The Amnesia Clinic

by James Scudamore

Even by Fabián’s standards, it was a spectacular double bluff, and Suarez’s response couldn’t have worked more in our favour. First, he reproved Fabián for blowing his cover on the sick notes, and said that he would think twice before writing him another one. Then he really got into his stride. As he spoke, he paced the room and poked a plump finger repeatedly in our direction. His words were punctuated by tiny flurries of cigarette ash that fell in time to his emphatic hand gestures.

  ‘A word of advice: next time, don’t try and get me to lie for you on the basis that staying here to fester in front of American television is a more worthwhile pursuit than exploring one of the most extraordinary cultures the world has known – and, what’s more, the culture that still defines the country you live in, contrary to many people’s best efforts. Really, for two imaginative boys like you, I find it pathetic. I’m being perfectly serious about this. You have to take a more active role in your own education, Fabián, otherwise you might as well leave school now and graduate straight to washing dishes. As for you, Anti: when you go back to England, people will ask you, “What was it like in South America?” Do you really want to tell them that the most interesting thing you saw when you lived here was on the HBO network?’

  By the time he was finished, he had told us in no uncertain terms that we would go on the school trip, that we would enjoy it immensely, and that he expected a full report from both of us when we got back on the reasons why we had found it an enriching experience. He asked us when we were leaving.

  ‘This Wednesday, coming back Sunday night,’ said Fabián, almost grinning. He was so pleased with himself that he was barely able to maintain his moody, adolescent façade, but just as Suarez looked back in his direction he managed to reassemble it. As for me, my only problem was not looking as terrified as I felt about the direction in which things were going.

  ‘Oh, please. Stop looking so pathetic,’ said Suarez, to both of us. ‘You’ll have a great time.’

  ‘If you say so,’ said Fabián. ‘We’ll try.’

  There are plenty of ways I could defend not having spoken out at this point, before anything dangerous happened.

  I could say that I didn’t think we’d ever actually make it down to Pedrascada.

  I could say that I still believed Fabián saw the newspaper cutting as another act of the ongoing pantomime between us, and so wouldn’t mind even if we did get there and he found out that the Amnesia Clinic didn’t exist.

  I could say that my friend seemed happy again, and that was enough for me.

  I could even say that I thought I was in some way following Suarez’s drunken advice to me on the night of the tequila incident.

  Any of these statements might hold water to some extent, but I know now that none of them is the real reason why I said nothing and allowed the trip to go ahead. The truth is that I envied Fabián the world he had created for himself, with its Easter visions and its bloodshed in misty mountain bullrings. This would be my last opportunity to take a proper excursion to that world. I wanted to break in and inhabit it while I could, before it was lost to me for ever.

  And I was terrified to the point of paralysis.

  NINE

  Names seem more and more important to me the older I get. Take, for example, the shipping region of Finisterre, which no longer exists. Its name is derived from the Latin, finis terrae, because early sailors thought they had reached the ends of the earth when they strayed into its waters. The bus station in Old Quito is called the Terminal Terrestre, which strikes me now as an interesting echo of the same idea. That name is derived from the cosier notion of reaching your final destination, but when Fabián and I arrived there after school on Wednesday afternoon, and I saw it for the first time, I wouldn’t have questioned the suggestion that I was reaching the end of the world as I knew it. Young Indian girls and their siblings, or children, sat in corners, hoping for food or sucres. Beggars plaintively waved leprous stumps. Travellers and businessmen ignored them as if they were drawings on the walls. As if in response to this indifference, one girl of about my own age sat against the wall with her turquoise skirt spread before her, tapping monotonously with a coin on the greasy but empty metal meal-tray in her lap. I couldn’t decide whether this small but determined assertion of power over her environment was intended to attract the attention of potential philanthropists, or just to remind herself she was still here. Or maybe it was no announcement at all – maybe she was just passing the time. I realised that, in fact, I was in no position to draw any conclusions about this place, which made being there seem all the more exciting and dangerous. We were about to jump.

