The Amnesia Clinic Page 2

  In stark contrast to the New Town apartment where I lived with my family, Suarez’s house was a place where nothing was static or out of bounds, where dogs cascaded downstairs to greet you on arrival, and where anything queried – a dusty old accordion, the sea-bitten figurehead of a sunken boat, a case of Mayan arrowheads – yielded a story of one kind or another, bearing testament in turn to the curiosity and learning of Suarez himself. So although it wasn’t my home, and although it was the largest house for miles around, it felt welcoming and comfortable to me. Not that just anyone would have felt at home there. I am quite sure that uninvited guests would have got pretty short shrift from Byron.

  Byron and his wife Eulalia, who kept house and cooked for Suarez, lived in their own apartment within the house. Byron doubled up as the gardener and prided himself on the range of flora he cultivated – giant prickly pear cacti, acacia trees, exotic roses – all carefully tended in the deep-red earth, which would bleed from the garden on to the driveway in rusty streams during heavy rain.

  Ecuadorians from the south have a theory that Quiteños are uptight. Something to do with living at high altitude, it is said, deprives their brains of the oxygen necessary to live the laid-back, party-going lifestyle of their southern or coastal counterparts. Even if that were true, Suarez was definitely an exception to the rule. He wore his respectability very casually, or at least he did when Fabián and I were around. Moreover, anyone who takes the trouble to build a miniature nightclub in his house can’t be all that strait-laced. The room was known as ‘the library’, but in addition to ceiling-high bookshelves, a serious-looking desk and a fireplace it contained a chequerboard dance floor, a bar with proper red leather stools and an antique jukebox stocked with 1950s singles.

  Suarez, a surgeon of some repute, did have a first name. According to Fabián it was Edison, though nobody had ever used it or even heard Suarez using it. He was known simply as Suarez, even to his nephew, and even to his nephew’s friends. Suarez. He squats in my memory to this day, stinking of acrid bachelordom marked with cologne and tobacco. I see him now: smoke rings evaporating into the air before him along with the stories that emerged constantly from his wet, red lips; his salt and pepper moustache; his incongruous fondness for tweed; his short-sleeved shirts and spanking, tasselled loafers, which he referred to as ‘beetle-crushers’. He sits there, tapping his foot to Bill Haley and pouring himself another cuba libre or lighting a long Dunhill International as he embarks on the answer to yet another of our inane questions – which would invariably spring open such a mess of tangents and shaggy-dog stories that what we had originally wanted to know could rarely be remembered. More than anything, though, I hear him: his measured, mid-Atlantic accent (he’d lived in both the US and Europe), always sounding slightly amused, was to us spellbindingly authoritative. He could tell us anything and send us into a sideways world which we never failed to believe in, even though we knew that what he said couldn’t possibly be true. I still hear that voice, chuckling away at our expense, and I expect I always will.

  That evening, over dinner, the conversation turned to Juanita the Ice Princess. Fabián and I were speculating on the state of decay she must have been found in after five hundred years in the ice, and Fabián was talking again about his own aspirations of exploration and discovery. Suarez was unimpressed.

  ‘This Ice Maiden is all very well,’ he said. ‘You want to see something really special? I’ll show you. Come into the library. Bring that bottle with you.’

  When we were in the room, Suarez put down his drink and went over to the safe by his desk. He opened it with a couple of deft twirls of the dial and withdrew a small package wrapped loosely in green tissue-paper. Keeping his back to us, he unwrapped the contents tenderly and then turned and held up the object with all the berserking triumph of a medieval executioner.

  ‘Mother of God,’ said Fabián.

  I fought an urge to step backwards.

  ‘Impresionante, no?’ said Suarez.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Fabián.

