Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

Her sarcasm sweetened to irony.

‘Well, we didn’t have such a bad time, after all. Just let me think it’s for personal services. The door’s always open for you if this is what you’re paying. Well,’ she exclaimed flicking through the notes with her thumb like a pack of cards, ‘I think I’ve found my vocation.’ She looked up as I approached the door. ‘Do your friends pay as well as you do?’

‘I’m going,’ I replied.

‘Yes, I know. And I wanted you to stay and protect us. You’d probably open the door for him.’

‘Think what you like,’ I told her with one hand on the door handle.

‘Wait. One more thing. I should have waited to tell you, but I suppose I’ll never see you again. I do think you’re Felix the Cat, but what I can’t believe is that that little dream-kid has grown into this.’

She was sitting in the middle of the sofa, under the direct beam of the night-light, very upright, knees together, arms at right angles either side of her body, hair cascading over her shoulders: a queen on her throne, dismissing a vassal who, forbidden to turn his back, could but withdraw backwards. The blinding points of light glittered ever more intensely as the rest of her body was slowly eclipsed in half-light. She suddenly appeared to me as one of those drawings of the constellations in maps of the sky: the random star groups the only sharp reality, the lines that joined them and the animal or human figures that enclosed them just ghosts projected by the imagination to populate the frozen blackness of space. I closed my eyes, and, piercing my eyelids, the points of light remained there, pinned red-hot on my retinas.

‘A few years ago I went back to Malihuel in a fit of nostalgia to regain something of the flavour of my childhood, a time when life was beautiful for me. Don’t you know what happened to the town?’

My face must have said no for me.

‘It’s been swallowed up by the lagoon. There’s nothing left, just a few odd houses you reach by boat. They had to move all the public buildings to Fuguet. The water floods the streets we played in as children, Felipe. As you approach across it, the first thing you see in the distance is the church spire. We got as far as the ruins of the altar in the boat. All you can see of our island is the top of the hotel (where I had dinner with Sandro when I was a girl) and the dead treetops of the beach resort. There are no flamingos, no nothing. Malihuel has gone for ever, Felipe.’

They brought the draft round to my house one night in a patrol car (I’m talking of course about the first half of this story, the part that took place ten years ago). Not that I wasn’t expecting it: when I’d heard about the recovery of the Islands on 2nd April, I knew that if my bad luck had made my military service coincide with our only war in a hundred years it wasn’t just to give me a fright. For a few days I toyed with the idea of dressing up as a Chola and decamping to Bolivia on the Estrella del Norte; only half-heartedly, because I knew my fear and inertia would win the day, so to save time I put the books and notes for my programming degree under the bed (I’d only started the week before) and got down to the only thing I knew how to in these situations: waiting. I remember that night well because I was stroking Ana’s naked back (still unused to the miracle), when her skin began to flicker in electric blue flashes and, peering through the blinds, I saw them get out. It would have been around eleven at night and I tore it open in front of them in my T-shirt and underpants. I was to present myself at 0600, and when I’d finished reading, they stood there staring; for several seconds I wondered if they were waiting for a tip. ‘You’d better be there or we’ll come looking for you and you won’t get off so lightly then,’ spat a titch with a Chinese moustache, and the three of them turned and left like the Three Wise Men to carry on the distribution, every draft promising a pair of ill-fitting old army boots, a FAL with a bent barrel, a dented helmet without a strap in every little pair of shoes that nobody had left outside, their gifts to receive. Ana rang home to say she was staying the night at a friend’s house, while I tried unsuccessfully to explain to my mum but couldn’t make her understand or even stop smiling; she told me to wrap up warm and send a postcard (I think she thought that I was off to England for a computing course and, humouring her as I always end up doing, I found myself telling her not to worry, it’s summer over there) and not to forget to write to my father (whom I’d never even met). That night was the first time that Ana, softened by the filmic romanticism of the situation (‘This could be our last night together’), let me go down on her, and we lay there hugging, wide awake and barely talking, till the time came. At about three in the morning we took the bus to Retiro, then the coach to the regiment, which was out in La Plata, and it wasn’t till the belly of the plane, in the darkness and the deafening roar (quite a relief, because nobody felt like looking at each other or talking), that I realised I still had her smell on me, impregnated on my chin and eyebrows, and almost intoxicating under all ten fingernails. The perfume of her cunt stayed with me the whole war: it was enough to catch a faint trace of it flowering unexpectedly amid a thousand others for the whole unbearable reality to vanish like mist, and for me to return to her arms and my bedroom, which shone with colours more vivid than the ones in the Van Gogh painting. What the war stole from me, greedy for a bit of woman amid the stench of all those men (over 10,000 variations on a theme) it gave back to me with a deceptive composite smell, the substitution so gradual that I went from one to the other without realising: the smell of peat, wood, helicopter fuel, scorched meat, damp wool, the wind blowing from the sea, the collective fear macerating for weeks in the mud of the foxholes, the whiff of gunpowder in the morning air after every bombardment simulated the original so successfully that, two years later, when I caught it again on a woman, of whom all I remember was her smell (I never saw Ana again), I was paralysed, naked, on all fours above her, feeling the weight of the uniform and rucksack on my body, and under my hands and knees the slimy mud and sharp rocks, because all I could smell was the Islands. I could almost smell them now, perched tremulous as a butterfly on the reflection of my nose in the bus mirror. The driver looked at me out of the corner of his eye, puffing now and then on his cigarette despite the ‘No Smoking’ sign opposite the Malvinas sticker in the mirror. It can’t have been his, he was too young to be a veteran; to think that not so long ago we were still the boys of war. Once or twice during the journey I raised my trembling fingers (from the cobblestones) to remember her scent, pursuing the fleeting trace beneath the cheap perfume of the soap I’d used the night before to shower when I’d got home; but it was so faint that I found it difficult to decide whether it was her smell or just the memory of it.

