My First Mistake by Andrew McKenna

My first mistake, probably, was swimming in the Río Napo. My second was letting a German doctor look in my ear.

After trekking for nearly a week in the sucking ooze of the upper Amazon, he’d left his better judgement and I’d left mine in a miasma rising out of the sweaty foliage.

“I’ll use river water now,” Dieter said, snapping the lid off the shampoo bottle and holding it under the water. I watched a lazy trail of silver bubbles break the scum on the surface.

“You see, ve yust need to unlodge de vax. Den you will be able to hear normally again. It’s zo zimple.”

A soft, almost reassuring flushing noise had been in my ear since I’d swum in the Napo three days earlier. The swim wasn’t even refreshing—the water felt like only a slightly thicker but same temperature version of the air we were breathing. At the end of a hard day’s walk, some of it through virgin forest where our guides hacked a path clear for us, it was a simple pleasure to watch the mud in solution drift away, to have your ankles free of mosquitoes, however briefly.

But a piece of wax lodged over my eardrum, causing the flushing noise, muffling all else. I could pull on my earlobe, and the wax would stretch and pop, momentarily restoring normal hearing, but when I let it go, it would spring back and block again. I hadn’t been able to dislodge it even with tiny sharp instruments from Libby’s sewing kit.

Dieter noticed me jiggling my ear at lunchtime and offered to syringe it for me. As he was fresh out of syringes in the middle of the Amazon, we used a shampoo bottle with purified water.

Having water squirted into your ear under high pressure is no unpleasant experience. It sounds as if you’re in the middle of a washing machine, I imagine, and makes you nearly as unsteady on your feet, but it feels like something is moving at last around what’s been bunging your ear.

Dieter kept up a cheery banter as he worked, along the lines of “Ya, ven I vas in Africa, hey hey? I only used to take de malaria tablets ven I’m getting de fevers, you know? And such fevers! De human body, you know? Can’t get dis hot without combusting spontaneously.”

We ran out of purified water, which was when Dieter filled up again with a splash from the Napo. Maybe he was fresh out of common sense, too.

He gave my ear a solid squirt, forcing the ooze and wrigglers under high pressure into my ear, and with a ‘Well, I hope dis works now,’ we wandered back to the others.

The wax didn’t move, but I was too hot and giddy, and there were too many mosquito bites to think. Maybe it would work its way out, just pop out when I least expected. I watched the butterflies while we ate a meal of potato mash, rice, and spaghetti. Carlos, our guide, was a man for the major food groups.

Libby was sulking. She’d had enough of jungle food. She’d had enough of the jungle.

“For all we know,” I said by way of consolation, “maybe your body needs this many carbohydrates in the jungle?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she hissed. “I can’t believe what that man is doing to us.”

She toyed with a ball of greyish mashed potato with her fork, and a bird screamed above us. She started.

“Did it work?” she asked, remembering my ear and fixing Dieter with a withering gaze across the clearing as he chatted to his girlfriend.

I said, “I don’t think so.”

“Sssshhh, you don’t have to shout,’ she said, with the faintest of smiles. It was the first smile we’d seen for a week, and it brought the old Libby to mind fleetingly. But it disappeared, and Jungle Girl returned.

“But it sure felt good,” I added.

When we hit the water again in our motorised pirogue, the engine noise struck me full blast in my wounded ear. I watched the steaming jungle slip by as we headed back to the relative civilisation of Misahuallí and cupped my hand over my ear. It throbbed in empathy with the roar of the motor.

“If I was a train, I’d run up and down your back,” kept running rhythmically through my head in time with the throb of the engine, as I watched Libby sitting up in front of me, sniffing disdainfully at the forest.

Families—whole villages—waved to us from other canoes as we slipped past. One little girl saw me with my hand over my ear and, giggling, imitated my gesture as her boat shot past. The flushing in my ear had grown more insistent. The crap was backing up in the pipe.

In Misahuallí, Libby and I waved goodbye to the others and booked into a guesthouse. We took cold showers and picked off stray leeches under our socks, sleeves, and, marvellously, her bra.

