The Amnesia Clinic (16 page)

Exhaling, Pif offered me the joint.

‘No thanks,’ I said.

‘Not to try is not to know,’ he said, in an irritating singsong voice.

‘I have tried it,’ I said. ‘I live here, remember?’

I’d smoked it a couple of times with Fabián, usually
ending up green with nausea and coughing my guts up while Fabián giggled uncontrollably in a corner. But now, mingling with mango juice on the breeze, and with the sea not too far off, the smoke smelt sweet, pungent and right.

When the joint had been circulating for a few minutes, the mood on the train roof relaxed considerably. Fabián appeared particularly happy with the development and said, ‘I think I may be able to forgive this guy,’ a few minutes after it had crossed his path.

Pif now gazed stoically forward at the track being guzzled by the train as we proceeded. Every so often, he rubbed his thigh.

‘Listen, man,’ said Fabián, leaning over. ‘I want to apologise to you for the crossbow thing.’

Pif gaped at him.

‘You made the cigarette kid do that to me?’ he said.

‘Yeah. I’m sorry.’

Pif laughed silently, his shoulders bobbing up and down, then held his hands up in a mock-defensive position as he spoke. ‘Okay. You hired an assassin to get me. From now on, I’ll believe anything you say.’

‘That’s more like it,’ said Fabián, smiling serenely.

‘You crazy fucking bastard,’ said Pif, shaking his head and laughing some more. ‘I would hate to be there when you get down to that beach and find out your clinic doesn’t exist at all.’

‘I’ll let that one pass,’ said Fabián. ‘But don’t push your luck.’

Our stop was a town called Bucay, which isn’t on any maps. If you look for the place where the railway line stops on its way to Guayaquil, you’ll find a town called General Elizalde, but nothing called Bucay. The thing is, though, in spite of whatever the illustrious general did to get a whole town
named after him (albeit a somewhat mucky and unprepossessing one), everybody calls it Bucay. Because everyone calls it Bucay, Bucay is what it now
is
.

‘Know who came from Bucay?’ said Fabián, as the train drew in.

‘Who came from Bucay, Fabián?’ I said.

‘Lorena Bobbit,’ said Fabián. ‘The dick chopper-offer. We should be careful here.’

‘Thanks for the tip,’ said Pif. ‘No pun intended.’

The roads of Bucay were ochre-coloured mud tracks. Pre-war American pick-up trucks with improvised repairs jostled with rickety bicycles in the dirt. Political slogans crowed from every possible surface: on painted banners slung between the whitewashed flat-roofed buildings; in stencils spray-painted on to every wall. The declarations were defiant to the point of melodrama:
Ecuador fue, es, y será país amazónico
(Ecuador was, is, and shall be an Amazonian country);
Perú, Caín de Latinoamérica
(Peru, the Cain of Latin America). I had forgotten that the further south we travelled, the closer we were getting to Peru and, therefore, to the war. Soldiers leant on every street corner in the town in combat fatigues and baseball caps, rifles slung casually over their left shoulders, pistols jutting from their belts.

‘What is it with this war, anyway?’ said Pif, his accent thickening a little now he was a bit stoned.

‘You don’t know?’ said Fabián. ‘You’re a fucking
Ecuadorian
, man!’

‘I’ve been away. Humour me.’

‘Well,’ said Fabián, ‘even if you believe it is a real war – which it isn’t – it’s about roughly a third of the country that no one lives in apart from a few Indians. If you went and told them they were now Peruvian instead of Ecuadorian they wouldn’t have a clue what you meant – that is, if you managed to get the sentence out without having your head
cut off.’ Words spilled out of him with a kind of dreamy eloquence. Evidently, the weed had given him a taste for political rhetoric. ‘But there’s another reason too,’ he went on. ‘Without a piece of the Amazon of our own we wouldn’t feel right. We wouldn’t feel South American. They want to take that away from us. Even you must feel that, don’t you?’

‘I guess,’ said Pif. ‘Kind of.’

‘Yeah, right – all to do with your Amazonian pride,’ I said. ‘And nothing whatsoever to do with all the oil in the disputed area.’ Sometimes living with a mother as earnest as mine had its uses.

‘Well, I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Fabián. ‘I prefer the Amazonian pride as a reason. We’ve never got on with Peru, anyway. We’ve been at each other’s throats since Huáscar and Atahualpa.’

