The Amnesia Clinic (12 page)

On Friday, Suarez arrived late and brimming with sarcasm about the events of two weeks before. True to his word, he made no reference to our exchange in the library after Fabián had been hauled off to bed.

‘Anti, how wonderful to see you again. If I had known you two hell-raisers were getting together, I would have ordered in another case of tequila, or some whores. Well, it’s short notice, but we might get lucky. Hand me the telephone directory, will you?’

After several remarks of this kind, we escaped to watch television in Fabián’s room.

On the surface, it was a normal evening – exactly what I had feared lost following my fall-out with Fabián, and exactly what I knew I would miss most when I left the country. We discussed the merits of a low-calibre horror and soft-porn film on cable TV and traded a couple of lame lies about girls at school. But there was something listless about our behaviour, as if we had been asked to act out our customary roles and lacked enthusiasm for the task. I’d already felt the urge to escape this familiar room, with its well-worn videotapes and its over-ogled pin-ups, even before I noticed that Fabián was leafing through a road atlas.

‘So,’ he said, ‘where shall we go?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I thought you were planning to live a little more before you get locked away for ever in Englishness.’

I had relayed to Fabián some of the details of my experience during the power cut in the lift. Not the full amount – not the tears, for example – but some.

‘Hand me the atlas, then,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a look.’

I envisaged a day trip in the company of Suarez to climb Cotopaxi, or at best an illicit afternoon’s boozing in some highland bar. I leafed through the atlas and suggested to Fabián a few places we might go within easy reach of Quito. Otavalo. Baños. Cayambe. This amused him.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ he said. ‘We should go to Pedrascada.’

There were plenty of reasons why I had chosen to position my made-up Amnesia Clinic in Pedrascada. It sounded like an exotic, faraway place. The fact that it was a surfing beach seemed cool to me. The prospect of Francis Drake’s sunken treasure had fired some youthful corner of my imagination. But a fourth, less obvious reason was that in spite of having seen it mentioned in Suarez’s encyclopaedia, I had been unable to find it on any of the maps of Ecuador we had at home. It had seemed to be a neat solution: put the imaginary hospital in the place that doesn’t exist. I had been pleased with my ingenuity. I would soon learn that there are many places in South America that don’t make it on to maps.

‘You think we should go to Pedrascada.’

‘Why not? Why choose somewhere random?’

‘Well, okay, but … it doesn’t seem to be in this atlas.’

‘I know where it is. I’ve heard about the surfing beach there.’

‘But—’

‘Just think about it for a second. A whole hospital full of people who don’t know who they are, or where they came from. Wouldn’t you like to see that?’

My anxiety must have shown. He grabbed the atlas back
and said, ‘I know what you’re going to say. I’m not crazy. I know this place may not be there any more, if it ever existed at all. I know that even if it is there, the chances of us finding my mother there are virtually zero. But don’t you think it’s worth a look anyway? Hmm?’

He was testing me. He wanted to see if my resolve would fall at the first hurdle, and I couldn’t let that happen. It would invalidate all the effort I had made to show faith in him in the first place.

‘Yes, I do,’ I said, carefully. ‘That’s why I showed you the article to begin with.’

‘There you go. We should go to Pedrascada. We’ve got to go
somewhere
before you leave, and it might as well be there. Besides,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘I’m sick of being stuck here. Suarez has been driving me crazy ever since that night we got drunk. Asking me if I’m okay, if I want to talk about anything. He even invited me to go see a
bullfight
, the weirdo.’

I felt blood rushing to my face and looked away in embarrassment, but Fabián carried on talking. Either he hadn’t made the link between Suarez’s bullfighting question and me, or else he had unearthed my betrayal and was using it to lever me into going along with his plan.

‘I want to get away from him for a while,’ he concluded. ‘It will be great. We can go whoring.’

So I wasn’t off the hook after all. I could only hope that, like so many of the plans we made together, this one would wither in the light of good old feasibility. Skipping school was easily done, but to justify a long absence from our respective guardians we’d have to do something virtually impossible. We would have to lie to Suarez. Given what a connoisseur of bullshit he was, he would be as alert to a bad fib as a gourmand to a duff cut of meat. With that in mind, I decided it was safe to play along with Fabián for
now without fear of having lost face later on when the plan died anyway.

