As she spoke the train crossed over a bridge, Leo looked down and saw a shallow gorge beneath his feet. ‘Jesus, what the fuck am I doing here?’ he gasped, but he felt a thrill of excitement race through him. The train was pulling up into another plantation stop. There was nothing but a few small huts and a field of bananas climbing up a gentle slope. Beyond the field was a vertical wall of rock. They were still at least another fifteen hundred metres below the plateau. Past the huts a dirt track began, and there was the bus waiting with its engine running.
‘I’ll save you a seat,’ Leo shouted.
‘I’m coming out of the window, I’ll be right behind you,’ Eleni replied.
As soon as the bridge had been crossed, men started jumping from the train. Some of them fell in the mud. Others, more nimble, were already pelting towards the bus carrying their woven bags and chickens. Leo jumped, skidded but avoided the fall and hurtled after them. By the time he reached the bus every seat was either taken or reserved for a woman. People were squashed against the door. Now there were people standing the whole length of the bus and Leo was right at the door when the driver shouted out that he could take only two more. He gestured Leo to get on.
‘My girlfriend, what about my girlfriend?’
‘Of course, your girlfriend too.’ The driver smiled. ‘Do I look like a man who would separate a man from his woman?’
The crowd, which was mostly men, pulled back from the door to let the women and children get to the seats their husbands and fathers had reserved. When Eleni got on she laughed, ‘That was fun.’
Leo marvelled at the way the men had let the women on, back home it would have been strictly first come first served.
‘Thank God we made it,’ Eleni said. ‘I mean look at this place, we would have been buggered if we had to stay here.’ It was true, there was absolutely nothing to the place, no hotel, no restaurants, nothing. ‘We would have had to sleep rough and eat bananas.’
They both started giggling, they were breathless and excited, the absurdity of the moment had got to them.
‘Hey, chica,’ the driver called to Eleni, ‘you can sit on my gearbox.’
She looked at him and burst out laughing. The driver was mystified for a moment, then he too started laughing. ‘Oh she is naughty, that one. That’s not what I meant.’
‘I know, I know, I’m sorry.’ She struggled to contain herself and turned to Leo and said in English, ‘I think I’m going to wet myself,’ and she cracked up again.
‘Not a good time, Eleni, we’ve got all day on this bus.’
‘Oh dear,’ she gasped, ‘I don’t even know why I’m laughing.’ And she sat down on the boulder-sized plastic moulding of the gearbox next to the driver.
As they set off and Leo watched the crowd disperse he asked the driver why he hadn’t let anyone on the roof.
‘The road is very bad. It is too dangerous.’
‘That never stopped anyone before,’ Leo remarked.
‘This road is not normally used by buses and there has been a lot of rain. You will see, señor.’
They were not even around the first corner when the bus came to a standstill and the wheels were spinning in the mud. The driver got out of his seat to make an announcement. ‘The bus is too heavy. All the men must get off the bus. I will try to get out of this hole and if I cannot manage it I will ask you to push.’
All the men trooped off the bus. They were no more than fifty metres from the plantation, and some of the unlucky men who had not made it ran up the hill to help. Leo could see that the rear wheels were caught in a huge soggy ditch. This is no place for a bus, he thought. A man from the plantation came up with a couple of planks and put them under the wheels. The bus lurched forward, the planks broke and the bus slipped back.
‘Everyone push,’ the driver shouted. The men bounced the bus out and it drove ahead a little way and waited for the men to get back on board. A hundred metres further on and the men were off again. And so it continued for hours. One stretch of the road was so bad that the men did not bother getting back on, they just walked behind the bus until the next ditch. Eleni jumped off to find a bush, as did everyone at some point or another on that hellish journey. A great spirit of camaraderie built on the bus and the driver put a salsa tape on full volume. Everyone knew the words and was singing together at the top of their voices. Whatever Leo and Eleni felt about the buses in South America there was always a party atmosphere. People made friends, offered their food and sang. No matter how wretched the journey, Leo and Eleni could only marvel at the irrepressible joy of these people.
