Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘Come over here, Sergeant. I apologise I can’t offer you the glass of red this deserves, or even salt, criminal,’ he said with his mouth full of lamb, and having stripped a rib, he’d toss it away and the men in the neighbouring positions would crane to see where it had landed, while Verraco smacked his lips and licked his fingers. It was the same face I saw now and the same hatred that I felt. What had I been doing with it all these years? What parts of my life had I had to amputate to stop them rubbing against this hatred, what percentage of my body had I turned into dead meat, the only kind that can store it without writhing in agony? ‘You killed him,’ I mouthed. ‘You killed him,’ I said, not knowing if I was saying it to Verraco or to myself.

‘Felipe, are you feeling all right, mate?’ Tomás came over to cover me.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Verraco.

‘Nothing,’ he said jovially. ‘Reckon he’s had one too many.’ Indulgent laughter. ‘Soldier …’

‘ He killed him,’ I said, louder now, and tried to stand up. Several hands, it must have been Sergio and Ignacio, forced me into a chair.

‘No wonder the first game you gave me was all over the place,’ said Verraco, coming my way. ‘Been at the bottle, have we? You should see me now. I finished the last level yesterday.’

‘You killed him. You bastard.’

Again, he took his time understanding. And when he did, he raised his eyes to heaven and huffed in annoyance.

‘No, not today. Not another one.’ He turned to his comrades-in-arms to recruit their understanding: ‘Boys, wasn’t this all supposed to be over?’ Then he turned to me and said, ‘Well? Who?’

‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying, Lieutenant Colonel Sir …’

‘It was you. It was you. You had him out there all night, staked out in the frost! For stealing food because you lot were starving us to death! Say it was you!’

‘Listen, mate, if I had to remember every Tom, Dick and Harry I’ve had staked out …’

‘Carlos, his name was Carlos Feuer! He was from La Plata, he was twenty-three years old, he was about to graduate in psychology!’

‘Terrible memory for names. If I could just put a face to the name.’

‘He’s dead, you sick fuck!’

‘You bet,’ he said with a smile. ‘Otherwise, it definitely wasn’t me.’

My three friends had to drag me to the door while Verraco, also being restrained, yelled at me insanely, his red neck exploding with veins in the tatters of shirt I’d left him. Hugo, who’d wheeled in on Verraco’s behalf, tried to grab me, shouting, ‘If I had my legs, if I had my legs,’ and in the ensuing brawl I knocked him over, chair and all, on the leftovers of the Three Forces Pie. In the confusion my friends managed to drag me out and shove me into the lift. Back on the street Tomás slammed me against a wall and held me there until I stopped kicking.

‘Are you mad? You just beat up Lieutenant Colonel Verraco! You know what can happen to us?’

‘I don’t care! I’ll kill him!’

Sergio stepped in.

‘If they come down, you’re a dead man. Get a taxi,’ he said to the other two. Ignacio ran towards the avenue.

‘Listen, Felipe,’ said Tomás, slamming me against the wall again. ‘I don’t care what happened up there with Verraco. We’re all on the same side now. Him, you, us.’

‘Not me,’ I said, feeling as if my throat was being torn apart.

‘You too. Look, we all know Verraco’s a bastard. But we need him. Otherwise, who’s going to take us back?’

‘We have to rise above personal grudges,’ chimed in Sergio. ‘Can’t you see that if we fight with each other we make it easy for the English?’

‘What English? What English!’ I yelled at him.

‘The English,’ repeated Tomás, and there was something in his tone that silenced me: it was the same one I’d heard upstairs, and his eyes were small and cold like Verraco’s. ‘You know who the English are better than us. You speak very good English, don’t you?’

‘Listen,’ said Sergio, grabbing Tomás by the shoulder to loosen his arm, which was starting to squeeze too hard, ‘go home. Or maybe not today. We’ll try and sort out this fucking mess. We’ll tell Verraco you made a mistake, you were drunk, the shrapnel in your head makes you hallucinate stuff. I’m sure he’ll forgive you in the end, but you have to give it time, right?’

I nodded. And it was true. I did fucking understand. Tomás let go of me.

‘Like he says,’ he said. ‘I guess you deserve another chance. But I’d be watching out if I were you.’

‘Felipe,’ Sergio went on, ‘we’re so close. Don’t go and ruin it over something like this. It’s the future that matters, not the past. Our home awaits us in the future. When we get there, none of this will matter. Only the chosen get to go back to the Islands. Don’t fail us now.’

‘You’d better go. We’ll be waiting for you. After all,’ said Tomás, patting me on the cheek, ‘where else can you go? We’re your family.’ He was in the middle of the street by now and his breath steamed in the cold air under the street light. I realised I was wearing a T-shirt: my jacket was still upstairs, as spoils of war for the enemy. A pair of yellow headlights with a little red dot floating above them bobbled towards me over the cobblestones. Sergio pointed:

‘Your taxi’s here.’

I’d given him my home address, but as we drove around Retiro it was the last place I felt like going. Rather than cure me of my need for company as I’d hoped, Hugo’s party had awoken a greater eagerness. I desperately needed some contact, but where to find it at two in the morning and in such a condition? ‘Take Córdoba and I’ll direct you,’ I told him; if only I could find a little something for the dizziness, to restore a bit of lucidity, I prayed as we started to cross Avenida 9 de Julio. We hadn’t got halfway when Archimedes leaped out of the bath and began to dance about naked in my brain.

‘Yrigoyen and Cerrito!’

A heaving crowd was jammed like a champagne cork into the entrance of El Dorado and I found it hard to get close enough for one of the bouncers to spot me and, his arms acting as power shovels, open a channel for me to get in.

‘Wotcha, Felipe?’ Slap on the neck, kiss on the cheek, tongue out at the people shouting ‘Queue-jumper!’ and I was in, the rubbing of bodies upholstered in leather rayon moiré silk cotton quilting velvet sackcloth denim studs feathers vinyl rubber polyester linen cellophane wool lace nylon wire suede sequins organza lamé returning the heat to my cold, numb body in minutes. Behind the river of disconcerted first-timers who, overflowing its banks, milled among the columns and eddied around the bar, and the regulars who would float over them every now and then like ducks on water, rose the dancing swell of raised arms and heads, most in 3D specs. Just then I caught the profile of Cayetano over the human dunes, as imperturbable and distinguished as the head of a dromedary, and launched myself after him before the wake of his passing closed behind him.

‘Is Moisés here?’

He raised his thick, black eyebrows over his shaven head, bluish with the first growth of hair.

‘Saw him in the kitchen, I think. But listen here, darling, I’ve de-fi-nite-ly given up, so I don’t even want to find out if he’s got any or not,’ he delivered his Saturday speech and, with an elegant swish of the hand, whisked me a gin-and-tonic off the tray, which his other arm held aloft like the stalk of some aquatic plant.

On my way into the kitchen I bumped into Horacio, who was balancing a giraffe of dirty glasses and had thrown together an outfit of Flecha trainers (the ones with the jagged toecaps and diamond-shapes on the soles), fishnet stockings, hot pants and blue sports top.