Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘Can you imagine if we all took it at the same time? The concentrated energy would be so great that the whole world would change, and that change would be irreversible.’

‘You are a sweetie,’ Gloria said to me, reaching out one hand, between whose caress and my cheek an infinitely fine dust had settled, as on a piece of furniture after a couple of days without dusting. ‘You remind me of my first time. I also thought that giving my ex an e would turn him into John Lennon. If only. It doesn’t work on pricks like him, you know. They drool all over you at best. I’ve been there.’

A few minutes ago, I thought, I wouldn’t have believed it, but now what she was saying sounded perfectly reasonable. With dawning astonishment I realised we’d started talking in order to communicate again, that a conversation like this one would have been inconceivable until almost a minute ago, and at that precise instant I felt in the pit of my stomach the certainty that Tuesday existed and, in the mere conception that another state unlike this one was possible, I sensed with the most childish pain that the effects of the drug were beginning to fade. Gloria was looking at me with the most intimate love, but over her soft smile the first quiver of still invisible sadness had begun to play.

‘You too?’ she asked without needing to specify.

‘So soon?’ I implored and went quiet as I heard the first muffled thud, feeling it directly over my heart from the effects of the pill. The dinosaur from the end of the world, wakening from its brief nap in the sun, was on the march again.

It receded in waves just as it had come. The moments of overwhelming fullness came back at regular intervals, but now there was always the awareness, an awareness that they weren’t invincible, that little by little they were losing ground and that at some point they’d be gone completely. I still didn’t feel fear, anguish, guilt, impotence. But they were now becoming thinkable … The clocks had regained their authority over time, minutely slicing it up with their precise knives, objects were again clothing themselves in their surfaces and fingers no longer sank in when they touched them. Knowing, always knowing, the ignorance of anything distinct from pleasure ebbing from the incandescent cells that went out one by one like stars in the light of day, I tried to delay the inevitable by closing my eyes and launching myself in one last assault on the still ductile body yawning and stretching to loosen its joints beneath mine, but my caresses were those of a shipwrecked sailor on the chest that keeps him afloat as the current leads him inexorably away from the promised land.

‘It’s going, it’s going, like grains of sand in your hand,’ Gloria kept repeating as it crept hopelessly through her fingers.

‘Why won’t it go on?’ I implored. ‘I don’t want it to stop! I want to live here for ever!’

‘I do too, my love. I dunno.’ She stretched out, curved and sinuous, to the upturned alarm clock. ‘Ha! Know what time it is?’

‘No.’

‘Twelve. Noon, but anyway. Cinderella has to make a quick phone call.’

She dialled while I stroked her, closing my eyes to delay for a few more instants the moment at which they’d re-establish their tyranny over the other senses.

‘Hi, Mum. I’m fine, don’t worry. Reeeeally fine. Are the girls back from school yet? Put them on … Sole, my love, my little chickadee. How’s Mummy’s little darling? Is Malvina with you? Oh, you were listening. You little snoop! Mummy loves you so, so much, you can’t imagine how much. Bet you don’t know who I’m with?’ She covered the receiver with her hand for a second to talk to me: ‘You’ll see, they’ll guess straightaway.’ She went back to them: ‘Yes! Got it in one! We’re going to take you to the cinema this afternoon as a treat.’ To me again: ‘Doing anything this afternoon?’ ‘Going out running on the clouds for a bit,’ I murmured, ‘but I can leave it till tomorrow.’ She gave me a long, liquid kiss on the mouth and went back to the receiver. ‘I’ll come and pick you up at … Put Granny on. Mummy adores you, eh. Muah. Muah. Muah again.’

‘They say hi,’ she said when she finally hung up.

She began ruthlessly to get dressed.

‘Tomorrow’s Tuesday, isn’t it? I have to find some work as soon as possible, I’m …’ She checked her handbag. ‘I can’t even afford the cinema; I’ll have to ask my old lady for some. You and I just took the last of what you gave me. Mmmh I can still feel it, can you?’

I was smoking, contemplating in the dead corner of the ceiling the life I had before me, my lungs flooded with smoke, which the residual effects of the ecstasy made silky, caressing. Luckily the comedown was gradual, like a slow low tide of the blood, quite unlike the suicidal precipice of cocaine. Now that would have been too much. I felt prey to a strange lucidity, a blank, empty lucidity, with no other object than itself, a dispassionately contemplated nothingness. Nothing here, nothing there …

‘I’d like to stay in bed with you, to fall asleep together … We never have, have we? But I don’t like them travelling in taxis on their own. There are all sorts … Are you going home? Ah, right, you haven’t got one. Want to stay? You can sleep for a while, while I go and get them.’

She stopped talking when she saw me crying. Without bothering to ask me she got on the bed and made room for my head between her breasts, running one hand — merely a woman’s hand by now — over my face and hair, repeating in a whisper ‘It won’t be all right, it won’t be all right,’ her heartbeat calming me till I could breathe again with my mouth closed.

