The Man Within My Head

by Pico Iyer

  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 g
uessed, 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.

  So,” said Anna, after accompanying us back to the room of wailing men. It was still New Year’s Day. “You would like dinner?”

  She felt sorry for me, I could tell, and though I longed to return to my room and nurse my wounds—my legs were aching and my body was stiff, and I wanted to call Hiroko and hear the solace of her voice—it seemed cruel to abandon our new friend after all her hard work. We sat in a little cafeteria, and she told me of her dreams of practicing medicine, of how difficult everything was in Bolivia, of her hobby, singing. In some ways I might have been with the sweet tour guide in Lake Titicaca from my previous trip: Anna could not have been less pushy, kinder, more innocent in what she hoped for. She still lived with her parents, though close to thirty, and when we walked out into the street just before midnight, she said, “I will see you in the hospital at nine a.m. tomorrow” and got onto a bus home with a welcome lack of fuss, waving to me from the window.

  The next day she was as good as her word. She spoke to the doctors. “Of course they say he must stay. They want a rich foreigner in their bed. There is no need. They are criminals, all of them.” She explained to the driver’s mother—relieved that her son now seemed okay—that we were touched, deeply touched, by their gesture, but we could afford the five dollars the stay would cost. In the night, Louis told us, he had cried out for help, the pain was so intense. But the nurse had refused to give him even an aspirin. Of course, Anna said: you had to pay for medication in advance, and an aspirin could cost a cent. They didn’t want you to get one free.

  It seemed wise to try to get away from the place, if only to the capital. Anna helped find us seats on a flight out at lunchtime. She called to La Paz to locate a hospital that would take Louis, an international facility in the embassy district. She called to double-check that an ambulance would be waiting for us when we landed. At Sucre’s little airport, she accompanied us to the tiny office where a man ensured that Louis was fit to fly.

  When we got to Sopocachi, and a truly sleek facility in La Paz, with a doctor who spoke English, Louis asked if it had been madness to get on a plane.

  “Yes,” said the doctor, matter-of-factly.

  “So if there was a problem, I could have …”

  “Yes. It was very stupid.”

  Then we managed to get flights out of the country, back to the safety of our homes, and the letters from Anna, kind and imploring (“You know how it is in Bolivia”), began to stream in.

  I still bear scars, visible and less so, from our accident in Bolivia; somehow the world it opened onto was so charged and dark, so far from logic, that I cannot easily leave it behind. Driving up hairpin turns in the Indian foothills of the Himalayas three months later, the boys at the wheel accelerating wildly around blind switchbacks, I had to close my eyes, gripping the seat between my knuckles, because I could feel it all happening again. My house burned down as I watched, I was in a car in Egypt that ran over a little boy in a village—his bloody body thrown into our backseat so that there were stains all over—I have seen close friends possessed or try to commit suicide; but none of that so unnerved me, or haunts me still, as the boy in the tomato-red T-shirt. The modern world has yet to make many inroads on Bolivia—that was why I wanted to share it with Louis—and it was possible to believe, as Greene had believed in places like Liberia and Haiti, that one was back in a much more potent world where none of our easy defenses or learned reflexes could help us.

  It was not fashionable to believe all that; I’d resisted such implications for most of my life. It was exactly what we had been trained to disbelieve at school, even as we were being taught about a man walking on water and offering his body for us to eat, rising from the dead and turning water into wine. Most English literature, if it stuck resolutely enough to the social, could pretend that devils (and certainly gods) didn’t exist, and it was always easier to think so. Religion, in that sense, was part of the way Greene rebelled against his upbringing, affirming the subconscious. It wasn’t faith that was the escape, he always maintained, but atheism. Yet he had seen and traveled enough to have an acute, almost obsessive sense of the limits of what we can explain or know, and to realize that darkness can be more important to acknowledge than light, precisely because we are so happy to discount its existence.

  Besides, an adopted father can never die, I thought again; that’s one of the great advantages he has over a real one. Indeed, if he’s departed the world already, a vi
rtual or a chosen father need never even age; he’s always at the stage you need him to be, and you can hold him in all his ages at the same time, if you so choose. He grows old as you do, the books ripening and taking on new colors, so that what once seemed comical gathers shadows all around it. Yet he never grows too old, or loses his memory. He’s always there for you. Like a god, Greene might have added—except that a human, faltering, contradictory god is sometimes easier to believe in.

  When I went to the last room my father ever occupied—it turned out to be on the same road where I was sleeping, though down in the flats, while I was in the mountains—I saw his books arranged by his seat on the floor, where he liked to reach for them, and the mass of yellow, sky blue, grey folders that he always kept, with horoscopes, photocopies, caduceus symbols, records of important documents stashed inside them. His ashtray was on the table, and the pack of cigarettes that had in fact brought him to his death was sitting there, waiting to be opened. He had died not many days before, and it fell to me to sort his things out.

  As I was going through the books he kept beside him, heavily marked up, I saw that he was reading Gandhi, as ever, his chosen father, and was also collecting books (perhaps he’d always collect these more than read them) on how to improve his health. Then I saw, to my astonishment, a cover that looked familiar, and noticed that it was a copy of the first book I’d ever written, in the old, burned-down house, while he was still wondering if there was evil in California.

  I opened it and found it as marked up as any of his old books of philosophy or poetry might have been: heavy double underlinings in some places, cryptic arrows or infinity signs in red and black in the margin; parentheses that denoted some intense response beside the words. I couldn’t tell what the feeling was exactly, but he seemed to have devoured my book as intensely, with as much rigor, and even approval, as if it were a copy of The Republic or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Then I went into his bedroom, where his slippers sat by the bed, as if waiting for him to get out from under the covers and slip off to the bathroom.