The Amnesia Clinic (32 page)

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 were 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.

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.