The Amnesia Clinic Read online

  It was a calculated display of tolerance. There was only enough left in the bottle for a tiny slug each, but the idea that we might stay up all night putting the world to rights over Suarez’s rum was a fiction in which we were both willing participants.

  Later, Fabián and I said goodnight, and I went upstairs to Suarez’s spare room expecting my head to spin, not only with the rum but with frozen princesses and battle trophies, with severed fingers and pickled babies. My mind was on fire – not, as I’d expected, with all the peculiar objects of the day, but with visions of Miguel de Torre, striding through the heather, checking into hotels and enjoying candlelit meals, all the while in conversation with his dead loved one, moving continuously until he could find the right place to leave her behind.

  As a result, I was still awake when I heard the sound, echoing round the dark house like a cry from the bottom of a well: Fabián was calling out in his sleep for his mother.

  TWO

  Two years and three months previously, my family had moved to Ecuador. In that time, Fabián and I had become close friends, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have happened were it not for the trajectory of a water balloon at the end of my second week in the country. Without that thin membrane of latex, topped up and bulging with cholera-tainted water, tied in a knot and taken forth into the street for battle, we might not have got beyond the first month.

  For a start, we were very different. Fabián was tall and dark, with eyes like a pair of flawed emeralds: a languid panther to my wheezing albino pig. He looked older than he was, while I was consistently mistaken for somebody’s kid brother. What’s more, he enjoyed a kind of universal adulation that hardly cried out for a new friend.

  He had a range of essentially pointless but impressive physical tricks at his disposal, which he would deploy at key moments to impress the younger kids (and also, he hoped, the girls): double-jointed fingers, disappearing matchsticks, back-flip dives, smoke-rings. You name it: anything that required a bit of showing off, he was good at. He could pick locks. He could tie knots in a capulí stalk with his tongue. There was a patch of skin on his hand which he claimed didn’t have any nerve endings and was therefore immune to pain. Occasionally, but not so often that it became common knowledge, he muttered darkly about being descended from a shaman. He would do anything, in fact, to stop you from jumping to the easy conclusion that he was a standard-issue human being, somehow making the posture look effortless at the same time. He was the most charming liar I have ever known, and, on the surface at least, he had no need in his life for an asthmatic English kid who didn’t even speak the language. And yet, with the magnanimity of the omnipotent, he chose to become a public friend to me right away, shouting the other kids down when they spoke too much Spanish in my company and inviting me back to Suarez’s after school on the Friday of my very first week. He was also witness to many of the asthma attacks and nosebleeds I suffered early on in the thin Quito air, and took it upon himself subsequently to become the default carer whenever my sickly system let me down. But it was the water balloon that fixed it.

  My family arrived in Quito during the carnival season, just before Lent, when the water fights in the streets were in full swing. It’s a tradition: at that time of year, anybody is fair game, and it’s very important that you take your drenching in good humour. If you’re lucky it’s just some five-year-old with a water-pistol, but some of the young citizens really go to town, cruising around in cars with whole arsenals of ready-prepared weaponry. It’s just what happens. And I suppose Suarez must have said to Fabián that it might be nice to take the new boy out to witness some of this colourful local madness.

  We were wandering around the cobbled streets of the Old Town when some older kids ambushed us. One of them chucked a water balloon straight at Suarez’s head. It didn’t explode – just bounced off his shoulder – but for some reason, and unusually for Suarez, he didn’t see the funny side. He walked towards the kids, muttering threateningly, but the way they stood their ground and began squaring off meant this probably wasn’t such a good idea, and Fabián said so to his uncle. Suarez turned around, said that we were leaving and stormed off. I would never have done it even a few months later, but as a thirteen-year-old innocent in a new country I didn’t appreciate the danger of the situation. Without really thinking about it, I picked up the unexploded water balloon and hurled it back at the bunch of kids as hard as I could. To their amazement, and mine, it burst all over them. The three of us then ran off through the streets, Fabián and me laughing and Suarez trying to be furious but finding it too funny, until a cataclysmic wheezing fit destroyed my bravado a few blocks from the scene.