  The thing itself was the size of a large orange, but its hair, shiny and black, was easily two feet long and had vitality better suited to a shampoo model than a battle trophy. When we’d taken it in enough to approach, slowly, I studied the features. A concentrated reduction of nose and chin that resulted in a grotesque, implacable caricature, with thick, rubbery lips and eyes that had been sewn shut with clumsy black twine. The skin was dark and burnished, like a piece of rainforest mahogany.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Suarez. ‘It’s a tsantza. A shrunken head.’

  ‘Where’d you get it?’ said Fabián, trying to stay casual. But he couldn’t keep up the pretence for long, and his excitement came spilling out as he talked. ‘Is it yours? Is it real? How long have you had it? Why have I never seen it before? Christ, Uncle.’

  ‘There are only a few of these left in the world, you know,’ said Suarez, cupping the monstrosity in one hand as he reached for another swig of rum.

  ‘How do they get them like that? How do you do it?’ said Fabián.

  ‘First, you just have to win your battle,’ said Suarez. ‘That’s the easy part. Then you have to make sure that your defeated foe’s face is spotless, so that you can preserve the victory.’ He carefully laid it face down on the desk before continuing.

  ‘You sever the enemy’s head and then you make an incision, here, following the line of the skull.’ He grasped my head methodically and ran a surgeon’s finger down from the crown of my head to the top of my spine. I shuddered.

  ‘Then you remove the entire face, hair included, from the skull, and find a stone that’s almost but not quite as big. You wrap the skin around the stone, leave it in the sun to shrink, and then you find a slightly smaller stone. And so on, with smaller and smaller stones, until you have this – essence of enemy. And now we could have a good game of cricket with it, right, Anti?’ he said, looking at me and laughing.

  ‘Just laugh, Fabián,’ I said, backing off. ‘Keep him happy. We don’t know what he might do. Sleep well tonight, my friend,’ I said, pretending to leave. ‘Your uncle is a madman. He keeps heads in a safe in his library.’

  Although he smiled at this, Fabián was mesmerised. But Suarez wasn’t finished. ‘Now sit down, and I’ll tell you the really good part. Have a roncito. You may need it.’

  He passed the bottle of rum over and Fabián poured us a glass each. Suarez settled himself, knowing he had us hooked. Fabián and I fought for the chair facing the desk.

  ‘It’s got a curse on it,’ said Suarez, quietly.

  ‘Of course it has,’ said Fabián. We were beginning to recover now, and were both anxious to make up for our feeble initial reactions.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘of course it has. What self-respecting shrunken head wouldn’t have a curse on it?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Fabián. ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘You don’t believe in curses, boys?’

  ‘No,’ I said, too quickly.

  ‘I do,’ said Fabián, trying to stay ahead of the game.

  ‘Well, I do a bit,’ I said.

  ‘Either way, listen to this,’ said Suarez. ‘The tsantza you see on that table once belonged to a friend of mine. Now, because the majority of such artefacts are held in museums, to find one under private ownership represents a rare opportunity for collectors. Private collectors, you understand. People who will stop at nothing to own something – not so they can put it in a museum, or study it for everyone’s benefit, but so they can put it in a glass case, tick it off in a catalogue, or show it to their dinner guests over expensive cognac. There’s a nasty little international community of them – the same group of people who will, I’m sure, soon be at each other’s throats over who will end up with the body of your Ice Princess.

  ‘A wealthy American collector approached my friend in an attempt to purchase this piece. My friend said that it wasn’t for sale, but the collector insisted. He offered large sums of money. My friend had vowed neve
r to part with the head, which his grandfather had bequeathed to him, and he said so to the collector. He added, furthermore, that it wasn’t necessarily in the American’s interests to acquire it, since legend had it that totems such as this could bring very bad luck to those who did not inherit them.’

  Fabián and I exchanged brief looks to gauge how seriously the other was taking the story, then turned back to Suarez.

  ‘The collector laughed at this and told my friend that he believed firmly in the persuasive powers both of science and of money, but not in shrunken heads that brought bad luck. It was a museum piece, he said, nothing more. He offered a final, incredible sum, which my friend declined, and then he left.’

