Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

A few years ago, I thought, I’d have been singing along. As long as it wasn’t me doing the jumping. Taking advantage of Verraco and my friends being occupied, I nabbed the Scotch, poured myself a double and downed it in one without ice or water.

‘Feel better now you’ve been nationalised? Hop it, or next time we’ll be the ones dropping in on you.’ They sent him packing with a slammed door and, sure enough, the conversation turned to Chilean designs on our territory, Chilean tactical support of England during the war, Chilean plans to replace Argentina in the Malvinas — Mainland link, laying long-term plans for the Islands to become sovereign Chilean territory. Tomás and the others nodded as Verraco explained. They looked so at ease with each other … They’d waved me over a couple of times, come here, be friends, but I’d just raised my wine or whisky glass and sent them an indulgent smile and they’d given up without much interest.

‘You off already?’ crowed Ignacio when he saw me with my jacket.

‘Deserter! Deserter!’ hooted Sergio through cupped hands.

Verraco stood in front of me, crushing my chest with his open palm. Beneath his obscene moustache he was grinning happily.

‘Don’t you know the penalty for leaving your post in wartime, soldier? Well, Company?’

‘Death!’ they chorused.

‘Can’t hear you! Louder!’

‘Death!’ they roared.

I smiled, said all right lads and threw my jacket over a chair. Verraco slapped me hard on the back, making sure it hurt, and went off with two other officers who’d called him over. He was spoiling for a scrap, no doubt as payback for the video game (perhaps I had gone a mite over the top). I downed two glasses of wine, one after the other, and resigned myself to listening yet again to Hugo’s exploits, as narrated by himself — provided his mother was at hand to hear.

‘Malvinas? Malvinas? In that terrain, with that technology, you had to be queer or crippled not to win the war. The terrain of the Islands is just like England, they know it better than we do. But you know what? I’d like to have seen the English with their radar and their night-vision goggles and their body-warmers in the Tucumán jungle. I’d love to have seen them there! Day after day without a glimpse of the sun, advancing across unknown terrain almost blind, every second the possibility of an ambush by a faceless enemy without uniform or flag! The English wouldn’t have lasted two months in Tucumán! Like the Americans in Vietnam! They’d have lasted less than the guerrillas in Tucumán! Did I ever tell you about the time in Acheral when we got them with the helicopter? The whole Che Guevara bit was nothing next to that!’

Had I come to listen to this all over again? I sidled away and began looking at the campaign photos to see if there was anyone I recognised; but officers apparently don’t hang photos of privates on their walls. But I did come across the white mare, a sight that filled me with joy; I’d forgotten all about her. We found her waiting for us at the foot of the hill the night we arrived, watching with docile, incurious eyes the inferior beings writhing under the weight of their rucksacks and dropping at her feet; and when, raising our eyes towards the hill now the size of Mount Aconcagua, Rubén asked the sergeant Sir Sergeant Sir shall we start loading up the horse, Sir Sergeant Sir had him doing frog-jumps for half an hour for being a dickhead and a pussy: dogs are for burden, horses are for riding, he yelled at him, when the mare suddenly lifted her tail and aimed three or four steaming balls into his bag. From that day on we declared her our official mascot, named her Pampera and brought her grass, especially Carlitos, who grew very fond of her and walked her with the reins whenever he could, peripatetically unravelling philosophical reflections that the mare would nod to: ‘Yes indeed, old girl. We’ve been screwed, we’re prisoners before we start. If the war had been with Chile, you and me would be in California by now,’ he told her, ‘but unless you fancy swimming there, we’re never getting out. What kind of war is it if we can’t even fantasise about deserting?’

