Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

The landscape was different, unrecognisable, and I almost lost my way several times. The open country was a no-man’s-land: not even the sheep had stayed, and the only thing recognisable in the fog was the occasional cry of a gull. I passed the twisted, burnt-out wreck of a plane — impossible to say if it was one of ours or theirs. Normally people started to appear near the first mountain but now there was no one in sight, no one for kilometres, and yet I could feel dozens of hidden eyes watching me. There were craters everywhere, huge holes where the rocks had exploded out across the grass and peat, broken mouths full of water and mud, excoriations and scars, openings surrounded by refuse, like the mouths of vizcacha burrows, from which, now and then, a pair of fleeting eyes would peep out, then disappear again. The first ones I spotted were three soldiers who didn’t fit in their foxhole, their torsos sticking out and waving their arms like creatures anchored to the seabed.

‘Oy, mate, got any grub?’

‘Come over here, chubby, and we’ll scoff you!’

‘Food! Food!’

I shook my bowed head at them and began to run, the way I used to as a boy on my way home with Ma’s groceries and the gang on the corner used to chase me. I wanted to reach the safety of our position as soon as possible and set off around the hill as fast as I could, running whenever I found myself out in the open, hiding among the rocks from God knows what, because the English planes didn’t come out in the rain and the naval bombardment used to stop during the daytime. All the old landmarks had been blown to the point of indistinction, but I preferred to find my own way than approach one of the positions and ask, because, between the rain and the fog and the rumours of Gurkha commandos, some kid from the Class of ’63, his brain strained like a rubber band to breaking point, might finally lose it and start taking pot-shots in the fog till he was out of ammunition. Someone shouted something at one point: it might have been halt or a greeting or more demands for food, but by then they all sounded like animals leaping through the fog from cave to cave, alerting others of the intruder’s presence.

Night was falling (the day had been murkier than water from a floorcloth) by the time I reached the first crags of my mountain.

‘Felipe! Felix the Cat! It’s you!’

He hugged me before I saw him. Only by his voice did I recognise the soiled and shapeless bulk smelling of old dog on a rainy day as my friend Carlitos. The other faces I found by firelight, albeit so black, emaciated and bearded that I had difficulty recognising them: Chanino by his smile, Rubén by his red Independiente scarf (now brown) poking out of the neck of his jacket, the two Cordobans from the neighbouring position by the FAP they always lugged around. There was someone new too, a little guy with frightened eyes who looked at me as if he’d been sitting in my chair while I was away and now expected me to kick him off: but they’d gone on digging in my absence, and the foxhole was now a deep cave with room for all of us, including him. He’d turned up one day, asking for something to eat, and couldn’t say which company or regiment he was from. He was a ’63 — you could see it in his eyes — and had apparently fled after being mistreated or picked on by some officer; changing position was the nearest thing to deserting you could hope for on these shitty Islands. There had been a debate at first about whether to keep him (they could have been court-martialled, and then there wasn’t enough food to go round), but they adopted him as a mascot after Carlos forced the vote, and as he didn’t say a word or have any identification, he was nicknamed ‘Hijitus’.

They filled me in as we tended the ephemeral little fire like over-protective mothers, shielding it from the wind with our bodies and ponchos, feeding the weak beatings of its tepid heart with wet twigs and peat. They’d killed a cow a week ago and there were still a few bones left with bits of hide stuck to them to warm up in the embers (grabbing them with your hands and feeling them through your gloves warmed you up more than whatever scraps you could tear off). Apart from the wind, all you could hear was the gnawing of tooth on bone and, now and again, the sound of thunder from the coast, invariably preceded by a sequence of powder-flashes lighting up the layer of clouds that hung from the sky like the belly of a dead animal.

