The Amnesia Clinic (5 page)

Fabián watched the float as it drew near and tried to position himself where he could only hear music from
one
of the tourist stalls. Wherever he stood, it seemed, he heard different pan-pipe songs in mid-collision, often with a manic voodoo counterpoint of salsa music. The aroma of guinea pigs on the grill was no longer evocative; it had blended with sour body odours to produce a musky and unpleasant scent. The edges of things began to blur together, like soft pencil-markings under a thumb. A group of policemen pushed the crowd back from the side of the road, and Fabián was caught off balance in the surge. He lost his footing and landed half on the pavement, half in the cobbled gutter, looking stupidly up at the
coloured bunting across the street. The crowds, in agitated protest at this heavy-handed approach, were still being pushed backwards over him. He’d hit his head on the pavement, and it began to throb. The Virgin loomed over him, bobbing on the surface of the crowd, clasping her hands before her and gazing into the distance from within her glass case. Fabián noticed that her complexion seemed faded next to all the gold of the parade, but he knew he should be concentrating more on getting to his feet.

At this point, the nearest policeman got impatient and a bit panicky. He gave the crowd a bigger shove with his baton, and a tightly packed bunch of people fell backwards as one over the supine Fabián, trampling him beneath them.

A blade of vivid light tore through his vision, and the last thing he saw before the crowd cut off his line of sight was a new face looking down at him from within the glass box of the Virgin. The waxy lady with her enigmatic smile had disappeared, replaced by his mother, in flesh and warm blood. Joy blazed in her eyes, and the tear on her cheek no longer sat in a dummy’s artificial furrow, but slid tenderly down real skin.

The astonishment and pleasure he experienced both overrode his panic at being crushed under such a large crowd of people, and distracted him from the fact that his arm was broken in two places. Covered by the third and final backward surge, the vision of his mother disappeared, and information from his arm and head began going off around his body like one controlled explosion after another.

Consequently, he failed to notice the dust clouds puffing off the building behind him as the earthquake started.

Having got well into my wooing routine with the French flower dealer’s daughter, and congratulating myself on the idea of bringing Eugène along to translate for me, I was put
out when it emerged that the girl was his older sister, that she spoke perfect English herself and that the pair of them had been taking the piss out of me from the beginning. I wasn’t, therefore, in mid-seduction, but sulking furiously behind a statue of Columbus and wondering if I could risk a cigarette when the tremor started.

Whereas down in the Old Town an earthquake would manifest itself as something serious, like rotting whitewash tumbling off the masonry, or the collapse of an entire stall full of rain sticks and hash pipes, up there in the garden the event was infuriatingly incidental. The only real physical manifestation of it seemed to be the faint clinking of glassware on the Ambassador’s trestle tables, which meant that the earthquake operated more as a humorous addendum to the party than anything serious. The sort of thing that ladies in lilac might compliment their host on: ‘An earthquake! But how
charming
, David.’ People instinctively moved away from the house, but a lackey came on a loudspeaker and said that no one needed to worry about that because this was one of Quito’s most earthquake-proof buildings. Everyone relaxed and laughed. Someone said, that’s the advantage of living in a modern house, isn’t it? A butler theatrically opened fresh champagne with a sabre.

I thought of Fabián down in the Old Town. He would have remembered the earthquake drills we did at school, and would be fine, so there was nothing to worry about. But it annoyed me that I wasn’t there. I was, it seemed, destined to live a boring life, never around when the good stuff happened. Fabián had it all, right down to the uncle with the shrunken head, while I was that pale English kid who couldn’t even get it on with some florist’s daughter without being made a fool of by her baby brother. Nothing ever happened to some people unless they went out looking for it, I thought. So I resolved there and then to go out looking at
the next opportunity, and turned away from the view to see where the booze had got to.

The tremor had passed. It only measured 2.1 on the Richter scale but many people were shaken up by it, not least the float-bearers carrying the Virgin Mary. She must have weighed almost a ton and a half, and had nearly toppled into the crowd during the confusion. People began to pick themselves up off the ground. The policeman admonished them for their unruly behaviour and said, look how easily accidents happen. A penitent had dropped his own cross on his head, and now his wailing was genuine. Panic ensued as families realised they had been separated.