‘Okay. Let’s say we do go. How the hell do we get down there?’

‘I know how to do it. Bus-train-bus. Or possibly bus-train-bus-bus-taxi-boat, depending on how lucky we get. Don’t worry about that. You can get anywhere if you have the money. Leave the logistics to me.’

There was a rap on the door. Fabián thrust the road atlas towards me and I bundled it under his duvet before leaping into what I hoped was a nonchalant position in front of the TV. Suarez came in, amused at how obviously we were hiding something, and gave us time to relax into our assumed poses more convincingly before he spoke.

‘I am prepared to offer you a truce. There are two cold beers downstairs. They are yours if you want them. But at least come and tell me about whatever vicious scheme it is that you are hatching up here.’

We trooped down the stairs behind him.

Back then, I thought Suarez was the sort of person we could tell anything to. I also imagined that he would love the concept of the Amnesia Clinic as much as we did, and for the same reasons: for its appeal as an idea; for the fact that such things should exist in the world. If we’d simply told him what we were planning to do, he might even have sanctioned it. But Fabián did not perceive his uncle as I did. Even though I was the person who had given it to Fabián, the idea of the Amnesia Clinic was his now, and he would hoard it, away from Suarez, alongside every other secret he’d manufactured to obscure the dreary, awful truth. In spite of this, I thought that being confronted by Suarez and his chilled, conciliatory bottles of Pilsener would make it very difficult for Fabián to try to deceive him. I expected that
Fabián would relax as usual into the cosy fug of stories in Suarez’s library and let his mind wander from Pedrascada, as it had from so much else. It was not the last time that I would underestimate him completely.

‘So, boys,’ said Suarez, his beetle-crushers pounding across the polished hall floor and into the kitchen, ‘what are you planning? If it’s a military coup, then let me tell you, there are some very important dos and don’ts.’

‘We weren’t going to tell you,’ said Fabián, suddenly downcast as we entered the kitchen.

‘Weren’t going to tell me what? Sit down, sit down,’ said Suarez, setting the beer bottles down on the table for us.

‘We—’ Fabián looked miserably towards me. ‘We might as well tell him, I suppose.’

I shrugged. It was genuine. I had no idea what he was up to.

‘We’re supposed to be going away on this school trip next week. Visiting Inca ruins. Participating in an Indian festival. Some stupid cultural awareness trip. We were just trying to work out what we could do to get out of going. Anti says his parents would never write him a sick note, but I told him you’ve done it for me before. Couldn’t you find some way to get us out of it?’

Even by Fabián’s standards, it was a spectacular double bluff, and Suarez’s response couldn’t have worked more in our favour. First, he reproved Fabián for blowing his cover on the sick notes, and said that he would think twice before writing him another one. Then he really got into his stride. As he spoke, he paced the room and poked a plump finger repeatedly in our direction. His words were punctuated by tiny flurries of cigarette ash that fell in time to his emphatic hand gestures.

‘A word of advice: next time, don’t try and get me to lie for you on the basis that staying here to fester in front of
American television is a more worthwhile pursuit than exploring one of the most extraordinary cultures the world has known – and, what’s more, the culture that still defines the country you live in, contrary to many people’s best efforts. Really, for two imaginative boys like you, I find it pathetic. I’m being perfectly serious about this. You have to take a more active role in your own education, Fabián, otherwise you might as well leave school now and graduate straight to washing dishes. As for you, Anti: when you go back to England, people will ask you, “What was it like in South America?” Do you really want to tell them that the most interesting thing you saw when you lived here was on the HBO network?’

By the time he was finished, he had told us in no uncertain terms that we would go on the school trip, that we would enjoy it immensely, and that he expected a full report from both of us when we got back on the reasons why we had found it an enriching experience. He asked us when we were leaving.

