Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘It can’t see into these tunnels. It’s we servants who keep an eye on the masters here. We complement each other. We’re the moat around the castle. And they,’ he said with a slight bow towards the almighty computers, ‘are the higher authority on which the whole human sphere depends. Plato was right after all. In there live the Ideas and we are the new philosophers governing the Republic, because they’ll only speak to us.’ He drew closer until his voice became a complicitous whisper in my ear. Bad breath and all. He raised one of his E.T. fingers: ‘We hold the power of the key. Now you know who’s running the show here. One day we’ll even be able to do without the agents, and a handful of us hackers spying on each other’s computers will be able to cope with all the work. Soon there’ll only be simulations, virtual wars. An exact copy makes the original unnecessary.’

‘Try dropping a colour photocopy of a blotter and see if you flip,’ I muttered.

He smiled. He’d been provoking me.

‘I know. Your generation still believes in all that stuff about extending human capabilities. But look at them. Isn’t it us who are extending them?’ he said, patting one as if it were a thoroughbred. ‘The human mind’s an imperfect machine. Some day they’ll replace us completely.’

Instead of answering him I went to the nearest keyboard and typed in a simple instruction. Immediately the ordered columns, lines and graphs on all the monitors shattered like so many reflections on a still lake into which someone just threw a stone, and one by one the screens died into a series of windows open to a starless night sky. From the neighbouring rooms came shouts, wails, swearwords, anguished cries for help. The nerd’s face had gone a delicate shade of matt grey like the plastic of the computers, as if, chameleon-like, he wanted to blend into them.

‘What have you done …? All the … systems are down. What have you done?’ he stammered.

‘The paradox of the hanged man. Haven’t you read Don Quixote ?’

‘No, what’s that got to do with it …?’

‘You should read it.’

‘Paper hurts my eyes. You’d better fix this, Félix, or I’m a dead man.’

‘You’re the governor of an island. On the island there’s a river; over the river there’s a bridge; at the end of the bridge there’s a gallows. Everyone who wants to pass that way has to say where they’re going: if they tell the truth, they’re free to go on their way; if they lie, they’re hanged from the gallows. The system works admirably until one day a man arrives who says he’s come to be hanged on that very gallows. See where it’s going? If they decide to hang him, he was telling the truth and doesn’t deserve to die; if he doesn’t die, he was lying and they’re obliged to hang him. What would you do in their place?’

Six telephones started ringing at once. The nerd stretched out his hand, wondering which one to grab, like some new variation on Russian roulette. He let them ring.

‘What did you input that into the computer for? You’ve driven it mad. Computers can’t solve logical paradoxes.’

‘Because they’re perfect. So, what would you do?’

‘Nothing, you can’t do anything. The problem has no solution, I’ve already told you!’

‘Sancho found one. You know what he decided?’

‘No!’

‘That he should live. When justice is in doubt, it’s better to opt for mercy. The only way to solve a paradox: skip a level. From logic to ethics. Isn’t it brilliant?’

Just then Verraco whirled in like a miniature twister.

‘What are you up to, you dickh— Oh, Félix, it’s you. I should’ve known. Have you installed the game for me? What the fuck is going on?’

‘Slight glitch. We’re sorting it out, but we have a problem and we need your opinion. Imagine you’re the governor of an island …’

‘If they’d made me governor instead of Menéndez, I still would be, I can assure you.’

‘That’s right. You’re the governor of the Malvinas. You put a gallows on the Moody Brook bridge …’ I told him the rest. When I’d finished, he stood there staring at me.

‘So?’

‘So what would you do?’

‘Hang him for being such a smart alec. Where’s all this leading?’

I looked at the nerd with raised eyebrows.

‘Now do you understand why we’re irreplaceable?’

* * *

With the nerd out of action and banished to some obscure tunnel of the anthill, I sat, fingers itching, in front of the keyboard’s array of smooth nipples and, with the adrenaline rushing through my veins, I began to run through the files where the secret lives of everyone in Argentina worth knowing anything about flickered in the crackling fire of ones and zeros. My successor had changed the codes and cancelled several shortcuts I’d left for myself, but he hadn’t detected them all. You’re pretty good, kiddo, but you’re no match for the Master, I crooned mentally to him as, in a few keystrokes, I reached the files on Tamerlán and his sons. While I was copying them onto floppies, which the machine dropped one by one into my hand like an obedient dog, I checked, just in case, to see if the file I was looking for was among them. Apparently not: they only went up to 1991; all the files on this year had to be somewhere else. It took me another ten minutes to find out where. The file name was C/TAMERL.592. It was impregnable; hacking into it and dodging the alarms manually could take me hours. Time for the Falklands 140682 worm to work its magic.

