‘Always the poetic explanation.’
‘Fuck off.’
When the train pulled in, Pif approached Fabián to say goodbye.
‘No hard feelings. Here, take this. I’m flying down to Chile tomorrow and I can’t take it with me,’ he said.
He handed Fabián a newspaper-wrapped packet of weed, clearly, to my mind, having seen the size of the military presence and thought the same as me about the wisdom of carrying drugs into this town. Fabián seemed to have overlooked this key fact.
‘Thank you, man,’ he said, stuffing the package into the side of his rucksack. ‘Kind of you. Have fun in Chile. And sorry again for getting you shot at.’
‘Was it kind?’ I said, when Pif had retreated, and we were ready to disembark. ‘Should we really be getting off this train with a load of dope in our bag?’
‘The army won’t care about that. It’s the police you want to watch out for. Besides, we aren’t tourists. They only bust people dressed like your friend back there,’ said Fabián. ‘And even then, only if you tip them off – which, by the way, I am half-tempted to do. I’d love to see the look on that yanquí bastard’s face when he’s being fist-fucked by the Bucay police.’
‘Lovely meeting new people, isn’t it?’ I said, as we clambered down from the train and into the chaos of the town.
It was now late afternoon. Fabián swaggered with his usual confidence as we made our way through the mud towards the bus station, but I got increasingly nervous. Every new soldier we passed seemed to look at me for longer than the last.
‘Can’t you at least take off that hat, if you don’t want to look like a tourist?’ I said.
Fabián carried on marching down the street, muttering something about how the last thing we should be seen to be doing was hesitating, even when selecting which bus to get on. Eventually, we boarded a lurid, collapsing vehicle, chosen by him apparently at random. Bucay and Pif were behind us.
It was just the kind of bus I had been looking forward to: a dashboard richly upholstered with crimson shag-pile; charms and talismans swinging from the rear-view mirror; live guinea pigs in a cage on the seat beside us. A total lack of suspension meant that we felt every contour of the road, and the only shock absorber in the entire vehicle appeared to be our driver’s spring-mounted seat. He bounced gamely around on it, trying to stay upright. A winking cartoon Christ on a sticker above his head gave a reassuring thumbs-up gesture, and the speech bubble by his mouth proclaimed: Relax: I’m riding with you.
The sugar-cane plantations we passed through grew as high as the bus, so there was little to see from the windows. I dozed with my eyes half-open, still woozy from the dope on the train, watching the shards of a shattered beer bottle dance on the floor. The brown fragments leapt like earth-struck hailstones with every bump in the road; a graphic equaliser for the terrain.
Shortly after Fabián said to me that he reckoned we’d soon be approaching Pedrascada, the bus hit a huge pothole and everything within it flew into the air. My head collided with the ceiling. The driver wrestled control back from the road and slowed the bus right down. Then, without even checking behind him, he accelerated again as if nothing had happened. Two or three passengers shouted abuse forward at him:
‘Hijo de puta! Why don’t you learn how to drive, you fucking monkey?’
‘What bad manners. We aren’t cargo, you idiot.’
Two seats in front of us, a large woman with blonde-tinted hair sculpted into a bun was rocking forward, clutching a bleeding hand. A piece of broken beer bottle had flown up into the air and cut the tip of one of her fingers.
‘Madre de Dios,’ she repeated quietly, holding the finger in her left hand. When she released it briefly, I saw that the cut wasn’t too deep, but it had cleanly removed one of her purple painted fingernails. Calmly, Fabián knelt down and removed his shoelace, then moved up the bus to sit beside the woman.
‘May I, Señora?’ he said.
The driver, observing the bleeding hand in his rear-view mirror, had started to slow the bus down again, but Fabián shouted forwards to him:
‘Don’t stop the bus; we’ll deal with this. We’ll be taking your name and employee number at the end of the journey. Now take it easy, okay?’
He leant back towards the woman, hushing her as if she were an animal.
