Cumandá by Juan León Mera: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

The novel opens with a sweeping portrait of the forests of eastern Ecuador, from the Tungurahua volcano to the Pastaza river, and of their Jívaro and Záparo tribes. Among them rules Yahuarmaqui, the old chief of the Paloras, who counts his victories by the shrunken heads of enemy chiefs. The year is 1808, and the old missions have been declining since the Jesuits were expelled.

By the Palora river lives the small family of Tongana, the “old man with the head of snow”, a relentless enemy of white people, with his wife Pona, thought to be a sorceress, their two sons and young Cumandá, whose beauty and fair skin are nothing like her brothers’. Cumandá meets in secret, by two palm trees bound together by vines, with Carlos de Orozco, a young poet who has followed his father, the Dominican Fray Domingo, to the mission village of Andoas. They have promised to marry.

One chapter goes back in time: the missionary was once Don José Domingo de Orozco, a landowner near Riobamba who was cruel to his Indian workers, and in the uprising of Guamote and Columbe, in 1790, he lost his wife, Carmen, and his children when his house was burned; only Carlos was left to him. He became a friar and, repentant, devoted himself to the missions.

The story then moves to the canoe festival on Lake Chimano, which gathers the tribes under Yahuarmaqui as chief of chiefs. Cumandá is the maiden of the flowers; Carlos comes to watch, and her brothers, on Tongana’s orders, try more than once to kill him. To keep the lovers apart, Tongana offers his daughter as a wife to the old chief.

Mera wrote Cumandá as a gift to the Royal Spanish Academy, which had made him a corresponding member. In his dedication, dated Ambato, 1877, he notes that Chateaubriand and Cooper had already written novels about the Indians of North America, and claims for his book the novelty of the Amazon forests. It is a Romantic novel through and through: overwhelming landscape, impossible love, omens and battles, and a Catholic narrator who praises the work of the missionaries.

Yet it does not hide white cruelty: the 1790 uprising grows out of the abuses of landowners like Orozco, and the narrator writes that, after each uprising, “los blancos no se cansaron de instigar a los indios a la venganza, para luego ahorcarlos” (“the whites never tired of goading the Indians to revenge, only to hang them afterwards”). A classic of Ecuadorian literature that has inspired several operas, including one by Luis H. Salgado, it is still read for the power of its forest scenes and for its heroine, always a step ahead of everyone: “¿No eres hombre? ¿no soy salvaje? ¿a dónde no podremos ir?” (“Are you not a man? Am I not a savage? Where could we not go?”).

Juan León Mera was born in Ambato on 28 June 1832 and died in the same city on 13 December 1894. A poet, essayist, novelist, painter and conservative politician, he wrote the words of Ecuador’s national anthem, “Salve, oh Patria”.

He published poetry, a critical history of Ecuadorian poetry and collections of folk songs, presided over the Senate and was a corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. Cumandá, published in Quito in 1879 and in Madrid in 1891, is his best-known work.