‘Pepe is a fool.’
We sat in silence for a while, listening to the city’s equivalent of white noise: the steady exhalation of traffic, punctuated by the occasional, submerged blast of a car horn as some distant, chaotic moment unfolded.
‘I’ve got something I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ I said.
‘Shoot.’
‘Where do you think someone would end up if they were found, say, wandering around in the mountains with amnesia, and nobody claimed them? I mean, if it were back home, they’d end up in some hospital, and there’d be all that missing-persons stuff going on, all that, right? But there are still some pretty wild areas of Ecuador, aren’t there?’
‘Sure are.’
‘So it’s possible that someone could be missing for quite a long time – years, even – up in a mountain village or something, without anyone knowing where they were and thinking they were probably dead. Can you remember any examples of that sort of thing happening?’
‘I’ve read stories about people being found living whole new lives because they lost their memory, but mainly in books. I’m not sure if it happens much in real life.’
‘I’m not interested in real life. It can be very disappointing. You would say, though, that in theory at least, it’s possible?’
‘It’s possible. Why are you asking me this?’
‘It’s for something I’m writing for school,’ I said. ‘A story.’
‘A story? Didn’t know that was your kind of thing. Well, I don’t know if there’s any set procedure when someone is found. But I think … What I think is that there should be a special hospital set up somewhere especially for all the people with amnesia. They could stay together in safety, and then if you thought you’d lost someone, all you’d have to do would be to go along and see if they were there. That would be good, wouldn’t it?’
A plane came in to land right down in the throat of the city – one sight I had never properly got used to.
‘Yes, it would. It would be very good. Do you reckon anywhere like that exists?’
‘I doubt it – it would be pretty specialised. Besides, who’s going to pay for the upkeep of the patients if nobody knows who they are?’ He chuckled. ‘You know, I think your mother might have a point about how being educated out here isn’t doing you any favours …
‘Aha,’ he said, springing up as he heard her key in the lock, ‘now that sounded to me like the return home of a triumphant women’s tennis champion. Do you want to tell her the good news that you’ve done your tests, or shall I?’
‘I’ll leave that pleasure to you. One more thing, though: can you get hold of blank newsprint paper?’
My parents knew about Fabián and his missing parents but, luckily, I hadn’t yet updated them on the various recent goings-on – mainly because I hadn’t reached any firm conclusions myself about what I believed. Consequently, when I outlined to my father the story of a bullfight, followed by a car coming off a road in the mountains, he wasn’t suspicious in the slightest. Quite the contrary. In fact, all he said was, ‘Sounds a bit fantastic to me.’ Eventually, though, with his help, and without arousing too much suspicion, I wrote something vaguely journalistic. Then I just had to make it look right.
Getting hold of the right paper was only the first step. I then had to try to print on it in a convincing typeface. I was no master forger, but it’s surprising how much you can accomplish with a good printer, the right sort of paper and the spillage of a mug of tea (that particular trick was something I knew about having read about the forgery of the Hitler diaries). I even managed to photocopy an old car advert on to the reverse of the page so it looked as if it had been taken from a real newspaper, so that by the end, I had made a pretty convincing simulacrum. It wouldn’t have taken an expert very long to work out that it wasn’t real, but I reasoned that I didn’t have to work too hard: the Emperor’s new clothes were never described to him in detail because he was so ready to believe in them.
Luckily enough, Fabián approached me himself to make his peace on the day it was ready, which meant that I didn’t even have to think of a pretext to show it to him. He walked over as we were breaking for lunch after the morning’s lessons the following Thursday.
‘What’s all this about you leaving, then?’ he said.
‘It might not happen. But even if it does, I’ll be back for the holidays – just not for the boring bits in between.’
‘I see.’ He sniffed absentmindedly. ‘Sorry about last week. All this shit with my parents. It gets frustrating.’
An apology. That was new. Perhaps there was no need to go through with the plan at all. But I couldn’t lose my nerve now.