‘Now then, Señora, no need to worry. We’ll just tie this up to stop it bleeding and it will be fine.’
He gave the woman his most charming, full in the face, green-eyed angel look as he was tying it, and she smiled as she held out her hand to him.
‘There now, you see? The bleeding has stopped. And you’ll only have nine of them to paint for a while, huh?’
Her tourniquet attached, the woman now laughed with Fabián.
‘You sweet boy,’ she said to him. ‘Let me thank you for being so kind.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Fabián, shooing away the purse she had drawn from her bag.
‘But your shoelace—’
‘Believe me, Señora, I can find myself another shoelace easily enough.’
As he got up and stepped his way back up the bus, the remainder of the passengers burst into spontaneous applause. Fabián gave a modest wave and sat down beside me again.
‘What’s got into you?’ I asked.
‘No more delays,’ he said, watching the road ahead. ‘This journey has gone on long enough.’
ELEVEN
If you tried to translate the word ‘Pedrascada’ into English, you’d come up with something like ‘Rock Storm’. The name fitted the place. Colossal piles of igneous rock and sandstone book-ended the beach, taking turns to cast shadows over it at different times of day, like the elusive hands of twin sundials. And in view of all the local volcanic activity, the name wasn’t so ridiculous an explanation for their existence. How else were the Galápagos formed? One day they weren’t there, and the next, whole landmasses welled up out of the ocean: molten islands, boiling and slopping about on the surface until they set. In an environment where that was possible, imagining a storm of rocks wasn’t too difficult. If you’d had the strength to overturn one of the huge boulders that studded the shoreline at each end, you might justifiably have expected to find a startled pre-Colombian skeleton underneath, primitive fishing rod stuck in hand since the moment a few civilisations ago when the meteor shower caught him unawares.
But for their matching natural towers, the opposing ends of the beach bore few similarities. At the south end, on your left as you faced the ocean, the sand curved away from the shore behind the rocks, hardening into a dirt track that became a rooster-pecked high street, along which Pedrascada the town slowly accumulated. Single-storey, unfinished houses and bars became larger homes and shops along this road, culminating in the rough formality of the Plaza de la Independencia, where the town had evolved as far as it ever would: neat flowerbeds set among yellow dust and palm trees, street-lamps, a pharmacy and a post office that housed Pedrascada’s only telephone.
Our bus had dropped us at the north end: the untamed, anarchic end. Apart from a scattering of beach bars topped with palm thatch, civilisation here consisted of a crude complex of wooden cabins, set back from the shore amid scrubland and leafless trees, behind a primitive wooden sign that read ‘Juan’s’. Up here, the beach ended abruptly where it met the northern rock pile, and the only way to get out and into the next bay was to pick your way around the base of the cliff face at low tide. No formal pathway existed, but the accumulated graffiti of countless pairs of lovers indicated that the route was well-used.
Beneath the surface of the water lay the coral shelf that gave the bay its celebrated long right break. It meant that the waves were big at Pedrascada, but could be treacherous if you surfed too near the north end. A small, red-painted shrine, like a cartoon dog kennel with a cross on top, sat in the cliff face, facing the bay – a memorial to a surfer who had misjudged things a few years previously and keelhauled himself on the reef. More than once,
at night during our stay, I looked up and noticed that a candle had been lit there, although I didn’t see how anyone could possibly have climbed the cliff.
Further up, behind the peaks and crags, stood a bright, incongruous metal dome to which there seemed to be no access. It caught the sun when the rest of the beach had been thrown into shadow, flaring like a daytime lighthouse. At different times in the hours after we first arrived, I was aware that each of us was staring up intently at this building, but neither of us mentioned it.
When the bus had pulled away, we dropped our bags and raced immediately towards the water. You have to, I reckon. If there’s any life in you at all, the first thing you want to do when you see the sea after a long journey is run towards it and feel the salt on your lips, to punch a wave. We hit the surf, Fabián cursing his plaster cast and shouting at me for getting it wet.
