Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

Let us live with glory, our crown,

Or swear to glorious death.

‘It’s the bit they do best; they must think it’s about their mum.’ Getting up to revive Satie, Gloria carried on to the bathroom at the end of the corridor. She forgot to close the door properly and, to my delight, the whole time she was sitting there I could see her naked right knee and calf, pricelessly adorned with an anklet of skirt and black knickers (at last the answer), the merry tinkle of her pee thrown in for good measure. She came back fixing her skirt.

‘You will stay for dinner, won’t you?’

Milanesas and chips. The milanesas were very good: the breadcrumbs stuck to the meat, and there was garlic and parsley in the egg mix (the very opposite of the ones my mother makes; when you try to cut them, the breadcrumbs fall off in chunks like the skin of a leper). The chips, however, were flaccid and oozing grease, precisely what chips shouldn’t be.

‘These chips are awful, aren’t they,’ she remarked, stuffing a forkful into her mouth. ‘Want me to make you something else?’ The girls ate quietly, holding the milanesas in a scrap of brown paper, tearing off hunks of bread and wiping each other’s plates with them to see who’d win. They drank orange crush; we drank white wine and soda. The kitchen was warmer than the living room, as Gloria had left a couple of hobs on. They hissed faintly as if to reinforce their presence, which in the uniform brightness of the fluorescent tube their pale blue light did little to remind us of.

During dinner Gloria mentioned a town that rang more than a few bells; choking with eagerness I provided the name: ‘Malihuel’. We discovered we had something in common that was stronger than blood or sacred vows: the same childhood memories. Thrilled, we played pat-a-cake over the table, the girls clapping to see us so happy. I used to visit that little backwater in the toe of the boot of Santa Fe Province every summer; she lived there until she was ten. We spent a long time, at least until afters, trying to ascertain if we’d ever met; but we reached no conclusions. Maybe I was the boy who climbed the fig tree beneath her to cop a look at her knickers (highly likely!), but no, said Gloria, disappointed, I remember now, he was from Rosario. And didn’t she have a shaggy dog that looked like an inflated possum and played with me one day, fetching sticks from the lagoon? No, she didn’t. But the places were still the same even if we hadn’t seen each other there: the church steeple, the first thing that poked out above the trees as you approached along the highway; the Tuttolomondo spaghetti factory, which closed at siesta time, where we used to play hide-and-seek; even today the smell of eggs and flour when someone’s kneads dough or graduates from university sucks me back down the tunnel of time, and I’m there hiding behind the sifters, the racks of drying spaghetti, the hum of the extractor fans … Guido, Mati, Vicentito, did you know them? ‘Did I,’ she answered, digging a provincial idiom from one of the drawers of her memory that life in the capital hadn’t managed to exterminate. ‘Guido used to hang out with a friend of mine, and I heard something about Mati recently, let me see …’ The square on summer nights, enough shady hideaways between the lamp posts for a bit of nooky in the weeds: that was where I touched my first breast, I proclaimed proudly; whose, whose went Gloria, and when I told her she burst out laughing, sure, big deal, her tits were better polished than the one on the Monument to Motherhood. And I once had a wank at the historic watchtower too, I said, just to show her I wasn’t messing, and she’d thrown bread at me. The best memories, we both agreed, were of the lagoon and the island off the bathing resort. At weekends families would come from all over Santa Fe and you could barely walk on the island for the number of cars, lorries and vans, and the endless causeway connecting it to the shore was always jammed solid. We waxed nostalgic about dinners at the hotel, with its marble staircases and velvet curtains; there were festivals with artists and musicians from all over the country: Gloria’s father took up as an impresario and they once had dinner with Sandro, who gave the little girl an autographed photo. No, I didn’t keep it, I’ve got nothing left from those days, Gloria answered my excited question. That island, I remarked, was just a shell of rubble and flattened dirt barely sticking out above the muddy water, wasn’t it? Only the tip of the Yacht Club came off slightly better, sprinkled with sand and protected from the burning sun by the trees that two generations of Malihuenses had gone to great efforts to grow (the brackish water of the lagoon killed everything, even the fish). And yet, I went on, I swear even today that that little island only just delivered from the mud is the most beautiful island in the world and knocks any tourist brochure paradise, with its white sands, palm trees and crystal-clear waters into a cocked hat. Every so often I make plans to go back, spend a few days in the town, visit my friends, swim in the lagoon again. ‘You know that other island,’ Gloria interrupted, ‘the one full of rams’ heads? You could only get there by boat, and I brought back a skull, carrying it by one curly horn, and spent the rest of the summer polishing it with Odex and an old toothbrush.’ ‘And you remember the …’ I’d say to her and she’d say, ‘Yes, hold on, I don’t believe it, you saw it too? I thought I was the only one in the world,’ and we both talked over the top of each other, about the tiny island of flamingo nests in the distance, a patch of pink in the middle of the water, and when the boat approached, a miracle: the entire island would lift into the air and open like a hundred orchids flowering at once, and above and around us the flamingos blotted out the sky and the air was pink and thunderous, and in our memory we stood hand in hand in the same boat, our hearts stopped at the sight of such beauty.

