Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

Gloria asked me if I’d enjoyed it and I nodded enthusiastically.

‘Wasn’t it great? The first time,’ she said. ‘And we came together.’

‘I thought you came afterwards,’ I contradicted her.

‘What? Oh, right. I meant together, not at the same time. God, what a day. Just when you think the only thing you’ve got to look forward to is having dinner and watching the telly till you nod off, a stranger rings your doorbell, barges into your house and fucks you like a god. And there are people who complain about life.’

We chatted again afterwards, less anxiously, the stiff cock and the open cunt that lay in wait behind every phrase before, now sleepy and content, leaving us to play with words like two little kids in a sandpit, all wrapped up in themselves and serious with concentration, lending each other toys without knowing whose is which: post-fucking words, another dictionary that preserved the purity of life’s first words. They made it easier to find each other at last, at one of those crossroads in our common past where, until now, our paths hadn’t crossed.

‘Wait, wait. Felix the Cat! Was that you? You once beat the shit out of my cousin Diego!’

‘Your cousin? But then you must be …’

‘We did, we did meet: you ran after me with a squeezy bottle at the lagoon at Carnival! I grabbed you by the hand to stop you!’ she shouted, doing so again twenty years later. ‘You were just this little kid! My, how you’ve grown,’ she said, shaking my prick, which was awakening from its slumber. ‘That’s a big one, eh?’

‘I was floating on my back naked once in Bariloche and the newspaper published a photo of me with the caption “NESSIE SPOTTED IN LAKE NAHUEL HUAPI”.’

‘In that icy water too! Just imagine if it had been warmer!’

‘Yours was famous too. Guido told me.’

‘What?’

‘That you let the boys touch it.’

‘The liar!’ she shouted, bursting with laughter. ‘I only let him look once! The bastard had promised me he wouldn’t tell! The whole town … oh God, I want to die.’

Then it just started flowing, and we put together a story from the odds and ends of our two separate ones: chance meetings a basketball game, the church door, the queue at the bakery; sometimes conclusive, at others impossible, but which we vehemently assented to nonetheless, spiting the insipid truth with deception. For her, it also meant additional security: the stranger she’d let into her house, who was banging her a couple of hours later as her daughters slept in the next room, had been transformed into a child in red trunks, chasing her in and out of the picnic tables on the island, squirting innocent yet premonitory jets of water at her with his little carnival-clown squeezy bottle. I suppose that was another reason why she opened up:

‘You know what struck me about you? You met the girls from the start, but you stayed. With the others, you have no idea; I’d sometimes spend months thinking up excuses for them not to come round, because I don’t want to see them pull that face, and the day I do is the last I want to see them. With you I don’t have to worry.’

‘I want to see you,’ I said to her. ‘I’ll turn on the light.’

‘No, Felipe,’ she tried to head me off.

I should have listened to her, but she was too late; my hand was already on the switch. She managed to cover herself, but not the way a naked woman usually would: she’d left her breasts and cunt exposed, while her hands had flown to cover perfectly innocent parts of her breast and belly. Immediately I realised why. Ten people wouldn’t have had enough hands to hide the marks that swarmed over her body like insects, denser in the parts she was trying to hide.

‘Now you’ve seen me,’ she said to me angrily. ‘Now turn it off.’

I didn’t. I approached the sofa, sat down on the edge and touched one. It was as if they’d pinched very hard and torn a piece out, the surrounding skin then stretched like a darn to cover it. It was these shiny little scars that my fingers had detected, confusing them in the dark with some obscure tactile illusion produced by my enchantment; only now did the map I’d drawn by joining up these dots with my fingers begin to take shape. Gloria stared at me in resignation, waiting for me to make up my mind, and I’d like to have obliged: what, when, who. But I already knew the answers. They did it to this skin, I could feel it in my throat, in my eyes; they were capable of doing this to this skin.

‘The lighter ones are cattle prod; the darker ones, cigarette burns. And don’t worry: they’re more than ten years old. They won’t bite any more. Or are you the compassionate sort? Can you turn the fucking light off, now, or do you want to see more? Look.’

She opened her arms, exposing her body. I got up and turned off the light. Without approaching her body again, which I sensed was as tense, hostile and tight as a shut clam, I spoke without thinking.

‘You think you have a monopoly on suffering? I was sent to the Malvinas when I was nineteen; I was wounded in the head and spent a year not being able to speak. Yeah, I know, it doesn’t compare. I’m way down the rankings. I have no right to complain.’

I thought that she’d be even more pissed off after that and kick me out, but instead she sat down, hugging her knees, and asked me:

‘Where in Malvinas?’

‘Puerto Argentino. Longdon. What, you’ve been there?’ I said, a little more sarcastically than intended.

‘Not on Isla Grande?’

‘No. Why?’

She didn’t answer, but I could see her loosen up and propose a truce by tucking away her legs to make room for me. ‘You want the details or just the gist?’ she said to me after a minute’s silence, and I told her there was no need to if she didn’t want to, I’d heard plenty of stories like hers. ‘I can promise you,’ she corrected me, almost disdainful in her self-assurance, ‘you’ve never heard one like mine before. By the time I finish, you’ll probably want to leave. So think about it. You still have time,’ she finished, and from the way she said it I knew I had no option but to stay. Gloria went to fetch a blanket for herself and another for me; she brought cigarettes and smoked the whole time she was talking, without moving from her end of the sofa (nor I from mine); without touching each other once the whole time, each enwrapped in the cocoon of our own warmth.

‘The first time I realised what was going to happen I was eighteen and dating this boy from the Guevara Youth, who loved to talk at the meetings. He wanted me to go and live with him, but I wasn’t sure. I’d just started my degree (Law) and, although his passion turned me on, he wasn’t very bright; so naïve he was a bit thick, actually. There was a meeting that night in the faculty building, some kid who’d been wasted by the Triple A, and Fabián took to the podium in the street, which we’d cordoned off, and began to mouth off about all the blood spilt, the martyrs, the Revolution … As an orator he stank: one cliché after another, nobody took much notice of him except me. But I wasn’t listening to what he was saying. He suddenly looked so lovely up there, so full of life, that I felt something here, and said to myself there and then “Yes, alright, I will live with him, yes, I do. As he was climbing down, I waved to him and started to jump up and down to call him over; I could barely contain the urge to shout it out to him from where I was standing. But I wasn’t the only one: someone else was calling him from a parked car. His old gesture, as much as to say “Look woman, the cause comes first; you’ll have to wait,” always used to really get to me; but this time it filled me with tenderness, and I was trembling with impatience as he approached the open car window. Without a word an arm came out and hit him in the forehead with a hatchet. A hatchet: one of those little axes you use to cut the wood for the barbecue, and Fabián fell on his back with the hatchet still stuck in his forehead, and the car pulled off and disappeared before he’d stopped moving on the floor. There was pushing, running, shouting; people opened up to let him die, alone, in the middle of the circle of spooks that materialised out of the rally as it broke up. Me, I was paralysed, I couldn’t even shout. A friend pulled me away and I let her without resisting; the only thing I could think of was that they shouldn’t leave him there with the hatchet in his head, that someone should show some compassion and pull it out, I couldn’t stand the idea of him lying there like that with that look of frozen astonishment on his face and the hatchet buried in the middle of his forehead. That day was like a revelation to me, you see? As if it had been my own head the axe had split in two. I stayed in the movement, even after the coup, but only as a reflex, on automatic pilot, because the other alternatives were even scarier. I’d seen that day that we’d never beat them, that we weren’t capable of doing anything like that to them, that if we played by their rules, they were bound to win.