Literary recommendation: ‘A la Costa’, a classic of Ecuadorian literature that captures the anger of Luis A. Martínez

For Fernando Endara | Anthropologist and Literature teacher

A la Costa, Ecuadorian customs of the ambateño, Luis A. Martinez. Published in 1904, It is a pivotal work that represents a break with the preceding romanticism, and that sows the realistic bases that sustain the rise of the literature of social realism of the Generation of 30. Of course, To the coast It is not a perfect work, however, its merits assign it a privileged place in the history of Ecuadorian literature, let’s see its details.

In addition to being a writer, the Ambateño Luis Alfredo Martínez He was a painter, farmer, mountain climber and liberal politician, he held several public and administrative positions under the tutelage of Eloy Alfaro, among which are political lieutenant of Mulalillo, Minister of Public Instruction and administrator of the Ingenio Valdez in Milagro. His stay in the Litoral region allowed him to learn first-hand about the situation of the montuvios, some of their customs and ways of life; but he could not reflect them in their complexity in the novel due to his short class/regional view. During this period he fell ill with malarial polyneuritis (like Salvador, the protagonist of To the coast), was left paralyzed and bedridden; however, he was able to recover thanks to the care of his wife, Rosario Mera Iturralde, daughter of his cousin Juan León Mera, to whom he dictated the novel To the coast, during convalescence.

the plot of To the coast follows the life of Salvador Ramírez, a mountain man impoverished after the death of his father and who, with no prospects for the future, embarks on a journey to the Litoral region to work in a cacao plantation until he finds fleeting happiness in the arms of his young wife, Consuelo. .

The novel is divided into two parts: the first, the mountain part, narrated in a costumbrista tone, is very critical of religion, recounts Salvador’s childhood, adolescence and youth in his family: an ultra-Catholic conservative home that looks with disdain at the political challenges of the new century and that prohibits their children, Salvador and Mariana, from having relationships with Luciano, a young liberal friend of the boy, who became the daughter’s first love. The character and the voluptuous attractiveness of Mariana could not be enclosed in the dogmas and rosaries, she escaped violently to give herself, before mass, to Luciano the forbidden one; who hesitated, but in the end tore the membrane. Disgraced in the face of a macho society, the girl took refuge in Rosaura, an old pimp who behind her pious disguise hid her deceitful intentions: to organize sexual encounters between priests and young girls. Mariana was trapped with the celibate Justinian, with the good shepherd who did not hesitate for a moment to defy all spiritual order to rape the little girl, the tender rose that was left withered. After the death of her father, humiliated, broken, lost, Mariana followed the path, reviled by the author, of prostitution; Salvador, for his part, after enlisting, failing and becoming disappointed in the conservative army, deserted to take the course To the coast.

Pedro Gil Flores, the one stigmatized as a ‘cursed poet’, was not looking to be a legend, he just wanted to be a writer

In this first part, One of the author’s virtues shines at first sight: his anger, his courage to make visible and denounce the injustices he perceived around him. “We are facing something that never was [en la novela ecuatoriana previa a Martínez]: indignation and passion; anger […] In Martínez, anger becomes a novel. Here’s the news. […] Anger will make this novel a precursor to the Ecuadorian narrative of the 20th century: social realism” (Rodríguez Castelo, 1984).

An anger that leads him to write: “Religion and freedom, two deceitful ghosts that have swallowed thousand generations, without ever having been able, neither one nor the other, to dry the tears of humanity”. Of course, this outrage arises from his liberal perspective, therefore, the Catholic Church is attacked, as are its ministers, officiants and practitioners.

Although Martínez sought to distance himself from his romantic predecessors, through a direct language, even violent, avoiding poetic language, he did not completely succeed because the narrator of his novel returns again and again to romanticism, detailing and describing, not , by painting the landscapes of the Sierra and the Coast with words. Although the love plot of the first part is a pretext to unleash his rage and criticize the “outdated romanticism”, he did not postulate anything novel about women; as in romanticism, he reduced it to a creature without depth that is torn between holiness and perdition, between virtue and sin, between purity and rapture: a macho vision that dictates how a woman should behave and that condemns those who go out of the norm, even more, who stigmatizes the loss of female virginity as the worst of setbacks. That is why Martínez stayed in the hinge of romanticism/realism, because of his macho/conservative vision of women and because in his role as a painter he was one of the few exponents of Ecuadorian pictorial romanticism. Martínez was not a writer who painted, he was a painter who wrote.

The The second part, more visceral and heartbreaking, tells us the details of an evicted Salvador who ends up as a worker at the “El Bejucal” cocoa farm. in the most infernal region of the Ecuadorian coast, where the heat, the snakes, the mosquitoes, the dirt, the diseases and the human savagery do not let up. Martínez paints pictures of customs that are true historical documents about the trade, transport and production of cocoa, detailing the details of the agricultural processes and painting the exuberance of tropical agriculture, its clear waters and its mysteries.

The concatenated and contrasted descriptions of the landscapes, the customs and the people of the Sierra and the Coast pose a first idea of ​​the country; no longer a conglomeration of haciendas and large estates, no longer independent and disconnected cities, but a national state that, although divided by a mountain range, responds to a historical and cultural link. In the words of Jorge Enrique Adoum, To the coast is the “first expression of the will to see and explain the country”, a valuable literary and political attempt, postulated from the perspective of its time: a sexist, classist and regionalist dimension that reduced women, workers, workers, farmers, peasants and the costeño to an object configured for the use and abuse of the white pattern. Beyond its virtues and defects, To the coast is the defense of a liberal political project for Ecuador, which in addition to being a product and a reflection of its time (Sinardet, 1998), called for the search for a new man in a new space (with the death of Salvador the old Ecuador dies (Sinardet, The cultural geography of Luis A. Martínez: spaces and identity, 2020)), and showed the vital solitude that accompanied its author, Luis Alfredo Martínez, in connection with the spirit of nature.

Indeed, one of the greatest virtues of the novel is its magical and mystical description of Ecuadorian landscapes that are painted as superior and unalterable forces, sunsets that guard human tragedy, horizons of hope, vivid colors, exuberance and fullness: a landscape lyricism of moral elevation that leads to the sublime. To the coast It has earned, with all the merit, its place as a classic of the letters of Ecuador. Sorrow To the coast because the history of America is in our novels and not in our history books. (THE)