‘Always the poetic explanation.’

‘Fuck off.’

When the train pulled in, Pif approached Fabián to say goodbye.

‘No hard feelings. Here, take this. I’m flying down to Chile tomorrow and I can’t take it with me,’ he said.

He handed Fabián a newspaper-wrapped packet of weed, clearly, to my mind, having seen the size of the military presence and thought the same as me about the wisdom of carrying drugs into this town. Fabián seemed to have overlooked this key fact.

‘Thank you, man,’ he said, stuffing the package into the side of his rucksack. ‘Kind of you. Have fun in Chile. And sorry again for getting you shot at.’

‘Was it kind?’ I said, when Pif had retreated, and we were ready to disembark. ‘Should we really be getting off this train with a load of dope in our bag?’

‘The army won’t care about that. It’s the police you want to watch out for. Besides, we aren’t tourists. They only bust
people dressed like your friend back there,’ said Fabián. ‘And even then, only if you tip them off – which, by the way, I am half-tempted to do. I’d love to see the look on that
yanquí
bastard’s face when he’s being fist-fucked by the Bucay police.’

‘Lovely meeting new people, isn’t it?’ I said, as we clambered down from the train and into the chaos of the town.

It was now late afternoon. Fabián swaggered with his usual confidence as we made our way through the mud towards the bus station, but I got increasingly nervous. Every new soldier we passed seemed to look at me for longer than the last.

‘Can’t you at least take off that hat, if you don’t want to look like a tourist?’ I said.

Fabián carried on marching down the street, muttering something about how the last thing we should be seen to be doing was hesitating, even when selecting which bus to get on. Eventually, we boarded a lurid, collapsing vehicle, chosen by him apparently at random. Bucay and Pif were behind us.

It was just the kind of bus I had been looking forward to: a dashboard richly upholstered with crimson shag-pile; charms and talismans swinging from the rear-view mirror; live guinea pigs in a cage on the seat beside us. A total lack of suspension meant that we felt every contour of the road, and the only shock absorber in the entire vehicle appeared to be our driver’s spring-mounted seat. He bounced gamely around on it, trying to stay upright. A winking cartoon Christ on a sticker above his head gave a reassuring thumbs-up gesture, and the speech bubble by his mouth proclaimed:
Relax: I’m riding with you
.

The sugar-cane plantations we passed through grew as high as the bus, so there was little to see from the windows.
I dozed with my eyes half-open, still woozy from the dope on the train, watching the shards of a shattered beer bottle dance on the floor. The brown fragments leapt like earth-struck hailstones with every bump in the road; a graphic equaliser for the terrain.

Shortly after Fabián said to me that he reckoned we’d soon be approaching Pedrascada, the bus hit a huge pothole and everything within it flew into the air. My head collided with the ceiling. The driver wrestled control back from the road and slowed the bus right down. Then, without even checking behind him, he accelerated again as if nothing had happened. Two or three passengers shouted abuse forward at him:

‘
Hijo de puta!
Why don’t you learn how to drive, you fucking monkey?’

‘What bad manners. We aren’t cargo, you idiot.’

Two seats in front of us, a large woman with blonde-tinted hair sculpted into a bun was rocking forward, clutching a bleeding hand. A piece of broken beer bottle had flown up into the air and cut the tip of one of her fingers.

‘
Madre de Dios
,’ she repeated quietly, holding the finger in her left hand. When she released it briefly, I saw that the cut wasn’t too deep, but it had cleanly removed one of her purple painted fingernails. Calmly, Fabián knelt down and removed his shoelace, then moved up the bus to sit beside the woman.

‘May I, Señora?’ he said.

The driver, observing the bleeding hand in his rear-view mirror, had started to slow the bus down again, but Fabián shouted forwards to him:

‘Don’t stop the bus; we’ll deal with this. We’ll be taking your name and employee number at the end of the journey. Now take it easy, okay?’

He leant back towards the woman, hushing her as if she were an animal.

‘Now then, Señora, no need to worry. We’ll just tie this up to stop it bleeding and it will be fine.’

He gave the woman his most charming, full in the face, green-eyed angel look as he was tying it, and she smiled as she held out her hand to him.

‘There now, you see? The bleeding has stopped. And you’ll only have nine of them to paint for a while, huh?’

Her tourniquet attached, the woman now laughed with Fabián.

