Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

Sitting on a stone bench so clean that it looked recently carved, isolated by his wooden body from the piercing cold filtering up from the ground, Dr Canal sat reading a book before the imposing Roman façade — so realistic that for a moment I expected to be greeted by Victor Mature standing between the columns in chains and Vaseline.

‘Sr Tamerlán is expecting you in the pheasant cage, Sr Félix,’ said his talking head, swivelling on the pivot of its neck, the lower jaw rising and falling vertically like an old codger chewing his pap. ‘Escort him, Sr Tornero,’ he uttered, before sealing the exit for the enervating voice of the stone ventriloquist that supported him on its knee. Using my triceps as a joystick, Sr Tornero manœuvred me around the building towards a huge Victorian cage, almost identical to the condors’ cage in the zoo. Before I could determine what was going on inside it, a deafening report blew the leafy calm around my head to pieces, and from the big cage came a flapping, squawking pandemonium of panicking birds crashing into each other and the wire in their directionless flights and hanging there, flapping frantically like live butterflies on pins. Without any consideration for my feet, which were tearing up clods of grass in their urge to flee in the opposite direction, the white-haired man dragged me to the cage door and, shoving me inside, locked it and stood outside on guard.

Pacing about between the potted ficuses and palm trees and gargoyled white-plaster rocks, to which the generations of bird fæces had lent an almost natural appearance, Tamerlán didn’t come over to greet me, or give any sign of having noticed my presence. A shotgun rocked in his left hand, but instead of hunting gear he was wearing a slaughterman’s plastic apron, spattered with drops of blood like a mac on a rainy day, and yellow wellington boots.

‘Hold this for me,’ he said, proffering a glass from which I took a tentative sip (Scotch), and inserted several cartridges in the gun. He snapped it shut and, aiming with one hand from less than two metres, emptied both barrels into one of the hanging birds, sending most of its fragile mortal flesh through the wire; what was left on this side was little more than its spirit: a delicate ikebana of pheasant feathers.

‘Hunting,’ snorted Tamerlán’s clenched features, distorted with the contained fury that was released drop by drop with each shot. ‘A sport of hypocrites practised unceasingly by my class throughout the centuries. As if it would change anything to pretend the prey stands any chance of escape. Besides, in what forest of the world can you find such a variety of targets? This cage contains practically every known species of pheasant in the world, or did until just now at least: the Common Pheasant, the Impeyan Pheasant, the Tibetan-Eared Pheasant, the delicate Lady Amherst’s Pheasant, the Golden Pheasant, the Silver Pheasant, the Pearly Pheasant, the Diamantine Pheasant, even the extremely rare Great Argus Pheasant, almost impossible to find in captivity and on the verge of extinction in its natural habitat. Watch it go,’ he said before turning it into a collage of blood and feathers on the rocks, whose rusted wire frames peeped out of the holes made by the shotgun.

‘I wasn’t wrong about you, Sr Félix. You’re a capable man, you can’t conceal it, even if you do try and hide behind that failed hippy disguise. You alone, with your meagre resources, managed what an entire team of professionals couldn’t.’ He diverted his gaze slightly towards the white-haired thug, who was grinding into the tender lawn a sole accustomed to breaking the resistance of lives more tenacious than a cigarette’s. ‘Ah well, that’s professionals for you. Perhaps your wartime experience hasn’t been so unproductive after all. My father valued his military past and was always sorry we’d landed in a country so timid about international wars. Parents, I suppose, always want the best for their children, and sometimes it pains them when they can’t get it.’

He’d recovered his composure now, his clenched finger resting loosely on the trigger, his breathing issuing silently from his nose rather than whistling through clenched teeth. And judging by his shining eyes, he seemed to be moved — though it could also have been the effects of the tab on my own.

‘There’s a problem with the last information you brought us, Sr Félix — or rather two problems: either it’s untrue and there’s still one name missing from your list; or it’s true, and is therefore truer than I’m prepared to tolerate. I have to know your sources. To make myself perfectly clear, I want to know who gave you the information about Captain Arturo Cuervo.’

Suddenly Gloria was walking towards me over the prop-room rocks like the Virgin of Lourdes in her grotto and I started desperately signalling to her to hide, until I realised Tamerlán couldn’t see her. For now. I have to keep her invisible to his eyes at all costs, I managed to tell myself in a moment of lucidity. The whole situation had suddenly become deadly serious, more serious than it was a few seconds ago, when all that was in jeopardy was my own life.

‘My sources are very indirect,’ I began, to buy some time. If at least I hadn’t dropped the acid, if it would just abate a little …

‘Sr Félix, those mediæval slaughtermen out there know tortures that not even the Inquisition dared to implement, and Sr Canal is an expert in highly subtle forms of psychological coaction. It would take them no longer than it would take you to break into a video-club computer. There isn’t a scrap of information, however insignificant, nor a corner of your body secret enough to stuff it in, that they can’t find with a bit of a rummage.’

Now that he’d calmed down and was speaking so articulately, choosing his words with such care, combining precision with expressive force, he was even more frightening than before.

‘Why?’ I began to ask.

‘He’s dead, Sr Félix,’ he spat at me like a spitting cobra. ‘The man’s been dead for almost ten years. Missing in action in June 1982 to be exact. Just like my Fausto. And now you claim that he — he of all people — has been resurrected from that pile of mud and bones to come for my other son as well?’

He held out a piece of continuous feed just like the first one. His eyes had grown as grey and dark as the sky they reflected. I began to understand something, just a glimpse, and I desperately needed to understand more to keep them away from Gloria. It was all that mattered now. So I read:

Where art thou, Fausto? Wretch, what hast thou done?

Damned art thou, Fausto, damned! Despair and die!

Hell calls for right, and with a roaring voice

Says ‘Fausto! come! Thine hour is almost come.’

‘Sr Tamerlán, I understand your pain,’ I improvised.

‘Have you ever been a mother?’

‘What?’

‘I asked you if you’d ever been a mother.’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘How can you understand then?’

‘You’re right. I don’t.’

‘Of course not. I’m not talking to you about any old son, you understand. Sons are ten a penny. You might have sons and not realise. You might be my son, come to that. So what? Are you going to come to me with demands? Because one night, thirty years ago, instead of coming in the dry, I came in the wet? No! I’m talking about my son, my one and only. More mine than the Son of God to God. You don’t understand, do you.’

He was pointing both gaping barrels at me. If it goes off, I thought, at least Gloria and the girls will be safe. No, I corrected myself. It’s not enough for me to disappear, this time. I’ve already ratted them out to him. I have to stay alive to protect them.