“I don’t have the faintest idea why I came,” she muttered as I poked a glowing matchstick into another engorged body.

When we treated ourselves to a slap-up meal of banana pancakes afterwards, I could hardly chew for the ache now gripping my ear and jaw. Libby looked up at me from the book she was reading between bites when I whimpered, and sighed as if I’d made her lose her place.

We caught the bus up to Baños the next morning, leaving the lowlands and the Oriente, as they call it, behind for good. To Ecuadorians, it holds the mystery and danger, that delicious frisson of terror that the words “Japan” or “Formosa” must have held for Victorian Britons. To highlanders the Amazon is full of head-hunting tribes (they don’t anymore), bird eating spiders (I didn’t see any), mosquitoes that suck so much blood they can’t take off (true), piranhas and sucking red mud (fact). Highlanders would rather stay in the cool highlands during a coup, a volcanic eruption, a war, than venture at the best of times into that steaming pit of leeches, swollen brown rivers, and incorrigible German doctors.

By the time we pulled up in Baños, the pain in my ear was intense. Dictionary clutched in my hand and money tied up in my handkerchief, I visited Dr Raul Martinez-Lopez. He had a tiny, glum office with dirty blue linoleum on the floor. The man matched the office beautifully. He was tiny and glum and had cloudy, pale blue eyes.

He glared at me as if I had lost my mind when I started to explain the problem, but I eventually made myself understood. He shoved in his poky instrument with the light in the barrel and peered down my ear, making a few non-committal clicking noises with his tongue.

“Yes,” he said in his rasping Spanish, “you have an infección. How did you get this?”

“Swimming in the Río Napo,” I said, grinning sheepishly.

“Aah!” The doctor let out a great explosion of air and looked at the ceiling. “I myself am too afraid to go to El Oriente. Spiders the size of your face. ¿Piranhas, no?” He grinned, exhibiting a row of brownish teeth.

Libby was drying her nails when I reached our room, and didn’t look up. Look up and you might smear the polish.

“You’ve spilled shampoo all through my bag,” she said by way of greeting.

“I spilled it,” I said, throwing myself on the bed.

“Yes. You packed it.”

A silence in which you could hear the nails drying followed.

I said, “Uh. Sorry. I’ll be more careful in future.”

“I hope there’s no rats here,” she said, looking around the room.

“So how did you go at the doctors?” I asked after another silence.

“Yeah, pretty well,” I replied. “I got these big antibiotics, see? Big blue pills. I’ve taken a double dose already … How’s your ear? … Well, it hurts like fuck.”

“You’re the one who wanted to come here,” she sniffed, “and I wish you wouldn’t swear.”

I lay awake most of the night as the pain settled in. I listened with my good ear to the strange night noises: scratches, snuffles, some sort of faint sobbing behind the wall. The breeze. It did occur to me that perhaps the noises were coming from inside my own head.

I couldn’t rest the right side of my face on the pillow and was doing well to swallow a gob of my own spit. It was beginning to feel worse than an average infección. White-water rapids were building up in my ear canal.

We took the first bus back to Quito in the morning, and I swear I was delirious. I pressed my fingers into my temples and sweated, but it wasn’t hot. We passed through an eerie landscape of plunging ravines with the sun glinting on rivers far below, hairpin bends, impenetrable, overhanging foliage overcrowding the edge of the road.

Indians with stoic brown faces, dressed in brilliant ponchos, got off the bus in the middle of nothing, and disappeared quickly over the brows of hills, or came out of nowhere to flag our driver down.

I saw a man silhouetted on the crest of a hill, holding a dagger aloft, about to bring it down on the chest of his victim. I saw a rag-tag band of Spanish conquistadors marching across the mountains, frayed by hunger and exhaustion, defeating a whole nation of Inca warriors.

Back in Quito, Libby and I broke out into a beautiful argument at the depot. Amused faces stared at us from the sidelines as her voice grew ever more shrill. She wanted to go to our pensión and unpack before I went to the hospital. I wanted to go straight to the hospital, but I was overawed by the heat (it wasn’t hot) and unsteady because of the earthquake (there was no earthquake that morning in Quito).

