And so the front door of Suarez’s house closed on me for the last time. As we left, I heard my mother muttering, ‘What a horrible man.’ The sound was distant, drowned, irrelevant. The unreality of it all felt like pins and needles in my face. Byron’s exotic rose beds and cacti, the whitewashed walls of the house, the red earth by the driveway, our stupid, practical car – I expected all of it to dissolve away at any minute and leave me alone. I realised that I hadn’t even said goodbye to Byron and Eulalia but, at that point, I could not have cared less.
In fact, the strongest feeling I had was one of regret. Not for anything I had done in Pedrascada, or even what I’d just said in the library. I regretted the fact that I had embarrassed Suarez and made him drop his mask in such an ungainly way. With that single loss of composure, the last of the bright illusions that had sustained my life in Ecuador had expired.
My mother offered what solace she could. ‘Anti, you know you aren’t the person he’s really angry with, don’t you?’
She started to say something else as I climbed into the car, then saw the expression on my face and stopped. It was too late for any more conversation. We drove home in silence, down a deserted motorway eerily lit by pale street-lamps. When we passed through the Old Town, its whitewashed fronts and empty, cobbled streets lent it the ghostly quality of a deserted stage set. I resented all of the colourful people who would have been bustling round the place during the daytime for being absent now, on my last journey through, when I needed them the most.
TWENTY-ONE
The following afternoon, I stood at the airport saying goodbye to my father, still unable to believe that someone in a shiny suit was not going to appear from behind a screen, escorting a grinning Fabián and telling me the whole thing was a joke. My parents would stay on for a few weeks more to finish what business they had left in Ecuador, and I would be met at Heathrow at the end of my flight by an uncle I barely remembered, to be looked after until their return. I wanted to ask my father whether there was any way I could stay on for Fabián’s funeral the following day, but I had left it too late. My suitcase was checked in and my connection to Caracas would leave in an hour.
‘This arrived for you this morning,’ said my father. ‘From Suarez. Delivered by that enormous chauffeur of his. Apparently it was something of Fabián’s he wanted you to have.’
I took from him a heavy, square parcel, covered in brown paper and wrapped tightly in masking tape.
‘Bye, mate,’ said my father, giving me a hug. ‘Call us as soon as you get to the other end. And try not to think too much about all this for a while, if you can.’
‘I’ll try,’ I said.
We hadn’t discussed the crime I’d committed in manufacturing the newspaper article, or my father’s small degree of complicity in it. But, I reasoned, there would be plenty of time to talk about that later. Fabián’s death was a topic of conversation that would be around for a very long time.
I walked through passport control with the package in one hand and my hand-luggage in the other, pausing to give my father a brief wave at the door. I just caught him wiping his eyes before he turned around to leave the airport building.
A customs official dressed in light brown with a huge pistol strapped to his belt stood behind a long table by the X-ray machines. I saw his eyes light up at the sight of me, the approaching gringo, with the suspicious brown paper parcel.
‘What’s in the package, my boy?’ he asked. His breath smelled awful: stale coffee and cheap, black tobacco on a bed of halitosis.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, ‘it’s a gift.’
‘Come on, son, you know the rules. If you didn’t pack it yourself, we can’t allow you to take it on the plane without looking at it.’
‘Of course,’ I said, putting the package and my holdall down on the table.
The customs official took a knife from his pocket and slashed open the package down one side. He bunched a hand on either side of the opening he had created and ripped it apart crudely. The parcel had been well wrapped, but it yielded to his ham-fisted persistence and tore open to reveal an object wrapped in old newspaper. The customs man, who had by now been joined by a colleague no less mean-looking but several pounds fatter, pulled some of this to one side. I saw a shock of straight, black hair and smelled a familiar preservative smell. Of pickles and hospitals.
‘You know what this is?’ asked the customs man.
‘I’m not sure, but I have a feeling that it might be a tsantza,’ I said. ‘A Shuar shrunken head.’
The man’s eyes widened. ‘Is that right? If it is, you’ll have to pay a heavy tax to take it out of here, you know that? And I’ll need to see your export licence.’
I sighed. Leaving wasn’t going to be such an easy business after all. Already, in my head, I had begun to calculate how long it would take my father to retrieve his car and drive back home so that I could call him and tell him to come straight back to the airport to pick me up. On the plus side, it meant that I would definitely be around the next day to attend the funeral. Surely they wouldn’t deny me access if I was still in the country?
The customs man took the head, lifting it up by the hair, and yanked it free of the packaging. Its dried-up face popped through the aperture in the parcel in a grotesque caricature of childbirth.
