‘Of course. Fabián’s father always drove them everywhere. My sister never even learnt how to drive.’
‘But surely his father was too hurt to drive a car?’
‘Too hurt? What’s he told you? They’d gone up to the mountains on a hiking trip. That’s all we really know. It’s that not-knowing part of things that makes it so difficult for Fabián to understand. He was staying with me for the weekend when it happened. They left him here because he’d been ill and was too weak to do the walk they wanted to do that day. The next thing either of us knew, they were gone. That’s very often the way it happens, Anti. People just aren’t there any more.’
Suarez twisted the end of his cigarette against the plastic of the tequila tray to get rid of some ash. He looked at me again, gesturing with the glowing cone.
‘If Fabián hadn’t been sick, he would have gone with them in that car. That’s what I always tell him. He should feel happy about that, not guilty. It means that his parents are living on through him.’
‘There was no bullfight, then,’ I said, almost to myself.
‘Bullfight? Fabi has never even been to a bullfight. I took him to a harvest festival once in the hills where there were some kids fooling around with bulls, but he’s never set foot in a proper bullring.’
‘I see. That makes sense,’ I said.
‘Would you like to go?’ Suarez continued. ‘Would that cheer him up, do you think? I’m not sure he enjoyed it when we went before. One poor boy got spiked by the bull, and it quite upset Fabi at the time. But if you think it’s what he would like, I would happily take you both.’
‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t think it would help,’ I said. ‘I think it might remind Fabián too much of his father, somehow.’
‘Ha. A likely story. Good old Félix Morales. A nice guy, but no bullfighter.’ Suarez drove his cigarette end into the tray in front of him and dusted his hands free of ash.
‘What was he like, then, Fabián’s father?’ I asked, not wanting to expose Fabián’s story any further than I had already.
‘Well,’ said Suarez. ‘Some thought he wasn’t right for my sister – they said he was too obsessed with class, too paranoid. What you would call having a chip on your shoulder, right?’
I nodded dumbly.
‘But I always disagreed,’ Suarez went on. ‘As far as I was concerned, all that fear made him stronger.’ He poured himself more tequila. ‘My own father, God rest his soul, once said of Félix, when it became obvious that he was going to marry my sister, that he was “the kind of kid who lies awake at night, terrified that all of his toys are going to come to life.”’
He drained the tequila, wincing slightly. ‘The trouble with Félix’s son, of course – the trouble with my nephew – is that he lies awake too much as well. Not because he’s afraid of his toys coming to life, but because he’s hoping as hard as he can that they will, and he wants to catch them in the act.’
I got up.
‘Suarez, I’m going to clean this up now. It stinks. We shouldn’t leave it till the morning.’
‘You can leave it for Fabián if you want. I know it’s his mess more than it is yours,’ said Suarez, waving a vague hand in the direction of the vomit.
‘I’ll do it,’ I said.
Having fumbled around trying several wrong doors, one of which opened on to a startling menagerie of stuffed animals that I’d never even seen before, I found Eulalia’s cleaning cupboard. I took out some blue rubber gloves, a bucket and some disinfectant, and was on my knees scrubbing the black and white squares of the library floor when I heard a sound at the door. Suarez, it seemed, had returned for another drink before he went to bed. He’d changed into a plush red dressing-gown. As he crossed the room to sit back at the table, I thought I noticed him stumbling slightly, although it might just as easily have been my intoxication as his own that gave me that impression.
‘You better just tell me what Fabián said to you tonight,’ he said. ‘This whole episode has worried me considerably, and I think I need to know what’s going on in his mind.’
I was cornered. I pulled off the rubber gloves, dropped the scrubbing brush back into the bucket and sat back down at the table.
I gave him as good an account as I could of the bullfight story. Again, in my drunken state, I developed the ending to include the possibility of Fabián’s mother being missing with amnesia. I was losing track of who had said what.
