The Amnesia Clinic (2 page)

Quito is not one city but two: the New Town and the Old Town lie at opposite ends of a long, thin valley running from
the north to the south. At the northern end is a bland sprawl of glass and concrete boxes: apartment blocks, shopping centres and offices. The business district. A city of tethered Alsatians, lawn sprinklers and air-con. It was here in New Quito that I lived with my family, in a block of flats devised for the purpose of formal entertainment. Arranged on strata of open-plan, polished surfaces, the place was a veritable gallery of picture windows, each one of which provided spectacular views over the city and the volcanoes beyond. The vantage point allowed you to watch incoming aeroplanes as they hurled themselves down between buildings and on to the floor of the valley, where the airport was situated. It also meant that if you took a pair of binoculars and followed the city as it curved away to the south-west, you could make out, buried away at the opposite end like a dirty secret, the whitewashed walls, crumbling churches and narrow streets of the Old Town.

The story went something like this: once upon a time, high in the Andes, among the volcanoes, the Incas built a city in the clouds. But when word came of the approach of the conquistadores from the south, General Rumiñahui, whom the great Atahualpa had left in charge of the city, destroyed the place himself rather than let it fall to the enemy. Not one stone of the great Inca city remained. What we referred to as the Old Town was the colonial city that had been built on top of the Inca one, whose arched balconies and terracotta roofs were now in disarray themselves, repossessed in some cases by
indígenas
, but rotting all the same. And so, while the New Town continued to unpack itself to the north, like prefabricated furniture, the Old Town sat still, slowly settling on top of its predecessor, like compost. Like geology.

Today, thanks to various international protection orders and heritage schemes, I read that this process of decay has
been arrested, that the Old Town has been sanitised, and that all those derelict whitewashed buildings, reclaimed by the rich, gleam once more. That collapsed mouth full of bad teeth is now, apparently, capped and sparkling. I find this impossible to imagine. Perhaps it was the manifest poverty of the place, or perhaps it was the thrill I associated with any forbidden location, but to me Old Quito, or El Centro as it was widely known, always stood for life in its most concentrated form. It crawled with the stuff. You couldn’t set foot there, it seemed, without having to fight your way through the billow of steam from a mobile soup stall, fend off a market trader trying to press you into a hat or a frilly blouse, or intercept some urchin trying to tickle your wallet. Then there was the intoxicating, head-spinning cocktail of smells, exacerbated by the high altitude: diesel fumes, rotting fruit, stale urine. And, during festivals, cane alcohol, and the charred flesh of guinea pigs grilled over coals.

Only once had I been let loose in the Old Town alone, and the experience had merely served to whet my appetite. Due to its proximity to the Equator, the weather in Quito is schizophrenic at the best of times – at any time, the most tedious cloud formation might suddenly admit an impossible rainbow or dump a preposterous hailstorm – but, being in the Old Town, this particular episode stuck in my mind. I was out with my father and, to save time, he had sent me to get a key cut while he bought something at a market stall. I was thirteen at the time, and welcomed this opportunity for solo exploration. Hearing the ripple of thunder in the distance, I stopped in the street beneath a terracotta awning and looked behind me towards the peak of Cotopaxi to see the flash of a jaundiced, smoky fissure in the sky. The Indian ahead of me geed up his mule by tapping its back with his stick. Stallholders stowed their wares beneath plastic sheeting. Then, with only a couple of warning droplets beforehand, the rain arrived. Walls became
vertical rivers. Brown torrents foamed down the streets and frothed into holes in the ground. The pavements felt greasy underfoot with drenched pollution. Dogs gazed out from under tables, waiting for it to pass, and for about ten minutes, I watched as the storm drains choked, gulping down the weather as best they could. Afterwards, it was as if nothing had happened: the blue canvas of the market stalls quietly dripped dry, and their proprietors tapped out their pipes to do business once again.

Perhaps the storm would have been equally impressive had I been on a playing field at school, or sitting on the balcony of our apartment in the New Town, but at the time I believed that it was the fact of where I was that had made it so striking, that such freak weather was particular to Old Quito, and that everything, rain included, was more interesting there.

