The Man Within My Head (30 page)

“Lucky we didn’t choose ‘the most dangerous road in the world,’ ” I said. The Lonely Planet guide had described, with some relish, a mountain road not far away on which an average of twenty-six vehicles a year veered over the edge, to fall three thousand feet to a valley floor. Modern vehicles in a largely undeveloped place like Bolivia are always an uncertain proposition, and even the road we drove along now was lined with the small white crosses and simple memorials, sometimes draped in fresh flowers, that remembered inattentive drivers or unlucky passengers.

“Did I tell you about my friend Harri?” I asked.

“No.”

“You met him almost thirty years ago, the first time you came to Santa Barbara. One of the nicest guys I ever knew in California. We used to play tennis together—for years—and he was the ideal partner: he never wanted to win, and we were always at exactly the same level. We’d start playing again after years apart, and every set would end in a tiebreaker. I played the piano—Bach—when he got married in our house, thirty-five years ago. As the sun came up. Not long before we did ‘The Rape of the Lock’ with Meredith.”

“Really?” I could tell my friend was more interested, understandably, in Grace Slick.

We came to slightly flatter land, and the car began to bump, then to rattle as it bounced along a track just off the side of the road, next to a ditch.

“You okay?” I shouted.

The driver swiveled round. “No problem!”

We continued on our way and then, out of nowhere, he pulled up at a gas station.

“One moment,” he said, and disappeared.

“He’s strange,” I said to Louis.

“More than strange.”

“Sinister almost.”

“More than sinister.”

It only hit me now that the boy probably hadn’t slept much on New Year’s Eve; for all we knew, he might still have some drink, or coca, in his system. But going back would be as dangerous as going forwards, and we hadn’t wanted to bother the older man.

“You sure you’re okay?” I said, as he came back. He hadn’t filled up the car or done anything with it at all.

He gave the thumbs-up sign again and turned the volume on the Airplane way up.

We started to climb once more—another pass—and every now and then the car bumped off the tarmac, to the side, or seemed to waver around the central line. Luckily, few other cars were visible in rural Bolivia at 10:00 a.m. on New Year’s Day.

“Anyway, Harri, whom I was just telling you about, got killed in a car crash, four months ago. It was the strangest thing; I mean, he was the one who’d taught me how to drive. He’d been driving—everywhere—for forty years. But he had a new wife, from Russia, and she was at the wheel, on a freeway
in Utah, and somehow she rolled the car. He was thrown out and killed. She was almost fine, though she wasn’t wearing a seat belt either. And ever since …”

And then I noticed that we were careening, at high speed, into the mountainside.

“Jesus Christ!” I screamed, and the driver, jolted awake, swerved crazily to try to avoid the rock face. But it was too late, and we slammed into the mountain, and then bounced back. The car fell on its top and righted itself. Then, just as things seemed to settle down, we began to bounce once more, into a ditch and then back out again, onto our side.

“Why is he trying to kill us?” had run senselessly through my head in the long seconds before the actual collision. “What has he got against us? Why has he come here to get rid of us?” Instinctively getting into a fetal position as I saw the collision imminent, I might have been preparing to go out of the world in much the same way I had come into it.

Now, as the car stopped bouncing, there was silence everywhere. After a long, long time, I said, “Are you all right?” I heard a groan from somewhere.

Scrunching even further down, no longer human, I slithered through a shattered window and got haltingly up. Everywhere there was blood and glass. The carry-on that had been in the locked trunk was now in a ditch twenty feet away. Cassettes and sunglasses and shorts that had been inside it were scattered across the road. A tape that had come unspooled. Louis’s worn Bible. A hat he’d brought to protect himself from the sun.

I didn’t know what to do, so, reflexively, senselessly, I began clambering around, collecting the stuff from the ditch. Then Louis came out. Blood was pouring down his face, as if he’d just walked out of a scene from
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
.

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t think so.”

Too many seconds later, the driver wriggled out through the windscreen. He was cradling a bloody mess of an arm and wailing like a baby.

I walked around collecting the stray tapes, the sunglasses, the backgammon set that had accompanied us to so many places.

