Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

Nothing much had changed. Only the Sunday radio station was new, set up in a dusty patio surrounded by dormitory wings, its microphone fought over by the more active inmates to broadcast their cries for help to the outside world; after an initial second of smiling happiness, the ball of wire mesh finally in their hands, they’d be overcome by the anguish of not knowing what to say and look around in fright until encouraged to go on with smiles and pats on the back:

‘Today’s as cold as my mother’s tit but us loonies are having fun in here; it’s Sunday, the day the outside world remembers us, brings us presents and the family comes to …’

The one with the mic looked around him as if expecting to see them come round the bend any moment. Another seized his opportunity and the mic, and the two of them began talking at once like a badly rehearsed music-hall double-act, their haloperidol-laden voices slipping on the elusive vowels and clinging to the consonants, rising and falling like a cassette tape when it starts to drag. One boy, who can’t have been more than fifteen, his naked legs covered in gooseflesh, his fat whitish body wobbling with every jump, was dancing around two awkwardly smiling women.

‘Auntie! Auntie! My aunties have come to see me! Auntie!’

A young couple (visitors) were pulling second-hand clothes from an imitation leather bag and pushing them into longing arms that stretched like bicycle spokes from the surrounding ring of crazies. After his aunts had taken flight, the white-skinned boy had clung on to the girl and was edging towards one of her tits. I approached and, being more alert than most of them, managed to get hold of a burgundy sweater I’d had my eye on, and immediately pulled it over my head. Beside me a little old man, thin and stiff as a board, had procured a blue towelling dressing gown for himself. After doing up the belt with a simple knot and plunging his hands into the side pockets like two plummets, he looked at me and we both smiled in satisfaction. A man with a big nose and a government suit, whom we dubbed The Bard, read one of his compositions through a megaphone:

We all dream,

perchance, of the prince

who never comes.

We all dream,

looking through the mirrors

of solitude;

death can drive

on to a careless end.

Or we aren’t all terminals

but gods

of the world

we couldn’t create.

‘Let go of the microphone! Let go!’ burst in the one looking for his family, elbows flying. ‘Nobody’s going to come for us!’ he yelled. ‘Nobody’s going to get me out of here! I’ll never leave the Borda!’

The radio people tried to calm him down in case the din brought the male nurses, but he went on yelling at the towering dovecotes of identical square windows; the mic, forgotten in the confusion, returned to the hands of the poet, who crooned to him in a calm, almost absent voice:

Summer traffic jam.

On the taxi antenna

A dragonfly lands.

His companion’s shouting stopped at once. Sane and insane alike stood there in silence for a few seconds.

* * *

Emilio was entwined in the bedspread: they looked plaited together; the white loincloth over his squalid nude body (actually, an adult nappy) made him look rather like a fakir. He wasn’t the only refugee from the bleak Sunday-afternoon excitement: inmates sleeping or smoking or simply staring at the ceiling occupied a third of the flaking iron beds, wrapped in sheets as thick as restaurant tablecloths frayed in long jellyfish fringes, which our self-guiding fingers endlessly plaited and unplaited to the rhythm of the identical days and nights; others were covered only by moth-patterned blankets, under which the madmen laid their naked skin on mattresses saturated with the sweat of the countless loons that had gone before them, or the bed-wetters on thick polythene covers. The bed next to Emilio’s — my old bed — was unoccupied, and I sat down on the edge and heard the familiar groan of the worn-out springs accommodating my buttocks to their familiar bumps and hollows, the memory of my body finding again — without surprise, as if no time had passed — what my mind had gone to such lengths to forget. Emilio never took his eyes off the angle of the wall and shuddered and stiffened when I touched him, only slowly returning to his customary slackness.

‘Emilio. It’s me, Felipe. Emilio.’

He opened his mouth as if to speak but could only produce a few strangled noises from the back of his throat. He had fewer teeth than last time, and the ones he had left were encrusted with scale and close to falling out. I ran my hand over his hair, sticky with a patina of filth, like the stuff that accumulates in the nooks and crannies of badly scrubbed kitchens, but again I failed to get through. So I got up and took off my jacket and pullover and, in what was left of my combat uniform, I went and stood between the wall and his eyes. The voice sprang from his lips as if inside him it had never stopped:

‘Thanks to our tong taker, my known ledge of the naivetes and their curstoms has incrazed conshudderably. They can them save by the name of culprits, which in their tongs singe-fries something like “marr” or “mess” … The world scalp is all supplied by them to a certain long slithery sea-weird, most abundaunt in these wartears …’

This is it, of course, I thought, sitting down on the edge of my bed in fresh defeat. What else did you expect? There’s all the data you need, the facts, the dates, the names; a tale told by an aphasic with a bullet in his brain who wasn’t as lucky as you were — or maybe luckier. Who knows? You ask him.

‘Their reeligion is suppressingly like our own, as if both stunned from a commun trunk; or, more pro Blabely, it washing stalled in them by some messinary and, over the sinturies, the lack of guiddance and their nurtural tenduncy to prigganism have removed it form its original from; our Chaplin conshivers the passivility of accomplicing a vapid conversion as being veery high …’

What was I to do now? Go home for my walkman and tape him, and then play Tamerlán the tape and tell him ‘Somewhere in this Blabel you might find the information you’re looking for about the fate of your son or Major X. Enjoy yourselves.’ Could I really have come all this way, in my state, in the hope of getting something out of him? Only the vestigial effects of the acid could explain such stubborn stupidity.

‘They seem to be fame liar with the conscript of dog, as they are with the scared book, which they call Babel (end be the similitary to the orang in all). Leafang through its tin pages, I noticed a scimitar arraignment and the recruitance of names in which, with a little effart, it was passable to detract the echoes of the origin ale, the phony tics of their rouge tongue having gradually defirmed them to pronuanceable varrants: If, No Arse, Messes, Dalai La, Ma, Ark, Punctuous Piles Ate , etc …’

I’d never felt this tired in my life, or maybe just once before. Unthinking, I lay down on the bed in the same position as Emilio. I unfocused my gaze on the same corner of peeling wall, trimmed with mottled patches of damp, on which his eyes were fixed: once the eddies in my brain and those of the flaking plasterwork had combined like one river flowing into another, I recognised, without too much effort, the outline of the Islands. They’ll follow you wherever you go, a weary voice murmured in my mind, I don’t know if to Emilio or to myself, while down the whole length of my exhausted body, becoming one with the worn-out bed-springs, the memory occurred. I lit a cigarette and the smoke in my lungs caressed my chest like a calming hand; and so, cradled in the endless sadness of the world, I fell asleep, the lighted fag between my lips.