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Authors: James Scudamore

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BOOK: The Amnesia Clinic
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Just reading the name again was like throwing back the
dustsheet on a stockpile of drab English memories: drizzle and anoraks, motorway cafés, a dismal visitors’ centre. But as I read the entry, I began to see the place in a different light. Why hadn’t I been told this stuff before? Here were druids and solstices, and great, hefty unknowns. I’d opened the encyclopaedia expecting it to be a boring, factual reference book – the sort of thing you were
supposed
to consult – but in frank, unashamed prose, this one explained the cosmic felicities in the location of the site, detailed the mystery of how the stone had been transported there from Wales, and referred me to an entry in another of its volumes relating how Joseph of Arimathea had visited Glastonbury and planted a spear there that became a rose-bush.

Something began to make thrilling sense to me. When I had first met Byron two years previously, he had asked me where I was from, and I had said England.

‘Ah, Londres,’ he said. ‘City of the kings.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘London is the city where you still have kings and queens,’ he said, wistfully.

At the time, the remark had merely struck me as naive, but now, faced with this encyclopaedia and all its entries, his words seemed defining, iconic – a lesson in how removal could enable re-imagination, how looking at things in the right way could breathe warmth into the palest of truths. If such a simple re-expression of the facts could do that for grey old England, then what could it do for Ecuador, where princesses frozen in mountains made the headlines on a day-to-day basis?

I took down an earlier volume, and turned to the entry for Inca:

Lots of dates; lots of facts; a terrible photograph of Machu Picchu; a woodblock print of the great feuding brothers, Huáscar and Atahualpa. Some juicy details about
brain banquets and the massacres of Spanish Catholics, which were promising.

Further down, another entry, ‘Isla de Plata’:

Known as the ‘poor man’s Galápagos’; profusion of endemic species; humpback whales migrating from Antarctica to Colombia; named Island of Silver (or Money) on account of being site of (as yet undiscovered) treasure of Francis Drake; seventy-two tons of silver thrown overboard; nesting ground for albatross and blue-footed boobies.

As yet undiscovered
.

‘Okay then,’ said Fabián, charging in with a tray. ‘Here it is: tequila, limes, salt. I sense a quest coming on.’

‘Have a look at this,’ I said, bringing the encyclopaedia over to the table.

‘Are you mad? Look at
this
, man! Whatever it is, it can wait. Sit down.’

‘But this—’

‘I thought you wanted to hear about my parents. Take the chance now before I change my mind.’

Fabián unplugged the jukebox, turned off the overhead lighting and switched on the set of antique disco lights that Suarez had installed in the library. This story was to be told not by firelight, but by roaming spotlights of phased red and blue.

Before putting the book back on the shelf, I committed a place name from the map to memory: a small town, on the coast, not far from the Isla de Plata, with a reputation for surfing. There were other, bigger-looking places, some of which I’d heard much more about, but this name leapt out at me and stayed in a negative image on my retina after I had closed the covers – even after the room had been thrown into a silent dogfight of scrolling primary colours.

The name was Pedrascada.

Fabián positioned himself in front of the tequila tray and
poured two pairs of shots. Solemnly, we each threw back one, then another. Our winces turned into nervous smirks after the second, but Fabián said, ‘No laughing. These ones we can sip.’

He poured out two more, and we sat staring at each other across the table as if an accusation of cardsharping hung in the air. The only sound in the room was the gentle creak of rusting disco hinges.

‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ said Fabián.

FIVE

Something you don’t know about me is that my dad was a mestizo (said Fabián). He would never have admitted it, but he was. His grandmother was an Indian, from Peguche. He used to claim that even she was technically a mestiza, and that his Indian blood was so diluted as a result that it didn’t exist.


Mestizaje
is relative,’ he would say. ‘In Europe, maybe I would be considered a mestizo. I have enough Indian blood in me to be seen as different over there. In Ecuador, I am not. Here, I am white. I am basically a Castilian.’ What he really meant was that he was ashamed of his own grandmother. Suarez would never approve, with all his crap about ancestry and the way he loves all that indigenous stuff, even though
he
is about as pure a conquistador as you can get.