As someone who had spent all of his life nearby, Fabián’s attitude to the Old Town when we talked about it was one of complacency, as if he knew it well and could no longer be surprised by it. In spite of this, I knew that he too had never spent much time exploring it on his own and longed to do so almost as much as I did.

Fabián lived full-time with his uncle on the very southern outskirts of the city, beyond both New Town and Old, and even though he was my best friend, at no point over the previous two years had I asked him what had happened to his parents. At the back of my mind I was always conscious of their absence, but Fabián never mentioned it, so I kept a respectful distance from the subject, wanting to show that I could manage the concept of bereavement as tactfully as anyone else, however alien it was to me. I wasn’t actually
trying
to be sympathetic; I just thought that not mentioning it was the adult thing to do. Besides, a set-up as brilliant as
living with Fabián’s Uncle Suarez wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to question.

The house they lived in was built in the style of the colonial buildings in the Old Town – white walls, red tiled roofs, Moorish balconies – but it was a modern construction, and the area where it was situated was not fashionable either among the professional class or the expatriate community. I had stayed there countless times over the previous couple of years, and not once had I left its gates without having been infected by some new and captivating idea or story. As a result, the place had attained a magical status for me, and whenever the electronic security gates parted to admit us in the back of Byron’s Mercedes, my imagination would start working overtime in anticipation.

In stark contrast to the New Town apartment where I lived with my family, Suarez’s house was a place where nothing was static or out of bounds, where dogs cascaded downstairs to greet you on arrival, and where anything queried – a dusty old accordion, the sea-bitten figurehead of a sunken boat, a case of Mayan arrowheads – yielded a story of one kind or another, bearing testament in turn to the curiosity and learning of Suarez himself. So although it wasn’t my home, and although it was the largest house for miles around, it felt welcoming and comfortable to me. Not that just anyone would have felt at home there. I am quite sure that uninvited guests would have got pretty short shrift from Byron.

Byron and his wife Eulalia, who kept house and cooked for Suarez, lived in their own apartment within the house. Byron doubled up as the gardener and prided himself on the range of flora he cultivated – giant prickly pear cacti, acacia trees, exotic roses – all carefully tended in the deep-red earth, which would bleed from the garden on to the driveway in rusty streams during heavy rain.

Ecuadorians from the south have a theory that Quiteños are uptight. Something to do with living at high altitude, it is said, deprives their brains of the oxygen necessary to live the laid-back, party-going lifestyle of their southern or coastal counterparts. Even if that were true, Suarez was definitely an exception to the rule. He wore his respectability very casually, or at least he did when Fabián and I were around. Moreover, anyone who takes the trouble to build a miniature nightclub in his house can’t be all that strait-laced. The room was known as ‘the library’, but in addition to ceiling-high bookshelves, a serious-looking desk and a fireplace it contained a chequerboard dance floor, a bar with proper red leather stools and an antique jukebox stocked with 1950s singles.

Suarez, a surgeon of some repute, did have a first name. According to Fabián it was Edison, though nobody had ever used it or even heard Suarez using it. He was known simply as Suarez, even to his nephew, and even to his nephew’s friends. Suarez. He squats in my memory to this day, stinking of acrid bachelordom marked with cologne and tobacco. I see him now: smoke rings evaporating into the air before him along with the stories that emerged constantly from his wet, red lips; his salt and pepper moustache; his incongruous fondness for tweed; his short-sleeved shirts and spanking, tasselled loafers, which he referred to as ‘beetle-crushers’. He sits there, tapping his foot to Bill Haley and pouring himself another
cuba libre
or lighting a long Dunhill International as he embarks on the answer to yet another of our inane questions – which would invariably spring open such a mess of tangents and shaggy-dog stories that what we had originally wanted to know could rarely be remembered. More than anything, though, I hear him: his measured, mid-Atlantic accent (he’d lived in both the US and Europe), always sounding slightly amused, was to us spellbindingly
authoritative. He could tell us anything and send us into a sideways world which we never failed to believe in, even though we knew that what he said couldn’t possibly be true. I still hear that voice, chuckling away at our expense, and I expect I always will.