When I finished, Suarez said nothing, and I worried that I had got Fabián into trouble.
‘I’m sure,’ I said, hoping to limit the damage, ‘that Fabián doesn’t really believe all of this himself. It’s probably just a way for him to make sense of what happened, and to tell me a good story. I don’t think you need worry about it that much.’
‘The problem with Fabián,’ said Suarez, ‘is that you never know whether or not he believes what he says. I sometimes worry that he’s so good at talking nonsense that he deludes even himself.’ He frowned down at the table. ‘Perhaps I should have a word with him. It sounds to me as if this is getting out of hand.’
I began to panic. If this conversation got back to Fabián, he would be furious.
‘Do you really think that’s necessary?’ I ventured.
‘Don’t you?’ said Suarez.
‘I’m sure that deep down he knows the truth, even if he does let some details run away with him at times,’ I said. At this point I would have said anything to stop my betrayal being exposed.
‘As you know, I’m the last person on earth who would tell people what they can and can’t believe,’ said Suarez. ‘So long as you think he isn’t deluded in a way that is dangerous.’
I wondered what Suarez would make of Fabián’s belief that he had seen a vision of his mother on a carnival float at the Easter parade. But mentioning that was out of the question. I felt in enough trouble already.
‘I don’t,’ I said.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Positive.’
My certainty cheered him. He just wanted someone to tell him things weren’t serious, and, inconceivably enough, he appeared to have allowed that person to be me. The responsibility made me feel even more uncomfortable.
‘You’re right, of course,’ he continued. ‘Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to let people believe what they want to believe. I haven’t forgotten how distraught I was myself at the loss of my sister. It took me some time to accept that she was gone when they couldn’t find her body in that car.’ He sighed. ‘Real life can be so very disappointing at times, don’t you think?’
I thought of Fabián. What would the unimaginative person say?
‘Looking back,’ said Suarez, ‘I am probably in no small part to blame for Fabián’s state of mind. If I couldn’t admit it to myself at the time, then I doubt I was capable of admitting it to him.’
‘But you accept it now,’ I offered, feeling more out of my depth than ever.
‘I accept it now. Fabián does not. It may take some time. But let us not forget the words of my friend Miguel de Torre: “Grief asks different questions of us all.” If, as you say, I have no need to confront Fabián about all of this,’ said Suarez, who now, strangely enough, appeared to be smiling, ‘then I suggest that you allow him to continue to believe what he wants. Up to a point.’
I started to speak, but he cut me off.
‘Right now, however, it is my belief that you should forget about this conversation altogether, and go to bed. You have a lot of tequila to sleep off.’ He tousled my hair with fat, splayed fingers.
‘You won’t tell him, then?’ I asked. ‘You won’t tell him what I told you?’
‘I promise not to mention it. I am trusting you when you say that I don’t need to. And trusting you to tell me if the situation changes.’
At the foot of the stairs, he turned, gave me a playful punch on the arm and said, ‘You never know. There’s always the chance that what Fabián says about his mother may be right!’
My las
t memory before I passed out was of his eyes, sparkling insanely in the gloom.
The following morning, I woke, impacted into the sheets, to bright light and hideous noise. I had forgotten to draw the blinds, and Eulalia was vigorously cleaning right outside my door. The plastic pipe of her vacuum cleaner clattered and chimed against the metal banisters with all the discord of a child systematically thumping piano keys.
Suarez was in a spry mood. When I made it downstairs, I found him sitting in a bright pool of sunshine at the kitchen table, wearing a lurid short-sleeved shirt and smoking a Dunhill over his coffee. Fabián cowered beside him and barely lifted his head when I walked in. He probably knew that I’d heard him retching through most of the early hours of the morning.
Suarez took pleasure in presenting us both with a huge and traumatising breakfast: a tray of wobbling poached eggs and blood sausage, drenched in bright-red chilli sauce.