‘I wanted to talk to you about that,’ I said. ‘I found something, and I think it might be important. It was in a stack of newspapers Dad brought home from work.’
We were in the canteen by then, which was hot and steamy from great vats of rice and beans on the counter, and when we had got our food and were sitting at an isolated table in the corner, I got out the press cutting and laid it out for him on the table. It was creased and stained. It looked as if it had lain in a folder somewhere for a few years.
Fabián read it through several times. For a few moments, his eyes were spyholes on the struggle in his head. They flared from anger to incomprehension and back again. Then he must have realised that he was losing too much cool, because he checked himself and organised his features into a less vulnerable expression, closer to touched amusement.
I was taking a big risk here. In spite of whatever outward reaction he chose to manifest to the cutting, I could have no idea what its real effect on him would be. For all I knew, it could have meant the end of our friendship.
He looked back at the cutting, then up at me.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he said.
‘I—’
‘You’ve been checking up on me?’
I paused.
‘I wanted to show you that I believed you,’ I said, carefully.
We looked at each other for a while longer, uncertain of how to proceed.
‘I see,’ he said.
This is what was in front of us:
El Diario, 29th February 1989
DOUBLE TRAGEDY AT ZAPARO FESTIVAL
IBARRA: A man and his wife may both have perished on Friday when their car plunged from the road to the Hacienda La Reina. They were rushing to hospital to attend to the man’s injuries following a freak mauling sustained during a bullfight at the hacienda’s Zaparo Festival celebrations. The man did not survive the accident, and his body was found in the wreckage of the car. His wife is yet to be found, and so it is not known whether or not she also lost her life in the tragedy. The couple have not been named.
OPENING OF NEW AMNESIA CLINIC DIVIDES BEACHSIDE COMMUNITY
GUAYAQUIL: Mixed reactions yesterday greeted the opening by local eccentric Dr Victor Menosmal of his new, privately-funded Amnesia Clinic on the outskirts of the coastal town of Pedrascada. Menosmal, who has no formal medical training beyond a master’s degree in psychology, has long been obsessed with the problem of memory loss, and upon receipt of a large inheritance following the demise of his father, vowed to dedicate himself to the study of the problem. The clinic, says Menosmal, will be part research institute, part safe haven for those suffering from amnesia. ‘Obviously,’ said Menosmal yesterday, ‘there will be cases of free-loaders who haven’t lost their memory and are merely looking for free accommodation, but we’re confident that the stringent tests we will perform on admission should alert us to such cases immediately. We’ll also be sure to monitor all of our inmates on an ongoing basis in case they should regain their memories without telling us.’
So far, the clinic has no patients.
‘Yes,’ said Fabián. ‘I see.’
I looked down at the congealing beans on my plate.
‘You say you got this through your dad?’ Fabián went on.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘I never saw the newspapers at the time. I didn’t know it had been reported.’
‘Well, it was. There it is, in black and white.’
‘Yes. There it is.’
‘Yes.’
I swivelled the cutting round in my favour and pointed with a fork.
‘Interesting about this Amnesia Clinic, too,’ I ventured.
‘Yes,’ said Fabián, staring at his food. ‘Although that name is a bit ridiculous. “Menosmal”. Can anybody really be called that? It would be like an English person being called, I don’t know, “Justaswell” or something.’
‘I think I’ve heard it somewhere before. It might be French.’
‘Right. I see. Thanks for showing me. Can I keep this?’
‘Of course. It’s for you.’
He folded up the cutting and slid it carefully into his wallet. Then, after silently shovelling in his food for a while, he said, ‘So. What are we doing this weekend?’
