The Amnesia Clinic (18 page)

‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

‘I lost something down the cast,’ he said. ‘Itches like crazy.’

‘What is it?’

‘My Maradona ’86 medal. I can’t lose it. It’s one of the only things my dad ever gave me.’

The Maradona medal was a stained, bent object which Fabián kept on him at all times. He would flick it from finger to finger in idle moments, and it was the prop for many of his disappearing coin tricks and other sleight-of-hand gimmicks. Fabián had claimed to me early on that it was a genuine player’s trophy from the 1986 World Cup, but that had turned out to be nonsense put about by his father when Fabián was young. It was nothing more than a freebie given out by a cereal company at the time, but I knew that it had attained for Fabián a kind of totemic power, and I guessed that the part about it being a gift from his father was true.

‘You aren’t going to lose anything up there,’ said Ray. ‘Wait till the cast comes off. Have a stone.’ Fabián threw the skewer into the fire and took the stone from Ray’s outstretched hand.

‘Now,’ said Ray. ‘What brings you boys here? Forgive me for saying so, but you’re a little younger than my usual guests.’

‘Treasure hunting,’ I said, before Fabián had a chance to break his promise.

‘First I’ve heard of any treasure hunting,’ said Fabián, amused at my desperate efforts to keep him off the subject of the clinic.

‘You don’t know the story?’ said Ray. ‘Cristina, baby, tell them the story of Francis Drake.’

‘Only if they want to hear it.’

‘Course they want to, don’t you guys?’

‘Okay, but they probably know more about it than I do.’

‘Trust us: we don’t know anything,’ said Fabián, burping mid-sentence.

‘Nothing at all,’ I agreed, keeping quiet about what I knew. To have shown too much local knowledge would be as good as to declare to Fabián that I had manufactured the newspaper cutting.

‘Okay then,’ said Cristina, gesturing out to sea as she spoke. ‘So, it’s fifteen eighty-something, and out here, a great sea battle is in progress.’

‘Just like this afternoon,’ said Fabián, settling in.

‘Shut up,’ I said. ‘Please carry on, Cristina.’

‘Your Englishman Drake has been chasing a Spanish galleon for months. His men are tired and hungry. They have been away from land for so long that they are living on seagulls, which they have taken to fattening up with the flesh of dogs for a few days before they cook them, to stop them from tasting too fishy.’

‘Cool,’ I said.

‘Why not just eat the dogs?’ said Fabián.

‘No more interruptions,’ said Cristina. ‘In spite of this hardship, the men are not disheartened, because the prize in their sights is so magnificent and they have resolved to do anything to get at it. Drake is chasing a ship that Spanish sailors nicknamed the
Cacafuego
because it was so fierce in battle that it looked like it was shitting fire. After chasing it all the way up the coast from Chile to Peru to here, Drake finally captures it, and all of the treasure on board. It is a triumphant victory. He is out there, ready to take both of the ships back to Plymouth and his waiting queen, where he will receive a hero’s welcome.
Not only his own ship but the
Cacafuego
as well, and all of the silver in its belly.’

‘Nice work,’ said Fabián.

‘Very nice,’ said Cristina. ‘Sadly, the Spanish have other ideas. Before the last of them are captured, they have enough time to scuttle the
Cacafuego
.’

‘What’s that?’ said Fabián.

‘It’s when you sink your own ship to stop it being captured,’ Ray explained. ‘Very noble behaviour. Personally, I would just say, “Take the ship, dude.” Not these guys.’

‘Do you mind?’ said Cristina, laughing at Ray in spite of herself. ‘So, the
Cacafuego
is going down. But Drake vows not to lose one piece of Spanish silver. His men manage to rescue all the silver from the Spanish ship just before it sinks. Now, this, on top of what the
Golden Hind
already carries, creates a serious overload of treasure. One of the Spanish prisoners starts calling Drake’s ship the
Cacaplata
, because it is now virtually shitting silver.

‘It’s actually a problem. The ship is now carrying so much treasure that Drake doesn’t know what to do with it. Sailors are skimming silver coins off the side of the ship to watch them bounce on the water. Even the youngest little cabin boy – let’s call him Hawkins, like in
Treasure Island
– even he is running around on deck with shining silver buttons in his jacket. The cook begins experimenting with it in the food. Silver is spilling over the sides with every lurch of the ocean. Do you get the picture?’