Rumours were something else we found to entertain ourselves with. There were rumours about the negotiations: the United Nations had intervened and declared the Islands a nature reserve; the Pope had intervened and declared them an earthly paradise. The Peruvian fleet, the fourth largest fishing fleet on the planet (or the third, or the second, depending how hungry we were that day) was on its way, laden with tuna to solve the food shortage. Catastrophe rumours started flying as soon as the English fleet surrounded the Islands: from the nuclear missiles that would wipe us out in seconds (the Kelpers had had fallout shelters for a while now) to the Gurkhas who could advance underground like moles and eviscerate soldiers in their foxholes, sucking up their entrails and leaving just the empty shells behind them. Then up popped an NCO with an optimistic version to balance things out: the English didn’t have our main ally, ‘Admiral Winter’! Psychologically worn out by the long wait on their ships, into which they’d been forced by Argentina’s resistance, they’d reverted to aberrant practices such as the inordinate consumption of alcohol and drugs, sodomy and continual masturbation. They don’t know what they’re fighting for; they’re mercenaries, unemployed kids picked up on the streets to defend their country for a scrap of stale bread! (Carlitos: the poor English, going crazy in their narrow bunks, suffocated by the heating, nothing to do all day but watch videos and play ping-pong, while we’re here having a great old time in the open air, playing cards every night and guitar sessions till dawn.) Another one that kept us entertained for several days was about English commandos strolling about the Islands in Argentinian uniforms, speaking perfect Spanish. If you wanted to unmask them, you had to ask them something that only an Argentinian could answer. We had a lot of fun with that: two days chasing each other around the mountain, shouting ‘Famous football teams!’ (‘Boca, River, Independiente, Huracán, Racing, San Lorenzo …’) ‘Argentinian inventions!’ (‘buses, biros, dulce de leche, barbed wire, finger-prints …’) ‘Ingredients of a parrillada!’ (‘sausage, black pudding, chitterlings, sweetbreads, kidneys, brains, udder …’). We once cornered an NCO who’d lost his way and tested him at gunpoint.

‘Flora and fauna of the Pampean region!’

‘Colour of the Pink House!’

‘First article of the National Constitution!’

‘Main crops of the Antarctic!’

Our man almost started crying and only when he got one right (‘pink’) did we lower our FALs and let him go.

The other rumours touched on events on the mainland. By the end of May, prevented from landing on the Islands by our dauntless air force, the English had landed on the shores of Buenos Aires, where the citizens had driven them back by pouring boiling oil and water on them from the rooftops. And one day a lad from C Company ran up the mountain panting that they’d bombed the city. ‘Bid to assassinate Galtieri, bombing of Pink House. Noon yesterday, city centre full of people. Nine English bombers, cloudy sky. Dive-bombing, one after another. Pink House roof collapses, civil servants dragging themselves across the glass, dead colleagues and chunks of masonry blown across the square littered with exploded cars, uprooted trees, scattered corpses, mutilated survivors begging for help. A scatter bomb hits a full bus driving down Paseo Colón, ripping one side clean off like a sardine tin and spilling a horrific cargo of dead and wounded onto the street. Galtieri manages to escape through secret tunnels down to the river and takes refuge in a gunboat that whisks him away north, so many dead in the square they have to be lined up for the ambulances to get through.’ The images were so vivid, the details so minute, that no one doubted the bombardment had in fact taken place, and there were scenes of weeping and despair until a lieutenant popped up and slapped us out of our hysteria: ‘Listen, you dick-brains! Do you honestly think we’re going to leave the capital defenceless? No foreign power has or ever will bomb our Republic’s Capital! That’s our job!’ We weren’t completely convinced, but then someone picked up the radio and it was playing folk, tango and national rock all the time — no word of any catastrophe — so we breathed a sigh of relief: the English were only bombing us . By then they were doing so for a few hours a night to ‘soften us up’, as they say. In the town you slept fairly peacefully because you had the shield of the Kelpers, but on the mountainside there was nothing but sheep, and they fired on us with the patience of a housewife tenderising milanesas with a meat hammer. The blows smashed our heads against the walls of our cave, hurled us one on top of the other, sucked us down or pulled us out, as if, chewing us up, the foxhole couldn’t decide whether to spit or swallow. Carlitos swore at his folks for abandoning him here, Hijitus covered his ears and we had to tear his hands away and force him to shout to stop his eardrums bursting; Chanino wept and begged us not to make a noise, as if the bombs had ears, Toto, the skinnier of the two Cordobans, who’d muscled into our foxhole because it was deeper, shouted with the impotent fury of a child to get the fat boy off him, but never explained what he meant. I was revisited by the terror of the dinosaur from the ends of the earth. As a child, it never entered my mind till I laid my head on the pillow: then one, and another, I could hear its tread, thundering its way to my ears across the thousands of kilometres that separated us. Nothing could stop the enormous legs making the earth shake (one alone could squash a car); yet, however hard I tried to stay calm and tell myself they were far away and would take years to get here, the same voice that told me I was right would add yes, its steps sound a long way off but tonight it’s closer than last night, tomorrow closer than today, and one day they will reach you. But they didn’t; they eventually disappeared the night I realised they were the beatings of my own heart; I never remembered them again, till now, when, drowned by the same beating, waiting for the first bomb to fall in the frozen calm of the night, I realised I’d been deceiving myself, that the dinosaur had gone on advancing all this time and finally arrived, only to find the frightened little boy of fifteen years ago.