun sets over Latacunga, we dress for the wedding and I wonder what type of wedding Leah dreamt of when she was a little girl, when she still planned to meet a nice strapping Jewish American boy. Probably long pews packed with visitors, roses and bouquets, a classy band playing ‘Hava Nagila’, a towheaded gap-toothed flower girl, and a reception where the bride and groom feed each other cake and smear it on each other’s cheeks.
Instead we have a reception room in the hotel/motel, above a room that, judging by the booming bass emanating from below, has already begun to party; an entryway of flowers; ten Americans dressed in their finest packable wedding wear feeling as nervous as a pack of guinea pigs crossing the Ecuadorian border; and a roomful of Ecuadorians who look like they bite off guinea pigs’ heads with their teeth.
After a few brief formalities – limited by the language barriers, and the fact that the parents of the bride and groom don’t seem to have much to say to one another – Leah walks down the aisle. I say aisle because the guests are divided as if the line from Mitad del Mundo had been invisibly extended to the parquet dance floor. We Americans stand quietly on one side, the Ecuadorians – and there are dozens of them – just as mute on the other. This set-up has all the characteristics of a battlefield – if someone were to yell charge, I am not at all sure what would happen. We are taller, but there are more of them. And their women wear sharp-looking heels.
The ceremony is over quickly and is mostly in Spanish, leaving the American guests to stare dumbly off into the distance while the Ecuadorian women dab tears from their eyes. The part about there being any reason why these two souls should not be joined in matrimony is definitely done in Spanish, which is wise as most of the American guests are looking surprised that this whole wedding thing is actually happening. There is some Hebrew read, a few Jewish traditions upheld, rings exchanged, and before I know it, the deejay shouts ‘Viven los novios!’ and cracks open a bottle of champagne, and the salsa music is pumping.
Before the shock settles in that Leah is now married to an Ecuadorian mechanic who speaks no English, the dance floor erupts into a party of fast-moving couples who know the steps and man, can they dance. We Americans shuffle off to the side, shell-shocked, shy. Next to the dark-skinned guests on the other side of the room, we look like white twerps who sit around and watch Seinfeld on Saturday nights while the Ecuadorians dance the night away.
But my parents are not ready to give up so quickly. My father, a deejay in his college days, reaches into his jacket pocket and shows me a CD of Billboard’s Top Ten Dance Tunes he bought at the market earlier that day. He sidles over to the music stand and confers with the deejay by nodding and pointing. He comes back, determined.
‘Get ready to dance’, he says to nobody in particular.
We stand watching twirling couples until the pumping beat of Little Eva’s ‘Locomotion’ arouses a cheer from the American side of the room.
Everybody’s doing a brand-new dance now…
And the American contingent floods onto the floor, shaking booties and nodding heads with vigour. Finding comfort in solidarity, they form a conga line. The Ecuadorians, more surprised than anything else, step off to the side, not sure what to do. The conga line does a slow but well-meaning lap or two around the dance floor, my father leading, then breaks up so that its members can shake their hips now. I can’t help but join them; I feel so embarrassed by my elders trying to have a good time on their own terms that I want to add to their numbers.
Even the Locomotion has to end, but the deejay is skilled, blending the last notes into a techno Latin beat that arouses cheers from the Other Side.
Exit the Americans, enter the Ecuadorians. They pair off and spin and twirl and dip and shake while my parents and the bride’s relatives catch their breath. They haven’t danced this hard since the sixties, and are sweating and gasping for air in the high mountain altitude.
‘Just wait ti
ll he plays “Respect”‘, my dad says, pumping a fist in the air.
The deejay tries a few more Latin melodies before the next Billboard song, which is a relief because the bride’s dad looks like he might need a bit of a breather and I don’t know if they even have an emergency room in Latacunga. But the Americans are back in full force by the first chorus of ‘YMCA’, which scares the Ecuadorians off to the side again, and shows off the sweat stains in the Americans’ armpits. The Ecuadorians don’t seem to sweat at all. They are also unsure what’s so much fun about spelling Y-M-C-A with your arms.