That evening, over dinner, the conversation turned to Juanita the Ice Princess. Fabián and I were speculating on the state of decay she must have been found in after five hundred years in the ice, and Fabián was talking again about his own aspirations of exploration and discovery. Suarez was unimpressed.

‘This Ice Maiden is all very well,’ he said. ‘You want to see something really special? I’ll show you. Come into the library. Bring that bottle with you.’

When we were in the room, Suarez put down his drink and went over to the safe by his desk. He opened it with a couple of deft twirls of the dial and withdrew a small package wrapped loosely in green tissue-paper. Keeping his back to us, he unwrapped the contents tenderly and then turned and held up the object with all the berserking triumph of a medieval executioner.

‘Mother of God,’ said Fabián.

I fought an urge to step backwards.

‘
Impresionante, no
?’ said Suarez.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Fabián.

The thing itself was the size of a large orange, but its hair, shiny and black, was easily two feet long and had vitality better suited to a shampoo model than a battle trophy. When we’d taken it in enough to approach, slowly, I studied the features. A concentrated reduction of nose and chin that resulted in a grotesque, implacable caricature, with thick, rubbery lips and eyes that had been sewn shut with clumsy black twine. The skin was dark and burnished, like a piece of rainforest mahogany.

‘That’s right,’ said Suarez. ‘It’s a
tsantza
. A shrunken head.’

‘Where’d you get it?’ said Fabián, trying to stay casual. But he couldn’t keep up the pretence for long, and his excitement came spilling out as he talked. ‘Is it yours? Is it
real
? How long have you had it? Why have I never seen it before? Christ, Uncle.’

‘There are only a few of these left in the world, you know,’ said Suarez, cupping the monstrosity in one hand as he reached for another swig of rum.

‘How do they get them like that? How do you do it?’ said Fabián.

‘First, you just have to win your battle,’ said Suarez. ‘That’s the easy part. Then you have to make sure that your defeated foe’s face is spotless, so that you can preserve the victory.’ He carefully laid it face down on the desk before continuing.

‘You sever the enemy’s head and then you make an incision, here, following the line of the skull.’ He grasped my head methodically and ran a surgeon’s finger down from the crown of my head to the top of my spine. I shuddered.

‘Then you remove the entire face, hair included, from the skull, and find a stone that’s almost but not quite as big. You wrap the skin around the stone, leave it in the sun to shrink, and then you find a slightly smaller stone. And so on, with smaller and smaller stones, until you have this – essence of enemy. And now we could have a good game of cricket with it, right, Anti?’ he said, looking at me and laughing.

‘Just laugh, Fabián,’ I said, backing off. ‘Keep him happy. We don’t know what he might do. Sleep well tonight, my friend,’ I said, pretending to leave. ‘Your uncle is a madman. He keeps heads in a safe in his library.’

Although he smiled at this, Fabián was mesmerised. But
Suarez wasn’t finished. ‘Now sit down, and I’ll tell you the really good part. Have a
roncito
. You may need it.’

He passed the bottle of rum over and Fabián poured us a glass each. Suarez settled himself, knowing he had us hooked. Fabián and I fought for the chair facing the desk.

‘It’s got a curse on it,’ said Suarez, quietly.

‘Of course it has,’ said Fabián. We were beginning to recover now, and were both anxious to make up for our feeble initial reactions.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘of course it has. What self-respecting shrunken head wouldn’t have a curse on it?’

‘Yeah,’ said Fabián. ‘Yeah, right.’

‘You don’t believe in curses, boys?’

‘No,’ I said, too quickly.

‘I do,’ said Fabián, trying to stay ahead of the game.

‘Well, I do a bit,’ I said.

‘Either way, listen to this,’ said Suarez. ‘The
tsantza
you see on that table once belonged to a friend of mine. Now, because the majority of such artefacts are held in museums, to find one under private ownership represents a rare opportunity for collectors. Private collectors, you understand. People who will stop at nothing to own something – not so they can put it in a museum, or study it for everyone’s benefit, but so they can put it in a glass case, tick it off in a catalogue, or show it to their dinner guests over expensive cognac. There’s a nasty little international community of them – the same group of people who will, I’m sure, soon be at each other’s throats over who will end up with the body of your Ice Princess.