‘If I remember rightly from my days as a party animal, you must both be starving after last night,’ he said. ‘No, nothing for me, thank you. You boys dig in. Eat it all.’
He sat grinning, and continued to smoke throughout the ordeal. Nor would he allow us to open a window in spite of the heat. There was to be no escape. His anger from the night before had apparently vanished, but at a price: eating the breakfast, it seemed, was the debt we owed to Suarez for the fun we’d had at his expense.
The eggs looked up at me like prised-out eyes. The sausage was heavily spiced. I barely made it through, but I fared better than Fabián, who got halfway through his plateful before mumbling, ‘No one should be subjected to this,’ and taking flight to vomit once again.
When it was over, I got the bus home as arranged, took the service lift up to the apartment and went straight to bed.
SEVEN
The week passed, and Fabián barely spoke to me. I assumed he was embarrassed about what had happened and would re-establish contact when he was ready. But it turned out that I wasn’t the only victim of his volatile state of mind. On Wednesday, he caused an incident during a science class. We were usually partnered up randomly to do experiments, and Fabián had been put with Verena Hermes. I was on the other side of the room when it happened, so all I was aware of was an explosion and some shouting, but afterwards, I asked her about it.
‘He’s so weird these days,’ she said. ‘He just started zoning out while we were doing the experiment, inhaling the ammonia, then looking out of the window at the sky and whispering. Crazy stuff. I tried to ignore it but he was saying it right into my ear, and we were supposed to be working. I got a zero because of him.’
‘You’ll bounce back. What was he whispering?’
‘He just kept saying, “Can you see her?” What a freak.’
That wasn’t all. I heard he’d got into a fight with someone during a football match after school and hit the guy over the head with his plaster cast. And I’d seen him from a distance, striding round the outskirts of the playing fields, gazing up at the mountains as if he were seeing them for the first time.
On Friday afternoon, we ended up waiting outside the school gates together, and I came to the point.
‘Are you going to stop this weirdness, or let me in on it?’
He ignored me.
‘Well?’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’
The hostility took me by surprise. ‘What do you mean, what’s going on? Why are you only interested in how I am on Fridays? Are you trying to get another invite back to my house?’
‘Jesus, no. What’s the matter with you? I just thought I’d see how you were.’
‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.’
I crunched pistachio shells listlessly under my foot.
‘I’m going back to school in England soon,’ I said. ‘I just thought you should know.’
He continued to scowl.
‘Listen, I spoke to Suarez after you’d gone to bed—’
‘Good for you. Next time you want to come over, why not just call him directly, seeing as he’s such a big buddy of yours.’
‘Wait a minute—’
‘Byron’s here,’ said Fabián. ‘I’ll see you Monday.’
Waiting to be collected from school had never felt lonelier. I had to do something to make things right.
That weekend, my father walked into my room holding an envelope with a UK postmark. From the mollifying look on his face, I knew it was bad news.
‘Aptitude tests,’ he said, with a shrug. ‘I have to time you while you do them, then send them back to the school in a special sealed envelope. All very official and self-important.’
My mother was out playing tennis, so I would have to remonstrate with him. I sighed dramatically and threw my hands in the air. I hated doing this sort of thing to my father, as he was much worse than my mother at working out when I was acting up and when I was genuinely unhappy. But, unfair as it may have been, my displeasure had to be registered.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘If you really don’t want to go, we’ll see nearer the time. But I’m not sure if even you know yet what you want.’
I raised an eyebrow in what I hoped was a scornfully sceptical fashion.
‘Come on, mate. It’s a beautiful day – you can do the tests right now out on the balcony, and I’ll bring you lunch.’
My shoulders were slumped as we trooped out of my room, and I walked as slowly and painfully as possible, wheezing a little as well for good measure.
‘Okay,’ said my father. ‘Here’s a thought. If you really want to make sure you don’t have to go to this school, you could always just … flunk the tests.’
I stopped in the corridor and looked back at him.
