Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

‘Where are you going?’

‘Morón.’

‘No, thanks. I don’t live far.’

‘You’d better get a move on. We’re about to close. Mind you don’t get locked in.’

‘Wouldn’t be the first time.’

When I was alone again, I lit another cigarette to help me think. Once again my instinct had won out against my common sense, guiding me to Major X along the winding trails of intuition and scent. Maybe Tamerlán was right after all and, despite all my doubts and reticence, I was the only person capable of solving this case. As one of them, only I could get inside their heads. It hadn’t been just another manifestation of my monomaniacal fixation; the Islands had been mixed up in this whole business right from the start. But how exactly? Fortunately it wasn’t my job to understand, just to find Major X and hand over the information. So all I needed to do now was hole up and wait, instead of bouncing round the city like some crazy ball. That was all I asked, to be able to rest a little, to curl up on my side and tuck my knees under my chin for a little warmth. It took me a while to get back to sleep because the blanket was too short, and if I covered my chest my feet froze, and vice versa. In the end I resigned myself to leaving my boots on, the way we used to in the Islands, but about six in the morning I awoke with a full bladder and cold feet; quite understandably because someone had pinched my boots while I was asleep. Crawling among the coughing bodies I looked for them in vain; it must have been someone from another wing, or perhaps a male nurse trying to make it through to the end of the month. I returned to my bed carrying a pair of hairy espadrilles that fitted me nicely; wrapping them in the blanket and, with my hands tucked between my thighs, enough warmth returned for me to sleep till breakfast: boiled maté and bread. Monday morning seemed like a good time for Major X to drop by, so I went back to bed to wait for him. If he doesn’t show up by noon, I can slip back home, have a shower, change into some warmer clothes and come back for the afternoon shift; but I found out there was lentil stew for lunch and it felt cruel to force myself to make such a long bus journey on an empty stomach with it looking so cold out and me barely over my acid hangover and no sleep for twenty-four hours. Everything will be a lot easier, I reasoned, with some hot food inside me; besides, I’ll save making lunch at home and can keep a more efficient watch. It must have been a long time since I’d eaten properly; I devoured three platefuls, wiping them clean with hunks of bread, then felt so full that I decided to have a lie down. The calories in the stew kept me warm better than any blanket and by the time I finally woke up it was three o’clock; now it made no sense to leave when visiting hours were so nearly over and I could go back and spend the night at home. The only thing I missed was my cigarettes, but I felt pretty good apart from that. I didn’t even need to think about the case. Tamerlán had asked me to find Major X and I had — all but. Now it was just a matter of hunkering down and waiting. I had only a very vague idea what I was going to do when he showed up: race to a public phone (no, better get the Miniphone from home) and call Tamerlán; steal his wallet or a diary; I’d see when the time came. The main thing right now was to remain at my post, get used to sentry duty again. And what’s more, without guilt, because I was clearly doing my duty. At some point I fell to thinking about what I’d do if he never showed up. I couldn’t stay here indefinitely. Well, I suppose I could. It was an option, after all, and I was a free man.

After they closed the gates, I wondered why I’d been so sure a man like Cuervo would respect visiting hours. Obviously, he wasn’t going to show up at three in the morning, but it was surely worth waiting till late in the evening, especially as I had nothing much to do at home till tomorrow morning. After dinner I joined in a game of truco, but my partner had a tic and his signals kept confusing me: I’d play to his seven of coins and it would turn out to be a four of cups, and then no one paid any attention to the rules and called ‘envido’ on the second round, took threes with twos, got the score wrong (forty-three, one of them called, after adding a horse and a king together) and nobody could remember who’d called ‘quiero’. But the worst thing was that they all got on really well together. They had a fine old time and kept going for hours; I was the superfluous one, so the following night, after pudding (an unrecognisable fruit purée, probably flavoured aubergines), I went straight to bed. It was also the last day I managed to keep track of the time, because my watch was stolen in the night and my bad temper lasted halfway through the morning.

