The Amnesia Clinic (3 page)

‘A wealthy American collector approached my friend in an attempt to purchase this piece. My friend said that it wasn’t for sale, but the collector insisted. He offered large sums of money. My friend had vowed never to part with the head, which his grandfather had bequeathed to him, and
he said so to the collector. He added, furthermore, that it wasn’t necessarily in the American’s interests to acquire it, since legend had it that totems such as this could bring very bad luck to those who did not inherit them.’

Fabián and I exchanged brief looks to gauge how seriously the other was taking the story, then turned back to Suarez.

‘The collector laughed at this and told my friend that he believed firmly in the persuasive powers both of science and of money, but not in shrunken heads that brought bad luck. It was a museum piece, he said, nothing more. He offered a final, incredible sum, which my friend declined, and then he left.’

‘So who was he? Who was the friend? Had his ancestors killed this person? The friend’s not Byron, is he?’

‘Slow down, Fabián. The story isn’t finished. I dare say you are implicating poor Byron in this due to what you have heard about his illustrious namesake and Anti’s fellow countryman. As you are doubtless aware,
that
Byron was fond of drinking from skulls plated with silver and fashioned into cups. It is a perceptive link, but you are wrong in this instance.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Fabián.

‘Never mind. That’s another story. No, our own Byron may have once been a fierce upholder of the law, but I doubt he ever decapitated anyone – this was not standard police procedure, even in 1960s Ecuador. And if you took some time to think about it, my unobservant nephew, you would see that Byron’s ancestors are more likely to have been African tribesmen than Shuar warriors from the rainforest. Don’t you want to hear the rest?’

‘Of course. Sorry, Uncle Suarez.’

‘My friend – whose name, since you ask, was Miguel de Torre – was a wealthy and powerful man. He had no need
for the American’s money, and he wanted to keep the head for himself. It was a part of his past. To sell it would not have been right. But not long after he had sent the collector on his way, Miguel found himself in a situation where money had suddenly become paramount. More important than his ancestry – which, as you should both know by now, is one of the most important things there is. His wife was diagnosed with leukaemia.

‘Miguel, who had come close to discarding the business card left for him by the American collector, now found himself thinking differently. His love and his desperation were so acute that he was adamant his wife should be treated by the best bone-marrow man in America, at the kind of prices that even his considerable personal fortune could not possibly accommodate. And so he found himself telephoning the office of the collector and explaining the change in his circumstances. He made it clear that he was parting with the piece against his will, but he offered to sell it.

‘Miguel’s wife received the best treatment that the money could buy. Sadly, she did not live long – her disease was too far advanced even for the best – but it is nice to think that that poor little warrior over there went some way towards keeping two lovers together for a few precious years, don’t you think? Even in death, he has done some good – not that this will help him now. Let us rescue him from his undignified position on that desk. His hair is still growing, after all. It’s just possible he may be thinking ill of us inside that little stone that now passes for his skull.’

‘It’s still
growing
?’ said Fabián.

‘Of course. Look at how long it is. I must check with the relevant people, actually. It may be up to me, as its current guardian, to groom the thing.’

As Suarez pondered this responsibility out loud for our
benefit, we looked at the head with renewed interest.

‘Pass it over, will you, Anti?’ he said casually. ‘I’ll check it for split ends.’

‘Listen, Uncle Suarez, stop trying to scare us. We know its hair isn’t still growing. Where’s the rest of this story?’ Fabián was bouncing back, but then he wasn’t the one who’d been asked to pass it over. Even during this tough talk, he was glancing in my direction to see how I was rising to the task.

I got up, went over to the desk and picked up the head. It was disarmingly light. I cradled it in the palm of my hand as Suarez had done, but although I had resolved to try and avoid touching the features at all costs, my fingertips brushed its withered little nose as I moved it and I leapt quickly in Suarez’s direction to get the transportation over with. The locks of hair swung beneath my outstretched hand, bearing a preservative smell, of pickles and hospitals.

‘Thank you, Anti. You have earned yourself a refill,’ said Suarez, gesturing at the rum bottle. ‘Now, where had I got to? Ah yes, the American. Needless to say, Miguel de Torre was an honourable man. Having sold the piece in good faith, he wouldn’t have dreamt of trying to reclaim it. Besides, who would have contemplated a change of heart on the part of the rapacious collector? He thought he had seen the back of this head, if you’ll forgive the expression, for ever.