‘You didn’t hear this suggestion from me, obviously. But it strikes me that the only reason they’ve sent you these tests is to make sure that what they’re about to take on isn’t some halfwit who’s had his brain wiped by two years at the International School.’ He lowered his voice conspiratorially. ‘All you have to do is be the halfwit.’
Smiling now, and breathing freely again, I slid open the balcony doors and positioned myself at the table.
‘Got a crayon?’ I asked.
‘That might be taking the piss a bit, I think.’
I sat, observing the city. A swallow dipped low over the eaves of a house down the slope below us. Beyond that, Quito spread in its muddled way towards the foothills and slopes of venerable volcanoes. My father had left a brochure on the table while he went to find me a pen. I opened it and had a look: kids with bad hair in tweed jackets sitting around a pool table; a geek with soft stubble and a huge mole wearing unfeasible safety goggles as he squinted into a Bunsen burner; some poor myopic boy limping along with a rugby ball against a desolate backdrop of mud and bare trees. I looked up again. Sunlight ignited the crest of Cotopaxi, sending it back for magnificent reflection in the glass doors that fronted our balcony. I coughed feebly to myself and poured a cup of coffee from the pot on the table.
When my father returned, I made one final plea for clemency, but it fell on deaf ears. (If I remember rightly, it culminated in my saying, ‘Then my father is truly dead,’ the pivotal line uttered by Luke Skywalker when Darth Vader refuses to renounce the Dark Side. My father’s response was both predictable and justified: ‘Stop being so melodramatic.’) Pen poised above the paper, breathing in rarefied air tinged with sweet smog, I gazed again across the city as if it were for the last time, towards the volcanoes in the distance, and thought of Juanita. She never had problems like this.
My father was right, of course. I could easily have fixed my answers. Been the halfwit, and been sure of staying put. But he knew me far too well to think I would ever take that suggestion seriously. And much as I would like to say that at the time I was so concerned about Fabián’s welfare that I overlooked any course of action beyond just getting the tests out of the way, that isn’t what happened either. In the end, my pride won the day and, by the time I had finished the first test, I knew that I was in the process of consci
ously writing myself out of Ecuador. There was even – I can say it now, with the benefit of hindsight and greater self-awareness – there was even a certain masochistic pleasure to be derived from completing my own extradition document with everything that I would miss lying right there in front of me. I was deliberately expelling myself from the land of giant turtles and ice princesses, and I only had myself to blame.
That said, the problem of Fabián began to resurface in my mind before I’d even finished writing. I had to find a way of regaining his trust, especially if I was not long for this country. And no matter how much I thought about it, every course of action I considered seemed to bring me back to Miguel de Torre, and to a half-remembered, blurred image of Suarez the previous weekend. Sometimes it doesn’t hurt to let people believe what they want to believe. Real life can be so very disappointing at times.
The tests done, and safely packaged up in their envelopes to be sent away, my father and I sat together on the balcony, eating a lunch of salty, buttery corn on the cob and playing a favourite game. It involved waiting in silence until an interesting sound came up off the city, then competing with each other to arrive at the best explanation of what had made it.
‘That was a taxi driver screeching to a halt when his client wouldn’t pay the bill, followed by the shot as he dispatched him using the silver-plated pistol he keeps strapped to his ankle in case of such problems,’ said my father.
‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘The screech was the sound of a condor that escaped from the city zoo this morning hoping to fly back to his family in the hills, and the bang was the sound of a tranquilliser dart being shot at it by his keeper, Pepe, who is terrified of being fired because he’s lost two condors already this year and they are hard to come by as it is.’
‘Did Pepe catch the condor, then?’ said my father, wiping his chin with a paper napkin as he stared distractedly ahead.
‘No. It got away.’
‘Good. That’s good.’
‘Subconsciously, Pepe is allowing the escapes to succeed because he believes he was a condor in a previous life.’
The Amnesia Clinic Page 8