Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘It’s bitter.’

‘Yes. We were going to bring out a fruit-flavoured line, but the lab fell. Try not to taste it. Swallow it whole. But let’s have a toast first.’

We clinked pills and, with a sip from the same glass, we both swallowed them. I closed my eyes. Quick, quick. But I opened them and everything was still the same. Gloria looked at me for a second like she’d never looked at me before and gave me a wan smile. Then she became preoccupied with picking at an ingrowing hair in her bikini-line that had escaped the wax.

‘It’s not working.’

‘No, it isn’t, is it?’ she replied absorbed in her business.

‘Isn’t it supposed to be instantaneous?’

‘They must be coated. Coated ones take longer to act, you know.’

‘They didn’t look coated,’ I said with so little conviction that she didn’t bother to answer. ‘Where did you get them?’

‘My guerrilla days.’

‘Won’t they have expired by now?’

‘Cyanide never expires.’

There was nothing to read on the ceiling; it was impeccably painted, not a trace of damp, like a blank screen on which, miraculously, in those last few moments, the film of my life was mercifully not being projected. A bit of luck: I don’t think I could have taken it. Just a few brief flashes on my retinas after diverting my eyes from the filament of the light bulb. The room dissolved around them and, when I tried to get back to it, I found myself staring instead at the light undulations of the Malihuel lagoon, the sunlight ricocheting off its surface and dazzling my eyes. I dipped a hand in the warm water and could feel it holding me, its fingers flowing and interlacing, playing with and between my own.

‘Feel it? Feel it?’ Gloria’s voice asked me.

I felt it. The first time just something moving, expanding, at regular one-minute intervals. My ribs began to bow outwards, to give it space, and my heart began to pulse, rather than beat. Then I was breathing differently, as if I had a hot-air balloon inside my chest and the atmosphere was giving me the kiss of life, forcing more — and more — into my lungs with every breath until, fit to burst, it let me go and all the contained air escaped in gust after gust of unspeakable sweetness. In my surprise I remembered that these novel and varied sensations were those of death; I wouldn’t have waited so long if I’d know it was going to feel so good. Gloria’s hand was still moving inside mine, as if it had a life of its own, and mine did too. They touched and recognised each other like people. It was as if I’d always been wearing gloves and now, for the first time, had been allowed to take them off. I turned to look at her. Her eyes had become liquid, brimming, like water overflowing a glass, and her smile was the same as the time I ran after her with the squeezy bottle at the carnival in Malihuel. Her chin trembled uncontrollably as she spoke.

‘Looks like it’s working, doesn’t it?’

‘What is it?’ I asked, enraptured.

‘Ecstasy. Never tried it?’

‘No.’

‘Mmmh. Congratulations. Your new life begins today.’

‘Aren’t we going to die?’

‘Someday, I guess.’

I didn’t feel disappointed. It wasn’t that I’d suddenly been filled with the will to live, just that, in this state of absolute plenitude, it didn’t matter whether I was alive or dead, as long as I could go on feeling like this. ‘This is what we were made for,’ I found myself repeating without surprise as I slid my hand along the curve of her backwaistbuttocks, recapturing the mystery of the first time — no, realising that the first time I’d done nothing more than brush it. So this was touching? This conviction that my fingers weren’t discovering but creating what flowed between them, my hands running over Gloria’s skin, dissolving the old scars with the ease of the potter’s hand smoothing his clay on the turning wheel?

‘Hey, I think these things are the real deal.’

‘Where did you get them?’

‘Manna from heaven. A friend from Spain.’

‘Christopher Columbus?’

A fresh gust of warm air blowing from the new world extinguished the words in our mouths before we could speak them and a drowsy sweetness gripped my limbs, holding them fast, delivering me defenceless into her irreverent hands, which began to knead the clay of my old body. A new identity was being born, trembling as her fingers gradually drew out the forms of the new; the hands of Rodin couldn’t have breathed more life into my limbs. Possessed by an ambition for greater plenitude, I leaped on top of her and slid inside her open body but, after the first few assaults, I realised I could barely feel anything. Not that I regretted it too much, because my willie swam slackly between her legs the way as a boy I went skinny-dipping one summer in the warm water of Malihuel’s lagoon.

‘It’s not for fucking, is it,’ she murmured without disappointment. ‘Everything wants to go out and play. Nothing wants to stay inside.’

I couldn’t even if I wanted to; my body was turning inside out like a glove so that the hand of the world, which had taken the form of Gloria, could approach to touch me.

‘It’s great this, eh?’

‘Mmmmmh.’

‘Can’t you say anything else?’

‘Mmmmmh.’

Why when a single sound was enough? With both of us feeling the same, there was nothing left to say. Our words had fallen away like our clothes and in this terrible, fearless nakedness the voice was nothing but breathing sounds, the words poured into my ears nothing but prolongations of the lips that were kissing them. How wrong I’d always been: it wasn’t things that were distanced from words, it was us. In the same way that, for the first time, I was touching what my greedy baby’s hands were reaching for, for the first time I was saying the words I’d only repeated until now, saying them with my whole body. Before today, I understood, I’d only lied.

‘You’re really tripping; I envy you. How long’s it been since you had something to eat?’

‘Day. Night,’ I mumbled.

‘No wonder. And no sleep. It’s like you’ve taken three at once. Come with me; let’s put some music on.’

In our bare feet on the surf-cold sand that had burst through the scales of the parquet floor, we ran to the living room to put on some Prince. Blindly lying on the sofa I discovered that my whole body responded to the slightest vibration, tibia-femur-hip as tremulous and sensitive as hammer-anvil-stirrup, the diaphragm turned eardrum trembling in wave after wave of pleasure transmitted to the throbbing folds of the intestines. I opened my eyes to Gloria, who was parading her nakedness around the room while tracing arabesques with her arms, placing the soles of her feet with deliberate care — a transported, ecstatic Bacchante.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked her, fascinated.

‘I’m dancing,’ she remarked, without looking at me, bewitched by her own movements. ‘Dancing barefoot on the broken glass of the past.’

‘How long do the effects last?’

‘Six hours more or less. Adam and Eve’s time in paradise. The guy who invented it thought of everything.’

Six hours! But what did I care if in these six hours I was going to feel everything I hadn’t felt in my thirty-year existence? I found myself repeating a phrase I’d once read in a book I never finished, and immediately forgot, remembered now that I could finally understand it: ‘There is another country where one is at home, where everything one does is innocent.’

‘Why did nobody ever tell me this existed?’ I stammered. ‘Is there a planet-wide conspiracy to stop us experiencing it?’

‘Maybe you’re right. It brings out everything good that’s been repressed, it takes the fear out of love. Don’t you sometimes get the feeling we’re more afraid of showing the good than the bad we carry around inside us? Who knows if the unconscious isn’t full of precisely this love? We think it’s nothing but a sewer because we’ve been fed Freud’s whole psychic trip.’