The Amnesia Clinic (14 page)

‘You do not sit around comparing notes on brothels with Suarez. It’s bullshit.’

‘Is it? How do you think I know what the brothel in this town is called, then? You don’t have any idea what Suarez and I talk about when we’re alone. It’s not like having a parent. His attitude towards me is completely different.’

‘So what’s this brothel called, then?’

‘Ethel’s.’

I burst out laughing.

‘Ethel’s Brothel? That’s good. That’s brilliant. Let me buy you another beer.’ I was still chuckling as I got to my feet.

‘You can buy me another beer if they believe you’re old enough,
rubio
. And you’ll be eating those words before this night is out.’

‘It’s after midnight. Where the hell are you going to go? The whole of this town is shut up. And we have to be on that train first thing in the morning.’

‘What, you think brothels have nice sociable afternoon opening hours? I told you. I’m going to Ethel’s. Just because it sounds like an English name. It’s not so ridiculous in Spanish. Ethel was—’

‘Fabián, don’t bother with the story. It’s hardly even a realistic name.’

Fabián sighed. ‘When are you going to get over your expectations?’

‘I might ask you the same question,’ I said, turning my back on him to request the beers.

The conversation moved on to how we would reach Pedrascada the next day, which would be complicated. We still didn’t know exactly where we were going, and success would depend on finding the right bus to take us up the coast once we had descended the Andes by train in the morning. I assumed that the brothel conversation had died. It wasn’t as if there weren’t other exciting plans afoot. But Fabián had made plans all of his own for this trip, and the discussion of what might be in store for us the following day was not enough to dampen his ardour.

‘Right,’ he said, finishing his bottle of beer and wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, ‘I am now ready for the arms of a loving woman.’

He turned to the group at the next table and spoke to them in Spanish. I overheard the word ‘Ethel’s’. He pronounced it ‘Ettel’s’.

The Indians spoke to each other quickly in a mixture of Spanish and Quechua and then laughed uproariously.

‘Fucking
campesinos
. All the same,’ he seethed as we left. ‘Whose religion was it anyway?’ he shouted back, mysteriously.

There was more laughter from within the café.

I noticed that he had brought with him the knife he’d been eating with.

‘Carry on,’ he said, ‘this won’t take a minute.’ He scurried back towards the pig. I stood further down the street, waiting for him.

‘What was that you said about me not having the balls?’ he said, running back towards me.

I looked down and saw that he held the bulky, bloody scrotum of the pig in his right hand. Pulling his arm back, he flung it at the café window. It hit the glass with a dull thud and slithered on to the floor, leaving a slight mess on the glass.

Fabián ran off gleefully into the darkness, leaving me to face the music.

Nobody came out. They hadn’t even noticed.

I walked slowly down the street after him.

I wasn’t sure of the way back to our hostel, but it didn’t seem to matter. I was happy to walk in this misty, unfamiliar place, following side-streets at whim, catching glimpses of The Light of God between buildings and allowing my mind to wander. There was no sign of Fabián, and that didn’t matter either. After I had taken a few turnings at random, I could hear the sound of water and found myself walking towards it in the darkness, as if it were a beacon.

I reached the source at the point where the town gave up and the mountainside’s lush cape of secondary rainforest began. A few basic dwellings poked their heads above the trees lower down, but mainly the slope was so steep and the forest so thick that construction would have been impossible. The channel of water spilled from the forest, out of the sheer side of the hill and into a man-made gutter by the pavement. I watched the harnessed waterfall for a while, allowing its clatter to drown out my thoughts like white noise. I put my hand in the flow, which was numbingly cold. It had been a glacier not long ago. I realised I was ready for my bed.

I found my way back and managed to ease open the great front door of the hostel without much difficulty. No lights
shone in the interior of the building, and I couldn’t see beyond my own knuckle in the darkness. It was almost 2 a.m., and I was nervous about waking people up. I took a step forward. The door closed behind me. As my pupils expanded, I could make out the grey light of the central courtyard. I stepped towards it, trying to reconstruct the position of the stairs in my mind.

Something crunched under my foot. In my mind, I had trodden on a monster cockroach – one of many. I stooped down, felt around my shoe and then lifted it up to see what was underneath. Something chalky. Just a cracked terracotta floor tile. I took another step forward. More crunching of insects.

