Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘Major X doesn’t exist,’ I managed to say. ‘It’s just another daft story from Malvinas. A losers’ fantasy. Losers like us are always making up stories like that. If they told them all, they’d fill more books than true ones. You won’t find anything in that direction. You’re wasting your time.’

‘I’ve already wasted ten years.’

‘How will I manage? Not everything’s inside a computer, you know.’

‘You’ve already shown me — though perhaps not yourself — that you can get by without them. If you don’t take care of it, they ’ll have to do it.’ He pointed vaguely in the direction of the grounds, but I understood perfectly well what he was referring to. Those in power are always clear even when being vague. ‘They’ll start by asking you where you got the information that eluded them; then, they’ll go and ask that person, and a third person if need be, leaving their muddy footprints on every doorstep. That’s why I prefer you. You’re capable of proceeding with delicacy, like saying your rosary, counting off each bead till you reach the cross. That’s where I want you to get to. The cross. And if that cross is in the bleeding Islands, that’s where you’ll have to go to get it.’

He turned his back and took off his apron. The meeting was over, and Canal — who else — was waiting for me outside to finalise details. We walked through the grounds while Canal gave me my instructions. Only the last vestiges of the acid were keeping me up on my feet.

‘One last question,’ I interrupted when I no longer understood what he was saying. ‘Has it never occurred to you that your patient is madder than a box of fucking frogs? He’s a spoilt brat who still thinks reality’s just another word for your parents. Now he wants to play at doing natural selection. And tomorrow what? Why should I be the one to bear the burden of his frustrated motherhood?’

‘The mind needs new structures, Sr Félix,’ he began. Cracking jokes to him was like tickling a woolly bear. ‘Our current psychic framework is from a primitive stage of the species, but only a few chosen ones have started to go beyond it. Little by little they will build the immaculate crystal and multiply its facets. And in the meantime the masses will go on wallowing in the dark sludge of dreams and the unconscious until extinction puts them out of their misery. The vulnerable, archaic formation based on Œdipus and the sinister triad will become the tar pit of millions. The strong will move on to the next stage: the colonisation of the entire psyche by the conscious mind and the direct line of father to son. The female mutation will disappear, in time, save for a few specimens preserved in zoos and nature reserves.’

We heard a loud whistle and for a moment I looked up, thinking it was God. Tamerlán was beckoning to us.

‘Will it be easy for you to find work? I mean, when everyone’s perfect and there are no more sick people,’ I asked my companion, for the sake of saying something, as we approached the cage.

‘Every great athlete needs a trainer. Only with a trainer can they reach perfection. That’s my job. I don’t look after the sick. They make me sick.’

After the air of the grounds, the smell of gunpowder and scorched flesh was so strong that I’d have turned the clock back ten years if I hadn’t closed my eyes. I didn’t. With one finger on his lips, Tamerlán was pointing at one of the nests; the scratching of claws on wood could clearly be heard, and the tip of a feather fleetingly emerged like a tongue of flame from the circular entrance. What a shame, I thought; I hoped this one would make it. I assumed Tamerlán would simply shove the barrel of the shotgun into the opening and pull the trigger, but instead he shoved his arm in up to the elbow, like Sylvester looking for Tweety Pie, and groped around till he found what he was looking for. To my surprise, it wasn’t the pheasant. Cupped in his hand was a speckled chick, as fluffy as a dandelion clock, a bubble of down barely anchored to the earth by the weight of its trembling little wire feet. It lifted its head, turned it one way, then the other, and went ‘Cheep!’ as if to express its approval of the world it was seeing for the first time. When I looked up from his hand, Tamerlán was smiling, his two rows of perfect teeth shining on the punished land like a rainbow of covenant.

‘See that? Life goes on regardless.’

A barely comprehensible gargle answered the phone, like someone strangling a drainpipe in the dead of night.

‘Hullo, Soledad?’

‘Oooooooooo.’

‘Malvina?’

‘Eeeeeeeees.’

‘It’s Felipe. Remember me?’

