In a new story, Dermot Healyresponds to Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as part of a series in association with Amnesty International to mark the 60th anniversary of the declaration
THE DAY WE arrived in Ecuador we spoke in Irish. Through a timber worker en route to Columbia we found a room in a hotel. All we had with us was a letter of introduction to the cultural aide, the phone numbers of the Irish Consul and a Divine Word missionary. At breakfast, the waitress lit a Carroll I gave her, and threw marvelling eyes at the ceiling. We took our first walk in Quito, stepping downstairs into memory.
The street was filled with the smell of fireworks from a festival of the night before.
I dropped a dollar into the cap of a man. He was sitting, head-down, on a deck chair on the street with one hand, palm-upwards. He had enormous blue-veined thighs wrapped in bandages, and huge crutches.
His fingers wriggled in reply.
I met him again a few days later in a park, where we went to watch three-man-aside netball. He was lying back, eyes closed, with his legs crossed, hidden in a copse of trees. Then we encountered him being dropped off at five in the morning onto his patch. Two helpers were wrapping the bloody bandages round his thigh, and painting the blue sores onto his skin, for the day ahead.
When he saw me he rose a finger to his lips. I dropped a dollar at his feet. He gave a grand gesture. I winked at him and he stared back outraged. The wink I later learned means that you are about to inform on someone.
We got an apartment after two days. Each morning Indians on the street below opened rubbish bags, took what they needed, and retied the bags. The poor dressed in white. McDonald's had armed personnel on the door. The Indians studied us as we set off each morning to various government buildings with the letter of introduction, but each time we arrived to the wrong door. A woman on the street felt my beard. We ate in a local cafe, and I led the way home. We were walking in a breathless maze for 45 minutes.
"Are you sure you know the way?"
"Yes."
"How do you know?"
"I took down the name of the street."
"What is it?"
"Una Via," I said.
"One way," she said. I had brought us back up through all the one-way streets in Quito.
On another aimless walk, I tried a police station. I was searched and shown up stairs to see the chief. It was 4.30 of a Friday. He was sitting alone in an office laughing to himself. I gave him the letter and he offered me a rum. Two men materialised alongside the far wall.
"You seek Senior Philatao?"
"Yes."
He laughed, lifted up the phone and rang, and shook his head. "Go to the Casa Cultura," he said.
We went to the museum the next day, and for the first time got out of the modern city into the old. We began to feel more at home, as our estrangement grew, but found no cultural aide. We stood outside. The army passed, rifles cocked. I looked up at a sculpture of a boy archer on the balcony of the building.
"Do you see him," I asked. "See how he is shooting the arrow out."
"He is shooting it in."
"Out," I said.
"In," she said. "Everything I say or do, you find fault with," and she burst into tears. A small angel had started a row between us. The smell of fireworks was at its height. We climbed back to the apartment exhausted. The night grew dark. I phoned the Irish Consul. It rang out. We watched a lady cook on the TV. Her hair went into the soup.
"What's going on?"
"I don't know."
I lifted out the phone number of the Divine Word missionary that a philosopher, I hardly knew, had given me in the bar of the Abbey Theatre. I rang, and a voice answered in Spanish.
"Do you speak English?" I asked.
"Are you Irish?"
"Yes, and there's something wrong."
"Where are you?" he asked, and in 10 minutes he climbed up the stairs, entered the living room and looked at us and said: "You have altitude sickness, you are at 11,500 feet."
A weight lifted off my head.
Through him we would visit the equator; and join a protest march in solidarity when six priests, and their housekeeper, were killed in San Salvador. The brains of the religious were cut out. Priests in shawls arrived from all the poor quarters. A nun grabbed the mike outside the university and said she was ashamed to teach among Jesuits who had let the deaths pass without protest.
At the Peruvian border, we would attend a mass for the second funeral of a woman who was dug up a year after she died because a voice told her son she was in the wrong grave. We'd visit the Village of White Fools. We tried to visit the Virgin on the heights of Quito, but the woman in the shop at the bottom of the steep ascent said, "No Señor," when I told her where we were going.