I heard swift shuffling movements in the darkness. Tiny, efficient rustles. The songbirds were shifting in their cages. I moved past them and found the bottom step. Something wet and heavy fell on my left shoulder. Too late, I remembered the wild birds in the rafters. I moved to the outer edge of the stairs, away from the wall and the roosting pairs. According to some, it’s good luck to be shat on by a bird.

Relieved to arrive at the room, I fell on to the musty, yellow sheets to allow the adrenaline generated by my stealthy entrance to dissipate. It didn’t occur to me until I was almost asleep that Fabián still hadn’t returned.

The saturated colours of a high-altitude dawn: Indians lugged produce across the market square against a backdrop of rich green mountainsides and a fierce blue sky. A piercing screech overhead put me in mind of condors, but when I raised my eyes towards the slopes that reared up above the roofs of the town, the size, the
clarity
of it all induced in me a kind of inverse vertigo and I couldn’t keep looking. First light in the mountains is pretty intense anyway, but on this morning, in this place, the colours and textures seemed so tightly focused that the effect was almost agonising.

Anger is another powerful sharpener, and I was fuming. Pink Slippers had woken me by pounding frantically on the door, and then ejected me so abruptly from the hostel that I had assumed there wasn’t time for breakfast before the train left. Now, sitting beside the locomotive with our bags at my knees, I seemed to have plenty of time at my disposal, but no travelling companion. And a fat squirt of dried bird-shit from the night before coated my shirt. I kicked Fabián’s
pristine new rucksack in frustration, and hoped I’d broken something valuable.

It wasn’t a train station as such. The tracks were set in the cobbles to one side of the square where we’d been dropped the night before, so that the train could be approached from any angle, like a bus. This made the passengers seem vaguely opportunistic, as if they had just turned up with no travel plans, seen the train waiting and thought,
why not
? As the day bloomed and our departure time drew closer, more and more of these chancers flocked out from the town – foreign tourists strapped into gaudy backpacks, locals hauling their own, better-worn luggage – but still no Fabián. The engine pulling the train was a dull diesel-belcher, rather than the working steam locomotive Fabián had described to me, which was yet another reason to have a go at the bastard when he finally turned up. The last two carriages were more like it, though – antique wooden wagons, painted a deep claret colour, with gold lettering on the side that said
Ferrocarriles Ecuatorianos: Primera Clase
– and these were filling up. Men and women wrapped in bright ponchos queued patiently for tickets, leaving their luggage to be loaded into the second-class wagons. These weren’t painted, nor did they have seating. They were in fact just metal boxcars with sliding doors, but Fabián had anticipated this. He’d told me that the best ride was on top of these carriages, which cost next to nothing and gave you panoramic views. It was just the sort of thing Fabián would have said either as a boast or, more likely, as a practical joke. How like him to get me up on the roof of the carriage, then come along at the last minute laughing about it and asking me what the hell I thought I was doing up there. Well, no thanks. Nobody else was clambering on top of the carriages, and I wouldn’t be the first.

The diesel engine coughed into life, sending a dense whoosh of smoke out over the square. I watched as the
breeze whipped it into black, dissolving curls and felt my agitation build. Only one train ran every day, and if we missed this one, our plan to get down to Pedrascada was all over. My temper began to unravel. It was typical of Fabián to miss the train because he was out proving some point about his womanising – as if simply turning up late would be enough to prove he’d been up all night with the non-existent beauties of Ethel’s Brothel. I didn’t have the luxury of an indefinite amount of time in this country, and now, just for once, the reality at our disposal was more exciting than the invented world he lived in. I bunched my hands into fists around the handles of our bags and stood up.

As I did so, a man in his twenties walked in front of me, lobbed his pack overarm on to the train roof and casually hauled himself up the ladder on the side. Although his complexion and colouring suggested that he was a local – possibly even with some Indian blood, given his broad features and straight, dark hair – his confident, almost contemptuous gait suggested someone from the outside, and his English, when he spoke, was impeccable, with a note-perfect New Yorker’s twang. His teeth were capped and polished to an impossible bright white, although he had several deeply pitted acne scars high on his cheeks and he stank of aftershave. He wore preppy, American clothing topped off with a Yankees baseball cap and carried a portable stereo as well as a brand-new black rucksack. Not for him the plausible linen shirts or ethnic waistcoats worn by most of the other tourists boarding the train: this traveller might have just been spirited away from any campus in the world but for his physical appearance and absolute confidence in this environment. As I went to board the train, he leapt to his feet again and leant over the side of the carriage to take my bags and help me up the ladder.