‘Miguel was distraught at the loss of his wife. He resolved to go on a long voyage around Europe to cope with his loss. And he took with him a keepsake, which you may find curious. He took with him his poor dead wife’s wedding finger.

‘Without leaving any forwarding address, he set out on a voyage of no fixed duration. It would take as long as it took. He was in no hurry at all. He took his loved one
in his mind – and her finger in his pocket – to see again some of the places where they had spent time together, and to discover some new ones as well. They went to the opera in Verona, just as they had on their honeymoon, dined at fine restaurants in Chartres and Barcelona, and walked for long hours together through the Scottish Highlands. I think they even completed a portion of the pilgrims’ trail to Santiago.

‘Throughout the trip, Miguel kept his dead wife’s finger in his pocket, occasionally touching it as he went and enjoying conversations with her as he had throughout their happy life together. Eventually, when he had said all he needed to say, he found a beautiful place near a river – where, he did not tell me – and buried the finger in the ground. Then he returned home to resume his life, his mourning at an end. Isn’t that a beautiful story?’

‘Suarez,’ said Fabián. ‘What has any of this got to do with the curse?’

‘Be patient,’ said Suarez. ‘When Miguel returned home, he found evidence of desperate attempts to contact him: a mountain of letters and messages, many of them delivered by hand. His relatives had also been contacted several times. It seemed that the American had regretted his purchase after all.

‘Since acquiring the head, his life had taken several wrong turnings. He had been implicated in a financial scandal and had lost his job at the merchant bank where he worked. Many of his friends had disowned him in his disgrace. To make matters worse, as he was on his way to the courtroom to plead his case, he was knocked down by a speeding taxi. His injuries were so terrible that the ambulance crew were forced to amputate both of his legs there and then on the court steps. As if this weren’t bad enough, when he woke up in the hospital, he found out that the reason the taxi had
been in such a hurry was that his wife was inside it, encouraging the driver to get to the court as quickly as he could in order that she could file for divorce.

‘Nor was this the end. Just as the collector was beginning to cope with his new life, as a disgraced, divorced, convicted criminal in a wheelchair, he began to suffer from a strange muscle-wasting disease which could not be explained by any of the specialists he consulted. Eventually, it dawned on him that he must return the head to its rightful owner. Which he did.

‘And when, years later, Miguel died, having reclaimed his property, he left it to me in his will. I have inherited it rightfully, you understand, which means it should bring me good luck – and may you too one day, Fabián, if you believe in that sort of thing.’

Fabián was thinking.

‘I don’t believe the bit about the finger,’ he said. ‘That’s the only bit I don’t believe.’

‘That, my boy, is the truest part of the whole story. The loss of a loved one can make people do very strange things. You know, several friends of mine asked Miguel at the time why he had chosen to react to the death of his wife in such an … unorthodox way. Miguel would simply smile and say, very quietly, “Grief asks different questions of us all.” And he was right. I have seen some highly eccentric responses to death over the years. There was an old lady when I was working over in Andalusia whose child had died before she could get it baptised. Rather than allow it to be buried in unconsecrated ground, she kept the child preserved in a pickle jar in her kitchen for the rest of her life.’

‘I hope she didn’t get drunk and accidentally use it as an ingredient,’ said Fabián.

‘I hope so too,’ said Suarez. ‘I enjoyed her cooking on several occasions.’

‘What do you think, Anti? Shall we ask Suarez if we can take his cursed head into school to scare the girls?’ said Fabián.

‘It would certainly be a good conversation piece,’ I said.

‘Forget it,’ said Suarez. ‘You two might decide to give it to someone you don’t like as a present, and I suspect that being indicted for witchcraft would not do my medical career much good. Having said that, given the superstitious nature of some of my patients … No. I’m afraid it stays here. But you see that your Ice Princess isn’t the only exciting relic around here, in spite of all this anxiety of yours to get out and discover things. You need look no further than your own family, Fabián.’

