Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

She went quiet, trying to guess from my expression whether I’d had enough, drawing long and deep on her cigarette. Through the half-closed blinds filtered the headlights of a car disconcertedly going round and round the hub of all those streets, trying to guess which one to escape down.

‘Did he make it back?’ I eventually asked. She nodded as she put out her cigarette in the cone of fag ends that spilled over the ashtray between us.

‘He was one of the last. He came straight from the ship. I hadn’t had any news of him, not a thing; one hand wanted him to come back soon and look after the three of us, for him not to leave me alone in a situation like that — I wouldn’t swap my girls for anything in the world now, but at the start … The other prayed — alone — that he’d tread on a landmine and blow himself up, or be riddled with bullets, or captured on a mission (the bastard was a commando), and that they did to him what he’d done to me. Too bad they were English — such gentlemen! The Chileans would have been much better. The Gurkhas were a disappointment, weren’t they? Did they cut off anyone’s head in the end?’

‘Not that I know of …’

‘I kept dropping things, cutting myself, burning myself when I was cooking: one hand versus the other; they could barely do anything together when they were looking after the girls. And in three months everyone was back, and there was I hearing rumours of prisoners being taken to England in secret as hostages, getting used to the idea he wasn’t coming back and beginning to enjoy it. But the bastard always turns up just when you least expect him. But this time I had a surprise in store for him; this time it was me who’d pulled a fast one on him. It was a night like this, nearly ten years ago, I heard the doorbell go and opened the door. He was still in uniform, carrying his kitbag, and, without so much as a hello, he stared at my empty belly and said “I want to meet my daughters.” He was gone, way gone (he’d never really been on the hither side) but this time I knew he’d gone for good; thousands of kilometres out to sea. My letters had fallen into that black abyss staring at me now, along with everything else. When he saw the girls asleep in the light from their night-light, he stood there stock-still, struck dumb. Fifteen minutes, without moving a muscle or making a sound. I was on the verge of yelling at him when he asked me in this neutral drone, still not moving, what I’d called them; Malvina and Soledad, the way you wanted, I told him, digging my nails into my palms to stop myself screaming. But we can change them if you like, there’s still time, I began; but he stopped me and held up one hand. Then he said “No, it’s fine. It’s fine,” he said, looking at the girls sleeping together, one little hand on top of the other, face down in their cot. “It’s fine,” he said, looking dumbly at the room, “It’s fine,” he repeated, measuring me with his eyes, and again, “It’s fine,” as he picked up his bag, “It’s fine,” as he opened the front door, and one more “It’s fine” reached me as I peered out onto the pavement, riding on the noise of his footsteps receding loudly on the flagstones, hard with winter cold. He never came back and, a few months later, someone who didn’t want to identify himself phoned me to tell me he was dead and that I should never try to find out any more. Can you believe it? The terror of the camps, the hero of the Malvinas, ran away from a woman and two newborn babies.’

‘Would you rather he’d stayed?’

A flash of the old pain, still capable of life, like those dried-out fish that gradually revive when placed in water, flitted across her features. She went on the attack.

‘What if you lot had won the war? What if the girls graduate as lawyers? Do me a favour, Felipe. Haven’t you understood what kind of a creature he is? For Christ’s sake don’t give me that cliché about the guy who tortures, rapes and murders in working hours, and then goes home and is a loving father and exemplary husband? Bullshit. A torturer’s a torturer everywhere he goes. He just changes his style, his instruments. At home he’s more patient: he has years ahead of him. A bastard’s a bastard and he defiles everything he touches.’

‘The girls too?’

‘No, not the girls. My body filtered out all the harm. The girls were born pure. Can’t you see? What do I care if they aren’t intelligent. What I do know is that there isn’t a wicked bone in their bodies. That’s where I beat him. It was my only way out. If they’d turned out normal and they’d had this much intelligence, he’d have turned them into what he wanted. This way he didn’t get the chance. You know what they are, my girls?’

‘What?’ I asked, instead of giving the obvious answer, out of politeness.

‘Angels.’

She said nothing else. When she tired of waiting for a reply, a remark, anything, she whisked the blanket off her with a toreador’s flourish and went to the bathroom. The light in the corridor lit the fall of her shoulders, the gentle wobble of her buttocks, her ankles as slender as wrists. Pity, I found myself thinking as I was getting dressed, with such a pretty body as that.

‘Leaving already,’ she said when she came back and saw me dressed.

‘Yes,’ I said, trying not to look her in the eye.

‘You got scared.’

‘No, it’s just that …’

‘What. Got to feed the cat?’

I ought to have gone, I thought, while she was pissing. Done a runner. Now I was trapped again. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘a little longer,’ and I sat down on the sofa. Immediately, a shooting pain ran from my arsehole to the back of my neck, and I leaped up and screamed.

‘What happened,’ she exclaimed in fright.

I pulled out the offending article. It was the fox badge from Surprise. Gloria put her hand over her mouth, but her laugh escaped through her fingers. Still in pain, but seized by the irony of the situation, I chuckled too. The cheque, I suddenly remembered. Gloria had sat down beside me and was eagerly attacking my belt buckle.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I have to look at it. Surely you don’t think I’m going to let you go home wounded in combat.’ She laughed some more, flipped me over and pulled my pants down, lightly nipping each cheek. She turned on the light to examine my wound, forgetting her own for the moment. ‘It’s a deep fucker, eh.’ She came back with some cotton wool and hydrogen peroxide. While one hand bathed the affected area, the other tiptoed up and down my crack, brushed my arsehole and toyed with my balls and cock, which it found hard despite myself. She finished and just as I was (kneeling on the ground, my elbows on the sofa cushion) she threw herself on me, running her hands over my chest, the soft brush of her cunt on my arse.

‘Don’t go, Felipe.’ Her tone had lost its sexual insinuation: all of a sudden, she was begging. ‘At least not tonight. The girls and I need you to stay tonight.’

Instantly I shrivelled, as if, like a bottle of champagne, my prick had been dunked in an ice bucket. I don’t know if it was the position, but I felt like I was being buggered, and did what I usually do in these situations (when pushed, I mean): I lay there, stiff as a statue, and Gloria’s caresses began to slide off the ‘No’ of my body like water off a waxed surface. Eventually giving up, she sat down on the sofa beside me, rigid, her hands on the angle of her closed thighs.

‘I don’t understand,’ she told me. ‘Things happened to you too, if you haven’t been telling stories. I thought that that … And Malihuel, too.’ She was doubting.

‘Malihuel yes,’ I managed to mutter as I adjusted my belt. Then she did something I wasn’t expecting. She went down on her knees, hugged my legs, grovelled.