‘This Wednesday, coming back Sunday night,’ said Fabián, almost grinning. He was so pleased with himself that he was barely able to maintain his moody, adolescent façade, but just as Suarez looked back in his direction he managed to reassemble it. As for me, my only problem was not looking as terrified as I felt about the direction in which things were going.

‘Oh, please. Stop looking so pathetic,’ said Suarez, to both of us. ‘You’ll have a great time.’

‘If you say so,’ said Fabián. ‘We’ll try.’

There are plenty of ways I could defend not having spoken out at this point, before anything dangerous happened.

I could say that I didn’t think we’d ever actually make it down to Pedrascada.

I could say that I still believed Fabián saw the newspaper cutting as another act of the ongoing pantomime between us, and so wouldn’t mind even if we did get there and he found out that the Amnesia Clinic didn’t exist.

I could say that my friend seemed happy again, and that was enough for me.

I could even say that I thought I was in some way following Suarez’s drunken advice to me on the night of the tequila incident.

Any of these statements might hold water to some extent, but I know now that none of them is the real reason why I said nothing and allowed the trip to go ahead. The truth is that I envied Fabián the world he had created for himself, with its Easter visions and its bloodshed in misty mountain bullrings. This would be my last opportunity to take a proper excursion to that world. I wanted to break in and inhabit it while I could, before it was lost to me for ever.

And I was terrified to the point of paralysis.

Names seem more and more important to me the older I get. Take, for example, the shipping region of Finisterre, which no longer exists. Its name is derived from the Latin,
finis terrae
, because early sailors thought they had reached the ends of the earth when they strayed into its waters. The bus station in Old Quito is called the
Terminal Terrestre
, which strikes me now as an interesting echo of the same idea. That name is derived from the cosier notion of reaching your final destination, but when Fabián and I arrived there after school on Wednesday afternoon, and I saw it for the first time, I wouldn’t have questioned the suggestion that I was reaching the end of the world as I knew it. Young Indian girls and their siblings, or children, sat in corners, hoping for food or sucres. Beggars plaintively waved leprous stumps. Travellers and businessmen ignored them as if they were drawings on the walls. As if in response to this indifference, one girl of about my own age sat against the wall with her turquoise skirt spread before her, tapping monotonously
with a coin on the greasy but empty metal meal-tray in her lap. I couldn’t decide whether this small but determined assertion of power over her environment was intended to attract the attention of potential philanthropists, or just to remind herself she was still here. Or maybe it was no announcement at all – maybe she was just passing the time. I realised that, in fact, I was in no position to draw any conclusions about this place, which made being there seem all the more exciting and dangerous. We were about to jump.

That name,
Terminal Terrestre
. It could mean more than the ends of the earth. It could mean ‘the end of all things earthly’. There’s life in that name, and possibility. It’s a hub, a convergence of threads, a decision yet to be made. The air felt as thick with possibility there as it was with the smells of frying, with dirt, with voices.

Plenty more good names could be found within the building itself: bus companies called
Flota Imbabura
and
Macuchi
, their syllables evocative of condors and volcanoes, operated out of concrete kiosks that lined the interior walls. Ticket touts bearing the different company logos on their short-sleeved shirts prowled the concourses, stalking customers. They bellowed the destinations they peddled as if they thought their enthusiasm for a particular place might actually influence your choice of where to go. Tulcán. Riobamba. Guayaquil.

Fabián had gone off to buy tickets. I stood nervously in the centre of the concourse, wondering whether we really were going to do this but not quite panicking. If we decided tomorrow, halfway through the journey, not to go through with it, then we could still come back, and all we would have to do would be to formulate a satisfactory explanation as to why our trip had been curtailed. My parents had accepted without question the story that we were going on
a school excursion; all that was left was to make sure the alarm wasn’t raised at school when we didn’t turn up on Thursday and Friday. Fabián had forged a sick note that Verena would deliver, and I had pleaded a family trip away. I think I remember saying it was the Queen’s birthday, although looking back now I can’t believe anyone swallowed that. Whatever reason I had given, with surprising ease, we were now covered until Monday. We could go anywhere we wanted.