When it ends, the Americans sit down and the Ecuadorians take over again and I realise I am witnessing two different weddings in two different hemispheres and it’s a competition more than it is a celebration of matrimony.
This might have gone on for ever, but we are saved by ‘The Electric Slide’. Now it might seem laughable that such a terrible song, and one that stirs up so many memories of middle school and forced line dancing, would serve as the virtual bridge between the north and south. But it doesn’t drive the Ecuadorians off the dance floor. And since it is in English, the Americans are obligated to dance too.
Sure, my parents don’t remember all of the steps, and the Ecuadorians have a different version that involves a little more hip-shaking and twirling that doesn’t work out so well for the bride’s uncle, but the reality is that there we are, now relatives by marriage or friendship, boogieing down to the electric slide in a hotel/motel room in Latacunga, Ecuador, while the volcano smokes miles away.
And even this might have been an anomaly had not the groom’s cousin, a teenager named Gustavo who had already drunk the equivalent of a bottle of champagne, grabbed my mother before she could even say ‘Ole!’ and started tangoing with her on the dance floor. His relatives follow. When the Americans try to institute their exodus at the onset of Latin music, they are waylaid by relatives of the groom who are determined to teach them how to salsa no matter how many times their toes are stomped.
And although I know we’ll be leaving tomorrow to go back to Quito and stay in the Hyatt while the Ecuadorians will go back home and thank us for our pig in the morning, I cannot help but appreciate the pull of the equator and its neutralising effect. For as much as we Americans had opposed the wedding, the Ecuadorians probably loathed marrying Jorge off to a family of such terrible dancers as well. And now Leah and Jorge are at latitude zero, able to go any which way, north, south, east or west, and here we are, having crossed the invisible line that first divided us, spinning at 1.667 kilometres per hour near the centre of the world.
I find myself a nice Ecuadorian man whose name I cannot pronounce who is one of the taller men in the room and thus only a head or so shorter than me. He is patient and teaches me how to salsa, and we even add a few bells and whistles of our own after I get the hang of it. I can see my parents raising their eyebrows when he dips me, but I am having too much fun to be embarrassed. We could have danced off until the sunset, or sunrise in this case, had not Leah remembered that she forgot to throw the bouquet, and stopped the dancing so she could line up all the unmarried females to participate.
I stand jockeying with a cluster of Ecuadorian women behind Leah, really more interested in avoiding the flying flowers than catching them. But when she throws them, they hit the ceiling and somehow bounce into my hands.
My Ecuadorian man applauds the loudest and I turn to wink at my parents. Another Ecuadorian wedding. Now wouldn’t that be nice.
THE MOST PERFECT HOTEL IN THE WORLD
SIMON WINCHESTER
Simon Winchester is the author, most recently, of A Crack in the Edge of the World, a centennial account of the great San Francisco earthquake. Among his other books are Krakatoa, The Map that Changed the World and The Surgeon of Crowthorne (also published under the title The Professor and the Madman). Simon lives in New York City and on a farm in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts.
This is a story not my own, but one that belongs to a literary figure of so towering a reputation among the belles lettristes of London that he feels it rather beneath him to relate it. He complains that the tale is, as they were once wont to say in Rome, infra dig, since it concerns such mundanities as the location of hotel rooms, the design of baths and the taps with which they are customarily equipped, the latest reported methods of making gin martinis and the rituals of American wedding nights. The fact that this confection, of what are to most readers really rather interesting items of ordinariness, was assembled for the making of the story in what was at the time one of the world’s finest hotels, to wit the Connaught, of Carlos Place, London W1, cuts neither ice nor mustard with the figure to whom the tale belongs – an attitude of such unrelieved stubbornness that it has compelled me to conclude, if somewhat irrelevantly, that the aforesaid literary figure is in fact, and in titanic proportions, a crashing snob.