  That name, Terminal Terrestre. It could mean more than the ends of the earth. It could mean ‘the end of all things earthly’. There’s life in that name, and possibility. It’s a hub, a convergence of threads, a decision yet to be made. The air felt as thick with possibility there as it was with the smells of frying, with dirt, with voices.

  Plenty more good names could be found within the building itself: bus companies called Flota Imbabura and Macuchi, their syllables evocative of condors and volcanoes, operated out of concrete kiosks that lined the interior walls. Ticket touts bearing the different company logos on their short-sleeved shirts prowled the concourses, stalking customers. They bellowed the destinations they peddled as if they thought their enthusiasm for a particular place might actually influence your choice of where to go. Tulcán. Riobamba. Guayaquil.

  Fabián had gone off to buy tickets. I stood nervously in the centre of the concourse, wondering whether we really were going to do this but not quite panicking. If we decided tomorrow, halfway through the journey, not to go through with it, then we could still come back, and all we would have to do would be to formulate a satisfactory explanation as to why our trip had been curtailed. My parents had accepted without question the story that we were going on a school excursion; all that was left was to make sure the alarm wasn’t raised at school when we didn’t turn up on Thursday and Friday. Fabián had forged a sick note that Verena would deliver, and I had pleaded a family trip away. I think I remember saying it was the Queen’s birthday, although looking back now I can’t believe anyone swallowed that. Whatever reason I had given, with surprising ease, we were now covered until Monday. We could go anywhere we wanted.

  It would have been easy for me to borrow a proper holdall or suitcase for the trip from my parents. But for some reason, thinking I would be giving too much away if I involved them in my packing, I had decided instead just to stuff a few changes of clothes into my canvas school bag. Fabián, on the other hand, had appeared at school that morning with a serious-looking rucksack, and I felt badly prepared as a result. Nevertheless, there was something exhilarating about embarking on a journey with so little baggage – it was an early sign of what has become an almost obsessive desire in me to shed any dead weight I might be carrying and travel light.

  An Indian woman approached me. She leant forward under the weight of a baby she carried in a bright green shawl across her back. Her face was flecked with dirt, her skin ruddy from exposure to open air. I grasped inside my pocket for some change to give her, before realising that all she was asking me for was the time. I took out a handful of sucres anyway, and went to buy myself a coffee. As I walked towards the café, a tout stood in my path, brandishing his sheaves of tickets like a street conjuror with cards.

  ‘Aaaaaaaa Ibarraibarraibarraibarraibaraaaa!’ he roared, maintaining furious eye contact with me throughout, as if I might fail to catch his drift if I didn’t concentrate.

  ‘No voy a Ibarra,’ I said, without stopping, though giving the man an apologetic smile, in case I had offended him by not wanting to go to Ibarra. I could hear him promoting the destination to others behind me with undimmed passion as I walked up to the café counter. The coffee was instant and bitter, but warm. I went outside again, and saw Fabián moving through the crowds towards me. He seemed to tower over the people in the bus station, as if the excitement about finally being on t
he road had added to his presence. He had been waiting for something like this to happen for a long time.

  ‘The bus leaves in ten minutes, and we’re gonna be on it,’ he said. ‘And thanks for getting me a coffee, fuckmunch.’

  ‘You can have this one,’ I said, giving it to him.

  He tasted it.

  ‘See what you mean. Let’s get some Cokes and stuff for the journey. It’s going to be a few hours.’

  I was expecting, and hoping for, one of the bright, chaotic buses you saw everywhere, struggling along on the brink of collapse, belching diesel smoke and dripping with people. However, when we got outside, Fabián marched towards a brand-new monster Mercedes cruiser, with dark windows, two sets of massive rear wheels and low-slung, predatory headlights. It wasn’t what I had in mind. I looked over wistfully at the real buses, where Indian men in hats and ponchos crowded together, carrying live chickens and passing their battered suitcases up to be lashed to the roof rack.

  ‘Thought we’d travel in style,’ said Fabián. ‘We need to do this bit quickly if we’re going to find somewhere to stay tonight.’