“It’s okay,” said Louis. “I don’t think I’ll be wanting that cassette again very soon.”

No cars at all were visible, thankfully—on a regular day drivers would have been veering around us and into one another’s paths—but we were alone on a silent mountain road in southern Bolivia at twelve thousand feet.

We waited and waited—I picked up more stuff—when, suddenly, as we hobbled across the tarmac, a car appeared around a turn, a bright SUV (the last kind of vehicle you’d expect on such a road), and a man jumped out. In a grey sweater, pressed trousers, startlingly clean for an area where not even Spanish was spoken and almost everyone lacked the barest essentials of life.

“
¿Qué pasa
?” he said. And then, more startling still, with what seemed to be a natural take-charge manner, he turned to us and spoke directly. “You speak English? What happened?” He looked to be a lawyer or the prosperous head of some local company, though what he was doing on this deserted road I couldn’t imagine.

I explained the situation. “I will take you to a hospital,” he said. “Can you move?”

“Is it far away?”

“Not far. One hour. More. Come.” He led Louis to the backseat of his new car and sat him very upright. I sat by my friend and thought back on our adventure in Ethiopia.

“What about the driver?”

“He is okay. He must stay here for the police. They will take him to the hospital in Potosí.”

The car started up, and, as the man accelerated over a bump, Louis let out a shout of involuntary pain.

“I’m sorry. I will go slower.”

“Please.”

It seemed like so many trips we had taken together; I was the one left to talk to the driver, while Louis tried to nurse himself back to normalcy. We had been in that accident in rural Cuba I sometimes thought about—he’d hit a boy on a bicycle while driving too fast—and I remembered the time he’d hit a dog in Morocco. He’d only had to visit me in California once to end up in a rural hospital near Nevada with dysentery. “How are you?” I’d said when we’d met four days earlier in the Plaza Hotel in La Paz. “Great,” he’d said. “Just give me time.”

“So,” the driver now said, as we again climbed up the mountain road, reversing our tracks, “you are from England.”

“Yes. We were at school together, years ago.”

“I was in Blackpool for three weeks,” the driver said. “Learning English.”

“Really?”

“When I was studying in Rome.”

We continued a little farther, and I could feel how every turn and pothole was throwing my friend out of joint; he sat as still as an Egyptian statue in a museum.

“You know this place, Eton?”

“Yes. Very well.”

“I went to see it when I went to Windsor Castle,” said the driver. All that studying of English, and he could not have had many chances to use it.

“You’re in business?”

“Business?” He laughed. “I am the Bishop of Potosí. I am going to Sucre now to conduct the Mass for New Year’s Day.”

Hadn’t Greene written about some bishop of San Luis Potosí in
The Lawless Roads
? But even in his books it seemed implausible that a savior on a deserted road would be a man of the cloth.

“We’re lucky you came along.”

“It’s not luck,” the bishop said. “It’s a miracle.”

An hour passed, another half an hour, and there was no sign of a clinic.

“Maybe it would be better to go back to Sucre?”

“No. We must get your friend to a hospital soon. I know a place.”

It had been two hours now, but maybe, I thought, he was driving slowly so as not to jolt Louis too violently?

Finally, he turned off the main road, and we were bouncing along the barely paved paths of a village, and the bishop was parking outside a small blue house.

“One moment,” he said, and disappeared.

Minutes later he reemerged, with a very pretty young girl by his side, in a fluffy pink dress. She sat next to him in the front, very straight, and I wondered who this teenage companion was. A daughter, as in the story of the runaway priest I’d written in Easter Island? An altar girl, perhaps? A local guide?

I didn’t want to entertain the other options—the Greenian ones—as she directed the bishop down a small road, out of town, till we arrived at a squat, single-story building. The clinic—as some words on a wall announced—had been established by the British to help Bolivia. Three Indian women in bowler hats were sitting stoutly outside, looking, as they often
do in Bolivia, as if they had been sitting there, accepting and almost motionless, for centuries.

We walked inside, and the nurse on duty let out a gasp, her mouth flying open when she saw Louis, the rivers of blood running down his face. She led us to a small bare room and told him to sit on the bed. A friendly man with a round face appeared, with a flyswatter, to keep the insects away.