Rain began to thud on the metal roof of the bus. For ten hours they had soldiered on before reaching anything that resembled a road. It was dusk and everyone was exhausted. They were beginning to relax in the knowledge that the worst was over when the bus turned a corner and the driver let out a shriek. Around this bend nature had turned on its head. For a dizzying moment their eyes were confused; the landscape seemed to be moving in the shadows. The mountains were collapsing and changing shape. The road had disappeared under a huge slide of mud and rocks, which cascaded down into the valley like some primeval soup. There was a screech of brakes as the driver tried desperately to bring the bus to a halt. To their right was a sheer drop, to their left a jagged rock face. The driver fought to keep control, but the road surface was wet and they careered into the rocks. Metal scraped stone and sparks were thrown up against the windows. Passengers began to jump out of the rear door of the bus, tumbling on to the tarmac. Leo and Eleni hung on to each other in dismay, the bus bounced back off the rock and came to a halt just short of the landslide.
The men gathered to inspect the damage; the side of the bus was badly dented, but, worse, the engine wouldn’t start. Leo felt sorry for the driver who had taken so many risks to get them this far. If he couldn’t get the bus moving he would lose a lot of money. That night they slept on the bus, and in the morning they picked their way across the landswept road before finding a taxi to take them the last ten miles into Ibarra.
How strange, Leo thought, that they should have been involved in two bus crashes. Could that really be a coincidence or had fate been chasing Eleni? What if fate did exist? Eleni was frightened of only one thing in Latin America: buses. Not illness or crime or any other horror, only buses. And in the end the buses had got her. Perhaps somewhere deep in her soul she had known her fate.
On the other hand, Leo reasoned, maybe it had nothing to do with fate at all. It could work the other way round. We might be so frightened of something that we bring it upon ourselves. You’re standing on a ledge and you have a fear of falling, the fear makes you lose your balance. You’re frightened of dogs, the dog smells the fear and bites you. That makes some sense, but how does this apply to a bus crash? Could Eleni’s fear make a bus crash? That would imply the existence of the paranormal. Leo couldn’t stop himself from entertaining the idea.
Was Alexandria right? Could God have been harvesting for heaven? Or was Eleni just unlucky: in the wrong place at the wrong time?
His mind was racing, searching for an explanation of the inexplicable. Fate, telekinesis, luck, religion – now there was no territory that he would not explore. He was like a leaf buffeted in the breeze, unable to find his way back to the tree that had given him stability.
6
MORNING CRAWLED IN LIKE A SALTED SLUG AND THE international business of death began. In Kithos Alexandria found a small chapel on a hillside overlooking the sea, spoke to the priest and booked a grave. In England Leo’s father rang the airlines and was told that the body would have to be embalmed and the coffin hermetically sealed before transportation. In Latacunga, Celeste had arrived from Quito and she set about informing the British and Greek consulates, organizing the post-mortem, procuring a death certificate and booking transportation to the capital. This was not so easy on a Saturday when all the corrupt civil servants sloped off to their ill-gotten country villas. Doctor Sanchez didn’t work Saturdays either, he had
a ‘life and death only’ policy at weekends. Post-mortems could wait but he made an exception for Leo. He insisted that he carry out the autopsy in private and Leo did not resist.
Death had percolated the flesh with bloodless pallor. Eleni’s soul had flown and only the discarded container remained. And yet she was still beautiful, indeed more so than ever. All the tensions and dramas of her short life had dissolved from her features and she seemed relaxed and serene. How simple and fragile life is, nothing more than the ebb and flow of air. Still the air and there is nothing.
