Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘You can tell me the next one sitting here,’ I said, patting my lap.

‘Remind me to sign the cheque for you before you leave. Sr Tamerlán said ten thousand. Will that do?’ she asked as she straddled my lap cowboy-style, resting her elbows on my shoulders to brush her lips on mine, as light as a feather, then shoving her tongue all the way down to my œsophagus. I’d felt nothing like it since my tonsillectomy.

‘I’ve been to so many places,’ she said, ‘but I might as well have been nowhere: because I’ve never been to the only one that matters.’

For some reason I puckered slightly.

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘There,’ she said, pulling her hand out of my fly to point. ‘Up there. Where you went on the first day.’

There was a new twinkle in her eyes as if she’d just spent the whole night looking at the stars and now had them imprinted on her retinas forever.

‘Tell me about him,’ her feverish breath pleaded in my ear.

I obeyed. Despite my neutral and factual tone, my account of Sr Tamerlán’s habits had more effect on her than all the obscene nothings I’d ever poured in the ears of womankind. Her hips began to sway, independent of her will; her hands worked my prick like a bicycle pump; her tongue sought out the hollow of my sternum and punctured it like a tin opener. Not to be outdone I sent one hand outside her clothes to her buttocks and the other inside to her tits. But it all felt rather mechanical, as if I was doing it out of, well, politeness.

‘I’m not comfortable,’ I told her. ‘I feel watched.’

‘Do you?’ she said with delight, rolling her eyes upwards until only the whites were showing. ‘Do you?’

‘Isn’t there somewhere more private?’

‘Oh, all right. But promise you’ll carry on telling me. Let’s see if there’s any room in the Ladies. If he wants to, Sr Tamerlán can light them up and make them see-through, but he rarely bothers. When he does, though, he always takes you by surprise.’

She’d stepped out into the corridor without bothering to straighten her tousled hair or ruffled clothing. I followed her to the toilets. She went in first, with a squeeze of my crotch to bid me a temporary farewell.

‘Come on,’ she shouted to me from inside.

I looked round for her, scanning the row of cubicles, all identical except one.

‘Here, in the handicapped loo. There’s more room. Come in, I want to show you something.’

I opened the door. She was waiting for me astride the toilet, her hour-glass jacket tight around her waist, her black stockings around her thighs and, between them, nothing but her hands: one in front and the other round back, her fingers interlaced between her legs, except her right forefinger and left ring-finger, with which she was masturbating simultaneously fore and aft.

‘Come in here,’ she panted.

‘In where?’

‘In my mouth. Oh, no; I need that to talk. Carry on.’

I’d got to the bit about the congressman when, with a double pop, she took her hands from their places and held them out to me.

‘Right, now, come here. I’ll take you wherever you want to go,’ she offered, and I nearly said I just wanna go home, when a sound like a car alarm came over the loudspeakers.

‘It’s him, it’s him,’ she screeched, slamming her legs shut and, lifting up my prick on her way out like a barrier at a level crossing, ran outside into the corridor. Thinking she might need them later, I picked up her skirt and knickers from the floor.

I found her sitting on her desk, her legs wide open, with a foot on either chair. In her right hand she held a banana-shaped phone.

‘It’s Sr Tamerlán,’ she said, her eyes ablaze. ‘He wants a word with you. Try and keep him on the line as long as you can, please.’

I nodded and stretched out a hand to take the receiver, but, instead of obliging, she stuffed three quarters of it into her cunt, leaving only the mouthpiece outside.

‘What are you waiting for? Start talking.’

Trying not to get my nose wet, I spoke into the only part of the phone that was still visible.

‘Sr Tamerlán … Félix speaking.’

‘I was forgetting something,’ Tamerlán’s sonorous voice sounded bubbly and muffled, but the powerful vibrations radiating over the receiver shook the secretary’s body into shudders and spasms; I could barely hear him because her belly dancing was making it hard for me to keep my ear pressed to the phone. I got hold of the receiver and pulled and, before she sank it back into the depths of her body, I managed to hear ‘Another job for you when you’ve finished this one.’ I shouted back that that was fine, without much hope of asking what it entailed, and, when the secretary realised from my tone of voice that he was about to hang up, she hissed furiously:

‘You can’t finish so soon! Don’t leave me like this!’

I did what I could to keep Sr Tamerlán on the line, but all I could make out was the occasional word of his bursting towards the surface like a bubble. Right at the last, when I was shouting and the secretary had opened her legs as wide as they could go to receive the full impact of the volume bursting into her whole body, I heard his parting words:

‘And tell that bitch to let go of the receiver, or I’ll have her sealed with tar like a pothole.’

* * *

I was surprised at how solid the ground of the port felt under the soles of my trainers, the dull crunch of sand on the roadway, the green blasts of grass growing in the joins where the tar had come out. I crossed the avenue of the Costanera, whose only traffic was a surplus of last autumn’s brown leaves stirred up by the wind in the vain hope of finding something of interest, and reached the wall, whose broad back contained the batterings of the river and stopped it pouring into the city. I rested my palms on the cold granite, pressing my fly against the stone edge and raising my feet in the air, and balanced there, watching five wet cormorants standing on five dark piles, between which plastic bottles and eddies of dull sediment bobbed and swirled. I jumped backwards, pushing myself off with my arms, and made a perfect landing on my heels. The rough pattern of the stone was impressed into my palms, which tingled for a few minutes as I walked along the wall. It was that time of day when the Costanera receives its pariahs, dragged by the wind to the edges of the city: couples so down-in-the-mouth that they don’t mind parading the last vestiges of their love in this forgotten corner; office workers running out of excuses to delay their journeys home; anglers stiff with cold standing amid piles of inedible yellow catfish twitching their last in the dust; a Tamerlán & Sons employee who can at last take off his glasses, rub the bridge of his nose with two tired fingers and ask if they’re biting without worrying about the answer; a lorry driver headed south, sipping maté high up in his cab and staring vacantly at the river; three kids with little home-made packets of sweets no one wanted to buy from them, walking along the edge of the broad wall and playing at pushing each other into the water; two firemen in blue staring at the horizon in silence from their red engine parked on the green grass … I watched them all as I passed, and they watched me.

I ordered a milanesa sandwich at a choripán stall, and a Coke to mitigate the effects of the coke. I had trouble swallowing at first, but after a few mouthfuls I realised I was starving, and the Coke sent my throat into spasms of delight. The simple pleasures of the poor, I thought, as I stamped to restore a little warmth to the soles of my feet. A small, white, woolly dog had been curled up on the floor amid the tables, uncleared since midday; it started when the wind blew some serviettes onto it. I gave it a hard crust of milanesa as a consolation and left it chewing and watching me out of the corner of its eye to see if there was any more.