  I suspected that Fabián had brought more money with him than the sum we had agreed. I had virtually exhausted my savings for this.

  The doors of the Mercedes hissed open.

  ‘Bring your bag on,’ said Fabián, doing the same in spite of the driver, who was gesturing towards the baggage area in the coach’s belly. ‘Then we won’t have to worry.’

  I looked back into the terminal as if down a tunnel, at stalls selling chubby green bananas beneath a yellow electric light that seemed to shine brighter as the daylight began to fade. The cold air of the coach was making me nervous.

  ‘Hey,’ said Fabián. ‘Get on.’

  I walked through the wall of air-conditioning and on inside.

  We settled into grey seats of imitation leather, the bus filled up and the doors closed with a hydraulic sigh. We pulled out into the pandemonium of rush hour traffic, glided between the red roofs of Old Quito and accelerated on to the motorway. I stared at a plastic cup-holder positioned in front of me beside a pristine ashtray. It jolted up and down as we moved, as if waving goodbye. The metropolis deteriorated around us, finally dwindling to nothing, via a few shanty efforts at reassertion, and within half an hour we were in open countryside, cruising swiftly along the part of the Pan-American Highway known as the Avenida de los Volcanes.

  ‘Sounds like someone’s address,’ I said. ‘66, Avenida de los Volcanes.’

  ‘Yeah, well. It’s our address from now on,’ mumbled Fabián, who was already dozing.

  We sped south. A frantic salsa horn section played over the coach stereo at a discreet volume. The tinted windows acted like great plate-glass sunglasses, both obscuring and improving the reality outside, turning everything into an image of itself. As the sun set, the coach was flooded with red light. We shot through roadside villages of breeze-block homes. Pale dogs scrapped in the dust; Indians walked hunched over with grain sacks – the scenes whipped across the glass and receded quickly into the distance behind us. The volcano peaks remained constant, towering behind the scenery that flew past, operating on their own massive scale. Our fellow passengers read magazines, slept and chatted to each other. The windows, like giant television screens, flickered with information regardless.

  I glimpsed patches of increasingly barren ground in the darkness as we climbed, and the lights of what towns I could see sank further and further below us. The villages we passed through became more and more desolate, often little more than a few wooden huts clustered by the roadside in the mist, with a dog, dead or sleeping, under a single street-lamp. And still we climbed. More than once, I looked out of the window to see a dizzying downward drop. I tried not to think about Fabián’s parents.

  We saw the lights of the town first, in a valley beneath us, and the coach began to thread its way down a giant corkscrew of a road. Some of the hairpins were at such an acute angle that the bus was forced to reverse just to get down. The bell-tower of the church in the town centre was lit yellow from within, and watching it zigzag up the bus window was the only way I could tell how far down we had got. It blazed so brightly, and everything else was so dark, that it seemed unreal, a toy tower. After a descent that seemed to go on for ever, we sped through a few deserted streets in dusty monochrome and the coach stopped.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ I asked Fabián. We were the only passengers disembarking.

  ‘Of course. It’s only because it’s late that nobody’s getting off. If you came here during the day this place would be packed with tourists.’

  We stood alone in a deserted market-place that reeked of passion-fruit and mangoes. The height of the surrounding mountains could only be gauged in the darkness by the cross of a hilltop shrine, lit brightly, suspended a mile in the air behind us like a vision.

  ‘The Light of God,’ said Fabián, looking up. He took a deep, satisfied breath. ‘Smell that highland air. Nothing like it. I like this place.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said, looking around us at the square. Some grand colonial constructions fronted on to it, with elaborate wrought-iron balconies and patterned wooden window-frames. Cats squealing in an alley behind us broke the silence: perhaps a dispute over some spoil from the market.

  ‘This place looks shut up. Where are we going to stay?’ I said. But Fabián was already making confidently across the square towards a side-street. I followed him.

  Studded doors faced cobbled streets in which disused tram-rails lay rusting. A lone radio squawked from behind a set of darkened shutters. The air was fresh after the bogus environment of the bus, but thin with the altitude. I walked slowly, feeling the tightness in my chest.