“You’re so fucking selfish!” she chirruped at me. “This is all your fault. I have to go back and lie down or else I’m going to die.”

“And I really will if we don’t get to hospital,” I whined.

An amused crowd had started to gather. Look at the gringos!

“A little earache never killed anyone!”

She was losing her self-control, and so was I in a different way. I’d liked to see her lose self-control in the past, but this was different, and not pleasant.

I was barely standing and could feel my bowels loosening. All I could do was suck up the dust in her wake. I reeled up the hill through the old colonial part of town, classified by UNESCO, oh yes, sweat pouring down my face, someone with a mean streak skewering my ear with an ice pick, built in 1546, yes yes, gorgeous. Nice old church. Beautiful plaza. Look up, there’s the sky. Watch out for the shit on the street.

We reached the hospital off Avenida Amazonas by lunchtime, after Libby had had her constitutional. The world was receding from focus. The doctor, another small, brown man with pale blue eyes, started talking, hey hey, German to me.

He looked in my ear and shook his head gravely.

“Tiene una abscessa,” he said. “You must see a specialist.”

Libby snorted impatiently when I reported back to her. As if I’d invited this abscess in, just to spite her. She was seated in the waiting room, engrossed in her novel. We had to wait another few hours until the especialista had finished his round of golf, or whatever it is that makes specialists the world over keep you waiting. Libby hardly budged the whole time, and I had my head between my legs and was counting the blood spots, either on the floor or before my eyes. I couldn’t tell.

The especialista had a merry glint in his eye for someone who was about to inflict so much misery. He looked down my ear, the third man in a dirty-ish white coat to do so in the past twenty-four hours, whistled between his teeth, and said something like, “My, but you have a big abscessa in there!”

As if it were something I should almost be proud of. So, in my delirium, I managed an almost-proud smile.

“We have to put a mecha in,” he smiled.

“¿Una mecha?” I smiled.

“¡Sí!” he smiled, almost laughing. “¡Una mecha!”

“What’s a mecha?” I smiled, growing tired of all this smiling and near laughing and becoming very nervous of a sudden. I looked around for my dictionary and realised it was in the waiting room with Libby.

“Una mechacita,” he said, “to draw out the pus.”

So, hey, it was only going to be a mechacita, only a tiny little mecha.

The next I knew, he had taken a white-hot metal poker out of the fire and climbed up on the table. He jammed the poker into my ear with both hands, then jumped up and down on my head and the side of my face, jamming the tiny little mechacita in.

I quivered, but I didn’t let out a sound. This was serious; I had a madman here. I clung to the side of the table as he pushed the little mechacita into my ear. He was moaning with the exertion, until I realized I was moaning with the joy of having such a small mechacita jammed into my ear.

They injected me after that, I don’t know who did it, or with what, but I know I loosened my trousers after a nurse asked me to, and they jabbed me in the rear with another white-hot poker. I didn’t know where they got so many all of a sudden.

“¿Dónde está el fuego?” I asked, surveying the room shakily. “Where’s the fire?”

Somebody laughed then, maybe me, and they ushered me out into the waiting room, into the stony silence of my girlfriend.

“You look pale,” she said.

The rest of the day twisted around my ears. Time was eaten by worms. I only remember snatches as the morphine or pethadine or truth serum took effect. Wandering off the footpath into the path of an onrushing bus and someone—not Libby—snatching me back; taxis floating by on Amazonas; busy, shoving crowds that were now dancing wraiths.

Libby looked up my dictionary and explained that a mecha was a “wick”. Simple. To draw the pus out.

I was bathed in an ethereal glow. I still felt pain, but I was beyond it, floating like a condor over Cotopaxi Volcano, perched on the rim and peering down at the fires below, waiting for the explosion.

Later, drinking dinner through a straw and rolled up in bed, I watched Libby brushing her hair, getting ready for a night on the town with the Irish girls from across the hall. I knew then my first mistake hadn’t been swimming in the Napo.