But my father – that’s Señor Félix Morales to you – well, he would never admit it. He tried as hard as he could to be what he thought was a European: he would listen to classical Spanish music, and try to dance the
pasadoble
like some
flamenco expert. He even wore this crazy red and white spotted neckerchief the whole time, imagining it to be somehow sophisticated. My mother, who had no Indian blood that we know of, loved dancing and listening to all that terrible pan-pipe music. She even spoke quite good Quechua.

Papi had grown up hearing folk-tales about women who had given birth to calves, and men who turned into condors – some great stuff. But he would never tell them. My mother would ask him sometimes to tell us his grandmother’s stories, and he would say, ‘If you want to hear a load of peasant rubbish you can look it all up in a textbook, or go and ask the first
campesina
you find grinding barley in a hut in the mountains.’

He read nothing but Spanish literature, and even put on a hint of a lisp sometimes, like in a Madrileño accent. He’d only ever been to Spain twice in his life, and even then only on business trips with the construction company.

All this revolution stuff is bullshit, you know. Mestizos might make up a third of the population but it’s not the top third – and that’s before you even get to the full-blood Indians. I mean, look at the people who live in the New Town. Ask the kids at school, or any of your parents’ buddies at that stupid sports club: they still think that one Indian is like every other Indian. They might just as well be animals.

So, Papi was embarrassed by who he was – and yes, he was impressed by my mother’s money. Look at all this – you don’t think all this came from doctoring, do you? Suarez and Mami come from a wealthy family. My father liked that.

I’m only telling you this so that you can see what kind of man he was. He was scared of himself, scared of being found out, scared of not being real, or something; I don’t know.

Here, have another tequila.

Arriba, abajo, a centro, adentro
. Mother of God, this is strong stuff. Sit up straight. Are you listening to me?

It was just over seven years ago. I was eight years old.

We used to go on these driving trips at weekends. My parents liked to disappear into the mountains, eat at village cafés, maybe go for a walk, that kind of thing. It was fun, even though I bitched about it at the time.

One day, we were somewhere really high up in the cordillera. We were meant to go for a walk, but it was raining hard, so we drove up to have a look at this hacienda instead. The Hacienda La Reina, it was called.

It was one of those farms that are so huge that whole villages grow up around them: there was a school, a church and even a little post office shop for the workers and their children. It was a beautiful place. The houses and fields were set against these massive green mountains. The air was wonderful.

When we got up to the hacienda we found a fiesta in progress. I think it’s called Zaparo – some Indian harvest festival. An excuse for people to let their hair down and get messed up.

The farm workers had been drinking homemade
chicha
and
aguardiente
for hours, and they were falling around all over the place. A band was marching round the fields, playing music. People were wearing bright red head-dresses made of feathers. Lanterns were being lit.

My parents weren’t the sort of people who just got back in the car in a situation like that, and soon they were eating the food, drinking the booze and chatting to the locals. There was a suckling pig on a spit, and kids sitting around playing. It was pretty cool.

I don’t know how my father got so drunk so quickly – I guess he wasn’t used to the home-made
chicha
they drink up
in the mountains. It’s gross, man. You know they make it with saliva? The women spit in a bowl with a load of maize and then ferment it. Sick shit, but the
indígenas
love it.

There was a paddock in the middle of the area where the festival was taking place, with a separate, smaller pen full of bulls to the side. I can’t remember how it started, but soon most of the party was crowded round this paddock, cheering and singing. There was a group of Indian farm-workers in the field, and they had started doing some amateur bullfighting for the crowd.

The bulls were little – they wouldn’t have been any problem for a proper
torero
. But these weren’t
toreros:
they were very drunk
campesinos
wearing rubber boots that slid around in the mud after the rain.

We stood around, getting into the spirit of the occasion, cheering and laughing when someone made a good pass. Messing around. Nobody was really going to hurt these bulls – the idea was just to get out of their way.