When I spoke to Tomás about it once, he nodded gravely — as if he’d been doing nothing but ponder the question for years — then pinched his tattoo to join the two Islands across the far north of the strait: the contour had barely altered, but there was no doubt that I was now looking at a perfect female sex, complete with half-open lips and a few unwaxed hairs on belly and thighs. ‘Get it now?’ he said, letting go of the fold of skin and breaking the spell. ‘What do you want them to smell of? And they ask us why we want to go back.’

That must have been why in the Islands having a girlfriend was a matter of life and death: we, the lucky ones, felt like part of an exclusive club where we could meet and talk about them, write them letters and share the delight of receiving them, although no one could conceal their initial panic on disembowelling the envelope and skipping the first few lines to make sure we weren’t being dumped, sigh and smile, and go back to the beginning, and only then start reading as you should. We weren’t fussy: sometimes it was enough to have necked once with them at the cinema; we didn’t even need them to like us that much. If the war turned any old cross-eyed, knock-kneed Aldonza into a Dulcinea, it was because in each of us nested the magical terror that only the ones who had a girlfriend waiting would make it back home. Though no letter of hers ever reached me, I have proof that Ana did wait for me; she apparently even came to visit me a couple of times. But I didn’t recognise her. At least, that’s what I was told several months later by one of the male nurses at the Campo de Mayo hospital, without sparing me the suggestion that he’d taken advantage of what I couldn’t. One of the first things I did when I was discharged was to look for her. I remembered she lived in Floresta, I even had a mental picture of the front of her house: a white thing encrusted with porous stones that looked like a meringue pudding, but I couldn’t remember the address. Three days running I scoured the neighbourhood street by street, first E to W, then S to N, my steps tracing its grid until I’d exhausted it, but I couldn’t find it. I approached lots of people to ask them, but most of them fled: my hair hadn’t grown back yet and the scar must still have been very visible. And, of course, God knows what I said to them. Even now, walking down the street, I sometimes imagine I’m going to bump into her, although my fear of not recognising her increases with every passing year. In all probability she’ll be an amorphous lump with sagging tits, a kid attached to either hand and another in the oven; when I walk briskly past her with head bowed, as is my wont, it’ll be she who stops me and looks at me smiling hesitantly. Felipe, is that you? Don’t you remember me? After all, if she went to see me at the hospital and recognised me, she’d have to recognise me now. I’ve hardly changed.