Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘The food’s ours. We hunted it. We’re past expecting anything from you, but at least let us eat in peace.’

‘In peace? In peace?’ replied Verraco, beginning to smile as his pupils narrowed like a cat’s, his whole face taking on an expression of intense happiness. ‘What do you mean leave you in peace, soldier, when we’re at war? Let’s see Corporal, Sergeant, and you two, seize the conscript and disarm him for me. We’re going to teach him some discipline.’

‘You two.’ Rubén and me. No one moved … Verraco whipped out his standard issue. He picked Rubén and jammed it into his neck.

‘Corporal …’

Chanino began to weep. He looked at Carlitos, pleading. Wally Walrus had taken out his gun too but was pointing it at the ground. Carlitos lowered the FAL then dropped it. It fell and broke a puddle of ice with the butt.

Everything happened very fast after that. Verraco, savouring every syllable as if it were a mouthful of the lamb he was looking forward to, ordered Carlitos to strip. As Carlitos didn’t move a muscle to obey, but just stared straight ahead (if only looks could kill), he ordered Wally Walrus and Chanino to do it. It took them some time because they had to peel him layer by layer, till he was left standing in his underpants at the side of a pile of clothes taller than he was.

‘Those too,’ said Verraco, pointing at the dead-mouse-coloured underpants, and it was Wally Walrus who had to approach and pull them down with two fingers, exaggeratedly averting his gaze to show he was a proper little macho man and wasn’t interested in what lay underneath. For a moment I felt more like shooting him .

There was no birthday party any more, no apartment, no city around me, there was nothing but that glint of death in the island’s hills, Verraco’s grinning face, both eyebrows raised in mockery of the sergeant, Carlitos as stiff as a stake, hugging his body to keep it from shivering, my finger clenched on the trigger of my FAL, Rubén huddled on the ground, Chanino trying to avoid my gaze, the hungry dogs sniffing about on the fringes at a safe distance.

This is the one, this one and no other, I thought as I watched him laughing and tossing peanuts down his craw, washing them down with a beer and wiping the foam from his moustache with the back of his hand, this is the one who made Wally Walrus, Chanino and Rubén stretch Carlos out over the rocks and frozen puddles, tie his wrists and ankles to the tent pegs, nearly tearing his bones from their joints; but, even though it all flashes before my eyes again, I can’t remember what it was I was doing. I suppose I must have obeyed and pulled on the ropes too, jamming my foot against the rocks, pulled with all my might, for that fraction of a second that condemns me for the whole of eternity, hating Carlitos for making us do this, hating his arm for resisting my tugs. Or maybe I wriggled out of it somehow, just played dumb, blended invisibly into the landscape, losing density and clarity as I have so many times since, managed to disappear — a survival trick — in front of everyone instead of picking up my weapon and pulling the trigger to cleanse the world of the beast that had now become part of my life for ever. It would have been easy: he wasn’t looking at me; he couldn’t see me as he paced smugly around the taut X in the mud that was my friend; but if I did it — if I even thought it — I’d become visible again, and then they’d come for me , then they’d do it to me. There was a moment when I thought I was for it: when Verraco was squatting beside Carlitos’ face (who kept his eyes fixed on the sky), gazing pensively at him as if pondering what was needed to make his work perfect; but the moment passed. Straightening up again, he shouted something to Wally Walrus, who grabbed Chanino by the arm and dragged him towards the forward positions. After a while — it could have been ten minutes or an hour — they came back carrying a heavy machine between the two of them and put it down by Carlitos’ body. At the first contact of the two bare wires he writhed and contracted like a worm pierced by the tip of a hook, and every one of his shrieks hung there above the trenches in the windless air, repeating themselves in echoes until relieved by the next. Five or six times until a jab of the wires brought nothing but blood. Minutes passed, captain and sergeant effing and blinding what the fuck’s wrong, checking parts, until Verraco got up and wiped the grease off his hands on a few handfuls of grass. ‘Looks like the generator’s fucked. Just as I was getting warmed up. Ah well, you’ll have to get by without radar till it’s repaired. Sergeant, double the guard; no one’s to sleep tonight. Let’s see if you lot learn your lesson.’ But he wasn’t done, and without taking his eyes off the body prostrated at his feet, he asked the sergeant something and repeated it twice before the other man understood.

‘Pliers! Those things for pulling out nails! Pliers! What am I talking in, English?’

The sergeant passed the order to Chanino who, like a sleepwalker, went to rifle through his things.

‘Oh, and in the meantime keep an eye on the barbecue, soldier, because we’ll be here for a while and I’m not about to go hungry,’ he added, and while Rubén readjusted the lamb skewered on the two stakes, a replica of Carlitos’ naked body in miniature, Chanino approached with a pair of black pliers (it was me who’d nicked them from the town, waving them proudly, the day I got back) and placed them in Verraco’s open hand. Gripping them carefully, as if about to dismantle a delicate piece of machinery, Verraco bit Carlitos’ upper lip with the tip and began pulling upwards, forcing him to lift his head till his chin touched his chest, and then held it there. In a few minutes the pain of the posture became intolerable, and his whole body arched upwards, tugging at the tent pegs till they bent, but he couldn’t lower his head, which hung with his full bodyweight from the lip that Verraco held in his grip. And Verraco smiled smugly at the touch of originality he’d added to that most traditional of Argentinian tortures.

‘Sometimes you have to think before you speak,’ he whispered into his ear, almost intimately. ‘An open mouth is the best way to get hooked, soldier,’ he said to him, giving him little tugs with the pliers as if the fish had taken the bait. He was starting to feel uncomfortable, and with the sergeant busy turning the lamb, he ordered Chanino to take over.

‘All right, corporal, hold this for me.’

He handed him the pliers and got up, pulling a pained face as he straightened his knees. Once he was on his feet, he began to harangue us.

‘Look and learn, soldiers. Did you think that all you had to do to defend the Fatherland was shoot guns like they do in the movies? Learn how to win the war, then we’ll teach the English too. All manuals and maps and blackboards the English are. Think they know it all. But we,’ he said, beating his chest to emphasise the fact he didn’t include us, ‘are veterans of a war they’ve never seen in the textbooks. Let’s see what all that theory’s for when they’re tied up down here! Just give me some old bed-springs and a well-charged battery, and they’ll see how the war here is over in two shocks of a lamb’s tail! They come on all macho with their body-warmers and night-vision goggles and tracer ammunition, but dripping wet and starkers on a set of bed-springs even the toughest of them will loosen their bowels, you’ll see! That sorts the men from the boys! Face to face! Without all their fucking clobber! Let’s see what they do with their night-sights when their balls are sputtering like a couple of fried eggs! They can stick ’em up their arse and then tell us what they see,’ he yelled, cracking up at his own joke, without realising that the weeping Chanino, whose arm shook uncontrollably, had lowered his iron grip until Carlitos’ neck was resting on a tussock of grass. The harangue had only whetted Verraco’s appetite, and he made for the lamb, cut off a rib with his knife, and started tearing and slicing at it gaucho-style.