The customs official held it up crudely, allowing the head to spiral slightly beneath his outstretched hand, and peered at those ineptly sewn-up eyelids. He smirked and then burst out laughing, then brought it right up to the face of his colleague in a bid to scare him.
‘Okay, kid,’ he said, smiling and dropping it back on top of the mound of brown paper, tape and newsprint, where it landed with a thud. ‘Very nice. On your way, now. Take your tsantza and get out of here.’
‘You mean I don’t need an export licence?’ I asked.
‘You would need an export licence,’ said the customs man, ‘if what you had there was anything resembling a genuine shrunken head. What you have there is a piece of moulded pigskin. I hope that whoever gave it to you didn’t pay too much for it. Enjoy your flight.’
He and his friend smirked for a while longer as I tried to rewrap the parcel, and presently they laid eyes on their next victim. I made my way through to the departure gate.
Even as I waited for the plane, I could feel my memories beginning to solidify and coalesce into picture postcards. Already, different occasions had begun to blur into one another and the things that had happened were beginning to transform at the edges into the things I felt should have happened. The simple act of going through customs had brought on the early stages of my amnesia.
As the plane taxied out, preparing itself for the strain of getting off the valley floor and escaping that basin in the mountains, I looked out at the New Town, trying to identify which was our apartment block and to spot the balcony where I had spent so many afternoons with my father, happily devising improbable explanations for the noises that floated up from below. Already, life in Quito seemed vague as Ecuador started to become My Ecuador, the one I would tell people about when I got home. I tried to embark in my head on the process of working Fabián’s and my experiences up into a good story, then I stopped and reminded myself that thoughts like that, this early, were wrong. Besides, I had lost my audience.
The gift of the head might have been Suarez’s idea of a pardon, or it might not. He didn’t enclose a note. Certainly, I felt no forgiveness. The tsantza should have been Fabián’s, and now it was mine, and I felt nothing but the cold clutch of its curse around my neck.
Once we were in the air, in a suffocating environment of bad coffee and tired air-filters, I shifted my gaze from the head in my lap to look sideways through the window as we picked our way out of the Andes. Seeing the volcanoes from up there felt wrong. The plane flew so close to some of them that you could almost look right down into the intimacy of their craters, blow-holes and all. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t seem to me to be a view I had earned. When you we
re down there, anywhere in the city, they could surprise you. They had the power. That was how things were supposed to be. Whether you were climbing into your jeep to play tennis in suburbia or buying a single lottery ticket from the blind man in a dusty Old Town square, it could happen to you. When you least expected it, you would look round and they would be there: blobs of ice-cream peak, flickering behind the apartment blocks on the highway or peering down at you through the belfries of churches. Then, sometimes, if you were in the right place, a full dose: round the corner you would come, minding the task in hand, and BANG, the volcano would shoulder its way through the city and take you square on, letting the distances and scale differences involved unfurl in your mind until you were snow-blind, mountain-struck, breathless with insignificance. Up there, from that knackered old Airbus, you could see it all. I didn’t want to see it all.
I have never been back to Quito in real life, although I have replayed the approach many times in my head. It’s a thrilling ride. You come in low, banking over green, terraced agriculture and russet foothills, and, incredibly, absurdly, there is a city, spread out like shattered dice fragments in a valley of baize, waiting to be rediscovered. Waiting for some other punter to step up to the table and try his or her luck. Technically the plane is descending, but it always feels as if an extra spurt of height might be required to heave it over the lip of the basin and drop it into the valley. And this hurdle over the mountains can’t help but seem random, as if the pilot has altered your itinerary at the last minute in order to explore some chance gateway he’s never seen before. The captain always misses a trick here. He just goes into the same, tired old routine of seatbelts and extinguished cigarettes. Just once, I want him to deliver a voice-over that tallies with the sheer implausibility of what I am seeing through my window:
Señoras y señores, this is your captain speaking. We will shortly be arriving at our final destination, so would you please now put your seat backs in the upright position and – Jesus Christ! What’s that? A city in the clouds! Quick – let’s take a detour!
It never happens like that. But I live in hope.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While most of the locations in this novel exist, some are purely imaginary, and readers shouldn’t necessarily expect to find them on maps.
Cristina’s guidelines on how to tell a good Quechua folk tale derive largely from my reading of Johnny Payne’s She-Calf and Other Quechua Folk Tales (University of New Mexico Press, 2000). Any inaccuracies or elaborations are my own.
Special thanks to Clare Alexander, Jason Arthur, Samantha Francis, James Gurbutt, Enda McCarthy, Tina Pohlman and Rose Grimond.
The Amnesia Clinic Page 25