Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

I was saved by Verraco, who whirled in shouting at me without saying hello. ‘What are you up to! You haven’t installed it yet? They’re all waiting.’ I said goodbye to George, who in his drunken stupor had perhaps mistaken my hand for one of the Islands and wouldn’t let go, and stepped out into the corridor. An unmistakable, welcoming, almost homely aroma filtered under the door of my old office, and in my enthusiasm I knocked loudly, without noticing that the old wooden door had been replaced by a press-board one, into which my knuckles sank, making a dent, at the bottom of which a fine crack appeared, and in my attempts to grout it with saliva my finger went through to the other side; but before I could pull it out again, I felt someone grab it and cried out, backing my arm up with such force that it took the skewered door with it. ‘I’ve got him! I’ve got the spy!’ screeched an indignant voice from the other side, without letting go or showing itself, the door still suspended between the two of us. I tried to circle round him, but that only made him turn too and we’d started to get dizzy when, with a shove, I managed to pop the door back into its frame, this time with me on the inside and my dancing partner on the outside. While I was holding the fort against the battering of his fists, I checked out the alterations they’d made: it was narrower owing to a new partition, and a lot of the old computers had been replaced, but something intangible preserved its identity. The smell probably, I thought, as I scanned the place until I spotted a wisp of smoke and let go of the door to open a drawer which, as if it had been holding its breath, exhaled a blast of white fumes. Catapulted forwards, a gangling nerd burst into the room and trained his bright, glassy eyes and chinless jaw on me, and shouted at me in that shrill and brittle voice affected by young men who’ve been given too much authority:

‘You haven’t touched anything, have you?’

I pulled furiously on the spliff to breathe life into its embers. Then I held it aloft.

‘This.’

‘You from narcotics, are you? What section?’

‘I’m from the outside.’

He brushed aside a greasy cowlick that had got in the way of his disbelief. He looked as if he’d just woken up from a nap in a tin of sardines.

‘Outside? Are you pulling my leg?’

‘Can’t. No hands free,’ I said, puffing merrily away. ‘Verraco sent me.’

His face changed the second he heard the name; even his hair suddenly perked up as in a before-and-after shampoo ad.

‘But then you must be … Forgive me, Master, I didn’t recognise you, come in and sit down. Félix, Felipe Félix, my God.’ He offered me a seat, another joint, a right hand with long, serrated, black-rimmed nails. ‘You don’t know how often I’ve imagined this moment …’

‘And who are you?’

‘Your disciple.’

‘Didn’t know I had any.’

‘I applied for this job so I could study your designs in depth. I tried to follow in your footsteps, you know. If you’ve got time, I’d like to show you some improvements I’ve made, I mean changes … I always wanted to be like you.’

‘I didn’t.’

He eased the tension floating in the air with conciliatory gestures of his long, fine fingers, flat-tipped like spatulas, adapted to the computer keys the way bats’ fingers are adapted to flight or seals’ to swimming.

‘I know, I know. I don’t belong here either. This is just a temporary thing. So I can be close to them,’ he said, caressing the nearest computer. ‘That’s the price, isn’t it? Did you bring the game? I’m dying to try it out.’

I nodded wordlessly, as I was holding my breath. I needed a more relaxed working atmosphere to perform the task in hand and, as the one outside wasn’t looking very favourable, I’d just have to create it inside. The rough edges of reality were soon mellowed by the smoke, becoming as soft and malleable as a dunked bay biscuit.

‘Why did they isolate the network?’ I asked him.

‘Look,’ he apologised, ‘it’s nothing to do with you. I know your defences were extremely secure, but paranoïa’s an endemic disease around here you know. And since they don’t know the first thing about computers … Every time they pressed the wrong key and the screen vanished, they started screaming “Digital subversion! Computer anarchism!” It was better I swear, you were breathing shit, it was unbearable.’

‘I know. Why do you think I left?’

‘Anyway, it’s a logical inevitability. Paranoïa, I mean. You know. If the intelligence service exists to keep an eye on everybody , it has to incorporate another service to keep an eye on the first one, then a third, and a fourth … A classic infinite regress. That’s how you formulated it, isn’t it?’

‘More or less. I wanted to show them that an intelligence service that works properly is a logical impossibility. Just to wind them up.’

‘But you were right! Your predictions were right! That’s why the SIDE only investigates itself now. The idea being that you can only solve the crimes you commit yourself. It simplifies everything. They’ve even decided to start with the solution and plan the crime backwards.’

I looked uneasily around me, then at the garrulous nerd, with an annoyance that masked the beginnings of fear. The dope had begun to kick in. I should have thought about this before taking the first toke.

‘Aren’t they listening to us?’

‘Of course they are.’

‘So how come you’re telling me all this?’

He’d just taken another synthetic cherry drop out of its sticky cellophane wrapper (his third: he apparently survived exclusively on them) and wiped his fingers on his pants before answering in sugary tones:

‘The only thing secrets produce is more curiosity. But, if we tell them all … We conducted tests. We tied the subjects to a chair and revealed the most horrifying state secrets to them one after another. You know how long the subject with the most staying power lasted? Two hours. After that it was like he was listening to the sea. You asked him to repeat things for you and he’d start mumbling nonsense. Information is the new opium of the people.’ He let out a laugh of insincere humility. ‘But anyway, you know all about that better than I do.’

Although theoretical digressions can normally grip me for hours, especially when I’m stoned, something was beginning to bother me: the eager looks of approval as he repeated my pedantic theories of yesteryear, the mixture of adulation and arrogance, the dreadful brotherhood he was yoking me into. It wasn’t his fault; it was just that it bothered me to see myself reflected in such a deformed mirror. What was I going to do if he decided to stick around? It was vital for me to work alone if I was going to avoid discovery.

‘Look, the way I see it, the SIDE’s an anarchist utopia in reverse. An organisation without leaders where nobody’s free. Nothing like the tower, is it.’

I have to admit that the combination of the dope and his inane prattle had made me drop my guard, but if he was testing my reaction, he can’t have seen much more change in my expression than a statue’s when a bird shits on its head.

‘You mean the Tower of the English in Retiro?’ I asked, with wide-open innocent Tweety Pie eyes.

He laughed. For a moment I thought he had a keyboard in his mouth, but it was just his stained teeth.

‘Come on. You know which! The Tamerlán Tower! An antiquated design. So rigid, compared to ours. Its function is to make people feel permanently watched over, even if they aren’t. Here it’s the other way round.’

Waves of relief ran up my thighs. It was just another theoretical question.

‘It’s the master’s eye that fattens the beast …’ I muttered, without a clue what I meant by it.