  ‘So who was he? Who was the friend? Had his ancestors killed this person? The friend’s not Byron, is he?’

  ‘Slow down, Fabián. The story isn’t finished. I dare say you are implicating poor Byron in this due to what you have heard about his illustrious namesake and Anti’s fellow countryman. As you are doubtless aware, that Byron was fond of drinking from skulls plated with silver and fashioned into cups. It is a perceptive link, but you are wrong in this instance.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Fabián.

  ‘Never mind. That’s another story. No, our own Byron may have once been a fierce upholder of the law, but I doubt he ever decapitated anyone – this was not standard police procedure, even in 1960s Ecuador. And if you took some time to think about it, my unobservant nephew, you would see that Byron’s ancestors are more likely to have been African tribesmen than Shuar warriors from the rainforest. Don’t you want to hear the rest?’

  ‘Of course. Sorry, Uncle Suarez.’

  ‘My friend – whose name, since you ask, was Miguel de Torre – was a wealthy and powerful man. He had no need for the American’s money, and he wanted to keep the head for himself. It was a part of his past. To sell it would not have been right. But not long after he had sent the collector on his way, Miguel found himself in a situation where money had suddenly become paramount. More important than his ancestry – which, as you should both know by now, is one of the most important things there is. His wife was diagnosed with leukaemia.

  ‘Miguel, who had come close to discarding the business card left for him by the American collector, now found himself thinking differently. His love and his desperation were so acute that he was adamant his wife should be treated by the best bone-marrow man in America, at the kind of prices that even his considerable personal fortune could not possibly accommodate. And so he found himself telephoning the office of the collector and explaining the change in his circumstances. He made it clear that he was parting with the piece against his will, but he offered to sell it.

  ‘Miguel’s wife received the best treatment that the money could buy. Sadly, she did not live long – her disease was too far advanced even for the best – but it is nice to think that that poor little warrior over there went some way towards keeping two lovers together for a few precious years, don’t you think? Even in death, he has done some good – not that this will help him now. Let us rescue him from his undignified position on that desk. His hair is still growing, after all. It’s just possible he may be thinking ill of us inside that little stone that now passes for his skull.’

  ‘It’s still growing?’ said Fabián.

  ‘Of course. Look at how long it is. I must check with the relevant people, actually. It may be up to me, as its current guardian, to groom the thing.’

  As Suarez pondered this responsibility out loud for our benefit, we looked at the head with renewed interest.

  ‘Pass it over, will you, Anti?’ he said casually. ‘I’ll check it for split ends.’

  ‘Listen, Uncle Suarez, stop trying to scare us. We know its hair isn’t still growing. Where’s the rest of this story?’ Fabián was bouncing back, but then he wasn’t the one who’d been asked to pass it over. Even during this tough talk, he was glancing in my direction to see how I was rising to the task.

  I got up, went over to the desk and picked up the head. It was disarmingly light. I cradled it in the palm of my hand as Suarez had done, but although I had resolved to try and avoid touching the features at all costs, my fingertips brushed its withered little nose as I moved it and I leapt quickly in Suarez’s direction to get the transportation over with. The locks of hair swung beneath my outstretched hand, bearing a preservative smell, of pickles and hospitals.

  ‘Thank you, Anti. You have earned yourself a refill,’ said Suarez, gesturing at the rum bottle. ‘Now, where had I got to? Ah yes, the American. Needless to say, Miguel de Torre was an honourable man. Having sold the piece in good faith, he wouldn’t have dreamt of trying to reclaim it. Besides, who would have contemplated a change of heart on the part of the rapacious collector? He thought he had seen the back of this head, if you’ll forgive the expression, for ever.

  ‘Miguel was distraught at the loss of his wife. He resolved to go on a long voyage around Europe to cope with his loss. And he took with him a keepsake, which you may find curious. He took with him his poor dead wife’s wedding finger.

