Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

I had trouble getting my key in the lock and there was no need to turn on the light to see what had happened. They hadn’t been content to take the floppies and the hard disks of my disembowelled computers; if what they’d wanted was information, they could have got it over the Web without setting foot in my house. No, they’d done it their way, the best they knew, with that characteristic blend of method and brutality, reliving the good old days that had never quite gone. I groped about for the phone, which at that moment was the only really indispensable thing and, after scavenging around in my own rubbish for some time, I found part of the casing. I went on crawling mechanically across the irregular mattress of my belongings strewn from wall to wall over the floor, groping mechanically for what I was looking for. Under the collapsed boxes of Christopher products appeared a pair of thick socks into which I stuck my feet, blistered and scratched by the last few blocks, which I’d walked on bare soles and, in a lower stratum, my Topper baseball boots, which it took me some time to lace up; all the while not bothering to turn on the light, or to close the door on my way out.

As if the visit to my house had been just a quick stopover, I carried on walking down San Juan against the flow of traffic. The first few blocks I was too numb to even look when I crossed and in the wide open spaces of Avenida 9 de Julio it was only the time of day that saved me from being run over on the motorway access roads. Only when I reached Avenida Entre Ríos did I feel any emotion: it was hatred. I was crossing Avenida Boedo and I still didn’t know what I was doing, so I decided not to do anything, just to go on walking till something happened. All need for a decision vanished, trampled underfoot by the simple fact of walking, sheer stubbornness, the soul’s most mechanical faculty. By now the lights were bowling handfuls of cars down the avenue every so often, which, with their uneven speeds, broke up till the next set of red lights marshalled them again. I took advantage of one of these starts to run across to the other pavement, laughing at the desperate flashings of headlights, the sudden meandering brakings and the long, continuous tooting of horns, and I would have done it again had it not been for the breathlessness that clouded my eyes so badly that the buildings began to waver like flames and I had to sit down and close my eyes until the city had settled again. ‘Go away,’ I shouted at it, trying to sound defiant. ‘Get lost, leave me alone. I don’t need you, I’ve never needed you. Why go on kidding ourselves? I never came back. I never left the Islands.’

I turned right at the next corner without knowing why, until I looked up and saw the name of the street: Malvinas Argentinas, what else. When I looked down, they were walking beside me.

They hadn’t aged, as I hadn’t either: like the clocks of Hiroshima, time for us had stopped at an instant. The time and place were just right for the meeting: the dead hours of deep night, the junction of the indistinct streets of Buenos Aires and Puerto Argentino. Their casualness would have made my astonishment sound rude and, with nothing more than an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders (although who knows what they could perceive?), I walked between them on the pavement, where only my steps rang out. The first to speak was Carlitos:

‘City’s changed, eh, since the last time.’

‘You don’t come often?’ I asked him.

‘Not unless we’re called,’ he looked at me. ‘Which is like saying …’

‘… less and less.’ Rubén finished the sentence. The charred rents in the material of his uniform looked like black holes in a sky of dry blood. ‘Why didn’t you call us before, Porteño?’

I hung my head as low as I could to escape the stabbing of accusing eyes. They still hurt on the back of my neck though.

‘I missed you all as well. I miss you more than ever. But I was afraid of calling you.’

I looked up slightly. They were looking at each other, winking.

‘Way hey! We’re wicked we are.’

‘We frighten the little boys.’

‘And fondle the little girls.’

They drew a smile from me. Bastards, over there too, against all the odds, they used to manage it. No one had ever done it, against my will like that, ever since. Well, one person had, I corrected myself. But she’s further away than they are now. With a supreme effort, more for their sake than mine, I looked up into Carlitos’ serene eyes. He was massaging his wrist. He’d let his moustache grow to cover the split lip.

‘Do you still hate me?’ I asked him.

‘Since when did I hate you?’ He answered me with another question, like a good Jew. Try as I might, I couldn’t detect the slightest trace of irony in his voice.

‘Since that day when I stood by and let Verraco do … Since that night when I fell asleep with you dying at my side. And all these years for letting the monster go on living. As if that wasn’t enough.’

The cars had reappeared by the time we reached Avenida Rivadavia. In the two blocks we’d been walking down the avenue, none of the drivers seemed surprised at the strange patrol of dead soldiers walking the streets of the empty city. Maybe, like me, they hadn’t bought the story about the end of the war either.

‘Your silence sounds like assent,’ I said with relief.

‘I’m thinking how to explain to you,’ he said, breaking it.

‘What.’

‘That those things don’t matter to us over there.’

‘Nothing matters to you then. How nice that must feel. You’re making me envious. You always did make me envious.’

‘Just one thing does. A lot.’ He turned to look at me before he said it. ‘You guys.’

We turned onto Donato Álvarez. I don’t know who did it first. We were moving in unison, like a flock of birds in the sky. All my tiredness had gone, and my doubts and my fear. This was what I’d been afraid of all along. Now it had come, my fear had been replaced by a calm acceptance.

‘All right, I admit it, it’s a fair cop. You’re right to accuse me. I declare myself guilty; it’s quicker that way. But don’t worry, it won’t last long, this state of things.’

‘You still don’t understand.’

‘I didn’t think it was so hard. I thought that’s why we crossed the lake: to make it less difficult.’

‘Chanino, see if you can make him understand.’

He put a hand on my shoulder. A hand as weightless as a blown kiss.

‘Listen to me, Porteño, you know what Hell is?’

‘Yes,’ I nodded vehemently. ‘You bet I do. I could write the book.’

‘Ours is different. In order to swim to the other side we have to divest ourselves of what we suffered in life. What we remember, we remember without pain. But there is a pain that comes across with us. Your pain. The pain of the ones still alive.’

Rubén intervened.

‘The only thing we ask is that you let us in sometimes. But with you there was nothing doing. We knocked and knocked but you wouldn’t open. Only very occasionally, in dreams that you’d forgotten before you woke up. A few days ago we waved to you from the highest peaks of Longdon but you didn’t recognise us.’

‘You elongated everything there, we looked like something out of an El Greco dream,’ Carlitos remarked. ‘Is that why you did it, so as not to recognise us?’

‘Not even when he’s dead will this one cut out the psychology,’ Rubén quipped. ‘And you cast Chanino as a Gurkha.’ The ‘Gurkha’ in question pulled an offended face. ‘Good thing he didn’t take it seriously.’

‘I didn’t dare to look you in the eyes,’ I said, my own looking down into the rubbish by the kerb. ‘I was scared.’

‘What of?’