The setting, the Connaught Hotel, was once an inn of the keenest perfection, a place of Edwardian solidity, quiet and discretion, a hotel where one might live for months and feel quite as civilised and content as though one had never left home in the first place. Lately it has been spoiled by fashion, of course; but at the time of the story its chambers, its drawing rooms, its corner bar and its restaurant were all impeccable in their own ways, needing never to be changed in any respect. The Grill in particular, though it plays no part in the story, was evidently an anteroom to Paradise: it was the kind of place where you might fall gently asleep over a perfect Dover sole, whereupon the waiters would be sure to pad past you with the softest of footfalls, would make certain that your tie made no contact with the butter dish, and on your awakening would enquire quietly if coffee or bonbons would be required as a conclusion to your evidently much-enjoyed repast.
But it is not the Grill that is the subject of this story. It is the suite of rooms, second floor front, that are on the very right-hand side of the hotel as you look at the door that opens onto Carlos Place. Most particularly it concerns the capacious and carpeted bathroom of this suite; and to be specific, without, I hope, any hint of vulgarity, it concerns the bath, and the slight eccentricity of its mechanics.
All the baths in this hotel, together, I am told, with all those in the older bathrooms of the Savoy and Claridge’s hotels too, enjoy the same and very singular arrangement, a design that was created to ensure peace and quiet for the bath’s intended occupant, as also for those who share his chambers: for rather than have the water flow into the bath from taps that are mounted on the vessel’s upper lip, as is customary, the unique design of the Connaught’s magnificently antique baths has the inflow pipe sited just above the drain, and so little more than an inch above the bath’s base. The consequence of the design will be clear: a few moments after the water has been turned on, its surface will have risen above the inflow, and no further sound – no bubbling or splashing or dripping – can be heard again. The bath thus fills in utter silence, a lavatorial discretion that is very much in keeping with the overall understated nature of this most grand of grand hotels.
However, these are modern times, times when few of the Connaught’s guests will travel as one generally did in the days the great structure was built, with one’s valet. And frankly, if one does not have one’s valet on hand to – in this specific case – turn the taps on and, more importantly, off, the silence that is offered by such an intricate design can lead to most costly consequence.
As was discovered, with much embarrassment, not by the aforementioned towering literary figure, but by his equally towering American literary agent, who had come to London and had wisely decided to stay at the Connaught and, most particularly, in the much-favoured second-floor corner suite of rooms. He was accompanied on his excursion not by his valet, but by his wife.
As she recounts, in chiding terms, it was her husband whose fault it all was. He ran the bath. He poured in a liberal quantity of bath salts. He walked away into the sitting room to await results. The reason for his wife’s later chiding arose
from the existence of a small sign on the ledge of the bath which read: Patrons are respectfully reminded that because of a unique design the baths in this hotel fill very rapidly and entirely silently, and it would behoove our guests (well, maybe it didn’t say behoove, but the Connaught is the kind of place where such vocabulary would be entirely acceptable) not to retire to the sitting room, or to use the telephone, while leaving the silently filling bath unattended, as flooding could occur.
No, she reported later, her husband did not take any note whatsoever of the notice, and as a result he was not behooven to avoid doing what he, as a towering literary agent, seems to have been born to do, and that was to telephone. He did so, at length, speaking to a number of long-unspoken-to friends in London, while all the time the bath, scented with expensive salts, was filling, filling, filling.
It must have been twenty minutes later when there came a soft rapping on the door. Our agent, exasperated by having his telephoning interrupted, opened it. (His wife was immersed in macramé, or some such.) A small man stood before him, clad in the uniform of a bartender. The man’s hair appeared to be wet – as, on closer inspection, did his barkeeper’s uniform, which clung limply to his form. An expensive aroma of vague familiarity wafted up from him.
‘Excuse me for bothering you, sir’, said the functionary. ‘But I wonder if you might be having some slight trouble with your bathroom. Water seems to be dripping through the ceiling of the bar – in rather sizable quantities, in fact. More like a steady stream. We’re having to close down.’
Oh. My. God. Of course! Agent, wife and the damply fragrant cocktailmeister ran as one to the bathroom – to find water silently washing over the edge of the bath and sheeting down onto a floor that was already six inches deep in warm suds. The room was a ruin. Good shoes floated about, wildly. An American newspaper lay sodden on the bubbled surface. Tufts of carpet drifted like eelgrass on a tropical beach. Oh. My. God.
By the Seat of My Pants Page 21