  Fabián was impressed. He reckoned that the older kids would have had knives, or worse. They almost certainly didn’t. All that water-fighting is nothing more than a bit of fun – the only crime is taking it too seriously, as Suarez did – but that wasn’t how Fabián saw it. He talked me up at school for weeks before he realised that the story made him look a bit spineless by comparison. Naturally, in his version, the street kids had their knives out already and had slashed at the arm of Suarez’s jacket by the time the balloon was thrown, so we knew they were serious.

  From that point on, I suppose I had proved my credentials, and we found more and more common ground as we got to know each other. When I first arrived I had a way of staring at perfectly normal things as if I had landed on an alien planet, and Fabián liked provoking it. He said that sometimes, when he had to explain them to me, things he had previously taken for granted became more interesting to him. He took these tour-guide responsibilities too far on occasion, diligently pointing out pigs, shopping centres and aeroplanes before being told, with tact, that these also existed where I came from. Later, he went on holiday to England with Suarez, telling me jokingly on his return that he was surprised to find that the country wasn’t made up entirely of thatched cottages, and that the Queen didn’t execute people in person. He brought me back some shortbread.

  And here we were, over two years on. Carnaval had happened again only a month or so before, but this year we had stayed in. We were far too occupied, shooting the breeze with Suarez and his shrunken head, to be bothered with jeopardising ourselves out there in the real world.

  However much I might have wanted to seem tactful and empathetic on the subject, it seems incredible to me now that for over two years I had a friend who had lost his parents, but that we had never once touched on the subject in conversation. And yet I know this to be true because I can remember thinking to myself that the cry in the night at Suarez’s house was the first time I’d ever heard Fabián even mention his mother. Until that point, all I knew for sure was the stuff I’d heard at school: that his father was quite definitely dead, and that his mother was … absent.

  There were rumours, of course.

  ‘That guy’s mother was kidnapped by guerrillas,’ said a red-haired kid I spent my first day with then hardly spoke to again.

  ‘Huge ransom,’ confirmed the daughter of one of my mother’s friends, as we queued up for a fire drill.

  ‘Cut his daddy up like a hog roast,’ asserted a boy with a bandanna and serious personal problems of his own.

  ‘I heard there was a botched rescue attempt,’ said one.

  ‘Yeah, and his uncle got sent a human ear in the post,’ said another.

  The stories didn’t stack up, to say the least, but they were ubiquitous, and everybody seemed to have a different one. By the time I got to know Fabián properly, they seemed so absurd that I never gave them a thought – and then we went beyond the point at which it would have seemed reasonable to ask. Besides, the closer we became, the more I realised how unlikely it was that anything that was said about him at school bore any resemblance to fact. He was the king of the doctored story, the gingered-up version of events, and nothing he said could be taken at face value.

  When I became established as a friend of his, I was asked more than once to confirm or deny some unsavoury detail
dreamt up by the latest fabulist eager to contribute to Fabián’s legend. I remained silent, which appeared dignified on the outside but, in reality, served to cover up the embarrassing fact that I was no wiser to the truth than anybody else. This had the effect of making people believe that what I supposedly knew was far more shocking than anything they had imagined for themselves, and the rumours evolved even further. Fabián, by making it clear that the subject of his parents was the one thing he would never talk about, allowed an aura of mystery to develop around him without ever having to endorse or reject any of the stories that were told or risk trampling on whatever sad, prosaic truth lurked behind them. In the end, the only fact that really seemed to matter was that his parents just weren’t there.

  But all of this was about to change. Hearing him call out in the night was perhaps a warning sign that his outer carapace of cool was under strain, but it was when Fabián told me that he had seen a vision of his mother in the glass case of the Virgin Mary during the annual Semana Santa parade that I knew we had a serious problem.

