Pan

Saturday, January 4. Quito, Ecuador

Perhaps it is customary to buy your bread the night before. Perhaps Ecuadorian bakeries respect the Catholic day-of-rest (a some four-hundred year habit?) and remain closed on Sundays. Perhaps breakfast bread is scarce if not absent from the kitchen table when it isn't bought beforehand. 

            Regardless, I was surprised by the line of perhaps twenty people that brushed the finger-stained glass of the panadería's bakery case in Quito's north district at dusk on a Saturday night.

While my host mother and I were being served by the employee behind  the chin-level counter, I noticed a couple sitting at a booth, a mess of  shapely coke bottles, fancy coffees in the hummingbird dishes that old, American diners serve ice cream in, and crumbly pastries littering their round table. Actually, it was the child I noticed first, the couple sitting nearby only as a product of the child's gaze.

Of course, I couldn't see the child's face, but I could tell from the skin at the nape of his neck and the slight shadows that licked his small jawline that he was dark. Dark like the rain-stained bark of a Michigan pine after an August storm. Dark hair, too, which covered his head like a child playing at pirates or buccaneers, slinging his mother's mixing bowls over his head and covering his eyes. 

His clothes were disheveled, loose, dirty even, and he stood alone. His parents weren't the fashionable couple sitting steps away at the table, nor the few other seated clients in the bakery. In fact, his parents weren't clients at all.

My gaze suddenly sought the two indigenous women standing at the shop's entrance, hawking strawberries and cherries to the unwilling and entirely unreceptive Ecuadorian middle class. These people obviously didn't buy their fruit from street venders; the women's strawberry mountains resembled the western Pichincha, the volcano that towers over the city like Sapo Inca, their mountains undiminished despite the Saturday traffic. 

The child, apparently, accompanied his mother. Perhaps he entered the bakery out of restless, three-year-old energy, out of curiosity. Maybe he was accustomed to the compassion of dining guests. 

Either way, the woman sitting at the table steps away noticed his gaze. She lifted her hand in the upside-down beckon of the Latino cultures—al reves—and handed the child the remains of a sticky-bun. The child was cautious to approach the stranger, cautious to take the pilled napkin-wrapped pastry, cautious to nibble the treat. Even at three, the child sensed the rigid class divisions that separate Quito's privileged from its largely indigenous poor.

I turned away then. I turned back to the counter, where my host mom was paying for some fourteen rolls. I turned away from the women, who was smiling, and the child, who was hungry, or restless, or merely bored. I turned away, and was glad the women didn't need to verify some abject justification—glad boredom was, for a moment, undistinguished from poverty, as good a reason as any to give a child bread.