Free The Amnesia Clinic by James Scudamore Page A

Indian blood in me to be seen as different over there. In Ecuador, I am not. Here, I am white. I am basically a Castilian.’ What he really meant was that he was ashamed of his own grandmother. Suarez would never approve, with all his crap about ancestry and the way he loves all that indigenous stuff, even though he is about as pure a conquistador as you can get.
    But my father – that’s Señor Félix Morales to you – well, he would never admit it. He tried as hard as he could to be what he thought was a European: he would listen to classical Spanish music, and try to dance the pasadoble like someflamenco expert. He even wore this crazy red and white spotted neckerchief the whole time, imagining it to be somehow sophisticated. My mother, who had no Indian blood that we know of, loved dancing and listening to all that terrible pan-pipe music. She even spoke quite good Quechua.
    Papi had grown up hearing folk-tales about women who had given birth to calves, and men who turned into condors – some great stuff. But he would never tell them. My mother would ask him sometimes to tell us his grandmother’s stories, and he would say, ‘If you want to hear a load of peasant rubbish you can look it all up in a textbook, or go and ask the first campesina you find grinding barley in a hut in the mountains.’
    He read nothing but Spanish literature, and even put on a hint of a lisp sometimes, like in a Madrileño accent. He’d only ever been to Spain twice in his life, and even then only on business trips with the construction company.
    All this revolution stuff is bullshit, you know. Mestizos might make up a third of the population but it’s not the top third – and that’s before you even get to the full-blood Indians. I mean, look at the people who live in the New Town. Ask the kids at school, or any of your parents’ buddies at that stupid sports club: they still think that one Indian is like every other Indian. They might just as well be animals.
    So, Papi was embarrassed by who he was – and yes, he was impressed by my mother’s money. Look at all this – you don’t think all this came from doctoring, do you? Suarez and Mami come from a wealthy family. My father liked that.
    I’m only telling you this so that you can see what kind of man he was. He was scared of himself, scared of being found out, scared of not being real, or something; I don’t know.
    Here, have another tequila.
    Arriba, abajo, a centro, adentro . Mother of God, this is strong stuff. Sit up straight. Are you listening to me?
    It was just over seven years ago. I was eight years old.
    We used to go on these driving trips at weekends. My parents liked to disappear into the mountains, eat at village cafés, maybe go for a walk, that kind of thing. It was fun, even though I bitched about it at the time.
    One day, we were somewhere really high up in the cordillera. We were meant to go for a walk, but it was raining hard, so we drove up to have a look at this hacienda instead. The Hacienda La Reina, it was called.
    It was one of those farms that are so huge that whole villages grow up around them: there was a school, a church and even a little post office shop for the workers and their children. It was a beautiful place. The houses and fields were set against these massive green mountains. The air was wonderful.
    When we got up to the hacienda we found a fiesta in progress. I think it’s called Zaparo – some Indian harvest festival. An excuse for people to let their hair down and get messed up.
    The farm workers had been drinking homemade chicha and aguardiente for hours, and they were falling around all over the place. A band was marching round the fields, playing music. People were wearing bright red head-dresses made of feathers. Lanterns were being lit.
    My parents weren’t the sort of people who just got back in the car in a situation like that, and soon they were eating the food, drinking the booze and chatting to the locals. There was a