‘Know what we need now?’ he said, when we emerged. He’d been keen to attack the weed again ever since we left the train. He took out the newspaper-wrapped parcel as we sat drying out on the rocks. Waves arrived with gentle slaps. The arches of my feet met with wet ridges of hard sand. It felt good after the heat and stench of the bus. Thoughtfully, Pif had given us a handful of cigarette papers to help us along. Fabián sat, his tongue out with concentration, wrestling with a paper he’d loosely sown with weed and the remains of a cigarette. His plaster cast didn’t help.
‘Fucking thing’s screwing up all my hand movements,’ he said. ‘Good job I got laid last night. Jerking off with this thing is a nightmare.’
‘So now you did get laid last night?’ I said. ‘Just so I know where we are …’
‘Of course,’ he said, grinning. ‘She was called Ana; I told you.’
‘Of course you did. Forgive me.’
Eventually, he had built something close to a joint. He licked its seam and folded carefully and ineptly.
‘Are you sure it’s supposed to look like that?’
‘You think you can do better, be my guest. This baby’s gonna do us fine. Don’t you worry.’
He took out a lighter, put the creation to his lips, and lit the end. The paper flared down its length on one side as if he’d lit a fuse, and half the contents dropped out on to the rock.
‘Ha ha,’ said Fabián. ‘Don’t worry, there’s plenty more. Practice makes perfect. There, you see? This is working fine now.’ He puffed frantically, trying to get it going.
Enough remained for a few drags each. We sat with our backs to the rock, passing the joint between us and coughing. Then we rolled another, and eventually, we blundered our way into a pretty relaxed state. Fabián sat on the sand with his eyes closed and his back to the rocks. In the ferocious light of the setting sun, his face shone like a bronze. He spoke quietly.
‘Up there. Behind us. Do you think that dome could be it?’
I kept my gaze on the water, where a perfect replica sun shone back at me. Networks of hissing foam fragmented on its surface.
‘I don’t know, Fabián.’
‘It could be, couldn’t it? What do you think it would be like?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I picture it with black and white tiles on the floor, like a chequerboard, and gleaming metal everywhere. Then there’d be signs on the walls to help the amnesiacs remember the basics. The obvious things they might have forgotten: You have eaten lunch. The day is Tuesday. Sixto Durán Ballén is president. We are at war.’
‘Listen, about the clinic.’
‘Then the signs would get more and more specific for each person in their own rooms – which, obviously, would have to be signposted with photographs rather than names – and so you’d have notices saying things like, you were found passed out on the beach near Salinas wearing a blue scarf, or whatever …’
‘Fabián. About the clinic.’
‘What about it?’
‘I thought we agreed not to get too carried away about that. You realise it may not be here, don’t you?’
‘Hey, don’t spoil it. The point is that it might be.’
‘But it might not be.’
‘That’s right. But let’s not find that out straight away. Let’s not be sure of that until we have to be. Then it could still happen. Didn’t you ever wait a few days after buying your lottery ticket before you checked the numbers, just to allow yourself to think you might have won something?’
‘I don’t play the lottery,’ I said.
We sat in silence for a while, listening to the suck and surge of the incoming tide.
‘Fabián. You do know that the most likely explanation is that your mother died in that car, don’t you?’ I said. ‘Whatever you and I may say to each other.’
He paused. ‘It’s easy to believe that my father died. I picture him very vividly. What’s more, we buried him. That helps. With my mother it’s different. I find it easier to believe … other things. Why else would I have seen her like that at the parade? It wasn’t a memory. She was there. At that moment, for me, she was alive. What’s wrong with that? It’s a gap, isn’t it? A gap that I can fill with whatever I want. Just like the inmates at the clinic.’
‘Which probably isn’t there.’
He scratched his head with a grimace, as if I had said something tasteless and he wanted to erase it from his memory.
‘Whatever I may or may not know to be true,’ he said, ‘if there’s anything – anything at all – that can make me feel that I’m investigating the possibility that she didn’t die, then I’ll do it. Can you see that? Can you see that even if this trip comes to nothing at all, it won’t have been a waste of our time?’
