The Amnesia Clinic (6 page)

‘All I can say is that this sounds like a
repellent
attitude to take towards history.’

In silence, we sped down one of the highways of New Quito, passing a detailed graffiti copy, on concrete, of Picasso’s
Guernica
.

And then she said it.

‘I think it’s about time we brought forward that plan to send you to school in England.’

Looking back, it seems obvious that my semi-digested regurgitation of Suarez’s fluid view of history would irritate my mother. The fact that she had pretended to find previous doses of the Suarez medicine amusing was neither here nor there. If I had known her as well then as I did later, I would have been fully aware that my mother’s currency in the world was, and always had been, facts. The same cannot necessarily be said of my father.

Among the many dark arts at my mother’s disposal was her Ph.D. in psychology, which I am convinced she somehow deployed repeatedly over the years as a tool to get her own way with both me and my father. Before I was born, when my parents decided on the globe-trotting lifestyle that came to define their married life, it was in answer to demands placed on them by my father’s job. His precocity as a young reporter boosted him into the position of Reuters’ West Africa correspondent at an early age. That he achieved this in spite of the fact that he didn’t have a degree was a testament to the esteem in which the agency held him. He was perceived as one of those seat-of-the-pants, university-of-life sort of people, and respected for it.

My mother leapt at the chance to go with him and live in Kinshasa and threw herself zealously into further academic work, writing what is now considered to be a seminal paper on the psychology of displacement, based on a series of recorded interviews with those who were beginning to return from the New World to discover their roots. In so doing, she took the circumstances imposed on her by my father and made them her own, until eventually even my father himself might have wondered whether it was his or her work that had originally brought them there.

Things tipped definitively in my mother’s favour following the events that precipitated their departure from Africa. When I was young, this story was shrouded in mystery, but I have since heard it enough times from Dad when he’s had a few drinks to know the details. In a nutshell, he was fired from Reuters because he made up a press release on a slow news day. There had been rumblings of a civil war in Angola, and he had spent three months trying in vain to find evidence of interesting atrocities in order to stoke up the atmosphere. Then one of his military contacts muttered something at a drinks party about an impending coup, and the next day, he put the story out on the wire without stopping to think about whether or not it had any factual basis. It caused quite a stir.

Any early promise in the field of serious journalism was not, therefore, fulfilled, and although he was now working for a small news agency in Quito, it was my mother’s work on the social status of mestizo and Indian families that was keeping us in South America. There had been what people now refer to as
El Levantamiento –
‘The Uprising’ – in 1990, and the status of
indígenas
was a hot social topic. My mother loved this, and churned out stuff not only on the Indians who were supposedly reclaiming their birthright and redressing centuries of repression, but also on the hitherto dominant Caucasians and the effects their meteoric descent
from favour was having on
their
sense of self-esteem. To me, all this couldn’t help but seem painfully earnest, but I would never have said so to her. And of course she, like my father, was writing for markets outside South America – to have presumed to publish comment on such issues as an outsider in Quito at that time would have somewhat defeated the point of the ‘revolution’.

In a smooth see-sawing motion, and with far greater permanence than the supposed overthrow taking place in the country we lived in, my father’s career had faded into the background; it was understood that we would leave the country when her work was done, and not the other way round. He no longer had a say in their trajectory. Which isn’t to say that there was some sort of power struggle – just that he was perfectly happy to stay in her slipstream and keep his head down.

On serious matters in which I hoped to have any say, it was always more advisable to approach him first, or at least the two of them together. Taking her on alone was suicide. So, as soon as the threat was uttered in the car, I knew enough to clam up and make no further comment on the subject of my education until dinner that evening, when I might hope for some backup.

I stalled my mother as best I could until we were almost home by asking her about her work. The monologue that ensued gave me a much-needed opportunity to collect my thoughts, and start planning how I might respond to the threat she had issued. Finally, the jeep banked into a steep incline, punched through the fug of diesel and aircraft exhaust that clung to the city, and we landed on the well-tended lawns of suburbia.