‘You look young to be travelling alone,’ he said, after I had thanked him.

‘I’m not travelling,’ I said. ‘I live here.’

‘Cool. Well, I hope you’re enjoying my country. I
don’t
live here. My name is Epifanio, but people call me Pif. I’ve been away studying, but I’m back down here now to check out the continent.’

I was pleased to have stumbled on Pif, even though I knew that he was just the sort of fellow countryman of whom Fabián would be immediately suspicious: from a wealthy family, educated in the United States and returned (having adopted certain prevailing attitudes north of the border) thinking that his country of origin was little more than a theme park tacked on to the great project that was America. Fabián ranted about the type. He knew quite a few of them, he said, including some family or childhood friends only a few years older than him, and he claimed that what happened was always the same: ‘They go off to the States for a few years,’ he would fume, ‘then come back like fucking tourists.’

According to the portrait that Fabián usually painted of such people, I could expect the following of Pif: he would cheerfully despise his country and find its inequality a source of curiosity and amusement; he would feel no solidarity with its people, or need to overcome its poverty, because he would no longer consider himself part of Ecuador but a resident of the greater
continent
instead. I didn’t care. I knew, of course, that Fabián despised such people because he dreaded that he might one day become one. And for now, in Fabián’s absence, I was very pleased to meet Pif. He was relaxed and friendly, and he immediately set me at ease. To a fifteen-year-old at large in a foreign country, I thought he would prove a tremendous asset.

The train began to fill up, both inside and out on the
roof. The diesel engines upfront were revved up and belching. I looked around the square. No sign of him. A whistle gave three huge blasts, and slowly the train started to move.

‘Problem?’ said Pif, noticing my unease.

‘I had a friend who was supposed to be meeting me to catch the train,’ I said, ‘but he hasn’t turned up.’

‘That him?’ said Pif, pointing over into the swelling crowds of the market-place. A brown cowboy hat cutting its way at great speed through the mass of people caught my eye. Fabián sprinted across the square towards the train, holding the new headgear in place with his one good hand. Pif laughed as Fabián came level with the side, shouting something incoherent up at me as he ran.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Pif. ‘We’ll get him.’

The train picked up speed. At the point where the tracks diverged from the road surface between the buildings of the town, Fabián flung himself at the ladder on the side of the carriage and Pif grabbed him by his bad arm. For a moment I thought there would be a comic cartoon scene in which Fabián would fall by the wayside, his legs cycling in the air, leaving only an empty plaster cast in the hand of his would-be rescuer, but then Pif pulled him upwards in a swift and confident movement and Fabián landed clumsily to cheers from the other passengers on the roof.

‘Welcome aboard,’ said Pif.

‘Thanks, man,’ said Fabián. He sat up.

‘This is Fabián,’ I said.

‘I like your hat,’ said Pif.

‘Thanks,’ said Fabián.

‘Where have you been?’ I said.

Fabián smiled sheepishly. ‘I told you where I was going, didn’t I?’

‘This is Fabián,’ I said to Pif. ‘He almost missed the train because he was out all night whoring.’

‘Nice,’ said Pif, with the polite zeal of the connoisseur. ‘Anything good?’

‘Is there any coffee in your flask?’ said Fabián.

I felt acid-limbed from lack of sleep and the cold, and I still hadn’t eaten, but as the train moved out of the town and the day got into its stride, I became more animated. It was impossible not to, in the face of such breathtaking scale shifts between us and the mountains around us. With each slope we skirted and each false horizon we shattered, the beast of an engine which had seemed so huge at the station felt less significant and more like a maggot browsing a mammoth. The train clattered through pine forests, across metal bridges and through dusty cuttings, negotiating its way through the fickle landscape of the highlands. On a couple of occasions we had to duck for tunnels. As the train passed through, the tunnel roof would whip over our heads like a near-miss from a guillotine blade and cool, moist air would stream over us inside, away from the sunshine. Screams and whoops would echo in the damp darkness for an instant before the light began to rush in as we approached the other end. Those who used the railway regularly knew precisely how low these were and stood in affectedly nonchalant poses, hands on their hips, the tops of their hats almost brushing the tunnel ceilings as the train shot through. I sat cross-legged and kept my head down.