‘Yes. I see that. Let’s stick to the idea that it might exist, though. Let’s not try to plug the gap, because then we might be disappointed. Okay?’
I looked at him.
‘Okay,’ he said.
‘Do you promise?’
He said nothing.
‘Do you promise?’
‘Yes, yes. I promise. I’m not expecting you to understand. You don’t know what it feels like. I feel it all the time.’
Now his face was in shadow, with the roaring sun behind it. ‘I feel it like a pain in the blood.’
I did not reply.
‘Maybe they would stockpile memories at an Amnesia Clinic, like blood in a normal hospital,’ Fabián continued. ‘Maybe even if we didn’t find her, we might at least find some of the memories of her that I’ve lost.’
I spoke hesitantly. ‘Just because you can’t remember her as well as your father, it doesn’t mean—’
‘I’m not saying I don’t remember anything. I do remember some things about her.’
‘Tell me.’
He paused. ‘She loved peaches. She was always eating them. She always smelled of peach juice.’
‘That sounds—’
‘Memory is a very strange thing,’ he interrupted. ‘You can create memories, you know. I could make you remember this moment for ever. All I have to do is mark it in some way, and you’ll never forget it.’
‘We’ll have to wait a while before you get a chance to prove that point.’
‘It’s true, though.’ He sat up. ‘I could make this moment stick in your mind for ever, if I wanted to. I could make myself immortal in you.’
‘That’d be nice. Maybe we’d better not smoke any more weed for a while.’
‘I bet you,’ he said, ‘I bet you fifty dollars that I can make you remember this moment, in, say, ten years’ time.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I should think I’ll have fifty dollars to spare in ten years. I hope so, anyway. But you’ll have to remember this moment too, otherwise you won’t be able to claim the money.’
‘I won’t need to. You’ll remember it. Is it a deal?’
‘Yes, it’s a deal.’
‘Give me your hand, then. We’ll shake on it.’
I held out my hand. Fabián grabbed my wrist, and with his other hand he planted the lit end of the joint into my palm with his thumb.
‘Cunt,’ I said, trying to pull it away. But he held it there, pressed into the flesh, fixing my gaze with a smirk on his lips until the coal had gone out. A welt bloomed in the centre of my palm, bright red, flecked with ash. Fabián had another on the pad of his thumb, which he rubbed slowly against the first two fingers of his hand. I jumped up to plunge my hand into the water.
‘Saltwater’ll heal it quickly,’ he said, whisking his own hand round in a small rock pool. ‘But I guarantee you will remember this.’
‘Fuck you.’
He was right, though. To this day, whenever I look at the palm of my hand, I see that moment. The mark is not much more than a pale little fleck, like a chickenpox scar, but it’s there. To one side of it, there are two or three little fault lines that I like to think are part of Fabián’s thumbprint, scorched into me for ever. Part of my DNA.
‘You see?’ he said, when the pain had started to fade and I’d sat down again. ‘It was an extreme way to make the point, but I could have done the same thing by telling you something memorable. Say if I told you that I had fucked your mum, and you believed it; you’d remember that. Words can be actions, too. The right sentence from me could have marked this moment in the same way.’
‘Except you didn’t do it with a statement, did you? You marked the moment by burning my fucking hand off.’
He relit the joint, which was now more crooked than ever, and puffed on it for a while.
‘“And the word was God”,’ he said, making his lips into a funnel for the emerging stream of smoke. ‘Do you think this is real weed? I don’t feel any different at all.’
I laughed so hard I fell off the rock.
We were about to get ourselves together and start looking for beds for the night, when a noise out to sea made us both look up: a muffled boom, like an explosion in the distance.
‘What the fuck was that?’ said Fabián.
‘Perhaps it was something to do with the war,’ I said, getting up. ‘Maybe there’s a naval battle going on.’ I scanned the horizon hopefully.
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