Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘Of you all accusing me. Of forgetting you.’

All four let out a prfffff of astonished laughter.

‘Forgetting us? You? You’ve been carrying us around on your back for the last ten years,’ said Carlitos.

‘For not fighting the good fight,’ I insisted stubbornly. ‘Because I’m alive and you’re not, and that makes me happy.’ That’s it, I said it, I thought to myself. Let the lightning fall once and for all and strike me dead.

‘All these years, we’ve been waiting to tell you,’ Carlitos began menacingly.

‘What.’

Here it came. This was it at last. What I most feared.

‘Not to feel guilty. It’s them, they’re the guilty ones. The ones who put us all in that situation. They’re the bastards. Not you. You did what you could.’

‘And something else,’ added Rubén before I could speak. ‘We’re happy you made it. That’s good enough for us. You don’t owe us anything else. But you do owe us that.’

‘That?’

‘We know what you’ve got in mind,’ said Carlitos.

‘It’s just that I miss you. I’d like to be with you.’ I implored. ‘Let’s stay together, like when we were over there … like now.’

‘You think it’s that easy? You know how long it had been since we saw each other, before you started remembering things?’ said Carlitos.

‘If you aren’t here,’ Rubén clarified, ‘there won’t be anybody left to reunite us. Our families dream of us separately.’

‘We didn’t come to look for you,’ said Chanino.

‘What did you come for then?’

‘To say goodbye.’

The knot in my throat rose to my eyes. They walked beside me for two blocks without saying a word, letting me weep. The tears slid down my cheeks and fell from my bowed head onto the flagstones.

‘We don’t want you with us,’ said a voice so childish yet so sure of itself that it made me look up. It was the first time I’d heard it. Hijitus’s voice.

‘You won’t have any alternative,’ I told them all.

‘That’s your decision,’ said Carlitos. ‘And it’s true we can’t stop you. But don’t lie to yourself that you’re doing it for us. We won’t be with you when you do it, so don’t bother calling us.’

The street was blocked by a long wall of bricks. The walls of Chacarita Cemetery.

‘This is as far as we go,’ said Rubén.

‘You’re on your own from here,’ Carlitos completed.

‘Chau, Porteño,’ said Chanino.

‘Chau, Felipe,’ said Hijitus.

The mirage of the city had risen again from its ashes in the faint colours of the early dawn and, as its fragile substance thickened and took shape, that of my friends thinned until the bricks of the cemetery walls showed through their bodies. Their hands could barely be seen as they raised them to wave to me, and their hoarse farewells merged with the whispering of the wind. The roar of a passing bus drowned them out and, with the first ray of sun over the wall, they disappeared like images from a film projected onto the blue sky.

I didn’t run into anyone in the next few blocks, although I couldn’t tell whether it was other people or me who weren’t there. I advanced through the current of the ever more tortuous river I’d been swimming against since I’d left the ruins of my apartment and, despite its ever narrower banks closing in on me and the tarmac swirling against my feet, some obscure instinct guided me towards its source. When I got there, reaching the centre of the oval mandala from which all rivers are born, I began to rotate slowly on my axis, my arms outstretched perpendicular to my torso, beneath the only mercury spotlight still on, as if meting out light and shadow in the morning of the first day.

Over the irregular saw-edge of ferns and geraniums, high up on the terrace of a house of white-painted brick and dark green blinds, which still sheltered the faint shadows of early morning from the all-conquering dawn, three figures in helmets and combat gear, silhouetted against the lemon sky, were watching me. More ghosts.

‘Here. Felipe,’ they called me, raising their rifles in the air.

‘We won! I hit an Englishman! I hit him!’

‘Come in, come up, they may be back!’

Gloria opened the door to me. I stumbled over the threshold and she had to support me to stop me falling.

‘Felipe, my love, what have they done to you?’

She helped me to reach the sofa. She smothered my face in kisses. Hers was running with tears.

‘It’s over,’ I managed to get out.

‘But look at the state you’re in. They’ve nearly killed you.’

‘See? They never can,’ I tried to smile. ‘They were here too, right?’

She nodded.

‘Luckily the girls were out. As soon as I was back on my feet, I rang Mum to come and pick them up.’

‘And why did you stay?’

‘To wait for you. Will you explain what’s happened at some point? Not now, but some time. Ok? I don’t understand a thing. Your friends …’

They were coming down as we spoke. Gloria gave me a few more kisses and went to the kitchen to make maté. Ignacio had one arm in a bandage.

‘You got hit?’ I asked.

‘Just a scratch,’ he beamed back at me.

He and Sergio (Tomás was still upstairs on guard) filled me in and, although their voices came and went as if they were covering and uncovering my ears with cupped palms, I listened to them patiently. It had, after all, been their first confrontation with the English, and they’d done it for me.

‘They swore in Spanish,’ remarked Sergio, with more curiosity than suspicion.

‘Special commandos,’ I answered him. ‘You remember how they warned us about them in the Islands?’

The first maté flooded through my body like a transfusion. From a tin between her knees Gloria fed me biscuits, which I ate at first with difficulty, then greediness and soon desperation. In the intervals she handed the maté round to the others, who took the gourd from her hands with shy and grateful smiles.

‘Can you tell Tomás to come down,’ I exhaled, stuffed. ‘There’s no further danger of attack. Gloria, are my clothes around?’

She helped me get changed, as I could hardly stand up. The combat uniform ended up in a pile of olive green at my feet.

‘I’ve got some bad news for you,’ I announced when I had them all together. Sergio, Ignacio and Tomás looked at me in concern. ‘The aim of the English attack — Major X — he fell in the line of duty. He’d come to Buenos Aires to elicit support: they located him.’ I looked at Gloria out of the corner of my eye. The back of her neck lodged in the back of the sofa, she was smoking, her eyes lost somewhere in the ceiling. ‘It may be of some consolation to know that at least one of his murderers paid — the one you shot. They were the same ones who came here.’

The three of them now looked at Gloria who, only just catching on, sat up in the armchair to accept their condolences.

‘We didn’t know, Señora, our deepest sympathy,’ they muttered softly.

‘But there’s something else,’ I went on when the moment had passed. It was strange: we were all deadly serious, even Gloria. ‘He left you something. Gloria, there’s a bag in the girls’ room. I don’t know if you saw it.’

‘I’ll go and get it.’

I took out the still unmanageable wad of papers and stacked them on my knees. After I’d put them in some sort of order, I handed the sheaf to Tomás, who took it in both hands. The three of them looked at me without daring to ask.

‘Major X’s diaries,’ I told them. ‘From now on you’re going to be their custodians. It’s a big responsibility,’ I added, to confirm what I read in their eyes. ‘Everything that was ever said is true. They hold the secret of the war.’