Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

Past a long, slender stone breakwater, as straight as a line drawn with a ruler on the surface of the river, the Ecological Reserve began. I got up onto the wall and walked beside the wire fence for a few blocks, till I found a gap and squeezed through it, plunging into the interlocking embankments that lined the lagoons and swamps carpeted with water hyacinths and, losing all sense of direction, I felt as if I’d left the city five centuries behind. I made for the open river, skirting the shores of a large lagoon from which I was watched with supreme indifference by a brace of orange-toothed coypus. I stopped a couple of times to take in the view: black-necked swans sailing in silence on the clearest of waters; a motionless heron scrutinising the surface of the water with the intensity of an old watchmaker; a lily-trotter delicately treading on each floating pad and hopping onto the next when the water began to wet its slender, yellow toes. I thought of Tamerlán’s bulldozers and how they’d eventually reach here too, burying the nests of coots and lapwings and swans under avalanches of rubbish and rubble and earth, tearing up the young ceibo and willow groves, filling in all the lagoons, save the odd one, which, dredged and purged, would be left to adorn the golf course. There were already several ‘upgraded’ sectors in the Reserve and I had to cross one before I reached the river: a flat, dead, brown expanse, where the only sound was the snapping of the wind in the blue-and-white-striped polythene bags caught in the still-living branches that protruded bent and broken from the labyrinth of caterpillar tracks.

Balancing on pebble-incrusted concrete slabs piled in disorderly fashion by the force of storms, and leaping pools of grey crabs that scattered as I passed, I reached the water’s edge. It was low tide and the rubbish glistened, covered in a brown sludge where the water had retreated. I skimmed half a dozen stones, most of them tiles or bits of hollow brick polished by the water, pulling off a fiver at my fourth attempt, and turned towards the city.

Only the city’s tallest tower blocks poked out above the foliage, their summits lit by the last rays of sun as the shadows spread across the plain. They looked implausible from the swamp, riding mirage-like over the undulating scrubland, fantastical towers of ice that would vanish into the sky if I approached them; and taller and nearer than any of them, the last light of the evening shining through the central fissure like the white of an eye between half-closed lids, Tamerlán’s twins towered above them all. Facing the city, legs akimbo, I got out my prick and pissed long and hard into a puddle, and then, inevitably, tried to have a wank. I didn’t get very far: the cocaine, the fatigue, the icy wind blowing between my legs, did little to encourage my stuttering erection, and the image of the blonde secretary, which I’d managed to conjure up, wet and panting before my eager eyes, gradually faded until, through it, I could see the lights of the two towers shining against the dismal sky. When the tip of my prick no longer emerged from its sheath of clenched fist, I realised I’d failed again.

Two or three choripán stalls had lit their hurricane lamps and, navigating by their greenish-white glare, I left the Reserve and walked along the Costanera in the direction of the silver tower.

‘We started out with a small jacket workshop in the late seventies. Me and my partner did the lot: bought the leather, cut the leather, worked the sewing machine and did the distribution, mainly to workers wanting to flaunt their new socio-economic status. We sewed labels into the lining over the pockets saying “Made exclusively on the premises. No workers were exploited in the tailoring of this jacket.” Of course, in those days, we hadn’t made the discovery of importing them from Bolivia and Peru,’ he said, weighing me up out of the corner of his eye to see if a complicitous wink was in order, and, not knowing what to make of my features collapsing with exhaustion, he saved it for a more auspicious moment. ‘The first time we went bust was in ’75, but, thanks to a timely inheritance from my in-laws, we were back in the ring two years later, this time with a menswear shop: affordable suits and shirts for ambitious office workers and small businessmen. We still have some in stock,’ he added enticingly, shaking the tip of his outrageous red and green tie like his prick after a piss. Its impact on my retina was like staring at the sun, so that, whenever my eyes strayed to the vast, white expanse of the fat man’s shirt, they saw a series of identical, negative ghost-images, like dancing girls in a chorus line — mercifully somewhat fainter than the original. ‘You wouldn’t be interested in …?’ He read the no in my eyes and went on. ‘The current government shook us out of the provincial slumber most of us small and medium-sized businessmen in this country were wallowing in, resting on our crumpled laurels until they were swept away by the start of imports, and we were washed up on the hard-but-healthy shores of fair competition. We applied for massive loans to modernise the factory so that we could compete with imported clothing on an equal footing and bring it to its knees. But by the time we were ready to do battle, the floodgates of customs had opened wide and the torrent buried us. We got through the worst by burning down a couple of warehouses and claiming the insurance, but we’ve still got a full one left. The day after that we switched to importing coat-hangers. You understand? Coat-hangers. Coat-hangers are easy to manufacture, materially pure, adapted to all tastes and never go out of fashion. You buy coat-hangers there, and you sell them here. Light. Simple. Coat-hangers.’

For the clothes you don’t make any more, my numbed mind absurdly spelt out. Then I said:

‘What about Surprise?’

‘Ah. That’s the other secret of success: diversification. “Never put all your eggs in one basket,” as the English say. We found the company motto irresistible,’ he said. That habit of his of always speaking in the plural, as if he were two people rather than one, was beginning to fray my neurons. Maybe he is, I thought looking hard at him; maybe he’s phagocytised his wife like an amœba. ‘You don’t need money to make money: in Surprise your friends are your capital.’

We’d reached Fatty’s office, which he unlocked with his own key, pushing the door open enough to edge his hefty bulk through. Inside, all four walls were lined from floor to ceiling with closed boxes of varying sizes bearing the words ‘Christopher Products’ (a few more in the doorway and the fat man would be walled up like the character in that Poe story); the only thing offering any contact with the outside world was a television screen embedded in the great wall of cardboard. He pushed aside a few more boxes on the top of his desk, and a snarl of tangled coat-hangers, to make some room and invited me to take a seat. I did; on his side of the desk, in the reclining swivel chair with armrests that looked like just the place for my level-3 coma. Making a visible effort to force his indignation back to the depths of his immensity, he sat down smiling on one of the straight-backed chairs meant for his evidently rare visitors, his ample arse spilling over the seat on three of the four sides. He rested his dainty hands on his belly, interlacing his fingers so that they wouldn’t fall to the sides under their own weight, and ratcheted his smile up a notch, his conscientiously pruned beard framing it in a halo of dependability.

‘Sr Marroné has informed me that Sr Tamerlán expects from me full and unstinting collaboration with you,’ he said, running out of breath a couple of times with the artfulness of his syntax. I took a cigarette from its box without offering him one, tapped the filter a couple of times on the glass of the desk, lit it, inhaled, exhaled, and said: