Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

He gazed at me as if trying to explain something with his eyes, but when they began to multiply on my retina like the facets of the eyes of an insect, I had to turn away. Being in that cage with him was like being locked in a microwave oven.

‘I got him out of the way, sent him to live with relatives in Braunau, my home town in Austria, to get in touch with his roots. Know it? Delightful place. And then to Vienna to study. Besides, the dogs here had taken advantage of their momentary ascendancy over their weakened master and wanted me to hand you over in exchange for having rescued me. They wanted to have you!’

His switch to the second person had been fleeting, but not so fleeting that it hadn’t thrown all my senses into turmoil again. He fell silent for some time, the V of one hand slotted under his lower lip, and when he spoke again he picked up the thread of his monologue at another point.

‘The guerrilla, I could live with that. I was willing to forgive and forget, and I thought the contact with his roots might have straightened him out. But it hadn’t. He comes back and volunteers, for a war, without asking my permission. A losers’ war. Pathetic! What was he trying to prove to me? We’d only been together a few months. To Malvinas! As a volunteer!’ he said, raising his arms in a gesture of perplexity, and stared at me as if waiting for an answer.

‘I was drafted,’ I clarified.

Once again Tamerlán’s contained anger passed like the shadow of a cloud across his shifting states of mind, as changeable as the sky when the south-easterly blows.

‘Malvinas. That was what I found most bemusing. Why did he do it? To get even? Just to prove to me that such an idiot couldn’t be my son?’

‘It was a gesture,’ I suggested.

‘A grimace,’ he corrected me, puffing at a pheasant feather stuck to his lip. ‘I’d rather he’d stayed a guerrilla. Some of the guerrillas from back then are wealthy and successful today. How many successful ex-combatants from Malvinas do you know?’

I totted them up. Sergio, Tomás, Ignacio, the taxi driver, Hugo, me … He was right. It had never occurred to me.

‘Actually …’

‘Not one. It’s obvious. Failing in a worthwhile venture like the takeover of a country tempers the spirit for more feasible ambitions. Failing in an utterly pointless venture only produces losers. War? A badly told Argentinian joke.

He was pacing up and down between the cardboard rocks like a king in an opera, hands behind his back, grey wrinkled face turning left and right. Now that there was nothing of the pheasants left but carrion, he’d become the old condor in the cage at the zoo.

‘When he got to the Islands, he was assigned to A Company, Fifth Regiment, posted at Puerto Howard, Isla Gran Malvina. Owing to a communications error a fraction of 601 Commando Company was stranded for the whole war at the same place. In charge of that group of men was the newly appointed Major Arturo Cuervo. The idiot! To think I gave him my backing! There wasn’t a single idea in his head that I hadn’t put there! So I tried to play Pygmalion to the military! My father’s naïve ideas! He and his friends wasted the best years of their lives trying to civilise that stupid, uncultured peat! That’s the real tragedy of Germany! Instead of educating Alexander the Great, Aristotle teaching Galtieri to read! Tragedy repeats itself as farce!’ I heard him yell without being able to pay too much attention, for once again the Tetris screen had filled right to the top and as a reward we were moving on to the next, harder, more complex than the last. And the first new pieces were already descending, a slow rain of bricks from the sky.

‘Felipe,’ I heard all of a sudden, and an unexpected shotgun blast couldn’t have made me jump any higher. ‘If anyone knows what happened to my son, it’s that man. If he’s dead, it will be satisfaction enough for me to make sure. But if he’s alive, then he knows , because whatever it was that happened to my son, he did it. He’d been waiting in vain to get even with me for too long to waste the perfect opportunity that fate had dropped in his lap. And if that was him that night in the silver tower, there’s no doubting he’s the one behind all this. What happened in the Islands was just the first step. Ten years later he’s back, looking for checkmate. That’s what you’re going to do for me, Felipe: find out what happened in the Malvinas ten years ago, or — which amounts to the same thing — that man’s whereabouts. Then you can cash in your chips and I’ll let you go.’

Without another look at me he began to undo the stiff, plastic apron and picked up the shotgun and box of cartridges he’d put down on one of the pheasants’ nests. From where I was standing I caught a glimpse of movement in the darkness behind him, and a pinprick of white light revealed the frightened eye of a pheasant that had managed to save itself from the holocaust. Don’t move, I begged it mentally, just sit there nice and still for a few more minutes.

‘Morning exercise always gives me an appetite. Care for some breakfast?’

‘Pheasant?’

He looked at the blasted paradise around him with something approaching sadness. The wind was carpeting one side of the cage with floating feathers.

‘Only in burgers. It’s a weakness I admit to; when I get like this, I can only wind down by destroying beautiful things. And, unfortunately, those tend to be the most expensive.’

‘I’m not your slave,’ I remarked coldly, trying to buy the pheasant some time. ‘I can’t be at your beck and call all the time.’

Tears welled up in his blue eyes. He came over and put one arm around my shoulder.

‘I know. And, believe me, I’ve never thought of you like that. That’s why I’m taking the liberty of asking you this favour, although of course, as you’ll understand, I can’t allow you to refuse. Try to understand me. Try to understand a father’s grief. If you get me what I ask, you can have whatever you like. Remember,’ he said winking at me, ‘I’m Father Christmas. I don’t quite know how to tell you, but in these days we’ve shared, I’ve grown very attached to you … Felipe, I hope you won’t be offended if I tell you that I … I love you like a son.’

The arm draped over my shoulder bore the whole weight of the world. The colossi of the Roxy would have collapsed under it like sugar lumps.

‘I’ve even afforded myself the luxury of dreaming, these sleepless nights … What if this unexpected visitor turns out to be a messenger from heaven instead of hell? Think about it. A whole group disappears without trace in the defiles of the Isla Grande, never to be heard of again; nobody but that friend of yours in the madhouse who left his mind over there for good and brings only his dead meat back. And now ten years on, it turns out the officer who was in charge is alive and well. Isn’t there a chance, a one-in-ten-thousand chance, that he wasn’t the only one to make it back? My son’s body lies in no known grave. What if … what if …?’

I tried to say something, but, trapped by the rigidity of tongue and palate, the words wouldn’t come out. The rigidity also extended down to my pharynx, like a big ball of phlegm and cocaine; any minute now my throat would shut as tight as a sphincter.

‘I suppose you’ve heard the legends too. The Island that never surrendered, the ghost platoon still out there fighting the English, the officer who wouldn’t accept the cowardly surrender … What was it they called him, Sr Canal?’

Colourless, odourless, noiseless as usual, the supreme bodyguard had approached us, nodding at old Lumpy Nose to take a break.

‘Major X,’ he informed us.

I tore my tongue from the roof of my mouth like ripping off a plaster.