Free The Amnesia Clinic by James Scudamore Page B

suckling pig on a spit, and kids sitting around playing. It was pretty cool.
    I don’t know how my father got so drunk so quickly – I guess he wasn’t used to the home-made chicha they drink upin the mountains. It’s gross, man. You know they make it with saliva? The women spit in a bowl with a load of maize and then ferment it. Sick shit, but the indígenas love it.
    There was a paddock in the middle of the area where the festival was taking place, with a separate, smaller pen full of bulls to the side. I can’t remember how it started, but soon most of the party was crowded round this paddock, cheering and singing. There was a group of Indian farm-workers in the field, and they had started doing some amateur bullfighting for the crowd.
    The bulls were little – they wouldn’t have been any problem for a proper torero . But these weren’t toreros: they were very drunk campesinos wearing rubber boots that slid around in the mud after the rain.
    We stood around, getting into the spirit of the occasion, cheering and laughing when someone made a good pass. Messing around. Nobody was really going to hurt these bulls – the idea was just to get out of their way.
    You know how it works. Normally, you hang your muleta on the estoque , the sword, to create that cape that the bull chases. All that olé crap. These guys were just pretending – running around waving their ponchos in the air for a laugh, then coming out of the paddock to high-five their buddies and try to impress girls into going back to their cottage for a fuck.
    Papi secretly loved those Indian festivals. He was taking more and more from the chicha bowl, and swaying around to the music. It was when he was in moods like this – in other words, when it suited him – that he used to let his mask drop and go on about how great it was to be an Ecuadorian, that you had the best of both worlds. The sophistication of Europe, the spirituality of an Indian, blah blah blah. But then he started to get angry about the way the men in the paddock were treating the bulls.
    The bull they were fighting was white, I remember. All the bulls were young, and very scared. No wonder they started running at these guys in the pen with them. It was totally disorganised.
    It was getting dark as well, and this wasn’t helping. People were sliding around more than ever. One guy nearly got trampled when the bull came in low and he slipped under its feet, but he managed to twist his head and shoulders away into the mud at just the right moment.
    The crowd was starting to lose interest and move away. There was no reason for my father to do what he did.
    He said, ‘These people don’t know what they’re doing. This is an insult to the tradition of bullfighting. I’ve got a good mind to get in there and show them how to do it properly.’
    And damn it if he didn’t go down there and say he wanted to go next in the ring.
    Right. Tequila break.
    Your turn.
    Get it down.
    Where was I?
    Oh, yeah.
    ‘Three cheers for the forastero !’ said the Indians. (It’s the word they use to talk about outsiders.) ‘The forastero ’s gonna show us how to do things properly. Give him another drink!’
    My mother was getting nervous, but was still smiling – she would never have suggested that he couldn’t do it. He’d have gone crazy.
    They held the bottle to his lips for a long time, until he was virtually choking on it. ‘Give him some cojones ,’ they said. Then they all slapped him on the back and pushed him towards the railing.
    He stepped through into the paddock. Now, the bull they’d been working previously was tired and had beendanced around by four or five men, easy. But some Indian guy, who I guess must have been a big cheese on the plantation, said, ‘No, no, no, this won’t do. We’d better give this grand torero a worthy opponent! An animal that stands up to his big talk!’ And they penned up the tired white bull that had been running around.
    I can remember watching it as