It was that night, before I became one with them and their daily routine, that I saw what, not the war, but the interminable wait for it had turned us into: a tribe of savages or cavemen, monkeys or — this was harder to accept — tramps. So this was the lesson we were here to learn; this was what we’d been brought so far for: this, our true initiation. Squatting in a circle around a dismembered corpse, the flames lighting the soiled faces as they chewed phlegmatically, the fingers with their black nails sticking out of open gloves, tearing off strips of meat and carrying them to the mouths, sometimes growling over the ownership of a bone, sometimes sharing the almost non-existent. Now and then one would disappear into the mouth of its lair and come back carrying some damp peat, or water in a halved skull that, laid beside the flame, turned out to be just a tin hat. The clan of youngsters, expelled from the safety of the herd by the dominant males, trying to survive till their time came; taking refuge from the rain or hurricane-force winds, or the dread voice of the lord of thunder, which now sank us every night into the most innocent of panics as we ran in circles or dug with the fire raining from the sky; or organising ourselves in the mornings to go on sorties and hunt or gather whatever happened to be lying around; every other day we’d go and check the rubbish tip in the town, but in the last few weeks nothing edible had been thrown away; once on our way back, with nothing to show for our efforts, we passed Moody Brook and checked the pile of empty pots, a bit of stew had been spilled on the ground, and Carlitos and Rubén had grabbed a spoon without thinking and tucked in, dirt and all, beckoning me to join them; I still had some reserves from my time in the town, and I looked away in disgust (they didn’t even notice), but two days later I found myself hungering after that food; or if we’d collected anything worthwhile, spending our evenings bartering with neighbouring clans (food, batteries, helicopter fuel, clothes, empty tin cans, dry peat; everything had a value, except money). The vision haunted me throughout that first night’s vigil till the following morning when, perched on the highest rocks of the prehistoric landscape, I watched the first occupants of the neighbouring caves come out, numb with cold, covered in any old rags, cloth, bits of tent, threads or patches they had to hand, and tying themselves up like parcels with the guy ropes of lost or unused tents. Coughing clouds of smoke in the grey dawn, shaking their boots to feel their toes, trying to piss with their pricks barely peeping out of their flies, blowing on the eye of the fire that had slumbered all night under clods of peat, breaking the ice in the puddles for water. I got a few matés: a Coke can for a gourd filled with the same yerba from three days ago, sipped through an empty biro, one end wrapped in gauze. The houses of the Kelpers, and their chimneys, and their teas with scones and strawberry jam were now a world away, one less and less of memory and more of dream; yet, despite everything, I felt a calm, a peace, because I knew that, come what may, I had to be here; this was my place and these were my friends; my passage through the town had only been a truce and now I could pick my fate up where I’d left it.

I soon adapted. The morning mist had turned to monotonous drizzle by midday and rain by nightfall. It rained for three days and three nights, a persistent sleet whipped up by demented gusts that stuffed it down your neck, up your wrists, into your ears; the peat became as waterlogged as washing in to soak, and the mud became soft and slimy, sticking to your boots and clothes like a second skin. The water that fell from the sodden, sagging canvas of the tents filled the ditch in less than half an hour and the four rifles slept at the bottom for a night until Chanino stuck legs, arms and head below the freezing water to fish them out. By the time it had stopped, my fleeting advantage of dry clothing, clean body and full stomach had vanished as if it had never existed and I was one of them again. I don’t think we ever recovered from that rain: three days without a minute’s sleep, weeping because we couldn’t feel our hands or feet, the five of us eating what I’d brought from the town in my pockets: two tins of corned beef, three Namur nougats, a packet of uncooked rice soaked in rain-water. We sang at first: Carlitos and I songs by Charly and Spinetta, Rubén cumbia and tropical, Chanino zambas and chamamés that brought tears to his eyes. Once we’d exhausted the repertoire, we tried telling jokes, but nobody laughed, so we sat there in silence, filling up with the water and the mud, the level slowly rising past our chests, throats, noses, eyes … Every minute was spent thinking I can’t, I can’t stand another minute, and by repeating the mantra, you reached the next, then all sixty minutes of an hour, the hours of a day and the night and another day, without any relief other than the moments of exhaustion and almost delirium when we hallucinated the layer of clouds opening to let the first feeble shaft of sunlight through or four soldiers approaching, dragging over a pot of steaming stew.