‘We get the picture,’ said Fabián. ‘There’s a lot of silver.’

‘There is a lot of silver,’ said Cristina. ‘People aren’t even bothering to steal it off each other. There is so much of it around that it has lost all of its value. You see?’

‘We see,’ said Fabián, getting impatient. ‘So what happened?’

‘Drake calculates how much weight they need to lose to get
back to England without sinking, and then he has to decide what to do with the rest of it. He sails into a tiny cove, near here, on an island called Cano – which we now know as the Isla de Plata. While the ship is taking on water and turtles for their journey home, Drake gets hold of a copper bowl and starts ladling up equal amounts of the treasure to his crew. And when he’s done that, he throws seventy-two tons of it over the side, somewhere in the bay. He notes the spot so that, eventually, he can come back and claim it. But he never does. And it’s still down there to this day.’

Fabián had finished eating and now lay on his back with a hot stone on his belly, looking upwards in the direction of the Southern Cross. ‘Cool,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should go treasure hunting after all.’

‘Maybe we should,’ I agreed, keen to establish any new quest, however absurd.

‘Ray’ll take you tomorrow, won’t you baby?’ Cristina said.

‘Okay. But first I think we should have a story from one of you two,’ said Ray. He pointed at Fabián. ‘I bet you’ve got a good one up your sleeve. Some highland folk-tale. I can see you’ve got the blood for it. Bet you can speak a bit of the
runasimi
too.’

‘No,’ said Fabián, sitting up. ‘My father spoke a little, but I don’t.’ Ray’s remarks had unsettled him. I don’t think anyone had ever recognised his Indian blood before.

‘
Runasimi
?’ I asked.

‘It’s the word that Indians use to describe the language everybody else decided to call “Quechua”,’ said Cristina. ‘It means “the language of real people”.’

Increasingly uncomfortable, Fabián claimed that he didn’t know any folk-tales. Cristina told him he should make one up. She said that there were only a few rules you had to remember:

‘First, start with guinea pigs, for dramatic effect. Either with “All the
cuyes
in the house woke up at once” or with “All the
cuyes
suddenly fell silent at once”. Second, make sure you stick in a symbolic animal or two somewhere. Third, draw your audience in at the end by addressing them personally and telling them you’ve got them a piece of cake from the wedding feast, or that your character still lives on, to this day.’

Ray liked the sound of the challenge. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘If you make up a good story for us, I’ll take you out to the Isla de Plata in my boat tomorrow, all expenses paid, and we’ll find some of Francis Drake’s treasure.’

I was lying on my back, balancing a hot stone between my knees and watching sparks from the fire fly away from me into the sky, so I couldn’t see Fabián’s reaction. But I knew that this incentive, as well as the challenge, would be too much for him to resist.

Okay. We’ll call this story ‘The Boy Who Said Nothing’ (said Fabián). The story goes that it was midnight in the village. It was a clear night, and the Southern Cross was twinkling away in the sky.

The boy knew nothing of this. He was in his bed and his mother was in the next room. His father was out night-fishing, and wasn’t expected back until the morning. Suddenly all of the
cuyes
started making noise at once. They had been disturbed by something outside. The boy lit his candle and waited for the
cuyes
to settle down again.

He walked into the next room where his parents slept, and saw that his mother’s bed was empty. He felt it, found that it was still warm, and assumed she had gone outside to piss, or to heat some chocolate for herself, as she sometimes did when his father was away for the night and she couldn’t sleep.

He went outside. His mother lay on her back over a fallen tree. Her skirts were hitched up about her, her legs were spread and a great white bull was on top of her. Its hooves were planted squarely on his mother’s shoulders, pinning her down, but she didn’t seem to be struggling. Quite the opposite. Already, the boy knew that the sound of her cries would stay with him for the rest of his life.

The boy ran back to his room, pacified the
cuyes
and put himself back to bed. In the morning he told himself that what he had seen was a dream, and not the truth. He resolved to put it to the back of his mind. But the vision would return to him two months later.

He and his father were carrying sacks of barley to the market, and his father, unable to contain his happiness, told the boy that he was to have a baby brother or sister. The boy was old enough and tactful enough not to say anything about the bull, but for the next seven months, he woke in the night from atrocious nightmares about his mother being punctured from within by horns as she tried to birth the bull-baby.

And still the boy said nothing. On the night of the birth it was raining hard in the village. The priest came to the cottage. He told the boy he was getting in the way and asked him to leave for a while. The boy was only too happy to go. He was tormented by what might happen.

The boy ran through the fields, slipping in the mud as he went, trying to escape the vision in his head. Whenever he tried to return to the hut, his mother’s cries of pain would send him off again into the wet night.

The boy ran for hours, finally collapsing to sleep beneath a
quiñua
tree that kept the rain off him. When he woke up the next morning, he was covered with dried mud and leaves and the valley was shot through with the widest, most
colourful rainbow the boy had ever seen. Everything he saw seemed filtered through it.

Taking this as a good sign, the boy made his way back to the cottage. The air was fresh and cold after the storm. The highland sun blinded him as he descended the mountain, and made his nose run. As he approached his home, he heard the sound of a crying baby and not the sound of a lowing calf, as he had dreaded. He started running, but the priest stopped him at the front door.

‘Your mother is dead,’ he said. ‘But you have a baby brother. It’s sad, but life will go on.’

The boy saw that life would go on. But he saw at the same time that the morning, and the rainbow, were illusions – that the previous night would now never be over, and that a part of him would be stuck inside it, running up and down the mountainside in the rain, for ever.

Over the next year, the boy tried as hard as he could to love his brother, but he could not look at the child’s face without seeing twisted bull-horns emerging like tree roots from his forehead. He began to fear that he might harm the child.

And so, to protect his family, he left home to work for a distant cousin, high in the mountains, where he could spend his days alone until he could stop living the same night over and over again. Even as he left, he knew that to outlive it would take longer than he had on this earth.

He’s up there in the highlands still, even to this day. And if you are lucky you may see him up a hillside, eating grubs and insects and tracking a white bull that he knows he will never find, through the night, every night. That is the story of ‘The Boy Who Said Nothing’.

The fire popped. Fabián stared into its glimmering heart as if nobody else were there, and then tilted his head with an
embarrassed look. Ray opened another bottle of beer and passed it to him, along with a hot stone.

‘Not a particularly feel-good story, is it?’ said Ray.

Laughter rang out across the sand.

The next morning, I woke to the tickle of flies drinking sweat off my face. A spasm of revulsion brought down my mosquito net, which had obviously been ineffectual in any case. Half-awake, and shrouded in white gauze, I allowed panic to get the better of me and writhed for a minute or two like a suffocating fish before finally shedding the net. With shutters clamped across its windows, our cabin was airless and damp with sweat and bug spray. I swept the room a couple of times to make sure Fabián hadn’t been present to witness my display, then pushed open the cabin door, stepping on to sand already scorched by the early morning sun. Recoiling from the glare, I made straight for the shower cubicle, where I stood flinching on the latticed bamboo floor and pulled the chain. Brackish, brown water sluiced over me. It felt good. I waited for the cistern to fill up, then flushed it a second time.

As I stumbled dripping towards the bar area, a prehistoric, animal cry broke the silence. I half-expected to round
the corner and see Ray grappling with a brontosaurus he’d snared us for breakfast, hallooing a jaunty ‘good morning’ as he swung from its neck. I couldn’t see the animal in question as I put my head under the palm thatch, but I could tell that all was not normal. Fabián cowered on the far side of the bar with a chair before him, lion-tamer style, as Ray and Sol looked on in amusement.

‘Good morning,’ I said.

‘Anti, keep back,’ said Fabián. ‘Fucking thing’ll take your finger off.’

I expected a komodo dragon, or at least a giant iguana. As I walked in, I saw that the beast was in fact a parrot, albeit the largest one I had ever seen. Predominantly a glossy red, with a tail of bright greens and startling blues that extended at least two body lengths behind it, it staggered around between the tables, alternately shrieking and worrying at chair legs with a beak that did, to be fair to Fabián, look vicious.