  The parade took place fourteen days after our shrunken-head evening, in defiance of an official earthquake warning. The seismologists weren’t predicting a big one, and besides, it would have taken more than a little quivering of tectonic plates to threaten a tradition as sacrosanct as Easter in Quito.

  The cobbled streets seethed with people. Grand gilded floats and groups of wailing penitents processed through an atmosphere of bunting, open-air cooking and music. A high-altitude mist dappled the air, in spite of strong, warming sunshine.

  On this occasion, I was not there.

  Fabián and I had planned to spend the day together, but I had been collared by my parents at the last minute and forced to duck out. As a result, our mornings were very different, and while Fabián had his religious experience down in the Old Town, I stood in an awkward suit between fragrant rose-bushes, looking down towards the parade through a telescope and wishing I was watching it with him instead of drinking warm Buck’s Fizz while my parents worked the British Ambassador’s garden party.

  The following has been pieced together from my own memories of the garden party, and the detailed account of the parade that I heard from Fabián the following Friday, as the two of us sat drinking beer in Suarez’s library. Well … that, and a negligible amount of poetic licence. Let’s just say that it went something like this:

  Fabián ambled through the crowds alone. He’d arrived at the parade with Suarez and some of Suarez’s less interesting friends, but ditched them as quickly as possible. He and Suarez had agreed to meet near the main entrance to the Monastery of San Francisco at 3 p.m. if they should happen to separate, and Fabián peeled off into the crowd as soon as he could. Perhaps he enjoyed the parade more now that it was a world to be explored instead of an imposed family chore. Perhaps the rituals felt more significant to him. I don’t know. There’s no easy way of explaining what followed.

  Market stalls still traded in spite of the crushing crowds, but with more of a party theme to them than usual. The practical items – batteries, cleaning utensils and electrical goods – had been cleared away in favour of more frivolous wares: panpipes and ocarinas, CDs and cassettes of indigenous music, and, for the coke fiend in your life, tiny silver nose spoons (whose use Fabián had only just begun to suspect). Clothing stalls sold colourful local gear and mountains of fake foreign sportswear. An old woman charged customers for the use of an illegal tap into the phone system. Trilby-topped Indian families held up exquisite children to watch the parade. The children’s eyes, pairs of bright, black beads, darted around, absorbing it all, just as Fabián’s had at their age. The parents looked weather-beaten and impoverished but still beamed in spite of it all, as if they were extras hired in specially to act out a cliché about emotional riches. The floats passing through the streets carried the usual religious icons, intended originally to terrify the indígenas into worship through the depiction of pain and violence – attributes which went on to become an unquestioned, traditional part of the pageantry. Processions of barefoot penitents followed the floats, some of them wearing sinister Ku Klux Klan-style hoods, others happier to bear their shame in public. Many dragged eight-foot-long wooden crosses and wore crowns of thorns – even of barbed wire in one case. Nor was penitence limited to the able-bodied: one man edged past Fabián at waist height, his right arm propelling his wheelchair while the left remained fastened to the cross he bore on his shoulder, its tail catching on the cobblestones as he went.

  Fabián remembered coming to the parade with his father when he was four or five years old, being hoisted on to his shoulders to get a better view of things, and imagining the pain. He couldn’t understand why they did it, and leaned forward to whisper into his father’s ear: ‘Why do they do it, Papi?’

  ‘They feel bad because of things they have done,’ his father said. ‘They’re here to show God they are sorry.’

  Fabián couldn’t imagine feeling bad enough about anything to want to drag a tree through the streets. With one hand he had tightly gripped the red and white neckerchief that his father always wore, and with the other he’d gathered a soothing fistful of his father’s hair, so as not to pitch forwards into the crowd.