EIGHT
I meant it as a gesture. An elegant, understated way to apologise to Fabián for having doubted him, and an endorsement of the stories he’d told me. Nothing more. I thought I’d left so many holes in the articles, not least the absurd name I’d given to the doctor, that both my authorship and the intentions behind it would be quietly obvious – although, of course, to have said this out loud would have been against the spirit of the exercise and destroyed it in the process. So when his reaction to the cutting was one of apparent vindication, and when he didn’t question anything about its contents beyond the doctor’s stupid name, I assumed that my apology had been both identified and accepted. Privately, we would pretend it was real. It would be taken as read that Dr Menosmal and his Amnesia Clinic existed, and he would enter the pantheon of fictional heroes who’d lived side by side in our minds with real, historical figures when we were younger. Churchill, Bolívar and Pelé were all very well. We believed in Dracula, Batman and Han Solo just as much – not because of any assessment of how real they were, but because of how much they seemed to us to deserve to exist.
For a while there, it seemed, we had come dangerously close to growing up, but thanks to my tactical bit of forgery we could fall back into our old habit of cheerfully talking rubbish. I was so busy being relieved about this that it never occurred to me for a second that he might believe any of it.
On Friday, Suarez arrived late and brimming with sarcasm about the events of two weeks before. True to his word, he made no reference to our exchange in the library after Fabián had been hauled off to bed.
‘Anti, how wonderful to see you again. If I had known you two hell-raisers were getting together, I would have ordered in another case of tequila, or some whores. Well, it’s short notice, but we might get lucky. Hand me the telephone directory, will you?’
After several remarks of this kind, we escaped to watch television in Fabián’s room.
On the surface, it was a normal evening – exactly what I had feared lost following my fall-out with Fabián, and exactly what I knew I would miss most when I left the country. We discussed the merits of a low-calibre horror and soft-porn film on cable TV and traded a couple of lame lies about girls at school. But there was something listless about our behaviour, as if we had been asked to act out our customary roles and lacked enthusiasm for the task. I’d already felt the urge to escape this familiar room, with its well-worn videotapes and its over-ogled pin-ups, even before I noticed that Fabián was leafing through a road atlas.
‘So,’ he said, ‘where shall we go?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I thought you were planning to live a little more before you get locked away for ever in Englishness.’
I had relayed to Fabián some of the details of my experience during the power cut in the lift. Not the full amount – not the tears, for example – but some.
‘Hand me the atlas, then,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a look.’
I envisaged a day trip in the company of Suarez to climb Cotopaxi, or at best an illicit afternoon’s boozing in some highland bar. I leafed through the atlas and suggested to Fabián a few places we might go within easy reach of Quito. Otavalo. Baños. Cayambe. This amused him.
‘Isn’t it obvious?’ he said. ‘We should go to Pedrascada.’
There were plenty of reasons why I had chosen to position my made-up Amnesia Clinic in Pedrascada. It sounded like an exotic, faraway place. The fact that it was a surfing beach seemed cool to me. The prospect of Francis Drake’s sunken treasure had fired some youthful corner of my imagination. But a fourth, less obvious reason was that in spite of having seen it mentioned in Suarez’s encyclopaedia, I had been unable to find it on any of the maps of Ecuador we had at home. It had seemed to be a neat solution: put the imaginary hospital in the place that doesn’t exist. I had been pleased with my ingenuity. I would soon learn that there are many places in South America that don’t make it on to maps.
‘You think we should go to Pedrascada.’
‘Why not? Why choose somewhere random?’
‘Well, okay, but … it doesn’t seem to be in this atlas.’
‘I know where it is. I’ve heard about the surfing beach there.’
‘But—’
‘Just think about it for a second. A whole hospital full of people who don’t know who they are, or where they came from. Wouldn’t you like to see that?’
My anxiety must have shown. He grabbed the atlas back and said, ‘I know what you’re going to say. I’m not crazy. I know this place may not be there any more, if it ever existed at all. I know that even if it is there, the chances of us finding my mother there are virtually zero. But don’t you think it’s worth a look anyway? Hmm?’