As if to a slow waltz, I rocked myself to the regular rhythm of the hours, to the uneventful round, no surprises, placid. Life was certainly easier, its alternatives simplified: like at summer camp, everything was planned. There were no activities, but at least the routine was organised: you had breakfast, you had lunch, you had dinner, and the rest was free time, like on a package tour (the idea of a holiday had stuck for good). The best thing was not having to take decisions. All my life, I finally understood, had been nothing but a heroic struggle … against the force of gravity. That was the real enemy. I understood that at this stage I embodied the fate, perhaps even the redemption, of the species. Our great mistake had been to adopt the upright posture, to become … bipeds. Dragging yourself along is easier. We’d entered one of those famous evolutionary dead ends, like the one that finished off the dinosaurs and spared the lizards and snakes. Verticality was quite unnecessary; anything that mattered could be done just as well or better in a horizontal position. I’d confirmed this with computers: setting up the keyboard on the breakfast tray did the trick. How I missed them now, after so many days’ abstinence. If only there were one here. Just imagine. A terminal for every inmate, or failing that, a little video-games room, and the age-old problem of mental health would be solved. Under the effects of the substance, an inmate could spend eight hours stuck to the colourful screen, for a Pacman makes no practical distinction between a mad player and a sane one. It was worth bearing in mind. A private room with two or three terminals connected to the Net. And — and — and — a telephone, telly, what else, a radio cassette player with headphones — if I’d had all those possibilities nine years ago, they’d never have got me out of here, I muttered enthusiastically; sometimes technology comes too late. I could set up a complete ecosystem, the dream of your very own fish tank; perhaps even taking steps to get them to install probes to feed and evacuate me. So enthused was I with the idea that I wanted then and there to make a list of everything I’d need, but couldn’t find my biro: someone had nicked that too.