You know how it works. Normally, you hang your
muleta
on the
estoque
, the sword, to create that cape that the bull chases. All that
olé
crap. These guys were just pretending – running around waving their ponchos in the air for a laugh, then coming out of the paddock to high-five their buddies and try to impress girls into going back to their cottage for a fuck.

Papi secretly loved those Indian festivals. He was taking more and more from the
chicha
bowl, and swaying around to the music. It was when he was in moods like this – in other words, when it suited him – that he used to let his mask drop and go on about how great it was to be an Ecuadorian, that you had the best of both worlds. The sophistication of Europe, the spirituality of an Indian, blah blah blah. But then he started to get angry about the way the men in the paddock were treating the bulls.

The bull they were fighting was white, I remember. All the bulls were young, and very scared. No wonder they started running at these guys in the pen with them. It was totally disorganised.

It was getting dark as well, and this wasn’t helping. People were sliding around more than ever. One guy nearly got trampled when the bull came in low and he slipped under its feet, but he managed to twist his head and shoulders away into the mud at just the right moment.

The crowd was starting to lose interest and move away. There was no reason for my father to do what he did.

He said, ‘These people don’t know what they’re doing. This is an insult to the tradition of bullfighting. I’ve got a good mind to get in there and show them how to do it properly.’

And damn it if he didn’t go down there and say he wanted to go next in the ring.

Right. Tequila break.

Your turn.

Get it down.

Where was I?

Oh, yeah.

‘Three cheers for the
forastero
!’ said the Indians. (It’s the word they use to talk about outsiders.) ‘The
forastero
’s gonna show us how to do things properly. Give him another drink!’

My mother was getting nervous, but was still smiling – she would never have suggested that he couldn’t do it. He’d have gone crazy.

They held the bottle to his lips for a long time, until he was virtually choking on it. ‘Give him some
cojones
,’ they said. Then they all slapped him on the back and pushed him towards the railing.

He stepped through into the paddock. Now, the bull they’d been working previously was tired and had been
danced around by four or five men, easy. But some Indian guy, who I guess must have been a big cheese on the plantation, said, ‘No, no, no, this won’t do. We’d better give this grand
torero
a worthy opponent! An animal that stands up to his big talk!’ And they penned up the tired white bull that had been running around.

I can remember watching it as it went back in, thinking,
Shit – Papi could have seen that one much better
. It stood out in the dusk, you see.

Three or four of them got in the pen for a while, arguing about which bull to send in. Then they decided, and started moving this bigger, fresher and blacker one towards the paddock. I nearly shouted out that it wasn’t fair because this one could hardly be seen, but my father wouldn’t have stopped, and I didn’t want to embarrass him.

He was standing in the centre of the paddock, getting mud on his loafers and up his chinos, trying to pretend he was a real
torero
. The crowd got into it and cheered as he did all his warm-up exercises. It was quite funny.

Anyway, this bull wouldn’t come out. The Indians pushed and pushed it, but it wouldn’t come. My father got braver and started shouting at the man who had challenged him.

‘I see your bull knows what’s good for him, my friend!’ he said.

‘You’re gonna pay for that remark,
forastero
,’ said the Indian. And in front of our eyes he went right up to the bull, took the end of his cigar in his fingertips, and stabbed the lit end into its leg.

It screamed and came flying into the paddock, kicking up earth all over the place. I still have this little blue T-shirt I was wearing then. I kept it even though it would never fit me now. You can see, between the bloodstains, some of the specks of dirt kicked up by the bull as it charged towards my father.

That moment is fixed in my mind: the bull’s horns down; the spray of earth behind it lit up by the lanterns; the band marching around in the background; an Indian guy passing out in front of me ’cause he was so drunk.

Papi wasn’t bad at all, I have to admit. He pulled some good moves. He started showing off, turning to face the crowd away from the bull, kneeling down in front of it and stuff.

BOOK: The Amnesia Clinic
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