Fabián lay crumpled in a wet gutter with his arm bent at a crazy angle, and miraculously Suarez found him after only a few minutes. He stooped to have a look at his nephew’s injury, assuming it to have happened during the earthquake. The arm had sustained a nasty couple of breaks, but it would heal. What worried Suarez far more was his nephew’s behaviour. He hoped Fabián wasn’t suffering from concussion. He didn’t seem to have registered that Suarez was beside him, and he was staring up at the sky with a broad, foolish grin, the like of which Suarez had never seen before.

As far as Fabián was concerned, everything was fine. He was waving at his mother with his floppy, broken arm, and at that point, nothing else mattered.

As I said, it went something like that.

At the time, I had no idea of the full drama of what had happened, and it wasn’t until we returned to school the week after Easter that the story began to emerge and develop, when Fabián turned up with a dramatic plaster cast encasing his right arm. The celebrity conferred by a glamorous injury
can, in the right circumstances, be considerable, and Fabián milked the situation for all it was worth.

My mother had just dropped me off and I was walking towards the classroom, preparing a daring adaptation of my encounter with the French flower dealer’s daughter for the benefit of Fabián – and of anyone else who would listen – when I was out-trumped before I’d even had the opportunity to begin. Verena Hermes collared me in the corridor and gave me the news.

‘Have you seen Fabián yet?’ she demanded.

‘Not yet.’

She seemed pleased to hear this. Her multiple earrings jangled, and a wave of her scent engulfed me as she leant forward conspiratorially. ‘He’s had a terrible accident. Fabián was right in the middle of that earthquake, and he broke his arm saving a little girl who was about to get crushed to death in the crowd.’

‘Sounds very heroic,’ I said.

‘He’s so cool,’ said Verena. ‘But he doesn’t like to talk about it too much. So you go easy on him, okay?’

‘I’ll try,’ I said to a swaying, tinted bob of hair as she turned her back on me and flounced into the classroom.

Fabián sat at the centre of an admiring throng, gesticulating wildly with the plaster cast even as some members of his audience tried to sign it. I noticed as I drew nearer that Verena had already scrawled her own name in thick red marker pen on the most prominent location.

‘I hear you don’t like to talk about it,’ I said.

‘I don’t,’ said Fabián. ‘It brings back too many memories. Now shut up and listen. Andrea, thank you, what a lovely signature. So, if you guys would care to make your way over here to the model skeleton, I will show you where the breakage occurred. These are called the radius and the ulna, and my ulna is broken both here, and here. A small
portion of this bone will always be adrift inside my arm – a reminder of the cost of being a hero. Please don’t weep, ladies. You know I would have done the same for many of you. I guess some people are just in the right place at the right time …’

Unlike Suarez, my parents weren’t equipped with an adventure playground of a house, so when Fabián came to stay with me we would spend most of the weekend at the Sporting Club, a sealed New Town compound where expats could paddle safely up and down the deep blue Olympic rooftop pool towards the volcanoes on the horizon, take an aerobics class or, more likely, enjoy a lightly grilled cheese sandwich with their Campari and soda.

Fabián and I would maraud around, making the place less relaxing for others by openly appraising budding daughters in bikinis, messing around in the bowling alley or attempting elaborate formation dives into the pool. My mother, meanwhile, would rain earnest sweat on to the clay tennis courts as my father made polite conversation with fellow club members in the library – a room which couldn’t have been further in spirit from its namesake at Suarez’s. This one qualified for the name on the grounds that it had panelling, a couple of yellow paperbacks and the
Herald
Tribune
on a table, and I can confidently assert that not a single interesting word was ever uttered within its walls. To me, at that time, my parents seemed so crushingly predictable that I could never understand why Fabián sometimes seemed to covet them: a fine illustration of how the comparative glamour of the world he lived in blinded me to its downside.

