The Amnesia Clinic (31 page)

‘As I walked back to our cabin with flies buzzing round my stinking face, I got more and more furious with Fabián. Our entire trip seemed to have been spent sitting on this stupid beach, getting wasted. I also thought that Fabián had scared Sally Lightfoot away by being so aggressive, which made me realise how sick I was of the fact that every story had to revolve around him. What’s more, he’d abandoned
me again for a ten-year-old girl, leaving me alone for the day, playing in sewage. I got more and more angry the more I thought about it.

‘I found him in a terrible state. Yet again, he’d been drinking. He’d also got into this obsessive habit of cleaning his face with pure alcohol, and looked awful. To make matters worse, he’d had a falling-out with Sol. It was nothing serious – she’d just slipped in a rock pool when they’d been out looking for crabs – but I managed to build it into the attack on him that I unleashed when I got back to the cabin. I accused him of betraying me by hanging out so much with Sol. I was so angry, I didn’t know what I was saying. I even accused him of trying to … molest her.

‘And then I told him that I’d been with Sally. I told him that we’d been alone all day, screwing under a beautiful waterfall. It was nonsense, of course, but I wanted to get him back for what he’d done to me. He was in a vulnerable state and I knew he’d believe me. That’s what got him so angry. That’s how it started.

‘We said a lot of stupid things to each other, but I think it was mainly to do with what we had done, running away: it was beginning to catch up with us. It didn’t seem like a game any more. It … it involved talking about the Amnesia Clinic, too, and him screaming at me that I’d never meant to help him when I made the newspaper cutting. That our journey had all been for my benefit, not his. Then he ran off round the cliff base to try and get up to the dome.

‘He’d been to the cave before, so he knew there wasn’t a danger of getting caught by the tide if you got there in time, but I didn’t know that, so I followed him, because I thought he might get into trouble.

‘When I reached him, I was almost having an asthma attack – I just wanted to stop, get my breath back and talk. But he was very angry. We ended up having a fight out there,
on the rocks, pushing each other around and screaming. Somehow, we both ended up in the water and hit our heads. I managed to get out and climb up to the cave. But I couldn’t see him anywhere. Then I must have passed out.

‘You wanted the truth. Well, there it is.’

My father dropped his olive stone in the dish with a clink. My mother gazed down at the floor with a grim expression.

Suarez stared at me, then exhaled slowly. I tried to get some signal from him, some indication that he was still on my side. But the twinkle in his eye had been snuffed out once and for all.

‘So,’ he said, eventually. ‘Just so we’re clear about this: you took it upon yourself to wind Fabián up, who was in a fragile enough state as things stood, so you could get him back for some harmless boyish story.’

‘I have to agree, Anti,’ said my mother, quietly. ‘It sounds like very irresponsible behaviour to me. Even
malicious
.’

‘But it shows you – it
proves
to you – that it wasn’t because he believed the article. The Amnesia Clinic had nothing to do with it. He was just crazy as hell anyway!’

‘Thanks to you,’ Suarez said coldly, ‘we will never know the truth of that. One thing is certain: I will never forgive myself for not discussing the matter of Fabián and his parents more with him. Look where it has got me.’ He shook his head. ‘Félix Morales screwing the maid. I should have known that pissy little mountain boy couldn’t keep his hands off his own kind.’

My mother didn’t like the sound of this. ‘Hang on. There’s no excuse for—’

‘And what do you know?’ he snapped. There was a new edge to Suarez’s voice. An unfamiliar spite that made me feel sick.

‘Plenty, as it happens,’ said my mother, ‘when it comes
to intolerance in this country. But, under the circumstances, I will bite my tongue.’

Suarez laughed in a particularly scornful, dirty way. ‘Please, Señora, don’t hold back your views on my account. I think you’ll find I am strong enough to take them.’

I told my mother to shut up and let me handle it. The last thing we needed was for the conversation to degenerate into one of her social crusades. Then I turned back to Suarez.

I talked for a while. It involved any excuse – conflicting excuses:
I didn’t think Fabián would take it so seriously. It was to make him feel better. You said real life can be disappointing. You said that sometimes it doesn’t hurt to let people believe what they want to believe. You said grief asks different questions of us all. You, and your stupid, pithy aphorisms for everything. It’s you. It’s your fault, not mine
.