Doctor Sanchez hated doing post-mortems. In a larger town it would be left to experts, but in Latacunga he had to do everything. He had cut open the children of poor Indians to give a medical name to poverty, he had found the hidden cancers and clots in the elderly, he had looked into the fatal stab wounds of young men, but he couldn’t remember the last time he had dealt with a woman in the prime of her life. He began to unbutton her shirt and then stopped, flushed with embarrassment. Perhaps he should see what he could ascertain without removing her clothes. He could feel four broken ribs but none of these was the cause of death. He would have to look further. It was absurd that the law required him to fill out a form establishing the exact cause of death for someone who had died in a crash. There were no suspicious circumstances, what could be gained by this desperately unpleasant rigmarole? He pulled open her shirt and saw signs of severe bruising across the chest. It looked like she had been smashed by a metal bar. He was 90 per cent certain she had died from internal bleeding. Her lungs must have filled with blood and she would have died within minutes. He would fill in the forms and no more questions would be asked. ‘She died instantly,’ he told Leo. ‘She would have felt no pain.’ This was not strictly true, but why make him suffer more? Would it help him to know that, had a fully equipped ambulance arrived quickly, Eleni might even have been saved? Or that she might have died in agony?
By three o’clock, the death certificate had been stamped and Eleni was in the back of a Quito-bound ambulance. Sanchez had achieved in hours what would normally have taken days. Leo’s knee had deteriorated through the night and he could no longer walk without a stick. The pain was increasing at the same rate that the shock was subsiding. He hugged the doctor in gratitude. ‘I won’t forget what you have done for me. And please send my wishes to José.’
‘José?’
‘The orderly . . . who helped me at the clinic?’
‘There is no José here.’
‘Oh . . . who was he then?’ Leo asked.
The doctor shrugged.
Celeste was waiting in the ambulance when Leo got in the back. He took his seat next to the bed where Eleni lay under a sheet and they set off. There was only one road to Quito; they would have to pass the place of the accident. He wondered whether he would see the wreckage and Eleni’s blood on the road. Nothing on the way seemed familiar until they rounded a bend and the imposing Cotopaxi came into view.
It triggered a memory of the bus reaching the brow of a small hill; the other side was lost in a cloud that had descended into the valley. They had driven into the mist and for a few minutes had seen nothing beyond a few metres. Suddenly the fog had cleared and there before them had been the magnificent snow-capped peak. A man close to them had asked, ‘Are you sure you still want to climb that beast, you crazy gringos?’
‘Oh yes,’ Leo had replied, but in the face of the mountain his confidence had drained away. It would be the most dangerous thing he had ever done in his life. Death entered his thoughts. What if I fall? Or get stranded in a blizzard? Or freeze to death? What madness to risk a life for what ultimately would be no more than bar-room brag.
In the ambulance Leo dropped his head into his hands. Perhaps death had been given a choice that day: either take the man on the mountain or the woman on the road. Maybe Eleni had sacrificed herself for him. He kicked himself, why couldn’t he stop himself from having such ridiculous ideas? Better stick to the facts. Leo now knew that the accident must have happened only minutes before they were due to get off the bus. He also had a picture of where they had been sitting. They had been on the front row. He was directly behind the driver, his bag was on the floor next to him and Eleni was over the aisle behind the vertical metal bar which passengers used to climb on to the bus. He was saved by the driver’s seat, and the ice pick must have slammed into his knee on impact. Eleni had been thrown with terrific force into that bar. Had they not been on the front seats Eleni would still be alive, she was the only fatality.
He wanders deep into the fog again in search of the black box and is rewarded only by the memory of a conversation with an engineer from Ohio whom they met in their hotel in Ibarra. They were telling him about the landslide and the crash on the mountain road. ‘It’s always best to sit in the middle of the bus,’ he said, ‘because in 90 per cent of accidents it is the front or rear of the bus that is hit.’
From that day on they had always sat in the middle of the bus, but for some reason on 2 April they had been sitting at the front and Leo did not know why.