The neighbourhood where we lived was called Quito Tenis, and it was named after a tennis club; not an early
hamlet, a river, or an ancient Inca burial ground, but a tennis club. Well-heeled settlers had been drawn as early as the 1970s to the area’s abundant tarmac surfaces, agreeable shrubbery and secure, gated developments, and it wasn’t long before a select community thrived: lawyers, politicians, doctors, engineers, foreigners. In spite of the fact that Tenis was situated high on the north-western lip of the valley, its architects elected to build several huge apartment blocks there. The result was a cluster of white earthquake-proofed columns that rose high up out of the smog. Picture a teetering tower of sugar cubes standing in a puddle of gravy.

Our own block stood in a secure compound, with armed guards at the front gates. As our car drew up, they would open the huge metal doors that led down into the basement garage. When we’d first moved in I found it an exciting novelty – a bit like living in the bat-cave – but this had long since worn off.

My mother brought the jeep at speed into its allotted space and turned off the engine with a snap. The radiator fan heaved hot sighs of relief. She had been furniture shopping, and the rear of the car sat low under the weight of a chair carved from highly polished rainforest hardwood, which I was instructed to bring up to the apartment.

‘But use the service lift, will you?’ she said. ‘Don’t want to get in trouble for scratching the floor of the normal one. And for God’s sake, stop
sulking
. Nothing’s been decided yet.’

With that she was off, clacking away on the concrete floor of the basement towards the non-service lift, my bag dangling from her fingertips at a safe distance. I locked the car, shouldered the chair and struggled over with it to the service lift. Mahogany is heavy.

Watching numbers turn yellow in the gloom as my mother
ascended, I pressed the other, dirtier button that hailed the service lift. I’d never been in it before, and was surprised by what I saw when the doors slid open. The interior was padded with thick brown material, put there to absorb the blows of furniture or appliances as they were delivered to the show apartments above. It had absorbed more than that, too – the smells of stale smoke and sweat, of coffee and pollution. The residents’ lift, which I was used to, was finished in shiny, faux-industrial metal and contained no such soft furnishings charged with atmosphere. This one had the same dimensions, and led from the same starting point to the same destination, but inside it couldn’t have been more different. It was as if I had momentarily slipped into an alternative version of reality. Even the ping as the doors opened came through the same coarsening filter – it was louder, and more ragged, as if some crucial, restraining part of its apparatus had been snapped off. I put down the chair and sat enthroned on it for a moment, taking in these new surroundings. Then I reached up, pressed button number seven and wiped the oily deposit this left from my fingertip on to the brown cladding. The machine jerked into action.

Halfway up to our apartment, the lift stopped with a jolt, the strip light overhead flickered and died, and a wheeze of dying machinery shuddered through the building. Due to the state of emergency over the war with Peru, power cuts were frequent, but they didn’t normally spread as high up the food chain as Quito Tenis. In its quest for energy conservation, the Ministry of the Interior preferred to reserve its strictures for those with fewer energy-hungry appliances and less political clout. Nevertheless, they did happen, and I knew I would have to sit this one out in the lift until the power came back on. My mother knew where I was, and would take steps to get me out if necessary.

I inhaled deeply and relaxed into the chair. Now that
the lift was in darkness, I was hypersensitive to the smells infused into its fabric sides. It smelt of the outside world; a world about which, in this country at least, I still knew very little. I pictured condors circling above waterfalls, Indians in ponchos trudging through misty mountain villages and olive-skinned kids playing with a battered football on the beach before realising that what I had in mind were mere holiday-brochure images of my adopted country. I had no more laid eyes on these sights than I had watched fireworks burst over the cathedral in Cuenca, mountain-biked down the slopes of Cotopaxi or ‘roughed it’ in some eco-tourism lodge in the rainforest. I might as well have spent the entirety of the past two years sitting in that darkened, padded cell, straining to imagine what lay outside, and now my chances of ever seeing it for real were dwindling by the hour. When the light stuttered back on and the lift lurched upwards again, I opened my eyes, in which boyish tears had sprung. I wiped them away quickly, and dried my hand on the lift walls just before the doors opened.