We were due to go to the Sporting Club that weekend, but the trip was called off at the last minute because of Fabián’s arm and no contingency plan was made in its place. Secretly this was a relief to me, because it prevented Fabián from performing his latest and most embarrassing routine in the pool: using what he called his ‘negative buoyancy’ to sink to the bottom of the deep end with a lungful of air and lie stock still, to the mounting agitation of some poor old lifeguard. Instead I spent a solitary Saturday afternoon bobbing about by the steps at the deep end, trying to discover the elusive secret of negative buoyancy for myself, or at the very least to better my own pitiful, gasping record for staying underwater. Most importantly, though, it meant that we missed a valuable opportunity to discuss what had
really
happened to Fabián on the day he broke his arm.

I saw little of him the following week either. Ours was a friendship that tolerated separation, and I naively assumed that he wasn’t around much because he was busy dining out on his new, heroic reputation. It was only later that I found out the truth: he spent most of that week alone, coping with the increasingly disturbing mental adventures his mind was taking him on, and allowing his own personal version of what had happened at the Easter parade to take root.

In my defence, I had distractions of my own at home. A monster threat, which had been lurking in the shadows for months
and which I’d been doing my best to ignore, lumbered blinking into the light without warning, and all of my energies had suddenly to be diverted into urgent evasive action.

The crunch came one evening when my mother collected me from school. Regardless of mood, she punished her Japanese jeep like a getaway driver, but as we roared away from the school gates that evening, it felt more than ever as if she were trying to escape the tedious gravity of New Quito once and for all and put us into orbit. I should have noticed straight away that she was tense, and played things safe, but I can be hopelessly unobservant at times.

I’d been telling her at the start of the journey about what we’d covered that day in a history lesson: the famous meeting in 1822 between San Martín and Bolívar at Guayaquil, after which, for no obvious reason, San Martín had agreed to stand down and let Bolívar take his place in history as the Great Liberator of South America. It wasn’t customary for me to come fizzing out of school talking about what I’d studied, and I didn’t usually have much interest in history, but every so often something caught my attention. Not only was this a continent-shaping event that had happened right here in Ecuador, but it was a captivating story for other reasons. To this day, nobody really knows what went on at that meeting – or why San Martín, who had done more liberating than most, should have meekly stood aside to let Bolívar be remembered as the man responsible for the freedom of the continent. It could have been straight from some
Boy’s Own
story about Men of Destiny, and like King Arthur, born so conveniently to take the sword from the stone, Bolívar seemed to me to have had it easy. If people are willing just to step aside for you because of your place in the story, power and responsibility become a lot easier to deal with, in my view. And where does that leave those of us with more mediocre destinies? Where did
it leave me, the pale English kid with faulty lungs and no shrunken-head-wielding uncle?

My mother was unmoved by my enthusiasm for the subject. She asked, in a dry tone of voice at odds with the death-wish apparent in her driving, whether I didn’t think I ought to be more concerned with what was going on in my
own
country in 1822, and my sarcastic response (something like, ‘Do
you
know what was happening in England then?’) was met with silence and a flooring of the accelerator. Another warning sign. But, fatally, I was feeling bored, and a bit antagonistic.

Knowing what an affront they were to her own intellectual rigour and attention to detail, I would sometimes repeat parrot-fashion to my mother some of the things that Suarez said to Fabián and me at the weekends, to see what sort of a reaction they provoked. Usually this would be indulgent laughter, followed by a jokey admonishment that I was hanging out with the wrong crowd and it was high time I got a decent education. But not today.

I announced that I had been thinking about the war with Peru.

‘What about it?’ she said, warily.

I launched into one of Suarez’s favourite tirades, about how all the petty squabbling between us and the Peruvians was distracting Ecuador from the larger project. How the pre-Colombian civilisations were just as bad. How South Americans had lost their one chance to unite, because they had lost touch with their mystical side thanks to failures of imagination inherited from the conquistadores. That expression. ‘Failures of imagination’. That really got her. The second it was out, she started driving even more recklessly, the bangles round her wrists jangling in time to her increasingly hectic gear changes. The exact ins and outs of the subsequent conversation are irrelevant, but it involved me
voicing Suarez’s view that believing something because it was a good story was just as worthwhile as believing something that happened to be true, and it ended with her gunning the engine and saying: