TRAVEL

Rag-dolls in the Amazonas

Matthew Parris

At first I thought they were actors in some macabre street theatre. In a variety of strange and awkward poses — some frozen in mid-gesture, some dancing a jittery, disjointed dance, some lying slumped, apparently lifeless — groups of human figures formed a weird series of tableaux on every side. Generally they inhabited little wooden stages, makeshift, hammered together by the kerb; but some were sitting on the pavement among us. A man was dancing with one of them.

I had not intended to spend New Year's Eve in Ecuador, but that is how it turned out. To be alone in Quito (a city strange to me) would be dull, I thought. That is not how it turned out.

Flights cancelled, flights delayed, and flights deflected from Quito until the equatorial storms rolling over the Andes subsided in the last hours of the old year, conspired to deliver me into this mountain capital at 10 p.m. on 31 December 1990.

It was too late to ring friends of friends, too late to book tables. In my smart hotel, drinking parties for German tourists were already in full swing. But does one come to Ecuador to clink litres of beer with jolly Bavarians?

At 10,000 feet one can shiver on the equator. So I had donned a warm jersey and an old pair of jeans and walked out into a clear, starry night.

`Avenida Rio Amazonas', the sign had said. Quito is a big city and not without sophistication, and the Amazonas is its Oxford Street. A few revellers at least, I had thought, should be outdoors. This might give me the flavour of the place.

There were perhaps 50,000 revellers. The central mile of the Amazonas was a wall-to-wall crush of people, spilling in, like the river itself, from the tributary streets joining from either side. From these came the sizzle and smoke of a hundred charcoal fires borne on little push-carts, selling brochettes of pork and sausages, potatoes (in the Ecuadorian style) of every colour, texture and size, bananas French- fried and banana crisps.

There was little alcohol about. In South America the Indians hardly drink for com- pany: they drink for oblivion or not at all. One or two of these could be seen lying, insensible, in doorways. Everyone else was sober. Everyone was walking, promenad- ing, Latin style, from one end of the mile to the other and then back.

Great snakes of people, young and old, families with children piggy-back in bobble hats against the cold, Indians in wide sombreros and ponchos, their long black hair braided in the manner of their tribe, and students in Levis and trainers (in the manner of their tribe) surged both ways, a confusion of movement, like the eddies in a cauldron, flowing back and forth among themselves, and ultimately nowhere. A sudden panic and hundreds could have been crushed; but the mood was relaxed: a sense of sightseeing, as among those who amble up Regent Street to see the lights, gripped the occasion.

For this was an unusual sort of prom- enade. On each side of the street were groups of revellers strangely apart from the rest of us. It was these we had come to see.

The one that first caught my eye was swinging from a trapeze strung between two lamp-posts. Nearby a boisterous dance-band thumped and strummed a tropical melody while the trapeze artist swung back and forth to the rhythm, limbs flopping from side to side, his hair, curiously thick and stranded, trailing in the wind.

He was not alive. He was a doll. These were mannequins, life-size and lifelike, constructed of cloth and straw, dressed in hand-me-downs, their faces painted in expressions of permanent pleasure, rage or pain, their limbs stiffened with wire and folded or outstretched as required, while movement (when desired) was secured by thin strings pulled by hidden hands. To every side the crowd was being entertained by dancing, swinging, flopping or frozen dolls, huge dolls.

There was something hateful about the dolls. As the purpose of the ceremony dawned on me, I realised why. Each puppet, each pose, each tableau, depicted something hateful from the old year. These dolls were the embodiments of pain and trouble, sin and misfortune. The evils of 1990 were being rounded up and paraded, to public contempt. Families stared, par- ents curious and children horrified, as dolls depicting disease, dolls representing com- mercial greed and dolls mimicking hated politicians danced or dangled in grotesque travesty to either side.

There is usually menace in primitive art. Something about all art touched by Indians in South America makes you shiver. Each scene was more chilling than the last. Even the humorous dolls had something horrid beneath the surface: a sort of gruesome- ness. Hanging entwined in the wires

TRAVEL

around the top of a telegraph pole, three grinning rag-dolls twisted in the wind. A tableau representing the rape of the natur- al world included a giant mannequin eating a giant ice-cream cone — crammed not with ice-cream, but with bloody gristle. Two scowling dolls locked in each other's rag arms swayed upright in a gormless tango, tied together with rope. Two young men danced with a girl-sized puppet, head' lolling senselessly as they threw her from one to the other.

Amplifiers pumped out mindless West- ern disco music as a mannequin in stars and stripes flopped from side to side, dollar bills in its mouth. Youths in Reebok trainers and designer tracksuits, their labels crude copies of famous American logos, shouted insults at Uncle Sam.

But it was the cardboard car passengers which stopped me. In a full-size cardboard car sat a family of three dolls: child, mother and father. Father, who was driv- ing, was depicted as a killer road-hog, grasping the wheel in manic style. By the time I reached this scene, arranged in the middle of the road, it was a quarter to midnight.

A can of petrol had been placed beside the car. Fifty or more promenaders had joined hands and were dancing in a ring around the puppet family in its cardboard conveyance. There was something threat- ening in the dance. The child doll seemed to peer anxiously out, half flopped across its mother's chest. The mother doll stared forward, blank, while father gripped the wheel all the tighter.

The dance grew wilder and faster. The ring broke and threaded back and forth, in and out, around the scene. The mother doll collapsed and a man ran in from the ring and rearranged it upright again, so that it could see over the dashboard. The dance was still growing in frenzy. Looking down the Amazonas I could see that every tableau, like ours, was now encircled by leaping Ecuadorians.

Someone looked at his watch. It was a minute or so before 12. Now the crowd ceased circling, and ran forward in waves at the car, closing in and receding. Again and again the crowd lunged at the puppet family, shouting, laughing, menacing. . . .

It was midnight precisely. The man with the watch darted in and grabbed the petrol can, emptying its contents over the puppets and their car. The crowd cheered. Then he laid a trail of petrol away from the pave- ment and out to the edge of the crowd, which had drawn well back. Here he lit the trail.

A flash of flame shot in from the crowd to the car. Instantly it was a blinding white blaze. The child was the final doll to crumple, its expression of goofy anxiety held to the last. A momentary silence fell on us as the puppets writhed and burned. I looked down the road. Every doll had suffered the same fate. The whole avenue

'I'd always assumed they'd be more intelligent than us.'

was ablaze with burning puppets. People had started cheering. Black smoke bil- lowed up into the stars.

It was a minute past midnight in Ecuador. In England it was 5 a.m. already. Perhaps you were sleeping: five hours five thousands miles, a world, away.

Matthew Parris is parliamentary sketch writer for the Times