Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

Tamerlán went over to his desk, where he selected an option by tapping the screen with his forefinger. His voice was captured by hidden microphones: ‘Marroné!’ he shouted. A woman’s voice answered. I could see her: a ruined blonde appeared simultaneously on a monitor and beneath our feet in one of the offices on the floor below.

‘He’s not here, Sr Tamerlán.’

‘I know, I can’t see him. Where the fuck is he?’

‘In the bathroom, Sr Tamerlán.’

‘Again?’ he exclaimed in disbelief. ‘Get him out or I’ll light it up so everyone can watch him taking a dump. Have him prepare all the information we have on Surprises.’ He looked at me inquiringly. ‘Would you like it printed or on a floppy?’

‘You can send it by e-mail,’ I said. ‘My address is …’

I said it aloud; the secretary made a note. Meanwhile, Tamerlán picked up the two empty wraps melancholically and tossed them under his desk in front of the congressman’s snout, who pounced on them, snuffling and grunting like a truffle pig, and hoovered up the leftovers with a series of obscene snorts, chewing them like gum to extract every last crumb after his nose had performed the impossible.

‘Marroné will give you another ten per cent of your money and make the relevant contacts for you. You have two days. Make the most of them.’

He said nothing else. Still scowling, the psychoanalyst escorted me to the lift.

* * *

Marroné’s secretary, a peroxide blonde in a tailored suit with pencil skirt, came out of her boss’s office for the second time and again asked me to wait please. The third time, she came out wringing her hands, all contrition, her sculpted nails lacerating her palms, her incisors dark with lipstick from biting her lip, a tear of irate frustration welling up thick with mascara under her oval mirrorshades. She didn’t know what to say and, balancing on her heels as if walking a tightrope suspended above the void, she disappeared behind the mirror without noticing I was following her.

On Marroné’s desk three phones were ringing, a fax machine beeping and an intercom demanding his presence at the top of its voice. The secretary, her ear pressed to the frosted glass, knocked insistently on a side door.

‘Sr Marroné … Sr Marroné … Please, your appointments are waiting for you.’

She’d wait a few seconds, then try again, quite undermining her warnings with her entreaties, and vice versa.

‘Sr Marroné … the red line’s ringing. Sr Tamerlán will be sending someone from security any second now to see what’s going on. I think I can hear the lift coming down. If you come out now, there may still be a chance to stop him, Sr Marroné. But if he comes down and finds you in there …’

Her knuckles rapped continuously and monotonously, and her breath misted the glass as she spoke. From the other side came a solid, palpable silence, a silence you could feel in the pit of your stomach like a heavy meal.

‘Sr Marroné. I know you’re in there. I can see you sitting down. That excuse about the colic won’t work again. Sr Marroné …’

My first impression was that two or three racehorses had been locked in the executive bathroom and that, dazed by the long wait and the desperate tap-tap-tap, they’d hallucinated the starting signal and started running round in circles in the locked stalls. The fragile door bulged outwards from the rattling and a howl, inhuman in its animal pain, streamed through the open cracks, making the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The frosted glass cracked cross-wise then shattered, opening a gash in the secretary’s tapping hand, which recoiled as if she’d grabbed a spider while absent-mindedly fiddling with the paperclips in her drawer. Finally the door imploded with a sharp tug and in the doorway stood Marroné, framed by tousled hair, tie unknotted and a prodigious spiral of toilet paper that began at the almost empty roll in its holder, wrapped itself several times round his body and plunged up the tightly clenched crack of his arse.

‘Stop iiiit! I can’t stand it any more! You won’t let me sleep, you won’t let me eat, you won’t let me screw, and now you won’t let me shit! I can’t shit in five minutes, I can’t shit to schedule! I’m constipated! I’m filling up with shit and you won’t even give me five minutes to get rid of it! I can’t stand it any more, I can’t bear this life! I want to read Proust! I want to read Proust!’

He’d thrown himself to the floor, wrapped in the string of toilet paper like a badly wound turban, and begun to sob, his forehead and knees sunk into the thick beige carpet; the secretary, sucking her blood-drenched hand and looking down on him with that curiosity-free contempt that only years of conjugal or professional cohabitation can impart, gestured to me.

‘Let’s go before he starts singing “The Bear”. That’s the part I can never stand.’

Through the glass I watched her return to reception and take some alcohol and cotton wool from a cabinet to clean her wound. I followed her in, closing the door behind me on the now quieter figure of Marroné, whose laboured sobbing was almost imperceptibly becoming a continuous and melodious murmur:

I used to live happily in the forest

I’d walk and walk forever and a day

I was king of morning, afternoon and evening,

Stretching out at night to rest I’d lay

…

Marroné’s secretary turned round before I reached her, and held out her open, alcohol-drenched hand.

‘Ow! It’s killing me! Blow on it, for God’s sake, blow on it!’

I took hold of her two open fingers and obeyed. She closed her eyes and smiled, sighing with relief. It was funny, but in a few minutes her boss’s little sketch had created a kind of intimacy between us. I tried to kiss her wound when I’d finished, but she pulled her hand away and slid it between my fingers, less out of rejection than as an invitation to follow.

‘Fancy a coffee?’

Standing beside the electric coffee-maker, she lit a cigarette and, without turning round, stretched out her arm at a right angle to her body and held out the packet. I took one. In the invisible room next door the murmuring continued:

But one day the men came with their cages

Locked me up and took me off to the city

They taught me pirouettes there in the circus

And so I lost my precious liberty

…

‘Does it get any worse than this?’

She shrugged. She exhaled. She climbed down from the torture of her high heels to bring over two coffees and we sat down on the appointments side of the desk.

‘It’s difficult to hate your boss when what you see when you look at his office is your own face.’

‘Have you worked here very …?’

She nodded. She scratched one thigh, the clean crackling of her nail on the invisible mesh of her nylon bringing the first spasm of lubricant to the tip of my prick.

‘You must have seen a lot.’

She cast me a wan smile, accompanying it with a gesture that took in our reflections in the side walls and ceiling, and the visible parts of the corridors and floors below us.

‘Seeing … not seeing … imagining. Differences are lost up here. Here’s one for you. There was one manager who got fired and had the gall to ask for an audience with Sr Tamerlán, who kept him standing outside his office for hours on end suffering everyone’s mocking looks and smug smiles as they came and went; Sr Tamerlán kept up a constant stream of traffic just to humiliate him, and called in lower- and lower-ranking staff — of a certain breed, shall we say? — just to see how long he’d last. He’d come to the door, for example, to personally shower greetings on the head sanitation engineer, slapping him on the back and showing him in. “That’s what we need here: people to take the shit out,” he said, and stared in the direction of the waiting man who, beside himself, eventually pulled out a gun and pointed it at the mirror, no doubt hoping to smash it with the first shot and hit Sr Tamerlán with the second. The two shots rang out, the mirror shattered and the manager dropped dead. Sr Tamerlán’s bodyguard, Dr Canal — oh, you know him — had been quietly watching everything from inside and had fired before the second shot — although the manager must have died thinking that he and his reflection had iced each other. They installed the metal detector after that.’