‘You sweet boy,’ she said to him. ‘Let me thank you for being so kind.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ said Fabián, shooing away the purse she had drawn from her bag.

‘But your shoelace—’

‘Believe me, Señora, I can find myself another shoelace easily enough.’

As he got up and stepped his way back up the bus, the remainder of the passengers burst into spontaneous applause. Fabián gave a modest wave and sat down beside me again.

‘What’s got into you?’ I asked.

‘No more delays,’ he said, watching the road ahead. ‘This journey has gone on long enough.’

If you tried to translate the word ‘Pedrascada’ into English, you’d come up with something like ‘Rock Storm’. The name fitted the place. Colossal piles of igneous rock and sandstone book-ended the beach, taking turns to cast shadows over it at different times of day, like the elusive hands of twin sundials. And in view of all the local volcanic activity, the name wasn’t so ridiculous an explanation for their existence. How else were the Galápagos formed? One day they weren’t there, and the next, whole landmasses welled up out of the ocean: molten islands, boiling and slopping about on the surface until they set. In an environment where that was possible, imagining a storm of rocks wasn’t too difficult. If you’d had the strength to overturn one of the huge boulders that studded the shoreline at each end, you might justifiably have expected to find a startled pre-Colombian skeleton underneath, primitive fishing rod stuck in hand since the moment a few civilisations ago when the meteor shower caught him unawares.

But for their matching natural towers, the opposing ends of the beach bore few similarities. At the south end, on your left as you faced the ocean, the sand curved away from the shore behind the rocks, hardening into a dirt track that became a rooster-pecked high street, along which Pedrascada the town slowly accumulated. Single-storey, unfinished houses and bars became larger homes and shops along this road, culminating in the rough formality of the Plaza de la Independencia, where the town had evolved as far as it ever would: neat flowerbeds set among yellow dust and palm trees, street-lamps, a pharmacy and a post office that housed Pedrascada’s only telephone.

Our bus had dropped us at the north end: the untamed, anarchic end. Apart from a scattering of beach bars topped with palm thatch, civilisation here consisted of a crude complex of wooden cabins, set back from the shore amid scrubland and leafless trees, behind a primitive wooden sign that read ‘Juan’s’. Up here, the beach ended abruptly where it met the northern rock pile, and the only way to get out and into the next bay was to pick your way around the base of the cliff face at low tide. No formal pathway existed, but the accumulated graffiti of countless pairs of lovers indicated that the route was well-used.

Beneath the surface of the water lay the coral shelf that gave the bay its celebrated long right break. It meant that the waves were big at Pedrascada, but could be treacherous if you surfed too near the north end. A small, red-painted shrine, like a cartoon dog kennel with a cross on top, sat in the cliff face, facing the bay – a memorial to a surfer who had misjudged things a few years previously and keelhauled himself on the reef. More than once, at night during our stay, I looked up and noticed that a candle had been lit there, although I didn’t see how anyone could possibly have climbed the cliff.

Further up, behind the peaks and crags, stood a bright, incongruous metal dome to which there seemed to be no access. It caught the sun when the rest of the beach had been thrown into shadow, flaring like a daytime lighthouse. At different times in the hours after we first arrived, I was aware that each of us was staring up intently at this building, but neither of us mentioned it.

When the bus had pulled away, we dropped our bags and raced immediately towards the water. You have to, I reckon. If there’s any life in you at all, the first thing you want to do when you see the sea after a long journey is run towards it and feel the salt on your lips, to punch a wave. We hit the surf, Fabián cursing his plaster cast and shouting at me for getting it wet.

‘Know what we need now?’ he said, when we emerged. He’d been keen to attack the weed again ever since we left the train. He took out the newspaper-wrapped parcel as we sat drying out on the rocks. Waves arrived with gentle slaps. The arches of my feet met with wet ridges of hard sand. It felt good after the heat and stench of the bus. Thoughtfully, Pif had given us a handful of cigarette papers to help us along. Fabián sat, his tongue out with concentration, wrestling with a paper he’d loosely sown with weed and the remains of a cigarette. His plaster cast didn’t help.

‘Fucking thing’s screwing up all my hand movements,’ he said. ‘Good job I got laid last night. Jerking off with this thing is a nightmare.’

‘So now you
did
get laid last night?’ I said. ‘Just so I know where we are …’