The Amnesia Clinic (13 page)

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 the 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.

‘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.

Contented, Fabián sat back in his chair and said, ‘I’m
glad we’re staying here for the night, for two reasons. First, it isn’t too far from here that my mother vanished. And second, I’ve heard that there is an excellent brothel.’

‘I wonder if there’s any coincidence there,’ I could have said. It was the sort of joke he’d have appreciated, and it would have been far less provocative than what I
did
say.

‘You’re not going to a prostitute. You’re too young, and besides, you haven’t got the balls.’

‘Is that right?’ he said. ‘It’s totally legal. Why shouldn’t I go?’

I lowered my voice.

‘You don’t seriously want your first fuck to be with a prostitute, do you?’

‘First fuck! Please. I’ve fucked more people than you could imagine. And why the hell shouldn’t I start with a prostitute, anyway? You’re so naive. I don’t know anyone whose first fuck
wasn’t
with a
puta
. It’s the best way to do things. They know what they’re doing, you get it out of the way, and then when you find the right woman later on you don’t make a dick of yourself.’

‘Keep your voice down, will you?’ I said. The Indians at the next table had glanced over more than once as Fabián raised his voice.

‘Don’t worry about them, they can’t understand us,’ said Fabián. ‘No, in many ways, brothels provide an extremely valuable service. Look at Suarez. He loves them so much he never even bothered getting married.’

‘There’s no brothel here. This isn’t exactly a bustling city, is it?’

‘My friend, there are whores in every little mountain pueblo up and down the Andes. Getting laid round here is as easy as picking sunflowers. You’ve been living in this country over two years now and still have no idea where you are, do you?’

‘That may be true,’ I conceded. ‘But I don’t believe Suarez goes round visiting prostitutes. He’s a doctor. He knows better.’

‘You know that this is an election year in Peru?’ said Fabián.

‘Yes. Hence the war,’ I said.

‘Precisely. And you know what one of the major election issues down there is? The abolition of brothels. The candidate going up against the current president has publicly said that one of the main reasons why he’s against abolishing them is that he enjoys going to them too much. You can’t assume that just because someone is a respected public figure they’re going to be unrealistic about the things that really matter. Same thing with Suarez.’