She stood in front of us on the road, looked at Helen, and drew her hand across her throat. We turned back. She had saved us from knife-wielding toughs above at the monument. We found the cultural aide, an office and a translator. With the oxygen reaching our brains, we moved into a hotel room in the old town, and planned trips to the Valley of the Volcanoes. I met an American historian who taught us how Magic Realism came out of the forests. When the woods were cut down, like in North America, the magic was lost.
I was coming home from my first day at my desk on a bus. To my right, on the street outside, there was uproar. Suddenly a soldier fired off a round of tear gas that landed in through the door. Everyone jumped out, including the driver. Crowds ran. I ducked with a man into a courtyard. We put our heads into a fountain, lifted our mouths to breathe but the arcade had a roof, and the place was filling up with bitter smoke.
We were collapsing with coughing, and tears, when a small door opened and a prostitute ushered the two of us into two indoor toilets. We stood silently alone. She let us out when the danger had passed. We walked down the hill with handkerchiefs to our faces, and shook hands outside the hotel.
The fireworks were tear gas; the festivals confrontations between student activists and soldiers. The workers supported the students, but paid for it. Buses were banned. Each late afternoon I joined the workers trudging home. Outside the hotel, another confrontation started. A woman and her children got caught in the swirls of gas. Helen lifted one kid and ran along with the mother up a hill and hid in a church.
Inside, Christ wore a Panama hat.
When we came out, the women were waving rolled lumps of lit newspapers to clear the pepper from the air. Next morning on my way to work I arrived into a stand-off. The students, in a side alley, were facing police and soldiers out on the main street. I looked round the corner judging the run. One policeman raised his hand, a student answered in reply, all weapons were lowered, and they let me cross.
We were invited to a concert. My translator showed us into seats in a private box. At the end of the show the lover was dancing to a lament as her man played the guitar to the side. Suddenly, rose petals, in thousands, fell down onto her, and into the gods. The roses stopped, then the skies opened again, and it began to rain; and underneath, the singer stood drenched in a garden of petals.
I found a distant other sense awakening. The applause started. The rain stopped. Helen's hand came down on mine. It was as if we had stepped out into the open air, as slowly, the waft of roses, at last, reached us in the balcony.
The audience came to their feet.
It was the most powerful, yet faint, sensation of smell I have ever experienced.
We tiptoed round in circles down the winding stairs and out onto the street. A few minutes later a jeep pulled in, braked hard, and two armed policemen jumped out with batons. They grabbed two lads who were walking ahead of us, and began hauling them across the foot path.
Suddenly Helen ran up, and touched one of the policemen lightly on the shoulder and shouted "Theatre!"
He swung round.
" Señora?"
"Theatre!" She pointed back at the concert hall; and the lads, who looked like trainee clerics, began nodding. "They were at the theatre."
"Theatre?" asked the policeman
" Si," said Helen.
" Si, Si," said the lads.
We showed him our passports. The police got into the van and drove away.
" Gracias Señora, gracias," said the students.
They were shaking. One lad drew the third of a Carroll into his lungs. We walked a little way along together, then we stopped, and reluctantly they went on, but kept looking back at us, waving.
A few weeks later on Stephen's Day our boat broke down on a tributary of the Amazon miles away from everyone. The boatman handed me the rope. I pulled hard, the engine took, and then gave again; we tied up, and set off afraid into the isolated jungle in search of someone the boatman knew. He began shouting a name into the trees. "Marcos!" "Marcos!" As darkness fell, a voice answered. That night we slept in a hammock in a small wooden hut in the forest. In through the canes next morning came a far away scent that we knew of old.
ARTICLE 3:Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.
• This is one of a series of 30 stories and essays by leading Irish writers marking the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The series was created by Sean Love of Amnesty International and continues next Saturday