To pass the time I started observing Emilio, whose sleeping lips kept up their regular movement without trembling or slobbering or tightening, as if in his sleep he recovered the faculty of speech. Who knows what there was inside there? Someone once explained to me that his ears perceived his own speech flawlessly, that it was ours that had become an obscene blabbering. The time we attempted to bust him out, he’d come back of his own free will after two months trying to communicate with people on the outside, and after that we left him to it. Who was I to judge, after all? It had taken him two months to understand what it had taken me nine years: that this was the only safe haven for exiles from the Islands. They’d busted me out of here too and only my greater inertia had stopped me coming back — until now, that is. They’d turned up for a visit one Sunday, without knowing I was there; they’d only just started doing the rounds to try to regroup the remains of the once mighty Malvinas army. As soon as they recognised who I was, they decided to bust me out, embracing me with tears that I observed with curiosity. They’d come prepared. Without consulting me, they shoved me into a toilet and, while Ignacio stood smoking at the door on lookout, Sergio and Tomás stripped me of my loony uniform and clad me from head to foot in combat gear, just like theirs save for the boots (they were hardly going to lug a selection of sizes around with them). We walked out through the front door, Tomás leading the way, Sergio and Ignacio at the sides to prop me up, and no one can have counted them at the entrance apparently, because we left without a fuss. As I couldn’t remember where I lived, I spent a week at the makeshift veterans’ centre on Honorio Pueyrredón, in a state of mute, universal, psychotropic-induced acceptance, till the following Sunday, after a rooftop asado with juicy meat and red from a demijohn, the combined effects of which ended up neutralising the residual effects of the drugs in my blood, my brain returned to my body and I looked around me as if seeing everything for the first time. I have a very clear memory of that afternoon: the sticky purple film deposited at the bottom of the hexagonal glasses, the shifting shapes of the clouds and the eddies of congealed grease on the plates, every one of the leaves on the paradise tree that graced us with a chequerboard of sun and shade, the flies balancing like tightrope walkers on the rims of the glasses; the roar of the few-and-far-between Sunday buses and the engines of the different makes of cars and the words of people’s conversations as they walked along the pavement, sometimes unwrapping a sweet from its cellophane or jingling coins in their pockets; two sparrows nervously eyeing the crumbs from the cement verandah, uncertain whether or not to approach; the serrated edges of fern shoots striving to take root in the hollows of grey gravel where the tar had come away … the world I was seeing was newly created. The next day I laid my hands on a keyboard again and within a week I’d found a job in a computer repair shop. With growing astonishment I realised that this was an area where my abilities had increased rather than diminished; I now got on with machines as if we belonged to the same species and the only possible explanation lay here, in this lump criss-crossed with scars that my hair in the mirror hadn’t quite yet managed to cover, a piece of the machine that I’d taken into my body for ever. The first to sense the change had been the doctor from the Campo de Mayo Military Hospital, who’d discharged me to free up a bed that no one needed. He called me to his office, where there was a lighted piece of milky glass plastered with X-rays. The photograph of the poor skeleton on display wasn’t exactly flattering; it had something that looked like a cactus growing in its head and I was about to point this out and ask about it when I realised it was me. ‘As you can see from this plate.’ He’d unsheathed a straight, extendable steel pointer and was touching my naked bones with it, point by point. ‘A fragment of your helmet has been left embedded in your skull. It was too dangerous to extirpate it,’ he said hurriedly, with evasive eyes, and I guessed he was lying; they probably hadn’t noticed it until it was too late. ‘And now it’s too late. It’s been soldered into your cranium, soldier,’ he said, smiling, and went on hastily when he saw I wasn’t laughing at his joke. ‘It’s actually now part of your cranium and extracting it would be like removing a piece of you. The metal will gradually be absorbed by the bone, covered over by it,’ he reassured me, perhaps fearing that I was expecting the reverse process. ‘In any case, you’ll be taking home a permanent souvenir of your time in the Argentinian Army,’ he said, handing me the X-ray, though I suppose he was referring to the helmet. I must have asked him about something, I suppose (for some reason all I can recall of those days are other people’s words), because his doctor’s smile returned to his face: ‘Don’t be impatient, patient: you’re not being discharged, just disinterned. From here we go back to barracks and wait nice and quietly, without rushing, for the Argentinian Army to decide to let us go. No, not us; you !’ He suddenly got angry at something I’d said, thinking I was taking the mickey; though in fact I took everything quite literally at the time. ‘ You’re going! Not me! I’m still good for something!’ Then they sent me to live with my mother, not expecting that in a week at most my headaches would force them to take me back and try out new methods of healing. As a last resort they experimented with fists and feet, because apparently my howls of pain were keeping them awake at night; I was one of the main reasons they’d decided to herd the hopeless cases into that olive-green lorry and dump us outside the Borda. It turned out to be just the place. My headaches began to abate, replaced in the long run by a blank, featureless peace. There were too many … things out there, and I needed to get used to them a little at a time. I soon discovered that here inside no one rushed me, that I had all the time in the world — that I could stay for ever. Except for Sundays, when the people from the cooperative came to bust our balls with their fucking workshops, the days were very quiet, identical to each other, no surprises. People sometimes get rather lurid ideas about madhouses from what they see at the cinema, but the truth is that they’re quite peaceful places where nothing much happens, as long as the haloperidol’s flowing, that is. The male nurses are people who go about their jobs and pick up their salaries and, like everyone else, what they most want to do is to put their feet up. The doctors, most of them unpaid trainees, don’t charge, freeze their balls off, especially in winter in those white coats of theirs, and spend most of the time smoking and discussing Lacan round little electric heaters. There’s always one eager beaver that pops up, though. And one in particular had taken a dislike — or a liking — to the little group of Malvinas veterans: whenever he came into the wing, he’d shout ‘On your feet, company! Tenshun!’ and get us to march around, or he’d sit on a bench out in the garden and shout ‘Forward march! Get down! Take cover!’ while us nutters, uncoordinated from all the drugs, ran about disorientated among the trees, bumping into each other and howling as he quaked with laughter, slapped his knees and called the others over to watch. When he was brought to heel, he got out the Rorschachs: he found one with such a mesmerising resemblance that you’d have sworn the very Atlantic had been folded in two along the San Carlos Strait to leave those two terrifying ink-blots on either side so that we could read our madness on their open map. Amid the frantic tat-tat-tat of oral machine guns and the explosions of swollen cheeks (they’d kept us all in the same wing at first) he’d stroll from bed to bed, showing those sad blots with all the delectation of a pervert with pocketfuls of pornography in charge of a kindergarten. Those of us who fell into his clutches were more impressionable, less stable, more defenceless. Every response — ‘an exploding bomb’, ‘a chest-wound’, ‘my head’, ‘claws trying to grab me’ — he’d carefully note down on a form covered in boxes. Then he drew up a chart that proved that all the responses invariably referred to the Islands, and that we were therefore all — here he’d give an indulgent chuckle — suffering from PTSD and were condemned to seeing them everywhere for the rest of our lives. He was right, I thought, resting the back of my neck on my pillow and letting myself be carried away, he was dead right, and as I drifted off, the distant, blurry shape of the Islands on the wall passed with me into half-sleep and spread without hope of containment across the endless plains of the mind.