Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

I listened to him in seismograph mode, only paying attention when some distinctive word or other made my needle jump; it only happened twice: ‘… a young woman who was allowed in, despite being in jeans and training shoes, to avoid an altercation at the door …’; and ‘… an elderly man in a grey trench coat, who arrived late and didn’t talk to anyone, not even when …’ He broke off. At that moment the miffed secretary came in with the coffees and put them down on the table, spilling just enough in my saucer for the cup to drip on my trousers afterwards; inside the rim was a thick border of froth and, as I couldn’t picture him undertaking the titanic task of whipping it, I was probably looking at his spit.

‘What shall I tell the patients, Aldo?’

‘Tell them to wait. They’re all from the social, anyway.’

He waited for the secretary to leave and, seeing that I was writing out his cheque, he paused.

‘I’m afraid it’s just the one thousand. Not even when …?’

‘Eh?’

‘I thought you were going to tell me about the murder.’

‘No, not murder,’ he corrected me. How could I think such a thing? He gave me his version. Sr Tamerlán’s son was trying to commit suicide and the other man fell, selflessly attempting to save his life. He sacrificed himself for the person he loved. He waxed lyrical, but when I asked him for details, he had none to give. He and Dr Tarino had apparently had a rather unpleasant tiff over who’d go down to see to the body and who’d stay to look after those in shock, until someone exclaimed that the body had disappeared.

I didn’t let go of the cheque till he had a tight grip on it in case it started pogoing round the room, then asked him if I could borrow his phone, to save some credit on my mobile (a precaution in case I didn’t get all twenty-six names for Sr Tamerlán, because then it was coming out of my own pocket).

* * *

Doña Ernestina Hidalgo was at home: a once stately town house, sandwiched between a video-game store and a Pizzaphone. Tucked away behind the tall iron spears of its railings and the polished leather leaves of two etiolated magnolias, it looked as if it were awaiting the mercy of the bulldozers to recycle it permanently into a rotisserie or a car park. Inside, however, it was impeccably preserved: the light from two sparkling crystal chandeliers bounced off burnished bronzes, skated over polished ebony surfaces, crackled off the silver, shone twice as brightly in the tall mirrors and oozed over the glazes of the vases before combining with the ashen light filtering through the coloured lozenges of the windows and the warm light climbing from the flames of the deep, grey marble fireplace, to be absorbed by the thick oriental carpets and the heavy tapestries hanging on three walls, the fourth being occupied entirely by a vast library crammed with old cloth- and leather-bound volumes. Preceded by a constant jingling of rings and bracelets, floating in a whirlpool of vaporous fabrics that reached down to her invisible feet, my hostess wandered about the few empty spaces in the drawing room.

‘A prize you say? How charming. The last prize I received was the National Prize for Literature and that was … Guests? The ones I told you. Sr Eugenio Lopatín, who brought a classmate, a Sr Walter, or Nelson … some Uruguayan name, I don’t really remember, an employee with one of those hamburger chains … Yes, I saw him too, a man in a grey capote — the kind the English call a mackintosh — piercing eyes … Then, as you must know, a most unpleasant situation, I’d rather not talk about that.’

‘You were invited by Dr Glans,’ I pronounced, when I’d finished taking everything down.

‘Don’t talk to me about that man. What a disappointment.’

I stifled a yawn. Tired of bouncing from one reflection to another like pinballs, my eyes had gradually adjusted enough to spot subtle inconsistencies that I hadn’t picked up at first, dotted about the room like garden gnomes on a golf course: a framed photograph of Carlos Gardel among the portraits of her ancestors; a seashell sea lion beside a fine, silver-mounted specimen of a nautilus shell; a sinuous marble of a naked goddess and serpentine swan about to be impaled by an imitation-bone corkscrew in the shape of a boy pissing … As if noticing the incongruous objects of my attention, her tone of voice changed:

‘You must be wondering what leads a woman of my status to patronise somewhere like Surprise. Well now, the answer is simple. I do it for the poor.’

I put on that expression of polite interest I’m so practised at, in the hope that I wouldn’t also be required to right myself on the ocean of blue silk in which I was so pleasantly submerged. It seemed to satisfy her.

‘The poor,’ she went on. ‘Ever since I was a little girl, they tried to instil in me contempt for the poor, but even then I was a rebel and wasn’t willing to accept the rigid moulds in which my class tries to pigeonhole reality. The poor have so much to offer us.’ She motioned in the general direction of the portrait of Gardel. ‘Just look at tango, which started out poor and is now played at the Colón. We have so much to learn from you …’

One of her feet brushed against me and an unexpected roughness made me look down. She was wearing espadrilles.

‘I’m talking about genuine poverty, mind you. Not like that diluted product, servants.’ She laughed tinklingly. ‘No doubt you think I’d be happy to converse with the maid every day while she serves me breakfast. Far from it! My encounter with the poor has to be full and total; it has to involve not just my soul but my body. I can see I’m embarrassing you.’

I nodded, though I was in fact looking down to check my watch: 11.30. Those guys could arrive any moment. I kneaded my stiff neck. The cocaine, what else. And that door was so far away.

‘I … believe we all have to find our inner pauper, the taste for the simple life. There are those who call themselves friends of the poor yet at the same time profess that their goal is a world without paupers no less! What would become of us without them? A world without paupers would be like a garden without soil. How long can flowers survive in a Sèvres vase, Sr … Sr …?’

‘Fuolxx’ I replied, stifling another yawn in my closed mouth. ‘Nwot lwong,’ I added straightaway.

‘Which brings me to the last and perhaps most important issue.’ At this point a faint shell-pink flush began to spread under the pearly gloss of her skin. ‘Our men are no longer potent; we have fewer and fewer, and weaker children. We would be engulfed by the inexhaustible proliferation of the poor if once in a while — and quite rationally — we didn’t incorporate something of their blood to fortify our own, a task that in my grandmothers’ days was exclusively reserved for the menfolk … But times change, you know, and the sixties cannot have been in vain.’ She’d come and sat on the arm of the sofa, and she was stroking the back of it as if it were stuffed with cats. She fixed her eyes on me, the only part of her face that preserved something of perhaps not life, but … moisture. ‘That’s why I’ve always dreamed of finding the ideal pauper, a special pauper shall we say, possessed of a degree of nobility even, the nobility of his poverty,’ she said as her hand began to play with the hair on the back of my neck. ‘I’d be willing to give myself to a pauper like that, to make his wildest dream come true, to toss away two thousand years of civilisation the way you’d throw off a silk shawl, and feel for once what the beasts of the field and the birds of the air feel …’

I got out of there as fast as I could, muttering something about millionaire parents and gagging on a silver spoon, and ran down the cracked marble staircase just as Tamerlán’s two heavies were opening one of the iron gates. The white-haired one walked straight past me and went up the steps towards the half-open door. The other one put — as I’d feared he might — one arm round my shoulder and invited me to go for a stroll in the garden.