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people, and distracted him from the fact that his arm was broken in two places. Covered by the third and final backward surge, the vision of his mother disappeared, and information from his arm and head began going off around his body like one controlled explosion after another.
    Consequently, he failed to notice the dust clouds puffing off the building behind him as the earthquake started.
    Having got well into my wooing routine with the French flower dealer’s daughter, and congratulating myself on the idea of bringing Eugène along to translate for me, I was putout when it emerged that the girl was his older sister, that she spoke perfect English herself and that the pair of them had been taking the piss out of me from the beginning. I wasn’t, therefore, in mid-seduction, but sulking furiously behind a statue of Columbus and wondering if I could risk a cigarette when the tremor started.
    Whereas down in the Old Town an earthquake would manifest itself as something serious, like rotting whitewash tumbling off the masonry, or the collapse of an entire stall full of rain sticks and hash pipes, up there in the garden the event was infuriatingly incidental. The only real physical manifestation of it seemed to be the faint clinking of glassware on the Ambassador’s trestle tables, which meant that the earthquake operated more as a humorous addendum to the party than anything serious. The sort of thing that ladies in lilac might compliment their host on: ‘An earthquake! But how charming , David.’ People instinctively moved away from the house, but a lackey came on a loudspeaker and said that no one needed to worry about that because this was one of Quito’s most earthquake-proof buildings. Everyone relaxed and laughed. Someone said, that’s the advantage of living in a modern house, isn’t it? A butler theatrically opened fresh champagne with a sabre.
    I thought of Fabián down in the Old Town. He would have remembered the earthquake drills we did at school, and would be fine, so there was nothing to worry about. But it annoyed me that I wasn’t there. I was, it seemed, destined to live a boring life, never around when the good stuff happened. Fabián had it all, right down to the uncle with the shrunken head, while I was that pale English kid who couldn’t even get it on with some florist’s daughter without being made a fool of by her baby brother. Nothing ever happened to some people unless they went out looking for it, I thought. So I resolved there and then to go out looking atthe next opportunity, and turned away from the view to see where the booze had got to.
    The tremor had passed. It only measured 2.1 on the Richter scale but many people were shaken up by it, not least the float-bearers carrying the Virgin Mary. She must have weighed almost a ton and a half, and had nearly toppled into the crowd during the confusion. People began to pick themselves up off the ground. The policeman admonished them for their unruly behaviour and said, look how easily accidents happen. A penitent had dropped his own cross on his head, and now his wailing was genuine. Panic ensued as families realised they had been separated.
    Fabián lay crumpled in a wet gutter with his arm bent at a crazy angle, and miraculously Suarez found him after only a few minutes. He stooped to have a look at his nephew’s injury, assuming it to have happened during the earthquake. The arm had sustained a nasty couple of breaks, but it would heal. What worried Suarez far more was his nephew’s behaviour. He hoped Fabián wasn’t suffering from concussion. He didn’t seem to have registered that Suarez was beside him, and he was staring up at the sky with a broad, foolish grin, the like of which Suarez had never seen before.
    As far as Fabián was concerned, everything was fine. He was waving at his mother with his floppy, broken arm, and at that point, nothing else mattered.
    As I said, it went something like that.
    At the time, I had no idea of