  The memory made him hungry for comfort food. He stopped at a stall selling empanadas and cuy, bought a cheese empanada and strolled with it. The smell of cuy grilled over charcoal reminded him of an incident that took place shortly after my arrival from England. I had been both thrilled and disgusted to learn that guinea pigs were a national dish: I had kept one as a pet back home. Fabián had fed me one of its scrawny legs before revealing what the flesh was, testing to see the expression on my face when the information registered and claiming to be impressed by my acting abilities when I tried not to look surprised.

  He finished eating his empanada and licked his fingers clean. This made him think back to Miguel de Torre, and his lover’s keepsake. He wouldn’t actually want his mother’s finger, or anything sick like that. But he wouldn’t have minded a lock of her hair, like you saw in films. Or he could have, say, half a gold doubloon on a chain round his neck until the day when the two of them were gloriously reunited. His half would fit with his mother’s half, and she would turn towards him with disbelieving tears in her eyes. He felt embarrassed for thinking like this, and found himself looking around to see if anyone caught sight of his mooning expression. Fabián never cried, either at his father’s funeral or his mother’s memorial service.

  He’d seen me crying. I was homesick early on, and some of the other kids thought I was a bit pathetic – notwithstanding the odd psychotic episode with a water balloon – but for some reason, crying in public didn’t seem to embarrass me. It wasn’t as if Fabián couldn’t get away with crying if he wanted to. His circumstances meant he could behave pretty much how he liked and be forgiven. His orphanhood had set in motion a machinery of sympathy that worked beneath the surface at all times, allowing him to get away with anything, but still he didn’t cry.

  Another wheelchair penitent edged past. It reminded Fabián of the unfortunate American tsantza collector in Suarez’s story. It also reminded him that he wasn’t too badly off, all things considered – at least he wasn’t voluntarily dragging a cross around in a wheelchair. A strip of tripe stuck in its spokes impeded this one’s progress. Discarded by some market seller, the tripe was caught up in the wheel and now attracted interest from a stray dog. Helping these people was supposed to be bad form, but Fabián stepped forward from behind, so the penitent didn’t see, and whipped the obstacle away. He dropped the tripe into the gutter for the dog before wiping his hand on his trouser leg and walking on.

  He wondered how the Ambassador’s party was going.

  The answer to that question is that it was ludicrous – a party in a style so Grand Old English that it would never have happened any more in England. The Old Town teemed and crumbled away just down the hill, but up there in the garden the atmosphere couldn’t have been more diffe
rent. Stilton had been flown out especially in a diplomatic bag, and the guests strutted about sporting medals and feathered pith helmets – even spurs in a few cases. If these had been gauchos, fresh in from barbecuing cattle and killing each other with knives out in the pampas, then okay, I could live with that; but they were former public schoolboys in pressed white linen, who’d hardly been outside an embassy in their lives. Their spurs were buffed to a high shine and had probably never seen anything resembling a horse’s flank, unless you counted some of the imperial-sized wives on display.

  My mother, a conversational up-swell, surged around from group to group keeping people on their toes. My father bobbed about somewhere in her wake, browsing the canapés and trying to sniff out interesting political gossip from local officials.

  I looked towards the Old Town, wondering if Fabián would stick to our agreement to aim a salutary firework at the statue of the winged virgin on the Panecillo. I didn’t hold out too much hope for this – of all the plans Fabián and I made, hardly any ever came off – and I was far more preoccupied with trying to talk to the daughter of a French flower exporter. A ripe seventeen, with freckles and dark hair wet from the shower, she wore the most ruthless white dress I’d ever seen, and I had spent much of the party discreetly falling in love with her. She’d been fighting off a lecherous old moustache with a ceremonial sword for half an hour, but had now managed to break away, and I was trying to get drunk enough on weak Buck’s Fizz to go over and goose her in the bushes.

  I picked my moment and began to advance down the stone steps, rehearsing my speech for the wedding a few years hence (‘we met under the shadow of Pichincha at a garden party’) and wishing I had some spurs with which to pique her interest, when my mother materialised and handed me some cherub of thirteen who had only just arrived in the country and didn’t know anybody.