  ‘Without leaving any forwarding address, he set out on a voyage of no fixed duration. It would take as long as it took. He was in no hurry at all. He took his loved one in his mind – and her finger in his pocket – to see again some of the places where they had spent time together, and to discover some new ones as well. They went to the opera in Verona, just as they had on their honeymoon, dined at fine restaurants in Chartres and Barcelona, and walked for long hours together through the Scottish Highlands. I think they even completed a portion of the pilgrims’ trail to Santiago.

  ‘Throughout the trip, Miguel kept his dead wife’s finger in his pocket, occasionally touching it as he went and enjoying conversations with her as he had throughout their happy life together. Eventually, when he had said all he needed to say, he found a beautiful place near a river – where, he did not tell me – and buried the finger in the ground. Then he returned home to resume his life, his mourning at an end. Isn’t that a beautiful story?’

  ‘Suarez,’ said Fabián. ‘What has any of this got to do with the curse?’

  ‘Be patient,’ said Suarez. ‘When Miguel returned home, he found evidence of desperate attempts to contact him: a mountain of letters and messages, many of them delivered by hand. His relatives had also been contacted several times. It seemed that the American had regretted his purchase after all.

  ‘Since acquiring the head, his life had taken several wrong turnings. He had been implicated in a financial scandal and had lost his job at the merchant bank where he worked. Many of his friends had disowned him in his disgrace. To make matters worse, as he was on his way to the courtroom to plead his case, he was knocked down by a speeding taxi. His injuries were so terrible that the ambulance crew were forced to amputate both of his legs there and then on the court steps. As if this weren’t bad enough, when he woke up in the hospital, he found out that the reason the taxi had been in such a hurry was that his wife was inside it, encouraging the driver to get to the court as quickly as he could in order that she could file for divorce.

  ‘Nor was this the end. Just as the collector was beginning to cope with his new life, as a disgraced, divorced, convicted criminal in a wheelchair, he began to suffer from a strange muscle-wasting disease which could not be explained by any of the specialists he consulted. Eventually, it dawned on him that he must return the head to its rightful owner. Which he did.

  ‘And when, years later, Miguel died, having reclaimed his property, he left it to me in his will. I have inherited it rightfully, you understand, which means it should bring me good luck – and may you too one day, Fabián, if you believe in that sort of thing.’

  Fabián was thinking.

  ‘I don’t believe the bit about the finger,’ he said. ‘That’s the only bit I don’t believe.’

  ‘That, my boy, is the truest part of the whole story. The loss of a loved one can make people do very st
range things. You know, several friends of mine asked Miguel at the time why he had chosen to react to the death of his wife in such an … unorthodox way. Miguel would simply smile and say, very quietly, “Grief asks different questions of us all.” And he was right. I have seen some highly eccentric responses to death over the years. There was an old lady when I was working over in Andalusia whose child had died before she could get it baptised. Rather than allow it to be buried in unconsecrated ground, she kept the child preserved in a pickle jar in her kitchen for the rest of her life.’

  ‘I hope she didn’t get drunk and accidentally use it as an ingredient,’ said Fabián.

  ‘I hope so too,’ said Suarez. ‘I enjoyed her cooking on several occasions.’

  ‘What do you think, Anti? Shall we ask Suarez if we can take his cursed head into school to scare the girls?’ said Fabián.

  ‘It would certainly be a good conversation piece,’ I said.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Suarez. ‘You two might decide to give it to someone you don’t like as a present, and I suspect that being indicted for witchcraft would not do my medical career much good. Having said that, given the superstitious nature of some of my patients … No. I’m afraid it stays here. But you see that your Ice Princess isn’t the only exciting relic around here, in spite of all this anxiety of yours to get out and discover things. You need look no further than your own family, Fabián.’

  He smiled as he said this, and then stood up to give his nephew an affectionate kiss on the forehead. He shook hands with me, as was customary, and then said, ‘Goodnight boys. All this weaving of yarns has tired me out. Sleep well. Don’t drink all my rum.’