The two lift shafts were side by side, but each lift had a corresponding hallway leading to different areas of the apartment: whereas the residents’ lift brought you to a reception area with a slate floor, the service lift delivered you before a garishly tiled vestibule leading out to the back – an area that we continued to refer to as the maid’s quarters, even though my mother had never bothered hiring a maid. ‘I don’t agree with it for one thing, and for another, I don’t see any reason to bring any nubile young girls to your father’s attention unnecessarily,’ she said. The idea that my father might dare to transgress with anyone, particularly under the same roof as my mother, was laughable, but the first reason she gave was deadly serious. So, although the apartment was fully
kitted out for domestic servitude, the brass bell-push embedded into the dining-room floor had never been used except in jest, and the tiny maid’s bedroom at the back served as a box room for cartons of ‘essentials’ brought over from the UK, which had remained unopened since we arrived. Scowling at these reminders of ‘home’ as I entered, I lugged the chair inside, put it down and went to the kitchen. My father kept a tray of short bottles of beer at the back of the fridge, and I decided I deserved a surreptitious reward for my trouble.

It wasn’t so much that my mother always had to have her own way; it was more that if you disagreed with her, the rhetorical power this unleashed would shock you into seeing things from her point of view. The minute she sensed resistance, all of her intellect would be summoned into an irresistible arrowhead of purpose, and the most sensible strategic approach was therefore never to disagree with her too forcefully. My father, like a farmer working the slopes of a much-loved yet active volcano, treated her with respect and knew when to back off, but I didn’t yet have the benefit of his years of experience.

All you had to do was to know when to keep your mouth shut. It was elementary. And clumsy as I was, under normal circumstances I would probably have reached this conclusion. Apart from anything else, if I’d had access to Fabián that week, I would have been able to canvass his opinion and work out a more considered strategy. Instead, alone in my room in the hours before dinner, I decided that the best approach to the crisis was to bluster through it, appealing to my mother’s heart. If she saw how much I had learned about South America, how much I loved it there, then she might come to see the value in my staying put. It was, after all, a passion of her own. All I had to
do was persuade. Not for the first time, I wished I had Fabián’s bullshitting prowess. In its absence, I boosted my confidence with several clandestine trips to Dad’s cache of beer in the run-up to the meal.

When the three of us were round the table, I hit the ground running, giving my parents one of Suarez’s most emotive tirades, on the subject of Machu Picchu. I held forth for a quarter of an hour on how the place had a talismanic power for South America, that it held collective memory and was therefore the key to the eventual realisation of the Bolivarian republic.

‘If talismanic power is what you want, go to the encyclopaedia and look up Stonehenge,’ my mother said.

Scornfully, I dismissed Stonehenge as a pointless load of old rubble, knowing even as I said it that I was already off target. I was supposed to be demonstrating my love of South America, not my hatred of Europe.

‘It sounds to me as if your friend Suarez has been reading too much Neruda and not enough sensible journalism,’ my mother went on. ‘And as for you: you should be taking more of an interest in finding things out for yourself instead of blindly believing everything that man says.’

It was only a matter of time before the subject of school came back up. When it did, I tried to keep things abstract and hypothetical, asking why we couldn’t just cross that bridge when we came to it and slipping in a request for the salt at the end of my sentence in the hope that this would start a new conversational thread. I could almost hear Fabián’s laughter at how badly I was performing.

‘We can see the bridge from here, Anti,’ said my mother. ‘There are big holes in it.’

Even at this point, if I had been less hot-headed, or more sober, I might have let the comment pass, nodded quiet agreement and waited for somebody to raise another topic.
My mother’s mind was capable of jumping about from topic to topic with all the agility of a mountain goat, and it might not take long for a new, mutually agreeable theme to arise, after which the previous assertion, however vehemently declared, would probably be forgotten. In my inflamed state, though, her implication here shocked me. I said that I didn’t see anything wrong with the International School, and that furthermore it was inhuman of the two of them to contemplate expelling me from Ecuador when they were planning on staying there themselves.