Heroically, my mother leapt to my defence. ‘Quite right. Whose influence was it that made the two boys decide to run away in the first place?’ she demanded. ‘From what I can gather, you not only encouraged but positively
fuelled
the “headstrong” nature of your nephew, as you described it, and I don’t imagine that my son would ever have made the decision to play truant and travel halfway across the country without your encouragement.’

‘Even a man who stands accused of having “an elastic view of the truth” can see that this is bullshit,’ said Suarez. ‘This has nothing to do with me, or with Fabián. This is to do with your son.’

The malicious energy that lit his eyes combined with his gaunt appearance to transform his expression. He turned on me like a snarling, slobbering pit-bull.

‘You are parasitic. A cuckoo.’

I started.

He pointed at me, marking each word with sickening
precision. ‘And like the cuckoo, laying its eggs in a weaker bird’s nest, you are nothing more than a vandal.’

‘Weaker? How could
Fabián
be the weaker one?’ I pleaded.

‘You are perpetually scared. You are a coward. That makes you capable of anything. As far as I am concerned, you as good as killed him.’

‘Enough.’ I had never heard my father’s voice so firm. I thought someone new had walked into the room. ‘He’s only a boy.’

‘He’s man enough,’ Suarez snapped.

Suarez stood up. He strode to the doorway and then, with almost absurd melodrama, he spat on the floor.

‘Leave,’ he said. ‘You’re no fucking storyteller.’

The three of us sat dumbly, shocked into paralysis.

‘Leave,’ he repeated, shaking with rage. ‘Before I set Byron on all three of you.’

‘Suarez. Please.’ I was determined not to cry, but it was too late. My cheeks were streaked already, and I could feel the tears trickling into the back of my mouth. I tried to find more words but I had no breath left to speak. All I could do was wheeze.

My mother strode smartly out of the room without giving Suarez another look, while my father helped me up. At the door, Suarez said, ‘One more thing before you go, Anti. I wouldn’t be so sure Fabián was lying about that brothel, if I were you. There is something of a predilection for whoring in my family. As, indeed, there is for storytelling.’ His inability to control himself was heart-rending. ‘Fabián’s world was fantastic because it
needed
to be. What’s your excuse?’

And so the front door of Suarez’s house closed on me for the last time. As we left, I heard my mother muttering, ‘What
a horrible man.’ The sound was distant, drowned, irrelevant. The unreality of it all felt like pins and needles in my face. Byron’s exotic rose beds and cacti, the whitewashed walls of the house, the red earth by the driveway, our stupid, practical car – I expected all of it to dissolve away at any minute and leave me alone. I realised that I hadn’t even said goodbye to Byron and Eulalia but, at that point, I could not have cared less.

In fact, the strongest feeling I had was one of regret. Not for anything I had done in Pedrascada, or even what I’d just said in the library. I regretted the fact that I had embarrassed Suarez and made him drop his mask in such an ungainly way. With that single loss of composure, the last of the bright illusions that had sustained my life in Ecuador had expired.

My mother offered what solace she could. ‘Anti, you know you aren’t the person he’s really angry with, don’t you?’

She started to say something else as I climbed into the car, then saw the expression on my face and stopped. It was too late for any more conversation. We drove home in silence, down a deserted motorway eerily lit by pale street-lamps. When we passed through the Old Town, its whitewashed fronts and empty, cobbled streets lent it the ghostly quality of a deserted stage set. I resented all of the colourful people who would have been bustling round the place during the daytime for being absent now, on my last journey through, when I needed them the most.

The following afternoon, I stood at the airport saying goodbye to my father, still unable to believe that someone in a shiny suit was not going to appear from behind a screen, escorting a grinning Fabián and telling me the whole thing was a joke. My parents would stay on for a few weeks more to finish what business they had left in Ecuador, and I would be met at Heathrow at the end of my flight by an uncle I barely remembered, to be looked after until their return. I wanted to ask my father whether there was any way I could stay on for Fabián’s funeral the following day, but I had left it too late. My suitcase was checked in and my connection to Caracas would leave in an hour.

‘This arrived for you this morning,’ said my father. ‘From Suarez. Delivered by that enormous chauffeur of his. Apparently it was something of Fabián’s he wanted you to have.’

