Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘So, kiddo? How’s tricks?’

‘Nothing yet. You?’

He shrugged and held up his Ray-Bans to view the irregular domino of visible sky.

‘What can I say. This assignment … The old man’s totally strung-out. What about you? What happened with your computers? Forgotten how to hit the little keys?’

‘Hitting the little keys has got me a lot further than you so far.’

‘Yeah, sure.’ He smiled meditatively, tossing a dead match into the bed of fume-blackened plants growing among the cat turds, and suddenly I found myself pinned against the trunk of one of the magnolias. I could see the butt of his.38 stuffed into his belt. ‘If we don’t find these missing punters, we’re well and truly fucked, you worse than us,’ he growled.

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Listen, pal,’ he said to me almost sadly, ‘don’t do this to me.’

‘I’m not that easily frightened,’ I insisted. ‘I was in Malvinas.’

He smiled with delight. He let me go, wiping his hands on his trousers.

‘The old man likes you. I understand why. You’ve got a sense of humour. So don’t blow it, pull your socks up and tell me what you learned at school today.’

I gave him a round-up and made it as convincing as I could, omitting some facts and inventing others to flesh out the story. If his questions were anything to judge by, they didn’t know any more than I did. The white-haired one came down the stairs, the same dozy expression in his half-closed eyes, and pulled out the hand he’d been hiding under his jacket: it clutched a silver candlestick. ‘I told her you wanted a word with her as well. I’ll wait for you in the car if you want to make the most of it.’

My companion bared his cruel teeth in a widening grin, patted me a couple of times on the cheek and, with a ‘Shan’t be long!’, climbed the uneven marble stairs. The other lit a cigarette, inhaled and pushed his glasses up over his forehead like an Alice band to hold back his thick, white hair. He let out the smoke as he rubbed the bridge of his nose, and contemplated the world through his listless, blue eyes. They didn’t include me in their disenchanted tour of the garden, the walls, the street beyond the railings … I hadn’t made any concrete arrangements with the other one, so I sidled over towards the half-open gate. Without betraying his sincere disinterest with the slightest movement, the melancholy thug smoked on with unfocused eyes. Once on the pavement, I set off at a brisk pace towards Plaza San Martín.

Only when I found myself under the thick, sylvan light that filtered through the tops of the tall trees did I slow down and call Daniel Tabardo’s secretary on my mobile; she slotted me in for 1.05 p.m. What precious precision: I had an hour and five minutes. Office workers, shop assistants, young couples and small groups of schoolchildren were beginning to mill around the square in search of a sunny spot for lunch. I stuck Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota in my walkman and set off in the direction of the slope. As I made my way down, I contemplated the traffic of pedestrians converging, swirling and issuing on, around and from the gigantic anthill of Retiro Station in ordered columns down Libertador, Alem, Maipú, Florida … out from Downtown and the City, the port, the coach terminal, the bus stops; scattering across English Square, negotiating the streets with their mosaic of taxis and buses, single file, kneading themselves into pavements narrowed by street vendors and their stalls. Letting my legs do the walking, I reached the War Memorial at the foot of the slope: twenty-six names on each of the twenty-five black marble slabs, mounted in a semicircle of pink granite facing the nearby English Tower, so that not even dead could they forget them. As always, there were bunches of fresh flowers, though I’d never seen who put them there. Like a blind man, I reached out a trembling hand to read their names by touch; letter by letter, my fingers reunited what stone had parted:

GENTILE

,

RUBÉN

FEUER

,

CARLOS

DAVID

SOSA

,

ROSENDO

CORREA

,

JOSÉ

ANTONIO

One of them could just as easily as be running their fingers over the letters of mine, I thought:

FÉLIX

,

FELIPE

Entering Retiro Station didn’t improve my mood. All the big stations of Buenos Aires get me down, with their sad-yet-worldly squalor; but there’s something at once more intense and vague about Retiro, something harder to define, that can only be described as belonging to the order of the metaphysical; the pigeons whirling high up in its vast domes looked like the souls of the damned looking for a way out of hell. I took a B-Line train, whose wooden carriage with its worn leather upholstery was straight out of the Far West, and empty enough for me to put my feet up on the opposite seat and have a smoke under the no-smoking sign while I reviewed my achievements to date. I’d started out with fifteen names and had found two more. There were still nine to go. It was slow and gruelling, but it was working, for now. I got off at Tres de Febrero, where the platform is level with the treetops, and, after walking through its wrought-iron Doric columns, I went down a broad staircase to a white majolica-tiled station. I walked along Dorrego for two blocks, under the lofty foliage of the tipa trees before I realised I’d got off one stop too soon and still had another ten blocks to go. The street was empty in spite of the hour, the only sign of life being two riders out on the polo field, appearing and disappearing behind the ivy-covered steps, every now and again the clack of the ball making the silence all the purer. From behind me, getting nearer, came an unmistakable diesel throb and I turned to hail the taxi.

‘Ciudad de la Paz and Concepción Arenal,’ I sighed, relieved to get in, and slumped back into the seat with my walkman on to underline the fact that I didn’t feel a bit like chatting. But there’s no one more tenacious than a bored taxi driver full of the joys of morning:

‘Cold out, isn’t it,’ he said, looking at me hopefully in the rear-view mirror. Ah well, what can you do? I thought to myself as I unhooked my headphones; I’d make conversation with the executioner tightening the noose round my neck if I thought he was uncomfortable with the silence. The cabby was dressed in a T-shirt and kept smiling. He was up to something.

‘Yeah, bit chilly. It’s the wind.’

‘This is nothing. You should have been in Malvinas.’

Oh no, not today, I thought to myself, feeling the familiar bolus of anguish starting to churn in my guts. Stopping off for a coffee, swapping war stories and phone numbers. Not today.

‘Were you in Malvinas?’ I asked, all innocence.

‘Uh-huh,’ he answered me and started telling me about the cold. He was missing two toes from his left foot and three from his right, but it wasn’t a problem driving; a friend of his had had his whole foot removed. Gangrene, he said, and me, how awful.

‘And don’t think we’ve been looked after; not a chance: we can’t find work for love nor money. I did all sorts when I got back. I was even a bear for Frávega — for a whole summer. Makes me come out in a sweat just thinking about it, it does. And me, so used to the cold,’ he said and turned left onto Luis María Campos.

‘Wasn’t it better to go straight on down Dorrego?’ I suggested doubtfully.

‘It’s this way Arenales, isn’t it?’

‘No. Aren al . Concepción Aren al . It’s that way.’

‘Oh. Not to worry. I’ll turn back,’ he said, cutting almost perpendicularly across a roaring 168 and, by the time I opened my eyes, we were meandering down a narrow alleyway of puppet-theatre houses, so incongruous in this part of the city that for a moment I thought the 168 hadn’t missed us and that, from now on, I’d be condemned to wander through a celestial, papier-mâché Buenos Aires with this taxi driver who didn’t know the way telling me Malvinas anecdotes for the rest of eternity. Two blocks further on we came out on Avenida Santa Fe, which was cut off where it joined Avenida Cabildo by an abyssal trough as deep as the Grand Canyon. ‘That’s a pain. I forgot all about the viaduct. The roadworks have been at a standstill for like five years, haven’t they? Would you look at those potholes. Reminds me of the valley we were stationed in. After the final bombardment.’