* * *

Back at home, I bunged the floppies in the computer and grabbed the receiver to call Verraco. I’d left him playing, drooling with joy, yelling ‘Gotcha! Gotcha! I’ll show you, you bastards!’, the veins in his neck bulging with the strain, belching out hoarse cries of victory every time he sank a ship or shot down an enemy plane. He’d forgotten all about the outside world and its inhabitants; his only reality, that screen glowing with colours so much brighter than the drab hues of nature. ‘Verraco is back! Nobody believed me, but, here he is!’ he yelled, wrenching the joystick back and forth in his clenched fists. Rarely had I seen a happiness purer than that which steadily invaded the screwed-up face of this old, moustachioed child as one by one he recovered the positions he’d lost ten years ago. He’d entered an ideal world of repetition without boredom, of surprises without nasty shocks, outside all time but the one created by the temporary obstacles the computer put in his way; without changeovers, without stopovers, without a military career, he could jump from the option ‘Rambo Single-Handed v The World’, mowing down, immortal, twenty divisions of the English army with a single machine gun, to the no less illusory ‘General Controlling Every Step of the War like a Game of Chess’, the two polar, yet complementary, opposites of every dyed-in-the-wool soldier’s fantasies.

‘So? How’s it hanging?’ I said to him when he picked up.

‘We’re winning!’ crowed his jubilant voice at the other end, and he hung up without further ado. Better that way. While I waited for the virus to take effect, I had time to quietly read through Tamerlán’s record and find out a couple of things that had intrigued me.

The Tamerláns had arrived in Argentina just after the end of the war, but there were no records prior to 1955; some farsighted employee, perhaps paid off by Wolf Tamerlán suddenly coy about his former proximity to President Perón, probably burned them, along with the stacks of portraits of the now-deposed ‘fugitive Tyrant’ and Evita that in those days hung on every wall. Then, patiently, over the years, his conscientious successors had gradually filled in the gaps with newspaper and magazine cuttings and assorted documents that patched together an official, somewhat sweetened version of Wolf Tamerlán and his son Fausto’s first ten years in Argentina. In one interview from 1973, for example, appeared a photo of a forty-something Fausto inaugurating a working-class housing complex, grinning in his brand-new leather jacket and sharing the V-for-victory with all around him. ‘The Day I Came To This Country, I Was Already A Peronist,’ bragged one headline, and then went on: ‘We disembarked at the port alone, my father and I, down a gangway left by the sailors in their haste, before we lost sight of them. There was no one there to welcome us, no one in all the endless empty port, and we trudged for blocks without running into a soul, dragging our only suitcase behind us. We didn’t even know what direction the city lay in. But it was a sunny day and, in my childish innocence, I marvelled at the fact that we were sweating in our shirtsleeves in mid-October and that the branches of the trees were so full of leaves. We walked for two hours: the bars, the shops, the houses … everything was closed; there wasn’t even any traffic. We were used to seeing devastated cities as dead as the landscape of the moon; but this — an entire city, with all its flowers and the singing of the birds, and devoid of people — this scared me more than anything I’d seen in the war. Reaching a broad avenue, we heard a distant roar drawing nearer, and the flagstones began to shake beneath our feet as if a stampede of thousands of animals (no offence) were headed in our direction. Curious, we quickened our pace towards the corner from where the tremors seemed to be coming and, when we got there, we were swept up by a torrent. Like a river bursting dam after dam, the fervent, pulsing human tide dragged us with it. Struggling just to stay together, we let ourselves be carried along until it flowed into a large square, a sea of dark brown heads dancing before the great pink reef that held back the pounding of its heavy swell. Tired from our trek and sore from the trampling, we took off our shoes and, as we had done so often in Rome, sank our feet into the balmy cool of a fountain. [ He smiles. ] Delighted at our daring, pointing at us and shouting “The Gringos! Look at the Gringos!” dozens of sweating workers imitated us, and soon the fountain was filled with their laughter and splashing. My ears still ring with the sound rising up from that human swell, like a seashell that is always with me; and without knowing its meaning — without even knowing if it was a complaint or an insult or an expression of popular jubilation — we joined in with the chorus of this people that had taken us to their bosom. With difficulty at first, then with enthusiasm and finally with genuine fervour, struggling with our guttural rs, like babes astonishing their parents, we pronounced the first word of this new language that would change our lives for ever: “Perón! Perón! Perón!” It was 17th October 1945.’