  ‘Ha! My research paid off,’ I heard Fabián say up ahead.

  As I rounded a bend in the street I saw a white neon sign poking out into the street above an enormous set of wooden doors. Although not illuminated, it did say, in red lettering, Hostal. Fabián battered imperiously on one of the doors and stepped back into the street to look back up at the windows. Nobody heard him: the wood of the door was so thick that his efforts had simply been absorbed by it. On my side of the door, I noticed an old metal bell-push, painted shiny black, and beneath it, a modern, plastic button. I pushed it. Presently, the clink and scrape of locks sounded from within, and a middle-aged woman wearing a tabard and pink slippers trundled to the door.

  I had expected people to question us on account of our age. But Fabián looked older than he was, and, as I was to discover, my European appearance tended to trigger a sequence of stock gringo responses in people that bypassed my youthful appearance. The first thing anybody saw in me was the potential for money. We paid Pink Slippers in dollars for our room, and then asked her to wake us in the morning in time to catch the train south. From her wordless nod of assent I guessed this was a common request.

  We followed her through a gloomy interior courtyard decorated with potted ferns but dominated by a fig tree decked out with cages of tiny, twittering songbirds. Guano streaked the terracotta floor tiles, and I wondered whether our hostess was in the habit of letting her birds out periodically to relieve themselves. Then, as we followed her up a flight of tiled steps towards the first floor, I looked up and saw the real source of the floor stains. Above us, suspended upside-down like bats, in the shadows where the whitewashed walls met the rafters, thirty or forty pairs of wild birds were roosting for the night. Newspaper had been spread out on every step, near the wall, to catch their droppings.

  The layout of the building was reminiscent of a prison. Each room led out on to a balcony that overlooked the central courtyard, and from any one door you could look up or down at any other. The noise of the caged birds rose constantly from the central well, whilst up in the rafters, the silent, wild birds oversaw things. What had this building been in its first life? A grand house built – when? During some banana boom? Now it was an aviary, and a backpackers’ guesthouse – in that order.
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  ‘What happened to your arm, cariño?’ said Pink Slippers to Fabián as we climbed the stairs.

  ‘I fell over,’ he said.

  Our room had yellow, peeling walls and high ceilings, and it was furnished with two iron bedsteads, a battered wardrobe and a cracked porcelain washstand. Water could be fetched from the bathroom down the hall if we needed it.

  ‘That is, if you boys are shaving yet,’ said Pink Slippers with a grin. Fabián scowled at her. She gave us a key, which I pocketed, and one for the outside door if we were going to be out late.

  When she’d gone, I lay down on one of the beds, but Fabián was ready to go out straight away.

  ‘I’m starving,’ he said, ‘and we’re on holiday. Let’s go.’

  The café to which Pink Slippers directed us was in a whitewashed building with a pock-marked Coca-Cola sign and a veranda. An entire pig hung outside the door, suspended by a shiny metal hook sunk into its jaw. It looked whole from the outside, but as we walked in, I saw that the flank facing into the restaurant had been carved into. Red, raw flesh sparkled in the strip-lighting against hairy, pale skin.

  ‘You are what you eat,’ I muttered.

  ‘Chancho. Excellent,’ said Fabián.

  Beer and soft-drink crates stood piled high on the concrete floor at the back. Pilsener. Sprite. Inca-Cola. An aluminium pot simmered on a gas ring. Three Indians were playing cards at a table in the corner. We ordered the two-course menu of the day. When it arrived, the soup was a watery concoction flavoured with large handfuls of coriander and one wrinkled chicken’s foot carefully placed in the centre of each of our portions. Fabián picked up his immediately and munched it, bones, talons and all. Silently, I transferred mine to his bowl. When this was out of the way, we were given forks and sharp, serrated knives for the main course – a delicious meal of rice and pork, accompanied by bottles of beer, fried slices of banana and bites from a great raft of brittle crackling that arrived on the side.