Leo couldn’t see any signs of a smashed bus on the side of the road as they passed Cotopaxi. The owner must have scraped up the wreckage and botched it back together. It was probably back in service already. Leo was twitchy for the whole journey, driving about in slabs of metal now seemed like a perilous activity, and he shuddered every time they passed a lorry going the other way.
It was dusk when they pulled up outside the morgue in Quito. It was a new whitewashed building with no windows and everything that Latacunga was not; modern, clean and completely devoid of spirits. But so dead that it was none the less terrifying. Eleni was brought in while Leo and Celeste were shown around as if they were on a tour of a stately home. They entered a white tiled room containing huge metal drawers from floor to ceiling. ‘This is where we normally keep the bodies before we do autopsies and embalmings, although in your case I believe the Greek consul has paid for the deluxe service so we will be going straight to theatre. This room is always kept at 5 degrees centigrade. We have our own generator, so we can keep it cold even in a power cut,’ said a man in a white coat, proud of his shiny spanking new death emporium. Their feet echoed on the floor, the neon lights buzzed; it was so over-lit that they cast no shadows as they walked. The waft of disinfectant bruised their nostrils. The place was so sterile that even the ubiquitous ants had quit it. The man showed them into another room, the mirror image of the first, except that a drawer had slid open and a battered purple naked man was staring at the ceiling.
‘They do that sometimes,’ their guide said and casually pushed the man back into the cabinet. They were just leaving when Leo heard a squeaking sound, he turned and watched the same man slowly slide out into the room again. Even morgues have their rebels.
They were led through to a small amphitheatre with raked seating and a huge stainless steel table in the middle. ‘This is where we do the autopsies. Notice the drains in the side of the operating table. This is to allow the blood to drain away during embalming. We got the table from America. We used to be knee-deep in blood but this is so much cleaner.’
‘What are the seats for?’ asked Celeste.
‘Well, we often have students from the medical school here. It’s really the best possible way to see inside the body and learn where everything is. So you see in our own way we are helping the living as well,’ said their guide.
Some compensation, thought Leo.
‘I am sure you will agree that your friend will be well looked-after here.’ Their guide smiled.
Leo wanted to punch him.
‘Now if you would like to wait outside, the process won’t take more than a couple of hours.’
‘I’m staying here,’ Leo said.
‘I wouldn’t recommend it, señor.’
‘I’m staying here,’ Leo shouted, and sat down angrily.
‘Well as you wish . . . but really I . . .’ Leo stared at him disdainfully, the man shook his head and left the
theatre.
Celeste sat down next to him. ‘Are you all right?’
‘This place is an abattoir, I can’t leave her alone in here . . . with these butchers . . . it’s a fucking meat-processing plant . . . who knows what they’ll . . .’ His rant was cut short by a pair of swing doors rocking open and the sight of Eleni being wheeled out on a trolley by two morticians. She was naked.
Leo jumped to his feet. ‘Who the fuck said you could undress her . . . without my permission . . . you imbeciles!’ he screamed in English.
The morticians looked up in shock, only their frightened eyes were visible; the rest of their faces were hidden under surgical masks and elasticated hats. Loose-fitting white disposable tops and trousers, rubber shoes and gloves covered their bodies and it was impossible to tell if they were men or women.
Celeste pulled Leo back. ‘They’ll make you leave. Now control yourself. They’re just doing their job.’
Leo took a deep breath and sat down sullenly. ‘Well, they should have asked me,’ he hissed.
Eleni was transferred on to the metal drain table. Her bones were rigid like a shop mannequin’s and she seemed to be frozen. Her flesh had sagged like a deflated balloon and she looked brittle and translucent. Only her hair was unchanged, still pliant, lustrous black and beautiful. One of the figures withdrew into the shadows and returned with a tray of steel implements. The other attached a pipe to a huge bottle of chemicals that stood by the table.
Celeste stood up. ‘I can’t watch this. I’ll wait outside. I think you should come with me.’
‘No.’
‘Oh Leo, don’t do this to yourself.’
Random Acts of Heroic Love Page 6
