Otavalo

Kelly Estrella crossed the road, held out her hand, and said, "Nice to meet you," and "I´m Kelly Estrella," and "would you like to come for a drink?"

I told her that I was Sam and that I would, and after a while I asked her who the old lady walking beside us was, and she told me that that was her mother and that she was coming with us.

Night had fallen on the streets of Otavalo, where, at this time yesterday, poles and tarpaulin had lain, horizontally or folded on the floor, as the unsold goods from market stalls had been packed into trucks or vans. Now we walked, a strange looking triplet, perhaps, as the rich yellow light of streetlamps swam like oil in the thick black puddles on the ground."

We sat in a brightly lit room. Myself on one side of the table, the mother and daughter on the other.

The hands Kelly had held out to me were small and delicate, and she wore the intricate gold necklaces, the high collared white and turquoise blouse and long black skirt worn by most indigenous women in this part of Ecuador. Her mother´s hands were hidden, wrapped in a thick woollen blanket, against the evening´s chill. The whirring then of an electric blender, juicing fruit. Maracuya. Tomate de Árbol. And mango.

"Yes we have mangos, " I was saying, "and passion fruits, but they´re not as good as here. No. I´ve never seen a tree tomato in England before."

Between Kelly, who was 23, and the lady wrapped in the blanket - with deep worn lines on her face, tracing every expression from grief and fear and sadness, to joy, amusement and hope, so that it looked now as if someone had laid a myriad of photos, one for each emotion ever shown, each on top of the other, so that what was expressed seemed more a retrospective of experience itself, even when moved to express current moods - there seemed a missing generation. We sipped the juice through plastic straws.

The conversation rotated around what my Spanish could manage. Every Sunday, Kelly told me, she and her mother came into town to speak with her older siblings, studying in Germany. It was the happy killing of a prejudice to learn that two people from a small indigenous village were studying in universities half way across the world. Kelly helped her mum to make clothes, which was a reinforcement of one.

"How do you say papas in English?" she asked, and answered her own question, saying something very close to potatoes, but without any ´o´s in it. I hoped as I corrected her that I was as endearing when I make similar mistakes in Spanish, but I doubted it.

Kelly Estrella paid for the drinks despite protestations and we waited outside for their taxi. Still the yellow oil swimming in black water.

"Would you like to come for a walk, to the waterfall, with us tomorrow?" she asked, and I told them sadly that I had to leave. Perhaps it was only the pronoun though, that failed to change my mind.



The clouds part at last - Cotapaxi´s summit, 5897m