By the time we met in that recollection of the flamingo island, we were no longer in the kitchen talking both at the same time, laughing at nothing in particular, looking into each others’ eyes (or me at Gloria’s round arse as she got up to get some ice from the freezer); together we’d put the girls to sleep, sung them half-forgotten songs by Sui Generis, La Máquina, Virus until they fell asleep: Malvina sucking her thumb, Soledad with her head under her pillow, and, leaving the door open a crack, we crept back to the living room with the light off, each sitting at our own end of the sofa and staring at each other without a word, barely able to make out each other’s silhouettes in the half-light across the strait that separated us. And when one of us decided to cross it, it was of course Gloria who ventured the first caress; she drew my eyebrows with her fingers, closing my eyes as she went, down the side of my nose to my mouth, which I opened for her to complete the sentence she’d started to write on my lips. I discovered that she kissed slowly, her mouth slack, her tongue lazy and languid, her teeth ghosting the shadowiest of bites. I’d like to see them simulate this on a computer; creating a liquid interface like this will require a qualitative technological leap that nobody’s going to waste snogging a mere simulation of a female. Kevin was right: we are still too attached to imitating reality. The possibilities of virtual sex are limitless: how about screwing your Harley Davidson or Porsche; or if art’s your thing, Botticelli’s Venus or, more perversely, the Venus de Milo, or — why not? — an orgy sur le pont with the demoiselles of Avignon (especially the ones on the right). My mind took to wandering the boundless marches of cyberspace, and when I finally re-entered the atmosphere of Planet Earth, I found myself with this strange woman, older than me, the mother of two mongoloid daughters, writhing on a dilapidated sofa in a tastelessly decorated living room. I’m better off like this, I thought; that whole childhood memory game was getting mawkish, now let’s get down to business. I slid my hand under her angora sweater, easily reaching her breast because, as my eagle eyes had already detected, she wasn’t wearing a bra. One less hurdle, I thought as I twizzled a hard, protuberant, knob-like nipple, far too large for a breast that fitted my cupped hand. To give myself more freedom of movement I pulled her sweater over her head so abruptly I nearly choked her, and began the predictable descent, kiss by kiss, down the ladder of her prominent ribs to her navel. But before I could reach it, she rolled over, forcing me to find new words to tempt her mute back. I stroked it distractedly, even feeling relief at the truce, and contemplated the possibility of a massage till I could come up with something better. Massages had always worked for me, especially since I’d got hold of a bespoke program: shiatsu, Thai, Swedish, energy, relaxation … ‘You still there?’ whispered Gloria suddenly, taking me by surprise (one of the things I find most annoying is having my train of thought interrupted), and I cheerfully chirped yeah, where d’you think, to mask the first stirrings of annoyance at her veiled complaint. Here we go, I thought. I rested my cheek on the curve of her waist and gradually loosened my arms, letting the weight of my body rest on hers. What a shame, such soft skin, I thought. A wave of dope came and went, blowing through my body like a hot wind, emptying me without warning. Such soft skin, I repeated, but the repetition was less in the words in my mind than in the suction of her pores and the static of little tiny hairs between her and me. I took my shirt off to hear better. Immobilised, Gloria squirmed to reach the edge of my jeans and slide a hand inside. ‘Hey, kiddo, I’m not Rubber Woman you know,’ she giggled softly into the pillow; but rapt in my new discovery I couldn’t let go of her or stop rubbing my newly awakened skin against hers. Something’s happening here, I felt rather than thought, with some alarm; something’s coming through this wrapping of mine, suddenly so thin and porous: it isn’t the dope, it isn’t the childhood memories, it isn’t just feeling horny. I had to find out what it was, this crackling of bubble wrap on my skin when it came into contact with hers, my armadillo carapace suddenly as soft and yielding as a cat to its caresses, and, seeking the answer, I lost myself with no chance of return in the succession of plains and hollows from her nape to her waist. This skin, this beautiful skin, a voice inside me kept repeating as I rubbed my nose, my eyes, my mouth on it the way you do on a sun-dried towel when stepping out of the sea. There were small pockets of energy that alternated with the softness of the skin, points so intense that my fingertips felt almost like reliefs, and I pursued their tracery across every corner of her body, flipping her over to snuffle about in her breasts and armpits and beyond her belly, following the elusive waist of her skirt, which she herself saw to unfastening and tugging off, twisting and turning to free hips and thighs of the trap, and make it vanish beyond her ankles. Her body became vast in the darkness, extending in all directions at once, lost in time as well, and I lost myself and roamed over it with my broken compass, my nameless map and handless clock. They’re more