‘Eeeeeeeees.’

‘Is your mum in?’

‘Felipe, is that you?’ Gloria’s voice came on the receiver and sat there waiting quietly. How do I tell her, I thought, running my free hand over the weed patch of my skull.

‘I wanted to know … how you were all doing.’

‘Fine, fortunately. A little quieter, you know. I’m sorry if the other day I … you know. Where are you?’

‘On a public phone. In San Isidro.’

‘Fancy coming for lunch? Promise I won’t make chips.’

‘I’d love to. Another day. Today …’

‘It’s a Sunday, in winter. What better day is there? A grey Sunday.’

‘I’m seeing everything in colour. I’ve got an acid hangover. I’m dropping.’

‘Come and drop here. My bed’s nice and comfy. I promise I’ll let you sleep and all. It’s horrible to be alone on a Sunday.’

With an obscene crunch of mechanical mastication the public phone swallowed my second token and began its swift digestion.

‘Listen to me. This phone’s going to cut us off any second. I rang because …’ I drew in breath. ‘I have to talk to your hus … to your ex-husband.’

‘Yeah, right, I’ll just put him on.’ She paused. ‘You’re a fucking bastard, you know? A complete fucking bastard.’

She hung up. It was my last token. I looked around me, devastated. Not a kiosk, not a news stand, not even a bar open: just the empty pavements and the traffic lights and the indifferent Sunday traffic of sealed cars rumbling north. Even inside the duvet jacket Tamerlán had lent me (it had been his son’s: maybe he thought contact with it would help me find him, like I was a psychic not a hacker) I was numb with acid cold, my head throbbing painfully, my stomach churning and churning like the drum of a washing machine. I had a vision of paradise in the shape of a welcoming little Porteño bar where you could get a café con leche and medialunas and watch the dead day go by from a window table while the espresso machine hissed cosily in the background. But the only thing I found after walking and cursing for three blocks was en enormous, empty Freddo ice cream parlour, gleaming with polished marble and dark glass, where some bloke in a short-sleeved shirt, numb with cold, stood behind the counter waiting for impossible customers. In the end I stopped a lone 168 approaching in the empty lane heading downtown, and crouched like a sick animal in one of the back seats, nodding every so often and hallucinating in dreams, vexed to nightmare by the exasperated rocking of the huge cradle of glass and steel. I got off at Constitución, where I had some breakfast at one of the local greasy spoons and, fortified in body and soul, walked the six or seven blocks separating me from the gates of the Borda mental hospital.

The night they took us — those of us no relatives had shown up to claim — out of the military hospital, they made us stand at the side of our beds, holding up the ones who couldn’t, threw civilian clothes over our hospital gowns, loaded us into a lorry and rolled down the canvas. Only one of us howled — the whole journey — that he didn’t want to go back, that he didn’t want to go back to the Islands; the rest of us sat there in silence, not even bothering to keep him quiet. When they lifted the canvas, we could see massed clumps of trees and bushes, a park yellowed from repeated frosts, wet metal street lights and a foggy background of low-lying houses on one side and an endless wall on the other. Once we’d all helped each other out into the square, the lorry pulled off and disappeared round the first corner. I don’t know how our whispering little band gradually broke up: a couple of us crossed to the first street and were lost among the houses; others headed straight for the trees; some began to look for something to dig foxholes with. I remember the plaster statue — ghostly it was so white — of an Indian from a raiding party, his horse caracoling fierily beside a pond full of dusty pieces of cellophane, shaking what must once have been a spear at the narrow city horizon hemming him in there; nothing but a rusty wire remained, hanging from his hand as if he were about to unblock a pipe. I must have stood there all night staring at it, because I remember nothing else, and that must have been where they found me, warming my bones after the night-time dew in the first weak sun of the morning, the male nurses of the Borda (for the sad walls that stood behind the trees were those of the asylum) sent for by the neighbours, who on their way to the baker’s had found themselves surrounded by these crouching shadows among the wet tree-trunks, alerting them to the imminence of the English attack.