Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

The dream I had was slow, mysterious, silent, like a film: just a noiseless, floating travelling shot of soldiers on hilltops, as if taken from a slow-passing helicopter and projected without sound. Graceful and erect, they were all standing in the mouths of their caves to watch it fly past, leaning gently on their rifles and machine guns like Zulus on their spears, looking impassively on, their sunken-eyed faces almost invisible under their beards and expressing nothing more than a mildly irked interest like that sometimes shown by lions for the camera in wild-life documentaries. The hillsides were steep, far steeper than my memory had painted them, vertical like the towers of a castle, the highest stone needles wreathed in wisps of fog that sometimes hid them and their perching sentinels from view. Looking more carefully, it was easy to make out the ones that had had lighter complexions and eyes, and you could still make out on some uniforms the olive green or the mottling of camouflage that had once served to differentiate them. It wasn’t difficult to understand then: the soldiers were an admixture of Argentinians and English, caressed by the hand of time till they’d become almost indistinguishable, and if the certainty of being the true owners of the land emanated from them like an aura, distinguishing them as the men that no army could drive out, it was because on those peaks, lit by the last ray of sunlight stretching over the shadow of the rising and falling plains, dwelt only the spirits of the dead.

I awoke with a start in that dread chasm at the centre of the night, as if, in the vast silence, someone had shaken me to warn me of imminent danger. I should have been so lucky: I was alone. The rest of the world had disappeared, swallowed by the silence and the dark. I got up, my heart revving feverishly, rather than beating, on a frequency of its own that had nothing to do with the rest of the body. I noted with infinite gratitude that my headache had receded, though I knew it was still crouching among the furniture, in the corners of the room, where the light didn’t reach, biding its time. Carefully, so as not to get myself any dirtier than I already had, I took off my sweatshirt and tank-top, screwed them into a ball and threw them onto the plastic crate from the laundry. Shivering with cold until the water ran hot, I soaped and rinsed my face, hair and arms, right up to my shoulders, several times, without being altogether successful in getting rid of the smell, until a glance at the mirror showed me I still had the duct tape stuck over my mouth and that the smell was coming from within. I don’t know how many times I brushed my teeth, chewing the toothpaste and swallowing it as well. I walked around the house turning all the lights on, breathing deeply with difficulty, kicking the magazines strewn across the floor. I made myself a large cup of milky coffee in the kitchen and drank it with bay biscuits, dunking them bit by bit to soften them up and swallowing them with difficulty, as if learning anew. I looked out onto the patio, through the half-open window: an overcast night, a sky of melted wax, a thin film of damp spread over everything, as if the noisy breath of the building — pipes, bed-springs, a dog growling in its sleep, an old man coughing, the hum of my computers, a telephone ringing in an empty apartment — were circulating through its rooms and corridors, and condensing on its walls, flowerpots, tiles, windows, doors … Further afield the growling and snorting and chewing of broken glass of a busy dustcart, and from the motorway the purring of engines and the displaced whistle of air and whisper of tyres on the wet tarmac. How long had I been in here? Was this the first night or the second? I looked for my cigarettes, but the packet was empty. I couldn’t remember smoking the last one. What a pleasure it would be now to grab wallet and keys, wrap myself in my coat and walk to the Shell station on Avenida Independencia, clicking my heels on the flagstones, ordering a jumbo hot dog and chatting with the manager for a while, he’ll listen to anyone at that time of night to stop himself falling asleep …

‘If you go out now,’ I answered myself sharply, to drag myself away from the crack through which the night air burst into my coke-ravaged nose, ‘you won’t be able to go back. If you’ve got this far,’ I told myself, resorting to the most idiotic, the most criminal of excuses, ‘you’re better off finishing at all costs, rather than giving up and losing everything you’ve done. Just a little bit more,’ I murmured as I dragged myself back to the screen, which had been waiting trustingly all this time, knowing I had no choice but to return. Where was I to go in any case? The English had me surrounded. They’d advanced on Puerto Argentino on different fronts: 3 Para and 45 Commando had crossed the whole island on foot from San Carlos; 42 Commando and 2 Para had travelled by helicopter as far as Monte Kent, from which they could see their final objective, sharp and clear as if on a model, incredibly close: the town lay at their feet. The ones that had had the worst of it were the Scots and Welsh Guards, who had arrived with the Gurkhas from the south in two ships: the Sir Galahad and the Sir Tristram . Daylight and the Argentinian planes (I sent in six odd Skyhawks so as not to waste time looking them up) caught them on manœuvres in a lost cove, isolated and with no air cover: almost fifty were horribly burned to death before they set foot on land. With varying degrees of luck, they completed the cordon and by the night of 11th June they were ready to strike. Almost 9,000 of us were waiting on the other side with three 155mm cannon, forty-two 105mm cannon, anti-aircraft batteries, mortars, machine guns, FALs, FAPs … The Navy had withdrawn all ships to the mainland, the Air Force, all planes and helicopters: now it was up to the Army to manage by itself. Puerto Argentino was like the village in Asterix the Gaul : ‘The Malvinas are entirely occupied by the English. Well, not entirely … One small village of indomitable gauchos …’ All we lacked was the magic potion.

The English start with Monte Longdon, defended by B Company of R7, a platoon of Mechanised Engineers Company 10 and a few marines with 12.7mm machine guns (no need to look that up in a book). 3 Para attack during the night after an intense bombardment to ‘soften up’ the Argentinian defensive positions, but this time the RASIT land surveillance radar is operational and the English are caught out in the open by the Argentinian fire, which, with the protection and height afforded by the hills, picks off the various companies one by one. I couldn’t remember how I’d installed the surrender and prisoner-taking options before, and I didn’t feel like going back to check, so Verraco was just going to have to kill them all, which, knowing him, wouldn’t bother him in the least; after all, this had been his battle, and he wouldn’t want the slightest bit of realism to interfere with a revenge fantasy he’d been nursing with maternal devotion day after day for ten whole years. Longdon had been the toughest battle of the war — although our mates at Goose Green also claimed that dubious privilege — and, despite being the one I knew best, the effort of including it in the game once again left me exhausted. I was dying to get some rest, but there was no time: 45 Commando of the Royal Marines are already advancing on the Cerro Dos Hermanas, which awaits them defended by some three hundred men from C Company of R4 and B Company of R6. Calmly, leisurely, the Correntinos use the English for target practice as if they were caiman or capybara, and celebrate the next morning with maté and a chamamé knees-up. Before dawn Verraco would still be contriving to tempt 42 Commando into a reckless assault on Monte Enriqueta, letting them advance to a preset point, after which 300 soldiers would emerge, armed to the teeth, from the very bowels of the earth, and the English would fly like fresh-mown grass. Here ends the first night of fighting.