Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘The wedding bed was prepared in the darkest, dampest room of the palace’s cellars, which was the one the toad had chosen, and the wedding was celebrated. At the banquet, held with great pomp and accompanied by music from a choir of frogs and toads, when they uncovered the dishes brimming with flies, the princess realised she was better off dead. But she knew she couldn’t let her father down a second time and so, under her husband’s vigilant gaze, she ate every last little leg of the flies on her plate. That night, in bed, recalling her father’s commandment and full of hope that one night would be enough, she tried to warm the toad’s cold, viscous skin by pressing it to her body, but it was her blood that turned to ice.

‘Little by little she grew accustomed to her new life: to not entering her private rooms, now full of toad children that broke her toys and pulled her dresses out of shape, to never seeing the sunlight any more. She even adapted to the diet of flies, sharpening her wits to make it more varied: in the mornings she would put milk on them as if they were cornflakes, at lunchtime she would make a pie, for tea she would spread them on toast and at night-time she would make purée. After dinner she only had to put up with the half-hour in which the pale greywhite belly huffed and puffed and croaked over her prostrate body, then turned its green wart-covered back on her, and the princess would delay her sleep imagining in a thousand different ways the features her husband would have the next morning, for she kept thinking that this time she had grown to love him and that tomorrow she would awaken at the side of the most handsome prince on earth. And every morning the first thing she saw on opening her hopeful eyes was a mouth stretched wider than the pillow on which it rested. The princess had never been outside the palace, which in a way was lucky, because the toads had turned the fertile lands of the kingdom into an open-air slaughterhouse, piling the corpses of the animals together with the crops to rot in the sun and so attract the millions of flies they needed to feed themselves, the entire population devoted to the job of catching them and carrying them to the palace in big baskets for the toads to eat. So she started sleeping, sleeping longer and longer. Every night in secret she would eat some crimson berries that brought her a deep sleep so that even when her husband climbed on top of her, she would go on sleeping, his slobbering kisses unable to awaken her. Through the lengthening night she dreamed of her handsome prince, sincerely believing she had come to love her husband and worrying about the inexplicable delay in the promised transformation; in her naivety she thought that if she slept as long as possible her dreams would eventually triumph. Her doubts began the morning she awoke to find the first wart on her finger. Affected by her long enclosure, her skin had begun to turn pale and green as if she were ill, and every morning on awakening she looked at herself naked in the mirror and found a fresh wart on another part of her body. It was around that time that she began to be afraid of, rather than wish for, the promised transformation; she would awaken screaming in the night from a nightmare in which the disgusted Prince Charming kicked the toad in women’s clothes out of his bed. Several months passed, during which the princess resigned herself to her new life so completely that she quite forgot her old one; when one morning, instead of finding new warts, she discovered that one on her belly had grown more than the others and began to get bigger and bigger from that day on. They called the doctor, an old toad with a briefcase who, after checking her, instead of frowning with concern, he stood up and smiled. “We must congratulate the father,” he said. “The kingdom will now have its heirs.”

‘“This then,” thought the princess, “was the change Daddy announced to me, only I was unable to see it. It wasn’t enough to dream it; the dream had to become flesh in my body. They may be tadpoles now, but when they are born they will have changed into little boys and girls just like any others — no, not just like any others: more beautiful than any others, as beautiful as suns. This time everything will be different,” thought the princess that night before she fell fast asleep.’

I have, in different ways, rewritten this novel.

On the one hand, the English-language version of The Islands is shorter than the Spanish original by some hundred pages. When I began writing Las Islas in 1992, some of its realities required a certain degree of introducing to the reader: the internet, virtual reality, new drugs. Today we take them for granted to such an extent than any explanation or over-insistence would be embarrassingly redundant, so that explanatory material has gone. In other cases, I have let go of elements that I judged would be of little interest to readers outside Argentina.

Turning my 600-page novel into a two-hour play in 2011 allowed me to see how further cuts inevitably increased the power of what remained. At the same time, my work on the adaptation, together with the contribution of director Alejandro Tantanian and our wonderful team of actors, brought new action, scenes and dialogue into play: some of these I found so irresistible I had to include them in this renewed version of the novel.

Translation is an exacter science than writing. Ian Barnett’s practised eye detected many errors and inconsistencies that I was happy to mend; some of these corrections have found their way back into Spanish, in the new edition to be published this year in Buenos Aires.

I believe, with Borges, that ‘the concept of the “definitive text” corresponds only to religion or exhaustion’, and that what endures, in art as in life, is not what lasts but what lives on, not what achieves finality but what constantly transforms and renews itself. I don’t know if The Islands will endure, but I have grown fond of its penchant for mutability, of its refusal to settle down and sit still.

Who knows if there are other versions yet to come.

Carlos Gamerro

March 2012, Buenos Aires

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