‘Don’t go,’ I begged her. I was pierced by a sudden glacial cold, as if my bones were vibrating inside me. She touched my forehead with the back of her fingers.

‘You’re burning up, you poor thing. Don’t be scared, it’s the hangover, worse in your state. You’ll be all right after a few hours’ sleep.’

‘Then what do I do?’

‘Well, if you feel ok, you can come to the cinema with us.’

‘With my life. You should give me an e every six hours, like antibiotics.’

‘That’s not a bad idea. A mite expensive, that’s all. And then you donate your liver to science. I dunno. Listen, darling, you and me … I’m afraid we’ve been seriously screwed. Happy we’ll never be. It’d be a real downer though to be happy in these conditions. So let’s think of an alternative.’

‘It’s just that it’s all so … fragile. First I fall into hell, then I emerge in paradise, and suddenly … here.’

‘Know what I think? Want me to tell you what I do when …? It’s like this. Heaven and hell … are just drugs. Understand? Drugs. Nothing else. They stay for a while, then they go away. Know what we’re going to do? I’ll go and get the girls, and meanwhile you can stay here in bed and sleep. I’ll only be a little while, ok? When we get back, I’ll make you something to eat.’

‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep.’

‘I’ll tell you a bedtime story. It’s a fairy tale to help you get to sleep. I’ve got some great ones. The girls love them. They’re fairy tales in reverse. In my stories the glass slipper fits the stepsister and the ugly duckling grows into an ugly duck. Ha! And Sleeping Beauty carries on sleeping covered in dust, unhappily ever after. Let’s see … I’ll tell you the one about the Toad King. Once upon a time … there was a very powerful king, who wisely ruled over a very rich kingdom that stretched from the mountains to the sea and had in it all climates and all landscapes, and the land bore fruit by the handful, almost without need for cultivation. This king had an only daughter, whom he loved with all his heart, and he would shower her with gifts and attention. Several rooms in the palace, where all ugliness was banned, were for the princess’s sole use: one full of sweets, another of dresses, another of pets, another of toys. Of these her favourite was a gleaming, perfect ball of gold, brighter than the sun. The little princess’s life was spent peacefully in the palace’s beautiful gardens, without a care other than playing with her golden ball. Until one day war was declared at the gates of the kingdom. The king called his beloved daughter to him and said to her: “Duty calls. I must fight the enemy that threatens our borders. In my absence you may play in all the rooms in the palace, including my chambers; all except the one that contains the book in which the fate of the kingdom is written, for what is written in it, once read, can never be undone. This is the key to that door,” he concluded and handed it to her. “I give it to you so that you will not use it.” The days passed and the girl enjoyed her new freedom so much that she was soon consoled about her father’s absence. One day, while playing in the corridors, the beautiful golden ball rolled up against the door of the forbidden room, as if it had a life of its own. Her curiosity making her forget the warnings, she took the little golden key, which she always kept at hand in the pocket of her apron, and pushed: inside was nothing but a heavy table, on which, lay a great, closed book with orange covers. As she approached, the girl discovered with astonishment that printed on it in gold letters was her own name. That was why he didn’t want me to read it, she thought to herself and, feeling offended by her father’s deceit, she opened it without hesitation at the first page. It was covered in tiny letters, but to her surprise the little princess discovered that they turned to bloodstains as she tried to read them. Page after page the same thing happened: seemingly ordinary letters became bloodstains no sooner had she fixed her eyes upon them. She closed the book, recalling her father’s warnings and sorry she hadn’t obeyed them, although no sooner had she done this than through the window she heard the sound of trumpets and cries of victory. Jumping for joy, she tried to reach it to look out, but it was too high, so she had to climb on the table; she still couldn’t reach the window; only by climbing on the forbidden book was she able to peek over the edge. What she saw through it struck her dumb with fright, and the golden ball fell from her open hand to the floor, where it shattered into a thousand pieces. Her father had returned, yes, but not resplendent as he had left on his spirited white charger, but weighed down by chains on a sad grey donkey and surrounded by an escort of ugly toads from the northern marshes, his allies in the war against the neighbouring kingdom; they it was who were croaking out the songs of victory. Leading the procession, mounted on the white horse, which advanced with white mane hanging and head bowed, now rode the Toad King. “Your father has something to say to you,” he roared in a voice of thunder. Without looking at her, the king spoke, his voice broken and glum: “You have disobeyed me and as a consequence the commander of the toads has deposed me and is the new king. He has asked me for your hand in marriage and I am in no position to refuse him. But do not despair: if you marry him and obey him in everything, the day you accept him and learn to love him he will turn into a handsome prince who will whisk you away to his kingdom, where you will live happily ever after, and I shall regain my throne and forgive you.”