He smiled as he said this, and then stood up to give his nephew an affectionate kiss on the forehead. He shook hands with me, as was customary, and then said, ‘Goodnight boys. All this weaving of yarns has tired me out. Sleep well. Don’t drink all my rum.’

It was a calculated display of tolerance. There was only enough left in the bottle for a tiny slug each, but the idea that we might stay up all night putting the world to rights over Suarez’s rum was a fiction in which we were both willing participants.

Later, Fabián and I said goodnight, and I went upstairs to Suarez’s spare room expecting my head to spin, not only with the rum but with frozen princesses and battle trophies, with severed fingers and pickled babies. My mind
was
on fire – not, as I’d expected, with all the peculiar objects of the day, but with visions of Miguel de Torre, striding through the heather, checking into hotels and enjoying candlelit meals, all the while in conversation with his dead loved one, moving continuously until he could find the right place to leave her behind.

As a result, I was still awake when I heard the sound, echoing round the dark house like a cry from the bottom of a well: Fabián was calling out in his sleep for his mother.

Two years and three months previously, my family had moved to Ecuador. In that time, Fabián and I had become close friends, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t have happened were it not for the trajectory of a water balloon at the end of my second week in the country. Without that thin membrane of latex, topped up and bulging with cholera-tainted water, tied in a knot and taken forth into the street for battle, we might not have got beyond the first month.

For a start, we were very different. Fabián was tall and dark, with eyes like a pair of flawed emeralds: a languid panther to my wheezing albino pig. He looked older than he was, while I was consistently mistaken for somebody’s kid brother. What’s more, he enjoyed a kind of universal adulation that hardly cried out for a new friend.

He had a range of essentially pointless but impressive physical tricks at his disposal, which he would deploy at key moments to impress the younger kids (and also, he hoped, the girls): double-jointed fingers, disappearing matchsticks,
back-flip dives, smoke-rings. You name it: anything that required a bit of showing off, he was good at. He could pick locks. He could tie knots in a
capulí
stalk with his tongue. There was a patch of skin on his hand which he claimed didn’t have any nerve endings and was therefore immune to pain. Occasionally, but not so often that it became common knowledge, he muttered darkly about being descended from a shaman. He would do anything, in fact, to stop you from jumping to the easy conclusion that he was a standard-issue human being, somehow making the posture look effortless at the same time. He was the most charming liar I have ever known, and, on the surface at least, he had no need in his life for an asthmatic English kid who didn’t even speak the language. And yet, with the magnanimity of the omnipotent, he chose to become a public friend to me right away, shouting the other kids down when they spoke too much Spanish in my company and inviting me back to Suarez’s after school on the Friday of my very first week. He was also witness to many of the asthma attacks and nosebleeds I suffered early on in the thin Quito air, and took it upon himself subsequently to become the default carer whenever my sickly system let me down. But it was the water balloon that fixed it.

My family arrived in Quito during the carnival season, just before Lent, when the water fights in the streets were in full swing. It’s a tradition: at that time of year, anybody is fair game, and it’s very important that you take your drenching in good humour. If you’re lucky it’s just some five-year-old with a water-pistol, but some of the young citizens really go to town, cruising around in cars with whole arsenals of ready-prepared weaponry. It’s just what happens. And I suppose Suarez must have said to Fabián that it might be nice to take the new boy out to witness some of this colourful local madness.

We were wandering around the cobbled streets of the Old Town when some older kids ambushed us. One of them chucked a water balloon straight at Suarez’s head. It didn’t explode – just bounced off his shoulder – but for some reason, and unusually for Suarez, he didn’t see the funny side. He walked towards the kids, muttering threateningly, but the way they stood their ground and began squaring off meant this probably wasn’t such a good idea, and Fabián said so to his uncle. Suarez turned around, said that we were leaving and stormed off. I would never have done it even a few months later, but as a thirteen-year-old innocent in a new country I didn’t appreciate the danger of the situation. Without really thinking about it, I picked up the unexploded water balloon and hurled it back at the bunch of kids as hard as I could. To their amazement, and mine, it burst all over them. The three of us then ran off through the streets, Fabián and me laughing and Suarez trying to be furious but finding it too funny, until a cataclysmic wheezing fit destroyed my bravado a few blocks from the scene.