Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘Heart?’

‘Arse. I mean my soul.’

‘A woman?’ He smiled at me, longing to know, his blue eyes and black-tipped lashes as wide as a doll’s. I mattered to him. I shook my head vehemently.

‘A man. Lots of men. Women aren’t so bad, even if they do give birth to penguins. You know what I mean?’

‘Yes, of course. Me too, the other day I had a fight with Marcelo …’

He understood me, and suddenly I had words, I wasn’t alone: confessing before the crystalline altar of the night, I told him everything and as I spoke it all became so clear, at last I could see the light, life in neon; years of groping in the dark and now my eyes were reaching the secret cogs and gears that moved the world; I’d been advancing unawares towards them, down a long, dark corridor and, at the end, a light barely filtered through the cracks and at the touch of my magical hands the doors of perception were flung wide and there on the other side were Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker in the colours of childhood, with a big mirror globe at the centre; understanding dawned on me in Technicolor and for the first time in my life I could talk about my dead friends and those who’d killed them, about a year as blank as a vampire’s mirror, about the subterranean existence of a mole, scenting the presence of other tunnellers but never ever tunnelling into one, so much grief stored …

He must have been talking to me for a while, but only now did the words penetrate the painted paper walls and reach me:

‘All right! But you’re taking things too far too! You’re a pain! You give me all that dense stuff, you … bore me! I come to you full of champagne sparkle and you pop all my bubbles, like … like … You think I spent hours getting myself all glammed up to listen to your blubbing? I can do that in jeans and trainers! You get me down … with your dead men and your wars and your diseases and … your disappeared! You sound like an old man! And me … and me … You just don’t get it, do you? What the fuck do you come here for?’ He held up his hands and waved them about in exasperation: ‘The night … the night wasn’t made for this .’

He walked away, or I did. Meanwhile, on the dance floor, all that Cristian’s slowies were missing was a piano accompaniment from Freddy Krueger; he was singing a duet with Rosamel Araya, who, a good head shorter, looked every year less and less like Clark Gable and more and more like Charles Bronson. Hanging from the chain so as not to fall into the open white maw of the toilet, I calmed its thirst with a hot, thin, yellow jet. ‘SAY NO TO LIFE AND YES TO DRUGS’, someone had written on the wall, and I pushed my way between three guys spasmodically pinching their noses in front of the mirror. Staggering in the sand beneath an implacable sun, I walked over to the black prophet.

‘You ripped me off,’ I spat at him. ‘You boosted me a bad tab.’

‘Don’t talk so loud,’ he pronounced calmly, exhaling dragon smoke.

‘Bad tab,’ I repeated defiantly. ‘It didn’t turn me into a butterfly. Get it? It’s still me. See? Me! Where’s the butterfly?’

‘You’re flipping. Piss off or I’m calling Timoteo.’

‘It was the Islands, wasn’t it. You lied to me. It was the Islands.’

He made a faint gesture over my head. A Michelin Man began to advance towards us. I plunged into the thicket of arms and legs, advancing with difficulty for lack of a machete, and reached the bar, where I ordered a glass of cold water. Despite the blond wig, the succulent cleavage and the glass of champagne in his hand, I had no trouble recognising him as he leaned beside me.

‘Hi, how are you, what a coincidence,’ I ventured in a friendly tone, happy to be with someone I knew.

‘No coincidence. Daddy sent his boys to look for you and I was getting bored at home, so I asked them to bring me along. Look, there’s Freddy.’

I looked. Beneath the mirror-ball he was raising his arms and repeatedly licking his moustache, while James’s snaking fingers discreetly stroked his sweating, naked chest inside his open shirt. Freddy responded to my frightened glance like a laser sensor and winked at me. Owl-like, I turned my head through 180°. The white-haired heavy was chatting with the bouncer at the only entrance, the space between the two narrower than between the bars of a railing. I’d have to start a fire, or something, if I wanted to get out that way.

‘Found all the nosey parkers yet?’ he asked.

‘Yeah. The lot.’ He had weasel teeth. ‘What are you going to do to them?’

‘Don’t you know what happens to people who see what they shouldn’t?’

I nodded.

‘Lady Godiva,’ I muttered. He let out a cackle, shaking his long hair, as blonde as wheat in a shampoo ad.

‘It wouldn’t be at all difficult to disguise myself now.’

‘You have no sense of privacy, you lot.’

‘Oh, what,’ he laughed nervously. ‘You’re talking about the other day. You really fell for it! Didn’t you realise, you of all people, that it was all just a trick with mirrors? It’s an act we put on sometimes, like the turd, to test people. Daddy and I just love it. You looked so hilarious, your eyes popping out, not knowing whether to believe what you were seeing, when all the time we were the ones who were watching you, front-row seats for that poor sod’s face of yours,’ he reeled off, although his voice went up a tone on the last few words, like a butcher’s saw when it hits the bone. ‘Well, now you’ve bored me,’ it said, recovering its feminine timbre of control. ‘I’m off for a bop. Say hello to my old man.’

He was swallowed up by the compound mollusc of the dance floor. Several flashes froze it white and I could see him tossing his hair in the wind, rubbing shoulders with James, who was no longer dancing with Freddy but with a grinning skull; nor was the craggy red-nose guarding the San Carlos Strait, down which I charged, emerging into the blinding clarity of first light at the other end, from which not even the 3D specs could protect me. The cold dawn embraced me shivering and, amid the ruins of the city, which had been shelled during our distraction, I searched for one of those black-and-yellow animals that take us home, but found two hands instead, each perched on one of my shoulders like friendly vultures.

Bolívar — Belgrano — El Bajo: I thought they’d turn at the port and take me to the tower, but they carried straight on down Avenida Libertador. Sicked on by the crop of panic, the acid whizzed faster and faster round my bloodstream like Scalextric cars: the rampart of apartments grew skywards, warping into a tunnel over the avenue; the myopic spectacles of the traffic lights nailed me to the centre of the earth with their red eyes, then forced me to run rabbit-like with their green eyes until the next red; cars buzzed around us, looming hugely before us and vanishing into wind at the sides in a video-game race; sitting in front of me the pair of backs and necks bulged by the second, threatening to fill the entire car and smother me. I lunged at the handle and managed to open the door enough to glimpse the ribbon of grey tarmac bristling and buzzing, but a crane seized me by the scruff of the neck and plunged me into the ditch, while the other one locked the doors. I tried to get back to my seat but the man with the white hair turned round, looking for all the world like a clean-shaven Santa Claus, and gifted me a slap on my left ear that left me with a shrill buzzing in my head; and as I couldn’t see anything except some tipa branches against the clouds, I spent the rest of the journey hypnotised by that splinter of sky from which the worst thing in the world was about to descend.

We turned off Libertador and drove one or two blocks over some cobbles, down a slope so steep that I was thrown against the front seats, then finally pulled up on the pavement. I heard the crunch of tyres on gravel and, leaning out of the window (this time they let me), instead of encountering the wide open space of the river among whose willows and rubbish heaps I was to be executed, I realised with relief that we were crossing sprawling grounds with trees neater than those in an English landscape garden, heading for some phantasmal Roman temple that flashed its tombstone-white columns (now you see them, now you don’t) through the dark foliage.