I took from him a heavy, square parcel, covered in brown paper and wrapped tightly in masking tape.

‘Bye, mate,’ said my father, giving me a hug. ‘Call us as soon as you get to the other end. And try not to think too much about all this for a while, if you can.’

‘I’ll try,’ I said.

We hadn’t discussed the crime I’d committed in manufacturing the newspaper article, or my father’s small degree of complicity in it. But, I reasoned, there would be plenty of time to talk about that later. Fabián’s death was a topic of conversation that would be around for a very long time.

I walked through passport control with the package in one hand and my hand-luggage in the other, pausing to give my father a brief wave at the door. I just caught him wiping his eyes before he turned around to leave the airport building.

A customs official dressed in light brown with a huge pistol strapped to his belt stood behind a long table by the X-ray machines. I saw his eyes light up at the sight of me, the approaching gringo, with the suspicious brown paper parcel.

‘What’s in the package, my boy?’ he asked. His breath smelled awful: stale coffee and cheap, black tobacco on a bed of halitosis.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘it’s a gift.’

‘Come on, son, you know the rules. If you didn’t pack it yourself, we can’t allow you to take it on the plane without looking at it.’

‘Of course,’ I said, putting the package and my holdall down on the table.

The customs official took a knife from his pocket and slashed open the package down one side. He bunched a hand on either side of the opening he had created and ripped it apart crudely. The parcel had been well wrapped, but it yielded to his ham-fisted persistence and tore open to reveal an object wrapped in old newspaper. The customs man, who had by now been joined by a colleague no less mean-looking
but several pounds fatter, pulled some of this to one side. I saw a shock of straight, black hair and smelled a familiar preservative smell. Of pickles and hospitals.

‘You know what this is?’ asked the customs man.

‘I’m not sure, but I have a feeling that it might be a
tsantza
,’ I said. ‘A Shuar shrunken head.’

The man’s eyes widened. ‘Is that right? If it is, you’ll have to pay a heavy tax to take it out of here, you know that? And I’ll need to see your export licence.’

I sighed. Leaving wasn’t going to be such an easy business after all. Already, in my head, I had begun to calculate how long it would take my father to retrieve his car and drive back home so that I could call him and tell him to come straight back to the airport to pick me up. On the plus side, it meant that I would definitely be around the next day to attend the funeral. Surely they wouldn’t deny me access if I was still in the country?

The customs man took the head, lifting it up by the hair, and yanked it free of the packaging. Its dried-up face popped through the aperture in the parcel in a grotesque caricature of childbirth.

The customs official held it up crudely, allowing the head to spiral slightly beneath his outstretched hand, and peered at those ineptly sewn-up eyelids. He smirked and then burst out laughing, then brought it right up to the face of his colleague in a bid to scare him.

‘Okay, kid,’ he said, smiling and dropping it back on top of the mound of brown paper, tape and newsprint, where it landed with a thud. ‘Very nice. On your way, now. Take your
tsantza
and get out of here.’

‘You mean I don’t need an export licence?’ I asked.

‘You would need an export licence,’ said the customs man, ‘if what you had there was anything resembling a genuine shrunken head. What you have there is a piece of
moulded pigskin. I hope that whoever gave it to you didn’t pay too much for it. Enjoy your flight.’

He and his friend smirked for a while longer as I tried to rewrap the parcel, and presently they laid eyes on their next victim. I made my way through to the departure gate.

Even as I waited for the plane, I could feel my memories beginning to solidify and coalesce into picture postcards. Already, different occasions had begun to blur into one another and the things that had happened were beginning to transform at the edges into the things I felt should have happened. The simple act of going through customs had brought on the early stages of my amnesia.

As the plane taxied out, preparing itself for the strain of getting off the valley floor and escaping that basin in the mountains, I looked out at the New Town, trying to identify which was our apartment block and to spot the balcony where I had spent so many afternoons with my father, happily devising improbable explanations for the noises that floated up from below. Already, life in Quito seemed vague as Ecuador started to become My Ecuador, the one I would tell people about when I got home. I tried to embark in my head on the process of working Fabián’s and my experiences up into a good story, then I stopped and reminded myself that thoughts like that, this early, were wrong. Besides, I had lost my audience.