Tuesday, 24th November, Cuenca: editors and gringas
The first of Pepe’s victories is Dr Nicanor Merchan, editor of the local paper, El Mercurio. Not only is he fiendishly accomplished, but he is also a passionate motorbiker, having done the Panamerican himself and manifold other mad biking adventures including the Himalayas. All 3 of his sons have some sort of National Motocross title, and bikes are very much a way of life for the Merchans.
We do a bit of a trade off with Dr Merchan – we interview him for our documentary, one of his guys interviews us for the paper. Dr Merchan’s wife is away, so it’s just him, so we decide to grill him on Cuenca and on biking. His wife doesn’t like to bike – how does that work? It’s his own special alone time. We ask him what it is about biking, and he replies that biking is life. It’s the way that he feels totally at one with the world around him, how he drinks in the great landscapes of the world. One time, he and his son were biking across the Himalayas. The snow was thick on the ground and they were wrapped up fully. In the distance, on the white landscape, he saw an orange dot. As they approached, he realised that it was a monk, wearing nothing but sandals and an orange robe.
They pulled up beside him, and the monk nodded peacefully, blessed them both and they hugged, managing to communicate across the language barrier. Dr Merchan said that it was one of the most moving and memorable moments of his life. You simply don’t get experiences like that without bikes, he seems to suggest.
We then meet Dolores, wife for 40 years of one of Cuenca’s most impressive residents, Edgar, a doctor who has set up a mobile surgery unit in which he travels the south of the country, doing much needed surgeries for free to the rural and urban poor. He loves Cuenca with his heart and soul and never considered living anywhere else. He met Dolores in Miami (she is a blonde nurse who he worked with in a hospital) and before he could marry her, he had to ask her if she would return with him to Ecuador, which 40 years ago was a fairly different place. He is the dean of the university, he was health minister for the government, and he and Dolores know everyone in Cuenca, pretty much. But he is away with the mobile surgery unit, so we can’t interview them.
So Dolores takes us to the home of her best friend, Diana, and her husband of 40 years, Tommy. Diana, like Dolores, is a US expat, married to an Ecuadorean. She’s a New Yorker and feisty, I can tell immediately that I’ll enjoy the interview.
Tommy headed to New York when he was 19. He didn’t speak a word of English and didn’t even really know where he was going. He got on a bus at the airport, then wandered around the part of New York he thought his uncle lived at. He was lost. He looked at people’s doorbells and eventually saw the name “Lopez”, assuming they’d speak Spanish, he rang the bell. Diana opened the door, didn’t speak any Spanish, but got her parents. Who happened to know Tommy’s uncle. And it went from there – Tommy’s uncle asked Diana to show him around the city, they slowly fell in love (and got better at each other’s languages – now they flit happily between the two). Effectively, Tommy married the first person he met in New York. Tommy has a husky contagious laugh and a smiling face and we all laugh our way through the interview. The two of them built their life out in Cuenca, have 4 totally bilingual kids – 2 in the States, 2 still in Cuenca. I always marvel at relationships which began with a courtship with different languages. How did they know that they were right for each other? Diana said that Tommy made her laugh from the get go, and she just knew they were great for each other. Lovely jubbly.