He was testing me. He wanted to see if my resolve would fall at the first hurdle, and I couldn’t let that happen. It would invalidate all the effort I had made to show faith in him in the first place.
‘Yes, I do,’ I said, carefully. ‘That’s why I showed you the article to begin with.’
‘There you go. We should go to Pedrascada. We’ve got to go somewhere before you leave, and it might as well be there. Besides,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘I’m sick of being stuck here. Suarez has been driving me crazy ever since that night we got drunk. Asking me if I’m okay, if I want to talk about anything. He even invited me to go see a bullfight, the weirdo.’
I felt blood rushing to my face and looked away in embarrassment, but Fabián carried on talking. Either he hadn’t made the link between Suarez’s bullfighting question and me, or else he had unearthed my betrayal and was using it to lever me into going along with his plan.
‘I want to get away from him for a while,’ he concluded. ‘It will be great. We can go whoring.’
So I wasn’t off the hook after all. I could only hope that, like so many of the plans we made together, this one would wither in the light of good old feasibility. Skipping school was easily done, but to justify a long absence from our respective guardians we’d have to do something virtually impossible. We would have to lie to Suarez. Given what a connoisseur of bullshit he was, he would be as alert to a bad fib as a gourmand to a duff cut of meat. With that in mind, I decided it was safe to play along with Fabián for now without fear of having lost face later on when the plan died anyway.
‘Okay. Let’s say we do go. How the hell do we get down there?’
‘I know how to do it. Bus-train-bus. Or possibly bus-train-bus-bus-taxi-boat, depending on how lucky we get. Don’t worry about that. You can get anywhere if you have the money. Leave the logistics to me.’
There was a rap on the door. Fabián thrust the road atlas towards me and I bundled it under his duvet before leaping into what I hoped was a nonchalant position in front of the TV. Suarez came in, amused at how obviously we were hiding something, and gave us time to relax into our assumed poses more convincingly before he spoke.
‘I am prepared to offer you a truce. There are two cold beers downstairs. They are yours if you want them. But at least come and t
ell me about whatever vicious scheme it is that you are hatching up here.’
We trooped down the stairs behind him.
Back then, I thought Suarez was the sort of person we could tell anything to. I also imagined that he would love the concept of the Amnesia Clinic as much as we did, and for the same reasons: for its appeal as an idea; for the fact that such things should exist in the world. If we’d simply told him what we were planning to do, he might even have sanctioned it. But Fabián did not perceive his uncle as I did. Even though I was the person who had given it to Fabián, the idea of the Amnesia Clinic was his now, and he would hoard it, away from Suarez, alongside every other secret he’d manufactured to obscure the dreary, awful truth. In spite of this, I thought that being confronted by Suarez and his chilled, conciliatory bottles of Pilsener would make it very difficult for Fabián to try to deceive him. I expected that Fabián would relax as usual into the cosy fug of stories in Suarez’s library and let his mind wander from Pedrascada, as it had from so much else. It was not the last time that I would underestimate him completely.
‘So, boys,’ said Suarez, his beetle-crushers pounding across the polished hall floor and into the kitchen, ‘what are you planning? If it’s a military coup, then let me tell you, there are some very important dos and don’ts.’
‘We weren’t going to tell you,’ said Fabián, suddenly downcast as we entered the kitchen.
‘Weren’t going to tell me what? Sit down, sit down,’ said Suarez, setting the beer bottles down on the table for us.
‘We—’ Fabián looked miserably towards me. ‘We might as well tell him, I suppose.’
I shrugged. It was genuine. I had no idea what he was up to.
‘We’re supposed to be going away on this school trip next week. Visiting Inca ruins. Participating in an Indian festival. Some stupid cultural awareness trip. We were just trying to work out what we could do to get out of going. Anti says his parents would never write him a sick note, but I told him you’ve done it for me before. Couldn’t you find some way to get us out of it?’
The Amnesia Clinic Page 9