A few minutes later a young doctor arrived—interrupted, no doubt, in his New Year’s Day lunch, but capable and brisk. He spoke Spanish at least.

“Your friend can understand what I say?”

“Not a word.”

“Tell him, please, that I have to make some stitches in his head. Fifteen, maybe more. He must sit very still. I don’t have anesthetic.”

It might have been the Indian in Mérida again: what was this doctor doing in this far-off village? Fulfilling some sense of duty or escaping an unburied secret in the city? I told Louis to be a man, as we’d been taught at school, and warned him that it would hurt, eliminating some of the details. He cried out in pain, and I sat by the bed and held his hand.

Then it was over, and the bishop and his pretty friend made their farewells.

“We must take him in an ambulance to Sucre,” said the doctor. Louis was placed on a gurney and carried out to a little van. I noticed, as we left, the big board at the front of the clinic, advertising prices. An IV cost twelve cents. A night’s stay would cost twenty cents. An ambulance would set us back fifteen cents. The three women in bowler hats couldn’t go in, I guessed, because the prices were too high.

The ambulance started up—sirens wailing and lights
flashing—and I sat in the back with my prostrate friend. “The worst of it is over,” I said, like a parody of myself.

“I hope so. It’s a miracle we’re even here.”

At ten, maybe fifteen miles an hour, the van labored over the unpaved roads, and, forty-five minutes later, we pulled up at a small hospital in Sucre. Louis was taken into a room with fourteen other beds, each one occupied by a man who looked as if he had been bashed about the head, by the police or their enemies. Some of the men were wailing, loudly. Some were ominously quiet. A nurse came in and tried to help, but it was difficult with a patient who spoke no Spanish.

I tried to translate for a doctor as he said, “I think your friend is okay. But we must keep him here. For observation. One week.”

“A week?”

“It is important.”

One of the men in the room let out a rending cry. Young women and children came and stood round some of the beds. Someone said that the mother and sister of our driver were on their way. They wanted to pay for us. Words like “hemorrhage” and “infection” and “fracture” were hard for me in Spanish.

Abruptly, someone decided that Louis needed a brain scan. There was said to be a machine for this in another hospital in Sucre. But night had begun to fall by the time he was carried out of the bare room with green walls on a gurney and put into an ambulance again to be taken to a sleeker facility up the hill.

On arrival, we were whisked into a high-tech radiation room, and he was put on a bed. A button was pushed, and slowly he disappeared inside a shell.

“Come,” said a young nurse. “You can watch.”

I joined her in the booth next to the machine and we
saw a diagram of my friend’s head. “So,” she said—she had identified herself as “Anna”—“this is his skull. No, wait, this is his cranium. No, maybe this is a line on the screen of the machine …”

“Maybe you could ask a doctor to take a look?”

“I am a lab technician. The only one. No doctor here can read these.”

“Is there someone in the capital?”

Her face lit up. “Of course! I will e-mail the scan to someone in La Paz.” She pushed a few buttons on the ultramodern machine. “Okay. Maybe fax.”

She printed out a copy of the scan—there were lines all over his skull, and she seemed to know as little as I did about what any of them meant—and then went to a nearby machine. “I’m sorry,” she said. “The fax machine is broken.”

She fiddled around with it some more—someone else had now wheeled Louis back to the ambulance—and then, as if on cue, the electricity went out. Anna and I were alone in the dark, with a printout of my friend’s brain.

We edged through the room in the pitch blackness, bumping against the bed, what might have been a computer, an expensive piece of equipment. “Oh, sorry!” “Is that you?” “No, you’re here …”

She got to the door and opened it. The whole space was black. Outside, all of Sucre was quiet and dark, too. Clearly, lights had gone off across the city.

Far down the hallway, a woman was standing with a candle, talking to a man in a white coat. Anna led me down the corridor and, stopping the doctor with a firm, gentle hand on the arm, she held the scan (upside down, I think) and said, “You think it’s okay?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?” And hurried off to some more urgent matter.

We got into the ambulance and took Louis back to where he had been placed before.