different than ever in the dark, I felt as I entered her, her cunt fitting me snug as a cast of my cock, her sigh so deep on feeling it slide in that for a second I wished for some light to see her face by — although the darkness had the advantage that I didn’t have to close my eyes to people it with the ghosts who’d lead me smoothly to the finale. It never ceases to amaze me that I’m never satisfied with the woman I have beneath me and that to get aroused I have think of another one, or of the same one somewhere else, in another situation, sometimes even with someone else. On automatic pilot my body dealt the thrusts that rock the world, while I searched the database of my mind for the most suitable images for the occasion. I made do with the first hit, Marroné’s secretary, which gave me a new spurt of fire to redouble my attacks; there was even a faint element of humiliation that made me pant more deeply, but then I got this montage with spirals of toilet paper fluttering over her boss’s arse, and started shaking my head (which I always keep to one side to avoid distractions) left and right to erase it from my sight, when I felt two hands grabbing it, pulling it to the middle, forcing me to open my eyes and see what lay before them: the eyes of the woman, capturing the reflection of the faint light that filtered in from the street, and gazing into mine. ‘Felipe,’ she murmured so low it could have been telepathy, and with a shudder, I suppressed a fresh wave of annoyance awoken by her interference. Nosy, I thought, don’t you understand what …? ‘Anything wrong …?’ she asked, and before she could finish, I said ‘Nothing, I’m fine’ (Why don’t you shut up?). I leaned against the sofa-back to let her move, leaving a corner of cushion for her to sit on while, lying on my back, I occupied the whole sofa, my eyes fixed on the grey light of the ceiling. She caressed me, despite the marble hardness of my tense body, as I pondered the fastest way to get up and go home without offending her. Before I could — slow as ever, timorous, letting myself be outmanœuvred — she straddled me, and, as fragile as the caress of a feather, I felt a glimmer of pleasure when the tips of her bush met my abdominal muscles and her generous buttocks lodged themselves on either side of my dispirited cock. Then it was gone, extinguished (absurdly, at that moment I remembered the wavering blue flame of the pilot light in the boiler when a south-easterly blows) and looked away, letting her get on with it, in the hope that the message would finally reach her, or that she’d soon tire. Still, to her credit, instead of treading the well-beaten paths, she chose to bestow her ghostly kisses and the petal-like brush of her caresses on the curve of my shoulders, my closed eyelids, the hollow of my arms and knees, the line of my throat … She squeezed my arms from top to bottom like tubes of toothpaste; she unknotted my clenched fingers one by one, licking their tips like ice creams; her tongue delved into the hollow of my chest, drilling deeper and deeper till it found the nest of all anguish. My hostility, my decision not to collaborate at all, turned against me and left me helpless in her hands, then suddenly Gloria was everywhere, exploring me at will and my skin was a mosaic of match-heads and her tongue the sandpaper lighting roads of fire as it went. The brain, I managed to think, what a criminal deception; the only erogenous zone is the skin. My body began to stir, far removed from my will, but I no longer knew which body it was — the heat fusing them at the points of most friction — nor who was panting above and sighing below, whose were the kisses that mingled in the total interface of our mouths, whose the air emptying from our lungs, or how long this membrane between two soap bubbles would last. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Only right at the last did I regain my body, feeling the whole of it liquefy down to the last cell and eject itself in a gush through the tiny hole at the tip, feeling that it was impossible for that to happen, and, before losing all notion of what was happening, feeling that the impossible was happening, as the still-uncontrollable judderings of hips above accompanied the broken murmurs poured in the ear below till the body above moaned and shouted before it collapsed trembling, no bones unbroken, on top of the awaiting one beneath. For some time Gloria went on biting and sucking my ear, neck, shoulder, anything she could reach without leaving the axis on which she turned, while I renewed the exploration of the mystery which I now felt further than ever from solving: what was it that my fingers kept detecting on the inexhaustible surface of her back, the sweet fruit of her buttocks, the slide of her thighs (climbing up, sliding happily down, running back up, the way we did on the slide in the square in Malihuel); I desperately wanted to be blind to feel her more intensely and, lifting my fingers to break the spell, I made another discovery: the air felt rough after touching her. Some part of my body, probably the one that most snugly fitted her recesses and projections, whispered a corollary: after touching this, it told me, you won’t want to touch anything else. Learn that now, even if you forget it when you get up: you’ll forever be comparing; any other skin will feel like sackcloth; it’s going to be hard to live without.