Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘Do you need me to spell it out to you?’

‘What?’ he asked in a tiny voice. His tie hung flaccidly over his defeated paunch like the tongue of a panting dog on a hot day. Discreet pearls of oily sweat beaded his brow.

‘You owe Sr Tamerlán four months’ rent. And all your capital is tied up in this company of the future, so for the time being your present looks pretty grim.’

That put an end to the fat man’s forced joviality. Big men eager to please are generally a pushover. It never comes naturally to them; they sweat a lot and wrestle with their obsequiousness like a belt with no more holes. Little men, on the other hand, play it cool: their fawning’s second nature to them.

‘The meetings are held on the top floor of the tower. The one right opposite Sr Tamerlán’s office. There were fewer guests than usual that day — a quarter as many — because there was a match on.’

‘I remember: Boca v San Lorenzo. The Crows bit the dust yet again.’

‘A shame, because the main speaker was one of the founders of the company, whom we’d flown over from Madrid specially for the event. You know, with the 5C celebrations, the Mother Country is promoting a much more aggressive policy of expansion and joint ventures. Europe once again has eyes for America.’

Yes, five hundred years later they’re coming back to see if there’s anything left, I thought.

‘Tell me about that night,’ I said.

‘Perhaps you’d rather watch it on video.’

What video!? screamed my brain, but fortunately my teeth snapped shut with an audible mental click on the question before it managed to escape. ‘Naturally,’ I answered, retaining my composure.

He pulled a video cassette from an identical, unlabelled row of black and held it aloft.

‘We don’t normally film proceedings, but on this occasion … Sr Ignacio de Bobadilla, our distinguished visitor from Spain, had finished telling the epic story of the beginnings of Surprise and, with the aid of explanatory graphics, had demonstrated how those who join our company have only one alternative: to succeed. We’ll wind the tape forward to the closing sections of his stirring speech.’

He inserted it into the video cassette player’s greedy throat, pressed play and sat down. Immediately almost the whole screen was filled by his voluminous, naked body, save the lower right corner, where an equally naked lady was doing her utmost to hoist his buttocks onto a vibrator that seemed to split the screen in two. Even the whites of Fatty’s eyes went puce and, in a frenzy of despair, he started slapping the remote control.

‘Your wife?’ I asked out of politeness.

Jabbing indiscriminately at the remote, he hit fast-forward instead of stop and his video self began jumping up and down as if riding a highly inflated bicycle fast over cobblestones. Eventually he hit eject and the machine peeled out its cassette with an obscene gurgle.

‘This is the one, this is the one,’ said Fatty in a barely audible voice, sweating cobs. He looked thinner than he had two minutes ago.

On the screen a well-dressed man with a trim, grey beard strutted self-importantly up and down before an audience of gawping wannabes.

‘A mere five hundred years ago,’ he reverberated in his Castilian accent, straight out of a Spanish TV series, ‘one man, ordinary but for his blind determination to believe in no one but himself, dared to defy two millennia of unquestioned truths and launch himself into the unknown, equipped with just three flimsy ships, a handful of faulty instruments, a rabble from the ports and gaols, and the obstinacy of his erroneous conceits. Paltry ingredients, you may say, for this paella of yours. Yet it is thanks to him that I am here today addressing an audience that doesn’t wear feathers on its heads; that I am here to tell you that you too, with what you see as your meagre resources, can all stake claims to greater lands than he did. How much longer will you go on looking for old solutions to new problems? You won’t discover new worlds by beating the same old tracks. The only way to stand an egg on end is to change it. Do you really think a man’s greatness precedes his deeds?’

‘Does Sr Tamerlán know of the existence of this video?’ I took advantage of a pause from the marquis to ask.

‘Of course. I made copies before I handed the original over to the police. He has one of them.’

‘And he let you keep this one?’

‘One word from him and the catfish would be watching it at the bottom of the river instead of us.’

The Spaniard’s words, meanwhile, were doing their best to crawl out from under Fatty’s: ‘… dared to cross a sea that all but he thought endless, and, on the other side, he found the greatest treasure in the …’ As he spoke, he inched imperceptibly closer to a thick curtain covering the window from end to end, and the camera inched closer to him. ‘But you, on the other hand, are a comparatively tiny distance away from glory, and you know for a fact that there is terra firma on the other side. You’ve seen it, you’ve smelt it, you’ve desired it all your lives. Yet you remain on this shore, watching the boats set sail and disappear over the horizon — and you know that they won’t tumble over the edge; you’ve seen those who took with them nothing more than the patches on their britches return laden with honours and treasure. What are you doing, standing on the edge of a world you already know like the back of your hand, a world that is too small for you and those around you. Dare yourselves to take the great leap! It isn’t as far as you think! Dare. Dare. Ply those seas. Your ideas will become real when your belief in them is blind. Come,’ he said, and his invitation wasn’t rhetorical. He stretched out his arms. He smiled. He invited them to share in the wonderful world he’d discovered. Accompanying his gesture, the camera, which had gradually been expanding the mid-shot of the marquis to a full one that took in his audience, now panned across their faces, which gazed back like children in a puppet theatre. Hesitant, looking uncertainly at each other, first one, then several, got up from their seats. ‘Do you still say you don’t know what there is on the other side?’ they heard. ‘I will show you what there is on the other side. Mark well. Behold your future!’ With a magician’s flourish he waved his arm twice and the great curtain covering the east side drew back to reveal the enormous window and the golden tower framed in it. ‘Come closer. Look.’ Oohing and aahing, knocking over chairs and tripping over each other, without looking where they were going, they advanced towards the huge window as if guided by a comet in the night. Some pressed their hands or noses to it, the latecomers tried to peer over their shoulders, until they eventually ordered themselves into a long strip stretching the width of the room.

‘Freeze it,’ I told Fatty.

I tried to count the heads in the paused, faintly flickering image. Twenty-four, I made it, including the Spaniard, who was out of shot.

‘Was anyone else there?’ I asked.

‘No, I think we’re all … The caretaker!’ he remembered.

Twenty-five. I counted again. One, two, three … twenty-five? I nearly slapped my forehead when I realised.

‘The one who’s filming! That makes twenty-six.’

One of the people I’m looking at, I thought, is the mysterious witness number twenty-six. How can I tell which one? I asked Fatty to hit play. The camera showed a wedge of river and some viscera-coloured clouds receding into the darkening sky on their way to Uruguay; the dark mattress of trees far below, the lights of the port and their reflections in the water, the long row of people looking out, more perfectly and beautifully recreated in Sr Tamerlán’s golden tower. ‘Look at yourselves,’ said the marquis. ‘Behold yourselves. You are part of that same golden substance; you can feel it running through your veins. If you only believe in your own potential, a golden future awaits each and every one of you. Who’s to say you’re not in there already, watching those still standing outside?’ I picked out the clear, gilt features of Fatty in the line of bobbing heads, smiling and waving at himself. Others pointed at themselves, called out, shouted things. ‘Mark well,’ repeated the marquis. ‘Mark well. Behold your future.’